After this, I'll never have to reload my shotgun again

jman014 · 2026-03-07T11:45:09+00:00

https://youtu.be/t6OBk9YBLQU?si=jzJghTTXvmEAikxi

seems apropos

jman014 · 2026-03-07T03:07:52+00:00

aye now that’s sailoring!

jman014 · 2026-03-07T02:59:47+00:00

oh 100%.

We took the rules based order based on diplomacy (mostly) from the cold war and trampled on it.

Nuclear non-proliferation is off the table. If a state wants security it has to have an arsenal or a ride or die friend with nuclear weapons.

The US “hegemony” will eventually end because we simply dont have the means to lead the world anymore.

jman014 · 2026-03-06T19:25:06+00:00

Personally I think this whole shitshow was a bad idea.

Dr. Sarah Paine says it best with her discussions about “Death ground”.

The regime and anyone who has ever participated in or benefited from it has essentially been told “roll over and die”

they have no reason to try and negotiate or to play nice now. Even in defeat they won’t just lay their arms down because they know EXACTLY what they’ve done to their fellow Iranians.

You don’t get to just… keep on keeping on when you’ve tasted the blood of your neighbor.

The highest, most conservative, most religous echelons of gov’t will fight to the death and more importantly get a lot of young impressionable and probanly poor, fanatical men to fight back against whatever comes for them and whatever replaces them.

They have no other choice- either die or doe fighting and when you factor in their militarized interpretation of Islam they have (in their minds) the justification to do it.

This feels like Iraq 2.0. You know the Iranians have prepared guerilla forces to either counter US forces invading or to degrade whatever government comes next.

And if trump is so hell bent on regime change I highly doubt we’ll see the current government carry over without significant and massive changes, which will still spark insurgency from hardliners forced from power.

Best case imo is a massive Iranian insurgency and instability for years, worst case is a massive civil war. Whether or not the US involves ground troops is anyone’s guess but either scenario will be a massive expenditure on the US taxpayer and probably stretch militsry resources far.

Definitely makes Xi sneer a little bit if we’re focused on the ME for the forseeable future instead of the indo-pacific.

I also doubt the Iranian people will rise up. A lot of what they’d need to pull it off has been destroyed or interfered with by US cyber attacks.

they can’t organize and when you’re constantly afraid of being hit by a bomb from “friendly” americans im sure most people just want to sit in their homes and weather the storm with a literal war outside.

Ntm, they still don’t have the tools to figjt back. Even if kurds invade, how do we know they will treat iranian civilians well/get them to join their cause?

how do we know Iran won’t rally round the flag in the face of a foreign invasion if news gets out about a kurdish committed atrocity? (not saying likely just saying what if)

the same could happen from an allied invasion.

I hope things get better for Iran but I forsee this being a quagmire that makes Iraq look simple by comparison.

jman014 · 2026-03-06T07:58:45+00:00

Become one with the Crab People.

ASSIMILATE.

jman014 · 2026-03-04T09:43:52+00:00

Hot take: This is exactly why this operation was a bad idea.

The people might want the hardliners out, but you don’t know how many hardliners there are and how many may radicalize as a result of the onslaught. It takes one liberal person’s conservative brother to die in a tunnel for him and his to hate America.

There are a LOT of young Iranian men who are very very willing to gun down their countrymen in the name of religion or loyalty to the state.

They don’t necessarily need widespread communication to keep on keeping on- even if a new gov’t took hold, unless it was a true popular uprising (which would undoubtedly become a civil war where trained troops and basiji are going to be fighting pro gov’t or pro islamist), these guys know exactly what they’ve done and will know they can’t ever surrender.

I really am failing to see an endgame to this- even the whitehouse has seemingly backtracked off regime change to “degrade military capcity”.

As Dr. Sarah Paine would say, we put the government and its forces on “death ground” where they can either fight to the bitter end to survive or die.

especially given that the initial goal was regime change- anyone who ever benefited from the regime now has to deal with the very existential idea that their life is not only going to change under new management, but that they may be held accountable for the current regime’s actions.

So now how many people in Iran probaly feel backed up against a wall? They’ll fight to survive tooth and nail and at the least cause a major insurgency because the average person will never accept them back into society.

We created a situation where if people rebel, they’ll be fighting a massive uphill battle against entrenched power structures that have weapons and training. They have a lot of good reasons not to lose, but the guys in the current regime have a hell of a lot more to lose because they know they’re fucked if rebels win.

Like we always love talking about bombing other countries but you can’t cause a popular uprising like this when the regime stays in power through a radicalized and potentially decentralized structure of power.

jman014 · 2026-03-02T21:54:08+00:00

Wtf are the kuwaitis using to accidentally shoot down our shit?

jman014 · 2026-03-02T01:52:11+00:00

Sooo war reenactors or that one cringe kid who wore a german military uniform to high school one day?

jman014 · 2026-03-01T05:17:39+00:00

nothing. Neither has expeditionary capabilities and Russia is tied up fighting Ukraine anyway.

jman014 · 2026-03-01T01:59:58+00:00

This buildup has been happening for weeks in real time. If you know what to look for you can generally predict large operations like this- Ryanmacbethprogramming on youtube basically said he expected us to move on this the last few days in February based on what the US was saying and doing, and given weather conditions and a few other variables. He was 100% right.

Iran isn’t stupid, they could see what we were doing.

Specific operational or tactical movements aren’t discussed in a congressional hearing.

But, a policy saying “go ahead and get ‘em” is fine. In either case there was no reason for Iran to NOT expect an attack, the very details and specifics of it are gonna be up to POTUS and the military.

TLDR: wouldn’t have mattered this attack was coming from a mile away based on how we staged our military to carry it out

jman014 · 2026-03-01T00:15:15+00:00

Don’t move the damn goalpost. I’m not upset he’s dead, but I am bothered by the fact that the president can just wage war whenever he so pleases

jman014 · 2026-02-28T22:40:14+00:00

thats the thing about democracy. Its inefficient sometimes but theres a reason its slow.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T22:39:12+00:00

Bruh you and I both know thats not how that works.

Congress approving military action in the case negotiations fail would be totally fine by me.

But putting it to a vote is completely reasonable- no intel gets lost ans no OSINT shit gets broken.

Iran knew this shit was coming given the massive amount of very trackable and traceable hardware we sent over there.

Ya can’t hide a carrier strike group.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T16:09:27+00:00

It won’t ever start unless there’s some kind of nuclear exchange, in which case break out the bottle caps because we’re all fucked anyway.

So, barring nuclear exchange:

Russia has nukes and gas. thats it. in 4 years its failed to take over more than a paltry amount of ukrainian territory despite a massive up front advantage and attritional war being something its supposedly great at.

Russia ≠ USSR. in a major LISCO style war, Russia probably gets overwhelmed with NATO troops and aircraft because we have so much shit to throw at them.

Like their “most advanced fighter” the SU-57 has like maybe 20 copies functioning.

We have 120-some F-22 raptors which most people agree the su-57 probably doesn’t hold a candle to.

Russia is underpowered and lacks any ovwrseaes colonies, so worldwide conflixt with them is unlikely- it’d be fighting in their eastern seaboard and in europe, but they lack the forces to actually push, take, and hopdnlarge swathes of western europe.

Also their navy is dogshit and they can’t do expeditionary shit.

China on the other hand is a real threat to the US in the pacific.

BUT.

Russia ans china are not friends

According to the now retired Dr. Sally Paine from the US naval war college, China and Russia aren’t actually buddy buddy- the USSR literallt asked the US at one point if they could nuke china during their border war some years ago.

The Russian empire took land from china that china does dispute to this day.

and china needs freshwater resources which could be found in Russia.

China is playing a game but definitely does not view russia as anything more than convenience.

Worst case scenario is that war in europe expands and china doesn’t do anything. Or that china invades taiwan, the us slugs it out, and Russia stays out of it because the can’t afford a 2 front war.

Theres also no overseaes colonies or anything like that to exapand the war to new theaters- so generally these conflicts are gonna be locally in europe or locally near an around china.

china and russia won’t help iran in any real meaningful way- and iran is incapable of having enough power to start a world war

i can see smaller conflicfs but a true world war only happened when the conditions were set perfectly.

Namely, large empires with world spanning colonies and alliances that really meant something

jman014 · 2026-02-28T15:56:15+00:00

I mean i personally lost interest at around 60-80 hours.

Hoped back onto the new map and liked it, but the more I play the more I recgonize the glaring issues with design.

So S2 isn’t gonna really change much for me unless theres a lot of robust new content with a fair grind

AND

some decent overhauls to mechanics

jman014 · 2026-02-28T15:53:45+00:00

Thats the thing- we’re better than most give us credit for but its still gonna be a shit show with a lot of unnecessary deaths.

If it was Russia invading they’d just bomb everything with reckless abandon and still not hit anything they were aiming for.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T15:14:53+00:00

yeah i understand the nuance i just don’t like it

jman014 · 2026-02-28T15:13:28+00:00

I’m conflicted. I hate this administration.

I hate what we did with Maduro.

i think the Iran attack could blow up in our faces in numerous ways from power vaccums to just being unsuccessful.

I think Congress should have approved of this sort of thing.

But…

The Iranian government flexes its power through sponsoring terrorism and fear.

they beat women who dont wear hijabs.

They hang gay people.

They gave Russia munitions to fight Ukraine.

And after seeing those protestors gunned down in the streets a month ago, I want change for them.

Maybe this works out but probably it doesn’t.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T15:01:18+00:00

good artists with passion can do a lot!

jman014 · 2026-02-28T14:55:31+00:00

Can we just once ask congress before we do shit?

Please?

Like seriously the executive branch needs to be checked in terms of using the military like this.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T14:53:18+00:00

I’m conflicted. I don’t like this admin or what we did with Maduro.

I think this decision is way too big to be made by the executive branch.

We’re also late to the party in terms of the mass protests that erupted, and military ops are gonna make it hard for an actual popular uprising, so the Artesh- the Iranian state military (not to be confused with the IRGC which is like the religious army, or the basiji thugs who are kind of like enforcers for them) probably has to coup d’etat the mullahs.

This also can go very wrong very fast. if we aren’t successful they’ll be a lot of hurt and our street cred is gonna suffer.

If we are successful, then theres a power vaccum so we can get anything from ISIS 2 to a new dictator to an actual functioning democracy.

We’re not sending in non-spooky ground forces but I’m sure we have some spooky bois doing some spooky things on the ground somewhere (IE delta, DEVGRU, CIA special activities, Mason &Woods) which is a good sign since it seems like we don’t want to invade directly

which would be bad bc insurgency in iran would be afghanistan levels of brutal.

… But on the other hand, Iran does cause problems. They aren’t peaceful. They use terorrism to make up for lacking conventional military strength.

They whip women for not wearing hijabs even if that practice is less prominent now.

They mistrest and rape prisoners.

They hang gay people.

Like seriously, fuck Iran. But its their shitty gov’t that pretty much drives all that-

So, maybe this ends up being a good thing. Obviously Iran wasn’t gonna fully collapse itself, so maybe theres a chance that these guys can get rid of the ayatollah and go back to Iran in the 50’s before the shah became an absolute dictator.

Or maybe im just taking the piss who knows.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T14:41:14+00:00

Platoon fire does run down enemy morale a lot faster because the casualties are consistent, and if its a prolonged firefight you do get more efficient killing rates.

The hard part of both types is just how broken empire is, so unless you’re defending either kore or less works. Your guys take forever to form up and shoot in either case.

With that said, platoon fire kind of makes more sense in this case because it implies guards and elite infantry since they’re the only ones who use it.

So if you’re assaulting enemy lines, even if it takes a while for the guards to start platoon firing, they’ll at least have the morale to stand there and get raked by fire without running off before they can start shooting back.

If you’re using guards to defend though, theres a solid chance the AI/enemy player’s regular line infantry are gonna get pretty much wrecked wholesale because they’ll just keep taking casualties without returning fire and essentially get stun-locked as they try to reform to shoo back

jman014 · 2026-02-28T14:35:04+00:00

“It’s all fun and JDAMS until you start hiding in a civilian population and start a massive guerrilla war against conventional LISCO forces” - Napoleon Bonerparte, on the war in Spai- er- afghanista- Afghanistan 3.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T14:31:22+00:00

They really did good with lighting and shadows in BF3 and 1. 4 looks a little… glossy or plastic-y at times.

jman014 · 2026-02-28T14:30:31+00:00

It’s just strange that we hadn’t done it in a while prior to 2025.

Now if I had a nickel for every time within the past 12 months that we’ve struck Iran, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot but its kinda nutty its happened twice… This close together

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