War, Good God Ya’ll

Quite a bit, actually

I hadn’t planned on doing two back-to-back articles on the elimination of Iran’s theocracy, but obviously there’s stuff here that is so in my wheelhouse, it’s running the helm and talking on the One MC. There will of course be other things discussed in this post, but number one with a bullet is the war on Iran.

Oh, and Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) What it’s good for, is to resolve, in a very permanent way, the problem of aggressor nations that want to kill your population, and destroy everything you stand for. It’s also good for causing nations that hate you to reconsider pushing their luck, letting the world know that pushing your buttons is not healthy, and giving more credence and power to your State Department’s negotiating positions.

If it’s known that “push that guy too hard, and he’ll just make your entire government and chain of command into pig food” people are more likely to find a way to negotiate.

In the game “Civilization” there’s a quote; “You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than with just a kind word.” It’s attributed to a guy whose business card read “Used Furniture Dealer.” If you know, you know (IYKYK).

Pull up a seat, dinner tonight is a recipe we’re inventing, Short Rib Onion Potpie, you know where the drinks are, grab something, and please don’t forget the tip jar where we collect for the mess.

The photo above is of course, an I/R still through the Type 18 Periscope, of the sinking of the IRIS Dena, as taken by the USS Charlotte. Or, why the crew of Charlotte will be drinking free at any submarine bar in the USA.

This attack is ridiculously controversial. I say ridiculously, because the idea that a submarine should not attack the warship of an enemy nation, that is headed toward a US Fleet, and multiple US bases, is so ludicrous as to be mocked with complete abandon. Seriously, any Submarine CO that wouldn’t take the shot in this situation would be court-martialed. To say this was a “war crime” as I’ve seen several individuals, including one former Vice Admiral state? Well as my friend Sarah Hoyt would put it, “the only thing to do is to look at such people and make duck noises.” Which is apparently how the Portuguese mock people that aren’t even worth wasting time talking to.

I’ve seen people upset that “Dena was supposed to be unarmed or lightly armed!” Uh huh, sure they were. And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

“The attack was without warning!” Well, that’s not quite as sure as all that. I’ve seen reports from an Iranian sailor that the Dena was told “you need to get off there, and abandon ship, you’re in our sights, and will be sunk” TWICE! https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/world/iris-dena-sailor-final-phone-call-us-warning-jj5hg7fp Which is far more “World War One” than I would have ever expected us to be.

“You used TWO Mark 48 torpedoes! It’s like you wanted to kill them!!!” Uh, you’re joking, right? That ship was heading in the direction of a US Carrier Task force AND was almost within missile range of a base (Diego Garcia) full of US Aircraft, of course we wanted to kill it.

What the fuck do you think Submarines DO? Doctrine says (Summing up here) in almost any action against an enemy ship, you shoot two weapons, so that if they detect them and try to run, they can’t evade both.

In addition, I will note that the sinking of Dena caused another two Iranian Warships to be interned, or have the crews desert. If Charlotte had let Dena get by her, and Dena had gone on to do some damage, even if only by ramming an American ship, those other two would also have been trying to do some damage. It probably also caused some of our “allies” that are seemingly also friends of Iran (Cough India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etal cough) to “reconsider their options.”

Finally, it has caused our enemies, like West Taiwan, to wake up and smell the Otto Fuel. Yes, everyone knew that American Submarines were to be found in any part of the world that has salt water, and that the first clue you get, that there’s a US boat in the area is a “Flaming Datum” as the tactics books call it. (Means there’s a ship burning and sinking, with no one obviously having shot at it.)

Still, our enemies, most solidly including the PRC (West Taiwan) and Russia, are used to people bragging about how wonderful their weapons are and exaggerating their capabilities by an exponential factor. After all, it’s what they do, and human nature is predisposed to think that everyone behaves and thinks the same way you do. A real, abject lesson, in the reality of American Submarine capabilities, like knowing you will be hanged in the morning, tends to focus the mind.

Michael Smith over at Unlicensed Punditry /two-days-over-iran? Notes that “Chinese probing flights around Taiwan—which had been occurring with increasing frequency in recent months—reportedly halted. Beijing had grown comfortable testing the limits of American patience, probing Taiwan’s air defense zone almost daily in an effort to normalize pressure. The spectacle of a regional military infrastructure being dismantled in a matter of days appears to have altered that calculation.” You should go read his article, he goes into a lot of important detail about how our opponents are rethinking their actions.

There’s a bunch of politicians in the parties out of power in various nations (like India) that are making noises about “how dare you kowtow to the Americans, if I were in charge—” Yeah, that’s nice. You’re not in charge, so it’s easy for you to talk smack. It’s entirely different to be the guy whose decisions can cause half your navy to rapidly and mysteriously become submarines. That’s another one of those things that tends to focus the mind.

Then we have the people who are “well, I’m OK with it, I guess, but did we really have to do that? Couldn’t we have just, like, shot a round in front of their bow or something?” For example we have Jack Devine War Is Hell — Even When We’re Winning

Jack, first off, claims “I believe that a major factor in our collective uneasiness about the war is that we’re not used to being the aggressor.” What the FUCK shipmate? Iran has been blowing up, or paying people to blow up, Americans since 1979! How are we the aggressors? “Death to America” ring any bells???

Jack goes on to say he was a fast boat sailor during the Cold War, and “we sometimes operated in close proximity to Soviet surface ships and submarines, always at the risk of detection and inadvertent confrontation. But — naively, perhaps — we never expected our ship to be firing live torpedoes at other vessels.”

REALLY??? Shipmate, I was a fast boat sailor during the cold war TOO. I remember sitting right behind a Charley class SSGN with strict orders “If they open their missile muzzle hatches, SINK them.” I also remember trailing SSBNs for weeks at a time, with similar orders. We knew that every missile that Charley launched was a chance that the USS New Jersey was at least damaged. We knew that every missile that SSBN got off was US Cities dying in nuclear fire. If you didn’t expect to fire live torpedoes at other vessels, you weren’t naïve, you were fucking brain dead.

Yes, there was always the concern when playing “chicken of the sea” (IYKYK) that we would actually collide with another submarine, and that would have been horrible, we would have felt guilty (assuming we survived) about it. (I can neither confirm or deny that such events ever actually happened.) These are “actions short of war.” No one wants to kill anyone in such circumstances. OTOH, once it goes to shooting, no qualms, no guilt, “He’s dead, and I’m walking away, and that’s the way I wanted it.” Or as the sticker on the Tactics trainer put it “He who gets off the first good shot, has to file a contact report.”

Then you have those never to be sufficiently scorned idiots over at POLITICO who breathlessly report that “A possible U.S. move to arm Iranian Kurds — in the hopes they would help remove the regime in Tehran — would lend the group a historic boost while running the risk of pushing Iran into further disarray.” Oh NO, we might push the enemy “further into disarray!!!” What fucking planet do you live on? What color is the sky there?

Seriously, in what world is it a bad thing, to put your enemy in disarray?

The same clowns talk about Trumps statement “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” on Truth social, with “though it’s not exactly clear what he meant by that.”

See, this is the problem with the idiots that are graduates of “schools of journalism.” They don’t understand the English Language any longer. They’re so used to people “Speaking in code” and “dog whistles” that they can’t understand plain English.

Now, that said, do I believe Trump’s only acceptable end state is WWII style Imperial Japan looking “Stack your rifles and report to interment camps, your officers will be allowed to commit seppuku?” No, this IS Trump, we’re talking about. He does that “art of the deal” thing. This is his openers. “Ask for way more than you will really accept, that way they think they got something.”

In somewhat related news, the Bad Cat did a nice piece on What Happened, v What Was Reported, with the terrorist bombing in NYC that failed because a couple of Neman Marxist Muslims couldn’t actually build a bomb that worked (thank the Gods) the-narrative-bombs? I don’t have enough space to go into it, so please, go give the cat a visit and check it out. It’s important stuff, and the Cat did good work in his coverage.

He (the Cat) also did a piece on that never to be sufficiently despised twatwaffle that was in charge of the LA department of Fire and Water, until the lawsuit over the failures during the Malibu fires caused her to flee with amazing alacrity, to the other end of the US. Where she is suddenly and miraculously the CEO of Puerto Rico’s power grid. Now the Cat is a citizen of PR, so it’s personal for him. puerto-rico-and-the-princess-of-darkness go take a look, especially if you’re part of the DOJ… There has to be some shenanigans here.

While we are on the subject of shenanigans, I’ve got a couple more for you, nashville-immigration-reporter-is-detained-by-ice-for-being-illegally-in-the-country Yeah, they busted her for reporting on ICE detaining illegals, because she was… wait for it… Illegal. She had overstayed her “Tourist” visa by about six years or more.

Then we have a couple of articles related to the same thing, The Fearless Band of Idiots seems to have had a special classification so secret that not only did the director of the FBI not know it existed, but neither did Congress, or almost anyone outside of the few people personally vetted by already existing members of this private little club.

This shit includes the changing of official records to hide the existence of the records in “Prohibited Access” (this, in itself is a crime) the perjury to judges, congress, and juries about what was known, and who knew it, and so on. This is the heirs of (and probably includes) that evil cross dressing son-of-a-bitch Hover’s ‘secret blackmail files’ that everyone in DC or anywhere else with a seat at the big boy table knew about, but never saw. After J Edger croaked, everyone wondered what happened to all his off the books, illegal investigations, that were used to blackmail politicians. Well, I guess now we know. They were kept, added to, and kept secret from anyone who might be “Boy Scout” enough to let the world know that they exist.

OOPS.

exclusive-the-fbis-secret-stash-, /kashs-cache-locating-the-fbis-secret, and 50-years-of-secrets-why-you-should-care All broke by Racket News. No one ever expected someone as Boy Scout, and as unconcerned with protecting the guilty for money, as Kash Patel, to wind up in a place where he might find out about this shit. Of course no one expected Trump to get a second term, and figure out where all the bodies are buried, either, so… This is big, like guys committing suicide or running for Cuba big. Big on the scale of the Philby spy ring, or the Walker spy ring big. And quite possibly bigger than that. It’s real John LeCarre stuff.

Isn’t it funny that the Mainstream media didn’t pick it up, and isn’t saying a fucking thing about it?

Sigh, no I’m not surprised either. Honestly, I suspect we’ll find out that the heads of the various mainstream media outlets have staring roles in some of these documents, and would really prefer that they stayed buried. Like at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, in the Challenger Deep, buried.

Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna (d, Cal 17^th district) are at it again, this time it’s a plan to tax “billionaires” by 5% a year… but wait, this isn’t 5% of what they made, it’s 5% of their total worth! Including Unrealized Gains. (In other words, whatever the current price/value of each and every possession they have, ignoring the fact that if they had to liquidate that shit, they would probably get pennies on the dollar, and quite possibly cause a market crash) Officially, this targets 938 Americans (at least right now, but tax programs historically grow.) the plan is that that money would then be handed out in three thousand dollar chunks to every family making less than one hundred fifty thousand a year.

They’re not even hiding the “from each according to his ability to each according to their needs” bit anymore. And you know, this has worked so well in the past… Punishing the successful has such a great track record.

Finally, we have a couple of pieces of gun news:

First coming out of the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane; there’s a new type of ammo being developed for the Navy and Marine Corps team (which means the Army and Airforce will get it too, eventually.) It’s the “Drone Killer Cartridge” (DKD) This looks like a modern version of what was known during the Civil War as “Buck and Ball” its multiple projectiles coming out of the end of a rifle barrel, at rifle speeds. Designed to allow the shooter of any rifle or machine gun to put scatter gun patterns at rifle villosities into the airspace a drone occupies, and because the projectiles are lighter, when they fall back to earth, they’re less likely to injure the friendlies or civilians that might be in the falling path. .americanrifleman.org/content/u-s-military-unveils-drone-killer-rifle-cartridges

The other one is a little more convoluted, there is a law on the books 18USC 1715 that says you can’t ship guns through the mail. There’s a law suit right now that challenges that prohibition era law, saying in effect “under the test in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, this law doesn’t stand up, the post office was around when the constitution was written, and for the next hundred and fifty years or so, no one made any rules saying I couldn’t mail a gun.”

Well, the Department of Justice looked at that suit, and wrote a 15-page legal opinion in January that boils down to “You know what? They’re RIGHT.”

Well, you would think that would be the end of it, right? The guy suing in Shreve v. USPS and the guy being sued both agree, so the suit should wind up in a summary judgement, case closed, that law is null and void, everyone go have a beer!

Oh NOOO, letitia-james-co-sue-to-bring-federal-gun-control-back-from-the-dead as reported by the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, it seems that the Atty Generals from NY, NJ, and Delaware have decided that they’re going to defend the federal law, against the federal government’s wishes. It hasn’t come to trial yet, we can dream of a judge that looks at this and says “Eh, NO, three states can’t fight against the federal government on a federal law.” I don’t hold out hope for that actually happening, mind you… it’s being heard in the Western District of PA, so who knows how that will go, and whether or not the AGs will even be granted standing. Of course if they’re not granted standing, then there will be appeals to that… in short, this bullshit could drag out for long enough that it will be decided under the next president, so by then we could wind up with a DOJ that says “No, we do think it’s a good law, and we’re going to fight it.” Welcome to the reality of delaying tactics and lawfare.

QOTD “Iran has been at war with us for at least 47 years. ... To say that this regime was not a threat … it’s ahistorical. They have been a threat for a long time.” —former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

Yours in Service,

William Lehman