Iran’s precision strikes picked apart Gulf infrastructure, blunting US war plans | Hacker News Reader

Iran’s precision strikes picked apart Gulf infrastructure, blunting US war plans

reuters.com

Biggest blunder of the 21st century, to have incompetent kleptocrats in charge of the national defense. “Wars are not won by firepower, but by logistics.” The Iranians are well aware of what two-dozen targets to disable to cripple US supply lines. In the meantime the bozos in Washington are asking Grok to classify whether a potential target is a school or a weapons depot. What did we accomplish, firing off every last cruise missile like it’s the 4th of July?

We don’t even have the tooling to resupply thanks to cronyism in contracting, eg half a billie spent on robot arms that keep setting themselves on fire [0]. We’ve outsourced everything but behave as if we have unlimited resources, not to mention diesel and jet fuel. At least we keep some of that in strategic reserve ;)

But as far as how all these wars are evolving I have my fingers crossed it’s eco-solar punk-terrorists that figured out how to goad the worlds superpowers into destroying each others gas refineries and data centers.

[0] The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artiller...

Until the US acknowledges its Neocon-Zionist-Psychopath problem, wars will continue that the majority of the population wants nothing to do with.

Pfft. You just need more robot arms to hose down the ones that are catching fire.

Also the biggest lesson here : as a (non white) country could not count on them to protect you even after paying trillion dollars of ransom.

Hey, I’m Ukrainian and even we white countries could not count on the USA to protect us. Trump stabbed us in the back.

I'm afraid it's an entire US political party that decided to do it, Trump's just the figurehead.

Oh, sure, the Democrats aren't interested in starting a war with Russia (much of Europe falls into this category) but the two sides are emphatically not the same. [0]

https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/42451-putins-invasion-ukra...

This is barely telling it. It's a start.

It's extremely concerning that the US military basically lost most of it's Middle East presence, had most of it effectively destroyed. We lost massive incredibly complex installations like our AN/FPS-132 radar complexes, huge powerful gigantic phased array systems, and various state of the art AN/TPY-2 and other radar. That basically seem to have been undefended. The TPY-2 could easily have been moved or hidden! Invaluable defense systems that we have absolutely no plans to protect. This is just the tip of the very expensive iceberg. We've basically lost various bases, entire THAAD systems: all similarly targeted and virtually undefended, destroyed. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us-mis...

And the "Department of War" (scoff, but I guess accurate if they are so utterly rankly incompetently unable at all to defend) lied and lied about the extent of the damage and the cost of human lives and casualties. There didn't seem to be any plan at all to protect these people. They were unequipped and not on alert, not warned at all, even as drones and missiles came and destroyed a dozen sites. Even the most milquetoast commentariat, Iraq war defender David French is still somewhat pissed about the endless bullshit and lies from the deny-it-all useless DoW. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/opinion/hegseth-iran-war-...

Department of War indeed. These incompetent losers seem to have not the smallest iota of understanding, not the least cares for what was coming at us. They had no defenses, no preparation. We faced incredible ruin. There's no plans, no idea what we do about any of this. We are in full retreat. It's unclear that we will have any presence left within thousands of miles. We can't even keep our planes in the UK, it's still not safe for us: the US military has essentially nowhere left on the continent it feels like it can leave it's equipment. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2026/0929/iran-war-mi... https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/10/iran-b1-bombe... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/suspected-plot-at-u-s-run... https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-port-shuaiba-attack-sold...

This administration has been utterly unmoored from reality in every way. They've injured America at home and abroad, again and again, and lied and lied and lied all the time. The rank incompetence really is just the tip of it. The malicious disdain for basic rules of civilization and decency (SecDef No-Tab ordering war crime bombings of civilian vessels, perfidy, on and on). I hope there's a half-competent civilization left to mourn unhinged stupidity and malice these perpetrators against the world have done to us all so dirty. It's all such ultra-compressed stupidity. Absolutely psychotic delusional detached madness.

> US military has essentially nowhere left on the continent it feels like it can leave it's equipment.

You should look into how many air craft carriers the US has, how carrier groups work, and then also look at the air force and the operating range of some of our air craft.

Some of the aircraft literally take off from the Continental us when they run missions in the middle east.

Also there are somewhere between 20 and 28 US military bases in the middle east alone plus 30-40 in europe. All of those could easily host offensive strike craft just fine.

it looks like you don't have a good understanding of the capabilities of the US military or how we operate, so perhaps you should do more research.

Also, just FYI, every single one of the sources you cited has some pretty heavy bias. It might help you to seek out some alternative sources. I think you're in some kind of algorithm bubble and it's distorting your world view.

If these sources are biased, which sources do you think provide good unbiased reporting?

There is no such thing as unbiased reporting, so to balance it out just check more sources that have different biases.

Ground news is a site that provides feeds from everyone. They are decent at making sure all sides of a story are represented in their feed.

Is it tho? Or is it a ploy from mostly republican-connected investors to legitamize less trustworthy right wing news sources?

You can decide for yourself, but I did think this post on its ownership was interesting.

https://literatemachine.com/2026/08/16/is-ground-news-a-righ...

CNN's biggest backers spent decades campaigning for war with Iran. Every day for years and years Wolf Blitzer would take some time in the situation room to tell us all about the impotance of binging regime change to Iran, going back to the 90s.

If even CNN are too biased for your tastes then it's probably not them. It's you. Hegseth is also a true believer.

saying that Iran would benefit from a regime change (everyone knows this, easy topic for Blitzer to kill some time, no one watched him anyways) is not the same as “campainging for war” (we always knew we cannot win).

It's exactly the same, actually. The point of my comment being that Wolf Blitzer's daily campaigning for war (with calls for regime change among other things) happened on the same CNN that is presumably not pro-war-with-iran enough to be convincingly unbiased for the parent comment.

calling for regime change does not entail USA being involved in an armed conflict to make it happen. regimes change all the time on Earth without USA

> You should look into how many air craft carriers the US has

Air craft carriers such as the USS Abraham Lincoln? Which had to remain at sea for 286 days, including 208 consequtive days without making port. During which time, the military suffered a massive logistical failure to adaquetly supply it, presumably due to them moving their logistical base from Bahrain to Diego Garcia. Then, was relieved only by diverting the USS George Washington and USS Theodore Roosevelt to the region, leaving no carriers in the West Pacific

> Also there are somewhere between 20 and 28 US military bases in the middle east alone

Bases which have been comming under repeated air attack; the extent and damage of which is kept quiete, but appears to be much more substantial than the US military wants to admit. And which are increasingly vulnerable as they loose air defense abilities due to both loss of supporting infastructure, and a depletion of interceptors.

I have no doubt that the American military is hugely capable.

But as the saying goes, the fish rots from the head. When leadership is replaced based on loyalty to one man, and not merit, all that capability is steadily eroded.

The era of big military ships floating around on the ocean in the open is coming to an end and manned jet fighters will be joining them soon afterwards.

That's what we're seen in Ukraine. Smaller teams and mobility becomes extremely important as everything too big becomes an easy target.

As for the surface ships yeah, they will become more vulnerable as AI can process and tag millions of images to find a ship in the ocean which then becomes the target. Wonder how long it'll be until the major powers switch to subs and cruise missiles as the primary force projection method.

Many of the bases were created to fight the "war on terror" and conduct a decades long massive regional regime change that cost the U.S. trillions of dollars. Anything that changes the course on this and prevents more global empire building is a good thing... Even at the cost of losing bases that never should have been built to begin with.

100% this. I've been vehemently opposed to the war in Iran, but only because I didn't expect it to be anywhere near as chronically catastrophic as it has been. I expected more of a long slow bleed like Iraq/Vietnam/Afghanistan 2.0. If I knew the outcome ahead of time, I would have been fully supportive of it. At the risk of sounding like 1984, losing this war will be the biggest victory in modern times for the US. Our hegemonic geopolitical strategy has been very damaging to both the US and to the entire world. We're not going to be king of the world, and we shouldn't endeavor to be such. Getting hided by a minor power is going to force us to rethink everything, and I think only good can come from this.

Even if the clowns in charge think the take-away is 'we need even more bombs, and bigger ones', they're going to learn that when we're expending this much on a relatively minor power like Iran, the economics/resources for this scale of war against a major power simply don't exist. We're looking at Proud Prophet 2.0 [1] which was also a huge victory in defeat for the US. It's unfortunate that in the past we were able to learn from wargames, whereas now we had to see things play out in real life. Perhaps next time when we do a wargame against Iran and lose [2], we shouldn't just change the rules so we can win.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet#Impact

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002#Exer...

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