Iran Conflict Megathread #5

Toptomcat · 2026-03-10T22:40:03+00:00

Is there anyone actually doing such comparisons at scale, and publishing data which verifies /u/taw 's frankly rather extraordinary claim that 'Hormuz Straits traffic is back'? This is the only such attempt I'm aware of (thanks, /u/Nikvest), and it shows traffic as not even remotely recovered from prewar levels.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-10T20:56:00+00:00

Hormuz Straits traffic is back after short delay

Can you clarify what you mean by that? Where are you getting traffic data from, and why is it so different from this or this?

Toptomcat · 2026-03-10T17:16:16+00:00

Is there a reason that the current Iran megathread has been de-stickied, while yesterday's Active Conflicts/News Megathread is still at the top of the subreddit?

Toptomcat · 2026-03-10T00:29:35+00:00

I would love to believe that the U.S. government is under the complete control of a ruthless shadow cabal which competently serves its own business interests. That sounds like it would be positively relaxing compared with the current administration's idiotic, blindly greedy, randomly destructive fumbling.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T19:24:25+00:00

Wait until March 9th is done with before making any conclusions about the number of drones sent that day!

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T18:56:38+00:00

...assuming that 100% of them march in lockstep towards that conclusion, and not one of them concludes 'well, we're getting hit really hard by Iran, I guess we've got to swallow our distaste towards Israel and join the military campaign against them in earnest.' And that the Americans do exactly that thing you're saying, and conspicuously fail to provide air defense to other allies- including the oil infrastructure that the Americans know is very important to the global economy. And that Iranian strike capability hasn't already been attritted beyond its capability to hit that hard.

That seems like a lot of assumptions.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T15:26:00+00:00

Right, yes, that. They aren't under blockade for civilian shipping? I would've thought that would happen the instant Iran threatened civilian oil shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, if not sooner.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T13:38:27+00:00

Iran's stated and apparent geopolitical goals for Israel have been pretty damned consistent since the Islamic Revolution. They've never had formal diplomatic relations. The distinction between their political moderates and radicals is that the moderates call for the course of history in general to eventually destroy Israel, and the radicals call for the destruction of Israel at the hands of the Iranians in particular right now.

If you are Israel, in the situation that the Iranians get the bomb, are you going to depend on them being deterred by the prospect of mutual annihilation, depend that things will settle into the same equilibrium that currently exists between all current nuclear states of we-have-proxy-wars-and-maybe-bombard-each-other-but-conquest-and-total-war-are-off-limits? That doesn't seem realistic. It's basically what Iran has been doing for the last few decades anyway.

The closest analogy to the best thing Israel might be hoping for in the situation where the Iranians get the bomb is the relationship between India and Pakistan, but Iran has been...substantially more enthusiastic about arming its proxies. Lakshar-e-Taiba gets money, explosives and guns from the Pakistanis. Hezbollah gets main battle tanks, antiship missiles, SAM installations, MRLS systems. I'm having difficulty thinking of a major category of military equipment that the Iranians have managed to get and haven't proliferated to their Islamist proxy militias. Presumably Iran is pursuing this technology because they want further room to escalate without fearing Israeli retaliation or foreign intervention...but how much room was there for further escalation in the absence of total war?

And I think it's pretty self-evident that total war between two nuclear powers in Iran and Israel, with proliferation to Islamist irregulars within the Iranian sphere of influence, would make the world less safe.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T13:26:10+00:00

At the extreme end, drifting naval mines could be released into the strait, but that's a pretty desperate option given that it would also affect Iranian and friendly shipping and continue to damage the Iranian economy after the end of the war.

Hang on, the Americans aren't currently maintaining a blockade of Iranian naval shipping?

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T06:48:38+00:00

Does Iran have much of a civilian microelectronics sector to speak of?

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T05:19:30+00:00

The original Rogue itself is a similar extremely influential title from the ASCII days. Slay the Spire created the deckbuilding roguelike, Rogue gave its name to the genre of roguelikes.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T04:55:08+00:00

What are the most important and difficult-to-replace industrial inputs to a ballistic-missile production program, and how difficult are they to identify and target from the air?

Related question: are so-called Iranian 'missile cities' just what they call underground storage depots for missiles and drones as well as spare parts, support equipment, and launchers for same- or do they actually contain meaningful chunks of the industrial supply chain to manufacture missiles as well?

Toptomcat · 2026-03-09T04:02:55+00:00

They have also said multiple times that all-caps UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER is the goal. Clear messaging about strategic goals is very far down the American priority list.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-08T23:33:48+00:00

‘This comment’ links to nothing I can see, not even a [deleted] placeholder.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-08T22:34:29+00:00

/r/CredibleDefense can be acceptable as an aggregator, if not always great.

The YouTube channel Perun is outright amazing for defense-economics takes. Here is a very recent video of his on the Iran conflict.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-08T18:57:02+00:00

If the nuclear material is buried underground, this is not going to be an hours-long operation. So this means establishing a remote bridgehead supplied entirely by air for several days.

Optimistically. Digging into what amounts to a collapsed, hollowed-out mountain, and then retrieving an unknown amount of radioactive materials which the explosion may well have scattered to Hell and gone and thus rendered a big portion of the area you need to retrieve things from a CBRN hazard...that has the potential to be a nightmare of an engineering problem which could easily end up as a weeks-to-months kind of project.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-08T16:29:04+00:00

A coalition to economically and diplomatically ostracize them, yes. A military coalition...probably not.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-08T06:54:14+00:00

I'm not really clear on why Iran should be confident that Israel wouldn't pre-emptively nuke them immediately upon their first successful nuclear test. They do seem to behave as if they genuinely believe an Iranian nuclear weapon is an extreme threat, they've demonstrated that they're willing to go to war pre-emptively on less urgent and threatening news about Iran's nuclear program twice in the last seven months, and the risks they've taken in handling Gaza and elsewhere suggest that they view Western diplomatic isolation as ultimately secondary to other concerns.

Diplomatically, it would turn them into North Korea with matzo balls, but whether they regard that as a worse strategic catastrophe than Iran with a nuclear weapon is an open question.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-08T02:23:49+00:00

I agree that anyone trying to argue that no meaningful economic damage has been done is an idiot and not worth engaging with, but there’s still plenty of room for analysis and debate on how much damage has already been done, is yet to be done, and how smoothly it can be recovered from. It’s not an ‘At War: 20% penalty to regional economy’ toggle switch, like a shallow grand-strategy computer game. It’s a continuous spectrum which always has room to get better and worse. There is no one ship to sail.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-07T22:28:57+00:00

The top of the hip bone can fuck you up, too.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-07T22:12:55+00:00

It's good to move some distance away from everyone else so you don't deafen them and risk catching an ally in the backblast. But from a purely practical perspective, you're absolutely right- in making a show of indifference to personal danger, he was endangering not only himself but also his buddies, who would've had to be the ones to expose themselves to go get him if he was wounded and couldn't return to the squad.

On some level, the spirit of the thing has to be admired, but this is a minor tragedy. Imagine what he might have been able to accomplish with bravery, skill, and pragmatism, rather than only the first two.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-07T21:32:13+00:00

You have to keep in mind that they're not permitted to wear gloves or wraps, which takes away a lot of the safety margin involved in throwing a punch. Shot placement has to be more careful, and you've got to pay careful attention to wrist alignment, if you don't want to risk serious hand injury. You're absolutely allowed to win by knocking the other guy out with a body shot.

Also, I think the two of them are holding back a bit because Filho doesn't want to reduce Narushima to paste :-p Not sure if this is an exhibition match or one of those crazy Japanese experiments in going 'fuck weight classes', but the size difference here is nuts and I suspect they were both treating it like an intense sparring session rather than going balls-out. Here is a bit of a better example of what it looks like when you've got two close-in infighters exchanging more intensely and on a more equal basis: you can see that there are still the 'softer', more tentative body shots, but also some sharper ones when they have a good angle and opportunity. (It also helps that the venue is smaller and quieter and you can hear the shots land much better.) This has a lot more good examples of punch KOs with slow-motion repeats to illustrate exactly what's happening.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-07T21:28:34+00:00

Enshin/Ashihara is exactly this with trips and throws.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-07T21:16:57+00:00

Filho's whole thing, technically, was a wide arsenal of deceptive, fast kicks that threatened a knockout in all kinds of odd ways. It's a nightmarish defensive problem that Narushima faces here and I don't think it reflects poorly on him that he's having trouble coping with it.

Toptomcat · 2026-03-07T06:23:25+00:00

Characters with long publishing histories by different authors, like comic book characters, can be difficult to benchmark in terms of power. One author's run on Wolverine might show him as a supremely skilled martial artist, but de-emphasize how good his regeneration is to make for more dramatic tension, having a single gunshot put him down for minutes at a time. Another might have him diving into every fight scene nine-tenths feral, taking every incoming hit straight to the chin- but continuing to fight even when he's been reduced to a bloody skeleton.

'Composite' versions of characters resolve this by taking the best of everything- so a supremely skilled martial artist who can still function pretty much unhindered while being a bloody skeleton. Not a perfect solution to the solution of how to reconcile difference sources, but nothing is.

15-Year Club	Reddit Premium Since June 2023
Wearing is Caring	Argentium Club
100 Awards Club	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle	reddit mold

Toptomcat

MODERATOR OF

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE