re: #713 bagua

One of the lessons of the Iraq war was that our efforts to contain the development of WMDs using tactics short of invasion were more successful than widely believed.

Interrupting the Iranian nuclear and missile program does not require an invasion or any sort of full scale war. The Navy and the Airforce would see combat, as would some specialised units.

A couple days and the Iranian nuclear and missile project is out of business, then a decade or so of an air policing, as was done in Iraq.

The problem is that unlike Iraq, Iran does have subs, surface attack craft and anti-ship missile batteries they will use against our fleet. We’d win, but we’d most likely have a couple of our ships at the bottom of the Persian Gulf by the time we were done.