Josh Keating

This is an asymmetric fight.

I don't think anyone was ever under any illusions that Iran was going to sort of defeat Israel.

the US and Israel in a conventional military sense, what they can do is they're willing to absorb a lot more punishment up to and including the death of the Supreme Leader while continuing to impose costs on the US, on Israel, on the wider region that might just be, you know, more than this US government can tolerate at a time of, you know, rising gas prices, lowering poll numbers, impending midterms, you know, pick your factor at work here.

Yeah, I mean, I actually wrote an article last week on how Russia has been a beneficiary of this conflict on a few fronts, one being whenever oil is over $100 a barrel, that's good news for the Kremlin.

But another are just these concerns that interceptors or other munitions that were previously bound for Ukraine could get diverted to the Middle East.

And there hasn't been reporting that that's happening quite yet, but it's something that

you know i i've in recent conversations i've had with european officials something they've been very concerned about and then yeah and turning to east asia the same week there was this reported they were moving the thad system out of south korea north korea was conducting tests of a new ship launched missile system of their own so

I've written about this interceptor issue, also about aircraft carriers.

The US only has three of those at sea at any one given time.

We've now moved two of them to the Middle East, one of which, the Ford, is badly in need of maintenance to the point that they just had a terrible fire on that ship.

Its deployment's been extended several times.

I think what both these stories really underline is that even with the sheer scale of money that the U.S.

spends on its military, even with the advanced technology it has with our ability to strike targets all over the world, seemingly at will, that there really are still

material constraints on the projection of U.S.

power and the ability to shift on a dime from fighting one war in Venezuela one month to the Middle East the next month.

There are real issues with the number of munitions and interceptors we have.

It takes time to move an aircraft carrier all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

We still do live in a real world with real physical constraints and that we have to remember that if we're going to be getting into a new military conflict every month.

Hmm.

Well, in a way, he did it by not being Marco Rubio. He kind of... abandoned everything that he, or much of what he has stood for in the past, endeared himself to Trump, supported the president vocally and through policy changes, and just, you know, earn the president's trust.