I don't know if this leak is accurate, but it lines up with my own expectations. There's really only one reason that Israel would even ask us to join the war: Fordow. They've done a much better job of dismantling Iran's leadership and air defenses than we would have. Their intelligence service and military have demonstrated great superiority to that of our ossified, bloated agencies: compare the campaign of the last few days with any period from any of our long wars. They have lived up to Sun Tzu's dictum: "Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt."
Our President seems to think that he is doing the same thing, telling the press that he is still open to talks and that he won't make a decision until a second before, that no one knows his plans. In the age of open source intelligence, that's not good enough for a military as large as ours. Everybody knows that we deployed a dozen F-22s to Jordan and KC-130 tankers to southern Europe (not northern Europe, where they might do something regarding Ukraine). Everyone knows that our ships are at sea and we will soon have three aircraft carriers in range. Diego Garcia has hosted extra B-2 bombers since March, and how has some extra B-52s as well.
Prime Minister Starmer isn't the only world leader reacting to this. Russia's President Putin has affirmed Russia's neutrality -- no help is coming, comrades -- as he calls for new diplomacy.
While a B-52 bombing campaign would likely shorten the war, there is as I said just one thing that Israel can't do for itself that it desperately wants done. The Fordow nuclear facility is buried under a mountain, and a deep earth penetrating weapon is the only way to reach it without a substantial ground invasion. The latter is out of Israel's reach, even if they weren't fighting a war in Gaza already. So both horns of the dilemma posed by Fordow require a US solution: either we send the Marines to seize it and dismantle it, or we bring in a B-2 -- the only bomber that can carry the only bomb that can do the job.
I wouldn't be surprised to see us use more than four to crack a hole deep enough, and perhaps even follow up with a nuclear weapon. That would also have the advantage of rendering the site impossible to reoccupy for some time. The point that the US would like to make, our major strategic interest, is the same point that was made when Obama ignored the War Powers Act to ensure the destruction of Gaddafi in Libya: no one else may have the Bomb. As in Dune, where the Great Houses all had Atomics because having Atomics was how you became a Great House, the possession of nuclear weapons determines the power structure of the world. Holding that power structure together with America at its top is the only real reason to consider doing this. The opportunity to completely eradicate a nuclear weapons program that is so close to completion may likely prove impossible to resist, especially given the vocal commitment of the involved nation on the subject of "Death to America."
Thus I suspect that, dissembling aside, Trump intends to issue the order. Despite both Houses of Congress introducing resolutions opposing it, semi-bipartisan in the Senate where Thomas Massie has joined it, unpassed resolutions are not even empty gestures.
Reportedly -- who knows if it's true? -- Trump asked Israel not to assassinate the Ayatollah Khamenei. The reasoning given in the brief quote aside, a better reason to leave him alive is that he is the only one who can plausibly negotiate a surrender. You have to leave someone alive that the losing side recognizes as their legitimate leader if you are to have any hope of getting them to accept the legitimacy of the order to lay down arms.
With the air defenses already effectively destroyed, a US air campaign will face relatively easy sailing. I would expect the Fordow strike to be done in more than sufficient force to leave it obviously and permanently destroyed. The psychological effect of having that fortress reduced to ash in one night might compel the aging Ayatollah to consider surrender, especially if more generous terms than "unconditional" are truly on offer behind the scenes.
If not, a B-52 campaign can go on for quite a while. That would be quite tragic, as it would harm a lot of people who have no more control over all of this than you or I do. Many of them would doubtless prefer a different government than the one they find themselves with no control over. As to that, this guy at least has been angling for this moment for decades; I have been running into his people for years. Long organization may pay off for him. I don't think he has a lot of support within the US government, but he may have some support in Iran especially among the true Persians. They are the largest and most powerful of the various ethnic groups and will have a lot to say about any future.
16 comments:
Couple thoughts on this.
1) You might have misread the newspaper's claim about delivering MOPs, the bunker busters. Our B-2s also can deliver those. My personal estimate is that it would take 3-4 MOPs to do in Fordow, possibly with a couple more in a second wave depending on BDA.
2) Fordow isn't the only nut Israel has trouble cracking. They've damaged Natanz, but that facility would profitably benefit (from our perspective) from a couple of MOPs, also.
3) BDA at both sites after, say, a couple of days--which as you've noted, the Israelis are fully capable of doing--would tell us all where additional entry/exit facilities are for those sites and where the rats are that are scurrying out and scurrying in to try recovery efforts--and so present additional targets for the Israelis.
4) Some reports indicate that Israel may be running low on Arrow missiles, perhaps faster than they're able to attrit Iran's ballistic launch facilities and missile storage/staging sites. I wouldn't be surprised if our THAAD deployed in Israel were in the same condition. That situation would profit from US Naval assets that are anti-ballistic missile capable moving into the Arabian Gulf to catch Iran's missile barrages on the rise and attrit them before they get into Israeli and US Med and Gulf of Aden range. On the other hand, the Iranian missile barrages seem to be getting smaller in size.
4a) Such a move would greatly benefit from an air campaign (US?) against Iran's Arabian Gulf and Arabian Sea ports and navy assets and shore-based countershipping sites. This is the only area that might draw the US into a prolonged campaign, but canceling the ports and navy could be done in hours to a couple of days.
5) I don't think Trump is trying to disguise much of anything other than specific timing. He's also playing head games with the Iranian government personnel.
6) I agree that executing Khamenei would be counterproductive, but not because a live Khamenei could negotiate a surrender. Iranian government personnel's promises, commitments, words--including the "and" and the "the"--are utterly worthless. Khamenei's only value here is maintaining a coherent government rather than leaving a vacuum into which shambles the mullahs and military chiefs would descend into internecine warfare for control. A bunch of guerilla outfits fight among themselves would do the Iranian people no good, and they would be very dangerous for the surrounding nations.
Eric Hines
"You might have misread the newspaper's claim about delivering MOPs, the bunker busters. Our B-2s also can deliver those."
It's only the B-2 that can, as I understand it. The relevant bomb is six meters long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP
"3) BDA at both sites after, say, a couple of days--which as you've noted, the Israelis are fully capable of doing--would tell us all where additional entry/exit facilities are for those sites and where the rats are that are scurrying out and scurrying in to try recovery efforts--and so present additional targets for the Israelis."
BDA for any readers who haven't spent years doing this is "battle damage assessment." Yes, that's right; if we want to do a longer campaign, they could feed targets to it.
"Khamenei's only value here is maintaining a coherent government..."
Only in the rough sense that Joe Biden was doing that. Khamenei's an old man too, and almost everyone he would have known and trusted was killed last week. He's just a figurehead; but he's a figurehead who can surrender.
I'm not happy with the President basically getting to declare war without Congress, but that's what we've had for years now.
A technical question: how much debris falls back into the hole? Later bombs have to traverse the rubble left by the earlier ones, so the depth achieved doesn't go linearly with the number of bombs. And I wonder how well partitioned the underground lab is.
Here's a 2021 open intel-based report that attempts to diagram how Fordow is laid out. No idea how credible it is.
https://www.intel-lab.net/post/fordow-fuel-enrichment-plant-as-never-seen-before
It's a reasonably good bet that the Israelis have pretty exact specs on the target.
...President basically getting to declare war without Congress....
Starting a conflict, or joining one in progress, isn't the same as declaring war. Legal technicalities matter.
The way the MOP works, a second one may will have an easier time penetrating the loose rubble than the first one had penetrating solid rock. My thought, though, was that the first few MOPs would be laterally spaced over the Fordow (and Natanz) sites, not successively drilling into a single hole.
Eric Hines
It's probably good to keep this thread for discussion of events. However, I feel like talking politics, so against all good judgment and taste, I'm going to the previous post to do that. It's OK if no one follows me; I have wine.
Link:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2025/06/looks-like-war-again.html
I know that in grading construction sites, the rough rule of thumb is excavated material increases in volume about 20%. That's a pretty significant de-densification when you're thinking about putting additional penetrators in a hole. Loose material is easier to penetrate than solid material.
I was thinking that another good reason to leave the Ayatollah was so the people could depose him themselves. This may avoid some risk of blowback by us directly deposing him, which could give Islamist radicals greater impetus to engage us in the follow on period.
It is most likely that Trump will green-light bombing Fordow to extinction. I think most MAGA peeps will agree to that, and ONLY that. "Regime change"? NOPE. "Boots on the ground"? NOPE.
Watch the slippery "involvement" word get tossed around by the WarPigs as though it is definitive. It is not, and I think Trump knows that, too.
Meantime, it appears that Trump has gotten Putin to sit quietly vis-a-vis Iran action. No surprise, as Russia has been attacked by Iranian-financed madmen, too.
When a foreign government seizes your diplomats and holds them hostage for over a year, you are already at war.
And yes, it has to be the Iranian people themselves who need to depose Khameni and form a new government.
"That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness"
It's only the B-2 that can, as I understand it.
My prior response to this has disappeared, or I neglected actually to push PUBLISH.
The B-52 also can deliver the MOP; that was the platform that was used to test it. One concern with using the B-52 is its survivability in a hostile environment. However, the B-52 has some really updated countermeasures that would go a long way to protect it, especially against the limited facilities that Iran has to reach its altitude.
My own concern with the B-2 is its survivability in a hostile environment--its maneuverability is severely limited. And, Luddite that I am, I'm really leery about relying on stealth technology.
Eric Hines
IIRC, and it has been a while since I read up on the topic, but do not ayatollahs draw their moral and perhaps political power from the number of people who acknowledge them as a true religions leader and follow them? Should that change with Khamenei, it could complicate or simplify matters. (I would wager on complicate.) Although, given the changes inside Iranian Shi'ism, that might not happen.
LittleRed1
So, Iran is unique in the world in a few ways. One of them is that it has two governments that operate in parallel, one of which is smaller but more powerful than the other. The second is that the military is not under the control of the government but directly under the head of state, the Supreme Leader. This would be equivalent to the UK Army and Navy reporting to King Charles rather than to whomever the PM is, not fictitiously or in pageantry but in actuality.
The Supreme Leader is a lifetime appointment. There's no further popular process to modifying his position under the constitution of the state of Iran. However, revolution provides its own alternative.
Here's an article from Robert Spencer on Iranian attacks on the US from 1979.
In it, he documents an interesting exchange:
... in March 2023, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Biden regime Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “How many attacks has Iran or its proxies launched against American positions in Iran and Syria, uh, since Joe Biden took office?” Austin answered, “There’s been, uh, about 83 attacks, I think, uh, since, uh, in the last several years.” Cotton responded, “That’s a lot of attacks over two years. How many times have we retaliated against Iran or its proxies?” Austin said, “We’ve, we’ve launched four major strikes, senator ..."
Proxies is an interesting idea. Is an attack by an Iranian proxy an attack by Iran? I tend to think so, but maybe not.
The idea of war in this context is also interesting. We were attacked 83 times and retaliated 4 times, but I don't remember anyone talking about us being at war during the Biden administration. Now, we're looking at maybe conducting some air strikes on an Iranian facility and suddenly "We're going to war!"
And what exactly is Iran going to do to us in this war? They haven't been able to take out Israel or stop Israeli attacks. What are they going to do about some US airstrikes that they wouldn't already do? At this point, it's unlikely they'll be able to shoot down our aircraft. There's always some risk, even in training operations, but I don't see a big reason for fear here.
Now, if we staged a ground invasion, that would be a whole different thing. We'd be putting US troops in danger and then there are things Iran could do to them. But this doesn't look like a ground invasion. So far, all the mobilization seems to be for an air war. I haven't heard anything about ground forces being mobilized.
So, it doesn't seem like it will be much of a war, but there does seem to be a lot of fear going around. Is it just because we're going after the principal actor instead of playing footsie with proxies? Is it just because we've got a Republican president attacking instead of a Democrat? I dunno.
The one thing I worry about is if Iran has terrorist sleeper cells already in the US ready to go. But, if that's the case, they'd hit us sometime. If they're here, I don't think we escape getting attacked by them. Our attacking Iran might change when they hit us, but not whether they hit us. On the other hand, if the Iranian regime falls, maybe those teams decide not to do anything. I don't know how to assess this risk.
Anyway, I may be completely wrong. This is not my area of expertise.
Former Green Beret Nick Freitas & friends put up a good discussion about this on YouTube. They discuss the Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz argument and get into what some other commentators have argued about the situation. In the end, Freitas talks a lot about what he learned in Special Forces about regime change and working with other nations. It was a thoughtful discussion.
For me, it brought out one interesting difference in how I look at regime change.
Everyone seems to treat regime change as meaning we invade, occupy, and rebuild the country. I call that "nation building." For me, regime change is just toppling a government. Then, you can nation build, or not. Your option. We don't have to stick with the Powell "you broke it you bought it" doctrine.
However, when I ask what all the fear is about, I suspect it's this. People don't want another round of occupying a hostile nation with conventional ground forces and trying to rebuild it while our people get shot and blown up for their efforts to help. I don't want that either.
Post a Comment