Former US Colonel Peter Mansoor says Trump thought Iran would surrender just from air attacks and didn’t have a plan for if they didn’t. He also said the war is unconstitutional, and that while a part of him is happy to see Iran get pain after killing hundreds of Americans in the Iraq war, most of him worries that Trump doesn’t have a plan and has opened a can of worms.
Trump initially said he was a militaristic guy but that he was against dumb wars like the war in Iraq. He later shifted to a more peace-focused rhetoric when he realized that was popular. But, he never had a strong belief in peace and always believed in the use of leverage and military force.
Much of America is enthralled by a demagogue who never had policy competency or decent character, and who has staffed his administration with many unqualified people and some who previously pretended like they stood for something but are now sycophantic enablers.
Ships are turning toward Iranian islands, checking in with Iran, and then moving on if they are one of the few allowed ships. Iran controls the Strait.
An F-35 may have been hit by an Iranian anti-air missile. The plane and pilot survived, making it safely to a base in the Middle East. Stealth makes the F-35 harder to detect and hit, but not invisible. If a video given by Iran purporting to be the F-35 getting hit is real, then it looks like a smaller payload delivered by a relatively short-ranged infrared or electro-optically guided weapon, or even a shoulder fired missile. If a radar guided weapon targeted it, the plane would sense it and the pilot would be trying to avoid it. And if larger, longer-range weapons hit it, the plane would not have survived that size of payload.
Regime change wars have never been successful from the air with conventional weapons. Administrations get wooed by the ability to strike targets with precision from afar, and forget that blowing a bunch of stuff up and killing important people doesn’t end a regime’s ability to suppress its people or fight back.
Facebook changed its name to Meta and spent billions on the Metaverse. This was a failure. If government had done this, it would be lambasted and held up as proof that government is incompetent and can’t do things. Yet, when the private sector does this, we let it go. We shouldn’t have this double standard. In both cases, if some money isn’t wasted on failed ideas, then we aren’t trying enough new ideas.
Ukraine’s drone killers are much cheaper than many US interceptors, and the US and Gulf countries are running out of such interceptors, so want these cheaper Ukranian drone killers to defend against Iranian drones.