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Notes -
The U.S. has spent a lot more than six man-months on that problem over the past eighty years. It’s not a doctrinal problem. Planes remain unable to occupy territory.
Hegseth’s cronies aren’t going to find one weird trick to rout the Iranians.
The problem the US has in this conflict is they’ve become duped and high on their own bullshit. There’s no longer a “fact based reality” even behind the scenes amongst elites and policymakers, as the analysis is driven more by narrative than facts on the ground. Once politicians and pundits began eating the same cooking they were feeding to the public, they started having the same blind spots as your average citizen.
Go back to Operation True Promise 3, all the way in June of 2025. Iran’s strategy followed the same pattern of previous attacks: overwhelm Israel’s defenses with drones, cruise and obsolete ballistic missiles, and then follow it up with targeted strikes on military targets. Israel claimed to have intercepted 95% of Iranian drones. This is just a blatant and straight up falsehood. Not in the sense that the information is false in every sense of the word, but that it’s been highly deceptively edited and presented, deliberately with the intention to mislead. The whole idea of saturation is specifically to draw one’s air defenses to a multitude of low value targets to open up the airways for the next volley of attacks to hit its intended targets. These 95% were specifically meant to be intercepted, because it’s the 5% that’s decisive. That’s the entire purpose of said strategy. The pundits in the west who tout this as some kind of a triumphant victory are a bunch of dildos and are lying to people.
Or if you want, fast forward to the uprisings and protests that “spontaneously” (and for absolutely no reason…) took place after Operating Rising Lion by Israel. What the media doesn’t tell people but scholars know (if anyone ever bothered to read) is that the US, France and Israel actually keep a core group of around a thousand or so militants that are drawn from the more sensitive ethnic groups (like the Kurds). The protests that happened were predominantly (though not exclusively) in the Kurdish provinces that border Iraq. The attacks were specifically meant to stir up ire and frustration which is why houses of worship got ransacked, which prompted Iranian authorities to act. I can’t find the article right now but if you read Indian news coverage of the event during that time, the Iranian police actually intercepted about 60,000 weapons in the Bushehr region, that was intended to bolster the uprising that was happening there (which incidentally proves the detractors counterpoint that these “protests” weren’t “peaceful”). If you followed Liveuamap around that time (which incidentally is a Ukrainian website), you saw the exact same scenarios repeating itself, again. Weapons were being brought into western Iran with support from the Kurds, trying to instigate an uprising in the country. And the same also started happening in northern Iran. It was an armed insurrection, not a spontaneous, peaceful protest.
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