| > Which ones? FONAV is not restored to the Strait, attacks on shipping have not been eliminated Neither of those were primary or secondary goals, we didn't even attack Iran for those reasons. Those only arose after the fact. The highest goal overall was to stop World War 3 from happening or at least delay it until the metrics can shift so dramatically that China cannot deny that the environment is not in its favor. Even though there are critical differences, there are also dangerous similarities in what China is doing today to what the Soviet Union was doing that sparked World War 2. Huge military build-up, purging its military and weaponizing communism abroad. The Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Iran chain was a message that we see the network. Expanding our military operations aggressively in South America to unwind China's leftist expansion there was a message. One aspect of that is to reduce the capacity of these countries to engage in coordinated interference or conventional attacks. All of these countries are heavily involved in interference inside the US, but they were also attacking their neighbors or threatening to. Another aspect is simply re-establishing deterrence. There had been so much propaganda spreading that the US is worthless, evil and in decline when in relative terms none of those are true. If countries think they won't face any real opposition, they feel emboldened to do whatever they want. Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela were all establishing themselves to feel invincible. It was their time and the US is done. The international order is done. Plenty of this propaganda still exists, but the propagandists themselves now mostly know better when before they were drinking their own kool-aid. Next, Iran attempted to assassinate the US president numerous times and even again recently. They also made attempts to assassinate Netanyahu. In addition, Iranian leadership engaged in indiscriminate mass killing of their own civilians. There was also intelligence gathering that contradicts the stated position of Iranian leadership not wanting to obtain a nuclear bomb. There has historically been an even more radical element in Iran that believed they needed to bring about something akin to the end times to cause the resurrection of their prophet. Officially they were suppressed and deinfluenced. Beyond that, they were involved in countless assassinations around the world and essentially caught red handed, yet still denied it. So a critical primary objective was to take out multiple layers of leadership to demonstrate "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I think everyone agrees you shouldn't be running around indiscriminately killing world leaders, so usually when it does occur it is the result of them attempting to kill other leaders or engaging in some other kind of deeply condemned actions. A follow on primary objective is to disrupt their nuclear program and ballistic missile program to prevent them from establishing a North Korea style nuclear immunity. An extension of that was to set back their space program for developing long range ballistic missiles and launching military satellites which would further allow them to identify targets and deliver nuclear weapons. Their nuclear material is buried and whenever they try to dig things up we blow them up. That can continue without requiring carrier groups. While their nuclear program was already bombed, there were other nuclear related labs and facilities which were intentionally not bombed to leave something to discuss, but that wasn't fruitful and now those have been hit too. Neither their navy or air force were really much of a threat and they were largely useless outside of their neighborhood or managing the strait, but destroying them does reduce their conventional options for harassing their neighbors, weakens morale, deflates their internal prestige narrative and so on. Using a submarine to destroy one of the ships was unnecessary, but intentionally communicates that our silent service does still exist and have the experience to act. It was historic and would make undeniable news. There were more primary and plenty of secondary objectives like weakening capacity to fund their radical militias abroad, attacking regime financing, complicating their industrial supply chain, slowing their drone production and supply to Russia, increasing public understanding of the links between Iran and China and so many more. Something comprehensive would probably be many pages long. |