Before I get into the rant, a lot of this is nakedly skewed by the fact one of my favorite books is set about 50 NM north of the edge of the map, and the fact I can’t make missions for it is maddening.
But in my head, this map is essentially going to be the Iran (and maybe Russia) vs the Gulf Cooperation Council ( and maybe the US, Maybier the UK, France and whoever). On the GCC side you have somewhere around 100 modern F-16Cs, Mirage 2000s and F-15s. On the Iranian side you have this:
and I’d take those numbers with a healthy grain of salt.
Further more, Iran has nine air bases. Four of them are located on islands that have runways of marginal length and are going to be entirely un-supportable once the red flag goes up anyhow. Of the remaining five three (Qeshm, Bandar Lengeh, Lars) are civilian fields that look like they could be knocked out of action with a single F/A-18s worth of GBU-31s. One (Handarya) looks to be a military field but mostly oriented towards supporting naval surveillance aircraft and helicopters. Finally Bandar Abbas looks to be a mixed use field, but is the only one that actually has bunkers, HASs and dispersed hangars.
In my lizard brain, I’m seeing the options of a red trying to push over the straights, blue trying to push over the straights, and some sort of neutral, unconventional conflict centered over the straights.
My concern is the majority of playable airfields (thus objectives) are on the “blue” side of the straight. Red is going to be attacking with a force consisting primarily of thirty year old aircraft into a wall of Patriots, AMRAAMs and MICAs. I don’t see how that’s anything but target practice for Blue. In a scenario where Blue is pushing into Iran, outside of the greatest IADs you’ve never seen, I can’t imagine where it would take more than five or so sorties to entirely knock the Red air force out of the fight. After which the music is over. That’s not to say Red automatically would lose, but it’s harder to craft a scenario where they don’t when their air bases are so fragile and clustered near the enemy. Chabahar or Shiraz create distance, and distance creates time, which with ambiguity creates tension. It’s harder to fit a pop-up threat in a smaller area and make it a surprise.
The most interesting of the three would be a neutral engagement. The geopolitical rub that makes Hormuz interesting in the first place is a disproportionate amount of Europe and Asia’s petrochemicals flow through a narrow body of water surrounded on three sides by an unfriendly country. The question is: can the US (and GCC) prevent a geographically better positioned but technologically inferior enemy from closing the straight and or causing unsustainable damage to civilian shipping?
Problem is. We don’t have the assets. We don’t have the proper US Warships save one, we don’t have any Iranian naval vessels or land based ASM and SSM sites, nor do we have Dhows, Tankers, Trawlers or civilian vessels required to create a mission more ambiguous than “sink tiny boats, protect bigger boats”.
This, to me, is a disappointment. I’m not ready to say the sky is falling. The recent announcements for the Hornet and the WWII stuff signal to me that ED seems to be set on expanding the list of assets again, and my complaints about size and arrangement of the terrain were eventually fixed marvelously on the NTTR. This can all be mitigated.
I’m just saying that in six months or a year when we’ve leveled Bandar Abbas for the fiftieth consecutive time, I better not hear @Tankerwade complaining about how all we seem to do is level Bandar Abbas.
