BDAs not looking good
I saw BennSue and SFC D’s comments about us not covering the Iran strikes – I think if you check TAH on 6 B’2s I think you’ll find that our trusty commenters did their usual great job of commentary.
Been interesting since then – Iran lobbed some missiles at Israel, some more at our facilities in Qatar, and Israel launched air attacks back at Iran.
Explosions were heard in Qatar, multiple news agencies reported, and photos showed missiles over Qatar’s capital city, Doha. U.S. and Qatari authorities said the missiles were intercepted and no one was injured.
President Trump has indicated that the U.S. was given prior warning of the Iranian strike. CBS News
No injuries or major damage was reported, which suggests that the Qatar attacks were pretty much a ‘pro forma ya know I gotta do this, right?’ sort of thing.
Now, Trump has managed to broker a tenuous cease-fire between Iran and Israel. Then…
Qatar’s prime minister secured Iran’s agreement to the U.S.-proposed ceasefire after Iran’s limited strikes on America’s Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
Both Israel and Iran fired missiles at one another following the imposition of a ceasefire on Monday night.
“I’m not happy with Israel. You know, when I say, okay, now you have 12 hours, you don’t go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them. So I’m not happy with them. I’m not happy with Iran either, but I’m really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning,” Trump said.Fox News
Trump sounded impatient with both parties. Iran was alleged to have fired a few missiles at Israel, Israel was counterstriking – yeah, obviously they both know how to conduct a cease-fire. Some cease-fires strive to achieve peace, some merely allow the combatants to rearm. I think both those I-countries view this ceasefire as the latter.
But everyone was relieved that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been bombed with bunker-busters and turned to underground rubble, right? Not so fast…
The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.
There’s those “those not supposed to blab spilling info” thing again. They say that according to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)’s assessments:
The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing, and could change as more intelligence becomes available. But the early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also said on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “have been obliterated.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Tell that to the defenders of Saipan?
Israel had been carrying out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities for days leading up to the US military operation but claimed to need the US’ 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs to finish the job. While US B-2 bombers dropped over a dozen of the bombs on two of the nuclear facilities, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment plant and the Natanz Enrichment Complex, the bombs did not fully eliminate the sites’ centrifuges and highly enriched uranium, according to the people familiar with the assessment.
Instead, the impact to all three sites — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — was largely restricted to aboveground structures, which were severely damaged, the sources said. That includes the sites’ power infrastructure and some of the aboveground facilities used to turn uranium into metal for bomb-making.
Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who has closely reviewed commercial satellite imagery of the strike sites, agreed with the assessment that the attacks do not appear to have ended Iran’s nuclear program.
“The ceasefire came without either Israel or the United States being able to destroy several key underground nuclear facilities, including near Natanz, Isfahan and Parchin,” Lewis said, referring to the ceasefire between Israel and Iran that Trump announced on Monday. Parchin is a separate nuclear complex near Tehran.
“These facilities could serve as the basis for the rapid reconstitution of Iran’s nuclear program.” CNN
It’s ‘way too early to really know. Different three-letter folks will no doubt be doing their own assessments, and we don’t know if DIA is an outlier or whether everyone is on the same less-optimistic assessment page.
