[kadoban]

I assume you're talking about "slow and expensive" like sending tens of thousand of troops to occupy at _least_ the ~entire shore around the narrow part of the Strait, indefinitely?

Yeah, shocking there's no political will for that.

[Gud]

That would not be sufficient because Iran can send drones from deeper within its territory.

There is no way to keep the straight open without cooperation from Iran, or a near destruction of all their military assets.

[energy123]

You assumed wrong. Maybe listen to the interviews before responding with aggressive sarcasm.

[kadoban]

It was an honest question.

[energy123]

I would point you to Gen MacKenzie's interviews as the reference on that question, I would just be regurgitating his views.

He says that a sustained coastal invasion is not necessary. Raids would be necessary to destroy any buried weapons, but these troops wouldn't need to stay there.

Other than this you need more of what they were already doing, "shaping operations" as he calls it, which is ISR drones overhead and lots of bombing/strafing runs.

Eventually, because they don't have a remaining industrial base and cannot effectively replenish their stocks (excepting more simple one way attack drones), they will lack the ability to project enough power beyond their borders to keep the strait closed.

Operation Praying Mantis is a somewhat dated case study, but still required reading.

The reason it's so expensive should be more intuitively obvious - interceptors are expensive and are needed to pace China, and a few more months of closure is significant inflation before the midterms.

[kadoban]

Thanks for the info, I'll track down that interview. That is an interesting strategy that I didn't consider.

[andriy_koval]

> Raids would be necessary to destroy any buried weapons, but these troops wouldn't need to stay there.

Shaheds can be launched from trucks from inside densely populated cities. Good luck with those raids.

> Eventually, because they don't have an industrial base and cannot effectively replenish their stocks

Modern drones are cheap and easy to assemble, Iran's allies (Russia, China) can easily smuggle them inside country.

[energy123]

The win condition is not zero Shahed attacks, the win condition is to open the strait.

[andriy_koval]

Its the same thing. Businesses won't move ships if there are shahed attacks.

[senordevnyc]

If the truth is that our extremely expensive military is relatively useless in this situation, do you really think he'd admit that?

[esseph]

Hundreds of thousands