Yes, Ive admitted they offer a counter strike capability, For any attack, nuclear and non nuclear. I'm just saying that 30,000 missiles is a pin prick of what the outer side could deliver to Iran.
In order to achieve deterrence against aggression, one doesn't necessarily need to match the whole extent of the enemy's arsenal one to one. One needs to be able to credibly inflict a high enough cost on the aggressor. Which is precisely what Iran is able to do.
The other side could deliver the equivalent of Irans arsenal even 7 days or so.
Not really. Iran's A2/AD and air defence would severly limit the numbers of munitions that would effectively hit their targets in Iran over those 7 days.
and continue to do so indefinitely. Alternatively if they are so inclined, they could deliver this firepower against Iran with one single nuclear bomb.
In fact, they are deterred from any such aggression as we speak, conventional or nuclear, due to Iran's counter-strike potential.
Irans best case scenario as I've said is what British threw on one germans city in WW2. 30 thousand tonnes of explosives will not defeat anyone.
War with Iran will not be comparable to WW2.
Tens of thousands of tons of explosives capable of being delivered by survivable missile forces and in a precise manner onto the enemy's offensive strike assets and/or vital infrastructure deters overt military aggression. Like it has in effect been doing for the past decades.
As said, the very fact that Iran has not been attacked is proof of this in and by itself.
Especially not Israel. It could destroy UAE, or Saudi and their economy. But not Israel. It would cause immense damage, but they would rebuild, they are not short of money. I think they are famous for not being short of money.
Money and the possibility to reconstruct aren't the issue here. It's that a blow of such an intensity to both their mythical military might (a myth that has carefully been cultivated for decades) as well as to their key infrastructures, which would be completely unprecedented, is going to have a traumatic effect on a population with a low threshold for strategic setback, and would rattle the foundations upon which the legitimacy of that colonial project rests in the minds of its own population.
Hence why to the zionist regime, launching a conflict that costly is not an option.
The cost is very bearable if it means they set Iran back 40 years and keep nukes away from them. A lot better to lose 150,000 than have an Iran with nukes that could kill 8 million Israelis in 15 minutes.
Much preferable yet it would be to return to their comfortable lives in the US, western Europe, Canada etc, rather than to sacrifice 150.000 on a colonialist project that requires so many to die in order to maintain itself. As said, other than a minority of extremist settlers, the bulk of liberal Isra"el"is is not going to go along with such costly endeavours.
In short, the zionist public definitely is neither willing nor ready to accept this many Isra"el"i losses in the framework of a preemptive war of choice, no matter the objectve pursued.
Also, here is yet another issue with this whole argumentation: for several pages, you'd been arguing that the Iranian leadership is naive for refraining from pursuing nuclear weapons. Yet now you're explaining that the zionist regime is going to launch one of the biggest wars since 1945 in order to prevent Iran from acquiring precisely those weapons... Which would imply that top zionist officials in your view have to be even more simple minded than the Iranian ones whose logic you dismissed, since they fail to realize that Iran isn't after nuclear weapons in the first place. What to make of your previous assertion that an Iranian effort to go for nuclear arms would actually be safe from preemptive attacks by the zionists, while presently you are suggesting the opposite (namely, that the regime in Tel Aviv can and will go to extreme lengths to prevent Iran from developing nukes, and that Iran in effect cannot deter it from doing so).
There would be complete Air dominance. With Air dominance will come ground dominance after a while and long enough for them to destroy everything worth destroying in Iran.
Iran's sophisticated, massive and integrated air defences, as well as its area denial weapons will prevent that, while raising the cost of aggression enough to deter the enemy from going ahead with such plans (as successfully done for decades).
explosives might be lowered into shafts using precision strikes, or, drones.
Drones will need somewhere to take off from. So will the platforms carrying precision munitions. Those locations are in range of Iranian precision BM's and will therefore be targeted by them.
Robots might be parachuted in, some might make amphibious landings in some remote part fo the country and be transported there in driverless armed vehicles with air support.
In both cases, aircraft will be vulnerable to Iran's A2/AD and air defence weapons. In the second case, attackers will be hit by Iranian ground forces.
Some sort of fuel air bomb would eliminate the infrastructure outside. some sort of bunker buster would open that door. The robots would enter, and blow up inside, or shoot the place up first then blow up.
All of this is hardly conceivable without effective opposition from Iranian forces.
they might be lowered into the shafts using stealth helicopters. Like the ones sent into Pakistan to get bin laden.
And Iran is fielding state of the art anti-stealth and stealth detection technologies.
They might be smuggled into Iran using dissident Iranians like the ones that helped orchestrate the scientist murder.
To smuggle in an entire army of hypothetical robots (operative term: hypothetical, since this scenario remains speculative) and have them travel thousands of kilometers accross the country undetected doesn't seem very plausible to me.
The list is a wide as our imagination, but ti would happen.
If the US regime thought it could invade Iran, it would already have done so years ago. So none of this really risks to occur in the foreseeable future.
Armenia has the latests air defences, perhaps as good as Irans, all provided by Russia, free of cost. the latest jamming equipment and the whole thing. It's not Armenias fault that Russian stuff is crap and cant shoot down Turkish Bayraktar drones or overcome Turkish jamming pods. Down forget while Iran was begging Russia for s300, Russia gave it to Armenia for free 10 years before it sold it to Iran for billions.
Iranian airspace is effectively undefended. You Iran managed to shoot down a ukranian airliner. and an America drone, but that was drone was probably sacrificed in order to learn about the Iranian air defences so they caudal be jammed next time.
Sorry to say but to make this sort of assessment, your information about Iranian air defence systems must be approximative or incomplete.
There's a thread dedicated to the subject on this forum, so I'd recommend spending some time there to get updated. In fact air defences come right after missiles as the second sector in whose development Iran has invested the most.
Iran didn't beg Russia for the S-300's, but rather didn't want to allow Moscow to renege on its contractual obligations due to pressures exerted by the zionists and the west. Furthermore, while Russia was delaying S-300 deliveries, Iran designed and developed its own domestic high-altitude / long range anti-aircraft system, the Bavar-373, which is on par with more recent S-300 models.
And that's just one of a series of domestic Iranian SAM systems.
In addition, Iran operates a large number of modern radar, electro-optic and other detection systems (from troposcopic scatters to passive, OTH, AESA and PESA radar systems etc). Its anti-aircraft artillery systems are top notch as well (ranging from a CIWS system to radar- and optically guided artillery of various calibers, while a domestically designed gun designed to fire AHEAD-type programmable air-burst munitions was shown by Iran some time ago).
The topic is so vast it should be read up on.
As for US (and zionist) UAV's neutralized by Iran, it's not just one American drone we're talking about. But an entire range of these, with at least 6 to 8 different types (and many more examples) of US-made UAV's either shot down or actually made to land and recovered intact - in particular the low-observable RQ-170 Sentinel captured by Iranian electronic warfare units in late 2011, which until then used to be a largely undisclosed secret weapon. Among those shot down, there's the RQ-4 Triton, which is among the largest, most sophisticated and expensive in the US arsenal. These cases put together disqualify any notion that the US sacrificed so much of its cutting edge technology (some of which came in handy for the development of Iran's own UAV industries) only to test Iranian defences.
Those UAVs would launch from aircraft carriers, or bases. Israeli ones would launch form their own bases or freeways.
These can be targeted by Iran's missile forces.
US would not need to land troops to destroy Iran. I admit, It could not land 500,000 troops for an invasion. At best it could send special forces to sabotage the bunker sand critical infrastructure and they would take large causalities. but that's their job. to take take casualties.
There are too many critical infrastructures in a country the size of Iran for the US military's entire special forces units to be able to eliminate these quickly enough. And even special forces need safe airspace or land to enter.
they could send those 332 fighters especially on the first day. They might not have bases to return to so they would land on the freeways, and be supplied using portable fuel trucks, loaded with bombs using pick up trucks and repaired by mobile mechanics.
They would have losses, mainly mechanical, and would be resupplied but he US as they are taking those losses. US has like 600 F-15's in storage. and maybe 2,000 F-16 in storage ready to be delivered.
And so the costs will increase and increase and increase. By now you can see what an onerous and messy undertaking all out war on Iran would be. Even from the economic standpoint, it would hardly be viable.
Israel has about 2,500 km of freeways that are suitable airstrips. This is how Taiwan does it, knowing that it also would not have any air bases intact in a serious conflict.
Highway strips require more than just a stretch of road as far as I'm aware.
Here's a list of highway strips by country:
According to this, the zionist entity operates three of them.
At any rate, they too can be targeted by precision BM's.
2.5 milion dead for Iran. under this scenario. per two months of this type of conflict.
Very unusual numbers for a conventional war. They would literally have to carpet bomb civilian areas for many months if not years non-stop, and if this were their goal, then in all logic they'd resort to nuclear weapons rather than to conventional means.
they will take the casualties in order to continue their western standard.
Western standards of wealth, development and liberalism = low tolerance for mass casualties. It's just how modern liberal socities are.
They didn't lose 165 in that war. They probably lost a lot more. they always hide their casualties. Their people have no choice, they want to keep that land. they will sacrifice if they are forced to and if it means a nuclear free Iran.
As said, most of them are akin to citizens of modern, liberal, western types of societies: not willing nor ready to sacrifice this much for ideological or religious beliefs.
Of course it's easy for the likes of the so-called Christian Right movement in America to cheerlead videogame-like wars of aggression against bled out, weakened, disarmed and smaller countries at the opposite side of the globe. But taking on a major regional power such as Iran, with a solid defence and a sound asymmetric doctrine to go with it, will trigger costs felt directly by these people, and is therefore a different ball game altogether.
And their regimes are aware of it. Which is why in effect, they have forgone any actual military option against Iran.
They won't start a war until Iran come very close to the nukes. they will just take out your infrastructure and personnel so it never gets to that drastic scenario.
But Iran isn't pursuing nuclear weapons. I thought you were aknowledging as much. Now there's no way for the enemy to suppress entire scientific communities as well as the entire nuclear infrastructure in Iran using sabotage or terrorist attacks. They would need to launch overt strikes, and not just a few, which as said would trigger war.
those 30,000 thousand missiles will not do very much to prevent attacks. they are preventing open warfare fro now. But if you come close to the bombs, those missiles will not save you from this destruction described above.
I have no doubt that if they were able to, they wouldn't hesitate one second to destabilize Iran in accordance with their so-called "regime change" agenda, and including by military means if they could get away with it at a bearable cost (in the subjective sense).
Finally, let's not forget that Iran's missiles are simply the central component of its deterrence. But this deterrence includes additional assets on top of the missiles, namely Iran's regional allies as well as its capability to interdict global energy supplies to a significat extent. Taken together, these three weapons at Iran's disposal make for a formidable deterrence against military aggression by the US and the zionist regime.