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Posts posted by Laxtonto
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3 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:
Hmmmm, so did Trump jump the gun here?
These are the same Iranian officials who told the media that:
They were destroying Israel
Destroying the US bases in the ME
Overwhelming the Israeli air defenses
Struck the Israeli defense HQ
Would strike America if the US entered their airspace
etc....
Come back in 6 hours and see Khomeini's declaration that Israel has given in to their might and agreed to a ceasefire while they negotiate the end of the failed Jewish state. -
1 minute ago, boilerhorn said:
You offend sponges and toddlers in a single sentence.
Why wait 6 hours for an official cease fire?
Because Israel already has planes currently doing air strikes before this was announced.
Once started, you have to set window for it to stop. I don't like it because more bombs = more death, but once Israel has entered Iranian airspace for another round, you can't expect either side to just stop. I would have hoped that this was something that would have been worked out before they left, but once committed to Iranian airspace, it is a disaster waiting to happen to try to call them back or to expect Iran not to target them while they are in the air. It is better to let things play out one last time than to try to wave them off mid mission and have someone on either side not get the message and have it break down all over again.
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21 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:
I find it a little hard to believe that over the course of a week since the war started, with air superiority, the Israelis just watched the Iranian's back up trucks to Fordrow and load it up with an unidentified cargo and drive away. Or the US overhead satellites feeding intelligence to the IDF.
My guess is that every truck for the last month or more has been tracked via satellite (and knowing Mossad via on the ground GPS locators as well), and they already have a solid idea of where it may be stored as a backup.
The real problem is that we are talking about is at most a few hundred kilograms of enriched material, so tracking it is more problematic than just burying it under the rubble.
The only way to get Iran to try to transport out of Fordow was to make it so that getting hit was imminent. Now what is interesting is was the timing of the Guam flight was done on purpose, knowing the Iranian evacuation plan for an impending US strike? Is it better to bury the current enriched uranium deep under Fordow and hope no one can recover it, collapse it near the surface (and therefore need boots on the ground to recover it) or get them to transport it and capture it either in route or at another location.
I think Israel and the US were hoping the very visible head-fake of the B2 flight heading to Guam got Iran to stage whatever they had left in the facilities in the transport tunnels waiting to depart in the morning, which instead got struck at 2 am local time. That puts it reachable with some work, but easily policed by air to make sure it "stays put" by not allowing any re-excavation until the time that either there is a regime change, a deal in place that requires that material to be recovered and turned over under US/Israeli supervision, or Israeli boots on the ground.
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First team All-American C....
That fills a huge hole both behind the plate and in the lineup
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19 minutes ago, SaucyJack said:
A buddy, "in the know", just texted me:
Figure it out. I'll let you know when it happens. 6, 31, 17, 12, 49
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2 minutes ago, Nicole44 said:
So if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz how much will this affect Russia and China? Considering they do get oil from Iran (India and others to a lesser respect.)
also wasn’t Isfahan the more important target given the reconversion of enriched uranium that is allegedly carried out there?
midnight hammer sounds like a drink at a biker bar. Or it is now…
I volunteer to go assess the damage around any lakes Iran might have. Please offer my name up if you know any military folk. I scout lakes like a stealthy mofo.
UAE aint going to remotely go for that....
It is already pretty obvious that the rest of the ME oil states are OK with Israel and the US making sure Iran does not get nuclear weapons. There is no way that they have OK'd flyovers by US and Israel, and then decide to close the Strait of Hormuz because the Iranian nuclear enrichment sites got hammered by the US a week later. If this was going to happen, it would have happened day one, when it could be used as a real threat and a bargaining chip. The only people who gets really hurt now are the ME states that can't use the EW Petroline pipeline Suadi reopened that runs from Jeddah to Qatar.
Could it slow exports of crude, yeah. Any military action in the Persian Gulf alwaysx slows both production and transport. Would the rest of the region stand by and let it happen, knowing that it doesn't stop exports from the entire Persian Gulf states, but only a few? Especially when SA takes the smallest hit while the other gulf states take the brunt of the disruption? I would be very surprised if this happens (and in truth, if the Iranian leadership follows through) and if it does Iran is a "accident" away from other ME states kicking them while they are down as well.
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Map info nerds unite!
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Anyone try to fill out a lineup card with what we have right now? I don't know enough about the portal adds to do it...
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Add this to the steadily growing pile of "Mossad is scary"...
The level of penetration Mossad has into the Iranian day-to-day operational intelligence is insane.
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Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s heir, releases statement to the people of Iran
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So, as we get to the hard realization that Iran can not stop Israel in the air and Israel does not have the air and ground capability to fully accomplish their full set of goals, we get to the "what now" part of all of this.
1. People keep discussing destroying the Iranian oil and gas production to bring "Iran to their knees" and thus ending the war. This is probably both overly simplistic and missing a huge part of the puzzle. If the idea were so binary, the US would have wiped out Kharg Island years ago, and Iran would have just drifted off into obscurity, right? The problem goes beyond OPEC+ and economics, and falls into the simple idea of what comes after. If you ever view the dream of a return to the classic Iranian Persian Monarchy with sympathetic ties to the west, the environment needs to be viable for success. If you wipe the refining capabilities off the map, you are looking at decades and decades to rebuild the refining capability at the cost of billions and billions of dollars. Without the ability to both extract and refine the natural resources, Iran has no economic future, and the Iranian people are looking at mass poverty and hardship. If you expect the current style of government to stay in power, you are balancing the idea of keeping the populace alive and having hope while trying to limit the headaches they can bring about with the hard currency they can make. If you expect a regime change and want that regime to last long term, you can't destroy the one resource they have to provide them a viable future.
So what do you do? That is the hard question, and why you are seeing Israel right now targeting domestic storage, production, and use facilities instead of the big refineries. I swing back and forth on how I view this because, without resources, Iran as a regional power player shrivels and dies. But without a future, the idea and dream of a Western-aligned Persia dies as well. This is why sanctions have always been used instead of strikes on refineries in the past. The "cut the baby in half" approach would be to target the field incrementally to halt production and therefore halt supply instead of the refining capability. Recapping a burning well is still a problem, but in the grand scheme of things, it is not viewed as a generational timeline that the loss of refining capability would be.2. We are seeing a steady degradation of the Iranian response capabilities. Ignore the "damage porn" of missiles getting through to the Israeli cities, and just focus on numbers. Missile intercepts are always going to be a fixed value tied to a distribution. That distribution will be a function of intercept capability and missile path. Missiles will get through and there will be casualties. That should be a given. What is more telling is not the damage but the count of missiles launched per wave. That is tied directly to the finite number of launchers. If you are paying attention, we are seeing a steady degradation of Iranian launch capabilities, with Israel having assigned a heavy priority of targeting launchers (even over air interdiction of missiles in flight). As there are fewer and fewer launchers, the intercept rate will steadily increase. The mix of a finite number of launchers and a limited number of ballistic missiles always puts a natural time limit on the number of days Iran could provide a military threat of response (not a nuisance threat), and by targeting the launchers, the volley size per wave is steadily decreasing. At some point, the launches lose military value and move into political theater.
3. What do you do as Iran at this point? They have limited military responses available in the air. Israel is not invading on the ground (yet), and their neighbors are not going to let them move an army over their territory to let them attack Israel. Besides, any form of land assault would be a disaster with Israel having total control of the skies. Unless Egypt goes rogue and surprise attacks Israel, there is little to the idea Israel will have to engage in a large land battle at or near their territory. So Israel is insulated by a major land or air assault, and Iran has a finite number of ballistic missiles and launchers and the window of their ballistic missile response being anything other than a nuisance threat is closing. The only thing they have going for them is that the overall goal of Israel cannot be accomplished via air attacks (without the US becoming involved) and would require Israeli forces on the ground in mass. So what do you do? You have already hardened the locations you can, and troop distribution and movement mean very little in this type of war. There are already as many troops protecting their hardened nuclear production and research facilities as would be functionally possible, and your lone military response is a finite resource. At this point, the best approach would be unconventional warfare strategies (ie terror attacks, suicide bombings, ect.) and political pressure. The problem is that the unconventional strategies are something Israel has become hardened to due to decades of Hezbollah, Hamas, ect. attacks, and they have little to no political capital to use (which erodes even more if they use unconventional warfare).
Iran is in a waiting game and is in a completely reactionary stance that will be dictated by what Israel and the US decide. The best approach is to try and get Israel to the table now under the condition of a complete ceasefire. The problem is that Israel has a "plan" of targets that covers 10-20 days of targets, and unless it becomes politically disadvantageous, they will stick to it. Much like with Gaza, their willingness to ignore the "bad" press on the global stage has insulated them from these types of demands by Iran. The only thing Iran has left to trade is their nuclear weapons program, and until it becomes apparent that it is either trade that or their regime being in power, Iran will not truly negotiate, and Israel knows this. What makes it more dangerous is at some point the US (or someone else) may decide that the only way this stops is to provide Israel the airframes needed to drop the ordnance to collapse these hardened facilities.
There is no real "end" to this that is positive to the current Iranian regime, without outside intervention on their behalf. Without their proxies, Iran is a "paper tiger" and the ME political landscape has made it more advantageous to be neutral on this topic than it is to be an ally to Iran. We can get into the religious/cultural ties with all of this, but even the Sunni/Shite rift and Arab vs. Persian divide only mean so much. We are now seeing the ME starting to act more "rational" as they begin to accept that the problems Iran brings to the region are no longer worth what it would take to "save" them. You can call it becoming westernized, or the power of capitalism, or the spread of exposure to rational discourse because of the internet, or the desire to normalize relations for a stronger ME as a whole, but the shift has occurred and now it doesn't look like anyone is coming to ride in and save the Iranian regime. Without it, it is just a matter of time for either Iran to cave to the Israeli and US demands (which may lead to a regime change) or being overthrown.
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36 minutes ago, Rex Kramer said:
Iran, if it continues, will get absolutely smoked. This is old man ayatollah pride we are witnessing. And it’ll end with his downfall.
Lots of unconfirmed rumors out there that he may have died in the blast on a strike on his bunker NW of Tehran. I give it 60% its true. I would go higher, but none of the regional Arab news are saying anything either way. Worth monitoring because there have already been reports of others in the government already leaving for Russia and other parts.
Regardless, I think Israel now has the green light from the rest of the ME that he is a valid target with limited reprisals.
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Israel vs everyone war thread
in Daily Texan
Posted
Sounds like the deal was brokered w Trump locking in Israel and Qatar talking directly to Tehran. This also makes the comments of the Qatari defense minister blaming Israel for the recent Iranian reprisals on the US bases in Qatar make more sense.
I am guessing that the Emir told Tehran that this is their last chance and if they refuse the ceasefire the rest of the ME will support a regime change. Right now, it is only a smoldering issue in the populace, if the other ME countries wanters to fan the flames, it would become inevitable.