It does seem like if I was China, this would be the perfect time to make a big geopolitical move: EU and Russia tied up with Ukraine and Iran, US & Gulf allies now stuck in a war zone, US showing aging tech with large exposure to new drone warfare.
This seems likely the conflict that forces the US into an immediate course correction in military makeup, or suffer large and expensive mass casualties on the battlefield.
What happened to Battleships after Aircraft Carriers entered the picture, comes to mind.
They don't need to do anything militarily. Just keep up with Belt and Road and being a stable trade partner while the US has a trade war with everyone and started an active war with Iran over nothing, and is threatening allies. Fill the vacuum the US left behind and see what happens when the US wants to put sanctions on China in the future.
That's a fair observation. They do a fair amount of objectively warmongery stuff though. All the force measuring in the south china sea, needless escorts, etc. They do engage in border skirmishes and make claim to Taiwan.
Ya, China will win by default, why do something stupid like Trump would? Make friends with the world, provide working affordable solutions to the high price of oil. Uhm, it’s like Trump is doing everything for China’s benefit.
Don't interrupt your enemy when they are busy making mistakes.
Iran is shaping up to be a quagmire worse than Afghanistan or Iraq. Even if Trump pulls back from the brink, the GCC economies are significantly damaged, Iran will extort a massive wergild, and European and Asian economies will suffer another energy shock. China is relatively unscathed.
"any real issue"? Like crippling the world economy? They can extract a tithe on every gallon of oil leaving the Gulf. Without Qatari/Iranian natural gas there is a global energy crunch.
South/Central America has no significant military opponents, most especially none that will consume large quantities of exquisite armaments. It would mostly consume Army resources in COIN, which they are extremely experienced with from Afghanistan.
It's actually mystifying that Trump started the beef with Iran, when he could have just invaded Cuba and had an easy win. The Israeli factor of course, truly America's greatest weakness.
Yes, the downstream effects of the helium shortage are going to be extremely painful. Chip production, MRI machines, welding, many scientific uses. (We can't forget the previous era of US insanity in dumping the helium reserve under the 'party balloon gas' anti-science/anti-facts 1990s Congress.[1])
The world still produces enough fertiliser, but prices will rise significantly. The biggest producers (China, India, USA) also consume most of their supply, and China and India get their methane from elsewhere or from coal. Russia is a leading exporter, so they could easily tighten the screws now, leading to further economic shocks. Big importers will feel a crunch [2] and this will leader to significant crop price increases.[3]
They are waiting for the political pendulum to complete its swing. Once the blue resurgence hits, US will be deeply distracted with domestic issues and too broke for adventures. Spring 2027 will be unseasonably hot…
If China has any sense they will be looking at how well Iran and Ukraine is going for the invaders and maybe think twice before they make the same mistake.
It would be, unless China isn't yet militarily ready.
Also if China's Taiwan plan includes using surrogates like Iran to cause simultaneous trouble, then reducing Iran's capability asynchronously eliminates one US worry during a Taiwan scenario.
Or not. China just saw two supposedly biggest military superpowers fail to achieve their military objectives. China supplied Iran with tons of most advanced SAM they could muster, and it took Iran over a month to shoot down _one_ 50 year old airframe. Gunning for Taiwan right now could provoke orange one to erase Iran oil infrastructure.
The situation makes more sense when you realize the actual geopolitical needs of America simply aren't part of the equation. Trump and his Republican enablers only care about gambling for a pre-midterm "victory" and salving the presidential ego.
If they cared about taxpayer dollars or the US' long-term strategic position, we wouldn't be in this mess. There wouldn't be an illegal/unconstitutional war fueling consequences that everyone (else) saw coming.
Arguably this has been happening since the Cold War, as aircraft-launched missiles back then were designed to take out incoming cruise missiles. But in principle using something like an F-15 firing something like an AIM-120 is cheaper than using a Patriot, because the Patriot missile has to include a huge booster stage, a disposable radar, etc, while those can all be integrated into the plane instead in the case of an AMRAAM. In practice of course whether or not it is cheaper is dependent on the cost per flight hour of the plane and how many AMRAAMS you're making versus how many Patriot interceptors you're building. In that regard though, this _is_ new, because there's a fairly recently introduced missile called Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) that puts a relatively cheap seeker head onto a cheap otherwise-unguided rocket (I'm pretty sure the cost of an APKWS seeker + rocket is less than $50k), and those are cheap enough that you can send up an F-15 with hardpoints full of them and not worry nearly as much about letting loose several million-dollar missiles.
This is indeed to save on more expensive missiles. A very cheap missile, the APKWS, is augmented with a cheap laser guidance kit to make the APKWS II, a cheap short range air-to-air missile.
APKWS II isn't useful for counter-manoeuvring targets like fighter jets, but it is perfect for one way drones. The Hydra 70 rocket it is build from doesn't have the range by itself to protect a wide area, but an F-15E can carry a number of 7-rocket pods, and has the speed to chase down drones and cruise missiles over a wide area, like a hummingbird zipping between flowers. Depending on loadout restrictions due to fuel tanks, an F-15E could employ 42 APKWS II and a mix of short range (AIM-9X) and medium range (AMRAAM).
All of this requires airborne cueing, which is why the loss of the E3 Sentry is so serious.
Great, so now the US is going to lean ever harder on the Australian E-7 Wedgetail's all while Trump continues to drag allies and not own up to his colossal misstep.
Yes, the US is highly dependent on the single E-7 at present. It has a much better RADAR than the old Sentry as well, especially for picking out low flying missiles against sea clutter. Obviously it can't be in the air at all times, but I understand from OSINT that many of the Shaheds are launched at night.
The ground location of the Wedgetail is obviously something the Iranians would love to know, in which case they would saturate it will ballistic missiles and it would be a race to get it in the air. I expect it moves regularly but that would create significant logistical issues too. Unlike Patriot batteries, which can be heavily sandbagged and routinely shuffled between prepared positions, a 737 on the tarmac is incredibly vulnerable.
I thought cheaper and slower moving counters would be used such as helicopters, a10s or propellor powered planes with guns (rather than with an expensive missile, I did not know if APKWS).
I guess, missiles shot from f15s are still cheaper than an interceptor missiles.
F15 seems to have the same cannon as f16, and there are multiple videos (like [0]) of successfully destroying Shahed drones and cruise missiles with it.
A-10 or propellor powered planes are more cost efficiteve but it looks like the US doesn't have enough of them and had to use much more expensive but numerous F-16 and F-35 e.t.c.
The US was not prepeared to counter drones and even after 4 years of the war in Ukraine still doesn't take economic aspect of drone warfare seriously continuing to behave like cost doesn't matter.
If you think that's bad, look at the total cost of under-defended systems lost so far (measured in billions, in the neighborhood of several and possibly more) and at the much bloodier potential of pointless deaths and humiliation than either the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam for an unnecessary ground invasion after an unnecessary air and sea war. The US MIC is primarily optimized by corporate greed and institutional inertia to fight a symmetric war from 1995. Send the Flag Code-violating action Ken doll and the sundowning real estate guy home along with troops in theater.. or lint traps stuffing and toilet cloggings will happen.
I know that wars are going on and I guess I have talked about this war in particular fair-share on it.
But when all of the Epstein thing happened, I genuinely thought that US media which moved the headlines faster than I can think about the issues for, would actually slow down given the severity and we as a society could think about it.
And then the US Administration did these wars with less discussion of Epstein files and their implications.
I used to see people raise these points within the start of war but as this war is getting streched more and more, it seems that the news cycle may've forgotten a bit about the files
A lot of my assumptions on the world and how it operates feel challenged by this pace of going from epstein to wars, Reading 1984, it feels like using war as a distraction so that nobody digs in too deep but everyone feels panic and fear so that they are easily controllable.
I hope that accountability can take place within the context of epstein files. Some of it is still redacted even unconstituionally.
(I kind of wish to do some data analysis checking the frequency of Epstein files related posts in Hackernews (for example) after the Iran war actually now [maybe-later, maybe this will also be one of the ideas which I might not implement right now] but I will try to share if I find any interesting results and perhaps someone who is also interested can do that as anecdotally, I feel like I see almost zero mentions of Epstein now from Media or very little aside from some comments like the GP's comment which mentioned Epstein in saying Epstein-fury.)
> But when all of the Epstein thing happened, I genuinely thought that US media which moved the headlines faster than I can think about the issues for, would actually slow down given the severity and we as a society could think about it.
Not to worry since the public face of the Epstein files coverup is back in the news.
“When I took over our military, we didn’t have ammunition,” Trump said Monday. “I was told by a top general – maybe the top of them all – ‘Sir, I’m sorry. Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘I’ll never let another president have that happen to him or her.’ We didn’t have ammunition.”
They can afford to. People are forgetting that unlike Russia, the US isn't in a wartime economy mode. Iran isn't a threat to world's most powerful military. And it's not as if Iran is suddenly going to launch a ground invasion against all its neighbours (which would be disaster for it). It too is seeking a stalemate end to the war. Iran's military has been crippled. The only problem is that as the Trump administration has declared victory, it's still trying to figure out what that "victory" is. And how to deal with Netanyahu's self-destructive tantrum that dragged the US into this mess in the first place.
The issue is that capability being gone without any ammo. As the article mentions:
> Again, the Tomahawk would be a primary weapon system used in a conflict with China, where the target sets can range into the tens of thousands, and the country’s anti-access umbrella will require the use of standoff munitions like none other in history.
>Netanyahu's self-destructive tantrum that dragged the US into this mess in the first place.
Trump was bought by the Israel lobby long ago. Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison and others gave him hundreds of millions to ensure he’d start this war while he was still campaigning.
The US has stepped into a huge pile of shit in this round. And instead of getting out fast, they just want to jump dive into it.
Some American people don't know that US misfortunes are celebrated elsewhere. 911 became a holiday in some regions. And if American empire falls down, I feel like at least half of the world gonna celebrate that.
Name one country that made September 11 a public holiday.
A lot of "celebrated misfortune" is a byproduct of arrogance and the pretense that the US is "smarter" (witness how often the US likes to play "world police"... and how often it correlates to US self-interest. There's nothing wrong with self-interest, but no-one's buying some noble "world police" bullshit when it only seems to happen when the US has something to gain). Certainly not limited to, but also certainly amplified hugely by the present administration.
It does seem like if I was China, this would be the perfect time to make a big geopolitical move: EU and Russia tied up with Ukraine and Iran, US & Gulf allies now stuck in a war zone, US showing aging tech with large exposure to new drone warfare.
This seems likely the conflict that forces the US into an immediate course correction in military makeup, or suffer large and expensive mass casualties on the battlefield.
What happened to Battleships after Aircraft Carriers entered the picture, comes to mind.
They don't need to do anything militarily. Just keep up with Belt and Road and being a stable trade partner while the US has a trade war with everyone and started an active war with Iran over nothing, and is threatening allies. Fill the vacuum the US left behind and see what happens when the US wants to put sanctions on China in the future.
Exactly, in the fall and aftermath of WWII the USofA Steven Bradbury'd it's way to No. #1 on the global pecking order.
China, now, is ready to do as little as possible and free skate into that position by the same means.
I feel certain at this point that the Western obsession with China beginning to warmonger is just projection.
That's a fair observation. They do a fair amount of objectively warmongery stuff though. All the force measuring in the south china sea, needless escorts, etc. They do engage in border skirmishes and make claim to Taiwan.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-fires-water-cannon...
https://news.usni.org/2025/12/13/video-china-coast-guard-bla...
Ya, China will win by default, why do something stupid like Trump would? Make friends with the world, provide working affordable solutions to the high price of oil. Uhm, it’s like Trump is doing everything for China’s benefit.
Don't interrupt your enemy when they are busy making mistakes.
Iran is shaping up to be a quagmire worse than Afghanistan or Iraq. Even if Trump pulls back from the brink, the GCC economies are significantly damaged, Iran will extort a massive wergild, and European and Asian economies will suffer another energy shock. China is relatively unscathed.
Iran is too close to china to make any real issue. USA can stop shooting themselves in the feet at any time and redirect to Taiwan.
If China wanted USA tied up, theyd get south america or cuba problems, forces away from China.
"any real issue"? Like crippling the world economy? They can extract a tithe on every gallon of oil leaving the Gulf. Without Qatari/Iranian natural gas there is a global energy crunch.
South/Central America has no significant military opponents, most especially none that will consume large quantities of exquisite armaments. It would mostly consume Army resources in COIN, which they are extremely experienced with from Afghanistan.
It's actually mystifying that Trump started the beef with Iran, when he could have just invaded Cuba and had an easy win. The Israeli factor of course, truly America's greatest weakness.
Without Qatari helium, there's a massive global semiconductor crunch.
The fertilizer crunch and food scarcity too.
It's wild to me how oblivious ostensibly intelligent people on this site regularly manage to be.
Yes, the downstream effects of the helium shortage are going to be extremely painful. Chip production, MRI machines, welding, many scientific uses. (We can't forget the previous era of US insanity in dumping the helium reserve under the 'party balloon gas' anti-science/anti-facts 1990s Congress.[1])
The world still produces enough fertiliser, but prices will rise significantly. The biggest producers (China, India, USA) also consume most of their supply, and China and India get their methane from elsewhere or from coal. Russia is a leading exporter, so they could easily tighten the screws now, leading to further economic shocks. Big importers will feel a crunch [2] and this will leader to significant crop price increases.[3]
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/02/21/federal-governm...
[2] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/yea...
[3] https://farmonaut.com/mining/largest-urea-producers-2026-glo...
Significant crop price increases, which tends to be bad news for anyone who eats food.
They are waiting for the political pendulum to complete its swing. Once the blue resurgence hits, US will be deeply distracted with domestic issues and too broke for adventures. Spring 2027 will be unseasonably hot…
If China has any sense they will be looking at how well Iran and Ukraine is going for the invaders and maybe think twice before they make the same mistake.
It would be, unless China isn't yet militarily ready.
Also if China's Taiwan plan includes using surrogates like Iran to cause simultaneous trouble, then reducing Iran's capability asynchronously eliminates one US worry during a Taiwan scenario.
> perfect time
Or not. China just saw two supposedly biggest military superpowers fail to achieve their military objectives. China supplied Iran with tons of most advanced SAM they could muster, and it took Iran over a month to shoot down _one_ 50 year old airframe. Gunning for Taiwan right now could provoke orange one to erase Iran oil infrastructure.
Invading Taiwan now would be incredibly costly for China even if they win.
So like exactly as analysts said would happen in the event of an invasion of Iran?
The situation makes more sense when you realize the actual geopolitical needs of America simply aren't part of the equation. Trump and his Republican enablers only care about gambling for a pre-midterm "victory" and salving the presidential ego.
If they cared about taxpayer dollars or the US' long-term strategic position, we wouldn't be in this mess. There wouldn't be an illegal/unconstitutional war fueling consequences that everyone (else) saw coming.
I am now seeing quite a few videos of F15s trying to shoot down drones. That seems an odd choice.
Was this happening before or is it a new trend ? Is it to save on surface to air interceptors ?
Arguably this has been happening since the Cold War, as aircraft-launched missiles back then were designed to take out incoming cruise missiles. But in principle using something like an F-15 firing something like an AIM-120 is cheaper than using a Patriot, because the Patriot missile has to include a huge booster stage, a disposable radar, etc, while those can all be integrated into the plane instead in the case of an AMRAAM. In practice of course whether or not it is cheaper is dependent on the cost per flight hour of the plane and how many AMRAAMS you're making versus how many Patriot interceptors you're building. In that regard though, this _is_ new, because there's a fairly recently introduced missile called Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) that puts a relatively cheap seeker head onto a cheap otherwise-unguided rocket (I'm pretty sure the cost of an APKWS seeker + rocket is less than $50k), and those are cheap enough that you can send up an F-15 with hardpoints full of them and not worry nearly as much about letting loose several million-dollar missiles.
This is indeed to save on more expensive missiles. A very cheap missile, the APKWS, is augmented with a cheap laser guidance kit to make the APKWS II, a cheap short range air-to-air missile.
APKWS II isn't useful for counter-manoeuvring targets like fighter jets, but it is perfect for one way drones. The Hydra 70 rocket it is build from doesn't have the range by itself to protect a wide area, but an F-15E can carry a number of 7-rocket pods, and has the speed to chase down drones and cruise missiles over a wide area, like a hummingbird zipping between flowers. Depending on loadout restrictions due to fuel tanks, an F-15E could employ 42 APKWS II and a mix of short range (AIM-9X) and medium range (AMRAAM).
All of this requires airborne cueing, which is why the loss of the E3 Sentry is so serious.
https://www.twz.com/air/f-15e-spotted-packing-big-laser-guid...
Great, so now the US is going to lean ever harder on the Australian E-7 Wedgetail's all while Trump continues to drag allies and not own up to his colossal misstep.
Yes, the US is highly dependent on the single E-7 at present. It has a much better RADAR than the old Sentry as well, especially for picking out low flying missiles against sea clutter. Obviously it can't be in the air at all times, but I understand from OSINT that many of the Shaheds are launched at night.
The ground location of the Wedgetail is obviously something the Iranians would love to know, in which case they would saturate it will ballistic missiles and it would be a race to get it in the air. I expect it moves regularly but that would create significant logistical issues too. Unlike Patriot batteries, which can be heavily sandbagged and routinely shuffled between prepared positions, a 737 on the tarmac is incredibly vulnerable.
> That seems an odd choice.
Why? In Ukraine everything that can fly (light aircraft, helicopters, fighter jets, etc.) are shooting down drones.
I thought cheaper and slower moving counters would be used such as helicopters, a10s or propellor powered planes with guns (rather than with an expensive missile, I did not know if APKWS).
I guess, missiles shot from f15s are still cheaper than an interceptor missiles.
F15 seems to have the same cannon as f16, and there are multiple videos (like [0]) of successfully destroying Shahed drones and cruise missiles with it.
[0] - https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1970127431030985059
A-10 or propellor powered planes are more cost efficiteve but it looks like the US doesn't have enough of them and had to use much more expensive but numerous F-16 and F-35 e.t.c.
The US was not prepeared to counter drones and even after 4 years of the war in Ukraine still doesn't take economic aspect of drone warfare seriously continuing to behave like cost doesn't matter.
Looks bad for other weapons too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504505
"The purpose of a system is what it does"
Someone is weakening America for a takeover
Is it a coincidence that America's greatest ally is testing drone swarms on FirstNet?
[dead]
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619701
If you think that's bad, look at the total cost of under-defended systems lost so far (measured in billions, in the neighborhood of several and possibly more) and at the much bloodier potential of pointless deaths and humiliation than either the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam for an unnecessary ground invasion after an unnecessary air and sea war. The US MIC is primarily optimized by corporate greed and institutional inertia to fight a symmetric war from 1995. Send the Flag Code-violating action Ken doll and the sundowning real estate guy home along with troops in theater.. or lint traps stuffing and toilet cloggings will happen.
>>or lint traps stuffing and toilet cloggings will happen.
Thank you for your service
Operation Epstein fury doesn't bode well for the deranged White House occupant...
I know that wars are going on and I guess I have talked about this war in particular fair-share on it.
But when all of the Epstein thing happened, I genuinely thought that US media which moved the headlines faster than I can think about the issues for, would actually slow down given the severity and we as a society could think about it.
And then the US Administration did these wars with less discussion of Epstein files and their implications.
I used to see people raise these points within the start of war but as this war is getting streched more and more, it seems that the news cycle may've forgotten a bit about the files
A lot of my assumptions on the world and how it operates feel challenged by this pace of going from epstein to wars, Reading 1984, it feels like using war as a distraction so that nobody digs in too deep but everyone feels panic and fear so that they are easily controllable.
I hope that accountability can take place within the context of epstein files. Some of it is still redacted even unconstituionally.
(I kind of wish to do some data analysis checking the frequency of Epstein files related posts in Hackernews (for example) after the Iran war actually now [maybe-later, maybe this will also be one of the ideas which I might not implement right now] but I will try to share if I find any interesting results and perhaps someone who is also interested can do that as anecdotally, I feel like I see almost zero mentions of Epstein now from Media or very little aside from some comments like the GP's comment which mentioned Epstein in saying Epstein-fury.)
> But when all of the Epstein thing happened, I genuinely thought that US media which moved the headlines faster than I can think about the issues for, would actually slow down given the severity and we as a society could think about it.
Not to worry since the public face of the Epstein files coverup is back in the news.
> But when all of the Epstein thing happened, I genuinely thought that US media
That US media controlled by wealthy elite, who almost all were using Epstein or similar services? That media?
“When I took over our military, we didn’t have ammunition,” Trump said Monday. “I was told by a top general – maybe the top of them all – ‘Sir, I’m sorry. Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘I’ll never let another president have that happen to him or her.’ We didn’t have ammunition.”
Or more specifically “We used up all the ammunition”. Americans got nothing for it other than higher inflated costs.
They can afford to. People are forgetting that unlike Russia, the US isn't in a wartime economy mode. Iran isn't a threat to world's most powerful military. And it's not as if Iran is suddenly going to launch a ground invasion against all its neighbours (which would be disaster for it). It too is seeking a stalemate end to the war. Iran's military has been crippled. The only problem is that as the Trump administration has declared victory, it's still trying to figure out what that "victory" is. And how to deal with Netanyahu's self-destructive tantrum that dragged the US into this mess in the first place.
The issue is that capability being gone without any ammo. As the article mentions:
> Again, the Tomahawk would be a primary weapon system used in a conflict with China, where the target sets can range into the tens of thousands, and the country’s anti-access umbrella will require the use of standoff munitions like none other in history.
>Netanyahu's self-destructive tantrum that dragged the US into this mess in the first place.
Trump was bought by the Israel lobby long ago. Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison and others gave him hundreds of millions to ensure he’d start this war while he was still campaigning.
The US has stepped into a huge pile of shit in this round. And instead of getting out fast, they just want to jump dive into it.
Some American people don't know that US misfortunes are celebrated elsewhere. 911 became a holiday in some regions. And if American empire falls down, I feel like at least half of the world gonna celebrate that.
Europe is celebrating America's idiocy. We actually are ok with the price of oil et al going up.
Its worth it to see the orange bozo act up.
No we are not ok with it, where the hell did you pull that from? LNG shipments are also blocked.
We are okay with the price of oil going up? Didn’t know that. Certainly not me or anybody I know!
Not celebrating the price hike, and im not European. But i am also not exactly opposed or offebded by the hike.
So now you are going to buy your oil from russia and north america? Lol
Can't they just pay Iran to allow the ship go through?
[flagged]
> 911 became a holiday in some regions.
Name one country that made September 11 a public holiday.
A lot of "celebrated misfortune" is a byproduct of arrogance and the pretense that the US is "smarter" (witness how often the US likes to play "world police"... and how often it correlates to US self-interest. There's nothing wrong with self-interest, but no-one's buying some noble "world police" bullshit when it only seems to happen when the US has something to gain). Certainly not limited to, but also certainly amplified hugely by the present administration.