Persian Gulf
INT'L MOD
I got the number 20 because Israeli affiliated OSINT accounts showed satellite images of significant damage to 22 SSM bases in West IranHere is the problem:
U.S. has 180 F-22’s. Even if we say a pathetic 50% are combat ready that’s still 90 F-22’s that could fly over Iran (not even counting the hundreds of F-35s).
How will the Iranian air defense team stop the F-22 from bombing the entrances of these bases?
For ones with silos, You can leave teams inside the silos 24/7 to fire whatever they can out of the silos. But not all underground bases are silos. And if F-22’s dominate the skies dropping a PGM thru those silo doors isn’t tough as the are not ICBM hardened silos they are basically just holes carved into a mountain with a cover.
I would be surprised if all 20+!aren’t already know by intelligence services. After all many were found by OSINT members. Their entrances and construction create visible signatures from space that an AI algorithm could shift thru images and detect any new construction.
For example,the Vera Rubin telescope (largest digital telescope on earth) uses AI to parse thru 20 TB of images nightly looking for asteroids moving in the night sky that haven’t been documented. Now imagine what CIA or space force has access to. The era of hiding stuff in remote regions from satellites has come to a close. Maybe in a country the size of China, not in Iran with a very distinct topography.
I don’t like this direct confrontation with the U.S. because Iran is not set up well for losing its skies. Sure it could hit some installations and maybe even hit a few ships. But to what end? A shoot out with the U.S. is not something it can win. And mass killing of U.S. soldiers will only get people in Trumps base to be more pro war.
Not sure how IRGC is going to play this. It didn’t perform well when it was Israel vs Iran and Israel flying from 1200 miles away every day. How can we expect better performance against the U.S. that has far more airbases and a carrier fleet?
Not trying to be a Debbie downer. But these were the same concerns I had when we lost HZ and Syria.
If you sit and do the game theory mental exercise on this, there’s not a whole lot of options for iran here. The goal was having Iraq, Syria, Hamas, HZ, Houthis able to start a regional war. There’s really only the Houthi’s now. Iraq PMUs might do some rocket attacks but nothing they haven’t done in the past
excavators should be stored inside the base, not outside, so it is harder to target them
you need very intense sortie rate over prolonged period of team to keep all the entrances blocked
there is no perfect solution, just more and more entrances, more and more hardened silos, more and more distributed mobile TELs constantly changing location, and better SHORAD protection at the sites













