No. of Recommendations: 12
Not while conducting offensive operations at the same time.
You're also making my point for me that the europeans have allowed their military readiness to slide beneath the waves to a point where they might as well not have any Navies at all.No, just pointing out the inconsistency of your position. If the europeans don't have much naval strength, as you suggest, and Trump is insisting that this is something the Europeans could (or should) do, then it's clearly something that we could do ourselves - even while conducting offensive operations.
The reason we don't do it is for the same reason we don't have boots on the ground. It's difficult and dangerous to the service members, because it requires putting large numbers of people within the range of drones and short-range missile fire that we can't protect them from.
How do you know we "haven't really been blowing anything up with respect to their nuclear program"? Are you getting briefings on the strike packages?Because we already blew nearly everything up the last time we were there. And the DNI's office confirmed that they didn't rebuild any of the stuff we blew up last time. Gabbard avoided saying it out loud in her testimony, because she didn't want the video clip - but Iran had done nothing to restore the prior facilities. We've done a few strikes on some of the sites again, but to very marginal effect, because these were either tertiary sites or because they were already "obliterated" last time, to coin a phrase. Per the IAEA:
Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in an interview that aired Sunday the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has not done as much damage to the latter’s country nuclear program as U.S. and Israeli strikes did last June.
“This time around, I think the focus of the campaign does not seem to be specifically the nuclear facilities, although there have been some hits in Natanz and Isfahan and also at another place near Parchin, which used to be a facility more related to the weaponization efforts, but back in the early 2000s,” Grossi told host Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“So, there has been some [impact], but I would say they have been relatively marginal when you consider the overall nature of the military campaign so far,” he added.https://thehill.com/policy/international/5795733-g... Then that makes the strategic inaction and inability to game scenarios where they do have one pretty inexcusable.Unless there isn't a scenario where attacking them can prevent them from having a nuke, at any cost you're willing to accept. If you're not going to do an Iraq-style invasion, and anything short of that won't prevent them from getting a nuke if they want one, then what you would call strategic inaction may be the only option.
There's no inability to game scenarios where they have one - it's pretty easy to do, and I'm sure every national security department in every country has run those scenarios. That doesn't mean that you can stop them from getting a nuke by bombing them.
If you can't stop them from getting a nuke by bombing them, and if your country is unwilling to invade with ground troops, then "strategic inaction" may be all that's left. I mean, there's always diplomacy, but you have to believe that would work for that to be an alternative. There's always the option of bribing them not to go for a nuke, which is what we were doing for a while....but if you're going to reject that, you're foreclosing a lot of the potential action space.
