Here's why the story about a US Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet getting taken down in a friendly fire incident by a US Navy destroyer while engaged in anti-Houthi operations is suspect... 1/
2/ First, a primer. F/A-18 Super Hornets are the primary fourth-generation warplane utilized by both the US Navy and Marine Corps. In this case, the F/A-18F, carrying a pilot and a weapons systems officer.
3/ These birds are some of the best in the world. They come equipped with an insane amount of detection and defensive capabilities to avoid being shot down. Systems, such as the AN/ALE-47 Countermeasures Dispenser, for instance, help deflect incoming missiles.
4/ Other systems, like the AN/ALE-50 towed decoy, have become essential in ensuring the F/A-18s of the US Navy's fleet remain dominant in the unfriendly skies of the world's nastiest hotspots.
5/ Then there's subsystems, such as the Multifunctional Information Distribution System (MIDS) and the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System (JHMCS) that all help the F/A-18's crew to have state-of-the-art situational awareness.
6/ Overlayed with all these defensive and detection systems is the fact that the F/A-18s participate in a complex interplay between themselves and the carrier group that they are deployed from. Basically, there are multiple redundancies put into place to prevent friendly fire.
7/ The official story is that elements operating from the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) were returning to the carrier after bombing a missile base and command node belonging to the Iran-backed Houthi Rebels in Yemen...
8/ when the USS Gettysburg (CG-64), a Ticonderoga-Class Guided Missile Destroyer, fired upon the bird. The crew ejected over the Red Sea and were safely recovered with one crew member receiving minor injuries.
9/ The Navy insists that this was a friendly fire incident and that the matter "will be investigated thoroughly." But this was the same Navy that claimed ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happened over the summer to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
10/ What we now know is that a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile came within 200 meters (656 feet) of the US carrier Eisenhower over the summer. So, again, the Navy was, at the very least, downplaying the seriousness of the Houthi missile threat.
11/ Now again we are presented with a massive downplaying of the Houthi missile threat. The fact of the matter is that the likelihood the Navy shot its own plane down, even if with the Biden Regime's military being so painfully incompetent, doesn't pass the smell test.
12/ If the Navy is being honest about the target sets in their recent strike on the Houthis (which included a missile storage facility and a "key command node") then you can bet these facilities were ringed with anti-aircraft defenses.
13/ And the Iranians have been developing some interesting capabilities in terms of air defenses and they have been using the Houthis as their missile testing agency for years. We've already seen this play out with anti-ship technology.
14/ The Iranians have an added incentive now to engage in such behavior w/ the Houthis, their last remaining potent proxy (Hezbollah is weakened and isolated in Lebanon now that Syria has fallen and Hamas is broken in Gaza). Especially b/c they fear Trump wants to overthrow Iran
15/ Iran is 💯% on the strategic backfoot after having lost Syria as a key conduit and ally supporting their proxies surrounding Israel. What's more, the intro of Turkey into the region now complicates Iran's ability to be on the offensive.
16/ Therefore, demonstrating to the incoming Trump administration, which is populated by a cadre of Iran hawks, that the Houthis (and by extension their Iranian backers) have real capabilities that could stymie US power projection is a key priority for the Shiite Axis.
17/ But just think about this: the Biden Regime has become so incompetent that their Pentagon is floating a cover story of simple incompetence on the part of the US Navy being the cause of the F/A-18F shoot down. That's how far we've fallen.
18/ The Houthis are a serious player. They should be taken seriously and they must be dealt with harshly. I am certain the Trump administration plans to give them the ISIS treatment from Trump's first term. BUT we must recognize this mission will be harder than taking out ISIS.
19/ And failure to reliably knock out the Houthis in Trump's first six months back in office will permanently complicate Trump's ability to restore US deterrence in the Mideast.
20/ Any failure to rapidly restore US deterrence in the region will lead to both more incidents of the sort that we're seeing play out over the Red Sea today and will eventuate in a massive world war from erupting from the geopolitical quicksand of the Mideast.
21/ AS AN ADDENDUM: if the incompetence storyline that the Pentagon is hocking is actually true it’s imperative to understand why. And the why is because the crew of the Gettysburg has likely been under such constant drone & antiship missile attack
22/ they mistook the F/A-18F for enemy fire. That in itself is a crisis and something much worse is set to come in any event unless a fundamental reordering of our policy in the region is undertaken. Remember, Yemen was the site of the USS Cole bombing in 2000.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
2/ The Pentagon’s antipathy toward the A-10 is well-known, and unlikely to change. Instead of arguing with Big Blue, then, proponents of the aircraft should offer meaningful ways to keep it relevant in the modern era.
The Ukraine War is entering its third brutal year. NATO has caused the war with its endless expansion, failure to understand Russian strategic concerns, and an obsession to collapse what it views as a weaker post-Soviet Russian Federation. A 🧵1/
2/ In 1991, the Cold War ended in a bloodless victory for NATO. After 45 years of a grueling, nuclear-tinged Cold War, communism was dead, Eastern Europe was free, Russia looked to the West for how to build a better, freer future for itself,
3/ and liberal democracy and capitalism reigned supreme. But in the ruins of the last war lie the seeds for the next great conflict. Ukrainians are being made to pay with their lives for the arrogance (and ignorance) of Western leaders in the post-Cold War era.
Let's clarify this. As I EXCLUSIVELY REPORTED in my book THE SHADOW WAR: IRAN'S QUEST FOR SUPREMACY, Iran already has a small arsenal of rudimentary nukes. The issue for them is how to miniaturize them and build reliable launch systems (they are). 1/
2/ Now that Iran is plainly on the defensive, they are currently repositioning to make neighboring Iraq a no-man's land/contested region between itself (the Shiites of southern Iraq) and the Turkish-and-US-backed Sunni & Kurdish elements of northern Iraq.
3/ Iran is escalating their support for the Houthis out of Yemen by giving them increasingly sophisticated ballistic missile systems to test on US forces operating in the the Red Sea and Strait of Bab El-Mandeb. Lessons learned from those launches apply to Iran's missile program.
Getting ready for a post Islamic Republic Iran? It's going to be a total disaster, fyi. A brief 🧵 1/
2/ Even if the war can be contained to only an air war that limits direct US military participation, the issue will be one of politics. As in, who comes after the mullahs collapse? The West seems to believe, on some level, that it'll be the Shāh's grandson:
3/ We could only hope. But does the Shāh's grandson actually have the support of the Iranian people or is he another Ahmed Chalabi, an exile who hasn't been in the country in decades, and with whom most actual citizens of the targeted nation are unfamiliar?
FUN FACT: Bashar al-Assad's Syria was used frequently as a place to send Jihadists Western armies & intel services captured globally. It was part of America's "Extraordinary Rendition" Program (a.k.a. torture). In essence, Assad was *HELPING* the US fight al Qaeda. 1/
2/ Ofc, people will counter that Assad also facilitated the movement of foreign fighters into and out of Iraq during the Insurgency years of the Iraq War (2003-06). Indeed, this is true. But Assad did this for two reasons...
3/ Reason #1 is because Assad was sitting on a powder keg of a nation. He was a minority Alawite Shiite Muslim (nominal) ruling a land of majority Sunni Arabs, with spots of Kurds, Druze, and Christians interspersed throughout. His biggest threat came from Sunni Arab pop.
Just to be clear, the Turkish-and-US-backed leader of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a 42-year-old man (pictured) named Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, likely killed and maimed scores of US troops during the Insurgency in Iraq (2003-2006). A 🧵1/
2/ Born in 1982 is Saudi Arabia, as a young boy JOLANI moved to Damascus. Interestingly, 1982 was also the year that Hafez al-Assad, the dictator of Syria and father to recently ousted Bashar al-Assad, annihilated the Sunni Arab stronghold of Hama.
3/The reason the Assad regime even entered Hama was because the Muslim Brotherhood, the mothership of all Jihadist terror in the region, stirred up the populace there. Rifaat Assad, brother to Hafez Assad, led 12,000 Syrian Arab Army troops and killed 10,000 civilians.