US president vows to respond to downing of aircraft in Hormuz strait just after saying a deal to end Iran war is days away
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-shot-down-highly-sophisticated-attack-helicopter-trump-says
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
More recently it hasn’t happened. Iran’s had a much better track record in targeting and knocking out American military equipment and killing personal than Saddam’s Iraq (both in '91 and again in '03) or Mohammad Omar’s Afghanistan or Milosevic’s Serbia or Noriega’s Panama.
Hegseth is doing a far worse job than Powell or Rumsfeld. And that’s not merely because he’s a shit-ass military leader. Iran is simply a harder nut to crack, what with the huge ring of mountains around the border, it’s seasoned military and advanced industry, and the loose alliance Iran enjoys with neighboring Pakistan, Russia, and China.
What we’re seeing is more akin to the US intervention in Vietnam and Korea. The failures of our mechanized infantry and navy to combat an advanced guerrilla force with long range artillery at its back is right in line with what we’d seen during the Cold War.
The US plan for Iran was always based on leveraging a domestic insurgency to destabilize the national government. We were not in a position to take the country by force any more than we could have taken Cuba or Venezuela. That’s why we’ve steered clear of these countries in an outright shooting war and leaned on economic pressure points… up until 2025.
IMO, it’s a combination of three factors. The first is that Iran is, by any metric, a far more militarily capable adversary than Iraq or Afghanistan. Middle Eastern countries aren’t all the same. Iran is a wealthy, technologically advanced nation with a population of 100 million people. They’ve developed drone tech that is being used extensively by Russia in the Ukraine war, and they have access to some of the more high end Russian equipment in return. That doesn’t put them on par with the US, or even close, but they’re a significantly greater military threat than anything the US has faced in a very long time.
The second factor, as you rightly point out, is that Hegseth’s leadership has been disastrous. Of course, a change at the top doesn’t suddenly lobotomize all the career officers who have been there for years. But Hegseth is using the military recklessly and without any regard for safety, and he’s feeding the worst instincts of a command structure that has always had a serious problem with over confidence. Throw in a side order of relying on sycophantic AI for advice just to make that worse.
The third factor is that for decades now the US Military has had serious training and readiness issues. Anyone who gets to work alongside them (and I know plenty of people who do) will generally agree on one thing; they’re just not very good. The overall level of competence, professionalism and expertise displayed by a US soldier falls well below the average for NATO. And those are the guys that actually get deployed. In the run up to Iraq and Afghanistan there were multiple brigades that simply could not deploy because they were so incompetent that they failed their work ups. This is why units are getting pulled from existing deployments to go to Iran; they know the people on deployment can pass work up, and they can’t say that for anyone else. The US Military has spent decades pissing away the world’s largest military budget without actually maintaining a force wide level of readiness commensurate to that budget.
Put all that together, and you get the mess that they’re in now. God help them if they actually try to invade Iran, it’ll be a bloodbath.
It’s already been a bloodbath, from Tehran to Lebanon. We just don’t seem to count Arabs and Persians in the tally.
Also doesn’t help that American propaganda hinges on never admitting we’ve ever done anything wrong. So we can lose an entire fleet in the Gulf, and the Navy will deny it happened for three presidents.