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What a war with Iran could look like

Shoot

Shoot

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Oct 25, 2017
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BAKU - Tension between Washington and Tehran are once again at their peak after two oil tankers were attacked on June 13th near the entrance to the Persian Gulf. The incidents were the second in a month, and US officials were quick to blame Iran but cited no proof. Iran, meanwhile, denied any wrongdoing. Although it's unclear what exactly happened, the event has stoked fears that a military confrontation between Iran and the United States is imminent. Truth, however, is the first casualty of war and so it matters little what truly happened. Yet, miscalculation, misinterpretation and bad judgement can conspire to turn a minor clash into a full-blown fight. What we want to know is how a hypothetical conflict between Iran and the United States would play out.
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For those who don't know, Caspian Report is the most reputable geopolitics channel on YouTube.

In the video, Shirvan concludes that a war between the U.S. and Iran would cause a massive war in the Middle East including Saudi Arabia, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, etc - basically all countries in which Iranian proxies operate and the U.S. has military bases in. He also believes that it would cause the U.S. to lose its status as the world's sole superpower due to the multi-trillion dollar costs of war and return us to a multipolar world. Since such a war would be terrible for everyone, he does not believe there will be one.

The most interesting part of the video was a U.S. wargame in 2002 pitting Team America (Blue) against Team Iran (Red).

Millennium Challenge 2002
Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.

Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.
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At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue's ships were "re-floated", and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?" After the reset, both sides were ordered to follow predetermined plans of action.

After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.
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This led to accusations that the war game had turned from an honest, open, free playtest of U.S. war-fighting capabilities into a rigidly controlled and scripted exercise intended to end in an overwhelming U.S. victory, alleging that "$250 million was wasted". Van Riper was extremely critical of the scripted nature of the new exercise and resigned from the exercise in the middle of the war game. Van Riper later said that the Vice Admiral Marty Mayer altered the exercise's purpose to reinforce existing doctrine and notions of infallibility within the U.S. military rather than serving as a learning experience.

Van Riper also stated that the war game was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing. He was quoted in the ZDF–New York Times documentary The Perfect War (2004) as saying that what he saw in MC02 echoed the same view promoted by the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara before and during the Vietnam War, namely that the U.S. military could not and would not be defeated.

Responding to Van Riper's criticism, Vice Admiral Mayer, who ran the war game and who was charged with developing the military's joint concepts and requirements, stated the following:

"Gen. Van Riper apparently feels he was too constrained. I can only say there were certain parts where he was not constrained, and then there were parts where he was in order to facilitate the conduct of the experiment and certain exercise pieces that were being done."​
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Navy Captain John Carman, Joint Forces Command spokesman, said the war game had properly validated all the major concepts which were tested by Blue Force, ignoring the restrictions placed on Van Riper's Red Force that led them to succeed. Based on these findings, Carman stated that recommendations based on the war game's result on areas such as doctrine, training and procurement would be forwarded to General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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In short, the Iranian team was winning so the rules of the wargame were changed to ensure an overwhelming American victory. The American team was given a number of hacks and the Iranian team were not allowed to use certain weapons and tactics.

I did not realize that the U.S. military's top brass was so immature.
 
DrewFu

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User Warned: Thread whining.
This has already been discussed to death.
 

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The video is alright, it's basically an armchair recap of what a conflict would look like, although it's getting far too into specifics for it's own good in terms of the play by plays of a hypothetical engagement.

Big take away is people need to stop thinking MC2002 is some kryptonite that's going to end the Fifth Fleet. The war game was a mess, and it's 16 years old simulation and the actual story is more complicated than "they reset it so they could win"


Meanwhile, Kernan received an urgent phone call from Luck: "Sir, Van Riper just slimed all of the ships." Kernan recognized that this was bad news because it placed at risk JFCOM's ability to fulfill the remaining live-fire, forced-entry component of the exercise — a central component of MC '02. The actual forces were awaiting orders at Fort Bragg, off the coast of San Diego, and at the Fort Irwin National Training Center. Kernan recalled, "I didn't have a lot of choice. I had to do the forcible entry piece." He directed the white cell to simply refloat the virtual ships to the surface. Bell and his blue team — now including the live-fire forces operating under his direction — applied the lessons from the initial attack and fended off subsequent engagements from the red team.
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Issue is Riper sunk the ships and effectively ended the entire War Game before any other pieces could get executed, which were in place and ready and a major part of the war game itself. That's why they "reset" the naval encounter, or at least a big reason why.

And as for the "nobody learned anything from MC2002, it's literally the opposite because everyone and their mom keeps bringing it up when talking about Iran.

However, a different enduring impact was in the minds of the senior military officials who were deployed from the United States to Afghanistan and Iraq or provided support in the years that followed MC '02. There, the inherently messy realities of combat negated the aspirational acronyms that conceptual development exercises were supposed to prove. Even during MC '02, Kernan recalled that many of the participants were understandably more focused on getting ready to go to war than on the exercise, which probably harmed the process itself. "I told Rumsfeld afterwards, 'If you want to do this again, you have to properly resource it, and if national priorities change, you have to be willing to scrub it.'" Yet Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials were unable or unwilling to hear the bad news that came out of the exercise.

MC '02 has become a shorthand reference for denigrating the cutting-edge and unrealistic notions of military transformation that characterized the Rumsfeld era. A concept-development exercise that was intended to socialize the military around the inevitability of a leap-ahead, futuristic transformation ultimately left precisely the opposite impression. That it required a $250-million red team simulation, and a motivated and justifiably angered former general officer, to make this apparent, suggests that it was a highly useful experiment after all.
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Kin5290

Kin5290

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Oct 26, 2017
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Nevermind.

I've seen it brought up in other forums that the Red Force activities weren't realistic, but I don't know the exact detail.
 
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SkyOdin

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Kin5290 said:
The Millenium Challenge is often cited as showing that the US forces are woefully unprepared for a near-peer State conflict and it is completely nonsense. Basically, RedForce cheated hardcore by doing things like simulating "motorcycle couriers" that could spread communications instantaneously and who we're magically immune to interception, or mounting antishipping missiles on fishing and speed boats that could not hope to carry them, let alone fire them.

It has about as much grounding in reality as the Pentagon Wars documentary about the M2 Bradley or any moron who talks shit about the Sherman in WW2.
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Do you have any sources for those claims about the wargame? I've seen them discussed before, but the only sources I've seen for them were internet posts with no sources of their own. I've been under the impression that the criticisms of the Millennium Challenge red team were mostly unsupported hearsay.
 
HStallion

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If Trump is running the show it doesn't matter if Captain America is leading the change, it's gonna be an absolute mess. This guy still fucks up even when he gets handed a win on a silver platter.
 

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Kin5290 said:
Nevermind.

I've seen it brought up in other forums that the Red Force activities weren't realistic, but I don't know the exact detail.
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I believe OPFOR, while using non-electronic communications, was still able to communicate near instantly and with little lag or delay. Basically the motorcycles were teleporting.
 

Deleted member 8257

Oct 26, 2017
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It is absolutely not an understatement to say that war with Iran will trigger a WW3 set in middle east. It's pretty surreal but I hope Russia talks some sense into the moron prancing around in our white house.
 
Buzzman

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Even ignoring the wargame, the land conflict by itself will be extremely tough and will see casualties close to vietnam. Iran is a vast desert with mountain fortresses.

No Easy War Here

Iran's ability to defend itself against a U.S. invasion begins with its formidable geography. As Stratfor, a private intelligence firm, has explained, "Iran is a fortress. Surrounded on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the ocean, with a wasteland at its center, Iran is extremely difficult to conquer."


Once again, geography would work to Iran's advantage, as almost all of Iran's major cities are located in the north of the country, and reaching them would be a herculean challenge under the best of circumstances. For starters, the terrain—as always—would be challenging to transverse with a large invading force. More importantly, Iran is enormous. As Stratfor notes, "Iran is the 17th largest country in world. It measures 1,684,000 square kilometers. That means that its territory is larger than the combined territories of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal—Western Europe
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Snake Eater

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DrewFu said:
I'm not upset at all. Just pointing out this topic has been discussed in detail in several other threads.
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This is a very fluid situation that the entire world is watching, a thread a day on this isn't out of bounds when we will have endless Keanu Reaves threads
 

onadesertedisland

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I've said it before, Bin Laden won when we got involved in two wars at the same time that we've yet to be able to get out of. Add a third one, and I think we're teetering on a fall of Rome event.
 
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Shoot

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RustyNails said:
It is absolutely not an understatement to say that war with Iran will trigger a WW3 set in middle east. It's pretty surreal but I hope Russia talks some sense into the moron prancing around in our white house.
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Because of how militarized and integrated the region is into the world economy, it is a lot easier for things to spiral out of control than, say, the two Congo wars in the 90s (which never left Central Africa).

For example, I can see a U.S. vs Iran war easily spreading into Africa with Houthis targeting the American military base in Djibouti and the Emirati bases in Eritrea and Somalia. China's only overseas military base is in Djibouti so that could potentially come into play.
 
DrewFu

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Nemesis-T Type said:
The US would win though yeah?
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The US could easily defeat Iran. It would be a pretty hollow victory, though, as the regional carnage, the loss of lives locally, and the hit to the global economy would be a loss for everyone.

Any way you slice it, it would be bad. An invasion would be a complete mess. And if the goal is just to destroy Iran, the negatives don't need to be explained.

TLDR: The US could easily defeat Iran, but it wouldn't be a "win" for anyone.
 
danm999

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DOT_mjo said:
Is there really a war America could lose? And I don't mean we wouldn't suffer loses but which country could honestly beat America in a war?
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Depends on what you mean by losing.

Do you mean the USA is invaded and broken up and the government is dissolved? That's probably not likely for decades.

Do you mean a regional conflict the USA has to withdraw its military presence from? There are probably a few countries that could do that.
 
samoyed

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I remember reading about that wargame. I never had great faith in the US military at all, a modicum of "patriotic trust" I suppose, but after I read that I realized the entire MIC is driven by big babies playing with their shiny warboats and this goes from the very top all the way down to the voters in front of their TV sets.

American cannot "lose" in the conventional sense of the dismantlement and occupation of a country a la Nazi Germany, but I'm doubtful it could ever "win" a war (achieve some tangible military-political goal decisively) unless it's a war of annihilation, which would be nearly impossible to wage in this era without the complete sacrifice of what remains of the US's hegemony, making any such "win" Pyrrhic in nature.
 
samoyed

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I think the gist is, America can "beat" Iran, maybe, but it definitely won't be able to occupy Iran. And a military victory without a successful occupation will just create a more resentful, more extreme insurgency.
 

anamika

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We'd just bomb them with drones, stealth bombers and whatever our latest super jet is, and cruise missiles. A lot has changed since 2002. The only boots on the ground would probably be on the border. It would be horrifically ugly for the Iranian people and that's why I don't want war.

I don't see any credentials for the contributors of that channel. Never heard of them. I don't understand why I should value their opinion above anyone else's. Not trying to be snippy, just saying.

The US is capable of flattening anyone trivially from the air and sea, as has been demonstrated. It's after that when it becomes a problem. Once soldiers are on the ground fighting street to street it becomes anyone's game, since Vietnam, and home field tends to have the advantage.
 
Sunster

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TLDR: US would win but be crippled, giving Russia and China an opportunity to ascend.
 

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Bass2448 said:
Yea..US could win. It would just require the use of things worse than an atomic bomb. If trump uses that, I suspect the US will be turned on by several countries.
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In no universe would a nuclear bomb be remotely required to take down Iran's conventional forces.

The threat of Iran are three fold in any major conflict.

1) The incredible damage Iran can do to the world economy via attacking and dismantling oil production, refineries, ports, and the straight's shipping lane

2) Iran's proxies that would be activated in multiple nations, both in the middle east and in western nations. Any major conflict with Iran would very likely result in major terrorist attacks in Europe/US/Western allies. Asymetric warfare, the entire region would light up and the US would be engaged on multiple, minor/moderate fronts

3) The long term commitment to occupation in order to outright prevent and deny Iran from ever developing a nuclear weapon. Once a war breaks out, the countdown to a nuclear Iran starts, and that's something the West and it's allies will never allow. Only way to prevent a nuclear Iran is occupation post-conflict.

If you don't know the basics of this shit, don't go around spouting how "something worse than nukes" will be used. Or some fan fiction that the world will gang up on the US

Iran's trump card in this situation isn't that they have any chance in defeating the US. It's that they can take the entire world down with them via turning the region into a war zone, oil going over $250, major terrorist attacks and so forth. They wouldn't go down without making everyone else who had a hand in their downfall feel pain.
 

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if we do attack iran i hope we take immediate massive losses to the point where it cripples our ability to proceed
 
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