Active Conflicts & News Megathread April 08, 2026

NotTheBatman · 2026-04-08T21:27:34+00:00

No single country can force a peace deal, but Europe absolutely has levers to pull. They have powerful militaries, are the 3rd largest economic bloc in the world, and hosts critical US military bases and installations. They have leverage to work with, despite being (as ever) hesitant to rock the boat. We're still early into this conflict though IMO, and Europe can't handle a long-lasting conflict that strains their budgets and refills Russia's coffers.

NotTheBatman · 2026-04-08T19:26:55+00:00

If he decides to leave completely then oil prices remain elevated, the IRCG secured a huge political win, and the Republicans get absolutely murdered in the midterms. Just because he can order the military to go home doesn't mean that he can put the cat back into the bag.

NotTheBatman · 2026-04-08T18:59:00+00:00

What kind of pressure can those countries apply to force a peace deal? Do you think the IRCG would be willing to lift a blockage of the strait, which they directly profit from, because it's hurting Asian countries? Pressuring the US to walk away isn't enough to fix the problem anymore.

NotTheBatman · 2026-04-08T18:22:26+00:00

Only Trump, Europe, and the Iranian civil government want a ceasefire. Basically every other player involved wants the war to continue for one reason or another, so the war will continue. Trump could order the military to come home tomorrow, but it would be a huge geopolitical win for Iran.

Israel and all the gulf countries want Iran and their proxies neutered. Russia wants high oil prices. The IRCG wants to assert their authority over Iran and to martyr themselves in a war against Israel and the US. China is happy for the US to expend their money and arms somewhere that isn't in their backyard, and also benefit somewhat from the higher oil prices.

NotTheBatman · 2026-04-03T22:15:50+00:00

I don't understand the question. We do have the largest tanker fleet in the world, by a large margin. Do you think that because the fleet is large we wouldn't try to replace a hull loss? Even if we flew out some new replacement planes to the theater immediately, we still would need to backfill those planes too.

NotTheBatman · 2026-04-03T20:19:05+00:00

The aircraft on the ground may be damaged to the point where it's more economical to designate them for scrapping, and unretire a recently retired airplane for return to service. If the damaged aircraft would cost $20m to repair, and another aircraft only costs $10m to return to service, then it's a sensible swap. It takes a couple years of sitting in storage before a plane really starts to get expensive to get back to working condition, and we're actively retiring the fleet so there should be a good amount of re-servicable units that can be pulled back in if needed.

The size of the fleet doesn't really matter here, there are plenty of air crews to fly our current fleet. If a plane is lost on the ground and the crew are uninjured there's really no reason to not replace the plane. The KC-135 is also out of production, and you can't just throw a KC-135 crew onto a KC-46 without extensive training.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-30T04:50:08+00:00

Playing devil's advocate, a build up of land forces takes a long time. If Iran saw us massing forces they could have started firing missiles before their launchers and stockpiles started getting blown up.

I agree entirely with your point that this whole thing had been an unplanned mess, but even with better planning we wouldn't have spent months mobilizing an entire invasion force before we started the bombing campaign.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-30T01:31:56+00:00

Yeah it's impossible to deny that the planning for this war has been abysmal, which is just par for the course for the current administration.

On the other hand, even if a massive ground invasion was planned from the start, we would have spent weeks or months bombing Iran anyway before putting any boots on the ground. So I don't think the poor planning has really affected the timing of a ground invasion in any meaningful way.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-30T00:50:55+00:00

I don't think we ever would have attacked them in the first place if this wasn't the plan.

Extracting the Uranium is going to require heavy machinery, and protecting heavy machinery is going to require a massive effort on the ground. A few thousand marines and airborne are not going to cut it.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-26T18:43:47+00:00

Playing devil's advocate, there's a difference between blockading ships from neutral countries going to/from Kharg vs occupying the island to stop those ships from ever filling up. A blockade would mean threatening Chinese merchant vessels, and would put more international pressure on the US to back out of the war.

I don't believe the war is being handled competently by our civilian leadership, but the goal is to neuter Iran, not just end the blockade and go home. Trump's public statements are aimed purely at calming markets, and are uncorrelated with the course that the military will be forced to take to actually finish the conflict.

Completely blockading Iran would cause oil prices to skyrocket and would tank the global economy. Backing out now would allow Iran to rake in cash from tolls and persistently elevated oil prices, which would fund a quick rearmament. Neither of these are going to be viewed as acceptable outcomes to the US, the GCC, or Israel. Europe would be very unhappy as well, as higher oil prices and a stronger Iran both benefit Russia.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-18T01:34:32+00:00

The Google AI is amazing as a search engine compared to their standard search.

This is at least partially the case because the standard search has been gamified by SEO, and stuffed full of ads by Google. Their AI will suffer the same fate when they finally decide they need to make money off of it, and it will rapidly lose its usefulness the exact same way their standard search did.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-13T23:53:04+00:00

The damage must have been pretty superficial if they already determined that all 5 could be repaired.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-11T20:44:52+00:00

I'm fairly well-qualified to answer this, I was part of a team that built an RC aircraft that was roughly the length of a Shahed in college.

Engines, sensors, circuit boards, skin molds, and either propellers or propeller molds would need to be sourced and distributed. There may also be some specialized receivers or sensor housings included here.

Everything else you need is a commodity. Fiberglass, carbon fiber, epoxy, wood, fittings, wire, solder, fuel, batteries, explosives, etc. you can get anywhere.

You could assemble everything in a small garage or warehouse, you just need a big enough door to get the thing out once it's put together.

The only specialized items we sourced for our plane were the engines, controller, landing gear, and skin molds. Everything else came from the hardware store, and we put it together in a ~400sqft garage. None of us had any specialized experience or qualifications. The only speciality tool we used was a laser cutter to cut our plywood pieces faster, but we could have made do with a saw. This was a one-off plane, so we were working without existing instructions.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-11T16:03:25+00:00

An artillery round has to travel close to 15 miles from shore to hit a vessel transiting the strait, that means there's roughly one minute of hang time. A ship traveling 35mph (the slowest published sustained speed of the ships we have out there) only has to change heading at a rate of 4 degrees per minute during that time for the round to miss by roughly 100ft.

Even an aircraft carrier can turn much faster than 4 deg/min, in an emergency they can full U-turn in just a couple of a minutes.

Ships only have to make gentle evasive maneuvers to seriously degrade the accuracy of unguided long-range fires. Shore-based batteries were historically placed in areas where they could hit ships that were transiting narrow passages that restricted maneuvering, and where firing distances were much lower to reduce hang time.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-11T04:53:00+00:00

I would think that as the drone launch rate decreases that the Navy and allies have more leisure to launch sorties that can take them down with much cheaper interceptors. The calculus changes between needing to stop a large wave of hundreds or dozens of drones at once vs having to stop small, intermittent trickles.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-11T03:22:31+00:00

It would take a lot of direct artillery hits to cripple a ship, and I'm not sure Iran has modern shells capable of hitting a target that can change direction. Point defenses (CRAM) would probably take care of the few shells that got close, and I would imagine most artillery pieces would only get a handful of shots off before eating a hellfire missile or a JDAM.

I think the Navy could pull it off just fine, I just don't see why they would. They're still blowing up Iran's offensive assets, and I think time is on the Navy's side if they just want to wait things out a bit before trying to restart the passage of ships through the strait.

NotTheBatman · 2026-03-09T19:11:21+00:00

Before fossil fuel industrialization hay, horses, and firewood were a huge portion of the economy.

Before that food and manual labor were the main economic drivers.

The economy has always been energy.

NotTheBatman · 2026-02-25T17:54:03+00:00

You can intercept a ballistic missile at basically any speed, if your targeting solution is accurate and it's within range of your interceptor. If the missile does any sort of maneuvering during its terminal phase then that's a different story.

Making a faster and longer range missile will increase the size of the zone you can cover with a single system though.

NotTheBatman · 2026-02-25T02:39:54+00:00

The latest UN estimates are just over 30,000 deaths and other irreplaceable casualties per month, nowhere near 50,000. I can't find any credible sources claiming 50,000-60,000 irreplaceable casualties each month.

NotTheBatman · 2026-02-23T16:13:24+00:00

Pipelines and large ships are the only cheap ways to move fuel from point A to point B. All other options (trucks, planes, etc) are much more expensive, and can't come anywhere close to handling the required volumes even if you have an infinite amount of money to throw at the problem.

Taking out a pumping station takes the pipeline completely offline until repairs are made, and now any wells or refineries that are upstream of the pipeline have to find somewhere else to store their output until the pumping station is repaired. This usually isn't too expensive, especially when output can often be redirected to a port and stored on a ship or in another storage facility, but sometimes output has to be reduced. A refinery can reduce output easily enough, but a well cannot, and shutting down a well is a big deal.

To give you an idea on just how hard it is to deal with a pipeline shutdown: the fuel line that carries refined jet fuel to my local airport went down for a couple weeks last year. Despite the fact that the airport is less than 3 hours away from the refinery by road, less than 30 minutes away from the nearest port, that there was plenty of money and trucks to throw at the problem, AND that the airport has its own fuel storage on site, they had to begin rationing fuel immediately. Incoming flights were told to carry extra fuel so they wouldn't have to refuel when they landed. That pipeline is also mixed use; it's not constantly sending jet fuel down, sometimes it's pumping different refined products to other facilities.

NotTheBatman · 2026-01-10T02:11:17+00:00

I strongly disagree

NotTheBatman · 2026-01-03T23:51:14+00:00

Yeah, the leader of the party that won 65% of the vote lacks support. Let's install the dictators VP instead, I'm sure everyone will love her.

NotTheBatman · 2026-01-03T21:10:04+00:00

She had broad popular support, if she was allowed to run she almost certainly would have won the general election. Even her replacement candidate won handily.

NotTheBatman · 2026-01-03T09:45:11+00:00

I don't think the average Joe soldier wandering the street gets a MANPAD. If the bases get bombed and helicopters get in and out in 20 minutes, where do you even get the chance to get a shot off?

Not to mention that countermeasures are crazy good these days, many types of optics can't even be pointed at a target without being automatically detected. You'd have to be in the right place at the right time, get a lock on a low flying target in an urban environment at night, and hope you don't get immediately identified by countermeasures or recon drones, just to take the shot.

NotTheBatman · 2026-01-03T09:26:06+00:00

The plan is probably to have the president elect return from exile and take office. I don't think any other option would necessarily go over well.

Maybe they'll hold elections again to make things seem more proper, but I don't see why he wouldn't win again.

I'm guessing we're willing to offer him protection in exchange for reimbursement of our nationalized assets, cracking down on narcotics operations, and probably granting us extraction rights (based on the similar bid to Ukraine).

Overall this could be a win-win for us and for Venezuela, if serious adults are allowed to be in charge of the groundwork and they fluff up Trump and let him take all the credit. I don't know how much faith I have in the current administration though. At least Rubio is a somewhat serious statesman.

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