US may not have capacity to take down full barrage of Iranian drones, officials warn (www.theguardian.com)
from breakfastmtn@piefed.ca to world@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 03:05
https://piefed.ca/c/world/p/571012/us-may-not-have-capacity-to-take-down-full-barrage-of-iranian-drones-officials-warn

Chair of joint chiefs of staff and others in classified meeting said Iran is trying to get US to spend its munitions

Top military officials told lawmakers in a closed door briefing on Tuesday that they may not be able to shoot down every Iranian drone being launched against US military installations and assets in retaliatory attacks, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The officials, led by the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Dan Caine, said Iran has been deploying thousands of one-way attack drones and while they have capacity to take down the vast majority but not all of the barrage.

As a result, the officials said in a classified briefing for lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the US was focused on destroying the launch sites for the drones and conventional missiles as quickly as possible. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.

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unmagical@lemmy.ml on 05 Mar 03:23 next collapse

Maybe we shouldn’t have started a war with them then?

intrepid@lemmy.ca on 05 Mar 04:44 collapse

Exactly! The aggressors can’t be the victim too.

xenomor@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 05:03 next collapse

Excuse me, but the administration told me that we preemptively attacked them before they attacked us. It’s a defensive offensive attack that we were building up to for months. Of course, if the Iranians had preempted our defensive attack, that would have been offensive and evil. Just the kind of evil attack that we are defending against by attacking.

andallthat@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 05:49 next collapse

It’s a game of 4D-chicken

intrepid@lemmy.ca on 05 Mar 07:19 collapse

Regime, not administration. They’re are the law makers and the executives. They’re the judge, the jury and the executioner.

atropa@piefed.social on 05 Mar 07:05 collapse

Think again   Putin

intrepid@lemmy.ca on 05 Mar 07:17 collapse

Poutine sounds nice! Meanwhile, what is the next farce to hide your name in those files, Mr. Drumpf?

panda_abyss@lemmy.ca on 05 Mar 03:32 next collapse

I don’t know, Hegseth just came out and said they definitely do today. It was probably totally unrelated to this.

Would the Trump administration lie?

Asafum@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 03:51 next collapse

Would the Trump administration lie?

Don’t be silly. Just because the lying liar that does nothing but lie and hire liars to lie for him as well, does so every day and all day, doesn’t mean they would lie!

I for one would be shocked, shocked I say, if they were lying!

Well… Not that shocked… It’s almost guaranteed to be a lie.

Tja@programming.dev on 05 Mar 06:42 next collapse

They also said, unprompted, they they have unlimited ammo. AKA they are going to run out soon.

aesthelete@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 07:21 collapse

The interceptor missiles they use – I forget the name because I don’t have a war boner – are expensive and have limited production capacity versus drones which are low five figures a unit and can be manufactured quickly.

I read some article basically saying wasting all of the missiles leaves a lot of the other places we protect open to attack and that our more serious enemies (China with Taiwan for instance) may be taking notes about how many we’re using.

Tja@programming.dev on 05 Mar 08:15 collapse

Patriots, probably?

echodot@feddit.uk on 05 Mar 07:23 collapse

With all that laying experience at least it’ll be a good and convincing lie, and not an obviously transparent and easily disproved one.

Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 03:55 next collapse

Would the Trump administration lie?

Hmmmmmmmm…maybe.

anomnom@sh.itjust.works on 05 Mar 12:33 collapse

The Trump administration would say no.

GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone on 05 Mar 13:06 collapse

Would the Trump administration lie?

We will release the Epstein files

I have the Epstein files on my desk

All of the files have already been released

There are no files, never were

There are files but they exonerate everyone on our side and implicate all of our opponents. No you can’t see them, just trust us bro.

Why are you still talking about the Epstein files?

The files are a democrat hoax…. But they still exonerate Trump somehow

Okay here’s the files, but Trump isn’t in there once.

Okay we removed the 10,000 mentions of trump that we missed.

Stop talking about this, Dow is over 50k!

World War III is no time to discuss the Epstein files

TachyonTele@piefed.social on 05 Mar 04:00 next collapse

It’s crazy to me that the US doesn’t have “fuck you” hoards of weapons and tech, ready to go at any time.

Hollywood did a number on me.

BremboTheFourth@piefed.ca on 05 Mar 04:28 next collapse

I mean, we do, but we did give some of it to Ukraine (not a criticism) and also more importantly, we want to keep having that hoard. I guess who knows wtf our foreign policy is now, but in general if you have a big, one-time-use stick, it’s smarter to threaten to use the stick than it is to actually use it and just hope that there’s nothing else that needs whacking afterwards. See also: whenever Russia threatens to nuke things

echodot@feddit.uk on 05 Mar 07:31 collapse

The problem is if you’re being attacked by a swarm of angry bees your giant stick used for attacking humans isn’t much use. The US likes to criticise other countries for under spending on their military but they themselves haven’t used their military funding to maximum efficiency either.

Trump is talking about building a new kind of battleship despite them being completely useless in any contemporary war.

Archer@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 11:16 collapse

A battleship would likely be a missile battleship, not a traditional naval one

FishFace@piefed.social on 05 Mar 11:54 next collapse

Ja but it still doesn’t make sense. He’s just doing it because the name is cool and it’d be big, and he thinks bigger = better.

echodot@feddit.uk on 05 Mar 18:10 collapse

Oh yeah I’ve seen the AI generated imagery. It’s going to have missiles and lasers and lots and lots of guns. And it’s going to sit out there in the ocean being completely useless, and then at night $2,000 worth of drones are going to come in under stealth of dark and they’re going to land, then they’re going to explode and sink it.

The cost disparity is enormous.

The US navy knows this which is why they haven’t been building lots of ships lately. But Trump doesn’t care about any of that he wants to ship with his name on it.

bitjunkie@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 21:54 collapse

A ridiculously expensive gold-plated battleship on fire and sinking from like 10 kids with remote-controlled toys is about the aptest visual metaphor I can think of for this administration.

procrastitron@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 06:41 next collapse

It’s asymmetric. The weapons you need to take out a swarm of drones are orders of magnitude more expensive (and complicated) than the drones.

So, any horde of such weapons cannot be replenished as quickly as the drones can.

echodot@feddit.uk on 05 Mar 07:28 collapse

The US hasn’t really invested in anti-drone weapons, despite the obvious risk they pose as demonstrated in Ukraine.

So instead they’re trying to blow up a $200 drone with a multi-million dollar missile, and they don’t even have a 100% hit rate. Things like RF jammers, real big nets, and big foam darts would be just as effective if not more so as they could take up multiple target simultaneously, and considerably cheaper and reusable. But nope.

Witchfire@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 07:10 next collapse

We gave up healthcare and education for this, but at least we still have the right to a weekly mass shooting :/

bitjunkie@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 21:50 collapse

Weekly? You’re quite the optimist.

TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 21:19 collapse

They do. They just can’t be in one place at one time.

There are 400+ combat aircraft in this war. The total inventory of the USA is like 3000+. Only about 15% of our air and navel power is being used.

NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io on 05 Mar 04:00 next collapse

Gee, I wonder if there's some way they could've survived without needing to shoot down full drone barrages then. I wonder what that could be.

EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com on 05 Mar 06:05 collapse

“I’m not even supposed to be here today!”

BigMacHole@sopuli.xyz on 05 Mar 05:09 next collapse

We CAN"T Protect our Soldiers so we WILL keep this War GOING!

-Pro Military Republicans!

intrepid@lemmy.ca on 05 Mar 07:24 collapse

It’s surprising how fast they went from “those dems war” to “our holy Armageddon”. Consistency is not their forte, is it?

WanderingThoughts@europe.pub on 05 Mar 11:18 collapse

They love how we hate their inconsistency.

thericofactor@sh.itjust.works on 05 Mar 05:29 next collapse

Iranian launch sites are mostly mobile. They fire those UAVs from the back of a truck and they’re gone.

Sundiata@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 06:09 next collapse

America mid 2027: Wifi was used to track and locate the unique body signatures of thousands of draft dodgers in what authorities are calling an “unprecedented epidemic of anti-americanism”. Canada and Mexico have agreed to cooperate with American authorities in rounding up these runaways tightening their border security.

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c2e73042-3e73-4aa3-8932-86f81a5cc18c.gif">

errer@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 06:53 next collapse

It’s going to be really great when some of these Iranian cruise missiles start poking through and striking the gigantic explosive oil pipelines criss-crossing the desert…

fox2263@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 07:13 next collapse

If they had any sense they would’ve been cooperating with Ukraine for the last year instead of being dicks. Arm them and have a full exchange of knowledge like their ability to knock down hundreds of drones on a DAILY basis. Drones made by Iran.

Instead Trump still has his vendetta against them (Zelenskyy specifically) for not inventing Hunter Biden evidence. And Trump holds a grudge like no other.

echodot@feddit.uk on 05 Mar 07:21 next collapse

Surely you are not trying to suggest that the US went into this with absolutely no plan whatsoever?

fox2263@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 07:23 next collapse

Oh they had a plan alright. But it was simply the words “attack Iran” on a piece of paper and “where oil”.

Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 05 Mar 11:14 next collapse

Is the media talking about the Epstein files?

No?!

Looks like their Pedo War plan is working perfectly!

SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca on 05 Mar 17:21 collapse

Drink beer, order pizza is a plan.

NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io on 05 Mar 15:21 collapse

Really, their incompetence is the silver lining in all this.

FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world on 05 Mar 14:27 collapse

The chairman of the joint chiefs literally told our two tv hosts that are running this war that it was an exceedingly bad idea.

And it seems we’ve come to the point where the bully fucked with the wrong kid.