KAL-EL
VIP Member
Actually it's not.
If the Israelis have nothing to lose and they're about to be obliterated, they'll activate the Samson option and take everyone down with them
US Perspective on the Iran - Israel / US War
- Thread starter AZ_HighCountry
- Start date
If the Israelis have nothing to lose and they're about to be obliterated, they'll activate the Samson option and take everyone down with them
_Arabia_
Trusted Member
Is that not the unofficial policy of every single nuclear-armed state if it faces an existential attack directly? MAD in other words?
Would North Korea for instance go silently down? Or China? Or Russia? Or the US?
Israel, if correct, is not really unique in this regard. However due to their small size, they are easier to destroy in such a scenario.
That mythical (or real) Samson option, talks about the entire world BTW. Not solely the Arab world.
But in reality all the world's nukes combined (around 12.500 or so), even if detonated all at once (never going to occur) cannot destroy the entire planet. What they can do though is cause a nuclear winter which will wipe out most of humanity.
Mighty_Dragon_Strike
Trusted Member
great post!
if IR had diminishing stockpiles of missiles, why would it block SOH?!
I think, it is a more of a question of how many missiles, attacking party is willing to take!
lets just say IR has 2,000 missiles, then why it is not negotiating?!
IR will fight as long as, it has sufficient missiles and drones to take down defensive shield!
my take, not more than 3,000 missiles remaining
but if they have other means to take down radars and AD shield, weight of last 3,000 will be very heavy on the attacking party!
F-22Raptor
Elite Member
_Arabia_
Trusted Member
KAL-EL
VIP Member
Well there's no doubt that they would be destroyed. And in turn, would destroy everything around them. Or at least close to it.
Just like if the USA, China or Russia had a nuclear strike against them, the country that launched those nukes would be obliterated.
F-22Raptor
Elite Member
The U.S. Commander With a Two-Week Plan to Escalate Strikes in Iran
President Trump was sitting aboard Air Force One on the tarmac in Delaware last week having just watched the caskets of four U.S. soldiers killed in the Iran war arrive from overseas. He was huddling with his top war advisers—Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Also aboard the plane in the impromptu meeting: Adm. Brad Cooper, head of the U.S. Central Command, who has been quietly directing the war from his Tampa, Fla., headquarters and who had arrived separately for the solemn ceremony.
The naval officer has often been eclipsed by Caine and Hegseth, who regularly brief Trump in the Oval Office and have been far more involved in the White House discussions on the war.
But it is Cooper who has prepared an option for a punishing air campaign against Iran that could take up to two weeks, people familiar with the matter said.
Now, as Trump vows to strike back after Iran’s surprise missile attack Tuesday, the president will decide how far to go. He could greenlight Cooper’s option of 10 to 14-days of intensive airstrikes intended to cripple Iran’s missile capability despite warnings that the U.S. is running low on air-defensive munitions. Or, he could opt for a more limited military strike in the hopes diplomacy could be pursued.
Critics on Capitol Hill say that any new air campaign risks dragging the administration deeper into war.
For weeks, Trump has oscillated between stop-and-start diplomacy and expletive-laden threats to return to the sort of major combat operations that were featured at the beginning the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. On Wednesday, a senior administration official said that Trump “is in an escalatory mood” but is still contemplating “the depth of that response.”
The idea behind Cooper’s high-end option is to go beyond the tit-for-tat airstrikes that have done little to deter Tehran from threatening ships in the Strait of Hormuz and lobbing missiles at American forces in the region by sharply escalating the war, according to people familiar with his thinking.
If the U.S. wants military action to be effective, Cooper has said, the U.S. must step up its air attacks, significantly blunting Iran’s missile threat, to try to break the stalemate. This “go big” approach, which is among a series of options he has developed, would reduce the need for the U.S. to use defensive munitions because Iran would have less capability to attack.
Caine, who is described as more cautious, often alerts the White House to the “second and third order consequences” of military options, the people said. He has raised concerns about the U.S.’s dwindling supply of air defense interceptors, which are needed elsewhere around the world to defend U.S. bases and allies, as well as fend off Iran’s missile attacks. Caine believes that the low inventories wouldn’t preclude a resumption of major combat operations against Iran but would add to the risk, the people said.
Spokesmen for Caine and Cooper declined to comment on internal deliberations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Wednesday with Hegseth following his meeting a day earlier with Trump. Israeli forces could be included in a possible major U.S. attack if the Trump administration decided to return to major combat operations, officials have said.
Trump signaled Wednesday morning that he is already determined to resume strikes, though he didn’t spell out the details and left the door open for negotiations.
“We’re going to beat the f—ing sh—out of them,” Trump told Fox News. “We’ll be hitting them hard.”
“We’re going to let them keep talking,” he continued.
As the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Cooper’s mission has been to prosecute the war with Iran and safeguard American security interests in the region. Caine’s job is to look at the worldwide picture, including threats from China, North Korea and Russia, which also made a claim on U.S. military resources.
Cooper has long labored with a bureaucratic disadvantage: he lacks the easy access that Caine has to the Oval Office. The vast majority of Trump’s updates on the war have been delivered by Caine and Hegseth. Cooper has briefed the president in person only a handful of times since the war began, and Trump and the commander have only occasionally talked by phone. Cooper’s last in-person meeting with Trump was last week’s session on Air Force One.
As the military leaders met in one part of the plane with the commander in chief who had mused publicly about ramping up the war, family members who had just attended the dignified transfer for their loved ones who had been killed in the Middle East sat nearby. Trump offered a Georgia-based family a ride home on the plane, the senior administration official said.
“Secretary Hegseth, CENTCOM Commander Admiral Cooper, and Chairman Caine stand completely aligned and are united in mission, strategy, and resolve regarding overseas operations involving Iran,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. “The Department of War is locked and loaded, ready to execute the President’s directives at a moment’s notice.”
Cooper has long believed that military force could deliver a body blow to Iran if given enough time, even as some military experts contend that air power alone has never won a war. As Trump was considering launching the war in February, Cooper figured that he could need six weeks or more to complete the operation. He was given less than that.
The joint U.S. and Israeli air campaign began on Feb. 28. By the end of March, however, the president was growing impatient. Iran had declared the Strait of Hormuz closed and begun laying sea mines in the strategic waterway. Surging oil prices roiled the global economy and prompted the U.S. to eat into oil reserves to bring prices down.
On March 31, Cooper calculated that he still needed about 20 more days to finish the job, according to a person familiar with his thinking. But on April 3, a U.S. F-15E jet fighter was shot down over southwestern Iran, kicking off a high-risk rescue mission. While both airmen were retrieved, the incident contributed to Trump’s decision to clinch a ceasefire agreement just a few days later.
In a press conference soon after the ceasefire was declared, Hegseth, who also attended last week’s Air Force One meeting, boasted that Iran’s missile program had been “functionally destroyed” with its launchers and missiles “depleted and decimated.’
But Iran’s missile force, U.S. intelligence assessed, wasn’t completely destroyed. In an early June interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said that Iran might have about 21% to 22% of their missiles left. Some analysts estimated they had more.
While Caine had informed the White House of the limited number of air defense interceptors in the U.S. inventory, Cooper’s reasoning was that powerful airstrikes would greatly diminish Iran’s missile capabilities and its ability to retaliate. Under Caine’s approach, U.S. air defenses could be realigned in the region to buttress the defense of key sites.
In outlining the options for an intensive air campaign, Cooper has drawn support from Hegseth, the people said.
But skeptics inside and outside government have said that the U.S. has pummeled Iran’s underground missile force and factories during the opening month of the war only to see the Iranians dig out launchers from underground complexes and resume their attacks, using different missile flight paths and maneuvers to try to elude U.S. defenses and augmenting their strikes with drones.
Iran’s missile capabilities were on display in mid-July, when an Iranian missile attack killed three U.S. soldiers at a Jordanian air base, and again on Tuesday, when Iran launched missiles in its surprise attack against American forces.
“All Iranian missiles were successfully intercepted. U.S. forces remain vigilant and at a high state of readiness,” according to Centcom.
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