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War with Iran
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Anonymous
Do you think this admin is going to admit to any of this???? Trump said he's going to refuse to tell journalists how many soldiers he's sending to the area. They're mad the newspapers are printing honorariums to our dead soldiers. Also this... West Point analysis warns that strait of Hormuz blockade will strangle US defense industry. “Report shows how minerals critical to defense readiness have seen a ‘near total’ disruption in seaborne trade.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/19...lysis-iran-war-costs |
Anonymous
Maybe if you close your eyes and go to your safe space. IRL all of it is true and more. The US Lincoln burned for 30 hours because of a “laundry” fire. Burned for 30 hours on a ship built to fight fires- aqueous Film-Forming Foam, overhead sprinkler systems that apply foam, Conflagration Stations, etc. |
Anonymous
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Anyone else find it strange that the UK has denounced Iran’s effort to defend itself by attacking the joint US/UK base on Diego Garcia?
When we attack another country, unprovoked, it seems to me that we have absolutely zero ground to stand on (legal, moral, whatever) when it comes to framing the acceptable limitations of that other country’s response. Certainly not while we continue to attack them with the intention and ability to threaten their actual existence. And no, that obviously should not apply to Israel’s response with Gaza. I know a lot of posters persist in pretending that the conflict in the Middle East began on 10/6/2023 (it didn’t) and/or that Hamas posed an actual existential threat to Israel (it doesn’t). Just to get out ahead of responses here that will inevitably attempt to argue that that this perspective justifies Israel’s policies and actions - yeah, absolutely not. It doesn’t. At all. |
Anonymous
| We are paying Iran to give us oil to reduce the increase in oil prices caused by us going to war with Iran. |
Anonymous
So we lost thanks to Trumps foolishness |
Anonymous
| The Iranians must think the Us is beyond stupid. We invaded last year and then stopped in 12 days claiming we destroyed their nuclear facilities. We invade 10 months later claiming we need to beat their nuclear facilities Again and now want to end the war after two weeks once again. But we are not losing though. Don’t you worry |
Anonymous
So this article is a lie? Our tax dollars are not burning up? https://liberationnews.org/counting-the-horrific-waste-of-the-u-s-war-machine/ |
Anonymous
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In the first weeks of its illegal war against Iran, the U.S. has suffered substantial material losses amounting to several billion dollars. These losses are piled on top of the staggering daily expenditure of the war, which already totals over $11 billion. This is waste at an unimaginable scale, burning human lives and money away at a rate of millions of dollars per second.
The concrete numbers demonstrate the waste of the U.S. war machine. The cost of a single THAAD interceptor or F-15E could fund countless programs that improve the quality and dignity of human life, in the United States and across the world. Instead, this vast wealth is being used by a tiny minority of billionaires to murder thousands, plunder resources, and destroy the environment. Here’s a look at just some of the U.S. weapons systems, and their costs, being utilized in this illegal war. Air defense systems: endlessly expensive Iran’s primary targets among the U.S. and Israeli military forces have been anti-air defense systems and the powerful radars that spot incoming aircraft and missiles and feed the targeting information to interceptor missiles to shoot them down before they can strike their targets. Without these advanced so-called “defensive” systems, the U.S. and Israel could not wage their offensive air wars with seemingly near-impunity. One of the primary Iranian missile and drone targets has been the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. Organized into mobile units called “batteries,” each battery has an AN/TPY-2 spotter radar, six interceptor missile launch systems, and a command station – all mounted on trucks that can be moved relatively easily. The U.S. has already lost four of the AN/TPY-2 radars used by THAAD, forcing it to pull THAAD systems from other theaters, including South Korea, to replace them. The U.S. only has eight THAADs. Each of these radars cost $500 million, and each interceptor missile costs $13-15 million each. A full THAAD battery of radar, control station, 6 launchers, 48 missiles costs $2.73 billion. So far, no Patriot missile systems have been confirmed destroyed in the present war, but numerous videos show their interceptor missiles firing at – and often failing to hit – incoming Iranian missiles or drones. Each of those Patriot interceptor missiles costs $3.7 million, and a full battery of radar, launchers, and command station costs $1.1 billion each. Another stunning loss has been the AN/FPS-132 Solid State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. base in Southwest Asia. This massive radar system cost $1.1 billion and is of the same type built across northern North America during the Cold War as an early warning system for Soviet ballistic missiles. |
Anonymous
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Missile and drone calculus
Even when these systems work as intended and defend successfully against Iranian missile and drone attacks, the cost disparity between a THAAD or Patriot interceptor and the low-cost missiles and drones utilized by Iran presents a devastating calculus. While hard numbers for the Iranian arsenal are hard to determine, the Shahed drone is estimated to cost between $20,000 and $50,000 per unit and can be mass produced. Iran’s ballistic missiles cost into the millions of dollars, but are still comparatively inexpensive. Each drone or missile usually requires at least two interceptors to successfully destroy, meaning that for each volley Iran fires, the U.S. is spending potentially tens of millions of dollars to intercept. The integration of cheap drones and missiles is a significant change to the strategic framework surrounding ballistic missile defense dating back to the Cold War. Interceptor systems have been an important part of international diplomacy since the Cold War, with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty limiting the U.S. and the Soviet Union to just a handful of interceptor systems capable of missile defense on a national level. However, the treaty allowed theater-level interceptors, meant for protecting troops or bases, but especially as the Cold War ended, the U.S. began to extend the ranges and capabilities of these systems, including THAAD and the Patriot, to well beyond the limitations of the treaty. In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty, giving Russia almost no explanation, and began developing a new generation of powerful missile defense systems. Alarmed at the threat this posed, which might give Washington the ability to launch a nuclear first strike, Moscow began developing a new type of weapon that could beat these air defenses and rebalance the strategic situation: the hypersonic missile. Hypersonic weapons travel faster than five times the speed of sound (3,836 mph at sea level) and most use highly maneuverable, unpowered glide vehicles in order to evade enemy defenses. Content with its own air superiority from stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, the U.S. did not prioritize developing hypersonic weapons of its own and has fallen behind Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran in attempting to develop a usable weapon. Iran has said it fired several hypersonic missiles in the present conflict and Russia has used them very effectively during its invasion of Ukraine. Aircraft losses The U.S. has also lost several aircraft since the start of the war, including six MQ-9 Reaper drones shot down by Iranian air defenses. The Reaper drone, also called the Predator-B, is a creation of the U.S. occupation wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, and has become infamous for enabling the remote-controlled bombing of weddings and homes across Africa and Asia. Each Reaper drone costs $30 million. In addition, several U.S. aircraft have accidentally been shot down by their own air defenses, including three F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets – each a waste of $97 million. Two KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft, airliner-sized jets that refuel other aircraft in mid-air so they can fly longer missions, have also been lost under mysterious circumstances — each costs $80 million. These enormous price tags are not simply because of the engineering complexity of military aircraft. The military aircraft industry has long been a black hole of public investment. The development of the F-35, the U.S.’s most advanced fighter jet, cost a total of over $2 trillion dollars, and ended up 80% over budget. This is a tendency across the aerospace sector, where contractors like Lockheed-Martin or Boeing use these projects as slush funds, massively inflating costs and development timelines. |
Anonymous
Anonymous
Maybe that poster meant the USS Gerald Ford. It was on fire and had to return to Crete for repairs. |
Anonymous
Anonymous
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Where is that marble mouthed Nick Shirley to street audit the Israel welfare program?
Nick, we need ya, bud! |
Anonymous
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Overconfidence is how wars and fights
Even trials are lost. Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders' minds − when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do |
Anonymous
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/03/20/overconfidence-is-how-wars-are-lost-lessons-from-vietnam-afghanistan-and-ukraine-for-the-war-in-iran-were-ignored/
Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds − when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the last war is mistaken for the next one. The Trump administration’s miscalculation of Iran is not an anomaly. It is the latest entry in one of the oldest and most lethal traditions in international politics: the catastrophic gap between what leaders believe going in and what war actually delivers. I’m a scholar of international security, civil wars and U.S. foreign policy, and author of the book “Dying by the Sword,” which examines why the United States repeatedly reaches for military solutions and why such interventions rarely produce durable peace. The deeper problem with the U.S. war in Iran, as I see it, was overconfidence bred by recent success. Before the conflict involving Iran, Israel and the U.S. escalated, Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed concerns about oil market disruption, noting that prices had barely moved during the 12-day war in June 2025 between Israel and Iran. Other senior officials agreed. What followed was significant: Iranian-aimed missile and drone barrages against U.S. bases, Arab capitals and Israeli population centers. Then Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes daily − not with a naval blockade, not with mines or massed anti-ship missiles, but with cheap drones. A few strikes in the vicinity of the strait were enough. Insurers and shipping companies decided the transit was unsafe. Tanker traffic dropped to zero, although the occasional ship has made it through recently. Analysts are calling it the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s oil embargo. Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has since vowed to keep the strait closed. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, reported after a closed-door briefing that the administration had no plan for the strait and did not know how to get it safely back open. |