Trump thinks war with Iran will be a cakewalk. American generals and politicians always say America’s wars of choice will be cakewalks. They never are, and this time the error my be existential. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:
I have repeatedly argued that launching an attack against Iran would result in a catastrophic defeat for the US military. I believe this for many reasons, foremost among them my long-held conviction that the aircraft carrier is an obsolete relic of a bygone era that will not survive a war against a peer or near-peer adversary…. it just so happens that the largest and most expensive war-game exercise in Pentagon history tested the thesis back in 2002. It was a massive battle simulation code-named Millennium Challenge. The Pentagon spent a whopping 250 million dollars setting the whole thing up, and it consisted primarily of a carrier strike group escorting a large amphibious landing force into the Persian Gulf….
the naval task force had transited the Strait of Hormuz, and then he launched salvos of land-based ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles launched from low-flying planes and helicopters, and swarms of elusive “fast boats” against the flotilla of ships. This attack entirely overwhelmed the defense capabilities of the fleet, and in a matter of mere minutes, all nineteen ships in the task force had been sunk, along with their entire complement of 20,000 sailors and marines.
It was a total catastrophe – not to mention a shocking humiliation for Pentagon planners… The problem is that, while the US military is substantially weakened since its high-water mark of dominance in 2002, the Iranians are significantly more formidable in every category….
I’d like to think the desk jockeys at the Pentagon “learned their lesson”, but I’m confident they did not. And if the US attempts to make war against Iran at this late stage of the empire’s denouement, I expect the real-life results to be at least as disastrous as they were in simulation over twenty years ago.
Will Schryver @imetatroninkDonald Trump’s advisors are withholding critical information that could dramatically impact his decision to launch preemptive air-strikes on Iran. Trump’s assumption –that the United States can inflict devastating damage on Iran without suffering significant losses itself– speaks to Trump’s ignorance about the breathtaking improvements in Iran’s state-of-the-art air-defense systems and hypersonic missiles.
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