It's pretty normal for planes to go down in a war. They've flown 5000+ sorties, it's a pretty huge accomplishment this is the first one lost over Iran. Especially considering all of the last decade's speculation about how tough attacking Iran would be.
You'll never be able to fully suppress all of their manpads. Even if you destroy the bulk of their air defence network.
2-3 a week is not great for the greatest military, more than half attributable to Iran.
With 300+ US casualties, that's ~10/day, a fatality every ~2 days. No boots on the ground (that we know of, sure there are some elite ops in the country)
You must not have read about all the hype Iran had before the war and before 2024 especially. The US airforce/navy has performed extremely well. In Desert Storm they lost far, far more aircraft and that only lasted 1.5 months (Iran is 1 month in). Even the ballistic missile strikes against Israel haven't been exceptionally notable, considering Iran is going full-bore and has thousands of ballistic/cruise missiles and drones. They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
The main issues with this war are strategic questions and people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication. But otherwise for an air campaign this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
Iran's regime is an radical Islamic theocracy that has "Death to America" as a matter of policy, supports every other radical Islamist militia in the entire Middle East region, and tried to build nukes after being told, repeatedly, not to build nukes.
I don't know about you, but the idea of a radical Islamic theocracy and a well known source of Middle East instability having nukes doesn't sit well with me. As far as reasons to invade countries go, this alone would make for a damn good one.
If a button existed that magically turned Iran into a secular-ish democracy(-ish) like Turkey then, yes, I would expect the President of the United States to press it.
No such button exists, and it's increasingly clear that this war will leave the entire world far worse off while further entrenching the current Iranian regime.
"Far worse off" how exactly? "Entrenching" how exactly?
Iranian regime wasn't doing that well even when it wasn't actively bombed. And "rally around the flag" only goes so far in a country that has been killing protestors by the thousands.
I don't see this war ruining Iran's regime overnight as is. But if it comes up with a sustained effort to pressure Iran, or a ground operation to topple the regime directly, it well might.
> "Far worse off" how exactly? "Entrenching" how exactly?
Hardliners and the IRGC have significantly more power than before, and however few moderates that remain have much less political capital and are at much greater risk of being purged.
If Iran doesn't win significant concessions tayt the sucker-punch attacks will never be repeated again[1], they are guaranteed to sprint towards the minimum viable nuke.
1. Bibi will refuse, obviously, and Americas capacity to leash him is questionable.
"Moderates" in Iran were consecutively dismantled and purged for decades. A country that has moderates providing a meaningful counterbalance to hardliners doesn't kill protestors by thousands.
Pre-war, the situation was bad enough that dropping bombs on Iran's key decision-makers might have actually made the government more moderate on average. Not that it matters much. "More moderate" in context of Iran's government isn't anywhere near "moderate" either way.
Here's an idea I heard put forth because Iran is asking for a great power guarantee against future incidents like this.
Have China the guarantor, build military bases, and put them under their nuclear deterrence umbrella. Iran can be assured they won't be bombed, the West can be assured they won't have nukes. (in theory, I largely assume the CCP will not aid in their construction or let them have nukes under such an arrangement).
Thing is, all the little countries are looking at what happened to Ukraine (who gave up their nukes), Iran (who has not gotten them yet), and North Korea (who has them). Their looking and thinking, if I had nukes, I probably wouldn't be the target of regime change.
Why would China agree to that? It's an insane proposition for them. "You have to put bases in a country where you have no strategic reason to do so, and in addition, you agree that if that country is attacked then you have to nuke the US, guaranteeing your own destruction."
They want a base in the Middle East and they have many reasons to be there, oil being one of them, they actually get it from there. As Trump says (today), the US does not have any need for their oil, so in that sense China has more reason to be there.
Mutually Assured Destruction has worked for 75 years, China is aggressively expanding their stockpiles. Would the US or Israel risk a war with China over Iran if they get the assurances from the Chinese they will keep Iran on a tight leash?
> Why would China agree to that?
Ultimately the aim to displace the US as the world hegemon. Having bases across the world is what hegemons do.
So Iran would sell its main natural resource at half-price forever to pay for China to keep bases on its territory? That also doesn’t seem plausible.
Realistically there is no amount that Iran would be willing to pay and that China would be willing to accept for China to essentially agree to be responsible for the defense of Iran. It’s a non-starter.
the big difference with Iran is the strait of hormuz. It doesn't matter how "well" it goes if it stays closed and torpedos the global economy
> inconsistent communication
I feel like "inconsistent communication" is putting it lightly, with trump going back and forth between "we won", "we'll take the oil", and "whatever we'll leave" often within the same day.
Does it matter? US is a net oil exporter, and not exactly starved for Gulf oil. And every day the strait stays closed is a day other Gulf states have a very pressing reason to conflict with Iran. As if Iran didn't give enough of those to the entire region.
Iran isn't somehow able to exert infinite economic pressure forever. They can play the chaos monkey, but how much does it helps them? Threats only work on those who cave in to them.
It does matter because oil is a global commodity, the fact that the US is a net exporter doesn't stop the prices from going up and other follow-on impacts to the global economy.
It means that US isn't hit the hardest. There's no "we have to end the war this month or our country grinds down to a halt". Just the slow grind of economic pressure that, I remind, affects more countries than just the US - and many of them far stronger.
US leadership can just say "this isn't enough to deter us" and proceed with the rest of the war however they want.
The Iranian regime is betting that they can outlast Donald Trump on this front. Trump's War is very unpopular and they don't care what the Iranian people think or suffer through.
Holy shit, thats really saying the quiet part loud.
“Does it matter?”
Yes, Who cares about the rest of the world?
Nations shutting down, businesses shutting down, and all because the elected leader of America got involved in a war to avoid accusations of pedophilia.
And lest we forget, this is the nuclear superpower. Thank god there is no conspiracy theory about Nukes being useful so far. I have more faith that the administration will bend towards conspiracies than away from them.
> They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
I don't see why they couldn't. The obvious strategy for Iran right now is to use cluster munitions and Shahed waves to expend as many interceptors as possible before sending in the high-throw unitary (or nuclear) warheads. It makes sense that we saw the smaller MRBMs first since they're the cheapest minimum-viable threat.
> this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
We're deep in the missile age. Air campaigns like this sucked during the Scud hunt, and it triple-sucks now that America has to contend with drone warfare. The limits of an air-only campaign have been constricting for the past three decades, and the death toll can only climb if the air war fails.
I wouldn't draw comparisons to Desert Storm, 36 years ago and a differently composed US military, along with all the ISR advancements since then.
> They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
Could, they are not going all out, but they do keep striking gulf states on the regular
> people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication.
Asking questions, we the people deserve some clarity instead of half a dozen changing reasons and being told we already won, but still need to win, and that we'll be done in a few weeks a few times now. We the people have to pay for this, we deserve answers, especially what's the plan for when the shooting stops?
Israel, or at least Bibi, seems to be the only one who is very clear about the goals and intentions.
US military is performing quite well. US political leadership is the questionable part of this war.
It would sure be nice if White House gave a reason to believe that there's an actual plan for dismantling Iran's regime, or Iran's influence, that goes beyond "wing it".
The only ones I'm seeing act like there should be no expectation of losing aircraft in a war are social media figures who always want to bloviate about something.
turn out the schizos were right. most of OpenAI *real* investment money comes from Gulf countries. without that money flow they can't sustain the cash burn anymore.
Faster is not always the best thing. I still remember when vs code changed to ripgrep I had to change my habit using it, before then I can just open vs code to any folder and do something with it, even if the folder contains millions of small text files. It worked fine before, but then rg was picked, and it happily used all of my cpu cores scanning files, made me unable to do anything for awhile.
To be honest I hate all the new rust replacement tools, they introduce new behavior just for the sake of it, it's annoying.
Tensor core performance is inversely proportional to precision across all generations (i.e., reducing precision by a factor of 2 increases OPS by a factor of 2). 8-bit precision will give you the same improvement ratio. A100/H100 didn't support 4-bit if I remember correctly.
So FP4/INT4 will likely improve the same 30% OPS/W. You could get a separate improvement by reducing precision, but going 1-bit for 4x improvement feels unlikely for now.
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