Simplicius explains why a US invasion of Iran is unlikely even in the event of an Iran-Israeli war:
Don’t even bother thinking about boots on the ground, if such a thing was possible it would take a year or more of preparation. Remember the Iraq invasion required 6 months just of transporting materiel and assets to the region, staging them, etc. But Iran wouldn’t let you stage them because it has far more sophisticated modern ballistic systems than anything Iraq had, which means large troop concentrations and armor/materiel staging areas could be hit and wiped out long before zero hour. Don’t believe me? Just watch the video at the beginning, the US army general says it himself toward the end: he states the accuracy of Iran’s ballistic missiles was shocking and they hit “pretty much everything they wanted to hit.”
So ground invasion is out—that’s not happening. The only thing they could possibly attempt is a long-spanning aerial campaign. But to even remotely scratch Iran’s capabilities would require a vast campaign lasting minimum 6-12 months and probably much longer. Remember, all of NATO mustered for 3 months against little Serbia with 6 million people and barely managed to destroy anything of worth. Iran has a 90 million population and a country probably a hundred times the size of Serbia, not to mention a far larger military. How long do you think it would take NATO to even put a dent in that from only an aerial campaign?
In short: it would take years, and during those years, Iran would shut down every major maritime and economic chokepoint in the region, crashing the global economy. If you thought a few ships being hit now was bad, wait til you see the nominal Iranian forces rather than Houthis hitting everything in sight—it won’t be pretty. And I’ve beaten the point before about how difficult it would be to even find targets in the decentralized vastness of Iran, just like in Yemen.
Furthermore, the US military can’t afford the necessary troop commitment for an invasion. The US Army doesn’t even have enough troops to confront Russia directly without withdrawing from most of its bases all over the world, assuming that the Russians permitted the delivery of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers to Europe in the first place.
Desert Storm required 950,000 soldiers, 3100 tanks, 2200 artillery, and 1800 aircraft back in 1991. The US Army currently has 452,689 on active duty, plus 180,958 Marines, and none of its NATO allies now have more than a handful of troops, most of whom have no equipment or ammunition anymore in the aftermath of NATO’s proxy defeat in Ukraine.
At this point, a real war with either Russia or Iran would not only lead to the loss of Taiwan, it might also lead to the loss of Texas. Which means that an ineffective “air war” is about the most that the USA can use to aid Israel, and even that might be too risky now that Russia has anti-air assets in the region securing Syrian airspace.
The neoclowns are agitating furiously for war in the Middle East, and later today I will post some extremely esoteric reasons why the Netanyahu administration might even deliver them one despite the USA’s limited ability to engage in one, but from a strictly military perspective, it is hard to imagine even the most deluded Clown World puppeteer deciding it is time to have the Fake Biden administration order a ground war anywhere outside of the current US borders. But as their time appears to be running out, we cannot dismiss the possibility of a desperate decision to roll the dice while they still have the influence required to do so. They did with the Ukraine counter-offensive that was always doomed from the start, and it’s not as if they are any less indifferent to American lives than to Ukrainian lives.
