wafdawg

Obama gave $1.6 billion in cash for Iran. Iran is giving Trump 10 oil tankers. This is what I voted for 🇺🇸

A Realistic Model of the Drone War If Iran can keep up the rate of fire enough to suppress traffic in Hormuz, it can progressively impose enough costs on the US to compel it to back off; in that scenario, it would've re-established deterrence and basically won the war. If the US and Israel can interdict or directly destroy drones on the ground faster than the Iranians can replace them, it can progressively neutralize the counter-value threat posed to Iran, reopen Hormuz, and carry on a one sided war on punishment on Iran. That scenario would not be an outright victory, but at least the US would avoid outright defeat. The model is just a formalization of this intuition. Instead of the stock of drones, which many found unpersuasive, we directly model the number of drone production sites, N, which obeys a simple ODE. The key parameters are the rate at which the US and Israel can destroy drone factories (d_{fac}) and the rate at which Iran can repair them or make new ones (r_{fac}). The decisive factor is the ratio r_{fac} / (d_{fac} + r_{fac}), which governs the dynamics of the number of working drone factors, N(t), the expected time to Iranian exhaustion, and drone inventories, I(t). 1/

really think Pokemon Cards stole NFTs thunder this cycle, the buyer pool overlaps heavily we are entering crazy land, I cant even name how many cards are up 500-1000%+ the last year, hundreds of cards

I continue to see influential accounts on here insist that this war is not primarily driven by Israeli foreign policy goals. It's possible to argue against this by sifting through media reports about who called who in the lead up to the war, and this is the tack most people take. But I'd like to build a case for Israeli strategic primacy through a different route. Place yourself in the shoes of an Israeli strategic planner, and assume that your principal strategic goal is Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. It should be uncontroversial to assert that eliminating Iran is a necessary (and perhaps the most important) component of this goal, so I'll skip over justifying that. How can this be accomplished? The IDF consists of 170k active duty personnel, and is suffering recruitment and retention issues. The IAF packs an outsized punch considering Israel's size, but it's ultimately a mid-tier air force with ~250 fighter airframes (most of which are F-16s and F-15s), no bombers, and only 11 refueling tankers. The Israeli Navy is a souped-up coastal defense force and can't be expected to operate in the Persian Gulf. Compare this to Iran, which has a manpower pool an order of magnitude larger, tens of thousands of drones and thousands of ballistic missiles, an asymmetric naval force focused on area denial, extensive proxy forces, and hugely favorable terrain for defensive operations. There's no chance of deploying an IDF ground component onto Iranian soil. It's an impossible prospect on a political level for any other state in the region to support this, and Iraq and Syria stand between Israel and Iran. Even if the Iranians didn't outnumber the IDF by a huge margin, sustaining some kind of invasion simply isn't on the table. The best you can do in terms of direct offensive operations is the following: • Launch a short campaign (remember you're limited by refueling aircraft) of aerial attacks using standoff munitions like ALBMs • Insert agents into Iran and have them launch drones from within the country • Try to arm and support proxy forces within Iran, or organize multiple small invasions • Orchestrate political violence, protests, terrorist attacks, etc The Israelis have attempted all of these, and so far none of them have seemed to fundamentally shift the strategic picture. This leaves one option on the table: get the United States to fight Iran for you. Considering this has been an Israeli goal for decades, and one administration after another has balked at the prospect, it's not an easy task. You'll draw vast sums of money out of a network of American Zionist billionaires to influence an election. You'll need the closest possible connections to US leadership, ideally agents within the executive's own family. You'll want to have your people involved in the US foreign policy apparatus, putting them in between the US government and Iran, so you can control negotiations. You'll need people within the Department of War, though having an agent as Secretary of War would draw too much attention. Once all of this is achieved, you'll stand a chance of orchestrating events to suck the US gradually into direct combat with Iran. You start off by provoking the Iranians into attacking you. Hit some embassies, assassinate IRGC personnel, launch airstrikes on Tehran. Keep pushing about the dangers of an Iranian nuclear weapon, make sure the US treats it like a red line. Pressure the administration into participating in a limited strike. Bide your time when necessary, then suddenly escalate again. When it seems like an off-ramp might be coming up, find a red line and cross it. Keep going until American hegemony itself is on the line. The sunk cost fallacy will ensure events unfold in your favor until American boots hit the ground. This is, of course, exactly what we're seeing. You can make a case that this war is really about China, or energy markets, or defense industry profits. There are sound arguments that some US interests overlap with Israeli goals. But it is *very* hard to make a case that this war isn't significantly the result of decades of Israeli soft power, influence operations, and espionage.