Thread by @HaroldWren22

This information is absolutely critical to the Iran war. Let’s do a thread! 🪡 🧵

Even with makeshift ONSHORE storage, Iran only has enough storage space thirteen days of pumping capacity. How long has the naval blockade been in place? Per @CENTCOM no Iranian tankers or oil are making it out of the Persian Gulf. That means we are a day or two or three before storage is 100% full. That means the oil derricks shut down & irreversible damage to production begins. That means the income of IRGC permanently, or maybe indefinitely is a better word, goes zero.

The TWO rail corridors out of Iran to China can’t handle very large volume of cargo. It is wildly insufficient to keep up with oil field production. But there’s another aspect to this, AND ROAD EXPORTS, that no one is talking about.

People talk in terms of cargo capacity, & rate of travel in regards to road & rail communication lines. Thats normal. People (consumers) & producers (manufacturers) think in terms of shipping goods, & that planning revolves around volume & turn around/delivery time.

Now I’m gonna teach you another way to think about it.

Rail lines of communication like road communication lines, ARE FIXED. They depend on rail switching points, & long stretches between. The long rail lines can be sabotaged, & train derailments caused. Do you know how hard it is to clean up a train derailment? Do you know how time consuming that is?

It gets worse: what if you sabotage the two routes & derail trains on both? And then follow on actions that ALSO destroy the switching stations?

What that means is nothing can move on those routes for weeks.

And do you know how easy to achieve this is? Demolition missions to sabotage rail lines of communications behind enemy lines is a core bread and butter mission of @USSOCOM which has already proven it can operate behind the lines in iranian territory.

Now lets talk about road communication lines. Tanker trucks are heavy. They’re big. They require certain types of roads & routes to operate. Those routes are known. What are big, heavy, slow trucks loaded with highly flammable liquids highly vulnerable to? Maybe it’s easier to see if i frame this with another related question: what was the biggest casualty causing weapon used in Iraq against Americans?

Roadside IEDs. Think about green beret ODAs & SEAL boat crews operating inside Iran planting powerful roadside IEDs all up & down Iranian road communication lines out of Iran to china. Think about using drones to monitor when oil shipments reach kill zones while drones are watching.

Special Operations can shut down any rail or road communications out of Iran with ease. And they cant keep on shore. And they cant keep it on ships.

But wait, it gets better. Lets say the Iranian Regime is desperate to use both rail & road communications to try to buy whatever time they can before they must shut the wells down. Let’s say they move IRGC, Basij, & foreign militias out to continuously patrol those communication lines. It would take tens of thousands of them & still might not be effective in keeping them open. Remember— you just need to close those routes for a couple days.

And where would the Iranian regime get those troops and vehicles needed to try to patrol & secure the rail & road lines?

FROM THE MAJOR CITIES. The Regime would be faced with a choice:
A.) secure the land lines of communications & lose control of the major cities, or
B.) allow US Special Operations forces to cut all land communications & maintain the tenuous control of the cities.

Its the ultimate catch 22.

@CENTCOM @threadreaderapp unroll please.