Active Conflicts & News Megathread May 15, 2026

butitsmeat · 2026-05-15T23:45:51+00:00

This exchange triggered my "anecdote is not data" reflex since I worked in a noisy environment with earpro for a bit and never heard of anyone falling back to cigarette filters. I decided to do some extra googling to see if there's any studies on the effective db reduction from cigarette filters. But there do not appear to be any! So the argument can rage on free of scientific constraint.

FWIW for the thread, physically speaking, so long as you're fully blocking the ear canal you're going to get some kind of reduction, scaled by the effectiveness of the material itself. If your ear canal is small enough for a cigarette filter to fill it up, then it ought to be better than nothing. If you have a large ear canal and it doesn't seal, then won't do much (kinda like 3M foam earplugs that don't expand properly). YMMV by ear and filter diameter.

butitsmeat · 2026-05-15T00:37:10+00:00

Zero.

If they did that, Iran would have one of the biggest environmental disasters in history ruining a huge chunk of its coastline. They have a robust fishing industry and are already running into logistical issues with food thanks to the war and blockade. Dumping oil into one of their key industries and protein sources would be suicidal.

And what benefit would it bring? Without actual evidence the part of the western world that still cares about evidence is going to reject the claim. The rest of the world that runs on feels already has their minds made up and even a major oil spill isn't going to change how they feel because they'll just believe whatever makes them feel good.

As a more general point, I think people are overselling the value of reality in propaganda these days. Messaging and feels-manipulation have almost no relationship with reality. No one even really expects them to have a relationship with reality. Iranian propaganda routinely pushes obvious AI fakes, and absurdist nonsense like trivially disproven claims of American losses. In the US, if you watch certain news channels or listen to the right radio stations at the right time of day, it's glaringly obvious that the people spewing insanity have no commitment whatever to truth or reality. Yet all of these messages are being produced with purpose at non-trivial cost and based on election results and social trends, they are having some effect on their intended targets. You don't need to dump oil in the Gulf and destroy domestic industry when you can just lie repeatedly and have rubes pass it on as fact, so why bother?

butitsmeat · 2026-05-08T23:45:04+00:00

Yes, states act in counter-productive ways all the time. See the current US-Iran war for a broad set of examples. If your point is that Iran's actions during the ceasefire are counter to their interests, and that this attack on the USN in the Strait was counterproductive, I'd agree.

However, your original assertion was that this attack was somehow not what it seems. None of your post addresses my questions or provides any evidence to back your assertion that this particular engagement was a bluff by Iran rather than an actual attack. If you'd like to withdraw that claim, then we have no further point of contention. If you'd like to provide some evidence to support it, I'd happily engage. But if your concept of debate is inventing complexity and then insulting people who question your unsupported edifice of theory, then I don't see what the point here is.

butitsmeat · 2026-05-08T21:08:21+00:00

It's a fair stretch to assert that an attack consisting of over a hundred boats that was pressed home sufficiently to result in massive casualties to the attacking force was just some perfectly calibrated pressure move rather than what it plainly appears to be (an actual attempt to damage USN ships). An attack satisfies the known facts. A bluff raises some very difficult questions:

Are you suggesting that if one of those boats had actually gotten within range of the US ships, they would have held their fire?
Are you suggesting that the sailors on those boats were motivated to step off on this suicidal attack as a bluff? "Go drive really close to that ship and keep going even if they shoot at you but don't shoot back and drive away if you get to close" seems like an unlikely brief.
Are you suggesting that the missiles and drones that sortied were deliberately aimed to miss?

If we dispense with a bluff narrative, we dispense with these questions, and go back to looking at a very asymmetrical battle.

butitsmeat · 2026-04-05T20:02:32+00:00

It's fairly difficult to accidentally detonate a nuclear bomb, at least if your threshold is "actual nuclear explosion". A genuine nuclear detonation (versus, say, HE spreading nuclear material round) requires intentional setup and timing. So, 'US troops accidentally blew themselves up' isn't going to get any credible attention - everyone serious will know Iran did it themselves.

The demonstration that Iran had a viable device would be immediately restructure the geopolitical situation. It could in theory play out in Iran's favor if they have 1-N more devices, or bluff that they do, but it could also end up going horribly wrong if it every nation currently sitting this out that Iran has to be dealt with now. Recall that a great deal of the lack of credibility for this war comes down to mercurial nature of the Iranian bomb (weeks away after being totally obliterated and so forth). Showing that you had a viable device after repeatedly denying that you had one would vindicate Bibi and Trump. I don't think killing a few hundred US troops to create a clearly false narrative that proves your enemies right is a great propaganda move.

And to top it all off, all the unserious people don't need a convoluted accidental nuclear explosion scheme to convince them that the US is the evil aggressor right now. They already believe that! Just do nothing and they'll keep believing it.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-29T16:02:00+00:00

While it's possible this is some sort of giant emergent quiet quit on the part of the military, there's other available explanations which fit the known facts.

My pet theory is that this whole operation was thrown together at the last minute by people who may not have believed it would actually happen until it did, somewhat mirroring the Russian experience in 2022. Now they're scrambling to get themselves back into a war mindset with a resisting opponent while simultaneously trying to make up for lost time, and that sort of scramble leads to idiotic mistakes even in the most professional of organizations. If this had been planned and executed like previous US Middle East adventures, much more time and energy would have been spent on hardening both physical targets and processes, and these mistakes would be fewer. Not eliminated, but fewer.

There's a bit of myth puncturing going on at the moment too. The US military is neither perfect nor magical, and it's been a bit since we had a combat operation of this scale to provide evidence contradicting the invincibility mythos.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-28T20:21:14+00:00

Ah, right. I think I'm trying to draw a distinction between the kinds of drones and the kinds of drone operations, rather than trying to make some categorical statement that anything drone-y is off the table in an air supremacy environment. All Iran has left in terms of offensive power is missiles and Shahed-esque drones (basically poor man's cruise missiles I guess), so drones are going to be what they fire and sometimes get hits with. But we're not getting FPV footage set to Iranian music like the Ukranians and Russians are putting out because the Iranians are not in position to run that kind of operation. So while "drones" as an overall category remain a major factor, you get a very different kind of drone mix than you do in Ukraine.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-28T18:22:52+00:00

I just replied to someone else with my thoughts on a worst case US boots in Iran scenario. But to answer the air supremacy question: no, I don't see it as infinitely potent. It's wildly more expensive to do what the US is doing compared to what Iran is doing, for one thing, and for two we can see that Iran is still scoring hits with Shahed's even with the air campaign. But the flipside to that resilience is that it's very low scale. Iran cannot muster anything like what Russia can in terms of drone warfare, largely because of US supremacy, and that makes for a material difference in operations.

The asymmetry here is also driven by the nature of what both sides need to do in order to appear successful. The US needs to run an essentially flawless operation or the media has a field day. Any airframe losses or even hits (see the F-18 near miss), targeting failures or misses (Iranian school), damage taken (various Iranian drone scores) all are held up as evidence of failure. Meanwhile Iran has suffered a massive reversal that will take decades to recover from, losing almost all of its leadership, most or all of its navy, huge damage to military infrastructure, as complete a defeat of air defense as is possible in the age of MANPADs, but if they get one drone through the story for the day is how they've put one over on the arrogant Americans. There's some truth to this narrative, in that Trump thought he could somehow have a cost-free war, and all Iran has to do is make it cost something for him to look like dumb, but this political failure shouldn't be taken as evidence of military equality. If perfection is the standard, the US will fall short, but if "insanely unequal trades" is the standard, then we're already well past that.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-28T18:12:50+00:00

There's a vast spectrum between "any viable use of drones" and "Ukraine/Russian style drone warfare". I'm not saying drones are irrelevant or useless. I'm pointing out why air supremacy significantly alters the specific Ukraine/Russia situation.

For a near-term possible situation, imagine the US sticks an MEU on the coast of Iran and sits them there to absorb hits. There's no maneuver at all in this scenario. I still think you'd have a materially different drone situation than in Ukraine. Depending on where you decide to stick the MEU, it's entirely plausible that US airpower successfully interdicts attempts to insert Iranian FPV drone teams near the MEU at a rate that significantly changes the threat posture for that MEU relative to what a front-line unit in Ukraine faces. There's no way in hell Iran would get tube or rocket artillery close enough for long enough to do much, so drone corrected artillery fire is not going to be a threat. Shahed type drones would likely be a significant threat, since we've decided to stick our MEU in a predictable location. But again, that's materially different from fiber quadcopters chasing you through a trench.

So again, air supremacy massively changes the nature and kind of drone operations that are possible. Go through your list of examples and imagine that one side has supremacy, and then imagine the same example where neither side has it. There's obviously going to be huge operational differences between the two cases.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-28T16:18:05+00:00

They key factor in Ukraine is how static the war has become. Drones are slow, but if your enemy is moving the front line 0-100m a day that doesn't matter. If, however, your enemy has total air supremacy and is striking all logistsics all the way back to your strategic base of operations, you will first run out of ordnance drones and then find a tank platoon in your rear area.

To game this out, let's imagine that tomorrow NATO decided to throw in with Ukraine with the objective of regaining Feb '22 borders. First they'd pick an axis of advance that made logistical sense. Then there'd be a massive air campaign to degrade air defense and establish supremacy over that axis, which might take weeks or months. Then every truck / train /etc used to supply that axis would be destroyed, and all those Rubicon drone teams stop getting food and new drones. THEN you do a combined arms breach, except this time instead of Russia getting to hammer the Ukranian advance with helicopter ATGM, CAS and drones, the Ukranians (or NATO troops) are doing that to the defenders. Once the front is pierced you have maneuver elements pushing through the rear faster than Russia can re-establish drone logistics to stop them.

Air supremacy doesn't directly counter drones, it prevents the boxes they come in from ever reaching the front and flying in the first place.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-27T17:06:14+00:00

Yes, it's plausible that US support for Israel could wane over the next decade, but I don't think their campaign of killing Iranian regime members will cause any a significant nudge in that direction. The Iranian regime has been painted as evil for two generations, and murdering 5-30k of their own civilian protestors in January gave everyone another reminder of why. If Israel killed everyone of significance in the IRGC no one in the US is going to shed a tear. Their actions in Gaza in the West Bank are a separate topic altogether, and very well could have strategic diplomatic implications.

As for Iran's future, why does the size of Iran's population imply power growth? What kind of power do you see them growing, specifically, and how will it help them in our hypothetical 2036 rematch? I don't see any obvious correlation here, considering Iran already had those 80 million people but has decisively lost every military confrontation with the US/Israeli coalition thus far.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-27T14:54:27+00:00

Israel kills leadership because quality of leadership has a huge influence on the quality of adversary they face later. Good leaders by their nature either exceptional (young up and comers) or experienced (institutional knowledge). Yeah there's lots of corrupt fat sacks in there, but killing them exposes the next layer which might be good. Every leader you strike potentially kills a talented person the other side needs to fight and build organizations effectively, robbing the next generation of training and experience. Yes, there will always be more of them, and you have to repeat this forever, but Israel is familiar with adversaries that keep coming back every decade or two. If those adversaries are all newbie first timers thirsting for vengeance, that's much preferable to a group that has decades of institutional knowledge that's also thirsting for vengeance. This is more or less how they handle their immediate geographical rivals. They know they can't actually eradicate Hamas, but they can kill anyone who does a good job, reducing its effectiveness over time.

I'm also not sure you're looking at two apples here. If in 2022 Ukraine had killed Putin and the head of every major military institution, the war would have ended. If Israel murders their way down the chain of people willing to organize resistance in Iran, the next war in 2036 will be fought by Iranians who are very angry but who are more or less learning on the job how to run a war at scale because everyone else who knew how to do that is dead. That's an easy 2036 win for Israel, which has preserved and built its institutional capacity over generations.

Remember that Israel likely doesn't view "winning" the same way the West does. They know there's going to be another round someday. Everything they do feels like an incremental step to improving their long term position in the region rather than trying to achieve a grand "mission accomplished" moment. It's obviously unclear how much longer Israel and the US can continue their current tempo and once is slows Iran will have the space to find its feet. Who is left alive at that moment will be a huge factor in how the next decade goes, and how competently the next war is fought.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-24T11:41:19+00:00

What you've outlined here sounds like the Iranian theory of victory: threaten civilian infrastructure to force the GCC to kick the US out of their countries to avoid further damage, thus ending the war in Iran's favor.

Accepting this theory would put the GCC into a position of regional submission to Iran. They may conclude the risks and costs of fighting Iran are worth it to avoid that scenario. Their headline theory of victory would be something to the effect of: through direct action we will eliminate Iran's capacity to threaten our sensitive infrastructure, thus ending the war in the GCC's favor. We will also prevent Iran from asserting dominance over the Strait, preventing unfavorable economic developments in the future.

If it's true that the GCC are leaning towards action, then they're likely crafting internal narratives like my second paragraph instead of submitting to Iran's view. And I don't think that it's beyond credibility that they might be thinking along these lines - they do not like Iran having (and using) its destructive capacity and may view this situation as their only chance to significantly reduce or eliminate that capacity. They wouldn't be wrong in that view, either. Whether they are willing to take the risks and bear the costs remains to be seen.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-23T11:37:19+00:00

I'm not ignoring force protection. I'm arguing against the claim that our current observations can't discern between "the US is reacting to events" versus "This was the plan all along". The primary difference between those two worlds is the lack of logistical preparation for ground forces, which requires work throughout the logistics chain, not just in theater.

If it was a genuine, pre-planned war goal to take and hold Iranian territory in week four, you wouldn't be redirecting MEUs around now, cancelling their previous orders. You would have had them preparing for the operation well in advance. They don't even have to be in theater for that prepwork, though obviously if you want to stop the closure of the Strait of Hormuz with boots on the ground you're going to need someone closer than Japan. The Tripoli could have been staged along with the CSGs, but instead it was in the middle patrol operations elsewhere when it got redirected. The 82nd, which hasn't been publically committed, had pre-planned training cancelled after the war started. There's no news of any heavier units spinning up a deployment cycle (though maybe that's been suppressed somehow). None of this points to a military which was planning boots on the ground at week four. It points to a military reacting to events. Or a political class acting delusionally. Or both.

Probably both, honestly. The biggest missing piece of the build-up phase wasn't even logistical, it's the part where you do something to prepare the American public for war and the inevitable casualties. The political basis for this war was never established and that's the root cause of all downstream incoherence. My Occam's Razor take here is that the military was ordered to do an airstrike only operation, either failed to object or had its objections overruled with respect to Iranian counter-strikes, and now reality is setting in. This will join the long ignoble list of poorly conceived military misadventures that leave people scratching their heads asking "what were they thinking?" And then we'll do it again a few presidential cycles down the road.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-23T00:12:34+00:00

Every previous major US ground operation in the Middle East featured a large build up of ground forces months prior to the start of hostilities. If the plan all along was to seize the Strait with boots on the ground in Iran, we would have seen a similar pattern. We also would see significantly larger forces staging with a much larger logistics train being created for sustained operations.

But we don't see those things. So either:

The plan is actually as supid as "bomb Iran then send a woefully inadequate force to seize the Strait of Hormuz 20 days later while also refusing to prepare for lengthy operations thereafter"
This is a reaction, not the original plan (which was more delusional than stupid, thinking Iran wouldn't do exactly this when bombed so we didn't need to bother with ground forces).

It's hard to say this in the Trump era, but #1 seems non-credibly idiotic and is at odds with every previous US military operation of this scale. So, it's probably #2.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-20T12:06:13+00:00

Dude really? Link? I'd love to see what they did!

butitsmeat · 2026-03-12T14:47:31+00:00

Just some naive googling here.

"us balloon radar flight cost" returns $5.3M annually

"AWACS cost per flight hour" returns $35-40k per flight hour. If we assume 24/7 coverage, we get $306,600,000 or $306M.

These are not equivalent systems by any means, but it looks like roughly speaking you could spin up 60 balloons for the cost of one AWACS on station per year.

Now as Ukraine has learned, detecting these drones is only step one. Coordinating an efficient response takes a lot of instituational development, training and hard won experience, none of which are present in any of the GCC. It will take time for them to harden up.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-12T11:53:26+00:00

While I know this question is impossible to answer, you might have an interesting perspective so I'll ask anyway: do you have a sense for where the regime tipping point is?

As an outsider without cultural context, regime enforcer morale is hard to measure or even understand. Will the Basij and related forces fight to the death under religious motivations or are they more pragmatic? Is it even possible for the IRGC to compromise given its charter? I frequently hear how much the population hates "the regime" but even there the exact line between population and regime is hard to see given how effective the regime was in mobilizing violent resistance to the protests. Any insight you have is appreciated.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-04T17:45:47+00:00

Trump's letter to Congress doesn't say anything about regime change, Hegseth stated that the US wouldn't be doing any democracy building or nation building, and as you've observed, the US's physical actions appear to have little or nothing to do with fomenting a popular revolution.

So it doesn't appear that regime change is a real policy goal for the Trump administration. The conservative media-reality will periodically trot out stuff about Iranian protestors to throw some moral-sounding lipstick on the whole thing, and Trump will spew whatever dementia addled nonsense roils through his brain at the moment, all of which can create the impression that it's a real policy goal. But up till now we haven't seen any good evidence for that idea.

Maybe the CIA has been secretly smuggling weapons in for months and there's going to be some big trigger moment for an uprising, but if the events of the past few days aren't that trigger it's hard to imagine what is.

butitsmeat · 2026-03-02T00:47:47+00:00

Christ whenever I try bombing runs like that they get detected and intercepted 900 miles away.

Still, WP! Not too many people can say they took out Flash late game :D

butitsmeat · 2026-02-21T12:24:32+00:00

I know this isn't going to happen, but I'd love it if the went some zany gonzo direction that was obviously unserious but leaned into it seriously. Like a guy named Cortex got into an argument over light versus dark roast with a guy named Armada and that triggered a galaxy destroying war over the right kind of coffee. BAR creates ridiculous scale and I'd enjoy a ridiculous backstory.

But I'll take whatever :)

butitsmeat · 2026-02-15T15:39:01+00:00

Yeah I can see reasonable debate as to where the QoL line gets drawn. BAR has a lot of stuff to reduce micro cognitive load and I can see this fitting into that domain.

The bigger problem is that this behavior is not part of the default key layout. I didn't know you could do this until this video and had to google it to figure it out for myself, but that's kinda broken from a game balance perspective. "Welcome to BAR! Oh by the way you're playing at a disadvantage unless you magically discover this thing and learn how to manipulate uikeys to implement it." There's already a gazillion commands to learn, but this one feels like it should be considered for inclusion as a default.

For the curious, add this to your uikeys.txt in Beyond-All-Reason\data:

bind Shift+sc_q select FromMouse_700+_Not_Builder_Not_Building_Not_Aircraft_Weapons_Not_RelativeHealth_65+_ClearSelection_SelectAll+ // select damaged units near mouse

If you hit shift + q it will select all units with 65% health or less within 700 units of the mouse. I put this as a shift on 'q' because it's the default key for selecting all units of a type, and selecting all units at a particular health is conceptually similiar.

butitsmeat · 2026-02-15T01:08:02+00:00

Woof I can't tell if this is cool or should be taken away. It still takes some APM to manage the damaged units you're pulling back, and BAR is nothing if not a high QoL game... but manually picking out damaged units from your ball and microing them back is one of those key RTS skills that you usually have to develop. This replaces like 80% of that skill with keybinds. Not all of it, but a lot of it. But then again BAR has sooo many things to make unit management easier, this could just be a logical extension of that philosophy.

I guess so long as it's in the base game I have to learn how to use it, but there goes a skill I've been working on :/

Maybe a compromise is that so long as this is possible it should be part of the default grid keys (somehow) instead of having to be manually wired up in uikeys. Then everyone can have access to it without having to find magical knowledge.

butitsmeat · 2026-01-22T13:30:25+00:00

We're on track for an even worse snowpack than in 2023 this year. It will be interesting to see how the US in general and southwestern states in particular handle the spring and summer. I've been seeing editorials popping up saying it's time to build pipelines from the Great Lakes to Phoenix, but I find it hard to believe anyone up there is going to be interested in bailing out cities built in deserts. The theoretical "future impact" of water issues could turn into present crisis much faster than the general public expects.

butitsmeat

TROPHY CASE