Victory and Failure in the Great American-Israeli Eastern Mediterranean Range Day MISSILEX of April 2024

we need praise and accountability

First of all, BZ to the generations of AAW professionals who built the integrated kill chain that brought this exceptional evening of anti-air excellence. This isn’t exactly what you built it for, but close to it you glorious, geeky bastards;

All of the real fun information is in the SCIF, but there is enough open source for all to enjoy and be proud of.

Here are my Top-4 Quicklook observations. They’re linked together.

1. Iran’s goal was to swamp Israeli defenses via a multi-axis, multi-threat attack to generate mass casualties and have the Israeli government lose face. Their planning assumptions were flawed. They failed.

2. From Tehran to Beijing (and my nogg’n too), everyone needs to re-evaluate their assumptions about the battlefield effectiveness of their cruise and ballistic missiles when facing a 1st-tier nation whose defensive systems are unchallenged and properly capitalized. Conventional or nuclear, having 99% of your weapons not reaching their targets is not acceptable.

3. From WWII through the Cold War ending roughly with the success of Desert Storm, everyone knew that any strike from the air required a robust, diverse, and leading Electronic Warfare (EW) component. Hard kill and soft kill. Ships, aircraft, and airwings were thick with all sorts of active and passive EW including VAQ, Wild Weasel, and all the funky USAF Raven Mafia cadre’s toys. In the “Peace Dividend” era, most of them either atrophied into a rump capability relative to requirements or were “transformed” into non-existence. The diversion of resources to support imperial policing actions for the first two decades of this century only made the neglect worse. I’m not sure how many warnings we are going to be provided in this area. We will not be on the defensive or offensive against 3rd and 4th rate powers forever.

4. More. From the, again, superb demonstration of the real-world utility of multi-mission heavy fighters in the shape of the F-15E Strike Eagle, to the superb execution of mission by our layered defense built around our family of Standard Missiles, the last six months have shown us what needs more resources should this same need be called upon against a 1st-tier challenger west of the International Date Line. Think a few dozen ballistic and cruise missiles augmented by a few dozen low-tech attack drones are a challenge? Try moving the decimal point to the right and give it a mid-single digit multiplier. That is what the People’s Republic of China has waiting for us from Guam, west.

So, there’s our victory. Where is the failure?

Where does one start?

The Biden Administration inherited a Middle East spiraling towards peaceful co-existence. ISIS was hiding under a few isolated shadows under rocks. The Abraham Accords brought Arab nation by Arab nation to normal relations with Israel. Commerce flowed freely bringing goods safely to market at risk-free prices through the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea. There’s more, but that’s enough for a blog post.

Where are we now? Biden brought in Obama’s B-team with all their unfulfilled bag of bad ideas which in a few short years begat ISIS and Iranian proxies joining together in renewed strength in Syria and Iraq enough to attack US bases in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Afghanistan is not only home again to Al Qaeda, but ISIS-K grows under the misrule of that besotted nation by the superpower defeating Taliban. From Lebanon to Yemen, Israel is under attack after suffering the largest slaughter of Jews since WWII. Iran and her proxies are seizing and attacking merchant ships and Western warships from the Gulf of Oman through the Red Sea. From Qatar to Saudi Arabia, nations are looking to secure a “Plan-B” by improving ties to Iran, Russia, and China.

The team Biden brought into power again in 2021 sent billions of dollars to Iran, loosened sanctions, and otherwise bolstered the Islamic Republic based on a failed and discredited theory of international relations. As bankrupt as its “Mirror-Mirror” theory that brought us to invade Iraq in 2003, and yet - no accountability or change. Neither theory survived in the wild outside academia and think tanks…and yet the Biden team’s almost religious devotion to their own perceived intellect folded in with pigheadedness has prevented any self-reflection … at least yet.

Is anyone really shocked that American institutional and national weakness combined with billions of dollars to the Islamic Republic brought us to the events from October 7th to today?

Without accountability, there can be no learning. We have no accountability, so we have no learning. We remember everything but learn nothing. Our nation and her friends deserved a new national security team after the fall of Kabul and our negotiated surrender to the Taliban in 2021, but no - we got nothing but more chaos and conflict.

Pray for peace, because the world is full of dry underbrush and our firefighters are driving around the countryside throwing lit matches out of their windows.