[JumpCrisscross]

> they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore

Drones + cheap antidrones + aircraft carriers + stealth aircraft looks like a solid high/low optimum. Anyone pitching an only-high or only-low strategy is leaving chips on the table.

[ohnei]

I'm not familiar with a stealth meant for even when you have to park it sometimes. If anyone has a great drone dominance then all your anti drone should go into drone related infrastructure. If someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd.

The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If anyone has a great drone dominance then all your anti drone should go into drone related infrastructure

If your opponent has drone dominance, you neutralize that advantage with anti-drone kit and then build your own advantage. Part of that will be drones. But part will be heavier, more sophisticated platforms. (Which will eventually pilot themselves, but aren’t drones since they aren’t cheap.) You can’t win a war only playing defense.

> someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd

Their high technology destroys your industry while you wait. This is strategy as old as the Bronze Age.

[throw0101a]

> If someone has the corresponding high dominance then you can wait until nature runs out of resources for maintaining the absurd.

If someone has high dominance, they can probably afford to take 20% of that capability and divert the funding to low dominance as well. The reverse will not necessarily be true: if you have low dominance does not mean you have the capability to go high.

> The US is a strategy of failure since Vietnam because it is profitable to war hawk supporters to lose every war in the economics and funnel the money back into more strategic losers.

The US generally does not lose militarily: it has 'lost' because they didn't have a strategic goal, or decided that their goal was no longer important.

The US could have stuck with South Vietnam just like it stuck with South Korea (to this day, in 2026), but decided to stop. There's no reason why they couldn't kept with it, and we have a North/South Vietnam like we have a North/South Korea.

That is the present situation with Iran: the US has/is trounced Iran military, but the problem is that the Administration cannot answer the question "What is the purpose of this war?". Hegseth is dunking on "elite" colleges and wanting a "warrior army", but one thing colleges do is things like teach von Clausewitz. You know, "War is the continuation of politics by other means."

The US managed to stick with Iraq a little longer, through the insurgency and then against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, and now Iraq has elections:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...

There was enough of a civil culture in Iraq that wanted a system of government to keep it going. There seems to not have been enough a civic culture in Afghanistan to sustain a similar government and to fight against the Taliban. Militarily the US was doing just fine against the Taliban.