Well this is alarming...

Looks like Iran has firepower now.

Iran 'ready to fire missiles at US bases' | World news | The Guardian

Well, to be fair Iran has had that capability for quite some time, and indeed they use the same missiles for their vaunted satellite programs. The question is whether the US military has assets in sufficient quantity and the necessary advanced notice to interdict such missiles. Such capabilities exist on the Arleigh Burke destroyers and Ticonderoga cruisers that are probably based out of Qatar. However, I don't know if they would have the range, notice, or sufficient quantity to make a difference. I know that the current generation of Patriot anti-ballistic missiles have officially had great success in Iraqi Freedom, but I don't know whether they're in the region or, again, whether they'd have enough notice to make a difference. The problem with either ship or land based ballistic missile systems is that they can be very effective against specific targets, however if the critical mass of targets is large enough it's possible to overwhelm the targeting systems. Either way, strategically this is merely a reminder of Iran's preexisting capabilities, not a new breakthrough per se.

Originally Posted by Raptor Buddha

Well, to be fair Iran has had that capability for quite some time, and indeed they use the same missiles for their vaunted satellite programs. The question is whether the US military has assets in sufficient quantity and the necessary advanced notice to interdict such missiles. Such capabilities exist on the Arleigh Burke destroyers and Ticonderoga cruisers that are probably based out of Qatar. However, I don't know if they would have the range, notice, or sufficient quantity to make a difference. I know that the current generation of Patriot anti-ballistic missiles have officially had great success in Iraqi Freedom, but I don't know whether they're in the region or, again, whether they'd have enough notice to make a difference. The problem with either ship or land based ballistic missile systems is that they can be very effective against specific targets, however if the critical mass of targets is large enough it's possible to overwhelm the targeting systems of the systems. Either way, strategically this is merely a reminder of Iran's preexisting capabilities, not a new breakthrough per se.

Good point. Like I said it was alarming for me, even if it is a "reminder" though it seems to be the first that they've shown success.

I am not exactly sure what this could mean, I mean it somewhat reminds me of when North Korea sunk that South Korean ship and when they shelled the South Korean bases back in 2011, I mean I was scared we were going to war.

I guess we can just hope it blows over.

Well, I should point out that if Iran launches those kinds of ballistic missiles, I'm not sure if there would be any meaningful way to distinguish between the various types of warheads. Thus, the warhead on the missile could be a conventional explosive, chemical, biological, or nuclear. The question would be, could the US and other potential target nations have the luxury of assuming that these missiles are simply conventional weapons, or would this be treated as the delivery of a weapon of mass destruction that would warrant a full scale nuclear response? Now, realistically, Iran probably doesn't have the capability to develop a working nuclear warhead yet, but the question does illuminate some of the complications for leaders in Tehran trying to structure a military response to the United States, Israel, or other potential enemies. The question that you have to ask Iran (as well as the US) is:

No matter what kind of warhead it is, other nations have the luxury of waiting before responding. This isn't a Cold War situation where both sides were set to literally flatten everything their opponents owned ten times over. At most Iran will have a couple of nukes and firing our own at them post-launch won't change anything, so might as well try to shoot them down and wait to see what type of warhead they had.

Indeed, there'd not even be reason to respond in kind. Not unless you like mass civilian casualties. Instead, a conventional war could be waged against them.

Originally Posted by John

No matter what kind of warhead it is, other nations have the luxury of waiting before responding. This isn't a Cold War situation where both sides were set to literally flatten everything their opponents owned ten times over. At most Iran will have a couple of nukes and firing our own at them post-launch won't change anything, so might as well try to shoot them down and wait to see what type of warhead they had.

Indeed, there'd not even be reason to respond in kind. Not unless you like mass civilian casualties. Instead, a conventional war could be waged against them.

True, but again the risk calculus is not what the US would do, but rather what the Iranian government thinks the US would do. While the situation you suggest is certainly the most likely, the question is whether or not Iran can be absolutely certain that a ballistic missile launch would not provoke a full scale response. Going back to Dirty Harry, how lucky do the Iranians feel? I think it's also worth noting that, to my knowledge, there is no set policy on what the United States would do in the event of a ballistic missile launch. While the US has a "no first-use" policy, whether "use" is defined as a nuclear detonation, a ballistic missile launch, or the successful evasion of a ballistic missile is (at least to me) unclear. It should be noted that, ala Israel, such ambiguities appear to me to be advantageous to the US.

It has been known for a while now that Iran has the capability to bomb us, but bombing the US is idiotic.

Hopefully, my igorance should be evident.

So elaborate, please?

The US spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. It has allies and bases the world over. Iran could not possibly win in a direct armed conflict against the US. It couldn't even use Al-Quaida-esque guerrilla tactics to try and even the odds because it would be the Iranian government that would have to go underground, and a government in hiding is no longer a government.

Originally Posted by keyaki

Hopefully, my igorance should be evident.

So elaborate, please?

What John said, and the fact that the US has a powerful set of allies. If Iran were to attack, they would be screwed.

I see.

But US spending most of the money on the military? I though that was North Korea?

Well, let's not underestimate Iran's capabilities either. Iran certainly doesn't have the technical, doctrinal, or human capital advantages to take on the US military. However, having a border with both Iraq and Afghanistan places them in a unique position to cause considerable damage to both US forces and their allies. Additionally, Iran has one of the largest armies in the world. While it's an army more or less oriented around static defense (ala the Iran-Iraq War), it is an army sufficiently large enough to frustrate Any US ambition to occupy the country--thereby preserving the clerical regime. I've said this before, but in many ways a war would be a good thing for Tehran if it could guarantee the survival of the regime. It would probably unite a good portion of the splintered Iranian body politick and be a distraction from the country's economic woes. Because the desire in Washington and the capitals in Europe is practically nil for a long term military commitment, I don't think the Iran would necessarily be all that idiotic in fighting the US.

And Keyaki, John's figure was based on raw spending--not on percentage of GDP.

Doesn't that assume that the US response would in fact be a traditional military campaign? The Obama administration hasn't really made its preference for drone strikes a secret, and those can be conducted pretty much indefinitely. It won't allow the US to occupy Iran, of course, but that's not necessary to take out the Iranian leadership. Even if drone strikes do galvanize the Iranian populace against the US (again), it wouldn't change the fact that the leaders would still be dead, and for all their rhetoric the Iranian leadership didn't become such by martyring themselves at the first opportunity.

There's also the fact that the US and Israel have admitted to authoring the Stuxnet and Flame malware. Stuxnet sabotaged Iranian centrifuges being used to enrich uranium while Flame monitored a significant amount of electronic communication in the country for years before being detected.

So the US is fairly confident that Iran doesn't have nukes and have had an ear on all of their government communications for years. It seems likely that this means that they're prepared for anything Iran may have been planning.

That said, Stuxnet and Flame were both pretty much unjustifiable.

@Darth Yoshi

Good point, but I think Iran is a bit different. It's not a personalistic regime where a strike against a dictator and his close affiliates might bring down the regime, nor is it a an organization with a small executive hierarchy that can be eliminated through protracted drone strikes. I think the scale of the regime and its base of support through its Revolutionary Guard organization would necessitate a ground campaign to be able to topple it in any reliable fashion. Furthermore, I think a ground campaign would result if for no other reason that one of Iran's few military advatages is its localized numerical superiority in ground forces, so I think they would make it a ground slog. Also, while both the Gulf War and the Iraq War featured extensive usage of strikes against "command and control" (a nice euphemism for assassination), these strikes generally failed to kill senior leadership. Now, the US military's capability to deliver such munitions has grown by leaps and bounds since, and the CIA has rediscovered HUMINT which was painfully absent in those initial strikes. Still though, it would take a very long time to be able to target enough leadership to produce an effect--during which time the Iranians have probably mined the Straits of Hormuz and are given a period to engage US regional allies. Thus, I think to remove the leadership in any meaningful way would necessitate some form of ground campaign.

@Raptor Buddha.

This is probably an incredibly n00by question, but what's to stop the US just sending in a host (100+) of long-ranged guided missiles at the Iranian seat of government?

Sorry for the crap earlier responses. Typing SD responses on an Android is generally not a great recipe for success; especially considering that my phone likes to insert random words in my responses.

Originally Posted by Mister Blak

@Raptor Buddha.

This is probably an incredibly n00by question, but what's to stop the US just sending in a host (100+) of long-ranged guided missiles at the Iranian seat of government?

Good question, and I think Bravo/Iron Man summed it up fairly well. You can certainly launch a salvo of guided missiles--but those sorts of missiles tend to be fairly slow and give most of your leadership targets advanced notice to evacuate. The alternative, drone strikes, is certainly a viable alternative. The catch is that the kind of drone strikes that you see in Afghanistan or Pakistan have the luxury of being made against an opponent without any air defense systems. Iran has an air force, to say nothing about its latest Russian surface-to-air missile networks that could fry something like those slow moving drones faster than Jesse Owens could lap a Special Olympics track team.

So the question is really more one of effectiveness than capability. The US found out that cruise missiles are pretty great against stationary targets: power plants, bridges, barracks, etc. However, if the target moves at anything faster than a crawl then all bets are off. For those, it probably makes more sense to use your cruise missiles to take out Iran's anti shipping missile batteries along the Straits of Hormuz so that you can bring your carrier based F-35s (whenever they finally finish developing them) or land based F-22s for more precision targeting since we do know that such planes have the capability of evading Iran's anti-air system.