alt Hacker NewsHow many US ships did the Iranians hit?
Ed: The answer suggests to me this is highly overblown in combination with the total number of US military casualties from missile and drone attacks (7). It makes “obliteration” of bases sound like extreme hyperbole and propaganda. It certainly suggests that, given one of the most powerful militaries in the world threw everything they had at the US and couldn’t do anything more than that, that the calculus has not changed much due to new missile and drone tech. It’s not like the status quo before was invincibility.
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The key point in the whole saga is that overwhelming US strength has failed.
The Iranians control the strait. This wasn’t a problem for the military, it was a problem for diplomats, as previous US governments knew.
Yes and no. They can't hit a moving target yet. They can hit a stationary one very precisely at a fairly long range.
They can't (yet) hit an aircraft carrier. They can hit an airbase, though, and have. That's more than nothing.
How many US warships did the Iranians need to hit?
Turns out, none. Plenty of stationary targets, like US-owned data centres in US-aligned countries. Plenty of huge, slow-moving, undefended tankers.
That's video game thinking. The effectiveness of a military force is not based on its ability to fight enemy forces, but on its ability to achieve its goals and prevent the enemy from achieving theirs.
US military could strike enemy targets and defend itself in the Iran war, just like in other wars in the past decades. But this time, its ability to defend its bases and the countries hosting those bases was clearly insufficient. Due to this deficiency, Iran managed to achieve not only its primary goal (to survive) but also a secondary goal (to make other countries in the region question whether US military presence is an asset or a liability).
Cheap drones and missiles create an asymmetry between offense and defense. A small offensive force can strike anywhere it wants, but the other side needs sufficient defenses at every target worth striking. The US had sufficient offensive forces, but it lacked the several times larger defensive forces needed to protect the region from Iranian counterattacks. Its regional allies might have had those, if the US had told them in advance and given them time to mobilize.