It's About Detection, Not Strike

I've been pondering this.

The Straits of Hormuz

Everything revolves around getting these shipping lanes open. If we can do that and the oil starts flowing again, we can take our time whacking the IRGC and their cardboard ayatollah. No one is going to stick their necks out for Iran, not even Russia or China. Lots of countries, however, are getting their panties in a wad over the price of oil.

The Saudis are increasing the amount of oil their pipelines send to Red Sea ports, so there's that. Still, what needs to happen is the Straits have to be opened.

For all intents and purposes, there is no Iranian Navy or Air Force remaining. The Iranians have unguided artillery tubes on shore, which are practically useless at the ranges required, something like 8+ miles. Fire a couple of poorly-aimed salvos and you reveal your location. A few minutes later, you're dead, thanks to American Naval Air.

That leaves the guided stuff. What guides the guided things? Well, drones can be self-guided, so they are a problem. Other guided things like missiles need a targeting system. That is, Iran needs emitters with line of sight access to the Straits to send guidance information to the launchers. American AWACS detect the emissions and Naval Air squashes them like bugs. You might be able to use a targeting system once, but certainly not twice.

If I was playing the Iranian hand, which amounts to a pair of 7s against the American full house, Qs over 10s, and the Jews' 5 natural aces because, as Tucker Carlson tells us every day, Jews always cheat, my problem becomes one of keeping my targeting systems alive long enough for the Democrats and other intestinal parasites to wear down American will.

How many do they have? If they emitted and lost one every other day, how long could they string this out? They're certainly going to lose some non-emitting ones on a regular basis, so the Straits won't be closed forever no matter how they play this.

What they need to do is hit a ship from time to time to keep the other ships from running the Straits. Then they do what all apparently defeated nations do - they try to make the cost too high for the enemy and end with a negotiated peace. That didn't work for the Confederacy, the Japanese or the Nazis. It did work for the North Koreans.

What's missing from the news reporting I'm seeing is any kind of intelligence or accuracy.

I can't believe I just said that. Like we could expect any kind of intelligence of accuracy from the theater kids who run our media.

I would bet a great big stack of folding money that CENTCOM has this dialed in and has plenty of eyes on the area. We'll know things have calmed down when a few ships make their way through the Straits successfully.

Another option would be to simply rev up the shipping lanes and send ships through normally and force the Iranians to expend their limited resources stopping them. Sadly, we don't have the oiler fleet to do this.

What we need are a pile of sacrificial maritime lambs.

A whole mess of Liberty Ships would be useful right about now.