By nearly every metric, the U.S. is losing ~~the Iran war~~
FTFY
My older brother and I played a lot of Rise of Nations and Age of Empires growing up.
My brother, being older, was better.
My goal was generally to not lose, as opposed to win. I'd accomplish this through shit like pouring all my resources into nukes. My brother would usually be maxed out on tech, including a missile shield. This a lot of times meant that I had to nuke myself near the border, or at invading armies, 25 times, before he captured my capital.
One time, I created an army of spies, and kept capturing his units, while he was trying to fight off two or three bots.
I don't think I ever technically won. But sometimes winning isn't everything, just making sure your big brother doesn't win can be victory enough.
Congrats Iran.
trump doesnt care as long as keeps the files off the MSMs.
I don't want to sound condescending but i feel bad, though at the same time feel a schadenfreude for a certain demographic that supported Trump-- lonely, insecure men. A guy I went to school with got into the far-right rabbithole and supported Trump because, despite being a brown immigrant, he is probably looking for someone to punch down. I have a Polish friend who is one of those centrist type that goes way too much into centrism. He voted a centre left party in his country after 16 years of far right rule; but supported Trump because he thinks America has become too liberal and also because of Trump's promise not to go into war.
Lonely insecure men are targets by extreme right to sow doubt, confusion and to recruit.
All but the metric of Trump’s word, right?
This was the plan all along. Rich get richer, population reduces, US people become more easily controlled, US becomes more isolated and less self-sustaining.
I don't know much about warfare, but as the US is the strongest military power in the world, how is this possible?
America's military was designed to work either as an integrated whole, or as a surgical strike system.
In full scale war, the expensive, ultra precise weapons hit weak spots, the troops on the ground then immediately exploit the response collapsing to take ground and defeat the enemy. Meanwhile, the air defence assumes the enemy's ability to project force back will be crippled quickly.
In surgical mode, the weapons are used to take out very specific targets. Think nuclear bunkers, or taking out leadership etc. It's small scale and over before the enemy knows America is about to hit them.
In Iran, trump has tried to get the best of both worlds. He tried to defeat a large scale force using specialist weapons. However, without ground support, it needs to be used on all targets, not just high value ones. This has massively depleted America's stockpile, which took years to build.
Compounding this is that Iran has been using low value weapons to strike back. America has been forced to use defenses intended to engage high value bombers to shoot down low value drones. This has depleted their stocks of interceptors too. This has let Iran strike at the bases America needs for a ground assault option.
In short, America blew its load too hard and too fast. Iran had expected this and so didn't crumble. Now trump (and the US military) is left holding a limp dick, with no stamina left, wondering what the fuck to do about it.
War is complicated and messy, it's not a linear scale from strongest to weakest.
A lot of overlapping and interacting measures.
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