By Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He is also the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a new revised, updated 2nd edition
After some delays, the United States is dispatching a second aircraft-carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and threaten Iran.
This is the third Atlantic crossing for the Ford’s crew since it set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2025, and the second time its deployment has been extended, first to redeploy from the Middle East to the Caribbean, and now to redeploy back to the Middle East.
There is a grave danger that the U.S. government is preparing to exploit the genuine sympathy of people all over the world for the Iranian civilians massacred during protests in December and January as a pretext for an illegal military assault on Iran.
A new US war on Iran would be a cynical and catastrophic escalation of the crisis already swallowing its people, piling the unimaginable death and suffering of a full-scale war on top of many years of economic strangulation under US “maximum pressure” sanctions and the repression of the recent protests.
The world must act to prevent war, and the voices of Americans calling for peace and humanity may have an impact on President Trump and US politicians, in an election year when Americans are already sickened by US complicity in genocide in Gaza and the murderous paramilitaries invading US cities.
In a succession of speeches and in its National Security and Defense Strategy documents, the Trump administration promised a major shift in U.S. foreign policy away from endless wars in the Middle East, to prioritize its ambitions to expand U.S. power and coercion in the Americas and the Pacific.
But Trump is already following in the footsteps of the five US presidents before him, quickly abandoning his formal strategy goals and diverting America’s overpriced but impotent war machine back to the Middle East, to threaten or even attack Iran.
The renewed US threats against Iran have made it clear to Iran’s leaders that their symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in June 2025, in retaliation for US strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran, were an insufficient deterrent to future US and Israeli attacks.
So Iran has signaled that it will respond to any new Israeli or U.S. attacks with more deadly and destructive retaliation against US forces in the region. Foad Azadi at the University of Tehran reports that Iranian leaders now believe they would need to inflict at least 500 US casualties to successfully deter future attacks.
Iran’s leaders may well be right that Trump would have a low tolerance for US casualties and the political blowback he would suffer for them, if he should make the fateful choice to launch such an unnecessary and catastrophic war.
Iran has had many years to prepare for such a war. It has modern air defenses and an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones with which to retaliate against US targets throughout the region, which include US bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE, and the flotilla of US warships loitering near, but not yet within range of, Iran’s shores.
The US is so far showing respect for Iran’s military capabilities, keeping the Abraham Lincoln at least a thousand miles from Iran’s coast, according to retired US Colonel Larry Wilkerson of the Eisenhower Media Network.
This cautious US naval deployment is a far cry from the six US carrier battle groups the US deployed to commit aggression against Iraq in 2003. The United States still has twelve “big-deck” aircraft carriers like the Lincoln and the Ford, but nine of them are in dock or unready for deployment. The USS George Washington, based in Japan, is now the only US carrier in East Asia, since the Abraham Lincoln left the Philippines in January to threaten Iran.
Standard deployments for these warships last only six or seven months, and their lack of readiness is the result of several years of overextended deployments, after which they need longer periods of maintenance and repair than the normal six to nine month turnaround time between deployments.
For example, since the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower completed a nine month combat deployment in the Middle East in January 2025, it has spent over a year in dock at Norfolk to repair the wear and tear it sustained in the failed US campaign against Yemen’s Ansar Allah (or Houthi) forces.
The United States and its allies bombed Yemen in successive campaigns under Biden and Trump, but failed to reopen the Red Sea and Suez Canal to Israeli or allied commercial shipping. As a result of the Yemeni blockade, most Western cargo shippers diverted their ships away from the Red Sea, forcing the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy in July 2025.
Ansar Allah paused its blockade when Israel signed a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2025, but larger ships still avoid the Red Sea and insurance rates remain high, as Israel’s aggression and genocide continue to destabilize the region in unpredictable ways.
The US failure to defeat the much smaller Ansar Allah forces in Yemen is a small taste of what US forces would face in a prolonged war with Iran, which already inflicted significant damage on Israel during the twelve-day war in June 2025.
Iran used its older missiles and drones to deplete Israel’s air defenses. Then, once Israel began to exhaust its stocks of interceptors, Iran used newer, more sophisticated ballistic missiles to strike important military and intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv and other military targets.
With Israel in trouble, the US entered the war directly, and bombed three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran, before agreeing to an Iranian ceasefire proposal on June 24, 2025. Israeli censorship has prevented a comprehensive public accounting of its losses in that war.
While overextended deployments have caused wear and tear to aircraft-carriers and other warships, US weapons transfers to its allies in Israel, Ukraine and NATO have depleted its own weapons stocks. This creates pressure on US leaders to hold off on launching a new war against a well-prepared enemy like Iran until it has replenished them, which could take a long time.
Meanwhile the war in Ukraine has exposed structural weaknesses in the US war machine. Russia has vastly out-produced the west in basic war supplies like artillery shells and drones, which has proven militarily decisive in Ukraine.
As Richard Connolly of the RUSI military think tank in London has pointed out, Russia did not privatize its weapons industry after the end of the Cold War, as the US and its allies did. It maintained and improved its existing infrastructure, which he called “economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”
After the Cold War ended, on the initiative of Soviet leader and visionary peacemaker Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s economic weakness forced its military leaders to make honest, hard-nosed assessments of what it would take to defend their country in the post-Cold War world, and the shrewd planning that Connolly put his finger on is one result of this.
On the US side however, Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex” used its “unwarranted influence” to exploit the west’s post-Cold War triumphalism and expand its global military ambitions. Many Americans immediately recognized this as a dangerous new form of imperialism. Wiser heads among America’s political leaders and foreign policy experts predicted that the rest of the world would ultimately reject America’s new imperialism and be forced to confront it as a threat to peace.
The neoliberal privatization of US and western armament production turned it into an even more lucrative and politically powerful industry, which only reconfirmed Eisenhower’s warnings. Monopolistic military contractors have produced smaller quantities of increasingly expensive, technologically advanced warships, warplanes and surveillance systems. Despite wreaking catastrophic destruction in country after country, these weapons have proven impotent to prevent humiliating US defeats in its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, and will likely prove just as useless in a major war with Iran.
The simplistic, linear thinking of Trump and his advisors leads them to believe that the solution to a trillion dollar per year war machine that can’t win a war is a $1.5 trillion per year war machine.
But this is nonsense. Russia has not defeated the US and NATO by outspending them. Quite the opposite. Since 1992, the US military alone has outspent Russia by fifteen to one ($26 trillion vs $1.7 trillion in constant 2024 dollars, according to SIPRI). Russia’s military superiority is the result of taking its own defense more seriously and confronting its problems more honestly than corrupt US leaders have ever tried to do since the end of the Cold War.
At a price tag of $17.5 billion, the USS Gerald R. Ford is the largest, most expensive warship ever built, costing more than the entire annual military budgets of most other countries. Making an even bigger warship for $26 billion would not make Americans any safer, just a bit poorer.
Relying on the offensive use of military force and record military spending to try to solve America’s problems has put the United States on a collision course with the rest of the world. In 1949, long before Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961, he offered some sage advice to politicians and pundits who were calling for a massive US attack on the USSR to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.
“Those who measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and mislead those who pay them heed,” said Eisenhower. “No modern nation has ever equaled the crushing offensive power attained by the German war machine in 1939. No modern nation was broken and smashed as was Germany six years later.”
Unlike Iran today, the USSR was indeed working to develop nuclear weapons, but Eisenhower warned Americans against launching a new war that might kill millions to try to stop it.
As Eisenhower insisted, offensive military action offers no solutions to international problems. But diplomatic solutions are always possible. Diplomacy does not mean holding a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they sign an unconditional surrender. It means treating other people and countries with mutual respect and finding solutions that everybody can live with, based upon rules that we all agree on.
The UN Charter universally prohibits the threat or use of force and requires all countries to resolve disputes peacefully. So one country’s wrongdoing, real or perceived, is never a valid pretext for another country to threaten or use military force.
There is no good reason to sacrifice American soldiers and sailors in a war on Iran; no justification to kill Iranian troops for defending their country, as Americans would do if another country attacked the United States; no justice in killing Iranian civilians by turning their homes and communities into a new US war zone.
Could the stark choice our country is facing in Iran be a turning point, a moment when the American people will stand up and clearly, strongly say “No” to war, before our corrupt leaders can plunge Iran and the United States into yet another “Made in the USA” military catastrophe?
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This paragraph caught my eye:
Ok but why do they need such a long turnaround time between deployments? I did google (and use perplexity). and various reasons came up . Around complexity, stress, modernization.
but if you were running a civilian fleet you couldn’t put up with this type of economic model.
Cross channel ferries run 24/7 all year round. Cruise ships take years before dry dock. Civilian aircraft are similar.
and there are clear differences.
cross channel ferry – you are at a port multiple times per day. Continuous maintenance is possible.
carrier – you are out for months at a time, away from your “home” dock.
cross channel ferry – modernization not need.
carrier – presumably modernization desirable.
is turnaround time part of design thinking for these things?
or is this just all part of the whole sorry story around mic, grift, complexity, shock and awe vs extended campaigns?
genuinely curious and wonder if any of the commenters have first hand experience of this.
It isn’t grift that causes it, though I’m sure some parties will take advantage.
Go to Wikipedia and look up some of the world war 2 battleships. You’ll see that many of those big ships spent as much time in port undergoing repair, maintenance and upgrades.
A major difference between warships and civilian ships is that warships undergo aignificsnt upgrades regularly. Which means part of that time when they are not available for operational tours they will actually be at sea going shake down tours and training.
If we look again at WW2 the KGV was finishing it’s shakedown tour when it was rushed into battle due to the need to engage the Bismarck. It hadntfinoshed becoming fully opwrational but it went to battle. And it still had a lot of civilian workers onboard.
If it was a do or die situation the US would probably be able to rush a few more carriers out to sea today. But they wouls not be at full operational capacity.
One big issue they have now though is a shortage of sailors to man the ships.
And there is maybe one final point to consider. A civilian ship stuck in port is losing money. A warship st sea is costing more money.
But in ahort long periods away from active service is common for warships.
Its the simple trade-off required in all engineering. You can optimise for one variable, or maybe two or three, but not all required variables. Nearly all war machines are disposable – you have to assume a high attrition rate in a hot war, so they are not designed like a ferry or cargo ship. Their primary purpose is to be highly effective in battle for a relatively short period of time. Kurt Tank (FW 190 designer) talked in terms of cavalry horses and racehorses when he compared his Focke Wulf designs to Messerschmidts, but you can equally extend that to cart horses and racehorses. Both are good, but only for their intended purpose.
You can see the trade off in those non combat security ships/aircraft that are designed for relatively low cost and long lives. Compare the specifications, for example, of a coast guard or fisheries patrol vessel to a military corvette or frigate. The former will be be significantly tougher and heavier and have simple proven marine diesel engines, while the latter will have lots of lightweight and low observable structural materials, complex hybrid (turbine/diesel) engines, far more advanced radar, multiple layers of fire control and so on.
You can extend this model across the spectrum, from ground forces to aviation. Every design is a trade off, and you pay the price for this if it turns out you are going to use your design for a different purpose. This is why civilian ships/planes/trucks etc are rarely much good in military use, and vice versa. There are a few contra examples in military history (for example, in WWII converting whaler ship designs to submarine chasers), but they stand out because they are so rare.
And even when designing toughness, its a different sort of toughness. For example, we often hear that Russian aircraft are more robust than western aircraft, which is true in the sense that they are designed for lower maintenance and rougher airfields, but its untrue in terms of long term life – their engines, for example, have much shorter lifespans than western equivalents or civilian engines. Its nothing to do with bad engineering – its about design priorities.
Thank you PK. Makes perfect sense. The race car vs the HGV.
I’ve wondered the same for a long time. Presumably it’s a combination of grift plus methods of construction. Milspec for example, while often attributed to mean best merely means that the component is the cheapest cost that can withstand the test conditions of heat, vibration, etc.
Another is that a lot of stuff is leading edge, wherein the designers are pushing the envelope of performance, so things simply wear out fast. My Jetta TDI is a good example of this. Well engineered with small 1.9l turbocharged engine that has run well for nearly 300,000 miles and has never broken down and left me stranded on any trip. It can go all day on the autobahn at 100 mph. At 2000km per week VW said it needed an oil change every eight weeks. Not to single them out, any vehicle driven that much will require additional maintenance and it’s probably true for aircraft carriers as well, even if they are nuclear powered. Yet I have spent more than the purchase price of the car on maintenance, beyond oil changes, like turbochargers and other bits of tech that when they work, they work great, they just don’t last. I often comment to friends that it’s the fighter jet of cars, needs x hours of service for every hour of driving. Whereas my 1968 Coupe De Ville did nothing special, wasn’t fast, and apart from engine oil and having to fuel up every 300 miles never needed any serious mechanical repair. However, if I drove it anywhere at a constant 100mph, I would expect the engine to fail within a few hours, it’s not designed for that kind of use.
I don’t have any experience of this but I see the business model as you and this article have exposed very clearly. The business of maintenance (O&M) must be a big one. Not only big in terms of money but in terms of dependence, to make you indispensable, and generate a continuous flow of money to the MIC. You have to somehow justify > 1 Trillion$/year: And very soon 1,5 Trillion$/year. 100 billion monthly expenses is real money. Isn’t it? The MIC is probably one of the best examples to explain the limits of the neoliberal economic model. In a single phrase what this article is saying is that a socio-economical order which can be considered in serious decline, very soon possibly in its last legs, is trying hard to keep on with world domination with obvious risks.
It is remarkable that the quality of the excuses the propagandists are coming with in the case of Iran is in serious decline too. Sign of steep decline if you ask me!
Although several of the commentariat argue its trade-offs, I favor the business model explanation, one because of the incentive (money, trillions of it) for expensive maintenance contracts and cost plus contracts. (show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome).
Consider the F-35, which has mostly never been in battle, and has readiness rates of 17-30% depending on variant. It was never designed and tested to work before delivery because a dysfunctional plane means the contract is extended. I do not think there is purposeful bad engineering, just atomization, minimal effort to ensure integration in the design phase, minimal supervision, etc.
Or consider the M1- only a specialized crane can put it on a truck if damaged (and the US built few of them). The engineers spent a lot of time designing the specialized crane at great cost, and yet at the concept level, it is self-evidently a moron-level (peacetime) plan.
WRT the ships, they are also OLD. OLD = High maintenance and poor performance (in humans and ships, and more so, airframes). Hot/cool cycling and high-sea wave stresses fatigue metal and microfracture welds. They should be retired, but the US can no longer replace them (even before the rare-earth blockade).
It’s the price of focus on decreasing operating costs through increased automation. For example, older Kitty Hawk had crews of 6000, Nimitz class carriers reduced that to 5500 and new Ford Class is down to 4500. The decrease is almost completely due to reduction in ship crew, not air wing, down from 3000-3500 to 2000-2500.
So you reduced the crew by 25% or more, meaning that there is less man-hours to do ongoing maintenance while the ship is on deployment so more of it has to be done in port. Also, a common way to save money is to defer maintenance or not stock spares, which means that maintenance takes longer when it happens because ships and crews are sitting idle waiting for parts.
This is true of not only aircraft carriers, I’ve seen analysis that estimate that a third to a half of the destroyers are available for deployment. Honestly, not a problem for the US navy since it lacks the missiles to equip all of its ships, which is another crazy thing, US lacks the air defense and cruise missiles to fill the magazines of its fleet. There are no spares and annual production rates are in the low 100’s.
US navy is not equipped for an extended campaign against anyone, it doesn’t have enough missiles even if the ships were in working order.
I have absolutely no knowledge or inside information on anything having to do with ships, but my feeling is that one major factor causing this discrepancy in maintenance time is that warships are necessarily much more complex systems than commercial ships. They not only need to house a much larger crew but they also need to carry a lot more gear and a lot more complicated gear. Armaments, fancy radar, various defensive mechanisms, cranes, etc. Probably multiply that many times for nuclear-powered ships, aircraft carriers etc. I would imagine that it’s at least an order of magnitude more complex to maintain than a commercial ship.
I’m sure that there’s plenty of grift involved too, but I imagine that one other factor would be that war ships probably have to comply with much stricter requirements than commercial ones.
which is a version of events only propagandized Westerners believe
Yes when you buy the false premises you are already letting the warmonger foot in the door. One could argue the gist of all these situations is less good intentions versus evil ones than truth versus ignorance. Once TPTB have manufactured even some consent it’s much easier to neuter the sensible.
I utterly agree!
True, the implicit bias is noted. The currency manipulation, economic warfare and meddling by foreign countries must be mentioned for significant context. The massive demonstrations in Iran that supported the Iranian state must be mentioned as well.
The use of the words “civilians massacred” is disappointing to say the least. Prof. Marandi has talked about this sort of discourse among leftish outlets. and so-called progressive US Congress critters like Sanders and AOC.
Thank you. I expected better from CODEPINK. Including that propaganda influences even those who agree with the anti-war stance, making them think that the Iranian leadership has it coming.
True. But it isn’t entirely wrong to highlight the Iranian ruling stratum’s reliance on repression, even if it’s not at a blood-flowing-through-the-streets level.
Western media likes to highlight the grievances of urban liberals in Iran for whom “Westoxification” sounds like a good idea. But everyone is squeezed, and there is significant disaffection all around. Yes, Western sanctions and so forth have a lot to do with that, but it doesn’t matter—Iranian weaknesses are very real, and many in power in the US seem to think that now is a good time to take advantage of these weaknesses.
The Iranian army seems to have been firmly in the corner of the present ruling elites in Iran, and that has made their internal repression largely successful. But I am sure that outside observers, like us, are missing a lot that goes on behind the scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some factions in the Iranian military are weighing their options right now: risk a catastrophic war with a vastly more powerful US, perform a coup and replace the theocratic layer of the rulership to appease the US, individually take bribes or hold fast, etc. etc.
the “recent protests” in iran were a long planned full scale cia- and mossad-orchestrated terrorist assault on iran involving the scum of the earth, isis, mek, and other sundry us proxy headchoppers and throatslitters. the cia and mossad openly bragged about their part in this mass murder. musk smuggled in 40,000 starlink terminals to facilitate this mayhem. these “protestors” murdered 300 police officers, some of whom were beheaded and burnt to death. iranian police are routinely unarmed. these proxy thugs, high on captagon, murdered random passers by by stabbing and shooting them. people were burnt to death. old people, children, nurses, worshippers at mosques. the aim was to create total chaos and terror. they murdered first responders, burnt out hundreds of ambulances and fire engines, and attacked public buildings, clinics, hospitals, mosques and police stations. these terrorists opened fire on crowds as per the standard cia play book, as seen at maidan and elsewhere. they were heavily armed with firearms and explosives supplied by their us/ israeli handlers. that is the nature of the “peaceful protestors” so beloved of the bbc and the western presstitute media. imagine what would happen to “protestors” who murdered police or ice agents on the streets of america.
Here in Canada we have hundreds of thousands intelligent and well educated Iranians. My snow shovelling days are over and within five minutes of my wife starting to shovel one of our Iranian neighbours joins her. The USA may want to demonise Iranians but Canadians certainly do not.
Canada is calling for regime change in Iran and has not ruled out participating in a US invasion. Very little daylight between the US and Canada wrt Iran.
In other words, Canada brays about insults to its sovereignty while trampling on the very concept wrt other countries. Typical NATO-brain.
And no, most Americans don’t want war with Iran and the US has significant Iranian diaspora communities, so no daylight there, either.
Distrust your government and elite media.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-wants-iran-government-change-increases-sanctions-2026-02-14/
As with many issues in Canada, this one is not helped by diaspora politics.
>Could the stark choice our country is facing in Iran be a turning point, a moment when the American people will stand up and clearly, strongly say “No” to war, before our corrupt leaders can plunge Iran and the United States into yet another “Made in the USA” military catastrophe?
Hard to see that, but people don’t want war. We tried protest in 2003 and they destroyed Iraq anyway. And these days there are closer to home issues for most people.
Trump let his base think he would be different, yet here we are again.
How can citizens stop a machine which has fully captured the democratic process. Whoever you vote for, you get the MIC running things.
IMO it’ll take the whole system to come crashing down to change that.
From July 25:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-israel-war-2672386204/
More than half of those Americans who supported Donald Trump for president in 2024 don’t think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel.
A new The Economist/YouGov poll conducted on June 13-16 found that 53% of Trump voters said the U.S. should not join the war, versus just 19% who said the U.S. military should. Sixty percent of all Americans surveyed agreed that the U.S. should not get involved.
US foreign policy has been based on vibes for decades now, if not since the fall of the SU, then at least since 9/11. Any attempts to bring reality into it has at the same time been more and more of a career limiting move. So I would expect any analysis based on the voice of reason to hit the mark only by accident.
As to the US people standing up and saying no, I can believe that, but the govt listening to them, probably not.
US foreign policy has most of all been based on the wishes of Israel. This has become more and more true over the years.
Good enough on the face of it, but no mention of the Israel question. This omission could be in the interests of the author’s career longevity prospects in the American oligarch based public communications system.
Stay safe all.
While it is fair to raise Eisenhower’s MIC warning, I think more relevant advice comes from the Powell Doctrine which evolved from Caspar Weinberger’s Six Points. General Powell also stressed six points, two of which state: Vital Interest: The mission must defend crucial national security interests, and Public/Congressional Support: Clear, robust backing from the public and Congress is necessary.
Trump has been unable to define what crucial national interest is at stake and he has been unwilling to work with Congress or engage with the people; He has not addressed the nation on the potential for war. He can only talk of a “deal” but now he must produce an agreement far more comprehensive than the JCPOA, which seems unlikely.
A number of honest pundits have pointed out that when it comes to ME foreign policy, Netanyahu, the Israel Lobby, and American pro-Zionist donors have more control over the US Congress than does Trump or the American people. This is Israel’s war and it’s an Israel first policy.
A “turning point” was mentioned, “when the American people will stand up and clearly, strongly say “No” to war” but the American people did stand up and voted for Trump who promised no wars. It’s time to stand up and stop supporting Israel and its wars unconditionally.
Thanks. No dispute with the gist of this article. The US war machine is an overpriced mess.
That said, there were a few passages that gave me pause, e.g.:
If memory serves, this is not quite how it went down.
On the 23rd, Trump made a unilateral statement that both sides had agreed to a ceasefire and he named it the “Twelve-Day War”. But the Iranian minister of foreign affairs issued a statement that there was no such agreement. Israel attacked Iran again on the 24th, and Iran launched another wave of missiles that morning.
After that, both sides respected the ceasefire, but it rather appears that the vaunted Iron Dome failed to perform as expected, Israel could no longer sustain Iranian missile barrages and Trump made an intervention in order to allow Netanyahu to save face and not admit that the Iranian attacks were too punishing.
the zionist regime and the us, not iran, were begging for a ceasefire in june after 12 days of war. that was because the zionist regime was being hit very hard and running out of missiles. it should be a condition of any agreement that the us and the zio regime have to give up their nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and air forces, and that zionist forces immediately withdraw from gaza, lebanon and syria.
Hey, Pete Hegseth is on it. No worries!
He brought in a White Christian Evangelical preacherman from North Idaho to the Pentagon to pray.
Broadcast to the military.
Pray tell prey on what? Presumably to prevail in the mid-east, foment and actualize The Rapture
(see Mike Huckabee, Our Man in Israel ™) and if that fails, at least bring in the $1.5 trillion for Pete, Trump, and all the Merde et Lardo grifting sycophant hangers-on.
As to protests, Trump has sucked any oxygen out of the room. People are conserving energy, watching the clock waiting for his term to end.
A few words from the late Mr. Bourdain about Iran. Worth noting that Tony’s politics were pretty juvenile: A reflexive libertarian.
Iran Is Not What I Expected.
The forces that the US has assembled around Iran are impressive but how much of all those forces are they willing to lose. As an example. Suppose the Iranians get a hit on a Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyer and she slowly sinks. About 300 swabbies go in the water but they are soon picked up because the Iranians let them. To replace that ship you now have to build another one at the cost of $2.2 billion dollars. But it will take many years for one to be built and maybe the costs will go up. In the meantime the rest of the fleet have to pick up the slack of that one single ship being sunk which puts a strain on those other ships not to mention the crews. Morale takes a hit too because the rest of the fleet realize that they are taking on a country that can actually shoot back. So unfair as Trump would say. Then there are the political ramifications at home of actually ships being sunk. Mind you, I am only talking about a single ship being sunk but you get the idea.
Even worse, after a few days, many of those ships will have to retreat, having depleted their air defense missiles, leaving holes that other ships will be unable to fill, increasing risk for remaining ships. Unless the first wave can somehow miraculously disable almost all Iranian missile launchers, even cheap drones with AI targeting will render these ships inoperative or sink them.
Sinking a ship and closing the straits might end the war. Maybe Iran would want sanctions, which are an act of war, to be removed before reopening it. IMO it’s logical to say, if we can’t ship our fossil from the gulf, neither can anyone else.
Granted, such a deal would not amuse the zionists, a wild card.
the navigable channel at hormuz is 4 miles wide. a few old ships full of cement used as blockships would do the trick. then see how all the maga retards in raccoonville tennessee like their $20-30 a gallon.
Do not sink those ships, just cripple them. This has several advantages:
1) A disabled ship can no longer participate in the fight; it is as good as sunk.
2) The USA must divert other ships to tow it back to port.
3) The damaged ship will be berthed for repairs, occupying a dock and technical crews, thus preventing other existing ships from being maintained or new ships from being built — probably for a long time, given the dismal state of shipyards in the USA.
Yet another unprovoked, unnecessary, immoral war is on the way. With genuine problems facing the planet, such as climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, growing inequality around the globe, etc., our response is more killing and destruction. (And, has anyone calculated the carbon footprint of aircraft carriers scudding about the oceans, or those “beautiful” B-2 bombers polluting the skies?) Once again, we learn nothing.
Will the Iranians deliver a State of Union platter of TACO Tuesday?
Will USrael allow Trump and Hegseth to stay out of the fray?
Is the Trump Tribe betting hard on Polymarket and Kalshi?
So many factors— its a relief to know that the Iranians are a simple, unsophisticated uncivilized tribe with
No History.
I have to head to visit ailing siblings in the sprawl that is the front range of Crowdorado.
Imagine my delight insinuating myself into gridlock and inanity during what might be a very dicey time in history.
Plan for the worst, hope for the best. To quote an orange clown, “…we’ll see…”
If the US aim is just destruction and turning Iran into another Libya, rather than anything more coherent and planful, the military might Trump is bringing to bear may be just sufficient for that. Iran will have to hit back very hard from the get-go to frustrate that aim. It would help if their assets in Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon had the wherewithal to chip in meaningfully (rather than just symbolic salvos that exhaust some anti-missile munitions but don’t accomplish much else). If Iran had a way to take out any significant number of the refueling air tankers or destroy the infrastructure they depend on, that could put a big crimp in the US campaign. The US ability to conduct a prolonged attack may, as the author indicates, be beyond what the readiness state of its forces will allow. But the privatization aspect is not new, like only after the Cold War’s end. Mainly what got privatized then was the Blackwater type mercenary companies taking over for GIs in the subsequent ground wars, as happened in Russia with Wagner. It’s more the whole transition of the economy from Fordist capitalism to the neoliberal financialized mode that’s to blame for what the author says about the more fragile state of US forces. If Iran can keep hitting back and doing actual damage for about three weeks, the war could redound to the chagrin of the attackers greatly. But they have to stay alive to do that.
Ref. Eisenhower’s 61 speech when he warmed us of the MIC. Well only one President (Kennedy)after the Cuban Missile Crisis tried to change this policy and it cost him his life. These folks coupled with the high tech industry and AI plus the neocons in DC tells me we are doomed. The US empire is in decline, it reminds me of the rot within the Roman Empire and its eventual fall.
It wasn’t too long ago in America’s past that finding fraud and waste in the Department of War could quite literally elevate one to the Presidency:
Truman Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Committee
Imagine something like that even happening in today’s America. Instead we get a Congress that has failed to perform one of it’s most important roles mandated by the Constitution – declare war:
Declaration of war by the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_United_States
Instead, it’s public knowledge that Congress profits from undeclared wars:
Lawmakers still benefitting from share trading in defense stocks
https://www.federaltimes.com/federal-oversight/congress/2024/04/01/lawmakers-still-benefitting-from-share-trading-in-defense-stocks/
And so here we are, on the brink of starting another war and even one of the so called “CIA newspaper of record”, the NYT, is asking why, why are we going to war?
As Trump Weighs Iran Strikes, He Declines to Make Clear Case for Why, or Why Now
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/us/politics/trump-iran-military-strikes.html
I have a nagging idea that the end game is/has been to drive oil prices up to cover the bets his cronies have made. It’s proving to be stubborn. It has never made sense to me to send an underpowered force. There, by appearances, is no way out…but these people are “smart” in their fields which in this case means good at ripping people off…follow the money and remember argh and tina and the soybeans which no doubt made bessent a pile. Oil is my dog thats not barking.
Taco tuesday..
If the US’ military is anything like many of its citizens, then – it is ‘porky’, obesely overweight, unhealthy, slow, and lacking stamina, relying on a steady supply of junk food.
It can barely walk, and certainly can’t run. It becomes breathless after only a few steps. It falls over easily. It’s track record of failures confirms its poor fighting capabilities.
As the handful of Houthis demonstrated, it doesn’t take much to send them packing, and the Iranians have a lot more to throw at them [and Israel] that will definitiely hurt – a lot.
Once that happens, then the US public will wake up as they see the body bags returning – and demand a stop to the hostilies.
It is slowly, but very slowly, dawning on them that their massive armada is more of a liabililty than an asset. Iranian hypersonic missiles, against which the US has no defence, can decimate those fleets, including the huge “sitting duck” aircraft carriers. That leaves jets, bombers, and ground forces. Many ME countrties are refusing to allow the US to use their airfields becase they don’t want to be targeted by Iran. And Iran is a large country for foreign troops to survive for long in, so little chance of success there.
It all adds up to an almost certain failure.A monumental debacle of massive proportions that will signal the end of US hegemony ‘unipolairty’, and the effective end of Trump’s presidency. Israel will suffer even more humiliation, as the Iranians are determined to punish it severely.
Perversely, I’m thinking – bring it on. Let’s get it over and done with, so with any luck the world can re-established some level of sanity and peace.