There are a few things I find fascinating about the current war. First and foremost, it’s a war of attrition and apparently that never occurred to the pentagon command structure. One of the things that Europe learned pretty thoroughly before the Franco-Prussian War, is that an experienced command structure that knows how to communicate and plan is essential. Or so we would think.
The US and Israel appear to have started a serious regional conflict, without having done any of the modeling and planning that would go with it. Earlier, I mentioned the amazing fact of the missile consumption problem and how the US, and Israel, do not seem to have thought it was worth considering. Or maybe they’re so incompetent that they didn’t think that ammunition supply was a thing? When someone (I hope not Bob Woodward) gets around to writing the history of how this happened, I hope they reveal the discussions leading up to it, the amount of co-ordination with Israel, contingency plans, and all of the other things. We’ve been seeing a remarkable performance of the default Trumpist action loop, which is basically a decision tree where all the nodes end in: “lie about it.” But even that does not seem to have been considered in a contingency plan – nobody pre-loaded the situation with “if something bad happens, downplay it and lie freely.” For goodness’ sake, even in high school we had enough sense to establish a default failure plan (e.g.: “run away and meet at the parking garage, deny everything.”) and we were never doing anything as heavy as overthrowing the world order, breaking up NATO, and cratering at least 3 parts of the global economy (oil, fertilizer, and aluminum) soon to maybe be microprocessors and fresh water in an area with a population of millions. The worst we did in high school was stuff like sneak into movie theaters.
Default failure plan? That’s the sort of thing that the pentagon is supposed to have, or be able to pretend that they have. Instead, we get the US’ latest $13bn nuclear aircraft carrier spattered by a few suicide drones and the press is fed some story about a fire in the laundry room, that displaced 300 crew, and disabled the ship enough that it’s headed for a repair facility. [And, since we here at stderr are real fans of the F-35, it gives us a jolt of schadenfreude to see that F-35s aren’t actually doing that well, and they’ve lost a few of them] But there’s not even a default success plan. The lack of a success plan somewhat reminds me of poor Napoleon Bonaparte, who marched his 500,000 soldiers to Moscow, got thousands killed at Borodino, took Moscow and discovered that the Russian monarchy had decamped and was not surrendering once their capital was taken. Wait, what? Enjoy the winter wonderland walk back to Poland. The US is in a weird situation, too, having duplicated the Israeli’s illegal and horrifying habit of assassinating everyone that they might be able to negotiate with. And then, Turnip, who must have heard it in a movie or something, starts talking about “unconditional surrender.” Then, the US has dropped back to its default anything military plan: bombing the living fuck out of civilians. Let’s talk about that.
I don’t expect this to happen, but it could and if I worked for the pentagon I’d get thrown out of every meeting by raising my hand and asking “what about counter-bombardment?” Here’s a scenario I don’t like very much: Iran refuses to surrender and continues to remind Israel periodically that they are still at war, and their missile “defense” is no longer effective. Basically, it’s the “Marv” move from Sin City – he’s covered in band-aids, he’s lost a few friends (which has really pissed him off), he’s willing to lose whatever he has left, and also he knows he’s ratcheting up a truly hellacious reputation for trading punch for punch. But imagine that Iran starts to focus on US bases and ships (which, you may have noticed, have run away) and Tel Aviv and Israeli settlements, and just does not give up. Every time Israel or some US base get another 6 interceptor missiles, hit them with 12 medium range missiles, and watch them run around putting out the fires. But this is not the payoff. The payoff comes when the US runs out of steam and Iran shrugs, “we are not done, yet.” Iran recently sent a message that the US did not catch (apparently) – they launched a long-range ballistic missile – which landed, with Putin’s permission, in Siberia. The point was “London, soon. Then, New York and Washington.” It would be 100% within Chinese or North Korean (or even Russian) strategy to drop the Iranians a few hints on advanced missile design that might let them bring the fight to their tormentors. I don’t know if you’ve seen the various disturbingly beautiful videos of Tel Aviv getting the snot whacked out of it, but that could be London next. And what’s crazy is that most of the world would cheer loudly. I just hope they don’t paint the missiles with black and white checks; that would be naughty. I have had this conversation with several of my strategist buddies “out there” and half of them think I am smoking opium (nope, sadly) or tripping on other psychoactives (nope, LSD, mushrooms, DMT, none of them make you think of anything as weird and fucked up as this situation) Anyhow, now you know why I have been so happy that when the US said “Iran may have nukes in 2 weeks” all I could think was “either that’s a lie or I’d start evacuating Tel Aviv”. Of course it was a lie. It’s always a lie. I am happy it was a lie.
Meanwhile, I sure hope the US and its allies are planning on thoroughly searching all the ships that are in the area that leave and head toward the UK or US. Imagine a scenario where a cargo ship with a couple missiles in containers joins the horde going around the cape to avoid the strait, and eventually, suddenly, blows a few holes in New York. Ooops now we need to stop and search every cargo ship. This is an old well-known scenario: a cargo ship carrying a nuke into New York’s harbor, just – not yet.
3 6-man commando teams could take out a major city’s power grid during a heat or cold wave, for weeks. Pull the guys who know how to fix the transformers and shoot them, then the transformers stay broken a long long time.
Usually, my friends insist that this sort of strike would result in a nuclear response. Unfortunately, Iran has been being subjected to B-52 strikes against Tehran and other targets. On top of that, its reactor at Bushehr has been severely damaged by Israeli missiles. So far the Israelis have not gone after the Mosul Dam, but I wouldn’t put it past those motherfuckers; it’d be a genocidal war crime and they like that. Note that someone is already going to have to deal with subterranean vaults permeated with uranium hexaflouride, and worse – adding a reactor clean-up at Bushehr is just a small increment. The Iranians are getting pounded, in other words, and don’t appear to have lost their starch at all. I was shocked as hell the other day when I found myself wanting to cheer when the Iranians counter-struck Israel’s main weapons factory at Dimona. They did not flatten the place, any more than the US strikes against Natanz flattened those. I’m sure that the US strikes made a mess, and the Iranians will struggle to deal with it and clean it up, but that’s how real people fight a real war that they are committed to. I guess that’s one of my key points: the US is not serious. The Iranians are really serious.
The US and its allies are not serious, in fascinating ways. Ways that, I suspect, have already gotten US soldiers and allies killed. Amazingly, the US military’s first response was to … (wait for it) blame the Russians. Or the Chinese. Or fucking Mickey Mouse, I do not know. So, there was a huge-ish collection of extremely valuable aircraft sitting at Al Udeid, the US base in Qatar. You can go on commercial landsat, pay $19, and have a look at them. Two days later, Iranian missiles plastered Al Udeid so precisely that one of the things they hit was an AWACS Sentry – a super-secret flying command post – and blew it in half. Another laundry room fire. Also, several parked KC-135s had laundry room fires. Officially the US casualties so far are 17 or thereabouts, but there are disturbing rumors in the overseas marine community that something really bad may have happened. Like the Iranians may have scored a direct hit on a laundry room full of people. Or a mess hall, or something else. That would also be part of the balance of warfare: as you stage your troops into positions where they can deal damage to an enemy, you begin to build up a force protection problem. I have written about that several times, before: your troops – until they become offensive weapons – are targets. It’s absolutely mind-blowing to me that Instagram, etc., appear to be full of very stupid people who post pictures from right outside of an airbase in England of B-52s taking off. Wanna know when they’ll be coming over Iran? How long does it take for a B-52 to fly from England to Iran? Since Iran hasn’t got an airforce, anymore, or air defences, really, I suppose that it doesn’t matter. But knowing when the B-1s are coming back might be interesting. That’s just math. Then, you need a bunch of guys in a boat in international waters, with some antiaircraft gear, holding down the glide path. That’s a one-shot opportunity, of course.
But the same imbecility (ignoring force protection problem) applies in many, many, creative ways. This is the sort of problem that special forces are supposed to create for an enemy: sneak out under cover of darkness and place a laser dot on the thing you want to see blow sky-high.
In US and Israeli terms, Disneyworld is a “legitimate target”
What people are resolutely refusing to see is that, if Tehran is a “legitimate target” for carpet-bombing by B-52s, B-52s in bases in the US homeland are legitimate targets, too. If the Iranian power grid is a target, so is Los Angeles’ power grid. Or oil wells. Or airport. It’s not “terrorism” it’s “special operations.” And – amazingly – the US has been calling Iran the largest sponsor of terrorism for decades when, in fact, the US CIA is almost certainly the largest terrorist organization in history unless you want to count the British army. Maybe I’m just trying to be too sophisticated with my asymmetric warfare, but I grew up in a time when the Irish beat the British army with a few truck-bombs and petrol grenades and the Vietcong demolished the massive US war machine with, basically, their guts and venom. It’s ironic, to me, that after decades of accusing the Iranians of being horrible terrorists, they’re not terroristing, at all, yet. Terroristing would be, you know, sending troops all over the world to hang around in the flight paths of commercial aircraft, with professional-level gear. [That is an oblique reference to the US Vincennes that “mistook” Iran Air flight 655 for an F-14 – and killed 300 passengers] My favorite idea in that area (Iranians, if you’re listening…?) Israeli settlements had big problems controlling wildfires when the season got dry. Incendiary drones would be less likely to trigger interception attempts from the systems in place to protect cities, so just … burn settlements.
I am not saying any of that with anti-Israeli animus. I am just being, you know, an equal-opportunity strategist. The Israel situation is … particularly interesting and nobody seems to want to talk about it. So, since I’m a horrible person, I guess I’ll go there and do that. The Israelis appear to have launched a major ground incursion into Lebanon. Wait, what? This is a war based on a joint surprise attack against Iran! Because Iran may have nuclear weapons, someday. No, but, right now Israel has launched a major incursion – in terms of typical Israeli incursions, I could say “massive” – into Lebanon. As of this morning, they are reported to have taken and/or flattened much of southern Lebanon. Also, as of this morning they have, supposedly, lost several of their “Merkava” tanks, which are a pretty good tank, except the word is that the Russians or Turkish have given the Lebanese a few “Kornet” Russian anti-tank guided missiles. A Kornet has a fair but not certain chance of taking out an Abrams tank with a flank shot, so the Israeli tanks are probably getting hurt just the right amount. I.e.: not enough to really freak out, but enough to remember that this was a bad idea. Yes, all of that makes no sense at all: the war is ostensibly to stop Iran from its endless plan of developing nukes, but the Israelis are using the whole thing as cover for what can only be described as a “heinous land grab.” Oh, for sure, they’re making their usual noises about how Hamas is shooting rockets at Tel Aviv but it’s kind of weird to be off expanding the borders, while Tel Aviv is getting plastered every night with serious missiles from Iran.
I don’t know how smart/aware/vicious/machiavellian the current Egyptian regime is, but I’d be looking at that map and building drones: anti-tank drones, incendiary drones, and anti-drone drones. Because it oughtn’t take a genius pyramid-builder to realize that when Israel is done consolidating its northern border, it’s going to look for easy pickings to the south. The Egyptian regime is probably thinking “Gosh, this Trump fellow is not very trust-worthy.” Or something like that.
So, I guess that’s the war so far. As someone who has studied historical strategy, I must say that literally everything about this is fucked up, so far. What I’m afraid is that it gels, or metastasizes into something truly horrible. Imagine if the Iranians start a Vietcong-style insurgency and pull in the Houthis and, basically, everyone else who is pissed off at the US Empire. Literally anyone and everyone who is a player in this mess ought to be figuring out how to arm the Cubans with something horrible. I’d bet something that this has occurred to some people. And what really blows my mind is that is seems like the best strategist and the person who is playing the tightest game is: Kim Jong Un. Missing from the scene is Bibi Netanyahu, who – I’m a bad person – I hope has been vaporised so thoroughly that his whereabouts remain a mystery for decades. And if you hear a distant cheering, that’s me everytime the Iranians mention that Trump ordered killed their entire power structure and the underground bunker his ballroom isn’t done yet.
He may be the wild card
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was some fucking weird times. Every nation that had oil rushed
to set fire to the others’ oil. Then, they complained. “Ooo, this sucks”, they said.
Perhaps you have noticed that I illustrated this posting with AI generated images. The new checkpoints are remarkably good – I’m using a trick of having one that has a particularly good vocabularly and comprehension generate a half-completed sketch, which is then handed to one that renders remarkably well. I’m going to say, categorically, that the images came out the way I wanted them to – they are not just “produce 10, pick 1” they’re usually correct on the first try.
I have mentioned on a few Instagram postings of bombers taking off from England, “Hey, there is a war on and that’s a legitimate military target you’re posting pictures of. You might want to think about this and then you’ll understand why most Americans think you English are clod-heads.” Maybe it’s my approach, but they want to argue with me. I, personally, cannot imagine anything more stupid than the US being perfectly comfortable saying that their B-2s park here and refuel. Those places are defended, sure, but not by a lot of people and if 20 men in 2 or 3 jeeps assaulted the base and started shooting things up, it would be a hell of a thing. And, in case you are thinking “Marcus is full of crap, as usual” consider the SAS raid on Sidi Hainesh airfield in 1942 where a bunch of SAS guys in a fleet of land rovers destroyed over 40 luftwaffe aircraft and also caused the germans one hell of a force protection nightmare.
I’m tempted not even to post this, but what the hell. This is my nightmare scenario: Iran currently has enough enriched uranium for 6 warheads. That is a lot. It’s only 70% enriched, not weapons-grade. But consider my cargo ship scenario above, or a commercial aircraft on a one-way trip, and imagine what happens if it’s carrying a bunch of enriched uranium 70% and explosive to scatter it. One hit with that and Washington or New York is a wasteland for 30-40 years, just like Pripyat. Mr Kim, if you want to hire me, have your people contact my people; my deets are easy to find.
I’ve been actively avoiding the news lately, because it’s just too much, and I’m too small and have no ability to do anything about it.
I feel like American society has been long building this problem with valuing confidence over competence, and hegseth is pretty much the end result of that. I’m reminded of that quote along the lines of ~ small team leaders think tactics, mid level think strategy, high level think logisitics, top level think finances, etc. And it’s clear hegseth has no clue about logistics – just that stunt a while back where he commanded all one-star plus ranks to show up in person for a stupid lecture/rant. I cant even imagine how exasperating it must be for an accomplished general or whatever sit through a wanna-be-dressing-down by some washed-up, reservist, O3 pogue, who doesn’t even understand the benefits of rules of engagement…
And he went about firing so many women, POC, and LGBT officers, and created an environment where many more (including cis/het, christian, white guys) officers resigned. Talk about competence loss and brain-drain.
I’m probably bumping into “benevolent sexism” and similar, but I’ve generally held in high regard people who have succeeded in environs that are institutionally hostile to them – I feel like such individuals not only had to be excellent in their field, but more so in over-compensation, as well as just enduring an inherently hostile culture.,
I’m reminded of a supervisor at a recent job who refused to make back-up/contingency plans, because they refused to accept the idea that their initial/primary plan could do anything less then perform perfectly. So much wasted time, labor, resources…
I’m not a fan of Iran’s religious dictatorship, especially it’s oppression of women and LGBTQ folk, don’t get me wrong. But, “double-tapping” (what a horrible appropriation for a truly despicable act of terrorism…) a girl’s school is inexcusable and undefendable.
Some people are taking solace in the horrible people in charge being so incompetent, but at this point, I’m beginning to think it just means even the best-case-scenarios are going to be apocalyptic in nature.
Sorry, that got a bit rambly, but I just feel so much is so wrong with what’s going on. I don’t have any confidence that things will be “set right” anytime soon. I’ve been prone to doomerism, but the current scenario has outpaced my pessimism…
The thing that’s really been bugging me recently is: what the hell are the Marines and the 82nd Airborne who are currently inbound, inbound for? I mean, I’m pretty sure they’re not on a sight-seeing tour, right? Is the US really going to position those forces and then go, “nah, actually, we’ve thought better of it”? Because let’s face it, “thinking” would be a major break with precedent here…
So, what the fuck do you do with a few thousand amphibious assault specialists when you’re losing a war in the Persian Gulf? Well, I can think of a few options, but all of them are horrible – like D-Day or Gallipoli, but you’re trying to land in literally hell, right down to the lakes of burning poison, whilst under constant drone, missile, and artillery fire. Oh, and everything’s been booby-trapped, and there are a couple of divisions of bright-eyed fanatics waiting for you and their glorious martyrdom, who know there is no possibility of retreat. And you can’t resupply or retreat once you’re committed… From the Iranian perspective, the main question looks to be “what percentage of the force do you allow to land before starting shooting, in order to cause maximum disarray?”
If we were going to make a list of the things that Hegseth clearly has no clue about, we’d be here a long time.
Why do you think Israel would take out the Mosul Dam? Iraq is barely a factor in this war, they’d be doing it entirely for teh evulz.
If you meant one of the big dams in Iran, they’re all running dry, so blowing them up doesn’t accomplish all that much. The ongoing water crisis in Iran was one of the many factors behind the recent protests after all.
I have absolutely no relevant experience or knowledge about military maneuvers, the logistics required, or military strategy. The closest I get is having played the Axis & Allies board game a bit in college.
And with all of that, even I knew that Iran would block off the Stait of Hormuz if seriously threatened. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it mentioned multiple times in the news, where anyone can hear about it. Iran attacked leads to Strait of Hormuz issues which leads to oil supply nightmare. I learned about this years ago.
I also learned that the crude oil produced by US oil wells is not the type our refineries are built to process. Which is a problem if you’re thinking the US just produces enough oil to shrug off world market issues. We have to sell ours and then buy someone else’s on the world market or we don’t have any we can refine into products like gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. This I only learned last year or the year before. But the idea that this could be an issue was starkly obvious if there were disruptions in supply. I should add I also have no inside knowledge of the oil industry.
But our supposed leaders who want to imagine they’re geniuses not only appear to have missed both of these basic facts, they give every appearance of having planned for Iran to just… stand there and wait to get bombed. They didn’t have a failure plan or a success plan because their plan seems to have Iran doing absolutely nothing.
I play roleplaying games and the idea that fights are broken up into rounds and people take turns doing things is so far from reality it’s absurd. But even that seems far more realistic than the idea that Iran would do absolutely nothing if the US attacked it. But that’s the level of planning we seem to have had.
As far as I can tell they were too busy thinking about their own issues. Trump certainly seems to have thought he’d finally change the news headlines with Operation Epstein Fury. Hegseth thought he’d finally found an excuse to pound his chest and have anyone take him seriously. Like a little dog so desperate to have you think he’s a big dog that he pees all over himself. And the rest were busy wondering how to swoop in and claim credit at the end if these two chucklefucks managed to pull it off while also having nothing to do with it if it went badly.
The GOP doesn’t seem to think too highly about mental health and therapy. But this sure as hell looks like the world’s most expensive mental health treatment for some of the worst people in the US. And it’s not even working. I’m sure they can still tell they’re worthless imbeciles.
I realized I do have one idea to contribute to the overall strategy.
Some reporting said Trump wanted to slap his name on the Persian Gulf. That would be ridiculous, obviously. But if the Iranians are so inclined perhaps they could find a small tidal pool near the Strait of Hormuz and donate it to the cause. We can all call it Trump’s Folly to commemorate what happened here. He could get his name on the maps! I’m sure he’d be happy.
I humbly suggest this could be a more valuable and useful tactic than anything the US does for the remainder of this war aside from ending it.
What’s clear to me is that they didn’t have a default failure plan because it simply never occurred to them that they COULD fail. And indeed, even as the rest of the world is looking at them and thinking “what a bunch of failures” they still seem unable to process the idea. They are the worst kind of delusional fantasists, high on their own supply, high on just how. Much. Money has been spent on all these amaaaaaaazing weapon systems (F-35s included). They seem to be labouring under the idea that whoever has, and spends, the most money, wins.
And the thing is, they’re RIGHT – as long as the battles you’re fighting are in the courts over things like unpaid bills. That’s what they’re used to, and they’ve grown used to winning, over decades.
But now these are not court battles, they’re, y’know, BATTLES.
You appear to have mislocated the very stupid people. The very stupid people are the people INSIDE those airbases (and the ones inside the aircraft, particularly) who are obviously blissfully ignorant of just how much the people standing just outside the airbase with cameras fucking hate them and would like them all to die. The people with the cameras will obviously argue with you because they want to maintain the superficially plausible facade of ignorance… but at least some of them know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re exercising their rights in a free country, after all. Are you going to suggest, perhaps, the English people in England should be somehow prevented forcibly from taking pictures whatever they like in a public place? Good luck with that. You can have the Andrew formerly known as Prince come and testify about his sex life in one of your courts the week after Anne Sacoolas faces justice in one of ours for killing an English man. The US’s reputation in the UK – never great – is surely at an all time low and burrowing.
Meanwhile, another reason why the US military is spending ALL the money and still can’t ever seem to actually win any kind of armed conflict may be explained by the following Fry & Laurie sketch: (Note: for SAS, please substitute Delta Force, Seal Team Six, the F-35, Space Force, the Marines, huge aircraft carriers, or any other impressive but functionally useless set of expensive gear/personnel).
https://youtu.be/jl3hw4LF9t8?si=KSdGGy1ogAH6hLF-
Where on the rumor→fact scale does the Ford “laundry fire” conjecture fit?
I think some people at the Pentagon have done the modeling and the people who decided to go to war didn’t care. This is an entirely political war, started for political reasons. I’m not sure what Netanyahu thought about winning but Trump assumed that the biggest fanciest army would win. Trump clearly thought he could show US superiority and Iran would negotiate for peace on Trump’s terms.
The US military realized sometime in the last year or two that the current missile/drone defense network wouldn’t work in a new war. The current US missile defense system is designed to stop individual attacks with the highest reliability at any cost. The war in Ukraine sunk in at some point and the planners realized that the US system is easily overwhelmed with drone swarm attacks. They have been trying to adjust but the US military is not fast about this sort of thing and US military procurement just makes thing worse.
Putting a laser dot on something can now be done by the cheapest drone you can imagine.
Those military guys in images 2,3,6 have pretty good camo… except for the bright red hats. Here’s my brilliant military tactic: Give your special forces reversible berets.
ahcuah@#7:
I’m inclined to believe what I have heard, which is that the Iranians tried an oversaturation attack and got a few hits in, one of which blew up a laundry room and bunk space for 300 crew.
Remember in Doonesbury when Zonker got the purple heart for cutting his thumb on a beer tab? There are a few people who tore their fingers with those aluminum foil packets soap comes in.
Sometimes quantity is its own quality. As 200 USD toilet seats go to 2000 USD for whatever specious reason, there’s still only so many ways a butt can sit on them.
The whole graft of military acquisitions requires that higher prices exist so that the vig can remain at the same percent but the total number of golden simoleons that end up in your pocket and your co-conspirators’ pockets goes up up up.
I’m a bit more cynical than you. I think they DO know that they are crippling this nation’s military and are fucking things up for forever. They just don’t care because y’know: the cash duckats.
lochaber@#1:
And he went about firing so many women, POC, and LGBT officers, and created an environment where many more (including cis/het, christian, white guys) officers resigned. Talk about competence loss and brain-drain.
I don’t want to sound indifferent, but militaries are pretty immune to that stuff. The competence and logistical skills exist at the level of the cadre that train NCOs, the NCOs themselves, and Warrant Officers. Lopping off the upper branches of the tree may seem like a dramatic shakeup, but it’s just as likely to cut out deadwood like David Petraeus, Mad Dog Mattis, the dipshits responsible for the “surge” strategy in Afghanistan, etc. Sure, some of them spoke out against some of the problems, but generally they were just promotion-hunters looking for a sweet pension. The US military is massively top-heavy.
Also, another shocker: the US military is top-heavy in terms of gear. Not only is our gear ridiculously over-priced, it’s over-designed and engineered for its typical mission, etc. Basically, the US military is a rip-off. I have mentioned this several times before – they buy next generation stealth aircraft that can’t do close air support, and cancel the aircraft that can – meanwhile the aircraft are mostly being used as bomb sleds conveying high explosive to noncombatant areas. The first red flag should always be if the B-52s come out: they only do one thing, and they do it remarkably well, so it means someone is going to get massive arc-light strikes. Probably Medcins Sans Frontieres hospitals, if history is any indicator. The US military is a gigantic rip-off: they are having trouble dealing with Iran, which has an annual military budget of under $8bn – and we’ve probably consumed that much just in paint for our ludicrously over-sized navy.
etc.
Some people are taking solace in the horrible people in charge being so incompetent, but at this point, I’m beginning to think it just means even the best-case-scenarios are going to be apocalyptic in nature.
For decades, political analysts have wondered if the US empire can achieve a “soft landing” without having to have a globally destructive war that ends with a nuclear exchange. It may be that the gods have placed Donald Trump’s spotted behind on the golden throne to serve as a lesson to the rest of us (dictatorships suck, white supremacists are evil) and to collapse our economic dominance (enshrined in the Bretton Woods and World Bank imperialism) and technological imperialism (in the form of the NPT) Maybe we will punch ourselves in the face and gain some clues.
Of course I thought the English were going to learn something from BREXIT, so fuck humanity entirely.
seachange@#11:
I think they DO know that they are crippling this nation’s military and are fucking things up for forever. They just don’t care because y’know: the cash duckats.
Yeah, well, “it has worked so far.”
When it stops working, we’ll either step back and re-assess things, or just blow the snot out of some small country and blame them and everything will go back to working because we terrorized them.
Reginald Selkirk@#9:
Putting a laser dot on something can now be done by the cheapest drone you can imagine.
That’s true. That area of military technology is subject to rapid change. Basically what we are seeing is empirical proof that a force that goes to war with 6th-generation stuff can still be given problems by a creative opponent with 2nd generation stuff. I’m thinking “Boer War” or “Siege of Kut” here… Or Ukraine. What’s really interesting is that the default Russian strategy (“behold, the plains are covered with my tanks and men!”) isn’t very good either, (“behold my 6th generation stuff, which is a small expensive handful!”) The Russians’ current predicament is inexcusable given what they failed to learn in the Winter War and Afghanistan, and the US’ current predicament is inexcusable given what they failed to learn in every war since and including Vietnam.
Those military guys in images 2,3,6 have pretty good camo… except for the bright red hats. Here’s my brilliant military tactic: Give your special forces reversible berets.
I specifically requested red berets. And how do you know those aren’t reversible, hmm? They’re just making sure they are in proper uniform so they are not considered “terrorists”
JM@#8:
They have been trying to adjust but the US military is not fast about this sort of thing and US military procurement just makes thing worse.
Exactly. Don’t worry the pentagon’s contractors are already rushing and sparing no cost to design a 7th generation “cheap” drone. It will have simplicity and cost-saving technology pouring out of its ass.
sonofrojblake@#6:
You appear to have mislocated the very stupid people.
No, I located them correctly – it’s just that there are a lot of very stupid people and they’re all over the place. In fact, it seems that everyone in charge of anything is stupid, and everyone who is in the media, or an influencer, or marketing, are rushing to make sure that good stupid ideas are promoted quickly.
I saw someone on youtube talking about how some of those B-52s were flown by the pilots’ grandparents when the airframes were built. And then they asked “when are you guys taking off, again?”
I’m going to hypothesize that a “serious war” is one where you realize you might actually lose. Not merely crawl home in defeat after 20 years of bombing peasants, but actually watch your cities burn and your neighbors blown to paste. I suspect there are some people in Israel who are just now deciding that they are in a serious war, and that’s part of why Netanyahu is playing dead at some Mediterranean AirBnB – neither he nor Trump expect to be greeted with cheering crowds.
About your remark:
“This is my nightmare scenario: Iran currently has enough enriched uranium for 6 warheads. That is a lot…”.
I see what you mean, but IMHO it’s not a very likely scenario, for several reasons:
– 70% enriched U235 is a very very valuable material: in order to reach that stage one needs huge investments in materials and time. Using it as a war gas is wasteful, even in the crazy world of today.
– second, it’s dangerous but not horribly so: it has not been irradiated, so not much activity there (you can safely hold in your hand unirradiated reactor pellets, just don’t lick them or anything). It is indeed toxic being a heavy metal, but nothing like a war gas.
– third, dispersion is not that easy: it’s a metal so an explosion won’t do much, plus uranium is really pyrophoric so a high temp will burn it rather than disperse it (it’s why depleted U shells are so popular as anti tank weapons: the warhead gets inside and then starts a nice fire. Ugh. It’s also why building a nuc warhead is not that easy: try machining that crap see what you get, fwooomp).
Your nightmare scenario has indeed been causing a lot of uneasy sleep since decades in a lot of places, but not with U235. Any shit coming out of a reactor or some medical devices would suffice, but luckily proper dispersion remains a big engineering problem. Even so, it’s considered one of the big geopolitical menaces out there.
Aside: remember the nerve gas attacks in Japan, 1995? Those idiots DID solve agent production, but NOT the dispersion stage, so their recourse was to carry that crap in plastc bags and hole them with umbrella tips. Let’s be grateful for that at least, as an aerosol attack would have had far more horrid consequences (try the Murakami book “Underground” for an interesting outlook).
Surely a dedicated follower of Herzl and the Hebrew Bible could retcon that map (say, by tracking “the Nile” back to Lake Victoria and “the Euphrates” to Basra) so that it includes the entire Strait of
HormuzTrump. From the river to the sea!Allegedly two U.S. aircraft have gone down in Iran, neither one of them an F-35. Current reports say an F15 and an A-10 Warthog.
@18 Pierce R. Butler: The fanatically right wing orthodox Jews don’t do that sort of thing. They are dedicated to a good literal reading of the Torah and then playing legalistic games on that. The orthodox Jewish solution to that problem would be to note that God promised Israel the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. The exact course of rivers change over time and there is nothing stopping Israel from doing some geoengineering now and changing where the Euphrates flows.
JM @ # 20: … there is nothing stopping Israel from doing some geoengineering now and changing where the Euphrates flows.
Well, except Iraq & Iran (if they really want to reroute the Euphrates past the Strait of Herzl).
A long while back (15 fkn years!) I was regularly contributing to the puerile digital arts community b3ta.com.
Their challenge of the week one week was “What Would Jesus Do?”, and I had a couple of answers:
https://b3ta.com/board/10571447
Note the brackets next to Mecca.
https://b3ta.com/board/10571540
There are some logos of UK banks that forriners might not recognise.