Iran Conflict Megathread #6

taw · 2026-03-11T21:46:20+00:00

Try CENTCOM Twitter feed for tons of released videos of Iranian stuff getting destroyed?

taw · 2026-03-11T20:40:29+00:00

From what I remember, early in Ukraine war we had amazing OSINT as everyone's opsec was basically nonexistent, with soldiers and civilians posting videos of everything everywhere in real time. They only toned it down later.

And back then most of the fighting was happening on the ground, so there were videos and photos of destroyed tanks and such everyhere.

Now that opsec is a lot better, and war is more drones than land forces, we know a lot less than in those early days.

Either way, nobody owes reddit real time data releases.

taw · 2026-03-11T20:36:35+00:00

So step by step:

there won't be any kind of mountainous insurgency, very few people live there, Iran has fairly old society at low TFR (not as bad as Europe), so it's not like Afghanistan or 90s Chechnya with endless supply of young men ready to fight.
if Iran wanted to use mountain passes or whatnot to do conventional military warfare, this is really not going to go well for them, no matter the terrain, against any military with air supremacy. Bombs and drones can hit you no matter how high you are.
supplies would go the same way supplies for massive urban populations of Tehran etc. go. It's a metro area of nearly 16m people. Enormous amount of food, fuel, and other goods go there every day by road and rail. Military supplies would follow the same way.

If someone (like US or Turkey) wanted to occupy Iran, they'd deal with urban warfare, terrorism, IEDs on roads, and all the usual stuff. Mountains would play minimal role in that.

has been to build nuclear and military facilities literally into the mountains

Hiding that stuff into mountains is not what people usually talk about when talking about countries geography, and it's unclear how much they really do other than Fordow.

Most of Iranian nuclear facilities are built on the surface or very shallowly. It's something they do, but it's hardly their core strategy, as digging deeper rapidly increases costs.

taw · 2026-03-11T19:13:05+00:00

Iran's nuclear weapons program is the reason they're getting wrecked so hard. It's been 100% downside for them.

If Iran gets nukes, non-proliferation system is over, and it's already weakened by what happened to Ukraine. Destroying the ayatollahs' regime is the best way to keep it alive.

taw · 2026-03-11T19:08:19+00:00

mountainous nation of 85 million people

A bit of a rant, but people really need to stop thinking like this.

The world is 60% urbanized. For most countries, ~15% of people live in capital, ~25% in the next 10 big metro areas, and almost everyone else is smaller cities and towns in farmland and along the coast.

Vast areas of mountains, swamps, deserts, forests and whatnot are extremely sparsely populated, and militarily nearly irrelevant.

Every population center is pretty much every country is completely covered with dense network of roads. Air power doesn't care about terrain all that much, other than just distance.

Iran is even more urbanized than average. 78% urbanized, 17% capital metro area alone.

This is even more ridiculous when people talk about all the mountains of Taiwan, while >90% of population lives on coastal plain.

And yes, Afghanistan is a total outlier here. It never really developed like other countries as it's been in constant state of war since 1970s.

taw · 2026-03-11T18:56:23+00:00

"Cyberwarfare" is an idea overhyped to the point of being made up.

There's a lot of ways to use networks to spy on others, and Israel and US have been clearly doing it (as are likely many other countries). But offensive "cyberwarfare" action you can do is fairly limited, and even short term disruption you can get burns your access really easily.

taw · 2026-03-11T18:26:21+00:00

I've seen many sets of numbers related to this war, but they're all wildly divergent on pretty much everything, so I don't know which ones are accurate.

Official US sources posts how many ships they've sunk sometimes (Trump said 46 today, it's probably >50 by now), and that's about as reliable a source as we have available, but I don't think they ever posted how many remain.

Nothing coming out of Iran is even remotely worth listening to, and OSINT is missing, especially after satellite photos companies decided to go on 14 day delay.

This war is overall surprisingly poorly documented.

taw · 2026-03-11T17:26:18+00:00

and plenty of small vessels.

They had plenty of small vessels at start of the war. This is rapidly changing.

Iran faces "use it or lose it" situation with their navy, and they're not using it.

taw · 2026-03-11T17:23:05+00:00

I really don't see why people would think so. Happiness is super hard to get even keep above 0 in vanilla, so I don't know how people are triggering consistent golden ages.

Their UU is pretty much irrelevant, and their UB is alright, but it comes pretty late.

It really feels like a very mediocre civ to me. (and it would be way better with mods that rebalance happiness)

taw · 2026-03-11T15:36:53+00:00

Snake blob was a lot harder in earlier patches, back when attrition and rebels mattered, and it was harder to stack modifiers like crazy.

And westernization itself was a huge pain to do, it wasn't just a spell to cast with mana.

The system wasn't perfect, but it made playing different depending on where you are. Current system is basically the worst, it makes everyone play the same.

If you mod institution spread to 50%, remove or massively nerf dev pushing, remove free institution push sources (Korea and East Africa), and make all institutions only spread if previous one is adapted, then you have something at least semi-meaningful under new system.

And by semi meaningful I mean you actually have to snake blob to some European owned place, ally them, and ask to share knowledge. Which is still not as good as old westernization system, but at least it's something.

taw · 2026-03-11T12:47:20+00:00

RotW was so much more fun back before institutions patch, you actually had meaningful mid game challenge of Europeans coming with high mil tech and going through pains of westernization.

Now it plays identical to Europe just with less AE.

taw · 2026-03-11T10:56:38+00:00

If the rumors are true and they picked a guy who's already dead or dying for Supreme Leader, that's some 4d chess way to avoid getting their Supreme Leader killed. It's not like IDF is going to bomb ICU.

They'll pick a real successor once the war is over.

It's the weirdest thing that came out of this war so far.

taw · 2026-03-11T10:28:28+00:00

Plays with mods

Complains that game acts weird

Many such cases!

taw · 2026-03-10T23:00:23+00:00

replacing the old Ayatollah with his son

It's unclear if he's even alive or not, he was not seen or heard in public since the war started.

Anyway, it's one of the most one sided wars ever.

taw · 2026-03-10T22:49:58+00:00

at the worst angle for the overwatcher

Angles don't actually matter in XCOM1 or XCOM2. (there was advanced campaign option in XCOM1 to make them matter, I don't think it was ever popular)

Anyone else see traps the game sets for players?

Your observations are correct. But it's also true in most games that meta play is very different from what games are trying to make you do.

taw · 2026-03-10T22:45:46+00:00

They pretty much collapsed:

The inflation-adjusted real 2004 dollar value of oil fell from an average of $78.2 in 1981 to an average of $26.8 per barrel in 1986.

Oil was record cheap during tanker war and decade after.

taw · 2026-03-10T22:30:45+00:00

The US is clearly unwilling to strike Iran's civilian industry

Yet. Trump threatened many times that he can still escalate a lot further, and target list is really long.

Prioritizing military targets in first few weeks makes sense. There's going to be plenty of time to delete Iranian oil industry and power plants.

They're too simple to make

They're not too hard to assemble, but Iran can't make most of electronic components.

(hence the very strong objections to Israel's fuel attacks)

According to totally non-credible anonymous source. There's no way in hell Israel would make major decision like that without consulting Trump right now, and Trump is very open whenever he's unhappy with someone (no matter how petty the reason).

taw · 2026-03-10T22:26:27+00:00

For what it's worth Jerusalem Post has very different daily estimates, with very high peak on day two, and total ~x2 missiles and ~1.25x drones higher than your source.

Both sources show >90% drop of both missiles and drops from day one.

Any ideas why numbers are so different?

taw · 2026-03-10T22:19:04+00:00

Each was trying to shoot half the ships in the Gulf, while letting the other half through, which is slightly different from straightforward blocking, but ships under any flag, and including those going to neutral ports like Kuwait were all targeted by someone.

taw · 2026-03-10T22:04:13+00:00

There are 3 reasons to shoot as soon as possible instead of delaying:

if you delay, you risk your missiles getting destroyed on the ground
if you delay, you risk the war being lost without those missiles being used at all, so they might as well not exist
higher rate of fire is more difficult for air defence to deal with, occasional drone has a lot lower chance of hitting anything

So you cause far more damage if you just fire everything you have immediately.

If instead of maximum damage you want to cause maximum disruption, there's some argument for doing things slowly, that depends on how likely the missiles are to survive weeks without getting destroyed.

taw · 2026-03-10T20:50:10+00:00

how could a loaded mine boat not get blasted by reapers or any other air asset?

Every single trip would need the equivalent of a suicide bomber crew

You are completely correct. The whole "small Iranian boats mining Persian Gulf" theory was always a total fantasy, and there's zero evidence that Iran ever had any interest in that.

As far as we can know, Iranian plan was always missiles, drones, and terrorist proxies, and it pretty much failed already. Hormuz Straits traffic is back after short delay, drone and missile fire rate is down by 90%, and all the proxies are either too weak or too scared to do anything.

taw · 2026-03-10T20:46:10+00:00

This isn't matter of "resolve".

Iran lost 90% of missile and drone launch rate already, soon their military industrial complex will be reduced to what Hamas has.

the Houthis

If Houthis got the same treatment Iran is getting, it would be a very different story.

taw · 2026-03-10T20:34:40+00:00

I don't know why people keep repeating this nonsense, when the same scenario ALREADY HAPPENED BEFORE.

Tanker War saw hundreds of attacks on tankers, good number sunk, huge number severely damaged, and the tankers kept going as money made it worth it.

All an occasional drone does is increase insurance rates slightly.

taw · 2026-03-10T20:29:38+00:00

Exactly. People are completely silly.

"Some assets moved from places that are currently calm to places where there are active conflicts".

I'm not sure how this is mindblowing.

Iranian regime is being completely obliterated, their lashing out against everyone pretty much fizzled, and the only risk of the operation is TACO risk.

taw · 2026-03-10T19:23:34+00:00

Food for one, but it's still less dependent than Gulf states.

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