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
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.
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.
I’d feel more enthusiastic about him pushing back if he hadn’t fucking balked at the concept of the EU being more self reliant in defense matters months ago. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very good that he’s criticizing orangeboi and the regime, but in light of the aforementioned bullshit, it smacks a bit of political grandstanding and opportunism to me.
Oh man it’s gonna be so fucking funny if he and his party just completely fucking flop at the polls. And great for Hungarian people and the EU and Ukraine, too.
How our government has treated and backstabbed the Kurds in the last decade or so is an absolute travesty.
I look forward to hearing about how all the countries who are holding US bonds decide to sell them, crash the USD, and switch to the Euro as the new global reserve currency. Because that’s how this is going to end. And that’s one of the reasons I’m looking more seriously and concretely into moving to Europe permanently.
I said it elsewhere and got downvoted for it, but yeah, pretty much. Putting aside how utterly fucked the situation is and how abjectly fucking stupid the orange and Bibi’s regimes are, this is an object lesson in why target discrimination is extremely important: you can turn a nominally neutral party into an actively hostile combatant with the push of a button. Iran has been getting high on their own dogma for so long that it’s evidently divorced them from reality. Leaning into an orgy of violence towards everyone around you that you can hit - instead of focusing it on the people specifically fucking with you - is a one-way ticket to getting regime-changed.
All that said: the US and Israel kicking this idiocy off was deeply fucking stupid for dozens of reasons. The Iranian regime was quite bad for a lot of reasons, but this is just about the worst way they could have addressed that geopolitical sticking point.
Unfortunately it’s probably going to result in curtailed weapons shipments and support - from the US, at least. But our current regime has been cutting back on that since they came to power, so my gut feeling is that it’s not going to be a catastrophic thing. Maybe they can reverse engineer some patriots or HIMARS munitions before things are fully turned off.
The likely ultimate outcome here, unfortunately, is that Ukraine is going to be left high and dry.
I’m betting they asked Claude or Grok or whatever Palantir’s FORINT/Secret Police model is and didn’t bother doing any additional auditing whatsoever because “AI is amazing” 😬
Russia just gave them some brand new Su-35s, and Iran has furthermore been a crucial strategic supplier to Russia in the Ukraine war (which, by the way, is where Ukraine’s support for taking out Iranian leadership comes from - you can’t expect sympathy from the country that’s you’ve systematically been helping Russia fuck over). Iran was basically the most crucial “pariah state” ally that Russia had, and they’ve been effectively swept of the board as a strategic threat and military industrial power.
Heh, Ukraine be like