[inglor_cz]

I understand the US doctrine, which is also fine-tailored to buying very expensive systems from certain corporations that have few to none competitors and feel no real pressure to innovate.

"Arguably, the current Iran conflict is a proxy war against the PRoC."

That is stretching it. The vast majority of weapons that Iran deployed were of their own build, and China sends nowhere near as much equipment to Iran as, say, Europe to Ukraine.

"Future military spending is focused on countering China, not on the style of conflict Ukraine is facing."

Which is part of the problem. As a wanna-still-be-superpower, the US will face a lot of diverse conflicts in the world, with various characteristics.

"The US is not optimized to fight such a war."

The US is not optimized to a bombing campaign against countries the size of Iran anymore either. You are literally running out of things to throw at them after mere weeks have passed.

Good luck fighting China then, with its 16x as big population and 100x as big economy than Iran has.

"The US (and Russia) could always win their current conflicts with ICBMs, but choose not to. That is a calculated choice, not an inability to win as you claim."

War is continuation of politics, not just destruction for its own sake. To win the war does not mean "utterly destroy a certain region", but "make the opponent do as you wish, at least in some aspects, against his will, while not suffering catastrophic consequences elsewhere".

If political constraints stop you from deploying WMDs, and you cannot achieve your political aims with conventional weapons, that counts as an inability to win the war. Can the US make the Iranian leadership drop their nuclear ambitions? It does not seems so. Can the US wipe Iran off the map? Yes, but at the cost of becoming a pariah nation, which is worse than ayatollahs having a few nukes. Only a fool would call the latter "victory".

[tristanj]

You obviously don't understand US doctrine, since earlier you were complaining how the US hasn't adapted its arsenal regarding drones in just four years.

Iran would not be able to pursue nuclear weapons nor missiles without China's assistance. The precursors of the missile fuel, the precursors of yellowcake processing, the chips and hardware of Iranian drones, all come from China with its assistance and blessing.

China has provided military equipment and weapons to Iran. China has military personnel in Iran operating air defense systems. It is accurate to call this a proxy war.

The fact you are unaware of any of this, demonstrates your lack of understanding of the conflict.

Further proof you do not comprehend US doctrine, is that the US can always escalate the conflict and pursue a ground war. But is hesitant to do so simply because Trump does not want war. Trump prefers quick, surgical operations; and does not want to drag the US into a forever war like Bush Jr and Obama did.

You keep claiming the US is "inable" to win the war, yet you do not understand the definition of this word. Choosing not do pursue a strategy for political reasons is not inable. The US would win a ground war against Iran, full stop. Your analysis fails to consider this option. But it would win at the cost of thousands of lives, and likely the US would need to occupy the country, which is politically challenging, and Trump is savvy enough to be hesitant to pursue this option.

You also lack historical understanding of war. You forget that total destruction and capitulation was the default strategy of war for millenia, see strategies of the Mongols or the war against Japan, where the US firebombed and leveled Japanese cities, even nuking them, until capitulation.

[inglor_cz]

" that the US can always escalate the conflict and pursue a ground war. "

You seem to be stuck on repeat with "don't understand, don't understand, don't understand". Yet it seems to me that it is you who got sucked into some bizarro understanding of war being fundamentally an annihilation contest between the two parties involved. This very shallow understanding is now somewhat widespread in the blogosphere and pushed by, again, shallow types like Stephen Miller. Claims like "total destruction and capitulation was the default strategy of war for millenia" are just not true. It happened sometimes, but quite often also not, because warring parties always have some limits to their effort, be it ideological, economic or political limits. And this was no less true in Antiquity than today.

Outside the bizarro "total destruction" corner, war between organized states has been understood primarily as a continuation of politics, with the goal to make your enemy do something that they don't want to. Even the Mongols you mentioned usually gave a besieged city an option to surrender, because their primary goal wasn't simply to kill, but to conquer and rule.

Yes, there are exceptions (Carthago delenda est), but these exceptions aren't the historical rule.

Let us look at the situation in Iran now.

The US seems to want something from Iran. It is not very clear what, but probably free movement of ships through Hormuz, nuclear disarmament and maybe even regime change.

It also does NOT want to genocide the Persians out of existence. While doable, it would carry a heavy reputational penalty and cause significant friction back at home. Not even Trump wants to add tens of millions of civilian lives to his conscience, hence WMDs are out of question.

A ground invasion is thinkable, but I am much less persuaded about its efficiency than you are. As you yourself say, this has a risk of turning into a forever war and the US isn't equipped, mentally nor doctrinally, to fight forever wars.

Which means that you likely won't get what you want from the current Iranian leadership by the sort of military means you can feasibly use against them, and that is not a victory.

Please give me a plausible scenario in which the current US is capable of winning a ground war against Iran in the presence of all the current political limitations, which are quite fundamental. You can't.

Ultimately it does not matter if you can't win because you cannot muster the political will to engage in a costly war, or if you can't win because you run out of Tomahawks (both are correlated, btw). It is still an inability to win, which is obviously detrimental to the US imperial standing.

[tristanj]

The US has a straightforward option to "win" the war via a ground invasion.

First, a large scale bombing campaign, targeting Iranian infrastructure.

Dropping bombs on every power substation, fuel plant, and generation plant would cripple the economy, and grind the country to a halt. A similar strategy was applied to Japan and Germany in WWII. If these facilities have military purpose, destroying these facilities is not necessarily a war crime.

A modern economy cannot function without fuel and electricity. The economy will quickly grind to a halt, and Iran will be forced to confront internal problems before mounting a concerted response.

After 2-3 weeks of chaos, the US would launch a ground invasion, though Pakistan and Iraq. It would then remove the nuclear material, clean up Iranian missiles that target ships in the strait, and the US would leave.

It achieves the primary, secondary, and tertiary goals of the war: no more nuclear weapons, removal of nuclear material, and reopening of the strait.

Combat losses to the US would be minimal. The cost for Iran, though, is astronomically high. It would take years for the country to rebuild, and set back the nation economically for decades.

Trump is trying hard to avoid this option. Many other presidents (I'd wager Kamela) would have gone down this path by now.

[inglor_cz]

There is nothing straightforward about the option you describe.

The necessary buildup would take several months and would happen within range of Iranian drones.

Neither Iraq nor Pakistan seem to be particularly likely to grant a permission to the US to stage a large-scale land operation against Iran from their own territory. Both have large populations partly sympathetic to the mullahs, the political destabilization caused by taking the side of "infidels" against the "faithful", plus suffering Iranian drone retaliation, would be just too costly for them.

"First, a large scale bombing campaign, targeting Iranian infrastructure."

The US already did that and emptied its arsenals to dangerously low levels. Were they replenished? Probably not yet, this is what we are discussing here; the military-industrial complex in America has grown fat and complacent and cannot quickly increase production beyond the very low level optimized out by post-Cold-War MBAs.

"Combat losses to the US would be minimal."

Uncertain. The US could probably swallow its pride and go to Kyiv to shop for anti-drone know-how and technology. In that case, the combat losses would be lower. If people like Vance and Trump cannot do that, I would rather expect the US losses to be at least in lower tens of thousands. A million cheap FPV drones can do a lot of dirty work, and this is probably the stuff that China can send to the IRGC quite quickly.

[tristanj]

You misunderstand. You underestimate the depth of the campaign. The strategy calls for a total dismantling of Iran's infrastructure, including oil generation, fuel processing, electrical generation, and industrial capacity. Similar how the allies won WWII against Germany and Japan by destroying their industrial capacity.

Iran would be paralyzed without fuel and electricity, GDP would collapse by 90%, and within days, there would be large social unrest. The IRGC would be too distracted managing unrest to mount a concerted response.

The US and allies would spend the next few weeks amassing forces, then would invade along multiple axises (from the east and west). Pakistan would join the war, as it is obligated under the Saudi/Pakistani mutual self-defense treaty.

Forces would then remove the nuclear material, clean up Iranian missiles that target ships in the strait, and the US would leave.

[bigyabai]

If that strategy was the only strategy, then it would have already been done, there would be no desire for diplomatic resolution here. Optics-wise, banking on social unrest has failed, and if the US escalates it to a Dresden situation then the Gulf States will have their own critical services attacked in reprisal. Part of the reason why we're even seeing negotiations is because the US has no free win button. The escalation ladder is still wide open for both sides.

It doesn't take a four star general to understand why a ground invasion sucks. By the time Marines land in Bandar Abbas, the HEU is halfway to an underground vault in Magnitogorsk. The remaining job of securing UF6 rubble, locating spare centrifuges and dismantling their enrichment loop is pointless. There is no option to "remove the nuclear material" that reasonably deters Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. The JCPOA was a more workable framework than this blockade has proven to be.

[inglor_cz]

"You underestimate the depth of the campaign. The strategy calls for a total dismantling of Iran's infrastructure, including oil generation, fuel processing, electrical generation, and industrial capacity. Similar how the allies won WWII against Germany and Japan by destroying their industrial capacity."

Nope, I understand quite well. I also understand that your picture of current US capabilities is too rosy.

The current US military simply does not have enough assets to do that without dangerously overstretching its commitments elsewhere. They already had to withdraw some missiles from the Far East to compensate for what was used during March.

The US armaments industry is nowhere near where it was during WWII in terms of current capacity, and its future capacity ramp-up is slooooow. Not enough qualified people, for starters. Many necessary components are produced overseas. Too much red tape and not enough willingness from the government to commit to large orders in the future.

In order to build a new factory, you need to be sure that the government will be buying the products for ~15-20 years, but the voters don't support this sort of military expenditure. They want more Medicare and Social Security, not unlike Europeans, and less military spending.

Even if the US decided to supercharge spending on its military, the lead-in time to build those factories is at least two years.

BTW your assertion that the Allies destroyed German industrial capacity is flat wrong. This is exactly the shallow understanding of history I was talking about. Dive into some actual historical sources on strategic bombing.

The Allies mostly destroyed living quarters of German workers, but Germany actually reached peak armaments production in 1944 and the occupying forces were surprised by finding the factories in good order and full of new machines.

What really broke Germany's back was physical loss of territory, severe lack of important resources like oil (caused by physical loss of control of Romania), molybden (which made their first jet engines unreliable) and a significant loss of people. But its industry was working quite reliably until Stunde Null. They moved the most critical factories underground and that was it.

One of the reasons why West Germany was so swiftly reintegrated into Europe was that their industrial capacity was necessary for post-war buildup. During the Marshall Plan years, Germany was the only European nation where the average age of industrial equipment was under 5 years.