Tag: war

Iran shoots down a US drone:

The US have confirmed that Iran has shot down one of its $180million spy drones, but refutes the Revolutionary Guard’s claims it was in Iranian airspace.

Iranian commander Hossein Salami declared his men were ‘ready for war,’ as the downing of the aircraft over its ‘red lines’ sent ‘a clear message’ to the Americans.

Tehran alleged an RQ-4 Global Hawk was shot down over their southern coastal city of Hormozgan, but a U.S. official said it had been a Navy MQ-4C Triton in international airspace.

A highly sophisticated missile will have been deployed, of deep concern to Washington not only for Tehran’s patently advanced arsenal, but the secrets they could steal in examining the stricken drone.

The MQ-4C soars to over 50,000ft, can be operated from 9,400 miles away and is loaded with optical/infrared sensors – it is believed to be the first time one has been taken out.

It comes amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington over U.S. economic sanctions and alleged Iranian attacks on shipping in the Straits of Hormuz.

It’s not quite so fun playing gunboat diplomacy when the enemy has the ability to sink your gunboats. The fact that a Triton has not been shot down before tends to indicate that Iran’s military capabilities are better than expected, which should give the Trump administration serious pause about listening to the neoclowns and their incessant demands for what very well could turn out to be the US empire’s Sicilian Expedition.

One should be hesitant to take either side at their word, however, since there were no Tritons officially deployed to the region and there is some belief that it was actually a RQ-4N BAMS-D drone, which are Global Hawks converted to experimental Tritons. This may explain the apparent contradiction in reports.

Now, remember, the neoclowns want us to believe that Iran can shoot down a new-model drone, which reportedly has never been done before, but nevertheless wasn’t able to sink a civilian ship in six separate attempts.

UPDATE: Iran has released what it claims are the precise coordinates of the shoot-down:

At 00:14 US drone took off from UAE in stealth mode & violated Iranian airspace. It was targeted at 04:05 at the coordinates (25°59’43″N 57°02’25″E) near Kouh-e Mobarak. We’ve retrieved sections of the US military drone in OUR territorial waters where it was shot down.

This Reddit analysis strikes me more as revolution porn than a revelation of actual government wargaming analysis, but nevertheless, it appears to be generally correct with regards to the essentials:

The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War. Their conclusion is as follows: They don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. It’s just a matter of how long it takes.

A longer analysis will follow, but here are the salient points.

30{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of the American population will actively revolt.

This alone is enormous and damning. Historically, you only need 10{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of the population to actively participate in a rebellion to successfully overthrow the establishment: We only had 15{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of the population actively attempting to throw out the British during the Revolutionary War; roughly 70{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of what remained was neutral and simply stood by. By contrast, 30{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of Americans in modern America would support a revolution to stop their own government if it happened tomorrow That’s how discontent the people are and how much the people don’t support the government.

The government would need infrastructure more than rebels would.

Already working with significant handicaps, the establishment would need electricity, access to the Internet, bridges, and airports to coordinate any active campaign against the rebellion. By contrast, the rebellion can work in the dark. Considering how easy it would be to sabotage US infrastructure, one of the first things the rebellion would do is collapse bridges, destroy, or seize power plants, and cover the Interstate in IEDs. This is relatively simple to accomplish, and it would inflict enormous damage on the establishment’s ability to restore order. It would also cost an enormous amount of time and effort to fix any sabotage, because the establishment would need to provide military protection to any workers attempting to rebuild, which is a drain their active fighting personnel resources that they could not afford.

It would certainly make for an interesting wargame design challenge. And it also is in harmony with what we know of the Clinton adminstration’s study of the various militia groups and the government’s inability to suppress them. As a general rule, there is very, very little that governments can do about 4GW insurrections; a government that lacks the ability to suppress illegal organizations such as MS-13 and the Gulf Cartel isn’t going to be able to do much about ideological rebels either.

As if there were still any remaining doubts, the evidence that FDR not only knew about the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time, but actually connived at making it happen in order to get the USA in the war against Germany is conclusive:

A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush’s South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about. After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinson published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.

Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear. Stinnett establishes and proves his case with voluminous documentary evidence, including forty-seven pages of Appendices presenting photographic reproductions of key official records, as well as numerous others reproduced in the body of the text, and 65 pages of closely detailed reference notes. This evidence proves Stinnett’s factual assertions, arguments and conclusions. His research files and notes are deposited at the Hoover Institute library at Stanford. Day of Deceit is exemplary documentary historiography. It presents the material testimony on which its analysis and conclusions are based. Its validity will be clear to any fair-minded reader. Stinnett’s book settles and resolves rational, candid, honest, fact-based discussion and debate about the background of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

As Stinnett shows, the plan that eventuated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was set in motion in early October 1940 based on an “eight-action memo, dated October 7, 1940 … by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Navy Intelligence.”

At this point it should be abundantly clear to every historically aware individual that absolutely no single incident should ever be regarded as a legitimate justification for war by the American public, considering the way in which the US government regularly engages in fraud and deception in order to manipulate public opinion whenever it wants to go to war with a foreign state.

And note that the author served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1946. He clearly isn’t an anti-military fantasist with an axe to grind.

Whatever happened to the imperial policy of free trade uber alles?

The US-India defense ties will be put at risk should New Delhi purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems, a senior American diplomat warned, noting that India should think very carefully about making such strategic choices.

“At a certain point, a strategic choice has to be made about partnerships and a strategic choice about what weapons systems and platforms a country is going to adopt,” Alice Wells, US principal deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, said this week at the hearings on US interests in South Asia and the budget for the fiscal year 2020. India’s procurement of the S-400s “effectively could limit India’s ability to increase our own interoperability,” she said, explaining that Washington has “serious concerns” about the implications of the $5 billion deal signed with Russia in October on India-US defense ties.

If it’s not my business that my neighbor hires a Nicaraguan gardiner, how is it a senior American diplomat’s business if India buys Russian air defense systems? If I were an Indian official, I would simply throw Washington’s idiotic free trade rhetoric right back in its face. As well as, of course, this amusingly ironic news concerning the manufacture of F-35s.

Exception PCB, a Chinese-owned company based in Gloucestershire, England, manufactures the circuit boards that control the engines, lighting, fuel and navigation systems of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter…. Exception PCB was bought by Shenzhen Fastprint in 2013, has never concealed its Chinese ownership and has also worked on the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet and the Apache attack helicopter, among other sensitive programs. A director from the company told SkyNews there are “clear firewalls in place” between the Exception and its Chinese owners, that the company only produces bare circuit boards, and that no additional electronic information is supplied. But Lockheed Martin didn’t seem so sure, informing Sky that “like all components of the F-35,” the circuit boards “are inspected repeatedly at each stage of manufacture.”

What’s to worry about? Countries that trade don’t fight, right? Anyhow, the continuing decline of US influence is becoming more apparent every day. No wonder the neocons are desperate to trigger a war between the US and Iran while the US is still capable of fighting one.

Item: Of 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei (literal translation: “second generation”; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei (“third generation”; the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei (“first generation”) immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.

Item: According to the 2000 US Census, there were 385,488 Americans of Iranian ancestry at that time.In the 2011 ACS, the number of Americans of full or partial Iranian ancestry amounted c. 470,341… most experts believe that the underrepresented number of Iranian Americans in the ACS is a problem due to the fact that “many community members have been reluctant in identifying themselves as such because of the problems between Iran and the United States in the past two decades.” Higher estimations of 1,000,000 and higher are given by many Iranian and non-Iranian organisations, media and scholars. The Atlantic stated that there are an estimated 1,500,000 Iranians in the United States in 2012. The Iranian interest section in Washington D.C. claimed to hold passport information for approximately 900,000 Iranians in the US in 2003.

Translation: there are at least 10x more Iranians in the USA now than there were Japanese in the USA during WWII. This is only one of the many reasons that the war with Iran sought by the neocons would be extraordinarily foolish. Not quite “invade Russia in winter” suicidal, but almost certainly “Sicilian Expedition” stupid.

Newsflash: “THE US said tonight that Iran was behind the “torpedo attack” on an American-linked oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman. Both the Front Altair and the Panama-flagged Kokuka Courageous – which was reportedly bombed – burst into flames and were forced to evacuate in the troubled region this morning.”

Newsflash: ” An unexploded device, believed to be a limpet mine, was spotted on the side of one of two oil tankers attacked on Thursday in the Gulf of Oman, a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

It’s going to be a little awkward if that limpet mine turns out to be of US or Israeli manufacture.

UPDATE: Even the Pentagon and the US Navy don’t buy it.

“We have no interest in engaging in a new conflict in the Middle East,” CENTCOM added. “We will defend our interests, but a war with Iran is not in our strategic interest, nor in the best interest of the international community.”

The US military establishment is gradually waking up to the uncomfortable realization that victory over its primary enemies is no longer guaranteed:

For the first time in decades, it is possible to imagine the United States fighting—and possibly losing—a large-scale war with a great power. For generations of Americans accustomed to U.S. military superiority and its ability to deter major wars, the idea of armed conflict between great powers may seem highly improbable. The idea that the United States—with the most expensive armed forces in the world by a wide margin—might lose such a war would seem absolutely preposterous. Nevertheless, the possibility of war and U.S. defeat are real and growing.

Given that U.S. armed forces’ last major conventional combat operations were the massively lopsided victories against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and 2003, many Americans might be wondering how this could come to pass. This report makes the case that one salient issue is that the American way of war—the implicit and explicit mental framework for U.S. military strategy and operations—that coalesced after the Gulf War is no longer valid.

China and Russia have spent almost two decades studying the current American way of war. While the Department of Defense (DoD) has taken its military superiority for granted and focused on defeating nonstate adversaries, China and Russia have been devising strategies and developing new concepts and weapons to defeat the United States in a war should the need arise. They have offset their relative weakness versus the United States by using time and geography to their advantage and by focusing their weapons- and concept-development efforts on finding ways to attack vulnerable nodes in U.S. military operations. The goal of these strategies and concepts is to create a plausible theory of victory whereby China or Russia avoid a “fair fight” with the Joint Force and could therefore defeat the United States and its allies and partners in a regional war. These Chinese and Russian strategies, which once seemed implausible or far in the future, are beginning to pay off. They are shifting military balances in key regions and pushing allies and partners to reconsider U.S. security guarantees.

I’ve been commenting on this for the last few years, and both Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind have been doing so for much longer, so it’s interesting to see the way in which the establishment is finally beginning to admit the obvious.

If you look at the various elements that went into the US victory in the two World Wars and the Cold War, the most striking observation is that virtually none of those elements apply anymore. Whether one considers the potential industrial base, the national demographics, or the geography, it is readily apparent that a) the United States is in the position of WWII-era Germany and b) China is in the position of the WWII-era USA.

This is taken verbatim from the Moorer Report, published in 2003:

Findings of the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli Attack on USS Liberty, the Recall of Military Rescue Support Aircraft while the Ship was Under Attack, and the Subsequent Cover-up by the United States Government 

We, the undersigned, having undertaken an independent investigation of Israel’s attack on USS Liberty, including eyewitness testimony from surviving crewmembers, a review of naval and other official records, an examination of official statements by the Israeli and American governments, a study of the conclusions of all previous official inquiries, and a consideration of important new evidence and recent statements from individuals having direct knowledge of the attack or the cover up, hereby find the following:

1. That on June 8, 1967, after eight hours of aerial surveillance, Israel launched a two-hour air and naval attack against USS Liberty, the world’s most sophisticated intelligence ship, inflicting 34 dead and 173 wounded American servicemen (a casualty rate of seventy percent, in a crew of 294);

2. That the Israeli air attack lasted approximately 25 minutes, during which time unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on USS Liberty’s bridge, and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into our ship, causing 821 holes, more than 100 of which were rocket-size; survivors estimate 30 or more sorties were flown over the ship by a minimum of 12 attacking Israeli planes which were jamming all five American emergency radio channels;

3. That the torpedo boat attack involved not only the firing of torpedoes, but the machine-gunning of Liberty’s firefighters and stretcher-bearers as they struggled to save their ship and crew; the Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty’s life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded;

4. That there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew; evidence of such intent is supported by statements from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Undersecretary of State George Ball, former CIA director Richard Helms, former NSA directors Lieutenant General William Odom, USA (Ret.), Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, USN (Ret.), and Marshal Carter; former NSA deputy directors Oliver Kirby and Major General John Morrison, USAF (Ret.); and former Ambassador Dwight Porter, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon in 1967;

5. That in attacking USS Liberty, Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States;

6. That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack; evidence of the recall of rescue aircraft is supported by statements of Captain Joe Tully, Commanding Officer of the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, and Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, the Sixth Fleet carrier division commander, at the time of the attack; never before in American naval history has a rescue mission been cancelled when an American ship was under attack;

7. That although Liberty was saved from almost certain destruction through the heroic efforts of the ship’s Captain, William L. McGonagle (MOH), and his brave crew, surviving crewmembers were later threatened with “court-martial, imprisonment or worse” if they exposed the truth; and were abandoned by their own government;

8. That due to the influence of Israel’s powerful supporters in the United States, the White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people;

9. That due to continuing pressure by the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, this attack remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress; to this day, no surviving crewmember has been permitted to officially and publicly testify about the attack;

10. That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history; the existence of such a cover-up is now supported by statements of Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, USN (Ret.), former Judge Advocate General of the Navy; and Captain Ward Boston, USN, (Ret.), the chief counsel to the Navy’s 1967 Court of Inquiry of Liberty attack;

11. That the truth about Israel’s attack and subsequent White House cover-up continues to be officially concealed from the American people to the present day and is a national disgrace;

12. That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation, and specifically are unwilling to challenge Israel’s interests when they conflict with American interests; this policy, evidenced by the failure to defend USS Liberty and the subsequent official cover-up of the Israeli attack, endangers the safety of Americans and the security of the United States.

WHEREUPON, we, the undersigned, in order to fulfill our duty to the brave crew of USS Liberty and to all Americans who are asked to serve in our Armed Forces, hereby call upon the Department of the Navy, the Congress of the United States and the American people to immediately take the following actions:

FIRST: That a new Court of Inquiry be convened by the Department of the Navy, operating with Congressional oversight, to take public testimony from surviving crewmembers; and to thoroughly investigate the circumstances of the attack on the USS Liberty, with full cooperation from the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the military intelligence services, and to determine Israel’s possible motive in launching said attack on a U.S. naval vessel;

SECOND: That every appropriate committee of the Congress of the United States investigate the actions of the White House and Defense Department that prevented the rescue of the USS Liberty, thereafter threatened her surviving officers and men if they exposed the truth, and covered up the true circumstances of the attack from the American people; and

THIRD: That the eighth day of June of every year be proclaimed to be hereafter known as USS LIBERTY REMEMBRANCE DAY, in order to commemorate USS Liberty’s heroic crew; and to educate the American people of the danger to our national security inherent in any passionate attachment of our elected officials for any foreign nation.

We, the undersigned, hereby affix our hands and seals, this 22nd day of October, 2003.

Thomas H. Moorer
Former Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

General of Marines Raymond G. Davis, USMC, MOH

Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, USN, Ret.,
Former Judge Advocate General of the Navy

Ambassador James Akins, Ret.,
Former United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia

Political commissars worked so well for the WWII-era Soviet Army, after all.

Back in December, Ron Unz observed that sooner or later, China is very likely to strike back against the out-of-control imperial corpocracy that currently rules the USA:

Since the end of the Cold War, the American government has become increasingly delusional, regarding itself as the Supreme World Hegemon. As a result, local American courts have begun enforcing gigantic financial penalties against foreign countries and their leading corporations, and I suspect that the rest of the world is tiring of this misbehavior. Perhaps such actions can still be taken against the subservient vassal states of Europe, but by most objective measures, the size of China’s real economy surpassed that of the US several years ago and is now substantially larger, while also still having a far higher rate of growth. Our totally dishonest mainstream media regularly obscures this reality, but it remains true nonetheless.

Provoking a disastrous worldwide confrontation with mighty China by seizing and imprisoning one of its leading technology executives reminds me of a comment I made several years ago about America’s behavior under the rule of its current political elites:

Or to apply a far harsher biological metaphor, consider a poor canine infected with the rabies virus. The virus may have no brain and its body-weight is probably less than one-millionth that of the host, but once it has seized control of the central nervous system, the animal, big brain and all, becomes a helpless puppet.

Once friendly Fido runs around foaming at the mouth, barking at the sky, and trying to bite all the other animals it can reach. Its friends and relatives are saddened by its plight but stay well clear, hoping to avoid infection before the inevitable happens, and poor Fido finally collapses dead in a heap.

 Normal countries like China naturally assume that other countries like the US will also behave in normal ways, and their dumbfounded shock at Ms. Meng’s seizure has surely delayed their effective response. In 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon visited Moscow and famously engaged in a heated “kitchen debate” with Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the relative merits of Communism and Capitalism. What would have been the American reaction if Nixon had been immediately arrested and given a ten year Gulag sentence for “anti-Soviet agitation”?

Since a natural reaction to international hostage-taking is retaliatory international hostage-taking, the newspapers have reported that top American executives have decided to forego visits to China until the crisis is resolved. These days, General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US, and China is also the manufacturing source of nearly all our iPhones, but Tim Cook, Mary Barra, and their higher-ranking subordinates are unlikely to visit that country in the immediate future, nor would the top executives of Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and the leading Hollywood studios be willing to risk indefinite imprisonment.

And there is nary an American who would shed a tear if they were imprisoned indefinitely over there. It’s such a shame that the Meng arrest didn’t take place before Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to China….