Re: Combination refuelling drone and gunnery practice target?
dmesg
"Pentagon leaders’ positive portrayals present an incomplete picture at best, people familiar with intelligence assessments told us. According to those internal estimates, Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of its small, fast boats, which can lay mines and harass traffic in the Strait of Hormuz."[1]
The truth is probably somewhere in between. Intelligence assessments are made to be pessimistic, and I bet the word in the actual documents is "may retain" not does retain. Because with extensive use of bunkers and decoys - it's very hard to do battle damage estimates.
However the massive drop-off in Iran's capability to launch offensive missile attacks in both its one-day missile barrages on Israel, its war with Israel and then this war strongly suggest that they have massive problems with launchers. Even if they've got large stocks of missiles left, which is impossible to know as an interested onlooker, they've lost quite a lot of launch capability - and every time they try to use it, it gets degraded further. Also, having large stocks of SAMs aren't particularly useful if you don't have the radars to operate them, the ability to coordinate your air-defence network, the launchers - and if any of this stuff goes out into the open it gets destroyed. Israel haven't lost a single aircraft in two wars with Iran. One Kuwaiti pilot has shot down more US aircraft in this war than Iran did.
I just don't buy that Iran has a huge amount of capability left. Except they do still have the small boats and probably a lot of anti-ship missiles - so getting through the Strait is going to take a lot of force. And maintaining that force in field possibly for years - at a much higher rate of threat than Western navies had to deal with in the Tanker War, back in the 80s.
However the US and Israel have clearly got some very good sources in Iran, as proved by their success in wiping out large numbers of the leadership. So I admit I'm prepared to be proved wrong. But critics are just as capable of cherry-picking their data as the Trump government do. And just because this war was politically stupid - and Trump clearly has no idea how to fix what he's broken - doesn't mean that Iran are having any kind of success here. Or that their leadership are any less stupid. The surviving ones at any rate...
After all, people like to mock Trump (rightly) for this clusterfuck. But the closure of the Strait is doing massive damage to everyone. Iran included. Their regime has destroyed their economy and massively damaged their society, and that was before they got themselves into a shooting war with Israel and then the US. And remember, they basically started the one last year. That was a war of choice for them. Which went disastrously. And if they can't sell their oil, due to the US counter-blockade, then they can't pay their security forces to oppress their angry population. That could lead to anything from no-effect to a civil war, via an internal coup or a popular uprising - with them hanging from lampposts.
