The War Nerd has gone way downhill from his prime, but I still read him anyway, because even so-so War Nerd is still pretty good. And sometimes he still throws out something thought-provoking:
"So, would the Osprey have helped? Hell yes. If we'd had something like it in service, the rescue mission might not have ended so disgustingly...
"Replay that raid with the Osprey as basic transport and you get a very different result. The Osprey carries 32 troops at a cruising speed of 250 mph; there'd be no need to land in the middle of the desert, because it can be refueled air-to-air. The flight would have landed directly at the staging area near Tehran, without any need to touch down in the desert during a sandstorm. A fleet of Ospreys instead of CH-53s would probably have ferried Beckwith's guys safely to their staging base outside Tehran.
"To be honest, I don't think the mission, at least from that point on, ever had a chance; it was James Bond crap that required this big American force to infiltrate Tehran in trucks and rescue the hostages, then fight its way back to the planes. It was like some mid- 80s screenplay that would've starred Patrick Swayze.
"Nobody would have made it home alive, but at least they would have died killing Revolutionary Guards at a nice, satisfying 20:1 ratio, with our air cover turning Tehran into a toasty lesson on why you should be nice to American diplomats. There's failure and there's failure, and with better transport this could've been a glorious failure instead of a painful (really painful, I remember!) joke."
Okay, obviously the Osprey wouldn't be on the table in 1980. But (handwave) let's say everything goes much better than iOTL -- all the helicopters arrive on time, the tanker truck isn't noticed, yadda yadda.
Now, Eagle Claw succeeding has been done. But what about a more spectacular failure?
The War Nerd is correct to call the rest of the plan "James Bond crap": it involved smuggling Delta Force into downtown Teheran in trucks, knocking out the Embassy's electrical power, cover fire from circling helicopters, storming the building, and then a fighting retreat (with hostages in tow) to a nearby sports arena for pickup from the air. The helicopters would fly to an Iranian Air Force base that was supposed to be captured by Rangers, so that pickup planes could fly in. It was an ugly kludge of a plan, always more likely to fail than to succeed.
But let's say it's a big, explosive, bloody failure: Delta Force makes it to the Embassy, gets the hostages out (losing some), fights its way to the stadium (losing some more), then gets trapped in the stadium. (Say one chopper gets shot down and the rest chicken out.) At the end of the day most of the hostages are dead and so is most of Delta Force. They do manage to take several hundred Iranians with them, mind.
Now what?
Doug M.