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We just exited a war where we lost against poor goat-herders living on a $1,000 annual income while we threw trillions of dollars at the problem. And this isn't just a case of them wanting it more or it not being a war worth winning. The problem is from a geo-political perspective it looks really bad to lose that war. Because of that alone it was a pretty serious defense interest to win that war. It was critical. Yet we failed to execute on it despite the differences in resources.
Why? Layered ineptitude. See armies don't win wars. They lose them. The question is who loses first. In order to lose you only need one layer of your command system to be inept, and you lose. We lost so at least one layer is inept, and nothing has been done to fix that, so any conflict we enter by default we lose. We lost faster than goat herders standing against a multi-trillion dollar army can.
What one has higher probability. A rag tag of zero training nomads fought off a trillion dollar army that has personnel with real training, only because their cause it true and just? Or that a multi-trillion dollar behemoth is so dysfunctional it's able to lose conflicts by default. The Taliban did not win that war. That would make no sense. We lost it. A whole is different than the sum of its parts. So while parts of our military are very well trained, the whole sum of our military does not function in a way that succeeds against real strategic priorities, seemingly no matter how small.
The question is if Iran is built to lose as badly as we are. They haven't lost any wars recently. So it's not proven that losing is in their blood like it is in ours.
We would not be smart to get involved in any conflict now. Certainly not taking a lead role. We risk letting history repeat itself. There have been many empires who have been dragged into Afghanistan, lost, and within one or two more conflicts, that empire is over. Maybe it's just a sign that a country willing to put effort into taking a land locked country is on its last legs because that country no longer thinks. It will enter more conflicts without thinking. It will engage them resting on its relative might instead of real thinking, and its over.
I think if we attack Iran we really can kiss America good bye. We just don't have the humility to see it. We lost a war to goat herders. Maybe we should learn how that humility thing works. Let other people fight wars for a while.
The US military has never lost a war it was allowed to fight.
The whole system is all its parts and what it interacts with. If it produces success it is built for success. If it fails to reach its bottom line goals it is built for that outcome. It wouldn't be the first military in the world to find itself being the best on some metrics and yet unable to succeed at or even identify the real game in front of it.
The real game in front of the military is keep Americans safe domestically. Yet it's able to get dragged into wars that don't do that.
All because one country has really disproportionate influence over us. Fuck Israel.
It's America's greatest liability.
But either a system works or it doesn't. Or a system plus its surrounding interface works or it doesn't (if our pride forces us to apologize for something that doesn't work). Systems that work take over and systems that don't die. Ours doesn't work. Countries that don't fail to function will take over. There are all kinds of inept countries out there. They are inept differently than we are. But the key thing is some of their obvious faults can sometimes be less significant than our hidden faults. If we didn't have blinders for our faults we would see them and they wouldn't be faults for long. But we do. And it's a mistake to think these hidden faults can't be more critical than some of the poor training or bad equipment or lack of experience that other countries have. The Taliban had all those faults to the furthest extreme possible and they proved to be less significant than our own.
Now we want to fight a country like Iran who is less weak in all of those areas and has some actual strengths. Unless there is something seriously wrong with their system that we haven't accounted for (worse than the Taliban) they are already stacking up better than something we've lost against.
It would be so easy to not fight them. The risks to the American public are significant. The gains are zero.