Aletho News

Big League War

By William Schryver | February 24, 2026

“What the West has, and has had for some time now, is a single-shot military. One serious campaign, whether finally won or lost, would disarm the West for a decade.” —  Aurelien

This, folks, is the simple truth of the matter.

The US simply could not, at this moment — nor at any time in even the medium-term future — mount and sustain a campaign the size, intensity, and duration of what we have seen in Ukraine for the past four years.

US logistical chains would have long-since broken down; losses in men and equipment — including LOTS of heavy lift cargo aircraft and the refueling tankers upon which they depend to fly across the planet — would have been calamitous.

Oh, sure, in the context of the current crisis in the Middle East, there’s a huge chorus of people who are gung-ho convinced that US air and naval power would overcome all obstacles in a matter of days, bringing the presumptuous third-world Iranians to their knees.

That’s not what would happen.

What would happen is that, despite a few spectacular successes to stuff the first 24-hour news cycle, the “full-spectrum dominance” everyone believes the US wields would, over the course of just a few days, suffer shocking losses across the entire military spectrum.

Several US aircraft of all types would be shot down.

A few US warships would very likely be damaged — or possibly even sunk.

US bases in the Persian Gulf region would be pounded relentlessly by Iranian drones and ballistic missiles.

US air defenses would exhaust their meager stockpiles of interceptors within just a few days.

US airborne ISR assets would be aggressively targeted, and some could quite conceivably be shot down.

SEAD assets like the E/A-18G Growler and the F-16CJ Wild Weasels would prove more vulnerable to Iranian air defenses than is widely believed.

The legendary (but old and slow) Tomahawk cruise missiles would be jammed and / or shot down in surprising numbers — or even just malfunction on their own, as did 25% of a recent salvo of a dozen that was fired into Nigeria.

As even Israeli intelligence is reported to believe, the US force arrayed against Iran could only sustain high-intensity strikes for about FIVE days. After that, the US would start to experience severe shortages of all types of precision-guided munitions, greatly exacerbated by the degree to which Iranian strikes could attrit weapons stockpiles, destroy refueling tankers, and render runways unusable by boutique US aircraft that need everything to be perfectly pristine.

Iranian naval capability would very likely surprise many people around the world. Their small, fast missile boat swarms present a formidable asymmetric threat, and they have several small submarines that may prove sufficiently stealthy to sneak up on US warships, including the big lumbering US Ohio-class missile submarines.

Iran is by no means a major military power like Russia and China. But they are unquestionably an extremely formidable asymmetric military power, and they have been planning and preparing to fight an asymmetric war against the Americans for the past quarter century.

And if, as now appears almost certain, the Russians and Chinese provide Iran top-shelf intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data, Iranian capabilities would be significantly augmented.

US naval officers confessed that the recent Battle of the Red Sea against the Houthi warriors of Yemen was the most intense combat the US Navy had experienced since WW2.

Iran possesses firepower an entire order of magnitude greater than the Houthi.

A two-week long high-intensity war against Iran would be a stunning exhibition of 21st century warfare.

It would be Big League War, rather than what the US has been fighting for the past several decades.

Both sides would be hurt badly, but the Iranians would not be severely depleted, let alone defeated, whereas the US would be hurt in a fashion it has not experienced in the memory of many people still alive — only to then look around and discover itself in a state of acute logistical crisis after only a fortnight of high-intensity combat operations.

That will be the moment of decision; the last chance for the saner heads within the halls of empire — those who have hitherto acquiesced as this catastrophe unfolded — to choose to finally act to stop the madness, or stand idly by as they and all the rest of us are acted upon by events that spiral out of control.

February 25, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Militarism | Iran, United States, Yemen