What would a US/Iran conflict look like?
What would a US/Iran conflict look like?
It would be fought and won at sea, and be enormously destructive to all sides. Any conflict with Iran will spiral into a conflict involving the entire Gulf Cooperation Council. Iran is gambling that its swarms of thousands of speedboats and ground-to-ship missiles will sink US carriers and utterly destroy the nation of Saudi Arabia.
The war would start with Iranian speedboats taking the easiest target – the Strait of Hormuz – to clear the way for minelayers to put literal thousands of mines in the narrow strait, thus blocking access to the Gulf. They might leave a channel open between Bandar and Hormuz in case some Gulf States stay neutral and demand a way to ship their oil out of the Gulf. That channel is too shallow for US nuclear submarines to travel undetected, so they can leave it open. The main stretch of the strait would be locked down.
At the same time, thousands of Iranian missiles and speedboats would attack the US carrier group in the Gulf, while a large number of other missiles will target the Saudi airfields and desalination plants. Saudi Arabia has only 2 airbases in range of Iran, so cratering them and the few small fields in the rest of the GCC will eliminate any ground-based air support the US and allies can provide, without lengthy mid-air refueling operations. This means most US air operations during the war would be conducted from carriers. Riyadh gets 99% of its water from the desalination plants on the Persian Gulf, and other GCC nations are almost equally dependent. Strikes on these desalination plants would instantly collapse all the GCC nations and create the worst humanitarian catastrophe since the Congo Wars.
Read more: Reddit
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