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by toomuchtodo 110 days ago
The US spent trillions of dollars and many lives during their last escapade into the sandbox, and still went home having lost. What evidence leads you to believe a coalition of countries can stamp out autonomous, independent, ideology driven, potentially perpetual attacks? The potential attack surface is enormous, and attackers need to win only once versus needing a constant, successful defense against them. “What is your threat model?”

Iran is already demonstrating how to exhaust a supply of $4M patriot missiles with $50k drones. Broadly speaking, chaos is cheap when asymmetrical power is available and successful and soft, undefended targets are numerous and readily available. The cost to defend everything at once is untenable, and in some cases, it is almost impossible to defend the target at all (artillery against an LNG loading facility, for example).
2 comments
ParentiSoundSys 109 days ago
What ideology do you believe is driving Iran? To me it just looks like "survive and deter unprovoked attacks from a genocidal aggressor, and don't become Syria 2.0"

I think it's the actions of the United States and Israel that beggar niche ideological explanations at this point.

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toomuchtodo 109 days ago
> What ideology do you believe is driving Iran? To me it just looks like "survive and deter unprovoked attacks from a genocidal aggressor, and don't become Syria 2.0"

I agree.

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wmf 110 days ago
Iran's attacks are only perpetual if they have oil and electricity, right? At a certain point we turn it all off.
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toomuchtodo 110 days ago
How much oil and electricity was needed for the 9/11 attack on the twin towers? Motivation was the primary ingredient. The developed world is exceptionally fragile unfortunately. Ideology has no supply chain to target.

Cyberattacks can also be performed from anywhere cost effectively. I certainly hope we haven’t underfunded and crippled CISA.

> "Our critical infrastructure is quite vulnerable. They look for outdated systems, systems that haven't been patched or are so old that they're not even patched anymore. They're weak spots and an unfortunately, as you accurately point out, those systems are largely what is the back end of so much of our critical infrastructure," he said.

https://abc7chicago.com/post/federal-agencies-us-cities-aler...

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