[_DeadFred_]

It's pretty easy to measure, you compare the two.

During the first 2 weeks of the Gulf War we lost 12 aircraft to enemy fire. 8 to Iraqi SAMs, 3 Iraqi AAA, and 1 lost in air combat (an F/A-18C Hornet shot down by an Iraqi MiG-25). Losses resulted in 19 deaths and 10 POWs. We had a 70% interception rate on Iraq's ballistic missiles versus 90% on Iran's. We were not able to find/stop Iraq's launchers during the entire war, meanwhile we have footage of eliminating some of Iran's.

We now have drones allowing us to do lots of recon without risk to our planes. Last I know we've lost 14 drones. In Iraq that would have been 14 piloted jets. This allows us to do more/more risky recon, and at a higher operational tempo as they can be in the air longer, don't have pilot fatigue, etc.

We have removed the top government officials, and continue to remove high value targets. Today Ali Larijani, one of the orchestrators for the mass killing of Iranian protestors, was killed along with Basij cheif Gholamreza Soleimani who bragged about personally beating protestors and whose forces use rape against women routinely, along with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

Militarily we have been extremely successful in our objectives. How that translates politically in Iran is unknown. But militarily it can't be denied. The start of the Iraq war is unilaterally considered militarily successful, and this war so far is wildly more successful than that was.

[duxup]

That really didn’t answer my question. It reads like trying to find misc metrics to prove success.

And WMDs, you think those were real?

Kinda fits the government’s shifting explanations for the war anyway, but that’s incoherence not success.

[_DeadFred_]

WMDs have nothing to do with military success.

You are talking about political success, and we won't know how that goes until the final outcome, but if we are successful we may never know (if we stopped a nuclear program that would have happened, how do we know we did?).

Currently we can look at military success, and it's pretty easy to see militarily we are meeting our goals.

[duxup]

Yeah like I said it reads like trying to make up a measurement to fit a story, these conflicts aren’t even comparable for obvious reasons.

[_DeadFred_]

It reads like military analysis of a military action. Strategic and tactical/military success are not the same thing, but both are worthwhile discussions to understand events. You seem to want to comingle the two but it'd probably be more productive for you to discuss your proffered topic of strategic success in one of the many threads here related to that.