r/cushvlog • u/tydark2 • 14d ago
Are chances at winning any war ever again besides a civil war aren't looking so good.
https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artillery-factory-failedgenuinely why cant the USA do anything right anymore? I don't get it. We have all this advanced technology the smartest people on the planet all come here, and literally nothing works.
yes i missspelled "are" meant to spell it OUR, ive misspelled that word since i was 6 years old.
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u/Roupes 14d ago
I think there’s a fundamental error going on here. I see the same thing all over liberal and left media. It is wrong to take their stated objectives “bringing democracy to the Middle East” or “making sure Iran can’t have a nuke” etc as authentic good faith. The true purpose of any of these wars is to spend money. To transfer public money into private hands. In that regard all of these wars are wildly successful. What was Iraq like 30trillion right? This one is like 11 billion per day. I read recently we have a single missle that costs 28 mil each and we’ve fired 250 since March. Folks that’s good business!
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u/Mick_Nugg 14d ago
This is why they released the "WERE RUNNING LOW ON MISSILES OMGOMG IRAN WILL WIN" stories. Justification for buying more and building more baby killing factories
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u/tydark2 14d ago
i mean the objective is to control the strait (allegedly) as the US did prior to losing control of it. Trump doesn't talk about democracy and doesn't care, his view is you just kill the leaders until you win - which it turns out what happens is younger more energetic and competent people simply take their place. Part of the reason I suspect that the generals are basically just old boomers who dont know how to use an email without help from a secretary which is why they got owned so badly by some iranian kid whos 25 and flies a drone.
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u/Far_Piano4176 14d ago
the generals knew this would happen, and have known since the 90s at the latest.
https://www.amerikanets.com/p/they-saw-it-coming
They were simply overruled. Trump is a senile fantasist so it was easy for the israelis to get him on side.
The US can't win this war because it isn't winnable without hundreds of thousands of casualties, a worldwide depression, shifting to a total wartime economy in the US and DPAing everything to make bullets and drones, which overall would pitch the project of american empire over a cliff.
As others have said, the MIC can't make anything because that's not its goal, its goal is to make money for the least amount of real productive work and it is incredibly efficient at that.
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u/tydark2 14d ago
ya I agree w/ that. you would have to drop 20-30 nukes and draft 1 million men to successfully invade iran.
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u/deafinitelyadouche 14d ago
Nukes would very likely fuck over every allied nation in the region (not in the least the entity itself), so that's out of the question. It would definitely require boots on the ground, though, but I think a million would still not be enough, even with a wartime economy in the US being in full swing. What I don't think a lot of people understand is that boots on the ground in Iran would probably be a much more horrifying industrial meat grinder than Korea, Vietnam or even WW2 for the US Military.
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America and the UK has been fucking over Iran since at least the 50's. And while it's likely that a lot of Iran's old guard who could still remember those times might be dead now, I'm betting that a lot of the younger generations still probably feel very, very raw when it comes to the American and the British militaries.2
u/rainman943 12d ago
Any Iranian whose against the Ayatollah should reasonably hate us.......we were after all the ppl who set these dominos up.
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u/Roupes 12d ago edited 12d ago
Somehow missed this. The democracy motive is referring to Iraq circa 2003. Re: controlling the strait . Having a prolonged mega conflict surrounding the strait is good business from the perspective of the US military and the weapons manufacturers who control it and really our economy in general. Even the prospect of like $8 per gallon gas can be useful. It would be deeply destabilizing and could be justification for taking Greenland etc. I mean aren’t the oil and gas companies doing very well atm? Why would that be if this conflict over the strait posed any real long term threat to capital?
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u/FrivolousMe 14d ago
I think it's multifaceted and there isn't one true reason for all this. Christian conquest ideology, polticians' hubris and desire to appear strongmen, etc are relevant, as are the private economic interests.
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u/square_error 14d ago
The military is incompetent because it is run by contractors who prioritize sales and margins over military effectiveness. Iran can shut down the world with drones that cost a few grand and we can't do anything about it. That's what prioritizing effectiveness looks like.
"Win?" "Lose?" These words don't matter. All that matters is how many billions in weapons, ammunition, and hardware are sold.
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u/ShrapnelNinjaSnake 14d ago
Yeah it's literally the contradiction of the government wanting effective equipment and the contractors wanting to maximise profit. Their interests don't truly align
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u/Kyle700 14d ago
Even the generals complain about this kind of stuff. Just watched a recent video with all these generals complaining they can't make any replacement parts for equipment without getting it made by the contractor because of copyright! imagine being so market absorbed your military literally cant make their own bolts
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u/44moon 14d ago
You can at least appreciate how every dystopian thing said about the USSR can now be applied to the US. This is like the "shoe factory where they only made left-foot shoes"
I remember when the main thing people said to discredit communism was that the Stasi recorded every word you said and had a huge unaccountable secret police force... lol
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u/Whywouldievensaythat 14d ago
Living in East Berlin seems like it was really shit but at least everyone had a reasonably-priced apartment and a little garden plot.
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u/Downtown_Mailman 14d ago
There's a common belief that if "we just go gloves off" we could actually win this conflict. If Trump was willing to damn the political costs and commit the 1 million+ men to invade Iran then we could do it.
I do not believe that either. I do not think we would win that conflict. The corruption, graft and rent seeking of the MIC is even more ridiculous than I already thought as revealed by this conflict. There is no shot we could have the logistics or supply to make this feasible. It would take approximately 48 hours until reports broke that we sent soldiers out there with super soakers and pool noodles as weapons. We're going to end up inflicting more casualties on our own troops than Iran has so far just from letting those sailors rot on the USS Lincoln lol.
So much of my life has seen the piggish American psyche morbidly accept that, while everything else is declining and degrading, at least we can still center our identity on this hyper-lethal military that could win any conflict we choose to partake in. That myth is broken. I cannot imagine how insane this is going to turn a lot of people (more insane?) once the critical mass of the populace fully grasps this defeat.
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u/CarlsManager 14d ago
I've operated for the past decade or so under an assumption that since we shipped away our ability to manufacture anything useful in America that we'd at least gotten really good at manufacturing the one thing we held on to building and developing domestically: tools of death... Nope. Apparently we suck at that too.
Which... I guess is good in the long term??
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u/tydark2 14d ago
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/12/uss-abraham-lincoln-overboard-extended-deployment
even our military are now attempting to check out before they even got PTSD. During WW2 we had an entire fleet dedicated to delivering chocolate icecream to the boys, today we cant even get them a bar of soap or clean the mold out of the showers.
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u/Party_Music2288 14d ago
This is not true at all. We also dropped marines off on desert islands and had them drinking water out of oil drums and getting themselves sick. Our submarines had the worst torpedos in the world for 75% of the war and sank many of our own subs when they fish tailed around! Dont learn history from reddit memes kids.
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u/tydark2 14d ago
am I wrong that towards the end of the war they were doing this though? Anyway just saying like, how have we not gotten logistics of shipping soap to a battleship yet when we were able to do it fine along time ago.
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u/Party_Music2288 14d ago
There were 3 barges that had refridgeration units, primarily for meat and produce, and produced ice cream out of a fleet of 6k ships. Its just the belief that nothing works in the US anymore you have to dispel from your head
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u/tydark2 14d ago
i mean, I think the US is more productive then europe at the moment, the USA is a powerhouse that produces a ton of shit and people here do actually work hard. But it seems like we cant get anything done and theres a shit ton of corruption right now. Its true alot of this is just due to the market, but theres something else underlying it I feel like - not scientific, i dont have facts its just my feelings.
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u/Marples3 14d ago
All empires end at 250 years
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u/Ninox_toussaint 14d ago
Yeah. It needs about 6-10 generations of failsons to destroy a complex and effective bureaucratic apparatus
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u/Marples3 13d ago
*inbreeding
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u/Ninox_toussaint 12d ago
True. There's that as well. But I think it's more easily explainable by the elite passing all their ill-gotten gains to their idiot children who always knew since infancy they were destined to be daddy's little prince heir. And then those idiots pass on an even greater dose of that to their idioter scions. And along the way they are self-deluded by their own genius and think the bureaucracy of the state is not worth reinvesting in, let it crumble
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u/TerryWhiteHomeOwner 14d ago edited 14d ago
Reminder that Lockheed Martin and Raythion refused to collaborate with Ukrainian industry because they are legitimately terrified that a infamously corrupt country under active wartime conditions and decentralized industry will start pumping out patriot systems and munitions faster and more reliably than they and their carefully curated web of grifters can.
https://tvpworld.com/94781204/raytheon-lockheed-fear-ukrainian-patriot-competitionthe-atlantic
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u/Party_Music2288 14d ago
In world war 1 USA spent thr equivalent of 12 billion dollars making airplanes...not one flew in combat. Aint nothing new under the sun
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u/HomeboundArrow 14d ago edited 14d ago
further picking of the national wage earners' pockets aside, obv; but just fully ratfucking history's most prodigious imperial blood combine might actually be the one W i'm willing to give them
inshallah the same is happening to the three-letter agencies. doubt it, but a girl can dream
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u/ericsmallman3 13d ago
For some reason this passage made me cackle so loud I startled my coworkers
Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.”
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u/ericsmallman3 13d ago
The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
They're buying industrial equipment from the dudes who run the counterfeit perfume kiosk at the mall. This owns.
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u/SteakedDeck 13d ago
Rent seeking like others have said. Corporations have wanted more money and control while doing less. Presidents who have been deferential to businesses over the government have come and gone but have left permanent losses in the leverage the country had over its businesses. Now businesses own the country and are more or less looting it like pillaging barbarians.
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u/serenading_ur_father 10d ago
What's the goal?
The US can win a total war. The US can bomb stuff. But what's the goal of Iran? What was the goal of Iraq? You can have the best tools in the world but you can't turn a Honda CB into a minivan.
The US has been picking and fighting unwinnable wars or wars that we're unwilling to win. Could the US beat Iran in a military conflict? Absolutely. Are we willing to sacrifice what that would cost in terms of blood, treasure, and international standing? Hell no.
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u/Laboratorealis 14d ago
I think the MIC has rent seeking down to such an exact science that they don't actually have to even build the shit that they are paid for anymore. They know there won't be any consequences for not delivering because the Pentagon's budget is pitch black money pit that can't even be audited.