I tried to do a posting the other night, and thought maybe I could keep myself from flailing around violently if I tranquilized myself with some of the traditional anti-anxiety drugs. By the time I was done writing – something – I was pretty much incoherent. It was also embarrassing because, as I was writing, I was imagining myself as being much wittier and more organized than I was.
There are too many factors for me to organize them cleanly, but I’ll try.
First off, I think that Turnip is getting some decent advice from someone who is not a complete zionist ideologue. When I heard that another carrier task force group was heading into the region, all I could think of was “that’s a bad idea: you’re talking about an area where they are throwing ballistic missiles back and forth.” As soon as you are talking about Mach-15 warheads coming in, it hardly matters what they hit. But, anyone putting a carrier task force group within range of unblockable missiles, needs to die quickly, before they re-implement “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” If you look at what is happening to Israel, right now, it’s horrifying how badly Netanyahu fucked up. He’s a slippery eel, like Trump, but he has backed his country into a deep corner. Some explanation: the Israeli “iron dome” system is optimized at dealing with home-brew explosive rockets like Hamas would periodically lob. In my opinion, those attacks did not accomplish much except giving a great excuse for why Hamas was bad. In reality, Hamas was pathetic. It has been my opinion for a long time that Hamas should announce a new direction in line with international humanitarian law, which is that they are only attacking occupation military targets, (plus, of course, regrettable collateral damage) – then begin a relentless campaign of booby traps, sniping, and direct-fire missiles against vehicles or even small groups of people. I remain profoundly unimpressed with Hamas’ strategy and see nothing coming along that is the least bit redeeming. An “international humanitarian law” push plus strict adherence, after the Israeli incursion, would have Created massive cognitive dissonance.
Now that the anti-missiles are running out, Netanyahu has set Israel up to be a ballistic missile firing range for anyone who wants to test non-nuclear warheads.
Depending on your sources, the US Patriot missiles were garbage (I agree: not worth even deploying) and the THAAD isn’t much better. The only good stuff the US has is the anti-missile missiles on Aegis destroyers. Those cost about $12mn apiece. The US supplier, Raytheon, is making them as fast as their shareholders can drool, and they’re making enough missiles for one engagement like sunday night. Annually. A big secret about Iron Dome is that the US makes basically all of it, though there are enough Israeli contributions for them to be proud. They seem to barely have any anti-aircraft missiles left, and are using precious F-35 flight hours chasing down autonomous drones with a plane that costs $40,000/second using missiles that cost $1mn apiece. This is similar to those scenarios that naval battleship fans are so in love with: your ship can make X knots, the enemy X+5, and you’re 200nm from support and you have enough for 3 broadsides and they have several ships in full supply: do you surrender or commit seppuku? The harsh logic of admiralty says it doesn’t matter how you got into that situation, your job is to get out, or die trying. Imagine you were the commander of a US Navy carrier task force group, ordered to get in close enough to Iran that your strike wing could hit something, and you’re telling the commander-in-chief’s bubblehead boy bimbo that means you’re 800nm under the enemy’s ballistic missile envelope and you only have enough ammunition in the CIWs and anti-missile systems for one or two good wave attacks. I was never a fan of Cardigan, but when he read the orders at Balaclava and shrugged, “there goes the last of the Brudenells” he was not being entirely stupid. A carrier task force group can be sunk, Iran cannot. That’s the opening move. From there, it goes to when the Iranians mine the Strait of Hormuz and park missile-farms targeted on the deliberately marked gaps.
My take is that Iran can make the land where Israel is, uninhabitable. Every time someone builds something, it gets blown up. I guess one way to get an occupying power to abandon a place is to maintain a steady rain of misery and high explosive on it. I know, you’re probably thinking that sounds a lot like Israel’s strategy to begin with; I am not immune to irony.
This is a fellow who speaks a lot of common sense about this stuff, though he’s a bit more dramatic than I like to be:
Professor Jiang is relying mostly on common sense military doctrines, which are common sense because they work. During the 2007 troop “surge” there were around 150,000 US troops in Iraq. The population of Iraq is 45 million. Right now, I am sure some jackass is telling Turnip “we have the best army in the world” (which is true) and that we could easily deploy 150,000 troops to Iran to dominate its 90+ million. That’s the Rumsfeld Doctrine, as one of my gamer buddies once joked: “send just enough troops to lose.”
The worst case is unimaginable, if you haven’t got much imagination: a bunch of US troops establish Fort Zinderneuf, Iran, and hunker down there while they are regularly shellacked with missiles of all sizes and shapes. A carrier task force group is similarly bogged down, unable to move its precious carrier because its fighter wing got blown off the deck in pieces a few weeks ago, and there’s nothing to shoot at except incoming missiles. I don’t want to succumb to the hypersonic missile freak-fest, but if you don’t understand that they are a complete game-changer for large, slow targets, re-think the scenario.
By the way, that same reasoning applies to Israel. They can’t get more anti-missile missiles unless the US starts giving them some of the ones they have earmarked for Ukraine. If the US thinks it’s going to attack Iran with anything that is also within ballistic missile range, it will have to survive a counter-attack. The US has not really traded punches with a peer enemy since Bastogne. (and those were extremely weakened panzer divisions) We are used to carpet bombing from relative safety (hence it’s our fallback strategy) but it never has worked. Bomber command blew Germany apart, Japan was smoking rubble, North Koreans had left their cities and were living in caves, and the Vietnamese started in the caves; Israel is going to look like Gaza within a year, and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t lose half its population to returning to Europe – which will just make European anti-immigrant sentiment explode off the chart.
A bigger picture view that seems fairly sane is:
I was recently listening to a history podcast episode about the Battle of The Bulge, and one of the points the ‘casters made, which I had never caught was that the whole great operation had no strategic purpose at all. What did Hitler think was going to happen? Get panzers on the other side of the Meuse River? What, then? So what? If they won, they’d have been overextended, and if they lost they’d be cut off. Does that sort of sound like the US attack on Iraq? They won but in winning they lost. In 1915, the British invaded Iran (though then it was part of the Ottoman Empire) and got as far as an utterly pointless place called Kut. There they ran out of steam, supplies, maps, ammunition, and food. I think we keep seeing empire blinding us to the reality of our position. So, the US was able to squash Saddam Hussein’s militarized police, in their 1950s Soviet tanks, but the US ought to be looking to what is happening in Ukraine: the Russian army was badly deployed, had a simplistic plan (1: attack Kiev, 2: sieze underpants, 3:??, 4: profit!) and bad command/control. Israel’s attempt to blow up Iran’s nuclear program has resulted in making them a free target. Talk about squandering good will! Even I, with deep reservoirs of good will, am laughing bitterly at the (apparently completely unaware) complaints by Israel that the Iraqi missiles targeted a hospital. How many hospitals did Israel destroy in the last 5 months?
Israel has as really good military, though they have gotten very soft because they’re mostly beating up unarmed opponents. And their discipline is starting to break down – Israeli army discipline has always been poor, in the service of plausibly deniable thuggery. Let’s go back to the question about the Battle of the Bulge: suppose they had succeeded in destroying all of Iran’s nuclear plans, what are they going to do 5 years from now? This is a country smaller than Florida attacking a country larger than Texas, with a domestic tech level that may not be impressive but their manufacturing is local. The Israeli army is already running out of control in a few places – including shooting Palestinians openly while the camera is running.
One thing that the MAGA idiots are right about: US industrial and technological capacity is not like it was at the end of WWII. Capitalism has made its little profit margins by moving production of complicated components to China. I’m not a big fan of the CIA’s analysis but a recent report they did claimed that China can build 200 ships to the US’ 1. Back in 2001 I wrote a book that mostly focused on computer security technology and its importance and one of the things I harped on was that the US has taken to outsourcing so much, there is no office or person responsible for technology strategy and making sure that the right stuff is still made locally. “Brain drain” is a security threat.
I have said elsewhere, and before, that Israel could very easily turn out to be transient. It could just be another one in the litany of colonies that failed, along with French Indochina, French Algeria, Iraq Americana, Afghanistan Americana, British Rhodesia, Dutch South Africa, Ivory Coast, American Vietnam, etc. etc. I am not trying to be dismissive – these collapsed colonies absorbed a lot of lives and caused a lot of pain, then collapsed and absorbed more lives and more pain. I am usually careful not to offer glib solutions for the “Israel Problem” but “call it a failure and go home” would be an option. More precisely: the problem that spurred Jewish ethno-nationalism was the Dreyfus Affaire – let’s acknowledge that the French, Germans, Austrians, Russians, Polish, Spanish, British, US, and Ukrainians need to establish some oversight, establish anti-semitism eradication programs, teach why genocide is a bad idea (it can come back to haunt you, for one thing) and – honestly – I think that the British owe some pretty serious reparations for screwing up the Levant to an absolute pinnacle of screw-up.
The next couple weeks will be interesting. I think Turnip will not lead the US into the greatest defeat since Iraq. But we’ll see.
One solution would be if Congress did its job and approved or disapproved the use of the military. Congress’ absolute spinelessness has its share of the responsibility for these disasters. Also, we should probably restrain the DoD from propagandizing the people for recruitment purposes. Remember when Iraq happened and the US was full of depressed 26 year-old veterans who were being sent back again and again because, if we’re going to do this kind of shit, our military is too small. Not to put too fine a point on it, we have allowed Congress and the DoD to build us an empire without putting any thought into it. Because we haven’t put any thought into it, our strategy is bad.
One of the things that worries me, is that almost all of our political leaders (U.S.) are morons of varrious categories: white supremacists, apocalypic evangelicals, Christian Nationalists, and just plain old dumb bigots. So I’m concerned that a situation/action that even an uneducated idiot would recognize as bad, is going to be dismissed because these fuckwits think U.S. forces will succeed regardless, simply because the people calling the shots are cis-het white guys, or pray to the right god in the right manner, or whatever.
And, while I think most people would hesitate to use nuclear weapons, I don’t think this group of idiots shares those hesitations. Hell, we’ve already got orange asshole on audio years back asking why we don’t use them if we have them… This is incomprehensible levels of stupid at the levers of power we have now. These are the type of idiots that argued against seatbelt laws in the 70s/80s U.S., because they were absolutely certain they would be fare better being thrown from the automobile during a collision.
I’m still wondering now and then how a civil war would play out in the U.S., since the red/blue divide seems to be less about geographical markers, and more about population density. I’m disgusted by Newsome’s recent bullshit of cuddling up to bigots and fascists, but am slightly curious about his comment about California not paying income taxes to the Feds, and would rather he fight orange asshole and other fascists than trans folk. (Not sure how that would even work out legally/logistically, but I’m still curious)
I know California leaving the U.S. would be bad for the U.S., and think it was likely an idea boosted and popularized by Russian troll farms, but if the U.S. is determined to slide into fascism, maybe CA should leave, if they can’t effectively stop it, and maybe they can take WA and OR with them as well.
I’m really having trouble envisioning a way the U.S. survives this intact…
“you’re 200nm from support”
*looks confused in metric* :P
Hopefully you’re right that they aren’t going to attack Iran. No one can win this, and there are a lot of people who will die
That said, I’m not as confident as you. The fools in charge of the US are a bunch of insecure men who are being challenged elsewhere, and insecure men tend to respond to violence in situations like that. More sensible people have been yet to get them to chill out
There’s an old saying of unknown provenance: “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics”.
I can envision a coda: “Conquerers talk about the domestic manufacturing base.”
The US military is probably still unmatched in its ability to get the things it has to the places it wants to get them. But the decades since the US first landed on Utah Beach with Ice-Cream for the troops just a few hours behind the landing craft have seen the country give up completely on the idea of manufacturing anything domestically. American corporate innovation now is entirely in the realm of stock buybacks and ‘financial engineering’. Americans didn’t just lose the race for manufacturing dominance, the happily conceded it because it played well on the stock market to have a few rounds of layoffs of the staff that did the distasteful work of actually building the things the companies ‘make’.
If America ended up in a shooting war with China or India, do you think the US could even find enough manufacturing engineers to do tooling design, to replace the materiel that would no longer be imported? Or factory designers? Molding engineers? Metallurgists? QA specialists? Your country (and mine too) has been hollowed out by a parasitic class of ‘managers’, who produce nothing except for reports that make the number go up in the market. We’re ruled by an irrational online casino. We can’t even make technical steels anymore – at least in Canada, the few foundries and steel mills we still have have not bothered to modernize enough to do the QA required to produce steel suitable for building pressure vessels. If we want that, we have to go to the advanced civiliations of Thailand, Vietnam, China or India to get those metals. Our capitalist overlords aren’t interested in anything as boring as actually manufacturing things.
America is engaged in asymetric information wars as well, and it has arrogated to itself a unique disadvantage: Americans refuse to learn the languages of other countries, but all of the countries that are to some extent enemies of the US have large English speaking populations. Even if the US wanted to staff up a large-scale troll farm and disinfo machine to target Russia, Iran, China or India – where would it find the employees? Only among the emigre populations from those countries living in the US, and maybe a few people who – in ages past – would have ended up working in the ‘State Department’ and studied foreign languages at University.
Russia can staff up a troll or hacker farm to target the US just by dangling a few roubles at bright college students, the vast majority of whom can get by just fine online in English. Hence: https://kyivinsider.com/the-troll-farms-and-bot-armies-of-russia-and-iran-are-taking-over-magas-online-world/
Loath as I am to credit that walking orange blancmange with anything positive – he’s probably the least bloodthirsty president I can remember. Attribute it to cowardice, laziness, or possibly his last remaning synapse being aware the he doesn’t understand war at all and can’t think of a way to make money from it, he certainly avoided adding military commitments during his last term. If he wants to take two weeks to let the Israel-Iran situation settle out before siding with whoever appears to be winning, or whichever side Fox News tells him to support, I’m not going to fault him for it. Hell, take two months…..
“Loath as I am to credit that walking orange blancmange with anything positive – he’s probably the least bloodthirsty president I can remember.”
This. I’ve been saying this for years. It’s his one redeeming feature. Can anyone keep a straight face and claim H Clinton would have maintained the level of relative peace that prevailed 2016-2020? Trump doesn’t “get” war – he can’t understand how to make himself, personally, richer from it. As a result, he’s just uninterested. Thank fuck for that, because the day he thinks he does get it, he’ll push the button.
This is the future of warfare. The “major” powers (US, Russia, and to a different and lesser extent China) have spent decades building the capacity to fight huge wars across vast distances against opponents who field things like tanks, helicopters, bombers, fighters, artillery and infantry. And the war in Ukraine has handily demonstrated that all of that was a massive, incredible waste of time and more importantly really astronomical amounts of money.
I’m sitting here trying to come up with an apt analogy. The F-35 isn’t even a sledgehammer to crack a nut, because a sledgehammer, heavy, clumsy, prone to error and expensive overkill as it is compared to a nutcracker, CAN crack a nut.
I’ve noticed a thing recently that keeps cropping up in my short video feeds – beautifully coordinated night time light shows consisting of huge swarms of thousands upon thousands of drones, forming dragons, King Kong, the starship Enterprise and what have you – massive 3d shapes drawn in the air, moving around. Captivating to watch, I’d love to see one in person. (This sort of thing: https://youtu.be/LpaSXwpKzGk)
I’m curious – assuming you made those drones about the size of my fist, and loaded the centre with a steel ball… just how much damage would be caused to an F-35 that tried to fly through a swarm like that? Because the cost of the entire swarm probably wouldn’t cover the cost of the helmet the pilot wears. There’d be some organisation required to get the swarm in the right place, of course… but would the navigation systems even be able to see them? Would it distinguish them from birds? So many questions… none of them with implications that I’d appreciate if I was actually making my living flying (or selling) F-35s.
Re: sledgehammer sayings
Like using a cybertruck to tow a trailer?
[MJR] “They seem to barely have any anti-aircraft missiles left, [] and are using precious F-35 flight hours chasing down autonomous drones with a plane that costs $40,000/second using missiles that cost $1mn apiece.” and “anyone putting a carrier task force group within range of unblockable missiles, ”
My question: isn’t this a modern instance of the “It has been said critically that there is a tendency in many armies to spend the peace time studying how to fight the last war. ” * ?
[* atrib to J. L. Schley apparenty, not Churchill]
This is also a really interesting perspective on christian zionism by the same professor. In case having a goofy blogger covered with millenialist tattoos as secretary of defense isn’t bad enough:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lkKrZq4YdqY&pp=QAFIAQ%3D%3D
Someone, hold my beer!
I’m sitting here trying to come up with an apt analogy. The F-35 isn’t even a sledgehammer to crack a nut, because a sledgehammer, heavy, clumsy, prone to error and expensive overkill as it is compared to a nutcracker, CAN crack a nut.
It’s using a destroyer to crack a nut. And have a whole carrier task force group handy to back it up, in case it has trouble. It can crack the nut but you won’t be able to find more than an expanding vapor cloud of pureé nut.
Hegseth maybe but most of the circle around Trump are so devoid of having their own ideas or so focused on the US that I would be surprised if anybody was. This isn’t like Cheney and the mercenary companies and military complex around him. That was a group that wanted to start a war because they would make a pile of money no matter which way the war went. The military complex people are mostly selling everything they can make right now anyways.
Aaaand here we fuckin’ go. Just read about the US bombing of three Iran nuc sites, so now we shall indeed have to see if the above described scenarios will come about or not.
Personally I am concerned about classic terrorism: bombs going off here and there, like the French had in the late eighties.
I do not see any meaningful Iranian missile offensive taking form, considering their low tech level (they can assemble fiberglass drones with lawnmower engines, but that’s about it).
In fact, knowing what it takes to keep a nuclear site going, I’m >> amazed << they managed to do anything at all. But that probably drained most of their tech resources, finances and personnel, so it will be probably back to the ol' trusty suitcases filled with explosives.
Of course all of the above can be totally wrong, what do I know. But it seems we're in for some really crappy future times.
Pedantic point: Kut in 1915 was in the Ottoman Empire in what is now Iraq. The last time it might have been a part of the Persian/ Sasanian Empire would have been in the 640s CE roughly speaking.
Where does Prof. Jiang get the idea that the USA could carryout a reasonably successful land invasion of Iran? Iran has land borders with Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan. Which of those countries are going to be willing to let the USA spend months building up invasion forces?
Does anyone think that Iran will make the same mistake as Saddam Hussein did and allow the USA to spend six months building up an invasion force rather than hitting it with ballistic missiles and drones from the time the first US military person sets foot in one of those countries?
Amphibious attacks from the GCC countries seem just as unlikely.
In today’s “fake news” information warfare environment, it’s really hard to tell truth from annoying propaganda. And, in some cases, there may be no truth to be found, at all.
I did find a map of the layout of the Fordow facility. It’s impressive. It’s a real “Doctor Evil Lair” – the access corridors drive right into the side of a mountain for about a mile, with corridor jogs to absorb explosions. If you look at designs of Cheyenne Mountain or Mount Weather, it has common design elements – it looks like they expect Israel or someone to nuke it. The long hallway where the centrifuge cascade sits is under 1km of rock (100M penetrator bombs need not apply) it’s not impregnable but the best way to blow it up would be to drop a regiment of paratroopers on it. Of course, that would be a trap.
A few random thoughts: nobody builds a fortress of evil that good unless they are doing evil in it. Rather obviously they are not up to a whole lot of good. This cost some money. In fact, I wonder if economic sanctions just make a nation dig in harder – they don’t have much else to do except design missiles and dig centrifuge cascades.
Judging from the sizes of the cascade room and uranium hexaflouride storage, they are running up to highly enriched (weapons grade) because why else go to all this trouble? So, they’re probably cheating on development and enrichment. It’s gross that Israel, which made its own nukes at Dimona in the late 60s, has never signed any treaty or disclosed anything, has never undergone inspection, and has produced about 200 warheads – it’s crazy and slightly gross that the US leaped into a war because Israel was afraid someone would be doing what they had done. Of course that’s not the consideration: making sure the US/European colony in the middle east has a nuclear monopoly is what that’s all about.
US foreign policy failures have done a great deal to convince everyone that one way to be safe from US attack is to have nuclear weapons. The way the US switches from full bluster to cringe telegraphs to everyone that having a nuke is The Way To Go (cue Tom Lehrer “Who’s Next?”)
There is an excellent technical report on the projected capabilities of the facility. [Isis Online]
outis@#11:
I do not see any meaningful Iranian missile offensive taking form, considering their low tech level (they can assemble fiberglass drones with lawnmower engines, but that’s about it).
They’re making 7000km-capable ballistic missiles with maneuvering re-entry vehicles. The thing they doing which is concerning is that the ballistic missiles are all designed to carry about a ton. Coincidentally, modern bombs weigh about a ton. A ton of high explosive will really mess up a city, and some of the accounts I am seeing are that up to 1/3 of the buildings in Tel Aviv are damaged or destroyed. The other really interesting dynamic is that the US-provided anti-missiles have run out. Right now the only things attempting to intercept incoming are Jordanian antiaircraft batteries, a British frigate with aegis anti-missile missiles, and 2 US aegis boats in the red sea, trying to catch Houthi missiles outbound. Nobody wants to talk about the spectacular failure rate of anti-missile-missiles once the missile gets out of its boost phase. If you watch the various bombings of Tel Aviv, you can see the cruddy rockets and drones and an occasional line that flashes down from the sky and ends in an explosion. At mach 15, you can’t even decide to launch at it, before it has hit its target. The Iranians have now worn down the Israeli’s anti-missile complement and they’re just able to pump high explosive into Israel at will. Downtown Tel Aviv looks like Gaza, which is interesting-ish.
My opinion is that the European powers need to start planning for how to accept returnees from Israel. Because revealing that Israel is vulnerable means that they’re going to have everyone going after their strategic weaknesses, now. It’s sort of what happened in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive: once the NVA were able to demonstrate that the US was not all-powerful and, in fact, panicked if attacked effectively. After the Tet Offensive the US will to endure was broken. It’s telling that the Israelis have shut down outbound aircraft and boats, to keep their population from fleeing back to Europe. There were some scenes of chaos at the airport that looked a lot like the Afghanistan evacuation or the fall of Saigon.
jrkrideau@#2:
Where does Prof. Jiang get the idea that the USA could carryout a reasonably successful land invasion of Iran?
I think that is his point: the Iranians might decide to let a few US units in as hostages.
It would be unbelievably stupid to start a land war in Iran because we’d need about 10 million troops to take and hold the place. Anything less just means that ballistic missiles with honking big warheads would be landing intermittently anywhere the troops went.
@5
or how much plastic shrapnel of the right size would be enough to gunk up the air intakes for some very expensive maintenance?
Perun’s most recent video covers Iran’s ballistic missiles. Key point; they don’t seem to be all that accurate, with a CEP in the hundreds of meters.
With such missiles, the probability of sinking an aircraft carrier is going to be very low, even if it wasn’t moving.
I have been noticing something interesting about one of the satellite photos of post-bombardment Fordhow.
https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2025/06/22/2a219ee4-0ee5-4bab-ac5e-a9014e96139d/thumbnail/1240×810/4dfa8f753c02243fcb8758fce5c64a76/07-after-airstrikes-close-up-view-of-holes-and-craters-on-ridge-at-fordow-underground-complex-iran-22jun2025-ge1.jpg?v=64f55bb7ef9382fe7916b907da543f1f
If you look at the impact holes they are in two groups of three. IF each B-2 carries 2 bombs, should we be expecting this pattern?
Some additional info regarding Israel, Zionism etc. There was Zionist activity before Herzl wrote his pamphlet and organized the first Zionist Congress (1897). The movement was called Lovers of Zion and was responsible for the early settlements of the New Yishuv. It as triggered by the 1881 pogroms in the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement. (Same pogroms also triggered the mass immigration of Jews to the USA at the same time.) And prior to that there was quite a bit of activity among Jews who, like their neighbors at the time were experiencing a rising in national identity (see events of 1848 etc). As Jews were being rejected by other national movements or the countries such movements were establishing (eg Romania’s refusal to grant citizenship to Jews) one possible answer was to have their own movement.
As for Israel’s Jewish population – a large part of it (no statistics because Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics no longer tracks ancestry of third generation Israelis) has no ties to Europe (or similar countries) whatsoever, or no ties to Europe since the 1490s (theoretically if a Jewish person can prove they are descendants of people who were expelled from Spain in 1492 they can get Spanish citizenship, I have no idea what level of evidence is required). The largest groups among these are people of Moroccan and Iraqi descent (fun fact, the Israeli city that suffered the most damage in the Gulf War of 1991 was Ramat Gan, a city with a large community of Iraq-descended Jews). In any case, it is estimated that about a million Israeli citizens have an additional citizenship, one way or another.
As of yesterday 65,000 Israelis returned to Israel in special flights, watercraft, even buses from Aqaba and Egypt. 84,000 were still looking for a way to get back. Meanwhile Israelis who want to leave are supposed to show that their return tickets are at least one month out, presumably so as not to interfere with the return of said 84,000. Hospitals are trying to get their vacationing staff back on their own, but the Ministry of Health demanded that they stop, in the name of equity (ie that better funded hospitals will be at an advantage over less well funded ones).
Thinking of cheap drone made with off the shelf parts in crude facilities as an indicator of Iran being “low tech” is not a good idea. A) Iran has been in the position of having to plan for a guerilla war for decades, those drones are potential guerilla warfare weapons
B) cheap munitions with a decenteralised production capacity are useful for surprise attacks and saturating defences. You have to keep your defences online because there might be a drone coming in at any time, but there might also be 100 drones so you have to have capacity for that. And you can’t bomb the one factory that makes them
I might be overestimating them, but i’m not sure i would bet my life on that
Likewise missile accuracy. Are you willing to bet an aircraft carrier that the missiles wont suddenly become a bit more accurate?
They’re in the position of someone trying to pick a fight with them that they can’t win via brute force. If someone is in that position you should probably assume they are going to fight like utter bastards
dangerousbeans@20;
The building that was mentioned in the Perun video was used by the Mossad.
I think we can take it as a given that the Iranian leadership is not that fond of the Mossad…
So it seems reasonable to assume that Iran was *really* trying to flatten that building.
None of the rockets came even close.
Hitting a moving target with a ballistic missile is going to be a whole lot harder than hitting a stationary building.
@11 outis
Crappy missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Martyr_Soleimani
I think it’s useful to remember that ‘victory’ is a fairly nebulous concept.
If your goal is to occupy and assimilate Iran, then you have a snowball’s chance of winning, but if your objective is to reduce all evidence of civilisation in the region to ash on the wind then it’s just a question of how many tons of explosive you can manufacture.
Granted, delivering that payload is not a trivial task, but it doesn’t require innovation, just a willingness to put a price on every acre razed. It makes perfect sense as far as I can see for the US to consider the war ‘won’ when the whole of Iran is a lawless wasteland from which no meaningful international influence can emerge.