An Iranian Toll-Gate on the Strait of Hormuz?
Ron Unz
EPub Format
The American-Israeli war against Iran began a couple of weeks ago and seemed very much a David-vs-Goliath contest, with combat operations likely to be extremely one-sided.
In recent years, America’s annual military spending has been roughly a trillion dollars, while Iran’s budget was merely $8 billion. Some estimates put Iran’s true outlays as considerably higher, but hardly enough to level the playing field. So whether the actual ratio of our military expenditures has been 100-to-1 or 70-to-1 or even merely 50-to-1, the mismatch was stark.
Over the last quarter-century, our ground forces have greatly shrunk in size, so our current strength is overwhelmingly concentrated in our air power, supplemented by our naval forces, with the lat...
