The Trump administration keeps claiming how well they have degraded Iranian capabilities, but US bases keep getting hit. Iran isn’t going to surrender due to air strikes. The best way to win the war is a full land invasion, with the massive costs that that would entail.
Ukraine’s medium strike with drones has gotten really good. This makes it hard to get supplies and reinforcements to the front and forces personnel and equipment further from the front line, increasing traveling time, which creates: delays, wear and tear on vehicles, and more vulnerable road time.
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.
The US military is awesome, but I’m skeptical it will achieve substantial war aims. Killing a lot of people and destroying a lot of equipment is a means to an end. It means very little if we don’t have a long-term major success. I’m skeptical the US and Israel will get there, but I hope they do.
“Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict.”
“An attack from two drones on the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh caused a “limited fire,” according to Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry, and the embassy urged Americans to avoid the compound. It followed an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait that announced Tuesday it had been closed until further notice.”