One of the things that really trips a lot of analysts, including ones with real skin in the game, is that they refuse - absolutely refuse - to accept how stupid Trump very obviously is. He has no knowledge of anything, is incapable of learning, and only remembers the last thing to happen to him.
McMaster is incredible for writing a great book, but then almost directly reenacting it's mistakes himself
this conflict is stupid, wrong, and infuriating
i am being absolutely serious here: CENTCOM had one job and it was literally to prepare for an Iran contingency
Hey CENTCOM you’ve been planning for this for decades, you wanna dust off that OPLAN for Hormuz now buddy?
CENTCOM:
Screenshot from the Planet of the Bass Tiktok where lyrics on screen say "Women are my favorite guy"
Screenshot from the Planet of the Bass Tiktok where lyrics on screen say "Tell the world 'stop the war'"
This song feels incredibly relevant today.
doing this without attaching it to a war powers vote is political malpractice
this is *particularly* fucking stupid when republicans are all saying that gas prices rising isn’t a big deal and it’ll all be over any day now. unbelievably bad political instincts from kelly and blumenthal here.
Today’s fun fact: the reason shipping lanes in the Baltic are so damn narrow is that there are anywhere from thirty to one hundred THOUSAND unexploded mines in the waterway from the World Wars, and the lanes are where the bottom has been swept
Gonna keep posting these things until people stop trying to make up IHL/LOAC www.justsecurity.org/133397/sinki...
Marco Rubio, sweating: leaked NATO emails confirm that the Kurds are in fact the Sea Peoples and are capable of great feats of amphibious warfare
oh im aware
I HATE SLOPULISM TAX CUTS
"surely they'll only attack at night so i can leave the bunker during the day" is honestly kinda funny like... bro...
it comes from PRC but the joke is that its also that lol
you have to clear channels through the field and keep them cleared and then you have to escort the tanks from air/surface attack
see when i go into town on the weekends i just drive to here and take the metro in because i ain't paying for parking in the district lol
cool podcast that @ohheckitspeck.bsky.social sent me
I love being able to recognize a station immediately
lol
……….fine, I’ll do it
Perhaps killing the dictator convinced that Nothing Ever Happens induced some kind of temperament shift in Tehran, idk why
"Why won't the Iranian just give us a ceasefire when we broke our not!treaty with them and keep attacking them every nine months? Why don't they take us at our word??"
its cool how we’ve spent decades anticipating this exact scenario where a cornered iran would mine or otherwise deny access to the strait and the US gov is just like “woah, no idea they’d play this card in response to [operation: no iranian government official left alive]”
“We can’t possibly escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, let alone gain dominance over it!” - the most powerful naval force in history of the world which is convinced it is the linchpin of all future conflicts and Guardian of the Pacific
kinda love the look of JRTC OPFOR uniforms
Can easily imagine her going "oh yeah if we ate a silkworm I knew I was fucked, but I wasn't gonna let them mine the strait when I had a ship that I could fight" and then it does set up her fall in the ~ANZIO Incident~ nicely because she gambles and loses
but also Scott was with the LCSes that charged a PLAN SAG so its also on brand and argubly less risky than Second Paracel
also FFG-62's first functional deployment soloing the SOH despite its shitty seakeeping makes Scott all the more brave/wreckless/insane
i mean that's because we don't want to deal with IRGC taking constant pot shots at DDGs for no reason until we're confident we've blown up most of their dangerous stuff, but fuck knows if we've yoinked their ASCM force
