[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.