The Soviet BM-13 Katyusha MRL truck launched a 132mm artillery rocket. Pictured is a modern day BM-21 122mm artillery rocket launcher.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Alexey Statsenko
[REGNUM] This summer marks the 85th anniversary of the first use of the Guards rocket launchers, the legendary Katyushas, which have always received special attention in the history of the Great Patriotic War.
But while many people know about the salvo near Orsha, the work of the mortarmen in the Battle of Kiev is quite the opposite. The Katyushas didn't turn the tide of the battle, but they left a lasting mark. And the contributions of Senior Lieutenant Tikhon Nebozhenko, the commander of the special battery of the General Command Reserve and the future founder of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces, are no less significant than those of Captain Ivan Flerov, who died in the Vyazma Pocket.
The battery, which arrived in besieged Kyiv in early August, was fully equipped with six M-13-16 mounts. The situation around the Ukrainian capital had become extremely dire by that time. Divisions of the Wehrmacht's 6th Army—the same Army that would be completely destroyed in Stalingrad a year and a half later—had begun to storm the city.
Guards mortars were an unusual military unit for the time, boasting complete autonomy, high mobility, and maneuverability. In addition to command and firepower, they included platoons for ammunition, fuel, lubricants, security (machine gunners), and a supply and medical unit. Three vehicles with twin-mounted four Maxim machine guns were assigned to repel air raids.
As Oleg Yasinsky, a former liaison officer for the Kyiv underground, recalled, "The convoy of vehicles moved toward Kyiv at night with their headlights off, taking cover in forests and groves during the day. Despite precautions, they were bombed several times. Fortunately, there were no casualties or equipment losses."
In Kyiv, the battery was stationed in the Academician Fomin Botanical Garden. Upon arrival, a guard was posted—the first line of friendly machine gunners, the second line of NKVD soldiers.
The Botanical Garden is practically the center of the city; now it houses a metro station of the same name, but the ideal place for shelter is a deep ravine covered with dense vegetation.
The veteran claims that the first use of Katyusha rockets took place on August 2, 1941, near the city of Irpen at 5:00 a.m. in the presence of the commander of the Southwestern Front (SWF), Colonel General Mikhail Kirponos, and the front's chief of artillery, Lieutenant General of Artillery Mikhail Parsegov. However, this is a common misunderstanding—much time has passed, and some details have been forgotten.
In fact, the salvo was fired on August 14.
Some Soviet sources, such as Marshal Bagramyan in his memoirs, then a colonel and head of the operations department of the Southwestern Front headquarters, cite the date as August 15. However, an intelligence report from the 71st Infantry Division and a combat report from the 75th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht's XXIX Army Corps unequivocally state that they first encountered Russian "winged mines" on the 14th.
It is curious that the 71st Division believed that the rockets were launched at them not from mobile installations, but from wooden frame guides:
“The firing range for the available throwers (according to the prisoner’s testimony) is: light mine thrower – 800-1200 m, heavy mine thrower – up to 2000 m.”
It's entirely possible that such launches actually took place earlier—such a practice was quite common during the war, both for us and for the Germans, especially towards the end. Apparently, this is precisely the reason for the confusion over the dates.
Colonel General Alexander Rodimtsev, who was still a colonel in August 1941 and commanded the 5th Airborne Brigade of the 3rd Airborne Corps, also speaks in his memoirs about the salvoes of real Katyusha rockets fired on August 14.
BM-13 Katyusha multiple launch rocket system based on the ZIS-6 truck
She fought in the southern part of Kyiv in the Goloseevsky forest.
The paratroopers managed to recapture the strategically important Goloseevsky Heights, where the agricultural institute's buildings were located, from the enemy. From there, they could only slowly push back the Germans, recapturing every meter with heavy casualties.
"When the enemy recovered from our counterattacks and began digging in near the agricultural institute, the Katyusha rocket gave its first 'concert.' An unforgettable spectacle! Enormous flaming torches rose above the forest with a roar and roar, spreading to the enemy positions, and rained down a furious flame on the fascist trenches. It was like a seismic catastrophe; as if a volcanic crater had suddenly erupted in the forest, and its red-hot cannonballs were bound to incinerate everything.
Our soldiers, who hadn't been warned in time, were stunned by the raging firestorm. The fascists fled so hastily and disoriented that they abandoned their weapons. Those captured mournfully chanted, "We didn't know the Russians were armed with thunder and lightning!" recalled Rodimtsev.
The next time Nebozhenko's vehicles gave the enemy trouble was on August 28th. Taking advantage of a miscalculation by the Soviet command, the Germans captured the first bridge across the Dnieper the day before, 65 km north of the city, near the village of Gornostaipol.
The only thing that saved them from a rapid breakthrough into the rear of the 37th Army fighting in Kyiv was the fact that the leading German units still had to cross the Desna River. In this area, it flows almost parallel to the Dnieper, and across the wide Desna floodplain with its large lakes, another bridge, defended by Soviet units, stretched.
The BM-13 battery arrived in the area of the city of Oster, where the same 5th Airborne Brigade, transferred from Kyiv, also took up defensive positions and acted as a fire brigade.
The Southwestern Front's Chief of Artillery, General Parsegov, assigned his chief of staff, Colonel Georgy Nadysev, to lead the battery into battle. Positions were withdrawn opposite the village of Karpilovka, which had already been occupied by the Germans. The enemy motorized unit bivouacked, while the enemy scurried through the streets, hunting chickens and geese, and smoke filled the kitchens.
The target was tempting, but a single salvo from the battery would have wiped Karpilovka off the face of the earth along with the enemy. And then, as if hearing the silent pleas of the Soviet artillerymen, the Germans poured out in a crowd onto the shore of Lake Devoshcha, located on the southeastern outskirts of the village, and began a relaxing bath.
That was all Nadysev needed: he transmitted the necessary coordinates to the battery.
After a few minutes of processing this data and aiming the Katyusha rockets, they fired a salvo. Nadysev recalled:
"The shells accurately struck a group of enemy soldiers and officers swimming and relaxing on the shore. Panic ensued. The few remaining Nazis ran ashore, screaming hysterically. A large military unit, before it had even entered combat, effectively ceased to exist. It was a huge success, especially in those days."
Fueled by excitement, Nadysev immediately decided to fire a second salvo at the discovered concentration of enemy infantry and tanks from the 11th Tank Division. This was done contrary to regulations prohibiting more than one salvo from a single location. After each salvo, a column of dust and smoke rose a hundred meters into the air, revealing the position.
Twenty minutes later, the battery fired a second salvo—with the same effect. Later, prisoners testified that the Germans suffered heavy losses. The battery immediately reassembled and retreated along a forest road… and just in time. No sooner had it disappeared into the distance than a group of enemy Me-109 fighters attacked its position.
Later, Vasily Yakimenko, a resident of Karpilovka who was 10 years old in 1941, recalled that two salvos of Katyusha rockets set a dozen houses on fire, killing many Germans and various animals, but the rural population was not harmed, as they managed to hide in cellars.
The battery then apparently split up. Its main part successfully left Kyiv and participated in the defense of Odessa.
But some vehicles continued to operate even after the salvoes on the Desna. For example, there was a strike on the enemy's 75th Infantry Division positions on the southern outskirts of Kyiv on August 30, and on the 71st on the western outskirts, where the Irpen River intersects the Brest-Litovsk Highway on September 12. BM-13 rocket launchers were caught in the encirclement along with the entire forces of the 37th Army.
There are photographs of at least three burnt-out Katyusha rocket wrecks on the highway leading from Kyiv to Boryspil.
Hundreds of pieces of Soviet equipment remained there at that time.
Of course, six launchers couldn't have been a significant factor in Kyiv's defense, especially since there was a constant shortage of rockets for them. But they were the forerunners of the time when the Red Army would operate not with batteries, divisions, or even regiments of guards mortars, but with entire divisions, of which it would have seven by the end of the war.
[Federalist] Newly uncovered internal FBI emails, obtained by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) through FOIA litigation, expose what happened after the FBI’s targeting of traditionalist Christians under the Biden Administration went public — and the Bureau’s own people quietly freaked out about it in writing.
Here’s the timeline.
1. The Biden FBI wrote down actual church addresses. Kept tabs on priests.
On January 23, 2023, the FBI’s Richmond Field Office issued an intelligence product claiming that interest in "radical-traditionalist Catholic" ideology presented "new mitigation opportunities." Those opportunities included developing sources, establishing "tripwires," and recruiting people with "placement and access" inside traditionalist Catholic communities. The memo named actual parishes, a seminary, and Catholic publications. Inside actual churches.
2. Their "evidence" was basically a hate list borrowed from a leftist organization.
The memo relied in part on the radical-Left Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of "hate groups" to identify who counted as suspicious. Once it leaked and the backlash hit, the FBI’s own intelligence chief, Tonya Ugoretz, sent an email to a room full of senior officials admitting: "[T]his product cites more subjective information from SPLC (a list of hate groups) without examining SPLC’s threshold for determining a hate group or explanation of how that threshold aligns with the FBI’s definition." (Emphasis added.)
Translation: "We used a radical left group’s opinion as evidence!???"
3. The FBI’s own lawyers thought their co-workers might be confused about what a "government organization" is.
This is the part that should stop you mid-scroll. An attorney in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel raised a deeper concern: "It seems that some of our folks may be equating a third-party organization with another government organization, and perhaps we need to remind the workforce about non-governmental organizations." (Emphasis added.) Someone then asked if there was a policy on this. The response: "Not that DI is aware of." (Emphasis added.) No policy. At the FBI. In 2023.
[NationalContext] The argument over Iraq’s armed factions is an argument inside the Shia political establishment about how to protect what it has held since 2003. One camp has concluded that state institutions now protect its position better than autonomous weapons do. The other holds that the weapons are what protect the institutions. Iran is adapting to both positions at once.
The deadline and what it covers: The military mission of the US-led coalition in Iraq ends on 30 September 2026. Baghdad and Washington reached a final agreement on the timetable on 12 August, and Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has called the date final and irreversible. What replaces the coalition is a bilateral security partnership under the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, with a US advisory and enabling presence in place of a multinational combat command.
A second process has been attached to the same date. The State Administration Coalition, the multi-bloc arrangement that sustains the government, authorised treating weapons held outside state authority after 30 September under the Anti-Terrorism Law. Al-Zaidi has separately ordered a draft law establishing a state monopoly on military weapons. The version circulating in Baghdad covers exclusive state ownership of military-grade arms, exclusive state authority over decisions of war, a ban on parallel chains of command, a prohibition on political parties financing or commanding armed formations, a national weapons inventory, surrender deadlines, criminal penalties after a transition period and a twelve-month implementation window. The text has not been independently authenticated and has not reached a parliamentary vote.
Iraqi officials use the 2011 withdrawal as the reference point. Coalition forces left that December and ISIS took Mosul thirty months later. The 2026 problem is differently shaped: ISIS is degraded, and the open question concerns the status of armed groups already inside the Iraqi system.
Enforcement has been visible. In the first ten days of August the interior ministry shut 71 offices operating under Popular Mobilisation Forces branding without authorisation, seized 49 drones, banned unauthorised drone flights and began a database covering roughly six million registered weapons. Al-Zaidi has merged security coordination into a revived office reporting to the commander-in-chief and replaced the heads of the Counter-Terrorism Service and the federal police. Government officials say a drone cell was dismantled in Baghdad during the security deployment of early August.
More at the link
Posted by: badanov ||
08/15/2026 00:00 ||
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[144 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iraq
[Jpost] The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres and the Ottoman collapse are behind Ankara’s fear of losing power; Jerusalem knows that regional bilateral agreements back Erdogan into a corner
The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire... is not enraged because Israel misreads it. It is enraged because Israel has read it correctly and acted.
The 2010 Israeli raid on the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... -bound Mavi Marmara marked a rupture. Gaza supplies rhetoric, mobilization, and diplomatic cover. Neither explains the strategic depth of Turkey’s hostility.
Gaza is the language of confrontation. The erosion of Ottoman Turkish gatekeeping is its substance.
The Ottoman Turkish double bind governs Ankara’s strategy. Turkey must be Western enough to be financed, armed, and consulted, yet revisionist enough to remain indispensable.
Full alignment would reduce Ankara to a rule-bound ally; full rupture would cost it markets, technology, investment, NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis.... access, and political shelter. Ankara arbitrages alignment and rupture: it manufactures friction, brokers relief, and invoices the system.
Punish Turkey, and it threatens to pivot toward Russia, obstruct NATO, restrict access, or open another theater. Reward it, and coercion pays.
Each concession reprices the next demand. Indispensability becomes impunity, but only while alternatives remain scarce. Israel is multiplying them.
Washington remains trapped. It prizes Ottoman Turkish access around the Black Sea, the straits and Syria, and fears obstruction more than the dependence its concessions entrench. The United States postpones rather than resolves the Ottoman Turkish double bind.
Pakistain established the model: preserve instability, then sell Washington the access needed to manage it. Taliban ...the once and current oppressors of Afghanistan... sanctuary, AQ Khan, and the late Osama bin Laden ...... who used to be alive but now he's not...... in Abbottabad ... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden.... should have ended it; Washington returned, mistaking access for strategy.
Turkey embedded the model in NATO through threatened defection, monetized access and absolution after breach.
US President Donald Trump ...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons... deepened the trap. At July’s NATO summit in Ankara, he signaled sanctions relief and Turkey’s possible return to the F-35 program despite the unresolved S-400 file.
Days later, the State Department said US law still barred the transfer. Trump offered Ottoman Turkish President His Enormity, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First ...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really more important... a transaction for a problem Turkey created.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed August 7 by Saudi Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start... , Turkey, and Pakistain, exports the mechanism beyond NATO, making an armed attack on one an attack on all.
Riyadh has accepted Ottoman Turkish wars. Ankara monetizes indispensability precisely as Jerusalem dismantles it.
Elected officials speak in names; states plan in systems. Politicians attack Erdogan; institutions dismantle dependence.
Defense, diplomacy, intelligence, and industry outlast elections and converge on one rule: no vital Israeli function may depend on Ankara.
ANKARA WISHES TO POSITION ITSELF AS AN ESSENTIAL REGIONAL PLAYER
Israel’s policy is an unofficial Sèvres Deterrent. The name invokes Turkey’s foundational fear of encirclement, weakening, and partition, rooted in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres and the Ottoman collapse.
The doctrine weaponizes Turkey’s need to remain indispensable. It threatens neither Ottoman Turkish territory nor national unity; Ottoman Turkish coercion instead catalyzes the partnerships, corridors, and capabilities Ankara fears.
Pressure in the Aegean, occupied northern Cyprus, northern Syria, the Ottoman Turkish-Libyan maritime corridor, the Straits, Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... networks, and NATO procedure form a mutually reinforcing perimeter. Peripheral theaters mature into direct threats.
The Constantinople Protocol operationalizes the Sèvres Deterrent through redundancy: no Ottoman Turkish gate remains singular. Ports, airspace, shipping, finance, trade, energy, cables, and data must be replaceable before Ankara can weaponize them.
Constantinople is a map, not nostalgia. The gate predates the state now monetizing it.
Iran's Houthi sock puppets ...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him... disruption at Bab al-Mandab and Suez raises the value of Ankara’s Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor while Turkey-based actors facilitate Houthi finance. Tehran arms the pressure; Ankara monetizes the diversion.
Turkey’s trade embargo tested the protocol. Ottoman Turkish goods had permeated Israeli construction and industry, yet the Bank of Israel found limited effects after Israel switched suppliers.
Ankara tried to prove dependence and accelerated diversification instead. A Ottoman Turkish restriction now triggers replacement, not crisis.
Israel’s partnership with Greece and Cyprus is the core, not an American guarantee. The triangle is institutionalized through a 2026 military work plan, joint exercises, intelligence cooperation, and interoperable infrastructure.
A planned tri-service rapid response force converts coordination into force generation.
Industry anchors the architecture. Greece’s July approval of up to €3.5 billion for multilayer air defense puts Israeli systems at the core of Achilles Shield while reserving production for Greek firms.
PULS, Israeli unmanned systems, Cyprus’s reported Barak MX layer, and energy interconnection deepen sovereign capability and erode Ottoman Turkish choke points.
Hakan Fidan acknowledged the architecture in January as a pattern intended to contain Turkey. He identified the structure correctly and the cause incorrectly. This is not containment of Ottoman Turkish territory; it is containment of Ottoman Turkish coercion.
Turkey still creates crises. It no longer controls what those crises create.
Poseidon’s Wrath names the contingency triggered when Turkey weaponizes occupied northern Cyprus against Israel, Greece, or the Republic of Cyprus. Its end state is the neutralization of forward systems, denial of reinforcement, the removal of Ottoman Turkish forces, and restoration of recognized Cypriot illusory sovereignty. Once the north becomes an operational platform for attack, response moves from signaling to enforcement.
Ottoman Turkish NATO membership does not automatically shield Ankara when coercion becomes force, whether through an attack from occupied Cyprus, forcible enforcement of the Ottoman Turkish-Libyan maritime corridor, or militarization of Turkey’s Russian-built Akkuyu nuclear plant.
Israel exploits that asymmetry by treating Ottoman Turkish NATO membership as a constraint, not a veto. NATO assesses armed attacks case by case; each ally determines the assistance it considers necessary. The legal hinge is armed attack, not membership.
WHY TURKEY’S INFLUENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST IS WAVERING
At Akkuyu, function is decisive. If Ankara uses the plant for military enablement, command continuity, protected logistics, or Russian operational depth, Israeli action to neutralize that function would fall under self-defense and the law of armed conflict.
NATO membership likewise cannot convert Ottoman Turkish enforcement of the 2019 Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... memorandum, or an attack from occupied Cyprus, into automatic collective defense.
Where NATO reaches its limit, Lisbon begins. Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... reverses the asymmetry. Israel is not covered; it need not be. Greece and Cyprus are.
If either suffers armed aggression on its territory, every EU member is bound to aid and assist. Israel thus gains strategic depth through partners backed by an obligation Ankara cannot veto.
French defense commitments, Egyptian maritime interests, and Indian-Emirati corridors carry the architecture beyond the Hellenic core. Ankara will search for a treaty to denounce and find a network it cannot veto.
Success is the declining yield of Ottoman Turkish coercion.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
08/15/2026 2026-08-15 03:01 ||
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[128 views]
Top|| File under: Sublime Porte
[LibertarianInstitute] The United States has long operated under a seductive strategic fantasy. Remove the leader of an adversary organization, whether a drug cartel, a terrorist group, or a sovereign state, and that organization will collapse, enabling American interests to fill the resulting vacuum.
However, decades of academic literature, hard empirical data from Mexico’s drug war, and the lived consequences of America’s post 9/11 targeted killing campaigns all tell a damning story many in the DC ruling class refuse to acknowledge. Decapitation strategies are, at best, tactically satisfying and strategically hollow. At worst, they escalate violence, radicalize successors, and produce precisely the instability they were designed to prevent.
The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran represents the most ambitious test of this doctrine in history. The results so far are deeply troubling.
The poor results should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the academic literature on leadership targeting. The scholarly consensus against decapitation has been building for decades. Jenna Jordan’s landmark research, first published in Security Studies in 2009 and later expanded into her book Leadership Decapitation, examined 298 incidents of leadership targeting from 1945 through 2004. She concluded that “decapitation is not an effective counterterrorism strategy” and that it tends to extend the life of terrorist organizations.
Jordan identifies three structural factors that make organizations resilient to leadership decapitation: bureaucratic depth, popular support, and ideological coherence. The more institutionalized and ideologically rooted an organization is, the more it absorbs the loss of leaders. Martyrdom replaces individuals with myth.
Through analysis of over 1,000 decapitation events against 180 terrorist groups, Jordan found that decapitation “does not increase the mortality rate of terrorist groups and, in some cases, even leads to more terrorist activity,” as War on the Rocks reported. The University of Pretoria’s Emmanuel Ofuasia confirmed that “the decapitation tactic has served as a basis for escalation and proliferation of terrorist groups rather than serving as deterrence against the possibility of recurrence.”
#4
The US Air Farce keeps insisting it can win a conflict without the other branches of service. They tolerate the US Navy, because their aviators believe the same thing.
The US public is not likely to tolerate another conflict requiring significant 'boots on the
ground' (pretty much anything involving a brigade or more).
The politicians keep listening to the Air Farce, because there are no other viable options.
And because they keep thinking the opposition will behave like Westerners would and concede when there is no chnace of 'winning'.
#5
The US air force became a political service the minute it was designated the Army Air Corp. The fight over the strategic fantasy was sold to congress and pentagon at their inception. They believed they could end WWII with strategic bombing. To prove their point we bombed a ball bearing factory, we were all taught that in school. But the truth was it stopped production for 3 days, had no measurable impact on the supply chain for the German war effort and we lost over 100 aircraft with 11 men on each one. Gen LeMay, on the other hand, was dropping a newly developed bomb made at Harvard called NAPALM. His bombings made measurable hits in oil and logistics sites. But the political class had him run out for too many casualties on the German side. So they moved him to the pacific. He fire bombed over 100 cities and is the reason the Japanese were negotiating a surrender. His fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people than any nuke ever dropped. While the nuke satisfied the moral argument claiming it stopped the war, it did not. What it did do, its intended purpose, was to show the world-specifically Russa- that we had one. The mindset of the moral compromise in DC and the Pentagon is bombing strategically works, it never has, ever.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
08/15/2026 9:42 Comments ||
Top||
#6
"Occupied Japan" after their surrender in WWII lasted what....5 years ?
Seems to me, no boots on the ground, no real conquest or change.
#7
For some things, yes Besoeker, especially when you want to change the government, ruling culture, etc. Just taking out a head of state and fucking off after doesn't take it.
But Iran is a thousand headed hydra. It will take years and some boots if you really want to change things and destroy the ruling minority. Otherwise you are just shuffling chairs on the Titanic.
#8
This was one lesson in Sicario. Take out a Cartel head and you create dozens of cartels. Take out the prince and you get internecine warfare
Posted by: Regular joe ||
08/15/2026 13:19 Comments ||
Top||
#9
Not advocating for a land war DV. It's just without one, the outcomes may not live up to expectations. I certainly agree with your "shuffling chairs" analogy.
Best thing for that region of the world is to let the inhabitants consume themselves.
#10
IMHO - It seems to me that air power, at fabulous expense and with impressive, morale enhancing visuals, has delivered the 80% solution. If open sources are to be believed, the Iranians are severely damaged militarily and economically. More importantly, the Hormuz choke-point is being reduced in value to them as pipelines and other methods are reducing the volume of world oil demands flowing through that spot.
Kicking the well dented can down the road with a targeted strike marked on the Iranian "nuke" locations may be the best we can get for the immediate future. Put the mid-terms to bed successfully, and we can rethink kaboom redux if needed.
So, we can declare an adequate level of successes, keep on choking them via Treasury sanctions and the money flows, and get the price of domestic energy down ASAP to stave off the mid-term belly-flop that will create "hearing-gate" paralysis until 28.
Hopefully, the Lefts own insane outing of communist goals and horrible candidates will help as well
#11
The aviators did a great job of destroying the IRGC military assets and there should be some interesting books coming out of the air campaign. The air campaign didn't fail on the military side, but on the political side because the IRGC are still in charge.
#12
Since the IRGC control/own ~60-80% of the economy, they weren't gonna go away instantly. Starve their supporters' salaries, purchases, and let them reign over ruin
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/15/2026 18:14 Comments ||
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#13
The end state is for Iran to surrender. They are 80% militarily destroyed and are not surrendering. They must fell the horror of war where the cost is not worth continuing or they will never surrender. Burn them to the ground, and they will surrender, or let them rule the world.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
08/15/2026 20:43 Comments ||
Top||
#14
Still waiting for the average suffering Persian civie to start killing IRGC and Basij in the street. They KNOW who they are and where they live
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/15/2026 20:49 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Federalist] Newly uncovered internal FBI emails, obtained by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) through FOIA litigation, expose what happened after the FBI’s targeting of traditionalist Christians under the Biden Administration went public — and the Bureau’s own people quietly freaked out about it in writing.
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...
