thread (nitter alt) about how Hollywood propaganda has completely broken people's brains about US military capabilities

One of the worst moments in the history of military cinema was the final battle in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Considering that film was heavily supported by the Pentagon, recent events have put a sinister cast on what is facially just an over-the-top action scene. ... an American general in a high-tech command center sees the battle happening on a drone feed and barks out orders to commence the operation. This causes a US Navy armada (including one destroyer mounting a railgun) to magically appear off the Egyptian coast and launch an amphibious assault with LCACs 110 miles up the Nile Delta to Giza to put US Army tanks on the ground and firing on Megatron in what appears to be literally a couple of minutes of in-universe time.

Of course the good guys win, hooray, it's a fun action set-piece in a lowbrow blockbuster. But here's the thing. This entire sequence was vetted and approved by the Public Affairs Office, and the US military was heavily involved with the production - to the point some of the "special effects" in the battle were live tank gun rounds being fired into the set. And yet, apparently, none of the soldiers involved with this thought for a moment to pump the brakes and point out that all of this was ridiculous. How ridiculous? This is a franchise about transforming robots from outer space and somehow the most unrealistic moment in all five movies doesn't even involve them. That cinematic low point instead falls on a depiction of the United States military teleporting its entire joint force enterprise into battle over the course of a literal phone call. And nobody thought to point this out to Michael Bay, probably, because that was exactly the message the Pentagon wanted to send.

And now we have people on this website assuming that the United States can just handwave the kind of military forces out of thin air needed to deter and, if necessary, defeat Iran. Logistics, basing, access, transit times, force correlations, who cares - we've got this. And that is, unfortunately, exactly in line with the Pentagon's most public messaging about its own capabilities. This has seen the US government repeatedly embarrassed and the US public disappointed in recent years when it turns out that American aircraft take days, carriers take weeks and tanks take months to arrive at the crisis of the hour.