Iran’s precision strikes picked apart Gulf infrastructure, blunting US war plans

jauntywundrkind

This is barely telling it. It's a start. It's extremely concerning that the US military basically lost most of it's Middle East presence, had most of it effectively destroyed. We lost massive incredibly complex installations like our AN/FPS-132 radar complexes, huge powerful gigantic phased array systems, and various state of the art AN/TPY-2 and other radar. That basically seem to have been undefended. The TPY-2 could easily have been moved or hidden! Invaluable defense systems that we have absolutely no plans to protect. This is just the tip of the very expensive iceberg. We've basically lost various bases, entire THAAD systems: all similarly targeted and virtually undefended, destroyed. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us-mis... And the "Department of War" (scoff, but I guess accurate if they are so utterly rankly incompetently unable at all to defend) lied and lied about the extent of the damage and the cost of human lives and casualties. There didn't seem to be any plan at all to protect these people. They were unequipped and not on alert, not warned at all, even as drones and missiles came and destroyed a dozen sites. Even the most milquetoast commentariat, Iraq war defender David French is still somewhat pissed about the endless bullshit and lies from the deny-it-all useless DoW. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/opinion/hegseth-iran-war-... Department of War indeed. These incompetent losers seem to have not the smallest iota of understanding, not the least cares for what was coming at us. They had no defenses, no preparation. We faced incredible ruin. There's no plans, no idea what we do about any of this. We are in full retreat. It's unclear that we will have any presence left within thousands of miles. We can't even keep our planes in the UK, it's still not safe for us: the US military has essentially nowhere left on the continent it feels like it can leave it's equipment. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2026/0929/iran-war-mi... https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/10/iran-b1-bombe... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/suspected-plot-at-u-s-run... https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-port-shuaiba-attack-sold... This administration has been utterly unmoored from reality in every way. They've injured America at home and abroad, again and again, and lied and lied and lied all the time. The rank incompetence really is just the tip of it. The malicious disdain for basic rules of civilization and decency (SecDef No-Tab ordering war crime bombings of civilian vessels, perfidy, on and on). I hope there's a half-competent civilization left to mourn unhinged stupidity and malice these perpetrators against the world have done to us all so dirty. It's all such ultra-compressed stupidity. Absolutely psychotic delusional detached madness.

abdelhousni

Also the biggest lesson here : as a (non white) country could not count on them to protect you even after paying trillion dollars of ransom.

jazzyjackson

Biggest blunder of the 21st century, to have incompetent kleptocrats in charge of the national defense. “Wars are not won by firepower, but by logistics.” The Iranians are well aware of what two-dozen targets to disable to cripple US supply lines. In the meantime the bozos in Washington are asking Grok to classify whether a potential target is a school or a weapons depot. What did we accomplish, firing off every last cruise missile like it’s the 4th of July? We don’t even have the tooling to resupply thanks to cronyism in contracting, eg half a billie spent on robot arms that keep setting themselves on fire [0]. We’ve outsourced everything but behave as if we have unlimited resources, not to mention diesel and jet fuel. At least we keep some of that in strategic reserve ;) But as far as how all these wars are evolving I have my fingers crossed it’s eco-solar punk-terrorists that figured out how to goad the worlds superpowers into destroying each others gas refineries and data centers. [0] The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artiller...