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Iran Super Thread- Merged

A few less-than-mainstream media accounts of "The Rescue" with different tidbits ...
 
Plan B?


A sapper of my ken once told me there were two solutions: fast and noisy or slow and quiet.

Syria took a bit of time. And it only happened once the flying buttresses were removed.

...

Meanwhile:

Signal or noise?


The Independent is not identifiably a pro-Trump source.
 
Renewed threats to close Bab al-Mandeb.

This is an advisor to Mojtaba Khamenei.
Hm. Very uncommon in middle eastern cultures to exaggerate for effect and pump a lot of rhetorical hot air. Good thing the US has a president that responds in kind.

"Mother Of All Battles" imminent, N'th round.
 
Renewed threats to close Bab al-Mandeb.

This is an advisor to Mojtaba Khamenei.

The problem for the Houthi and Iran is that once they do the thing they threaten, they have no more cards to play, and they may provoke action from the countries happy to watch America twist for now.

When the Houthi last shut down the BAM, Europe came out to play. If they do it again, Europe might decide that free passage of the BAM and Straits of Hormuz are in their best interests after all. China might even get in on the action if they start losing money because they can't ship to some of their most profitable trading partners.
 
The problem for the Houthi and Iran is that once they do the thing they threaten, they have no more cards to play, and they may provoke action from the countries happy to watch America twist for now.

When the Houthi last shut down the BAM, Europe came out to play. If they do it again, Europe might decide that free passage of the BAM and Straits of Hormuz are in their best interests after all. China might even get in on the action if they start losing money because they can't ship to some of their most profitable trading partners.
Assuming they aren’t selective like Iran in their targeting. Iran seems willing to play ball with certain non-parties. As a proxy of theirs, no reason to think the Houthis won’t too.
 
God damn, this op had everything.

Someone more in the know than me - which is basically all of our blue crew here and half the others… What sort of considerations would go into establishing a FARP versus continuing to refuel everything in air?

Sounds like there’s gonna be a hell of a medals parade for this one. BZ to all involved.

Not a FARP per se. We’ll see, but I’d bet those 130s were not newer MCs, and that they (and the Little Birds) were worst-case planned for one-way trips, hence why the 295Ws were in the AO and used quite successfully to exfil a bunch the -130 and -6 crew. The pax exfil requirements and planning I bet included extracting also one of the 295 crews as well as the two 130 crews and some of the 6s. Like OP NEPTUNE SPEAR, there were also likely some 47Gs lurking nearby with a metric boatload of 7.62 for the Dillons…”just for fear…” 😉

Oh man. Assuming those were MC-130s, someone in Delta got to blow up a quarter billion dollars.

They were Hercs, but we’ll see what variant they really were some time soon.

You really think US aircrew and potential aircrew are looking at the effort and resources just expended to recover one person and worrying about their role and the training they'll get and might have to apply in the situation?
*Yup, they did exactly what they signed up to, and were selected, to do. 🫡

Name three other countries that can credibly claim they've got their people's backs to that degree.

I’d give two, ISR and FRA, but don’t have a third…that WSO and the pilot earlier without question had their *backs covered by their Nation.

The Canadian version is higher performing. We required performance upgrades to meet our SAR performance requirements. Actually, they might have rebaselined the American version to our base frame.
The US birds are stripped of a lot of bumpf…I had heard of PW127G1 variant nomenclature for the AFSOC 295Ws, but darned if I can find it now. Open sources show both the CC-295 and the C-295W as equipped with the 127G, so same engine looks like. Im willing to bet the 295W MGTOW is notably lower than the Kingfisher, so I’d be unfounded to hand theAFSOC bird the performance nod.
 
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The problem for the Houthi and Iran is that once they do the thing they threaten, they have no more cards to play, and they may provoke action from the countries happy to watch America twist for now.

When the Houthi last shut down the BAM, Europe came out to play. If they do it again, Europe might decide that free passage of the BAM and Straits of Hormuz are in their best interests after all. China might even get in on the action if they start losing money because they can't ship to some of their most profitable trading partners.

The fear is more effective than the act.
 
Assuming they aren’t selective like Iran in their targeting. Iran seems willing to play ball with certain non-parties. As a proxy of theirs, no reason to think the Houthis won’t too.
They weren't selective enough the last time, so why imagine they will be this time? Iran selected the craziest proxies, so it's likely their proxies will continue to be crazy.

As Much as America isn't playing 16D chess, neither is Iran... They are holding on for dear life, because their lives are literally on the line if the are seen to be weak.

The fear is more effective than the act.
100%

They have one option, make trade impossible. Once trade is shut down, the rest of the world either finds a new way to trade, or they kil the people stopping the trade.

China might tolerate the blockade for now, but if the UAE decides to shoot at ships that haven't paid them a toll for the straits, China might get serious about freedom of navigation. We don't know the end state of all of this yet, but there is no world in which the Gulf States let Iran dictate the terms of passage through the Straits of Hormuz. Politically it would be a death knell for their own regimes, and financially it would ruin them.
 
They weren't selective enough the last time, so why imagine they will be this time?

Were they trying to be? Just because they didn’t show a capability of selectivity before, doesn’t mean they can’t. The Houthis have at least some ballistic missile and anti air capacity. We aren’t talking mindless idiots here.
 
The problem for the Houthi and Iran is that once they do the thing they threaten, they have no more cards to play, and they may provoke action from the countries happy to watch America twist for now.

When the Houthi last shut down the BAM, Europe came out to play. If they do it again, Europe might decide that free passage of the BAM and Straits of Hormuz are in their best interests after all. China might even get in on the action if they start losing money because they can't ship to some of their most profitable trading partners.
Not to mention Egypt, KSA, and India. I also see a lot of pipeline moving product to new terminals, away from those choke points.
 
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