Again, you are acting as a propagandist. Overinterpreting the "plz give more funding" texts of western MIC, and saying Baghdad Bob worthy things like "haha stupid westerners don't shoot at Iran's drones in international waters, it has to be because they can't, not because they aren't at war".More than the United States, no, but relative to where the balance of power was in the 1980s, without a doubt. Iran has developed pretty strong missile capacity, as the DIA notes:
To achieve its goals, Iran continues to rely on its unconventional warfare elements and asymmetric capabilities—intended to exploit the perceived weaknesses of a superior adversary—to provide deterrence and project power.This combination of lethal conventional capabilities and proxy forces poses a persistent threat. The IslamicRevolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force leads Iranian power projection through a complex network of state andnonstate partners and militant proxies. Iran’s conventional military emphasizes niche capabilities and guerilla-style tactics against its technologically advanced adversaries. Its substantial arsenal of ballistic missiles isdesigned to overwhelm U.S. forces and our partners in the region. Its swarms of small boats, large inventory ofnaval mines, and arsenal of antiship missiles can severely disrupt maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz—astrategic chokepoint critical to global trade. Each of these forces are becoming increasingly survivable, precise,and responsive
And their drone capabilities are very strong, as demonstrated by them repeatedly piercing U.S. air defenses for CBGs since 2016.
How do you stop a cheeky country from "piercing air defenses" of your ships in international waters without you know, committing an act of war?
Even a Maltese crop duster can pierce a CVBG's air defenses if no one wants a diplomatic incident.
In military parlance "free play" means a bit different thing than you think it does, it's not a good topic for notorious word gamers. If you read the article i linked you would even have the same guy explain it to you.And yet, you initiated this dialogue and the last three before it. When you didn't get your way each time, you claimed I wasn't worth your time and yet...here you are again. The lack of consistency is noticeable, so why the fakery? You're under no obligation to reply to me on this forum, nonwithstanding your moderator functions.
DoD News: Gen. Kernan And Maj. Gen. Cash Discuss Millennium Challenge's Lessons
www.globalsecurity.org
Q: Will there ever be an opportunity to really exercise these concepts and have more free play?
Kernan: Yeah, I think to a degree. I mean, you got to be careful about the word "free play." And I used it, and I wished I hadn't, because we do free play. We do free thinking. But once again, as with all the things I've done throughout my training, there's always been certain constraints. There's environmental constraints. There's areas in which you can fire and you can't fire. There is times in which you can use certain platforms and not use certain platforms. So there's always constraints that you have to weave around. And then there's the time constraint and the availability of troops.
Yes, I think what we can do is we can first of all recognize that some of these things are going to take a little bit more time. One of the advantages you have with simulation, quite honestly, is you're not bound by that and you can stretch out the time line. And if you -- and if something doesn't work, you stop, you re-cock, you turn the rheostat back, you make your assessment, you go back and you redo it. That's the way we would prefer to do an awful lot of these concept experimentations, is look at it from a simulation perspective because you're not wasting a lot of the troop's time and you can redo it time and again until you get all the data that you need. But recognizing how long some of these things take will also give us an opportunity to experiment better in the future.
Get your fucking brain working. That refers only to the people running the simulation portion. Obviously not the live exercise with ships and shit, you wouldn't crew more than a few of small ones with those numbers.You seem to not realize the Blue Team was 350 people and OPFOR/Red Team was just 90; it wasn't like they were running entire divisions. The wargame was partly simulated and things like NOTAMs exist for the live action portion.
Again, if you would just read the stuff you quote, you wouldn't be saying this stupid shit:
Millennium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and its Legacy
Since the infamous Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC ’02) concept-development exercise, run by the now-defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), was leaked
warontherocks.com
I think that's a bit more than 350...The exercise was mandated by Congress to “explore critical war fighting challenges at the operational level of war that will confront United States joint military forces after 2010.” Developed over two years at a cost of $250 million, it would grow to include 13,500 service members participating from 17 simulation locations and nine live-force training sites.
And you do realize that NOTAMs aren't magic, and USA is not North Korea?
If US military is going to ask for NOTAMs for days blocking off major airports, they probably aren't going to get them approved.
And this shit is exactly why Pentagon doesn't like releasing this kind of stuff. People as "smart" as you will take them, hang onto a few words, and use that to make whatever political conclusion they need to.Here you go:
Van Riper had participated in previous war games for JFCOM, including the previous year’s Unified Vision 2001 exercise in which he played the role of a landlocked regional power. At one crucial engagement during Unified Vision 2001, Van Riper was informed by the white cell, or “control,” overseeing the game that the United States had destroyed all 21 of the red team’s deeply buried ballistic missiles, even though the blue team commander never actually knew where they were located. It was simply assumed that in the future the United States would have the real-time radar and sensor capabilities to eliminate them. After the Unified Vision 2001 exercise, JFCOM provided a report to Congress that claimed that the exercise had corroborated the effects-based operations concepts. When Van Riper complained that that was untrue, he was promised, regarding MC ’02, that “next year will be a free play and honest exercise.” On the eve of MC ’02, Kernan even declared: “We have a very, very determined OPFOR, both live and simulation. … this is free play. The OPFOR has the ability to win here.”
The fact that exists only in your head, and was directly called out in the Pentagon report:
The reaction to the leak was swift. Senior JFCOM and Pentagon officials were livid that the retired lieutenant general had blown the whistle on MC ’02. They emphasized in press conferences that every major concept had been validated (there were 11 in total), while discounting what the OPFOR had been able to pull off. Kernan, who called Van Riper “a pretty slick fellow,” claimed that the exercise was not about winning or losing, despite contrary statements he had made weeks earlier. Kernan also admitted: “You [have] got to be careful about the word ‘free play.’ And I used it, and I wished I hadn’t.” Vice Adm. Martin Mayer, Kernan’s deputy, claimed, “I want to disabuse anybody of any notion that somehow the books were cooked.” Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace declared flatly, “I absolutely believe that it was not rigged.”Yet, JFCOM itself later concluded the opposite. The final JFCOM report on MC ’02 ran 752 pages long and was not released to the public for 10 years. The report detailed how the OPFOR had initially caught the blue team off guard, in large part because the blue team stuck closely to well-known and practiced U.S. military tactics. Moreover, to the extent that the blue team was perceived to be the winner, it was predominantly due to its quantitatively and qualitatively superior military capabilities. Meanwhile, the report admitted significant limitations and artificialities that were built into the war game. It also details the unexpected shifts in the rules of engagement early on. According to the report, “These changes brought about some confusion and potentially provided the blue team operational advantages.”Finally, the JFCOM report explicitly acknowledged:
As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations.
No, until we have holodecks we will never have perfect 1:1 simulations, especially with live elements.
Oh i think if it was the same it would be called a war, not an incident. And US Navy small boat officers being bad at navigation and their commanders higher ups, bad at escalation policy has little in common with that exercise.Except I cited an entire article going over a documented incident in 2008 showing the Iranians doing as Riper had been able to do in MC02.
Arabs are a culture, not a race, bucko... And unless you have a Skynet hidden in your basement somewhere, air defenses have to be operated by people. And it's not a simple job, it's more advanced air traffic control plus electromagnetic warfare and basic rocket science. If your military is organized like shit, and recruits are selected according to politics rather than qualification (and they really would have to struggle to find qualified ones), no amount of training is going to make them good (and they need far more training than just few US courses, hint hint), and even if they did, if the officers above them suck, and they usually do, that is worth only so much.While I commend you for openly attacking them based on their race instead of seeking to couch it in other terms, specifically, we were talking about their air defenses, not their armies in general. Your general characterization is wrong on that front as well, but I'll leave that aside to focus in on the point: if the training and the equipment is the same, what is the difference?
By your logic USA could have destroyed the Soviet Union just like it went through Iraq, because Soviet instructors trained Iraqi military and sold them gear.
So you are saying there is an enemy, and Iran should have been getting bombed since years. If that is so, i agree, USA should have had far more aggressive policy towards punishing irregular action by rogue states.Indeed, which is why you should know your original point is a non-starter:
Expecting the enemy to operate under the confines you place on it is rather foolish; as the old saying goes, they get a vote too.
US assessment is: "plz more funding, or losses *might* happen".Good thing I didn't argue that. What I did say is that Iran possesses the capabilities to inflict heavy losses upon the United States; read the DIA report I linked to earlier, if you want to see what the U.S. assessment is.
Wow, is the US political establishment paying you to write this shit? You really think it's not because the whole civil service and most of political class are cucks who fear what CNN will do to them over an escalation with Iran, it's because Iran is becoming a superpower and US military doesn't really have the ability to fight them easily so really all the bullshit Obama did in that regard was totally rational avoidance of a conflict that would be lost.In other words, exactly as everyone else?
Nor for the United States, hence why we have always strove to avoid conflict with them.
Did you register as a Democrat yet?
Yeah, i don't think the leftists in US administrations care about oaths and shit, what do you think they are, vikings, knights, samurai? No, they are leftists, and for them letting hostile foreign powers get away with shit they shouldn't is a feature, not a bug.And said individuals, and the institutions at large, took an oath to the Constitution to defend it against both domestic and foreign enemies; that they've avoided doing anything about it then takes us back to the characterization I said. Your argument is, when distilled, that they are cowards in one way, shape or form.
OR, you can take the exact tact I'm spelled out here; they're not cowards, nor is it a problem of our political class being insufficiently hawkish (lol, after 20 years of GWOT), but rather that our restraint is based on rational cost-benefit analysis of the costs of such engagement. If you read the DIA report, which is the end work of one of our main uniformed intelligence agencies, you see it's exactly as I present.