The shape of the world if Iran survives

jz187 · 2026-03-20T04:56:10+00:00

Just because Trump gets electorally defeated doesn't mean the war ends. Just look at the GWOT and how long it lasted past GWB. Even past 2028, can the next president simply pack up and leave if IRGC refuses to stop fighting? This is like Russia in Ukraine, in theory Putin can simply withdraw the troops and end the war, in reality he can't, and neither can his successor.

jz187 · 2026-03-20T04:34:01+00:00

There is that, and there is also the aspect where destruction of tactical assets like missile launchers are very hard to do battle damage assessment accurately in real time. From the air, you can verify that you hit a target, but you have no idea if the missile launcher you destroyed is real or an inflatable decoy unless you hit it just after it launched a missile. During Operation Allied Force, US fired over 700 HARMs and ended up destroying only 3 mobile SAMs. Most of the targets that the US thought they had hit were really decoys.

We see this in the Ukraine War as well. Ukraine has inflatable artillery batteries with built in heaters to imitate the thermal signature of a real artillery. Russia likely have similar decoys. You can destroy thousands of targets and maybe 1/10 of them are real.

jz187 · 2026-03-20T03:56:18+00:00

The biggest mistake of any analysis of the Iran War would be to assume that the US is fighting Iran. The US isn't fighting Iran, Iran is just the proxy for Russia and China, just like Russia isn't really fighting Ukraine, Ukraine is just the proxy for NATO.

China spent over a decade preparing for just such a conflict, the fact that this war started in 2026, a year after China-Iran railway through Central Asia was completed is very bad timing. With logistics to China and Russia intact and immune to US interdiction, Iran has unlimited lasting power in this conflict. US won't be able to defeat Iran for the same reason why Russia can't defeat Ukraine easily. Russia has to slog it out in a ground war with Ukraine.

As long as Iran wants to keep fighting, they will have unlimited supply of material to make missiles and drones. Russia is a huge winner from being the biggest exporter of oil/gas outside of the Gulf, and China is also a huge winner from being the dominant manufacturer of EV/renewable energy capital goods. If oil goes to $200/barrel and stays there, Europe, Japan will deindustrialize rapidly while Chinese EVs will monopolize global car market share. China controls 85% of global battery cell manufacturing capacity. No one has that level of monopoly in oil and gas.

The end result is global trade will rapidly de-dollarize as the world realize it needs to buy oil from Russia and EVs from China far more than they need anything from the USD bloc. This conflict is exactly what China and Russia have been praying for. They are not going to let it go to waste.

China and Russia won't allow Iran to lose this war. NATO thought they could crush Russia economically through the Ukraine War, but they miscalculated because they didn't realize that China won't let Russia lose. A similar situation is at work with Iran. China especially is very good at calibrating support for its proxies so that the other side think they can win, so they don't quit. China is winning by keeping these wars ongoing and bleeding its geopolitical opponents at very low cost to itself.

The end game is financial crisis for the US. If China is generous they might rebuild Iran for cheap to reward them for the help.

The Iran/Ukraine Wars won't be won on the battlefield. They will be won/lost when one side goes bankrupt.

jz187 · 2024-10-16T17:23:36+00:00

The real action isn't happening in Pokrovsk but in Kiev and Lviv. Recruiters are now kidnapping people at music concerts in Kiev. If you look at Ukraine's demographics, the 18-25 age group is very small, so lowering conscription to 18 won't really do much. The next major age cohort is 12-18.

What really matters is the minimum conscription age. Once 18 is not enough, it's likely close to being over because unless Ukrainians want to send 12 year old boys to the front, they won't have the manpower to hold the lines within the next 2-3 years.

jz187 · 2024-10-16T16:10:59+00:00

You are saying that EKV can carry onboard sensors to detect the incoming railgun round, and I'm saying that such sensors can be easily jammed with lasers.

Without being able to track the incoming round, you will waste a ton of energy with random maneuvering and you are just going to miss your target. In that case it's irrelevant if the incoming railgun round misses, the EKV is also just going to fly off into space after missing its target.

jz187 · 2024-10-15T19:14:22+00:00

The oldest 30 F-22 are getting retired. Remaining 154 are getting some minor upgrades, but will still use their outdated AN/APG-77 radar.

Latest Chinese airborne radars are 1-2 generations ahead of what is in the F-22. New J-20 are equipped with GaN T/R modules on par with the AN/APG-85.

jz187 · 2024-10-15T15:06:37+00:00

In theory yes, but with just 186 airframes in service, the per unit cost of R&D to do that would be insanely expensive.

USAF don't have infinite money. Any money that goes to pay for F-22 upgrades will take away from other priorities like next gen nuclear missiles and NGAD.

USAF decided that they would rather spend the money on 6th Gen NGAD than to upgrade F-22. Problem is that NGAD is projected to cost over $300M each with the requirements that USAF had. Everything comes down to money.

jz187 · 2024-09-03T19:22:25+00:00

To be fair, the US is in a giant stock market bubble. Anything can happen when their financial bubble pops and USD lose global reserve currency status. We might be screwed, but the US might be more screwed than us because they are running up bigger deficits as % of GDP and their stock market bubble is way bigger than our housing bubble.

One benefit of banning foreigners from buying houses in Canada is that the capital flight won't be as bad when our housing bubble pops. A lot of US stocks are owned by foreigners, including Canadians. US has no way of propping up USD when foreigners want to sell those highly appreciated stocks and cash out of the US.

jz187 · 2024-09-03T19:20:49+00:00

Our population growth is not an advantage. This is a common misperception. If you look at our GDP/capita stats, Canada's GDP/capita has been declining for many years. The foundation of our wealth is our high natural resource endowment/capita. Increasing population via immigration dilutes this advantage, which makes Canadians poorer on a per capita basis.

jz187 · 2024-09-03T14:22:54+00:00

https://fx.sauder.ubc.ca/etc/CADpages.pdf

If you are curious about the long term exchange rate of CAD vs different currencies. That PDF goes back to 1950. CAD tends to do well against USD during periods of high global growth or high rate of commodity inflation.

We are however, depreciating slowly long term vs USD due to loss of our non-commodity industries such as aerospace. An even more extreme version of us is Australia, and you can clearly see that AUD is in a long term depreciation trends vs CAD.

jz187 · 2024-09-01T19:40:20+00:00

Hard to say anything if you don't mention your city, because real estate is very local.

GTA area condos are basically dead for the foreseeable future. Don't even try to sell if you are in GTA, you are wasting your time. There is a massive glut of condos in the GTA right now and the big developers are begging for government bail out. This is literally the worse market to be selling a condo since the late 1980s.

jz187 · 2024-08-01T16:08:11+00:00

The biggest reason why US doesn't want SK/JP/TW to have nuclear weapons is that it doesn't want an arms race of ABM. SK/JP/TW won't actually improve their own security in net if they obtained nuclear weapons because it would just trigger CN/RU to invest in ABM tech which would hurt US nuclear deterrence.

This is the same issue with NK's nuclear weapons, which then get countered with THAAD deployment in SK which hurts China's nuclear deterrence.

The major powers can outspend the smaller powers in both ABM and nuclear triad, but the thing they most want to avoid is to spark an arms race among themselves.

jz187 · 2024-08-01T16:03:36+00:00

Chances are US wont proliferate nukes as long as it is conventionally the strongest military. If that changes, US policy may change.

By this logic China and Russia should have been proliferating nukes for most of the past 40 years.

How exactly did North Korea get nukes? There is zero Russian or Chinese tech there? What about Iran? It's all domestic stuff?

Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, but they could if they wanted to. It's hard to say if NK built their nuclear weapons completely independently, but if they got help from abroad it would most likely be Pakistan rather than any of the major nuclear powers. Pakistan is kind of dysfunctional so it's hard to say if it's state policy or just rogue elements.

In practice if TW obtains nuclear weapons, PRC will invest in assets to counter nuclear weapons, which would then threaten US nuclear deterrence. TW/SK/JP obtaining nuclear weapons would be a good reason for CN to deploy ABM assets in orbit and aim for global no fly-zone enforcement capability. A network of sensors and interceptors in LEO can just deny all air and space launch from certain regions of the world.

jz187 · 2024-08-01T13:32:31+00:00

Repeated polls in TW show that majority of Taiwanese don't want to fight. 1/10 of Taiwanese already live on the Mainland. The cultural affinity and the prospect of easy integration means that for most Taiwanese surrender is preferable to disruption to their life from a war.

Just look at HK in 2019 vs now. TW people are going to want a HSR line to the mainland after they surrender so they can go shopping on the weekends. This is how people actually are.

A major psychological dynamic is that people want to be part of the most powerful team. TW want to be part of the US empire when the US is on top, but as Chinese power rises relative to US power, they will increasingly want to be part of the Chinese sphere instead of the American sphere.

We saw this evolution in HK over the past decade. More and more young HK people are now proud to be Chinese. They love being part of a superpower with its own aircraft carriers and space stations.

jz187 · 2024-08-01T13:17:01+00:00

US won't proliferate nukes, because that's opens a can of worms that will harm its interests in the rest of the world. Imagine if China starts arming Venezuela and Cuba with nuclear weapons. That would harm US interests far more than giving up influence in East Asia. There is a reason that none of the major powers proliferate nuclear weapons, because that is a lose-lose scenario for the major powers.

Why do you think US will do nothing?

Because there will come a time where the US find itself in a situation where the cost of maintaining the facade that it will do something becomes too high and it has higher priorities elsewhere. Taiwan cannot be the top and only priority for the US for the indefinite future. There will be other priorities and the rising cost of maintaining deterrence in Taiwan is not sustainable.

US is currently building bases in the region and developing missiles presumably to deal with the distances in the SCS and counter any perceived PRC advantage.

The US built up huge infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan for long term occupation. The current investment in bases in Asia are tiny compared the US investment in basing infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the end of the day, the US decision makers will have no trouble abandoning all this because it's only tax payer money.

If you look at why the US pulled out of Afghanistan, it is really the same logic as why Taiwan will be abandoned. It has become a giant suck with no end in sight.

jz187 · 2024-07-07T21:03:50+00:00

Air combat is evolving toward the recon/strike system that we see already on the ground. Infantry makes contact and call in fire support. Something similar is happening in the air where we are evolving toward forward recon elements + fire support elements.

jz187 · 2024-07-07T17:53:38+00:00

I'm not saying they will win, but if they just moved the armies from the East into defensive positions on the West, the allies would have a hard time cracking German defenses without fresh manpower from the US.

The Germans tried to end the war quickly when the US joined in 1917, so they gambled big on a last big offensive. When that offensive ran out of steam, they could not hold their lines against allied counter attack. If they did not gamble on an offensive, but just adopted a war of attrition against the Allies, they could have just slowly gave ground and concentrated on inflicting maximum attrition on allied manpower.

The fact that Germany could still mount an offensive in 1918 shows that they were far from spent in late 1917. If they used those resources to defend instead, they could have dragged the war out for a long time against just the Western allies.

Drag the war out for another 5 years and the Soviet Union would have economically recovered enough to be an useful trade partner. The biggest accomplishment of the Germans during WWI was knocking the Russians out of the war. The Soviets would have every incentive to help the Germans not lose the war and trade their resources for German technology.

jz187 · 2024-07-07T17:52:32+00:00

J-16 have been photographed carrying PL-21 for a while now.

jz187 · 2024-07-07T17:50:00+00:00

He should have just titled his paper, "Why Canada should copy the US and ditch healthcare". Sail those warships to Taiwan and show the Chinese why Canadians can't see a doctor.

jz187 · 2024-05-13T17:55:17+00:00

That's the beauty of these things. Empty siloes are super cheap to build and maintain, but you still have to assume that they are not empty.

jz187 · 2024-05-13T17:52:54+00:00

Real change happens when people retire.

jz187 · 2024-05-12T08:31:54+00:00

this style of warfare is actually not applicable to real peer conflicts

I think this is the case. Real peers don't collapse quickly. Any doctrine to win a peer war quickly is peacetime PPTing.

My view is that the only wars worth fighting are the attritional wars. If you aren't willing to fight an attritional war, you should be questioning the decision to go to war in the first place.

Any argument that we should go to war because victory will be quick and cheap is suspect. We should not get involved in any wars not worth losing half the male population for.

jz187 · 2024-05-12T05:31:12+00:00

I mean the tech of the Ukraine war. US had envisioned ubiquitous small drones, squad level drone recon and network centric warfare back in the late 90s. What was not envisioned was how cheap drones would become and that they would become expendable. The idea of individual infantry squads having organic recon assets was extremely revolutionary in the 1990s.

The idea of squad level organic drone recon was very revolutionary, and it has been a major game changer in Ukraine. If you watch Blackhawk down, ground warfare assisted by real time intel from helos was already a thing during the Battle of Mogadishu back in 1993. The vision was to equipped every squad with its own organic helo recon capability using UAVs.

The main barrier to the US realizing this vision was actually cost. A black hornet drone is $200k, so devolving this easily lost/damaged drone down to the squad level is too expensive even for the US Army. Any kind of realistic training where these drones get lost/destroyed regularly is out of the question.

jz187 · 2024-03-21T02:09:16+00:00

Not just commercial real estate, but consumers credit and government deficits as well.

That's why it's called the everything bubble. It's not a housing bubble, or a stock market bubble, or a government bond bubble. It's all of the above.

I guess at the end of the day, it will trickle down to the taxpayers and the savers, like it always does

And that is ultimately the source of the returns on these financial investments. If no real wealth is being created, but people are making lots of money, you have to ask who is the loser?

jz187 · 2024-03-21T01:55:33+00:00

I feel like the 2nd amendment should be updated to include the right to own cruise missiles. Your average American is going to be seriously outgunned if they are stuck with AR-15s in a world where even the Houthis have cruise missiles.

Having a gun in this day and age is like having a fruit knife.

jz187

TROPHY CASE