…huh. It’s a… change…? I don’t expect an improvement, tbh.

I mean… it is incompetence, but it’s incompetence/process/doctrinal failure on the part of the Kuwaiti Air Force, not the USAF. Which is the only thing KegsBreath would give a shit about in this context.

It definitely saves face.

Since the pilots all seem to have been rescued successfully, the latter bit is a moot point.

It’d be interesting if some enterprising souls figured out a non-polluting, low-danger way to offline the plant for a significant amount of time. And then did it again. And again. And again. And- well, you get it.

it’s because of all the ketamine. I mean, I don’t trust me. Why would you trust me?

Yeah, but at the same time, it has WAY better performance than traditional SODIMMs. The primary technical reason laptops had RAM soldered for so long was because the transfer speed became problematic with that physical format under DDR5. LPCAMM2 removes that bandwidth constraint, and maintains user serviceability.

Heh, Ukraine be like

And that sort of crap would absolutely harm deconfliction efforts between the US and allied forces, and increase the likelihood of this sort of thing happening. So yeah, I would not be shocked to eventually learn that that played a big part here.

If I am recalling correctly, one was blue-on-blue, and one was a deck loss, where they also lost a tractor overboard.

Why do you think this is a conspiracy?

Yes, because that’s a thing that can happen in carrier ops. While uncommon, it is absolutely possible. Mistakes and equipment failures happen, and carrier ops tend to be very unforgiving.

I get being skeptical about shit the regime says, seriously, and generally speaking I’m right there with you. But you should also try to understand more about the intricacies of these sorts of things before immediately assuming it’s a cover up or whatever.

Edit: and here is my explanation of why I think the first 3 F-15s that were downed were actually blue-on-blue engagements, and not cover for something else.

Fat lot of fucking good the MiC is doing us now. They’ve always been kinda shit against asymmetric threats, tbh.

Honestly, Ukraine is going to come out of their war as one of the most important arms manufacturers and doctrine-definers of this new drone-centric age of warfare that we appear to be entering. The EU would do well to work very closely with them on that front - especially the Baltic states and Scandinavia (and, well, any country that’s been getting harassed by Russian drone swarms out of the Baltic Sea, like Poland and Germany, amongst others).

It’s possible, though I don’t think it’s likely.

Generally speaking, USAF doctrine heavily emphasizes SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defenses) deploying in concert and close coordination with any sort of non-stealthy strike mission, in the interest of minimizing the risk of combat losses - and by all accounts, the USAF is very fucking good at SEAD (having developed the concept - also known as “Wild Weasel” sorties - back in the Vietnam War, after USN and USAF began taking significant losses to Soviet/Vietnamese SAMs, and refining it a lot since, both in terms of tech and doctrine).

For strike planes to be caught flat-footed like that, I would expect that they were out of range of any possible Iranian SAMs, and thus were not in the mindset of constant vigilance, and moreover their SEAD support was probably not either (or had split off to land at another base altogether).

Also: if the shootdown was from a Patriot, their RWR (basically: “what radar is looking at me”) was probably saying it was a friendly radar, and the pilots may have even thought the Patriot (or similar non-Russian system) was giving them cover from something they didn’t see, and they reacted late as a result.

Thus, I do think that the blue-on-blue explanation is likely accurate - especially considering it was three F-15Es, and not just a single one-off shoot down. IMO, someone (not Iranian) was running air defense in the area and didn’t properly check their deconfliction and IFF.

Edit: actually, it appears it was probably a Kuwaiti F/A-18. And as the article points out, if the pilot used Sidewinders, there would be zero warning, as the seeker is passive. However, I’m pretty sure standard loadouts are for a pair of heat seekers and the remaining pylons loaded with AMRAAMs… so that would only explain two of them. We’ll hear more about this in the coming days, most likely.

“Another” is misleading. If this is the fourth shootdown, it would be the first that Iran actually achieved, as the first three were blue-on-blue (Kuwait shot them down in error)

Hey guys, come on, you can’t do your laundry with that shit, leave it alone

More context

Though they’ve recently hiked their spending. Primarily, I was just pointing out that Spain has been a consistent laggard in terms of responding and contributing to EU collective defense concerns and NATO defense guidelines in general. I’m glad that’s changing, but context and past behavior is important to consider.

I hope he gets (or has) cirrhosis and liver cancer 🥰

He’s a genuinely and unrepentantly evil shitstain.

Children of Kali when?

Almost certainly the US.

But the ship in question was an Iranian warship. It’s in the first line of the article:

Iranian frigate Iris (sic) Dena

Likely intended to be printed as “IRIS Dena”, as that is one of the prefixes Iran’s naval forces use. So either somebody uninformed put that together, or they used some LLM bullshit to generate the article.

At any rate: RTFA.

This is the other half of the story that you’re looking for. Kash fucking Patel was told (because he’s a complete fucking idiot and a consummate tool, and is incapable of having novel thoughts) to leave the back door open and unlocked and unsupervised, in a situation that is clearly going to create numerous and meaningful threats from a particular hostile state that we are now bombing the shit out of.

So my money is that this is all part of The Plan (i.e. that they’re very intentionally leaving a huge opening for Iran to do something terroristic in the US), which will be used as a justification for, amongst other things, fully occupying Iran and fucking with and/or outright canceling the US federal midterm elections in November.