So Fast It Isn't Even There

If you’ve been reading news for the last few years, you been reading that the U.S. Navy was on the verge of obsolescence, especially in a direct fight with the increasingly powerful Iranian naval forces. No, really.

Iran had ultrafast supercavitating torpedoes from Russia, so the aircraft carrier had become a white elephant. If the Americans ever dared to attack Iran, the Iranians would just drop all the carriers like it was sinking three-foot putts. Here’s a British headline from 2022:

2024 headline:

More recent headline from last year:

While the water would be full of insanely fast Iranian torpedoes, a U.S.-Iran war would also see clouds of hypersonic missiles in the sky. Iranian supersonic missiles, I mean. CBS News, among many others, reported a few years ago on unconfirmed claims that Iran had obtained anti-ship missiles that “can fly more than five times the speed of sound.”

So imagine what would happen if the U.S. and Iran ever actually went to war. Like the news said, the poor Americans wouldn’t stand a chance.

The shooting hasn’t stopped, so maybe we’ll still see the ugly spectacle of the Iranians sinking an American warship. There’s always room for a war to go sideways. But it doesn’t look like they have much left to shoot torpedoes from. The white elephants are working.

In economics, in global politics, in military affairs, in public health, in cutting off your genitals and sewing on some new ones, and name more examples if you want, we’ve been living through an age of facile theory. Those moments eventually end, and we come to the testing of the real thing. Here we are. What’s especially clear is that the American war is being watched. The U.S. just sunk an enemy warship with a torpedo fired from a submarine for the first time since World War II, so now everyone has had a real-world look at submarine-fired U.S. torpedoes in combat. (If you haven’t read how that torpedo works, click on that link and read carefully, ‘cause holy crap.) An Israeli F-35 shot down an Iranian jet, the first air-to-air kill in combat for the F-35, so now the world has seen an air-to-air kill from an F-35. Imagine the discussions around tables in military facilities all over the world.

A giant laboratory project is underway. Russia and China are developing a list of lessons learned without having to learn them firsthand, because the helpful Iranians are giving them the courtesy of serving as the test subjects. And it very much makes me wonder how much the American and Israeli combat operations are being analyzed by AI, especially in China. A few writers are already offering suggestions about what the Chinese and Russians think some lessons of the war might be. Don’t give the Americans time to park hundreds of warplanes next to your country, I think is one.

A bunch of theories are being tested and put to rest. We might know in ten years what the results of all that testing are. Ask an Iranian frigate commander about his supercavitating torpedoes, if you ever get a chance, because they’re supposed to be the dominant weapon in the naval battlespace.