Still talking about boots on the ground? When does this invasion start? Odd that the oil and stock market and airline industry isn’t planning or reacting in a way that indicates a long term conflict. Hopefully you heeded my advice and invested 3 weeks ago…

What’s the over/under airlines bring down their new bag fees? In the end airlines will keep the fees, keep the higher prices and vastly increase their earnings after fuel costs normalize. Hell, bookings aren’t even having much of a reaction. Demand still up. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

still waiting for tariff inflation and resulting recession to hit. After that we can discuss the Iran inflation and economic recession.

Like magic, gas at my neighborhood station is down $0.20 from a few weeks ago. Much like the Covid “Tracker of Death” on CNN, the “ Gas prices will be the end” tracker has disappeared.

Heres a fun fact: if you exclude CA from the West Coast gas price average, the average drops $0.40.

I miss the days when y’all were predicting $150-200 oil, furloughs, a/c delivery cancellations, and a massive recession.

Cue Hubcap talking about Ukraine and some post from a year ago.

Spooky combat SM these days, 2nd page story. In other news..

Actual current oil prices are above 150 and in the far east as much as 250 a barrel. The spread between paper prices and actual oil have never been greater. Paper prices are what get reported. Europe has 5 weeks of jet fuel left.

8 engines, a lot of smoke, a lot of wheels, a lot of flaps, a lot of wing and about 70k lbs of CBU-87/M117 each. The sound of persuasion no one shrugs off.

just to make sure this doesn’t get lost in the noise of the irrational

Huh? Iran is losing $450 MILLION per DAY… And their storage tanks are about to fill, requiring them to shut down production.

That doesn’t even begin to tally the billions in infrastructure and military losses from the kinetic campaign.

I’m not arguing for, or against. But the bolded is clearly demonstrably untrue.

This is the part that cracks me up the most. These idiots are quoting the daily rise/fall of the paper price as if it means anything.

It does.

Paper means your refinery will loose money because it pays more for oil and price of gas won’t go up to match.

Majors own their production, and already have lower cost per barrel.

They don’t care Delta’s boutique refinery had to pay more for light sweet crude, or shutdown.

If the majors run the price of gasoline up to where Delta’s refinery can make money overpaying for Middle East oil, then it would curve demand down for themselves.

They won’t give up profitable market share because independent refiners can’t find oil to buy.

Their refineries will run wide open max production all year. Throttling a refinery back cost more then just lowering gas prices, because they own their own oil and it has to go somewhere.

Using paper prices means the airline with the highest CASM sets pricing for the whole industry and everyone profits because loads can’t or won’t go down.

fair enough, i meant with regard to military hardware.

the overall point remains the same. Can we squeeze iran enough without boots on the ground to establish an iads? People here say they will commit jihad with a nuke, why would they not keep the straight closed (as theyve proven they can despite our conventional military superiority) and suffer the lost revenue using cheap drones that we have objectively not been able to counter. You cant have it both ways here.

one plus from all this that a previous poster mentioned is that this may instigate a diversification of traffic that went through there.

Ahh, ok, I see what you are saying about that cost in your earlier post. Fair enough.

The flip side of the quoted argument is, however, that if they are crazy enough to do all that, shutdown the Straight with drones and mines, cutting their own throats while losing $450M/day in illicit oil revenue, a crashing Rial/exonomy, and no oil storage remaining, forcing them to shutdown production (a major blow not easy to reverse as I understand), what makes you think they only want a nuke for deterrence?

Can people genuinely say there is not a real risk they will use it? Iran is run by radical ideologues. They aren’t in the same category of other rational actors. And in geopolitical terms, even NK is a rational actor.

Part of this is also about countering China over the medium/long term, as an ancillary benefit if not part of the calculus.

right, perception is everything.Politics aside..
Persia’s puppet masters are left relying on sabotage & SM guerrilla streaming. Mockery really. Which is nothing a sustained bombing campaign, blockade and power grid blackouts won’t overcome. Sad as a broken kite but we do still want to win this thing, right?

Fangs, while I don’t agree with all of your positions, you’re a generally reasonable and intelligent person. Explain this one to me. I understand that China gets far more oil from gulf states than just about anyone else. What I don’t understand is how turning off X amount of global supply hurts them more than us. The fact that it’s a global market has been discussed ad nauseam. Price and supply issues hit us both. Xi has the dictator’s luxury of being able to ignore public opinion (at least for a while), while the American public will very quickly tire of energy shortages, even if there were a strategic benefit to the country. I just don’t see how this play works out in our favor.

You’re correct Opie btw. Bay of pigs, Saigon, Baghdad, Kabul. Occupation, proxy regime change, bankrolling coup de’tats are losers. On strength of commitment to time, Tehran will sign an accord. To save themselves if nothing else.

I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone “rooting” for Iran on APC. In a 400 million person country with enough cameras you could find a few people protesting against free chocolate ice cream if that’s the narrative you’d like to create.

My friends are over there. I’m irritated they got yanked from their families and great air line jobs by people who specifically said they wouldn’t do this exact thing, and have clearly failed to articulate how to solve obvious, intractable strategic issues which everyone else clearly saw coming.

Very much this. 350 million people in a country with effectively two parties means you are going to have nutjobs in both. If you only judge a group of people by the most extreme elements in that group, it makes it really easy come to the conclusion that the whole group has lost its mind. Our splintered and partisan media fails us spectacularly here. People now routinely make strawman arguments based on what they imagine their critics to be rather than actually listening to and processing said criticism. The result is that we are all arguing with the monsters we imagine in our minds’ eye rather than actually hearing one another. Great for a quick serotonin release, less great for actually moving our country forward.

Oil is a commodity, so pricing is market driven. That says nothing about the logistics of getting it, though. The US produces most of the oil it consumes and only 4% is from the middle east. Contrast that to 50% by China. LNG imports are almost 0 in the US. 30% of China's go through the SOH.

Recall Animal House where Flounder cries to Otter and Boon about his pop’s trashed caddy? What did they say, “you f’ed up, you trusted us.”

so this is my point. We needed to go all in or not at all. This half measure has objectively done a few things
1. cost taxpayers billions
2. Not moved the ball one yard on uranium (subjectively one could say it has only increased the drive to obtain a nuclear shield against US aggression)
3. Educated our very real enemy in a strategy of closing the straight with incredibly cheap military hardware
4. angered our allies and the world at large by causing an economic crisis this further eroding soft power

the list continues, so yes, as to your comment. The only real solution was all in or diplomacy. One could state this as objectively true as evidenced by the current stalemate. Dont kid yourselves, we are currently in a stalemate and i dont see a way out of this other than to back down or establish a full on defense in depth of the entire iranian coastline.

for myself i was in the Air Force from 03-14. Ive seen the absolute dumpster fire of combat ops in the middle east. Enough is enough

With PRC of all nations, it's a little more complicated than just the global commodity price.

By purchasing oil directly from IR, presumably in violation of sanctions, they actually have a supply that is somewhat independent from both the global commodity price and also potentially from sanctions that might be levied against PRC in the event that *they* do something crazy.

I've stated ad nauseam that I don't know what the motive(s) were for this war, but there are a few objective fringe benefits, if not outright motives. With regard to PRC...

1. Shows US is willing to engage (at least some of their plans for ROC/SCS likely rely on US inaction).
2. Demonstrates that we can still execute large scale shock-and-awe in the maritime/air domains.
3. Reminds them that we can (and will) interfere with their interests in other parts of the world... they can't rely on a Taiwan situation being confined to the first island chain.

^^^^^^^ Prolly wasting your breath ^^^^^^^:D

In retrospect 4. Also put NATO on notice

GDP per capita in the US is over $85,000. GDP per capita in China is less than $14,000. Just as increased costs of basic items in the US hurt the poor more than they do the rich, increased prices of basic items (which fuel is) takes a larger bite out of China’s discretionary income than it does that of the US.


Similarly, while the US imports a large percentage of fruits and vegetables - predominately from Mexico - it is overall a big exporter of corn, wheat, and other grains. China struggles to be self sufficient in food, and greatly depends on imports of fertilizer from the Middle East and from Russia. Fertilizer, made from natural gas, is also a commodity, and approximately 25% of the worlds supply comes from the Middle East. Either elevated prices or even merely less availability, will have a more profound effect on China than on us.

in fact, a prolonged blockade of Hormuz by the USN might cause some serious questioning in China about just how badly they want to retake Taiwan.

Taiwan. More than Alaska is American, Formosa like Hong Kong, is Chinese. A deal nexus, as well there to be struck.

How about 4) uses up very expensive missile interceptors and other ordnance at an incredible pace, thereby literally weakening our own position outside the immediate theater.

ohhh no, how will we ever defend ourselves against the Canadians?

*certain ordnance. The mainstay of our aerial ordinance is vast.

I'm sure it is. But a Shahed drone costs about $35K per. The DoD (sorry, DoW) states that our interceptors range from $250K to $2M... Each.

It's ok, we'll just print more money to finance it all.

Yes the interceptors are expensive. Luckily GP bombs are relatively cheap and plentiful.

No we won't. That's why the DoD is modifying unguided 70mm rockets with extremely cheap guidance systems. If you're not military, 70mm rockets are the small cheap ones they ripple launch from helo pods in 'Nam movies. Big bottle rockets basically.

Drones are so slow and non-reactive that it doesn't take $ophisticated systems like AIM-9/120, PAC-3, SM-2, etc to splash them.

Guess that's another fringe benefit, we got to try out out gear against some of the new asymmetric stuff before a main event in the Pacific. We can practice shooting down model airplanes with bottle rockets.

$1 Trillion every 5 months to be exact.

"Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.

The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.

The Iran war has significantly drained much of the U.S. military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries like Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say."

So while we spend $$$ like it's going out of style, Russian oil revenues *double* month-to-month. Talk about a transfer of wealth few voters thought they were signing up for ...

They have already developed them. Work great.


.

The US is not a hegemon.

The unipolar/ superpower moment is over.


(sorry we ****ed it away for counties starting with “I”)

Enemies get a vote too.

Except you know as well as I do that those systems aren’t sexy & that the service chiefs feel a constant need to justify their exorbitant budgets. We’ll be burning F-35 flight hours to turn rubble into smaller rubble, having subs launch tomahawks into empty spots in the desert where someone spotted scud launchers 3 weeks prior, C-17s flying loads of empty pallets from Dafra to Ali al Salem, only to pick up another load of empty pallets headed to the ‘Died, and sending an army of chiefs into theater to make sure people’s socks are regulation before they’re allowed to enter a chow hall in no time at all if we aren’t already. Don’t kid yourself thinking that Haliburton, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril aren’t already gearing up for the windfall and absolutely making perpetual O-faces at the prospect of another forever war in the sandbox. We’re going to spend sickening sums on this thing for years to come. I literally never want to hear another word about fiscal responsibility from anyone, of any stripe, in any position of power.

Is that number accurate, where’s its source?

You're just now realizing this? The very nature of military procurement and warfare attracts frauds and opportunists like flies, been that way since Rome for sure and most likely since static civilization.

Doesn't mean that the system can't or doesn't work, at least in the US where we have a lot more public visibility and discussion of such things. It requires eternal vigilance just to minimize the FW&A, probably can't eliminate it entirely.

Less than 90% you can theoretically build a bomb, but it's a lot harder, requires a lot more precision, and it will be very large (too large for missiles and likely heavy bombers, not that IR has any of the later). So basically delivery by ship or maybe truck (if there's a sea or overland route to the target).

For long-range missiles, probably need 95% or better.

I thought he had posted it, or at least in a follow-up: https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/po...201328218.html

That's the total debt, not just the "excursion" which according to different estimates has cost $25--$49 billion so far. Assuming however that the run rate remains the same, that's about $300--$500 billion/ year *just* for the war.

“The oil market has passed the breaking point. The onslaught of oil inventory draws coming will shock the market awake. I suspect that only when financial players see the physical shortages playing out will they wake up to the reality that this supply outage is real. Until then, most people will not be able to accept the reality.

It is what it is.”

https://open.substack.com/pub/hfir/p...utm_medium=ios