What we have seen, just in the last few days, has no parallel, and damned few decent analogies, outside of military science fiction. This is the biggest, most significant change in the ways of war that I’ve ever seen. (For reference, I’m in my 50s, I’ve been a military history & theory dork since I was about 10, and I was a sonar tech in the Navy… I usually spent the midwatch reading out of the classified materials safe… not much to see on the hull-mount at 15 knots in 6 foot seas.)
The very first big mission of the war, the strike on the meeting of the top governing people in the Islamic Republic, took out the top men in the Iranian State. Like 40 of ‘em. All at once. That’s not a decapitatition. That’s more like a dethoraxization.
The first strikes cut so deep that the President literally didn’t have an answer to a question that he and his briefers knew he was going to get: “So, Mr. President, who do we think is next in line?” He had to, quite honestly, say, “We don’t know… we killed the next 2 or 3 guys at the same time… we didn’t plan for that.” (Nobody should expect a result like that, and anybody who tells you that they did should be fired immediately.) That’s like one shot taking out the Captain, the XO, and all the Department Heads… you just handed the ship over to the senior Lieutenant JG on board. And it’s dead in the water. And on fire.
Given that these men were among the most security-conscious and well-protected human beings on the entire planet, and that the sortie couldn’t launch until the IAF, (not Mossad... the guys with the keys to the airplanes,) learned about the meeting, and that they had at most a 3-4 hour target window...that alone would be enough to be in the top 10 of all tactical intelligence achievements in history.
That’s not the most amazing thing about it. Not even close.
The truly incredible thing is that the Ayatollah changed the time of the meeting the night before. It was supposed to be in the evening. He moved it up to the morning because air attacks usually happen at night.
That cut 8-12 hours off of the mission timeline… from the front end. Anyone who’s ever been involved in operational planning knows that that’s a ‘cancel everything and hit the beach’ event for a mission like this.
CIA / Mossad human penetration of the Islamic Republican State was so complete that the agent(s) were not only close enough to learn about the change, he/they were trusted enough that they could leave the Leader’s Holy Presence, access comms, send a message, and come back, without getting caught or questioned by anybody.
And the communications loop was so tight, and so secure, that the new schedule made it all the way from the compound to the airfields… in time to advance the whole mission, from gas in the plane to ordinance on target, by half a day.
That is fucking astounding.
That’s a plot that you wouldn’t buy if Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, Dame Judi Dench, and John LeCarre all pitched it to you in the same meeting.
And it was just the first op of the war.
Now?
We were hitting random IRGC ammo depots in the middle of friggin’ nowhere by the end of the first day.
We’re hitting mobile SRBM launchers while they’re still setting up the launch rails.
The Iranian air defense system, one of the tightest in the world, purchased at enormous expense, consisting of the best tech the Islamic Republic could convince Putin and Xi to let them have, completely ceased to exist in about 60 hours. We could be bombing anything in the country from high-wing Cessnas, and the Iranians still wouldn’t be able to do shit.
The Iran Navy is now something you probably wouldn’t hunt a rogue shark with.
The Iranian Air Force couldn’t launch a friggin’ weather balloon without the weatherman getting droned on the shitter.
A military-industrial complex that took five decades, and at least half of the value of some of the largest petroleum stocks on Earth, to build up, won’t last that many days.
We hacked the traffic camera system in Tehran. Years ago. Real-time surveillance of the enemy’s entire capitol city.
We hacked their State television system. Years ago. We’re interrupting State news broadcasts ‘to bring you ‘a special message from our sponsors’… In Farsi. That reflect current happenings. (So obviously not pre-recorded)
We sent ‘stand down, give up, go home’ messages into IRGC and Basji barracks break rooms. Dudes can’t even eat lunch without our being able to talk to them.
We hacked their official State Friday prayers app. (I’m convinced that one was a straight up ‘because fuck you, that’s why’ from the coding teams. Why not? I’d sure as hell do it. So would you.)
By next Friday, that hack will be useless. There won’t be any State prayers, because there won’t be a State to pray them. (And even if there’s enough of a remnant left to try to hold them, good luck getting a muezzin to climb that tower… I sure as hell wouldn’t.)
Until a few days ago, nobody had any idea what the combination of hyper-modern weapons systems, networked command and control from a private’s gunsight to the General’s desk, are-you-fucking-kidding-me intelligence, and world-spanning real-time logistics would look like when it went to war.
Now we know.
It looks like total military victory, over what everybody thought was one of the 5-ish strongest military establishments on Earth, in about a week.
Leave aside the geopolitical consequences of the Islamic Republic of Iran ceasing to exist, which are likely to be world-historic, century-defining things in themselves.
The last few days have been a dividing line in the history of armed conflict. There was then, and there is now. Warfare is now a very and permanently different thing. And, to the extent that warfare influences the world, the world is now a different place.
And it all changed at 10 AM Tehran time, last Saturday morning.
--Shannon
