Kamala Harris was right.

[Limnor]

That’s phase 1. When we achieve air superiority and defeat their ballistic missiles—let’s say with six month buildup of weapons that takes us an additional month of fires. So in about 8 months from now, we can move to phase 2, ground invasion.

So ... while you are doing phase 1, the Straits of Hormuz remain blocked for eight months, with all the consequences we know about. You've got a plan to deal with those consequences?

And that phase 2, ground invasion. Does the US currently have the battle-ready troops and other resources necessary to mount a successful ground invasion of Iran, and to continue the occupation of the invaded areas in at least the medium term thereafter?

And will that ground invasion ensure that the Hormuz blockage is finally lifted? Remember, nobody is going to send a high-value vessel through there while there is still a chance that somebody along the precipitous and difficult to access coastline has a cruise missile that they can bring out of a cave and launch at a passing ship.

You’ve identified a significant risk. You’d have to degrade the coastal defense cruise missiles and accept the risk in the interim while we build force in the region. Remember, our end state is Iran cannot militarily threaten its neighbors.

My guess has been 10-15 dollars a gallon for gas at the pump if we did something like this. I’ve read that it might take 4-6 months for US production to match demand.

During the Iraq invasion, Shinseki asked for something like 300k troops to accomplish occupation. You’d have to be willing to commit that amount or more to the region to achieve the goal you’ve laid out. Given an eight month buildup, I believe we could field a force capable of occupation. The aftermath would be brutal, though. IEDs, small resistance units, and other hit and run type tactics would be employed—much like we saw in Iraq.

Another risk is overextension in one region, taking resources from other priority defense issues. Like China.

I don’t recommend any of this, by the way. I’m just saying it “could” be done. It’s just a bad idea.

[canpakes]

Anyone can say they “won” if you’ve never defined what “won” looks like. The ambiguity seems to be part of the design.

This is the Trump Administration’s modus operandi. It’s perpetual smash’n’grab machine designed to allow Trump and his circle of friends to gather power and money for whatever suits their personal needs, while occasionally proclaiming that they’re ‘winning’ or have ‘won’ some vague thing in some undefined way, which is the feel-good teaspoon of sugar that they dole out to their MAGA base on the daily, to keep those voters nodding their heads and toeing the line.

No one in this Administration is doing much of anything to benefit the average American; rather, the players within the Administration do what they do to benefit their own bank account, satisfy their own petty grievances, and/or relieve their own weird insecurities … with the impact on the public at large not even considered.

[Chap]

I don’t recommend any of this, by the way. I’m just saying it “could” be done. It’s just a bad idea.

I am mightily relieved to see you expressing that view. I am hoping that, even given Trump's efforts to ensure that no US military leaders will ever tell him that there are things he should not or simply can not do, the people in the Pentagon will come to the same conclusion as yourself and tell Trump so.

[Limnor]

I don’t recommend any of this, by the way. I’m just saying it “could” be done. It’s just a bad idea.

I am mightily relieved to see you expressing that view. I am hoping that, even given Trump's efforts to ensure that no US military leaders will ever tell him that there are things he should not or simply can not do, the people in the Pentagon will come to the same conclusion as yourself and tell Trump so.

It has been my observation and opinion that the best senior leaders give advice like this.

Then they get fired and someone else executes the plan.

[Physics Guy]

The limits of military force are a puzzle to me. In the history of countries being invaded, some nations have capitulated quickly, while others have resisted for years and ultimately expelled their invaders. What makes the difference? I think it must be hard to say. Many different factors may be involved; some can probably be understood and anticipated but others may be elusive.

Under some circumstances, one guy with a gun can keep a thousand people hiding in their homes, for example if there's a warning about an active shooter. Under other circumstances, those thousand people might look at a hundred armed guys and realise, Hey, we outnumber them heavily, they don't know this landscape, they need food and water, they can't all be awake at once ... and we can get our own weapons.

What makes that difference? One factor is surely the expectation of how long the situation will last. The cops will soon get the shooter, so there's no point in risking one's life just to get the guy a bit sooner. The enemy occupiers, on the other hand, are going to be there for years if no-one does something about it, and maybe their presence is making life so hopeless that people have little to lose. Successful resistance still doesn't just happen automatically, though. I guess it may seem like pure wishful thinking right up until it suddenly seems inevitable.

So I don't know, but I doubt that the US armed forces are really capable of conquering Iran. Even if a hypothetically possible armed force could conquer modern Iran, I don't think that the American military is that force. It may well simply not be large enough, but even apart from sheer size, it just isn't trained and equipped for that kind of mission. Destroying a concentrated enemy force to seize a specific objective and hold it for days to weeks is a very different task from controlling a whole country for years on end.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Hey, MAGA board members. Do you understand the grift now?

[Limnor]

PG—you’re describing an important distinction that military planners make between defeating a military and controlling a country.

Given the time and resources, the U.S. could probably destroy most of Iran’s conventional military capability and establish air and naval superiority. But that’s a different goal than occupying and governing the country.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

PG—you’re describing an important distinction that military planners make between defeating a military and controlling a country.

Given the time and resources, the U.S. could probably destroy most of Iran’s conventional military capability and establish air and naval superiority. But that’s a different goal than occupying and governing the country.

Gen. Shinsexy was correct. You need 100’s of thousands of troops for SASO.

For Shades, from Wiki: “SASO stands for Stability and Support Operations. It is a military doctrinal term used to describe non-combat and crisis-response missions where armed forces provide safety, infrastructure support, and humanitarian assistance to civilian populations while attempting to suppress threatening groups or instability.”

Basically it’s Phase II of waging war with regard to US military doctrine, and you needs lots and lots of people to do it.

[Gadianton]

PG—you’re describing an important distinction that military planners make between defeating a military and controlling a country.

Given the time and resources, the U.S. could probably destroy most of Iran’s conventional military capability and establish air and naval superiority. But that’s a different goal than occupying and governing the country.

Right, to maximize Ajax's oil profits that can only benefit those taking place in the operation (not him) else it's communism, we'll need to spend how many extra tens of billions to avoid damaging the people and infrastructure needed to salvage each extra billion /year in oil profits?

[Physics Guy]

"SASO stands for Stability and Support Operations. It is a military doctrinal term used to describe non-combat and crisis-response missions where armed forces provide safety, infrastructure support, and humanitarian assistance to civilian populations while attempting to suppress threatening groups or instability.”

Basically it’s Phase II of waging war with regard to US military doctrine, and you needs lots and lots of people to do it.

How confident should we be that US SASO doctrine actually works? If I try to think of historical examples of reasonably successful military occupation, I can think of the Imperial German occupation of Alsace and Lorraine from 1870 to 1914, the German occupation of France and the Low Countries for a few years during World War II, and the occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II. Those are all from a long time ago, now. They all did involve large numbers of troops.

Another common factor that I see in those cases is that the occupied territories all had long histories as highly developed countries with strong governments that were accepted as legitimate by the overwhelming majority of citizens. This made it possible for "the country as a whole" to accept occupation and allow it to work, at least for a time, instead of everything simply dissolving in anarchy because "the country as a whole" did not even exist after the collapse of an illegitimate or primitive regime.

I guess one can look further back to the colonial conquests of large pre-modern territories in the 18th and 19th centuries. Those conquests all took place gradually, over decades. And it's not so clear these days whether aircraft carriers and stealth bombers really outclass drones and mines by as much as Gatling guns outclassed spears.

Anyway, one could evidently control a country like mid-twentieth-century Germany or Japan simply by destroying the fighting power of its government and then stepping into the vacated role. So the distance between defeating a national military, and controlling the nation, was not all that far. Has anyone, anywhere, ever managed to take over a country like modern Iran?