Wrong War, Wrong Century

20th Century Warfare Attacked the 21st

By Matt Bracken

The American MIC put together an unbeatable military machine, at least when it comes to blasting the ever-loving shit out of 2nd and 3rd tier countries that can’t really fight back. I call it the “Top Gun Maverick Military Model.”

The TGM3 works great in C.G. Hollywood movies, it worked great in the 20th Century against countries like Serbia and Libya, and most importantly of all, it’s fantastic for shoveling endless billions of dollars to our corpulent MIC “defense” industries. And for decades, it kept the rest of the world in line, afraid to test America’s evidently overwhelming destructive military power.

That is, until President Donald Trump, tricked by Bibi Netanyahu’s false promise of a quick and easy three-day regime-change victory over Iran, blundered into the greatest military disaster in modern history--and thereby exposed the obsolescence of the TGM3 against the 21st-Century Modern Missile Model, or the 21CM3. [I’m making up silly acronyms on the fly, so that the Internet Military Analysts’ Union will take me seriously.]

If the USAF and the IDF/AF launch another massive air blitz on Iran, as Trump threatened a few days ago, the key battle equation will be USAF air tankers vs. Iranian MRBMs, as seen below.

Not directly, of course, but the Iranian missiles can be used to destroy USAF tankers on the ground before they can take off to refuel the USAF and IDF/AF attack planes. This will give Iran the opportunity to spoil any such US-Israel air blitz before it can reach its crescendo.

Iran will not strike first, out of the blue, preemptively, but they will wait until they can see (from Russian and Chinese satellite intelligence, and from agents on the ground), that the main force is launching into the air. When some percentage of the air armada is airborne, say 30 or 40%, Iran will launch a furious missile attack on the air bases indicated on the below map, (and on other bases I don’t know about, but Iran surely does.)

If runways are cratered or even pitted, takeoffs can be aborted, and airborne jets will have to find alternate landing strips. This will upset the careful timing of the air blitz, since returning aircraft will be unable to return to their launching airfields to refuel and rearm and take off for their next scheduled sortie.

Timing is the crucial element in such an air blitz, and in Iran’s counter-attack using MRBMs. The Khorramshahr 4 missile with 80 submunitions seems to me as if it was designed for exactly this scenario. It was demonstrated in Tel Aviv last March, but has not been used since (that I know of). 80 bomblets are sufficient to heavily damage jet aircraft parked close together on concrete aprons, as well as to pit the runways, creating potholes and “FOD,” or foreign object debris, which must be cleaned up for the runway to be put back into full use.

Even if the runways are put out of action for a matter of only hours, this is enough time to spoil the carefully choreographed timing of a major air blitz on Iran. And any aircraft damaged on the ground will not be able to take part in the attack at all.

Planes which were in the air when the missile counter-strike took place, which are forced to land at alternate runways, will not be able to rearm and rejoin the air battle during the compressed window while it’s underway.

A few days ago, a drone struck an LNG vessel docked in Egypt called a the “Energos Winter,” one of a class of FSRUs, or Floating Storage and Regasification Units. Most folks have confused this with an LNG tanker, this is partly but not completely correct. I asked Grok to explain the distinction:

GROK: What was the LNG platform that was struck in Damietta Egypt a few days ago? A tanker ship the propels itself from port to port, or a stationary floating LNG liquefaction and gasification facility?

“The Energos Winter was functioning in the FSRU import role when hit. The vessel struck was the Energos Winter, a Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU). It is a self-propelled tanker-style ship (capable of sailing between ports under its own power) that was moored and operating as Egypt’s floating import terminal at Damietta. A secondary LNG carrier, Gaslog Salem, was also affected. It is not a stationary liquefaction facility.”

The important point here is that Damietta, where the Energos Winter was hit by a drone, is 50 KM to the west of Port Said and the top of the Suez Canal. If the missile came from Iran, it flew low and slow over the canal and many built up urban areas on its route. If it was launched by the Houthis, it flew the length of the canal.

This drone strike was merely a warning shot. The drone was only meant to start a fire in the superstructure. These LNG facilities are crammed with fire-fighting systems for obvious reasons. The fire was put out.

BUT, if the Iranians fired an MRBM with a 1,500 kg warhead, striking the Energos Winter at hypersonic speed would have caused a massive catastrophe. These FSRUs feed natural gas to Egypt. Beside the immediate local disaster, Iran’s gas system could be crippled. Factories would close, and electrical power plants would go off line.

Or, an Iranian MRBM could hit an American ship in the Suez Canal itself. Its warhead, striking at hypersonic speed, would not only sink the ship, it would likely blow it apart. In 2021 the Ever Given container ship blocked the canal for a week after simply going aground, fully intact. If ships are shattered and sunk in the canal, it could be blocked indefinitely. A reminder: the Sues Canal was blocked for 7 years following the 1967 “Six Day War,” a so-called “preemptive” war begun by Israel with sneak-attacks against Egypt and Syria.

How War Marooned 15 Ships in The Suez Canal For Eight Years

Another interesting aspect of the current war is that drones like the one that struck the LNG facility in Egypt are a near-perfect false-flag weapon. Unlike ballistic missiles, they can be programmed to attack from any direction, after taking routes designed to conceal their origin. We have seen this constantly in the Ukraine war, with drones programmed to strike from directions that will minimize their exposure to air defenses. We are assuming that Iran or the Houthis fired the drone at Damietta, it can’t be ruled out that this was a false-flag attack by Israel, designed to widen the war. This is unlikely in this case, but it’s something to keep in mind when regarding drone attacks.

And don’t rule out home-built American drones being used to attack refineries and chemical plants in the United States. The plans are now open source, and any skilled hobbyist capable of building a race car, a speedboat or a kit airplane can build a Shahed-type drone in a garage workshop. We will see them in the coming years.

Now, if anyone is wondering who is winning or losing the war that Donald Trump began on February 28, with sneak-attack assassination missile strikes during negotiations, here is a handy score card. The nation that is abandoning bases and moving away from its enemy is the side that is losing. We have abandoned 5th Fleet HQ in Bahrain, and we are leaving our bases in Kuwait and Iraq, among others. They are too close to Iran to be protected by our dwindling stock of interceptor missiles.

Another clear metric for determining the outcome of this war is to ask, who is in control of the Strait of Hormuz? The US Navy had dominated the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman since the 1940s, and now it has been driven out of the region.

Yes, the US Navy can still put a secondary blockade on ships leaving the Persian Gulf, but this doesn’t solve our problems, it only creates more, as this outrageously stupid war of choice drives the global economy into a great depression and possible famine. This will correctly be blamed on Trump and the United States, and it may well mark the end of the US dollar as the world reserve currency, as nations dump our Treasuries and move toward the BRICs and other financial arrangements.

It has also exposed the American military as an obsolete 20th Century museum relic, so while our own economy crumbles, we will no longer be able to force other nations to dance to our tune under the threat of sanctions and military action.

And this was all an entirely self-inflicted wound.

Also, I just appeared on Dialogue Works with Nima Alkhorshid, discussing current developments in the Iran war, the greatest blunder in modern military history.

Bracken—Out.

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