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So you're complaining that the administration didn't share classified intelligence?!? Speaking of which, do you have access to any real reporting outside of open source? Because if so, there's a lot you don't actually know. Go ahead and criticize all you want, but rralize you may not be the smartest guy in the room...

The US has not been good at the money/cost side of warfare since Vietnam. We outproduced Germany in WWII in part by making something that is 80% as good as the German equivalent for half the price and then making 4x as many. When we had Cold War defense budgets, we could get away with making a bunch of the most advanced (expensive) weapon we could find, but hopefully this is a bit of a wake up call for our acquisition side (probably should have occurred in the 2005 time frame).

@Pooter M2 summed my answer up quite well. It’s very evident your opinions and arguments are predicated on open source trash, or at best, some vaguely informed intel bro who read this one thing on SIPR (e.g. basically NIPR these days). You are far from accurately informed on this subject, but you talk like you’ve got it all figured out. There’s a lesson in this, if you can find it.

Saw this article with morning coffee, which tries to address drone defense vs ground troops, I think. Yahoo TechThe Iranian Drone Problem Forced a Radical Fix — The Mari...US marines just gave the M4 a driver-assist system for shooting drones. The modern infantry battlefield is quietly undergoing a transformation that feels as much like a shift in automotive control sysAnd then there's this company, which takes standard guns and turns em into automated, anti-drone point defense systems. Looks like they got rigs for Ma Deuce, 30mm Bushmaster, and the 7.62 minigun as well as the pic below, M240. Bullfrog M240An autonomous M240 weapon station to handle the full kill chain up to group 3 UASSeems like companies are seeing the current battlefield and are making stuff.

Wait till Pooter finds out that retirees and civilians can have security clearances... XedkA8l.mp4

Hegseth shows why he was the correct choice. He’s bringing religion back to the Pentagon by delivering a sermon himself! Pray with me: Amen!

Exactly, PUBLIC. Not sure why it’s so mind blowing for people that there is way more to things than what’s going to be stated publicly. In your open source based opinion, we are “far from a cohesive reason.” Those who are fully informed know that’s not an accurate statement. My biggest recommendation to you and others is understand there are great people doing amazing work for good reasons - and just because you aren’t personally in that realm/in the know doesn’t mean it’s not true. Also, open source (including admin press conferences) is primarily dead wrong, mostly full of shit, or intentionally vague/misleading.

I guess this dipshit was competing with the quadruple amputee cornhole player for lowest IQ of the year.

Yup Recommend this book to anyone wanting historical context on the US, Cuba, Spain on our relationship with Cuba and the Caribbean broadly https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=32225389305&dest=USA&ref_=ps_ggl_18382194370&cm_mmc=ggl-_-US_Shopp_Trade0to10-_-product_id=US9780805035001NEW-_-keyword=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=17190383930&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkYLPBhC3ARIsAIyHi3Qnl5NVKWRMObFCPideawRKr4h0xWBhurXdqxzWpnvJrhhGI73B0HwaAnWYEALw_wcB

That’s a very naive and objectively wrong statement. Additionally, I’m not tracking anyone here that said there aren’t any cons to a blockade. Thus, everything you said following said statements is invalid. Feel free to make your case starting from a true and accurate premise. You certainly don’t need to come to the same conclusion as others, but if you can’t start from truth, then the rest doesn’t matter.

Are you equally critical of the Biden and Obama administrations that put us in this shitty situation?!? Ya'll keep forgetting how we got there, and while Trump ain't no General George C. Marshall he really didn't have a lot of other options, did he? I typically oversimplify things, but the truth is the US put its head in the sand when it came to Iran for four decades; and it was only going to get worse if nothing was done about it. Sure, it would make more sense to have a well-thought out plan; and I sure the big brains at CENTCOM had a concept of operations gathering dust on the shelf for years; but in the immortal words of Sheriff Bud Boomer, "There's a time to think, and there's a time to act; and this gentlemen is no time to think!" RIP, John Candy!

Some of us do, but we can't talk about it here...

I've seen a couple of the prior C-146 guys make their way through the various FTUs at Altus. They're saying that AFSOC is downsizing, and in that process it's killing the U-28s and C-146. Granted, this is all second hand water cooler talk, so I'm sure some AFSOC dude can chime in and tell me how wrong I am.

Woah holy cow Obama and Biden launched a war of choice against Iran with no plan based on pressure from Israel, blatantly lying about an “imminent nuclear threat” our own intel agencies assessed the Iranians weren’t pursuing? I must’ve missed that part of the last decade.. Oh actually none of that happened and they did address the problem like semi-competent politicians. They negotiated the JCPOA which, while imperfect, provided a baseline for enrichment limits, inspection intervals, and further diplomacy. Trump then ripped it up while promising a way better deal, launched a war, and is now floundering to try to get back to some semblance of the diplomatic solution we literally already had.

So Trump is getting different intelligence than what all the other intelligence agencies that brief him? If we're committing blood and treasure, there needs to be a cohesive reason. That has been far from the case. We struck them last time because they were close to making a nuclear weapon. We 'obliterated' their capability to do so. Then we went full send this time to prevent them from an imminent nuclear weapon capability. The "I know a secret you don't know" shit doesn't fly in this case. Clearly laying out to the world where Iran was in the production of a weapon would have only helped our country in this pursuit. One can wonder why that wasn't presented or at least not contradicted intelligence agencies public statements....

@brabus @M2 you guys sound like such tools attempting to security clearance flex on people in an Internet forum.. But to answer your stupid misread, no I’m complaining that their pitch for the war directly contradicts their own administration’s DNI Annual Threat Assessment linked below now for the second time in this thread. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2025-Unclassified-Report.pdf “WMD We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.” So no, my source isn’t some amateur defense blogger. Just the Director of National Intelligence. Now maybe your point is the secret version of the DNI report says the total opposite of the unclassified version. Fair. It’s a possibility and I haven’t read it. Although in my experience classified doesn’t usually contradict unclass stuff, it just adds more detail/sources/methods/numbers. I’ll go in the vault Monday and track it down. I’m also confident you haven’t read it either and are completely talking out of your ass. Because no tactical pilot spends their time in the vault reading DNI reports. We read tactical level documents like the 3-1 and the threat guide. Also with a baseops accounts dating back to 2005 and 2003 respectively there’s a very low likelihood either of you are even still in the military or have a clearance at this point which makes it even weirder you’d attempt to pull the ‘I know more secret stuff than you’ in a public forum. As if the boomer memes didn’t already give off clear enough retired energy