> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.

> Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.

Wargames aren't like laser tag matches where one side wins and then it's over, the point of them is to be a training exercise. It's supposed to be closer to D&D than anything, where the person playing the opposing forces plays a similar role to the DM. If you look at interviews from other MC2002 participants, essentially what happened was that the Navy wanted to practice for an amphibious landing. Due to how they moved their ships, the computer running the simulation thought that the entire naval fleet had been instantly teleported right next to a massive armada of small boats that Van Riper had set up, without simulating what would have happened if the naval fleet had seen the enemy ships in the distance. Additionally, in real life Van Riper's fleet could not have held the missiles that he had told the computer they were carrying and now firing at point blank range at the Navy. The simulator that ran the US naval ships' defenses was also not functioning due to the engagement happening in an unexpected area, so it was turned off. Van Riper was able to sink the ships and defeat the navy within the bounds of the simulation, but not in a way that could have happened in real life.

This is basically like if I found an obscure sequence of chess moves that caused the Lichess server to crash and declare me the winner, then used it to beat a bunch of grandmasters, then went on a media tour saying that this proves that there's some massive flaw with how chess strategy is being taught.

The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.

The game being reset makes sense - time and resources have been spent to make it happen, and it's best to get as much value from those resources as possible.

Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.

I learnt something new - wow - we are truly led by idiots.

who rigs the results of a war game and believes the results - only an idiot drunk on power.

War games aren't useful for guessing the real course of the war. 'Iraq' was able to prevent a US invasion in pre 2003 wargames.

> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.

Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?

I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.

Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?

Watching helplessly from the inside is painful. What makes it worse is I know people who are intelligent and appear to not be hateful SOBs that voted for the clowns, and would do so again. It breaks my brain, and my heart.

From the article:

>Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.

>It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.

This situation is not just because we elected a clown, these people donated hundreds of millions to Trump's campaign (Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison, etc). The same lobby (the Israel lobby) has contributed hundreds of millions more to almost every US senator, to the point that both political parties are pretty much aligned when it comes to serving Israel. There are plenty of politicians in the Democrat party who are quietly supporting this war because at the end of the day they've been bought by the same lobby.

Kamala (the alternative candidate in the 2024 election) has her own ties to Israel, and publicly said "all options are on the table" to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Which means had she won the election she likely would have also invaded Iran.

It goes beyond just who we elected, it's huge sums of money flowing through our political system and effectively buying our politicians.

It's not all. I tried as much as I could not commenting on it, but the delusions of _a lot_ of hn users on the subject, even a few whose opinion I respect, were unreal. People who are not MAGA btw.

And I'm not sure most of those realise how delusional they were, even now. They will probably rewire their memory to forget what they believed 3 weeks ago, compress the time they were wrong.

I initially thought the 'manufacturing consent' part of the war was botched, unlike Irak, but now to me it seems that people are much more susceptible to propaganda disguised as 'almost true' information on social media, and I am afraid I might be in the same boat.

It is a ring of incompetent yes men, but behind those yes men is a nefarious foreign influence operation. These guys didn't arrive at their bad decisions by accident.

I don't think that is the whole picture.

I suggest a significant cause is Trump's arrogance and only listening to the advice he wants to hear.

Its what happens when your nation state has been raised on an unhealthy diet of warrior narcissism.

I think that criticism legitimately undersells Total War players (and thereby oversells the administrations competence).

Total War involves an understanding and exploitation of high ground, rivers, and choke points. Like just about any war gamer, with a glance at the map of Iran one arrives at The Pentagons stated wisdom on the matter for decades. Geography says you invade all of it, or cede the straight.

We have this issue many paces in the world and people just don’t get it. North Korean nukes are a threat, but the unstoppable artillery barrage that would kill tens of millions in the first minutes of the war is The Issue. You can’t have snipers on a mountain ridge over your house and feel safe.

Dick Cheney and the Bush family spelled it out over and over. They like money and oil.

Don't forget prior saber rattling about Panama. Cuba is still actively on deck.

And here I thought that they acted more like Tropico players.

Hegseth?

They're obsessed with what real white men did the in past centuries, ie old style imperialism, not the current US state of imperialism.

A swing and a miss.

No, the protests were mostly genuine. That's what happens when your country is so up it's own ass with religious totalitarianism that you set yourself up to not have water at all in the next few decades. Average citizens generally get really pissy when you take away the "At least I'm not literally dying" excuse.

The US could not participate in that because we had moved assets to south america to fuck with Venezuela. The war in Iran wasn't started until the USS Ford had been re-positioned back to the middle east.

Donald trump addressed the Iranian people in a video message and told them to rise up when the war began.

Seriously, all these armchair "experts" are missing very obvious truths -

1) Every authority figure is telling the Iranian people to stay inside and wait.

2) Revolutions don't happen overnight, the same way that businesses don't succeed overnight, even though from far away it might seem that way.

3) Official Israeli statements estimate it could take up to a year after the war is over for a successful overthrow, even if everything is going according to plan.

The truth is there's a lot of people who want this war to fail, because it will align with their political convictions and hopes.

No it means people driving cars into synagogues and shooting up bars.

Trump is quoted saying that Iran would surrender or be pverthrown way before they would close the strait.

This operation was cobbled together between Trump, Hegseth, Rubio and Vance without consulting anyone outside that circle. The way they have been selling it, espwcially the strait stuff, smells of unplanned developements all around.

yeah I did expect US to know all those things...

but what I did NOT expect, is how Iran regime would choose strategically suicidal options just to "feel good"

missile-rambo even on non-combatant countries? that'll trigger self-defense attacks...

$2M per voyage? woah... the stait-users don't have a choice, but "make an example out of" iran...

I mean, iran should have just shot israel with all its missiles (select and focus), and bring that "missle interception rate" down to 40%.

Now what did iran gain from shooting everyone? making more enemies, and showing your weaknesses (96% missile interception rate, even from UAE? wtf...)

don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying Trump was right on starting the war. I actually think what the fk was he thinking back then...

I'm just saying even if you're angry and desperate, there are wise choices and dumb choices

Trump doesn't care about the results in Iran. He's getting richer through graft while making himself look big. He's pathetic and we're all paying the price in one way or another.

I think it's perfectly encapsulated by Hegseth's comment about not fighting "with stupid rules of engagement."

The implication is that, the US's military failures in the past have been caused by lefty bedwetters wringing their hands about casualties and restricting the military. More generally, caused by "woke" policies that are about political correctness instead of about military success.

I would bet at least $10 that the top people in the administration are baffled that they haven't won the war yet. They're saying, we did everything right. We got rid of the trans people in the military. We fired the worst women and black people in leadership roles. We put a real tough guy in charge of the military. We told our troops to stop worrying about rules of war and let them off their leash. So why is Iran still able to fight?

That's one of the problems with bigotry and toxic masculinity and that sort of thing. Not only does it lead you to harm people, but it also hurts your ability to actually get things done. Thinking that gay people are destroying society is bad if you're in a position to hurt gay people, but it's also bad if your job involves preventing the destruction of society, because it means that you're going to look at idiotic "solutions" to the problem. And because it's not coming from a place of rationality in the first place, you're not going to eventually say, wait a minute, this isn't working, maybe gay people aren't the problem. You're just going to keep pushing at it harder because you know it's right, and if it's not working then it's just because you haven't done it enough.