U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war
cnbc.com319 points by tcp_handshaker 10 hours ago
319 points by tcp_handshaker 10 hours ago
Not an American but live here.
But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil.
So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?
It’s just baffling and public seems largely fine with this with the lack of widespread protest that this should have caused (vaguely remember living across the bridge from Michigan all the protests there post Iraq war).
The Occam's razor explanation is that it's all about Israel.
They're the only country that actually benefits from all these misguided Middle Eastern adventures, and it's not like it's just one, there's a pattern and it's always the same
Saudi Arabia benefits just as much, if not more, from a diminished Iran.
Not just Saudi Arabia but the UAE, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and Gaza.
Iran has funded terrorism and religious extremism in the region leading to massive death tolls in many of them. Not to mention Iranians themselves.
I would speculate that it’s more about Israel interests. Iran produces 5% of the global oil but more importantly, it represents 20% of their gov income and the major engine of economic growth in the country. So .. you control their oil, you control the government.. and with it, the major antagonist to us interests in the region. Every other country in the region is aligned with the US or just too poor to be relevant. So it’d be a big win for the global geopolitics board.
It’s about Iran and its proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, etc.) being engaged in perpetual terror campaign due to rigid ideology that is largely incompatible with surrounding countries and the world at large. And that would reach disastrous proportions if they got nukes.
It’s also about the price of oil being dictated by global markets. Oil companies love to sell expensive oil. If there’s a crunch, Exxon won’t be desperate to increase supply in order to bring the price back down. Instead they’ll take massive profits on thin supply. (Similar dynamic in memory markets recently.) Meaning if there is a Gulf crunch, gas prices skyrocket regardless of how much oil the US stores in the ground. And gas price is just about the only politically meaningful economic metric in the United States.
Iran has been the instigator or financier of almost all global terrorism that affects US interests for the last 50 years. It's not like that's a secret.
The only reason why the US has been dealing with the effects rather than the cause for so long is best illustrated by the mess we have now.
I guess we can be a little thankful this is bogging down because next on the list is Russia and the little proxy war between the US and China going on in Ukraine.
It’s simple. Oil is traded in USD. A large share of the oil is produced in the Middle East. If oil stopped trading in USD the value of our currency would plummet. So we have a strong interest in all oil exporters.
Absolutely not defending anything the US gov is doing now or for the past years, and in general agreement (Iran is targeted for totally stupid reasons), just to point out:
> With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution
Fracking isn't free of consequences, and while the current US gov doesn't care about them, people are directly affected and are rightfully pissed about it.
Bombing/invading foreign countries to get the oil is obviously not the right approach, but relying on fracking isn't a clean solution either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxptRmMBIrE + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54if9r6yiQ8 + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DDbYSg0Alw taken in concert. It's a bit complicated, but all 3 together will give you a pretty holistic picture.
What’s even more puzzling is that line of reasoning was one reason why trump was elected in the first place: increase domestic oil supply and get out of foreign wars
It stops being puzzling when you recall that Trump is a con man. This whole thing was never about making America great again, it was about lining Trump and his family's pockets. By every metric which matters to Trump, things are going exactly according to plan.
One reason among several is that middle east states fund the US fiscal deficit by buying treasuries with their oil revenues. If the US loses that source of financing then the US fiscal situation gets worse
This. Since it has been demonstrated that we can no longer guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, nobody has any reasons to price oil in USD or to finance our deficits.
Get ready for the mother of all tax increases.
Maybe the abundance was just a lie. We never know. Considering the amount of shameless lies the west manufactures every day, I wouldn't believe one word that comes from there.
One has to re-examine every claim ever made about capabilities from the west. Never thought I would say this. Heck they lost with 2 aircraft carriers against Ansarallah last year.
The US doesn't need more oil, but if Iran were to cut off oil supply from the Persian Gulf it would make oil prices significantly more expensive by reducing total available worldwide supply. The US economy, for the better or worse of it, depends on cheap oil to supply energy for commerce and transportation, and if that becomes more expensive, people stop traveling, trucks stop shipping, energy stops being produced and millions of US jobs are at risk.
The whole "Death to America" and USA is the "Great Satan" make them a much more morally easy target given they have practically no ability to fight back.
I don’t know, the US is the world‘s largest oil producer, and there’s a lot of people in America who are very happy about the high oil prices. Doesn’t exactly trickle down to the average American though. But there are many other industries is that matter a whole lot more to the US economy, for example, if Taiwan stop selling chips to the US, we would be really screwed.
Oil can't be the whole story, can it? If it was, we'd be more heavily investing in moving away from oil.
From what I can tell, it's as much extremism of "democracy", religion, and a version of "manifest destiny" as anything else
My understanding is that the point is not to hit iran, but the oil market.
The US has stocks and production, but EU and china, trumps favorite economical targets, do not.
No proof to offer, but it fits with his other move when it come to economy.
It’s because Israel has captured the US government through a combination of lobbying and probably blackmail. The endless wars in the Middle East are to bolster them as a regional and then global superpower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...
Maybe I’m missing the subtler geopolitical point here, but I don’t think it’s about oil. It’s about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons and threatening the region via their missiles, drones, and proxies.
Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.
How many of these tiger deterring rocks can I put you down for? They're $1T each but we've got a 3-for-2 offer going. You may think you're not often attacked by tigers now, but can you afford not to own one of these rocks to keep that record?
Trump doesn't give a flying flip about Iran having Nuclear weapons. If he cared at all, in the slightest, he wouldn't have unilaterally broken our treaty with them.
The US benefits from causing instability as it prevents a true rival peer power from forming.
It's the same technique China has been using economically and Russia politically for decades against the US.
MICE - Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego.
I think at least three might be at play here.
Guess who I'm talking about.
There is only ONE country in the Middle-East whose borders are, continuously growing...for the last 78 years ;-) Something about a promise from God...
AIPAC is the single most influential special interest group in US politics. If you don't do what AIPAC says to advance their foreign policy goals, they will remove you from office at the next election. They do this on a regular basis and even publicly brag about it.
Israel bought and/or blackmailed our politicians. We are doing it for them, our greatest ally .
Israeli hegemonic ambition. Zionist funding of Trump's campaign. Corrupt profiteering from market manipulation. Distraction from the Epstein files. Gullibility of a large fraction of the US public. Trump's ego and stupidity. And when a nuclear superpower starts a war like this, there's not much anyone else can do to stop it. The result: a massive strategic blunder for the US, the true cost of which may not be fully understood for many years.
Both the reasons (AIPAC + pricing Oil in USD helps finance our deficits) are why we were there. But both of those reasons have been severely weakened, to the point of probably being eliminated anyways:
1. After the midterms, we'll get a read on how much AIPAC is still able to buy congressmen.
2. Before Trump obeyed Israel and bombed Iran, we had the illusion of being invincible. But now, we are faced with the brut reality that we cannot guarantee the flow of oil through the Hormuz straight, nor almost anywhere else in that whole hemisphere. Even to Europe: Ask Putin how much drones have changed the game.
This really eliminates any remaining motivations to keep pricing oil in USD. Which removes most of the motivations for the world to keep financing our deficit.
At this point our best option is to just leave the region, and try to transition to renewables absolutely as fast as we can. Oh, and raise taxes on everybody, because demand for our bonds is going to crater.
Iran is generally a country run by some bad people. Letting them get nuclear weapons is a bad idea. Take a look at North Korea, they literally starve their people and there isn't much we can do about it now.
You think the USA are the good guys making sure the bad guys don’t get nuclear weapons? Like in the movies?
The war is not about nuclear arms. Plus, there was enforced followed agreement that ended because of people who started this war.
US leadership does not give a flying fck about other people starwing right now. Not in gaza, not in Iran, Syria, Afrika anywhere.
The US gives no shits about 'bad people'. There are plenty of bad people in other parts of the world - the oil is all that matters to us in the Middle-East.
>The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts.
>The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.
That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies.
PrSM has been in production for only a short time, and ATACMS stocks were never high. Neither of these are the backbone of US long-range precision strike weapons. Article is misleading.
It IS in an issue if standoff war is your only war, and it seems to be the exclusive approach here. If you run out of long-range precision weapons, what do you have left? Boots on the ground? That's not going to happen, and that means you will never win this on and off war.
The USAF has a pretty substantial inventory of stand-off weapons, and an absolutely enormous inventory of guided bombs.
They do, but the current leadership does not have any appetite for entering Iran's airspace after the last downing drama. If Iran captures a pilot, there is going to be no more room for market manipulation.
They want this problem to be solved. So you spend the munitions, forcing the manufacturing problem to get fixed. This works in favor of Anduril, which cares about manufacturing scalability
Never high and a significant number were donated to ukraine specifically because a ground launched pgm has never been a high priority for the US since the USAF exists.
> That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies.
Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases.
In the early phases of the conflict you use stand-off munitions to reduce the chances of people being captured or killed.
Because Trump doesn't really have approval for this escapade (from either Congress or public opinion) these 'fancy' munitions are the ones primary being used to reduce the risk of casualties.
Now, trying to reduce casualties is not a bad thing per se, but the trade-off is that the fancy stuff is more expensive and takes longer to (re-)build-up. And what if there are other conflicts that flare up where these munitions would be useful? If they're not available do you start using piloted aircraft?
>Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases.
Not ATACMS. SEAD is an Air Force/Navy activity.
You’re giving trump a lot of credit that you think he’s capable of thinking of second order effects of his actions.
Two birds with one stone for benefit of Putin.
Likely son of Ayatollah wanted to get rid of his weak father and Putin wanted the US to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. So Putin asked Krasnov to get rid of Ayatollah and empty the stockpile of weapons.
Trump always delivers for Russia.
I don’t know if I am convinced. Russia also uses a lot of Iranian drones, which presumably are going to have supply troubles because of this war.
OTOH reducing the supply raises the price of oil and thereby allows Russia to charge more for their main product of export. At the start of the war Trump reduced Russian oil sanctions[1]. Trump is also collecting all the money from Venezuelan oil sales[2].
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/russia/trump-eases-russian-oil...
2. https://newrepublic.com/post/213566/trump-hoarding-billions-...
I'm always confused by prices of "highly regulated" goods in the United States.
When I get a $150,000 bill for a 15-minute hand-reconstruction surgery, how much of that bill is the total margin vs self cost? And how much of that is warranted / acceptable?
When a single Tomahawk missile bills the taxpayer $3,600,000, how much of that bill is the total margin? When I say "total margin", I mean not just the margin of the company that builds the Tomahawk itself, but the margins of all the components that were used in it -- every last bolt and every ounce of aluminum.
There are a great many costs built into the system that this analysis won’t get you: mandatory useless ingredients, arbitrary standards, and pervasive regulations.
I worked in aerospace and know a bit about this. Say you want to make a missile. Well, you better have the paperwork for literally every component to show that the metal used in all of it originates from a foundry in one of a tiny handful of countries.
That sounds superficially reasonable. The supply chain should be trustworthy and reliable.
I agree. We want to expect competence at all levels of the private and especially public sectors, but we're only able to insist upon it in a few key areas (aerospace, medical devices, etc.)
It is funny to see the same story every time. It's all burdensome regulation by the nanny state until something goes very very wrong and the public wants answers NOW, at which point it's incompetent government getting led by the nose by monied interest groups and their public relations departments.
The unknowns of defense spending is a feature and not a bug - for defense contractors
RTX, formerly Raytheon, has the same revenue and net income as PepsiCo. PepsiCo has a higher profit margin.
Most of these companies are public and you can find their stats.
A Tomahawk missile is $3.6 million because it uses specialty components, all made in small batches using very expensive American specialist labor. It's also staggeringly more capable than a drone, or a shahed. Those extra capabilities are enormously expensive, because they are hyper niche.
A single American Artillery Shell is $3000.
Meanwhile, your $150k surgery bill example is completely different. It's a fake number, made up to cause a process to generate an actual, intended price somewhere. Your insurer and the hospital play some insane game of chicken where the insurance promises only to pay a percentage of what they are billed and so the hospital submits a fake number to get what they actually want (or nowadays the system is even more byzantine)
If you were to count the margin of everything it would be 100%. At the end of the day everything is either a resource harvested from the earth or human labor.
The more common concept of margin used in this context is net profit after expenses, including labor expenses. The question is therefore roughly "How much is purely for capital profit taking rather than directly involved with compensating labor and purchasing materials?".
Everything is human labor. There is no such thing as a “resource” without human labor to convert raw earth into something useful.
Two things that are necessary are both necessary. That doesn’t mean one collapses into the other.
Everything is food and air. There is no such thing a "human labor" without food and air to sustain it. I'm not sure what your point is.
Help me understand this.
There's the cost that the employees pocket, and then there's the share that the shareholders pocket, right? Doesn't "margin" represent the latter?
100% of the money ends up going to people.
It’s not like you get to the end of the chain and trade a fistful of dollars with the ingot of aluminum itself.
Sure, the concept of money is only meaningful / valuable to humans.
But isn't there a conceptual difference between the "owners" of the Tomahawk factory vs. the people who are actually putting the missiles together?
Many defense contracts are cost plus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_pricing
Nope. Very few defense contacts are still issued on a cost-plus basis. Especially not those for serial production of existing munitions.
Now they'll exhaust interceptors and other long range missiles like tomahawks and whatnot.
And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told the fed to print more so Japan can buy yens without selling their US bonds, so they are at least very concerned about the possibility).
Sorry for the rant.
If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.
The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.
The reality is that fighting any country with a decent military has to be all-out war. We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. A war with China would be the same, it can never be fought from a distance with primarily $1m+ precision surface to surface missiles.
Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.
> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs.
That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes. All of this means that they're forcing the US to choose between pulling out of the region or accepting losses of personnel and airframes (that likely cannot be replaced in a timely manner) at a level that the post-Vietnam US military has never had to face.
I suspect an all-out war between the US and China would go the same way as this one, if not worse. The US military in its modern form has focused on procuring very complex, advanced, and featureful weapons in tiny numbers. The problem is that this means that the US is incapable of fighting a sustained campaign against an adversary that can withstand attacks from American weapons and has a higher production capacity.
> That's what the US tried to do.
Yes but with the caveat that they wanted the lowest risk to US service members during the bombing. This means using up the fire and forget stuff rather than the guided munitions attached to planes. They have good air superiority, but poor logistical options to do that.
The traditional way to do this is to park two carrier groups within 500 miles of the target and convey tonnes of cheap munitions to the targets (as in iraq, Libya & kosovo) the problem for the US is that it means parking a carrier within drone range. You'd then establish a land base and move forward. Again all of the logistics of doing that are vulnerable to drone.
So this is the route they chose.
Until the US have something to counter drones cheaply, then they'll get stuck like this.
China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games.
China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.
> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle.
I wish people would take a short stop here and contemplate a bit on this sentence.
All of this talk about entering a hot war with China is crazy because of this fact. You don’t go directly from literally zero battles to starting a war with one of the strongest armies.
NATO exercises and, ya know, the war in Iran, seem to suggest there's limited applicability of the US's experience.
Dropping bombs and evading live anti-aircraft fire is of limited applicability? Are you sure you're not confusing combined arms exercises that the US has, and continues to engage in (Venezuela comes to mind recently) with your personal opinion on the validity of the war in Iran?
Uhh yes. I am sure.
A smash and grab in Venezuela is not Iran and Iran is not China.
The closest analog we have to war with China is Ukraine/Russia. All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Kidnapping.
Iran is a little taste of what's going in Ukr/Rus, but obviously China would be able to wield the same type of war at orders of magnitude greater intensity.
My comment was quite specific on my claim. You have provided zero evidence against it, and instead are just doing this weird presumptive ad hominem thing?
If you were paying attention to what's actually going on in modern battlefields, you'd know that in fact you're right: "dropping bombs and evading AA fire" is actually of limited applicability! Great examples! There are no bombs being dropped. Virtually no humans are being shot at with anti-aircraft fire. That's what I'm pointing out.
Ok so let me explain something to you as I think you might be a little new to the military or military theory, combat, &c.
Militaries need to train in order to test systems, test weapons, gain experience, and be able to generally perform better and accomplish any given objective. In the modern era, militaries need to engage in what is called Combined Arms exercises. These exercises, as the name alludes to, coordinate activities across different branches of the military. So it might be the army coordinating with the navy to attack a target or capture some piece of land or objective. Maybe the army is on the ground directing fire from naval ships off the coast, or it could be the Air Force providing drone coverage as special forces achieve some mission.
Coordinating these activities during peace time is a key function of successful militaries. It is incredibly important to align these activities to be effective. Because of this, not only do you have militaries that work on combined arms and other trainings internally, but in the case of NATO, or perhaps the US with alliances in the Pacific we also engage in combined arms exercises with other militaries to further enhance and integrate those capabilities so that when it comes time to fight, forces have been trained how to respond and can do so more effectively. A great example of this is KATUSA - Korean Augmentation to the United States Army where Korean soldiers are actually assigned to and reporting to American military command and train alongside the United States.
The reason Venezuela is important, for example, is because it was an exercise demonstrating combined arms coordination and execution. It shows what the US military is actually capable when air, sea, and land forces engage to accomplish some objective.
So why is this important re: Iran (and Ukraine certainly). Because it's combined arms activities except that it's the real thing. Real equipment failures might happen, real lessons are learned, you are actually getting shot at. Lives are at stake. The military is actually battle tested, even if the opponent is hopelessly outmatched.
So when you write something like this:
> All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Criminal Apprehension.
Those exercises, the lessons learned from the wars such as OEF, OIF, and even how Ukraine is today using and testing American military equipment in battle, matter a whole lot. And that's one of Xi Jingping's primary concerns with his military. They have done 0 of this. They've never really been shot at. They haven't tested their equipment in any sort of real battle. For the software-minded, it's like they've always been in development and haven't even touched a preview environment, let alone production. And worrying enough the US has demonstrated the capability to bypass and/or destroy Chinese and Russian military equipment including air defense and radar arrays - this is worrisome for those countries. If it comes time for a real war, well the only evidence you have so far is your state of the art equipment or close enough to it was absolutely fucking useless when it came to operations involving the US. Whooops.
They may start a war and find out they made a lot of bad assumptions and didn't train well enough and then what?
I'd encourage you to think about this a little more than you are here.
brother, how do you think this is going for us
I think that's a separate question from the validity of real-life combat experience that American (and other) forces are gaining that Chinese forces lack, with respect to the OP.