I haven't read anything today, but as of yesterday my understanding was that the US might get drug into the fight, mostly because Fox News is showing exciting war footage and Trump thinks that it'd be cool? Playing off his "always join the bullies" instincts?
Yes, a better blogger would have skipped this depressing topic entirely, but now that you've brought it up: Josh Marshall is offering his speculations and those of his readers as to where this all goes from here. It's some smart stuff all around, thoug inconclusive.
Trump's bully instinct here is conflicting with his cowardice. His desire to harm brown people in Iran is at odds with his desire not to help foreigners in Israel.
It may be wishful thinking, but I think cowardice and selfishness win out here, and he doesn't bomb. But I make that hopeful prediction with no confidence.
I highly recommend following Ankit Panda (mostly active on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/nktpnd.bsky.social)
and Jeffrey Lewis (https://x.com/armscontrolwonk) for good information and analysis on Iranian (and US, etc.,) nuclear and missile stuff.
https://x.com/armscontrolwonk?s=21&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
Fordow is under a mountain and according to IAEA's Grossi about 800 meters deep. There are serious doubts whether even many MOPs can reach it enough to have any effect or whether the US has that many on hand.
This whole thing is madness and Trump is being played by Bibi
What if the mountain comes to Mohamed?
4: I'm glad he's confident that Trump isn't being briefed on the use of nukes. I guess those are only for hurricanes.
This is two days old, but I think a fairly good big-picture summary: https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-iran-israel-and-trump
Tea leaf reading this morning is that he says he'll make a decision in two weeks (as he just did) when he wants to keep eyes on him as he lets the issue dangle then drop.
Great, two couples therapy threads in one day.
8 update https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/donald-trump-is-not-gonna-bomb-iran
11 is convincing. I don't think the US is going to war with Iran either.
I'm partial to the explanation that Trump just wanted out of the G7 meetings.
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I just came across this, and I immediately thought "Unfogged!" -- somebody decided to use machine learning to count how many yurts are visible in Mongolia in Google Maps. TL;DR: about 180k.
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Oops, wrong clipboard content (a video about the eternal "this will revolutionize education!" hype). Here's the yurt-counting exercise.
14 sounds like a good Google interview question. 180k yurts is more than I would have guessed...
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The Cuomo endorsement industrial complex frenzy among mainstream Dems is so, so disheartening. Jim Clyburn the latest. Because South Carolina cares.
And Crypto Gillibrand (not endorsing but ...):
"This is a country that believes in second chances," she recently told NY1. "So it's up to New York voters to decide if he should get a second chance to serve."
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I'm sure glad we ended up with a president who's not a puppet of Israel!
I'm thinking about getting a yurt, to go on the half-acre woodlot I am soon to acquire.
17: And the fucking rhetoric, my God.
Steven Goldstein*: "As a feminist who helped pass several pro-woman laws, I'm well aware of the issues with Andrew Cuomo, but Zohran Mandini is an existential threat to the Jewish people."
Among other things executive director for the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in 2016-2017
He sounds like it was his job to teach Anne Frank to respect the Nazis. And that he liked it.
I'm not able to confirm this, but apparently Oliver North is on Fox saying that Iran shouldn't be allowed to have missiles.
14-15: Neat! But also I skipped a bunch of the programming stuff.
Also also, he seems to have done all of this without realizing that "ger" is the Mongolian word for the traditional round dwelling that he calls "yurt."
Once upon a time, some places in Mongolia used packet radio on air-traffic control frequencies for their internet connections, except for defined times around the once-a-week-or-so flights to those locations. And the best predictor of any internet capability (outside the capital) was the presence of an American from the Peace Corps.
The Mongolian government also got the S. Korean and Japanese development agencies competing to connect the country to larger internet backbones. Well done, them!
"As a feminist who helped pass several pro-woman laws, I"
...have several black lady friends.
25.2 ??
Naturally, I was impressed by the quantity of yurts I saw, and I was curious: just how many yurts (ger in Mongolian) are in Mongolia and why?
One thing I've been wondering about - ajay, maybe you can answer. Why do people keep talking as though bombs were the only way to take out the underground nuclear sites? I have no military knowledge at all but couldn't you theoretically parachute a bunch of troops and just have them go in and dismantle everything?
Can we just portmanteau it together and call them yogurts?
28 is a reasonable question and I will do my best to answer. You may want to look back at my recent rant on the subject of airborne forces for a bit of background first. (I can't find it because the search facility is a bit wobbly but it was in the last couple of weeks or so.)
Finished? OK.
Bill McRaven, who used to be in charge of US Special Ops Command, wrote a very readable book called "Case Studies in Special Operations: Theory and Practice", and his big thing was the Area of Relative Vulnerability. Imagine a graph with time along the bottom and, up the side, the degree to which your forces on the target area are vulnerable (ie, outnumbered by an enemy who knows they're there). You want the area under that graph to be as small as possible. So you do things fast, to minimise the length, and you overmatch the enemy immediately, to minimise the height. And of course the longer you stay on the target, the more reinforcements are going to arrive, and the more vulnerable you become.
Now, say we're just thinking about the enrichment plant at Fordow. (It's a good target; it is also probably one of the two most valuable locations in the entire country to the Iranian regime.) What are we going to have to do, stage by stage, to get some of our guys underground with explosives (or just sledgehammers) and destroy it?
1. Insertion. We need to fly, in transport aircraft - which are slow, and not stealthy, therefore easier to hit - into Iran to a drop zone (DZ) somewhere within a few miles of Fordow. That might not be too difficult. Iranian air defences in western Iran are now very degraded. However there is no way that we will not be seen coming. At the very least, our aircraft will have to fly low and slow for the actual drop, so people in the area around the DZ will hear and possibly see them.
2. Infiltration. We then need to move on foot to the Fordow plant itself. This takes time (and we've already spent time sorting ourselves out after the drop). By the time we arrive at Fordow, the defenders will know we are coming.
3. Breach into the plant itself. We will need to defeat whatever defenders are around the door into the underground plant. We will need to overmatch the defenders three to one to ensure this. If there's a company, we need a battalion (800 men or so). Would they have more than a company at high readiness within, say, a mile of their most precious national asset? Probably. Whoever it is, by the time we get there, they will be there already.
4. Action on the target. We go underground and place charges or whatever. Meanwhile our friends on the surface are defending an area round the door so we don't get trapped underground by an enemy counterattack. We can assume that more enemy will have arrived by this point and will be trying really quite hard to retake the plant. Will they, perhaps, have armour? Tanks? Artillery? Attack helicopters? Fast jets? Yes, the Iranians don't have much left that can fly, but for this operation they would use it all.
5. Exfiltration. We come up again, collect our friends off the defences around the door, and move away, again on foot, to our pick-up point, while fighting off the enemy, who have been increasing steadily in number and strength as more and more forces arrive from the area around.
6. Extraction. Something comes and picks us up, somehow. If we're hoping to get flown out of here, then someone else will have to have simultaneously seized an airfield or a helicopter landing site for us to leave from, and have been holding it, and a perimeter round it, so that our flight can land. Otherwise it is a long walk out of Iran.
I am not a special operations planner, or indeed operator, and all this is from a position of almost complete ignorance. I have no idea what defences and garrisons are around Fordow. But I'm guessing there will be some. The idea is not impossible - nothing's impossible - but it would be extremely high-risk and doubtful of success. And if it fails, you probably lose the entire force - all of them.
There is a thing called 'friction' which everyone who's ever read any military theory can't shut up about, but it isn't a complicated topic; basically it's just "shit goes wrong, especially in war when someone is actively trying to make your shit go wrong, and so everything will probably take longer". And, see above, delays are what you least want in a special operation like this.
32.last: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UvvX2A9VKY
32: I suspect this describes the dynamic of the attempted Russian takeover of Hostomel pretty well. The very start of that operation was the best it got for them.
I hear the Iranian sand is really bad for helicopters.
I'm not saying we call on Tom Cruise, but I bet Peter Grave and the original MI crew could have pulled this off. Better yet, lets get James T. Kirk to beam the whole program out of the mountain.
The highest echelons of our government -- highest anyway -- are occupied by people who seem to have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction.
I agree with Drezner that the two weeks thing is the definitive sign that Trump isn't going to do anything. Hawks will hawk, but Trump isn't likely to buy their lines about how this time it's a sure thing.
32: one interesting detail is that there are no airfields anywhere near it. Tehran International Airport is about 70km away and on the other side of a mountain range, and, well, using that would be a daring choice.
Is there a train? Because I'm less than twenty miles from the airport, but it's an hour drive this time of day. With a dedicated rail link, probably only thirty minutes.
It's like a $70 cab ride right now. Or $2.75 if you have enough time to spare for the bus. Commandos are probably not bus people.
37: no actual airports but there's a little strip at Mahmood Abad just NW of Kashan. Near Mashkat. 1000m hard standing runway, looks like about 35/17. But it's still 40km from Fordow and that's a long way over a desert.
36: Yeah, I asked the same question in a friends whatsapp group and there I got the answer that unfortunately, there is only one Jack Bauer.
Americans of a certain age will recall that the US attempted a smaller mission in Iran that fell victim to friction at Desert One.
Yes indeed. And compared to jumping into Fordow, EAGLE CLAW was actually fairly plausible, and you will remember that almost everyone involved survived. This is because the structure of the operation included several natural abort points, one of which was at the Desert One site.
But there is no reverse gear on a parachute. Once you jump, you are committed, and you are only surviving if lots of things subsequent to the jump go well.
So some people, with varying degrees of candor, seem to be advocating more bombing as a route to regime change in Iran. Which I'm sure would be great, since we all know how eager the very organized and popularly-supported Iranian liberal secularist shadow government has become to take over. But to get there, wouldn't we need something more than just strategic bombing/missiling/droning? How many countries have had a regime change solely due to strategic bombing + popular discontentment? Cambodia? Libya? While there are certainly a lot of people in Iran who would like to see a different type of government, there also seem to be a lot of people who are fervent supporters of the current set up. Best case scenario from the Israeli govt perspective would seem to be Iran plunging into civil war, but even that seems vanishingly unlikely.
Just seems like any actual stab at regime change is going to involve a whole bunch of soldiers actually fighting on Iranian beaches and landing grounds, and in Iranian fields, streets and hills. I believe a certain Mr. Hussein, who is no longer with us, came to quite a bit of grief when he pursued that course of action.
It seems really hard to overthrow regimes these days. If the Iranian regime was going to topple, it would have happened in late 2022. There's just tons of countries with massive protests and unrest and the regime just survives (Iran, Turkey, Serbia, and Hong Kong come immediately to mind).
Maybe something could happen when the Supreme Leader dies, but bombing without an invasion is only going to reinforce the regime.
Airpower, even when paired with intelligence networks, has never toppled a government. Since the dawn of strategic bombing doctrines in World War I, early airpower theorists were captivated by the idea that, if organized correctly, bombing campaigns could encourage populations to revolt against their own governments. Since then, militaries have attempted a wide variety of schemes, including the intense bombing of cities to compel civilians to rise up and demand their government make whatever concessions necessary to halt the assault. In over 40 instances of strategic bombing from World War I to the first Gulf War in 1991, such barrages, whether concentrated and heavy or light and dispersed, never compelled civilians to take to the streets in any meaningful numbers to oppose their governments.
We were also thanked for our attention.
Usually whenever Trump proposes doing something, I always feel like, no matter how crazy, it is possible that he'll try it. The high tariffs, invading Greenland or Canada, whatever, he might actually do it. But I really truly did not think he'd start a war with Iran. And maybe he hasn't. No soldiers deployed yet. It's still a terrible thing to have done.
I guess now we'll see if aircraft carriers really are immune to ballistic missiles.
It'd be very Trump to do one day of bombing and then back out after that.
Do we think Khamenei knows about Taco?
49: I just looked at the Globe to see if Harvard had capitulated and saw that headline. He's doing a press conference. I just can't even.
Funny how the US only bombs countries without nuclear weapons of their own. Strange game: the only way to win is to build nuclear weapons as quickly as you can.
Yeah, the incentive structure we are creating isn't good.
58: We'll count it against your record. Oh wait.
I finally managed to track down this half-remembered comment from March.
I am too tired to fill in all the gaps in my knowledge of B-2 locations and behavior between late March and today, but placeholder.
Reports are these ones flew out of Missouri, but of course that could be a lie.
Apparently one of the bodies that keeps pushing everyone toward bombing Iran, besides whatever stew in the WH, is CENTCOM leadership? And has been for a while?
Combined skeets of someone with zero imprimatur but sounding knowledgable:
...as an institution they FUCKING HATE IRAN. Like the average staff officer there would order a nuclear strike on Tehran if they thought they could get the authority
...no ulterior motive, no MIC conspiracy, no 6-d chess attempts. Just a combatant command full of the dumbest fucking people in the entire DoD and an Admin stupid enough to let them run with scissors instead of keeping them locked up.
...There was never a "reset" in 2010, when we wrapped up Iraq (part 2), or even in 2019 when ISIS was defeated (mostly)....Iraq bled into Afghan Surge Part II taliban boogaloo bled into OIR bled into ~C-ITN~ ops bled into "oh shit the Iranians whacked us" bled into Houthis
...Iran was very much involved [in these phases] in various nefarious ways, including more than once directly killing Americans, and CENTCOM feels like they never got to hit back
Which is where an adult would say "wow man you never got to get the people that got you and your friends, sucks, probably go to therapy though instead of fucking up US FP for another generation"
CENTCOM doesn't do therapy
66 I know Mike Black and he definitely knows whereof he speaks
Curious what people here think about the viability of Iran blockading the Straits of Hormuz (for a significant amount of time). It seems the most formidable weapon they have against the US. Plus they've had a lot of time to prepare & come up with asymmetric techniques. In theory so have we but we're more blasé.
Anybody have any relatives in Tehran with entrepreneurial spirit? MIGA caps going to be in high demand soon!
The beauty of it is that you can also sell them in Israel.
68 blocking the Strait brings the Gulf Arab states into the war, but that isn't a huge risk because of the Gulf Arab states' utter incompetence in warfare. It also harms China and east Asia in general (who buy the oil) but helps Russia (who benefits from high oil prices).
Nearly all Iranian oil goes to China, and more than half Chinese oil imports go through Hormuz.
I read somewhere that there don't seem to be many casuaties because the sites were abandoned, and also doesn't seem to be much radiation, so maybe no stockpiles of nuclear material involved.
There's someone out there willing to offer any fool opinion.
Aside from massive tax cuts, this is probably one of the most conventional Republican president things Trump has done.
conventional Republican American president things
76 is really frustrating. No post-Clinton Democratic president would have done this. If people who were against bombing Iran all voted for Harris we wouldn't be here.
(I'm not sure what exactly Bill Clinton would have done, but I admit that it's very much plausible that he would have done this. But Obama, Biden, or Harris? No way.)
Obama destroyed Libya. Total state failure.
On the advice of Hillary Clinton, since apparently candidates count as presidents now.
Arms Control Wonk with an excellent thread https://x.com/armscontrolwonk/status/1936955686174466551?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
For the Blue Skyers https://bsky.app/profile/armscontrolwonk.bsky.social/post/3lsageddlpk2l
Also it's eerie how WMD this all feels.
Welp US Embassy in Qatar advisory for Americans to shelter in place and the U.K. has just followed suit. And Qatar just closed down all air traffic. Sheesh.
My apologies, but I don't think I know which one Arrakis.
I was like "Wait, isn't Qatar something close to an Iranian ally? Why would they be in trouble if the question is what Iran does next?" But of course they also have a US base. Shows what I know.
"I'm not sure what exactly Bill Clinton would have done, but I admit that it's very much plausible that he would have done this."
Yes, there's no way of knowing what Bill Clinton would have done if he had learned, while president, that Iran was building nuclear weapons.
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2000-04/iran-nuclear-briefs/clinton-signs-iran-nonproliferation-act
(And yes, in retrospect the fact that Qatar has a US base comes up all the time. I just blanked on it.)
All my group chats are on fire rn. What looks like a piece of a PAC-2 interceptor just landed a few feet away from a friend of mine
87: That's not the counterfactual, the counterfactual is Israel starts a war with Iran and wants our help. But at any rate, you're probably right, Clinton wouldn't likely do this without some additional allies on board.
83: at least we're being spared the yellow cake lies this time? More efficient?
Duncan Hines with chocolate frosting from a can. Yum.
Barry, you're still in the U.S., right? Or back already? Hope your group chatterers stay safe.
I feel like we're a level up above Harry Frankfurt-level bullshit where they're not even trying to snow people with lies, they're just saying random lies and expecting people to go along with it as submission to power.
Yeah, I'm in NY to the end of July (assuming everything returns to something normal by then)
What looks like a piece of a PAC-2 interceptor just landed a few feet away from a friend of mine
Better than a mushroom cloud, amirite?
93 feeling really bad for the ones with kids who are terrified. A friend's villa was shaking so badly she was afraid it would collapse
Just saw "temu ass bush administration" and it cracked me up.
Good thoughts to all there, Barry. I imagine it must be a bit frustrating with us being intellectual and/or jokey about it when missiles are literally falling from the sky near you.
Going back to the Hormuz question, I guess it's not just how the action by Iran would hurt its own allies or semi-allies like China, it would also really hurt them directly, because they use the straits a ton for their own oil.
97: ugh. At least there's some "signaling desire to deescalate" amid the unpredictability, I guess? But I think if you're a kid, you're just feeling 100% unpredictability at this point.
90: It's plausible to me that Biden or Harris would have stopped Netanyahu from attacking Iran. My sense is that Trump's attitude was "no skin off my back...let me know how it goes".
More signalling desire to deescalate. Until someone differently minded gets facetime with him.
53 and 54 to 101 and 103.
Do something dramatic and then immediately back down is the Trump way.
"Wait, isn't Qatar something close to an Iranian ally? Why would they be in trouble if the question is what Iran does next?"
Not allies but they share a huge natural gas reserve field that is the source of Qatar's wealth and that obviously requires some level of cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pars/North_Dome_Gas-Condensate_field
95. What will be regarded as normal by then?
Trump really mad about the size of the loads that Israel is dropping.
107 not having missiles flying back and forth for starters
Good thread https://bsky.app/profile/nktpnd.bsky.social/post/3lseb2ragzs24
Iran set back a few months at most. They moved the uranium beforehand, & the centrifuges are okay.
The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran's nuclear ambitions is ongoing, and could change as more intelligence becomes available.
If there's one thing the Trump administration is known for, it's the application of additional intelligence to current affairs.
They say the two happiest days in a centrifuge owners life are the day he gets his centrifuge and the day it gets destroyed by a puppet of Israel.
(111 and 112 and have similar takeaways, but 112 is sourced to the DIA.)
I wonder about the NYT's sources on the Iran strike. I suppose it has to be people within the Deep State (to coin a phrase) who want more bombing. That theory, though, sheds no light on whether the report is substantially true.
115 I'm wondering how increasingly unreliable DIA will be the more the Trumpers get their teeth into it. Anyway, Ankit Panda, is along with Jeffrey Lewis, one of the most careful and authoritative NPT/missile analyst guys out there.
What's so grimly hilarious is that baiting the US into bombing Iranian nuclear sites has been Bibi's wet dream for decades. And now he got his wish but it didn't really do much but as far as Trump is concerned it was 100% success and he's increasingly visibly irritated at Bibi, that's all he gets. Just the worst of all possibilities for him.
Our Kiwanis speaker today was a prominent Iranian-American prof, at the U. A very US/Israel friendly party line kind of talk -- one thing that was new to me was his claim about the extent to which high level assassinations of prominent Iranians (and that Hamas guy in Tehran) have been assisted by Iranian opponents of the current regime. People are being killed in their bedrooms, suggesting infiltration to an impressive degree. He thought these were likely people in the Iranian security services. If true, that's quite something.
Another thing the guy was adamant about is the Gulf leaders insistence that there not be a war. Too disruptive to business. Hence Trump's quick declaration of victory. I certainly buy this.
119 was in the FT, but they're insisting rather meekly. Headline: "Gulf allies feel sidelined and nervous following US strikes on nuclear sites."
While Gulf leaders last month feted Trump with pageantry and trillion-dollar investment pledges, behind the scenes the monarchies pressed him to stick to diplomacy with Tehran and avoid a regional war they believe would threaten their security and stability.
For the past week, the region's leaders have condemned Israel's offensive on their longtime rival, stayed in close contact with Tehran and called for a return to talks between Iran and the Trump administration.
Gulf monarchies have forbidden the US from launching attacks on Iran from bases on their shores. Diplomats and analysts say they strongly advised Washington against such a move, alarmed that it would even leave Gulf states as targets of Iranian retaliation.
On the story sourced to the DIA https://bsky.app/profile/nktpnd.bsky.social/post/3lserq5w57c2o
I'm sure the GCC was putting on a full court press to stop anything like Sunday's attack from happening but that was the best they were going to get.
Qatar generally has put far less restrictions on the US use of Udeid than other GCC countries on US bases in their countries. Iran of course would be an exception.
121: Is this news? Of course the WH is going to vituperate the report. ("Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 lb bombs perfectly on their targets" is pretty funny though. Like we all did that as teens.)
I really didn't expect the whole thing to turn out as grimly hilarious as it has.
You've got to figure that before they dig out and reconstitute the program they'll have to deal with how thoroughly they've been compromised by Mossad. And no one knows if the Ayatollah has changed his opinion on building a nuclear device.
127: what was the Ayatollah's opinion? I've never been clear about that.
He issued a fatwa against them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against_nuclear_weapons
Spell it like the first, pronounce it like the second.
https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1220527/exhaustion-and-inflection-estimating-interceptor-expenditures-in-the-israel-iran-conflict/
The minimum of 39 THAAD interceptors therefore cost over $495 million. The budget projects only 32 THAADs will be procured in FY 2026, so more than an entire year's worth of interceptors were fired in twelve days (The production rate in FY 2025 was only 12 interceptors).
https://www.ft.com/content/611fb4d1-1939-4401-85b7-1ba5d4455619
Many analysts forecast that the world would be awash with crude by the end of the year, putting more pressure on prices. "Everyone still thinks this [oil] is going down to $50 or $60," said Sen. "Once the risk is removed, people go back to looking at the fundamentals."