From 95% to 33% in like 2 weeks. If this goes on another 2 weeks, Iran will find tens thousands of new missiles and launchers under the living room carpet.
Twice the range too
They lied to us about the range! – greasy pete
We keep successfully destroying their missiles by tricking them into shooting them into all our military bases
Another missile down
Another victory for the arsenal of democracy!
Trump said on Thursday: “The problem with the strait is this: Let’s say we do a great job. We say we got 99% [of their missiles]. 1% is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost a billion dollars.”
This concludes my essay, Reasons Why I Think I Could Win an Air War Against a Country with Warhammer 40k Titan Mountains Full of Missiles I Can’t Intercept.
The sheer fucking hubris of the pig empire that they think they get to control every single nook and cranny on the globe.
What next, freedom of navigation up the 黄河?
Even before Afghanistan when the US military was pretending it didn’t die in Vietnam, even before Iran had most of its modern missiles/drones (Shaheds were reverse-engineered from an American drone in 2011) and geopolitical alliances, it was common knowledge that Iran couldn’t be invaded for all the reasons we’re currently seeing. The US Navy experienced Stupid Gallipoli from OPFOR speedboats in their Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise and the looming fear with Iraq/Afghanistan was that Iran would become directly involved.
JDPON Don is seemingly about to celebrate global decarbonisation and the collapse of Middle Eastern puppet states with drone videos of his most corn-fed loyalists dying for Jeffrey Epstein. I am excited for this beautiful moment when gamblers at that Washington DC Polymarket bar are betting on that day’s drone videos like they’re race horses. Autocannibalism as a 4th stage simulacrum is going to be peak absurd to me.
This hints at them knowing even a ground invasion won’t reopen the strait.
https://escalationtrap.substack.com/
I’ve liked this guy’s analysis a lot, seeing him mostly on youtube. An escalation trap is the only framework to understand this which makes sense to me. Israel and Trump’s sycophants convinced him it would be an easy war, kidnapping Maduro made him think that’s how strong the US military is, and US propaganda toward Iran actually worked on him. In order to seize any of its strategic objectives the US has to escalate while Iran only has to survive another day beneath mountains that the US can’t penetrate without physically raiding them. Iran matching any strike tit-for-tat, even launching one successful strike per day, demonstrates that they have the capability to and that contradicts the US goal of removing that capability.
This is a different kind of slanted editorializing. The US can confirm hits* on what’s suspected to be a third of Iran’s missiles.
They may have damaged or made unaccessible more than that, and I find that plausible at least. They claim to have targeted the infrastructure or storage around another third, but cannot confirm that indirect fire was effective. Probabilistically speaking, at least some of it must have been.
The real kicker though, is that US and Israeli intelligence don’t have an accurate starting point to derive to these numbers from. They have a best guess at how many missiles Iran had at the beginning of the war, but that’s all that counts for. Iran may have had exactly that many, slightly less, or sky’s the limit. We have no idea what the margin of error is truly, but it’s probably pretty bad. ±30%? More than that? Who’s to say.
With these two considerations in mind, any calculations about percentages of missiles destroyed or even out of service aren’t quite nonsense, but they’re napkin math on stilts. Best guesses by our best informed analysts… That’s still useful information, right?
Oh right it’s a propaganda war too. While this already looks like it contradicts the “official” Whitehouse line (which changes literally in the same sentence), it’s perhaps only a managed retreat from the most boisterous claims. I’ve not been that impressed with the videos Americans have released of strikes so far. They won’t shut the fuck up about destroying Iran’s air force, the navy, and “military installations,” (also see: schools, hospitals, universities, vital infrastructure for civilian life) we don’t see triumphalism video evidence supporting the narrative that thousands of missiles have been directly hit. Odd, to say the least, given the history of such evidence proudly trotted out in every other American adventure through the middle east.
So I don’t really know what to make of this news other than “it’s scared!”
Will you all sign my change.org petition to get Iran even more missiles?
