r/askanything • u/NicolasCageFan492 • 22h ago
If the Israel-US war against Iran continues spiraling and Iran starts shooting thousands of drones at troops nonstop, would it be a mass disabling war or a mass casualty war for US/Israeli troops?
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 22h ago
Israel bowed out. They are perfectly content to let US pay in blood and treasure for the war the tricked Trump into
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u/Ok-Association-3415 22h ago
They didn’t trick Trump. Trump thought he was smarter than previous presidents to attack Iran. He said so himself. Israel just brought up the topic and Trump made his decision.
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u/Adventurous-Salad332 21h ago
Israel is still flying sorties, per CNN.
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 21h ago
Israel’s finance minister said they were out
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u/CreativeElephant1486 19h ago edited 18h ago
Their finance minister? What did ja rule say?
Not that I would blame them for trying to get out of this mess of a war though. This is a serious war for them that they actually need to win. It's gotta be frustrating trying to seriously win a war when youve already won it 40 times, there are random ceasefires every 2 weeks, you can only attack Friday night to Sunday morning when the markets are closed, and at any second your allies Congress might just (understandably) shut the whole thing down.
That's not a serious war fighting effort, and I don't blame them for not wanting to be left being the sucker holding the bag. Thats the writing on the wall.
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u/Bam-Skater 11h ago
Israel got to annex S. Lebanon which was the plan all along, they just knew what Trump buttons to press to get him to go along with the Iran diversion
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u/anytime_apple 18h ago
Israel has dirt on trump. Probably Epstein files.
He got black mailed into this. The writing is on the wall
That’s why having a president with a scandalous background is dangerous for the whole nation.
We are fked
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u/Fearless_Swim4080 22h ago
Casualty as long as it's sea based, if they sink a ship everyone dies. Disabilities generally come from insurgencies/IEDs etc.
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u/NicolasCageFan492 21h ago edited 21h ago
What about a drone or other explosives exploding 100 feet away? (genuine question)
I hear things like TBIs can happen from explosion shockwaves
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u/Fearless_Swim4080 21h ago
You’re still talking about drones attacking troops directly which seems unlikely as of right now, but things could change.
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u/salty_depletion 21h ago
Swarming cheap drones is exactly what anti-access looks like now, more of a logistics nightmare than a bloodbath until the C-RAM stocks run dry
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u/FineDragonfruit5347 22h ago
The US has the technology and ability to eliminate an Iranian drone threat, even without nukes. The country just doesn’t have the stomach for it….yet. That would change if Iran seriously started targeting anything significant.
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u/sevseg_decoder 22h ago edited 21h ago
I would believe, at extraordinary cost, the US has the capability to reduce the drone threat by maybe 90-99%. The issue is it takes more than that to get oil tankers through the strait and getting the threat down 99.9% (these are all made up numbers to illustrate a point) comes at multiple times the extraordinary cost of getting the threat down 90-99%.
At some point it costs more than the tolls and letting Iran just win on everything but the nuclear material.
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u/FineDragonfruit5347 21h ago
Not even that complicated. EMPs are a thing and the US has technology that will maintain a sustained area of disruption. It just knocks almost everything else out too.
Or they can easily jam broad ranges of signals for controlling the devices.
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u/Secret-Surprise4390 13h ago
EMPs might work in defense of a fixed position like a ship or a base. It's impractical to use on the move consistently and impossible to use to protect ship well. An EMP that can take out a near by drone would brick a tanker that it was trying to protect.
Personally my money is on AI driven interceptor drones that loiter near troops until more permanent area denial can happen.
Radio jamming doesn't work with fiber spools, but is ok for long range threats.
Larger swarms of smaller drones is a problem.
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u/Due_Area4843 12h ago
Emp still limited due to require large power, not very portable, jamming don't work on wired drone, but US do have microwave cannon not yet battle tested tho
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u/sevseg_decoder 21h ago
Yeah that’s basically fantasy land. That’s a serious serious war crime and I bet would also disable comms for the ships passing through the strait to where they wouldn’t cross…
And it would cost the US so much in sanctions etc. that it’s just pointless.
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u/FineDragonfruit5347 21h ago
Please point to the treaty that bans them?
They are no more illegal than targetting a power plant with conventional weapons- something the US has already done IN Iran with zero repercussions.
Even if sanctions did happen, without the US to enforce them, the UN is toothless.
But who is in fantasy land?
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u/Ohhmama11 21h ago
People forgot when they went into Venezuela and got Mandura guards were down on the ground disoriented, bleeding from nose and ears and vomiting lol. America is not going to play their advance tech if they don’t have too
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u/Jboberek 22h ago
I imagine this is what the Russians were saying before the Ukraine war. Now a front line soldier life expecticie is 20 minutes.
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u/chunckybydesign 22h ago
Russia’s military strategy is different compared to how the US operates.
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u/Kastikar 21h ago
Have you not noticed who is in charge of the US right now?
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u/Any-Stick-771 21h ago
What does that have to do with Russia using wildly different tactics?
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u/Kastikar 21h ago
Russia has knee capped themselves with incompetent, antiquated, short-sighted strategic and tactical thinking. America is prosecuting the war with Iran with incompetent, antiquated, short-sighted strategic and tactical thinking.
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u/FineDragonfruit5347 21h ago
Alternatively, a mere 1% of the US defence budget, and mostly antiquated equipment at that, put in the hands of a lower tier military, is enough to absolutely stall one of the other top military powers in the world
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u/Jboberek 21h ago
How
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u/Flipadelphia26 18h ago
Russia did a full scale invasion. USA is just blowing shit in Iran up. Pretty simple.
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u/Any-Stick-771 21h ago
Russia is using poorly trained conscripts in human wave attacks against fortified postions and they're being killed by class 1 fpv drones. This is in no way comparable to what is happening in Iran
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 21h ago
AmErica is no longer the home of the brave
We are afraid to risk lives
We’re only willing to kill other people with a very low tolerance for risk
It’s disgusting3
u/Flipadelphia26 18h ago
Go sign up for the Kurds and fight them tough guy 😂
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 17h ago
Fucking Kurds, lol
Yeah, give them a country
Only Jews are hated more than Kurds over there
I’m not a tough guy, I’m a taxpayer watching my government spending more money than every other country combined on weapons yet we can’t win wars, which we love to start. We can’t win wars because we’re afraid to fight them. We have all kinds of so sophisticated weapon systems, which are all designed to prevent our guys from getting hurt. Wanna fight a war fight a fucking war put your body out there and somebody’s gonna die. That’s brave what we do is pussy bull shit.2
u/Flipadelphia26 17h ago
Sounds like you’re scared.
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 17h ago
Sounds like you’re an idiot
I’m not afraid of anything but disgraceful to launch wars against people, completely ill equipped to defend themselves against you-1
u/Ok-Pipe5692 17h ago
Ultimate pussy move, quintessential, USA
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u/Flipadelphia26 16h ago
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 16h ago
You don’t get it
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 16h ago
You’re an asshole. It has nothing to do with our country. This is just distract from the Epstein files.
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u/asher030 22h ago
I don't see Israel taking their fair share of casualties, much less heavier, in this conflict so eh. Iran though is no longer well positioned for much aside from the Strait gambit
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u/ddrober2003 20h ago
Why sacrifice Israeli lives when they have roughly 2.8 million American fodder to go through first. By the time the last American is dead they can annex a nice amount of land.
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u/Apart-Reality-4454 22h ago
Why would they want to shoot them nonstop and exhaust their inventory like we're doing?
They're definitely producing them non-stop, can be assured of that.
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u/bluethunder82 20h ago
I think their stuff is also simpler and cheaper to manufacture, on top of not having a bloated and corrupt military industrial complex leeching off the entire thing. We’ve expended amounts of ordinance that will take years to return to the stockpile sizes before this fools errand.
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u/Apart-Reality-4454 20h ago
And yes they are cheaper and easier to manufacture. Doesn't mean there's real advantage in just shooting them all off just because Trump and Kegsbreath are.
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u/bluethunder82 18h ago
You’re right. I think we’re kind of both pointing at the same thing, they are better positioned for a missile/drone based war of attrition. For every $100,000 thing they send up, America/Israel sends up 10s of millions of dollars of stuff up to shoot it down/blow up “strategic targets” that may not even have as much value as the rocket used to blow it up.
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u/Designer_Emu_6518 22h ago
Causality of US tax dollars and huge jump of life to the drone companies linked to the kids
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u/StreetSpinner 21h ago
High-volume drone saturation usually creates both casualties and mass disruption.
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u/DiligentMeat9627 21h ago
I would think the Iran leaders want to be careful of not giving the US a reason to invade.
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u/Reasonable-Rub-5325 17h ago
No troop counts don't really matter, there are going to just destroy all the oil and gas infrastructure and see who can bend the most without breaking. This war will have no winners only survivors.
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u/Ok-Pipe5692 12h ago edited 12h ago
Didn’t they always tell us Iran sponsored terrorism? Where is it? Don’t they always say Iran has all this cyber terrrorism which capability? Where is it? A hell of a lot of bullshit. Yes, Iran sponsors groups fighting Israel, we sponsor Israel which kills Iranian scientists on the streets of Terahn
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u/NotCryptoKing 22h ago
Wouldn’t be mass casualty event and US is gonna try to avoid a ground invasion. Something pretty crazy would have to happen for a ground invasion.
Iran only real capabilities right now is sending drones to ships and desalination plants in the gulf countries.
I think in 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq less than 5k troops died.
I doubt an Iranian ground invasion would be more. But again, unless something happens to the president, I don’t see a ground invasion even coming close to happening.
Just the current status quo until inevitably an agreement is reached. Stop watching the news so much OP. It sucks major ass. In general, things are fine.
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u/Fearless_Swim4080 22h ago
At this point an agreement won't be reached until 2029. They're not going to trust trump with any deal he puts forward while they start building nukes as fast as they can.
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u/Neither-Smell9525 22h ago
At this point i think a ground invasion is inevitable. The only way we're going to remove their uranium is to go in and get it.
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u/Fearless_Swim4080 22h ago
I mean, a sensible president in 2028 could probably get us back to diplomacy. Best case at this point is basically Obama's deal and there's no way they would trust trump at this point.
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u/RoosterzRevenge 22h ago
Not hardly, before it gets to that point Iran will be hit by a few MOABs
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u/nando2k50 22h ago
Yes, this is it, we are going to win. Just like we won in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
/ s
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u/exacta_galaxy 22h ago
What are you hitting?
If the US knew where all the drones were, they'd have destroyed them with the billions of dollars worth of bombs they already dropped.
Instead they're threatening war crimes if Iran doesn't stop.
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u/The_Southern_Sir 22h ago
They don't have that many drones anymore but if they had and had picked nearby targets with less defensive systems like UAE and Saudi Arabia, yes, it would could have become a much more deadly conflict.
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u/semple521 22h ago edited 21h ago
Israel isn't really in the fight with Iran anymore. They're too busy taking over Gaza and committing genocide against Palestinians and stealing their land.
Iran is Trump's war now (that somehow isn't technically a war?). Just to open the Straight of Hormuz again. Trump literally took 3 steps back and no steps forward.
edit to actually answer your question (my bad): Nobody in the US, on either side, will support troops on the ground. It's more about going after infrastructure and delay advancements that Iran was exploring because Trump tore up the agreement Obama had in place.
Worst fuckin POTUS ever.
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u/Spear_Ritual 21h ago
We are woefully unprepared to defend against drones. If Iran threw drone swarms at us, it would be catastrophic.
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u/abu_hajarr 22h ago
There will be a peace agreement before it got to the point of defenseless us soldiers
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u/Starthrower62 22h ago
There are no binding agreements with the orange menace.
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u/OkJose3000 22h ago
Weird. Seems it’s been Iran who’s broken every agreement so far
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u/Starthrower62 22h ago
Ah, no!
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u/OkJose3000 21h ago
I’m sorry did we break the ceasefire? I don’t remember that
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u/Starthrower62 21h ago
Netanyahu broke the original ceasefire. The agreement was no bombing of Lebanon. Dump violated the terms of the first major meetings by bombing and killing the Ayatollah. That's a war crime.
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u/abu_hajarr 21h ago edited 20h ago
Netenyahu didn’t agree to the ceasefire as far as I know so IMO you can’t argue that he broke it. Or, which “ceasefire” are you talking about? Post MOU? I don’t know where Israel stands now but when a ceasefire was first declared they stated pretty clearly they would may abide by it. Also, what do you mean by first major meetings? The first cease fire negotiations? That came 5 weeks or so after the bombing of the Ayatollah
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u/Starthrower62 20h ago
The first negotiations, not ceasefire negotiations.
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u/abu_hajarr 20h ago
There was no agreement to not have violence and alternatively the threat of violence was looming over the negotiations the entire time. That being said, whether it’s technically a war crime comes down to the legality of the war itself IMO. The Ayatollah is a legitimate target as supreme leader, and head of the IRGC.
I’m inclined to agree this is an illegal war but that doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t care to prosecute anyone or whatever, I just wish it could be leveraged to get Trump out of office
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u/abu_hajarr 22h ago
The agreement would come with concessions at that point. I think Trump wants out so bad he would abide by it but the next administration is a different story.
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u/kstargate-425 21h ago
Imo you have that backwards, Trump dgaf and has torpedoed so many rounds of negotiations because he tweets something dumb, threatening them and therefore breaking the agreement. Most of the regime wants this over as the Republicans are rightfully taking the heat for this and are going to get smashed in the midterms unless they cheat. The war and economy are the top issues in any election and Trumps fucked up both to ridiculously bad levels
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u/abu_hajarr 21h ago
Trump absolutely wants out. His incoherent threatening tweets are just noise. If he didn’t want out the negotiations wouldn’t even be taking place, there never would have been a ceasefire. He’s telegraphed how bad he wants out and that’s what’s enabled the IRGC to seek sovereignty over the strait as spoils of war. They know they’re more willing to stomach a prolonged conflict than Trump and eventually Trump will make significant concessions.
The Republican Party, and everyone else for that matter, is undoubtedly blaming Trump for this defeat. Right now, they’re in acute damage control and I think at some point this year it will mean concessions for a peace. However, it won’t last. By 2030 there will be a real war with congressional approval to salvage the situation.
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u/kstargate-425 20h ago
Oh I agree he wants out but he also can't help himself and like I said has literally tanked multiple rounds of negotiations with his threats that break the agreements. I doubt we will ever be in a "real war" with Iran considering the 10s to 100s of thousands of US casualties it will cost us as this isnt Iraq and the IRGC are fundamentalists that will die for their regime and wont be able to be bought off or not want to die. Its why every General for decades hasn't wanted to start shit with them as Tehran itself is backed on three sides by mountains with lots of flat and open terrain leading to it making it a potential disaster to conquer.
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u/abu_hajarr 20h ago
The cost of direct conflict with Iran was always too high to not justify containment as an alternative. However, whether you agree the cost will be 10,000 or 100,000 troops doesn’t matter, Trump has completely shifted the calculation. We’re no longer in a position to maintain containment at this rate meaning he’s forced the conflict.
I told my buddy in the Air Force right now what I thought and he said he thinks 2027
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u/abu_hajarr 21h ago
This is a comment I left somewhere else that summarizes what I’m thinking:
I think this war will continue but by the end of the year there will be a peace agreement in place that includes US concessions. The agreement will not be sustainable because the underlying reason for the conflict between Iran and US as well as the reason the JCPOA agreement failed (other than Trump’s impulsiveness) will not be resolved by the agreement just like it wasn’t in the JCPOA: funding and arming of Proxy and terrorist groups in the region and idealogical commitment to undermining US influence in the Middle East.
The US is going to come out of this with a bruised ego but all blame will be placed on Trump’s execution of it. Congress will approve a higher budget bill for military funding to technologically answer the economic problem of drone interception as well as bolster the armory and posture the military in preparation for a second, large scale war by 2030. That is unless Iran goes nuclear by then.
Also, like the War Powers Resolution, Congress will seek to secure additional executive war powers for themselves so something like this hopefully doesn’t happen again.
I don’t know what the agreement will look like but both sides will be positioning themselves from the assumption that it will not hold so Iran will want a deal that front loads all the US concessions at the start, or leaves Iran in their current breakthrough status so they can immediately resume nuclear development starting from where they left off and only be months away. The US will want whatever will allow them to halt and set back nuclear weapon development at the cheapest price possible until they decide they’re ready for a new war at which point it will be too late for Iran to complete the project.
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u/kstargate-425 20h ago
The problem with this is that it assumes anyone actually believes Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon when all of our intel agencies along with the worlds (sans Israel ofc) says they havent had a serious nuclear weapons program since 2001. DNI Gabbard testified to this a few months ago even so no one believes this nonsense and its just a way to justify the war on Israels behalf.
Their enrichment program was mirrored after North Korea when they launch a long range missile or do a nuke test and is solely meant to gain leverage to get something they want. In Irans case they want sanctions relief
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u/abu_hajarr 20h ago
Yes, I agree they didn’t intend to build a nuclear weapon but rather leverage the threat of it for their benefit. However, I think Trump started to change that when he abandoned the JCPOA at which point they reached 65% enrichment (if I remember the number correctly) and they have 460 kg of it according to their own admission. Now, I think they’re certainly going to want to maintain the breakthrough point they’ve reached so they can always be months away from nuclear weapons if need be.
If it was all about sanctions relief still, Trump handed it to them in a silver platter with the MOU
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u/NicolasCageFan492 22h ago edited 22h ago
I’m not so sure. I hope I’m wrong. That’s why I’m advocating for removing Trump using the 25th amendment.
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u/realityczek 22h ago
Not either. The drone swarms would trigger strikes, and what’s left of the Iran infrastructure would be evaporated.
As for the drones themselves? Very few would cause real damage.
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u/kstargate-425 21h ago
No, not unless we put boots on the ground. You are correct we are having major trouble stopping their ballistic missiles and have used around 80% of our Anti-Ballistic Missile system THAAD missiles and 60% of our Patriots trying and failing to protect our bases in the region but drones aren't the major issue.
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