War with Iran will not go down like Iraq or Libya. You ever heard of Millennium Challenge 2002? It basically was a war game that simulated what war with Iran would be like. Iran has a couple of advantages. One is geography. Second is that they would fight no a conventional war with the US. But an asymmetrical war against the US. It won't be a conventional war. It will an asymmetrical war. The Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf is vast. Plus the cost is a labyrinth of small islands. Iran has thousands of anti-ship missiles like C-802, Sunburn, Yakhont. Plus Iranian versions of those missiles which they successfully built. Their speedboats are also equipped with those missiles. They will use guerrilla tactics. That means fire missiles and flee to the labyrinth of rocky islands.
Plus the coast is very narrow. The anti ship missiles are very fast on their own. With a much narrow coast the Aegis systems will detect the missile only second before impact. That means the ship will have no time to for countermeasures. Not to mention Iran will set mines. And on top of that Iran would fire salvos of ballistic missiles along with dangerous anti-ship missiles to overwhelm American ships defenses.
Iran then would fire hundreds of ballistic missiles to Saudi oil infrastructure and activate their Shia proxies in the eastern province to start an armed insurrection.
Imagine Gulf desalination plants and electrical grid system destroyed. Imagine no water and electricity in Saudi Arabia? The country would turn into Yemen overnight. It will force the Saudis to fight a two-front war with the Houthi forces and Shia militias in the east. Shia militias in Iraq would start targeting US forces in Iraq. Iran would dump about 500 sea mines in the Persian gulf and Straigh of Hormuz. That alone would take months to clear up. Oil would skyrocket to record highs and the global economy would plunge into a depression. Since the Persian Gulf and Straights of Hormuz is so narrow US ships would be forces to be sitting out in the Indian Ocean.That bring up another dilemma. What if the Fifth Fleet is taking massive losses? How would they go and save them. Plus the further a US aircraft carries is from Iran the less likely they will carry heavier bombs which means their strikes will be limited in nature.
And on top of this, the air war would be hard to implement. Iran has the S-300 which is a game changer.
Iran's use of S-300 isn't to defeat the US air force. The US will simply use cruise missiles and stealth bombers to take them out. However, the fact that the US will have to destroy the S-300's before sending in conventional air force means that Iran buys time to use its military to retaliate against US interests. Without S-300 much of Iran's offensive abilities wouldn't last past the second or third wave. With the S-300 the first and second wave attacks will be against the air defense and not the offensive abilities. That is to say, it will protect Iran's deterrence ability and increase the cost of a war.
The problem with the S300 is that the US will have to focus solely on taking out the S300. That means they will have to ignore Iran's anti-ship missiles, ballistic missiles site, and other targets to focus taking out the S300. There is a reason they weren't thrilled that Iran was going to get them. It makes an air campaign in Iran much harder. What does that mean? More American casualties and the chaos spreads
This is why no one wanted war with Iran. The reason is that Iran's response would spread more chaos and destruction in the region. Meanwhile, you wouldn't win. It would be a stalemate. It would be like the Lebanon 2006 war on a grander scale. In the end, the US would have gained nothing. Only heavy casulties,a region is even more chaos,a global economy in total ruin.
