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News from the Middle East

kEiThZ said:
I know there's this idea among the left that military folks are callous bastards who love to kill. But I assure you that nobody in uniform wants a lifetime of PTSD and guilt that will come with knowing they killed a single kid, let alone several. I know quite a few soldiers, including and ex-CO of mine, who suffered tremendously from watching kids killed in Afghanistan. And without exception they all said they wished they had died in place of those kids (none actually killed a kid, just witnessed it). Several attempted suicide after.
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I agree with you, for the most part, but it is a difficult situation when the military's boss says or has said or wrote stuff like this:
We need to fight total war against our enemies when we do. And yeah, you don’t kill civilians on purpose, but you kill bad guys. All of ’em, you stack bodies, and when it’s over, then you let the dust settle and you figure out who’s ahead.
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“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars,”
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“If we’re going to send our boys to fight – and it should be boys – we need to unleash them to win.”
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They need them to be the most ruthless. The most uncompromising. The most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.
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“We are just fighting with one hand behind our back – and the enemy knows it … If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?!”
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“What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us?” he asks. “Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.”
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:"Our troops will make mistakes, and when they do, they should get the overwhelming benefit of the doubt.”
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It is stuff like that, from Secretary Hegseth, that makes people concerned. The man is deranged.
 
wopchop said:
I hope many are Americans!
The guy is insufferable.
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We have just a few on exchange that I work with. And it's pretty clear they aren't fans. But to be fair, officers are fairly educated. And Hegseth has been openly attacking higher education in the military. I'm sure there lower ranking folks who like all the tough guy talk.

But this op is the worst fear realized. He doesn't have the intellect to lead a complex geopolitical fight. All he does is film himself working out and talking about LETHALITY. You don't see senior officers or Generals do that. Let alone the SecDef. There's a reason he didn't make it past Major in his military career, which is as common as being a Captain in Canada.
 
wopchop said:
BBC yesterday was reporting the school is about 600m from the base, so right next door not exactly but certainly close.
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Not sure where BBC got their 600m from. From all the satellite imagery analysis I've seen, the school building was in a corner of an IRGC compound perimeter:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2027977564665639323

Again, this in no way excuses the strike. The school was build over 10 years ago, it should have made it on the no strike list long ago.

Rubio has all but admitted to it in this slip-up, when he stipulated that they would never deliberately target a school:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2028637841790558348
 
Full Metal Junkie said:
Not sure where BBC got their 600m from. From all the satellite imagery analysis I've seen, the school building was in a corner of an IRGC compound perimeter:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2027977564665639323

Again, this in no way excuses the strike. The school was build over 10 years ago, it should have made it on the no strike list long ago.

Rubio has all but admitted to it in this slip-up, when he stipulated that they would never deliberately target a school:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2028637841790558348
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This is a substantial intelligence failure. Maps are made by the geospatial intelligence agency and update daily or even several times a day during ops. In the US it's National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). In Canada, it's the Mapping and Charting Establishment (MCE). And part of the targeting process is verifying that the maps are accurate. So if this building changed a purpose and that was never updated on the maps, it's a big question of what went wrong.
 
Full Metal Junkie said:
Surprising a bonehead like that made it that far. Were the other guys even stupider and he got all the promotions?
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Making Major in the US is substantially easier than Canada. It's something like 70-90%. In Canada, we generally are half that from Captain to US. We also give Majors here much more responsibility and authority. In the US, promotion from Major to Lt Col is 70-80%. That should tell you how far down the list he was relative to his peers.
 
kEiThZ said:
Waiting to see what proportion of that assembly was hit and what the impact will be. I am weary that eliminating the cleric might lead to a more hardline IRGC led state.
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I wonder if they are as technologically averse as hezbollah. Afraid of US/Israel SIGINT to the point that everything is done via in-person meetings even when this could have been an email. Four days into the war and Iran is quickly running out of hardliners...
 
I really like the Iranian brand of AI slopaganda. It is always so grandiose, so grotesque, so over-the-top! It is always SO BAD, it's actually good. The 12-day war featured the StarWars-esque scenes of Imperial-destroyer-sized F-35s crashed in the deserts of Tatooine. This time, it took them four days to come up with their new masterpiece. Behold!

https://twitter.com/x/status/2028816562115772798

To demonstrate the might of the Iranian firepower against the US Navy, they have lobbed a Soviet "Vostok" space rocket (presumably with the cosmonauts still on board) at the Japanese battleship Yamato of the WWII vintage.
🫡
 
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Full Metal Junkie said:
Not sure where BBC got their 600m from. From all the satellite imagery analysis I've seen, the school building was in a corner of an IRGC compound perimeter:
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Not sure. They are still reporting it as of 3 hours ago
www.bbc.com

Funerals held for students and staff after Iran school strike

Iranian authorities say they were killed in a US-Israeli strike in the city of Minab on Saturday.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

The Guardian has some more information:
www.theguardian.com

Minab school bombing: how the worst mass casualty event of the Iran war unfolded – a visual guide

A strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh school during the US-Israeli bombing campaign killed up to 168 people. The Guardian has pieced together the incident and its aftermath using verified footage and images from the site
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
The Guardian cross-referenced verified videos from the site with satellite imagery to confirm the location of the primary school. Shajareh Tayyebeh school was adjacent to a cluster of buildings that form the local Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) barracks and support buildings. The complex next to the school includes a medical clinic and pharmacy, which has signage bearing the IRGC logo and reads “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy Medical Command”.
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Also in the wider complex is what appears to be a gymnasium or concert space, which is marked “Seyyed al-Shohada Cultural Complex of the Revolutionary Guard”. The school’s location has also been verified by Osint (open source intelligence) researchers, the Iranian student network, and independent Farsi factchecking service Factnameh.
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