Oil Facility Attack Launched from Iran per U.S. Officials
Red rectangles are used to highlight the areas that were attacked. (US government/Fox News)
According to U.S. officials, the weapons used to attack Saudi oil facility structures originated from Iranian launching points. Naturally, the Iranians are denying that they did this. Considering the proximity of this facility to Iran, the Iranians’ denial is meeting skepticism.
These are the same folk that claimed that they shot our drone down “inside Iranian airspace”. They also claimed that we shot our own drown down when it was clearly an Iranian drone.
In one of President Trump’s replies, he stated that we were ready to take action. But, he’s waiting on confirmation by Saudi government sources regarding Iran, and on the Saudi government’s desire on how to address this issue.
From Fox News:
Satellite photos released by the Trump administration show at least 17 impacts at two major Saudi oil installations — with what officials say was pinpoint accuracy — slashing Saudi Arabia’s oil output by half.
“Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, in part, on Twitter. “There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.”
U.S. officials told Fox News previous attacks from the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen only involved one or two drones at most and targeted southern Saudi Arabia. The attacks Saturday, however, hit facilities near the Persian Gulf not far from Iran, which denied responsibility.
For its part, Iran is emphasizing its desire for the U.S. to leave Syria. They appear to be “advocating” that Syria’s territorial integrity be preserved. They argue that our removal would aid in that objective.
You could read more on Fox News.
Category: Politics
Years ago that would have crippled us when it comes to our petroleum supply, but since we’ve tapped a number of the vast reserves we have in CONUS and are continuing to drill, it really can’t hurt us much. As to the Iranians, yeah, I wouldn’t put it past them.
I’m just surprised that the mullahs would take direct action, rather than shield themselves with a proxy. Not their usual MO…and the Huthis would very happily execute the attack.
Enough with the foreplay already. Bomb the sonovabitches. And while we are at it, carpet bomb the large Republican Guard naval base and put an end to that crap. Then turn the IDF loose.
At what point …. do we turn that wasteland (Iran) into glass? No one would miss it…
Now with Bolton gone, I doubt that much of any retaliation will happen.
Send the Envoy:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+envoy&view=detail&mid=5283E95BE24BF73EA0145283E95BE24BF73EA014&FORM=VIRE
Wow. That song was awesome.
In a weird way.
I had never heard of…Warren Zevon?
Cool.
I’ll add this song to my library.
Here is another of his greats:
https://youtu.be/lP5Xv7QqXiM
Not a fan of this guy but here
is a haunting tune you may like:
https://youtu.be/O9HFjErMMlA
Lest we forget Roland, that magnificent bastard.
https://youtu.be/wRWCK9zGynA
Warren Zevon is good for the soul.
Shocked am I, shocked I tell you. Why would the pieces loving peoples of Persia launch drones at fellow members of that pieces loving religion. They are not at war with the Saudi people. This is all a plot by the Great Satan and its’ war mongering ally the Israeli defense force. The weapons were launched by the invasion fleet parked in the proclaimed territorial waters of the pieces loving people of Iran. /s/
I say let the Saudis handle it. We have given/sold them enough hardware and delivery platforms to turn Iran into a smoking hole. Are they saving it for a museum or, are they afraid it may get dirty and not look good for the parade? I’m sure that with the assets in that area there is no lack of radar coverage that can verify where the attack was launched from.
Here’s a serious question for one of our miscreanted d/ws that has been in the Sand Box of late. Is there not radar coverage/anti air assets in place to defend such a major facility? If not, then why not?
Someone took a stab at one of the ways this could play out:
The drones may have been too small to register as threats.
Toy drones with a ounce of thermite each could do major damage in a refinery.
There are low-tech ways to be “stealthy”.
There are low-tech ways to drop a bunch of small drones off a commercial/cargo aircraft. Or launch from a delivery truck.
Drunken yahoos already are doing this stuff with cheap “firework” pyro and hobby-class drones.
I am surprised it took this long to surface in actual warfare.
Tanks thebesig and 11B. And a ditto to timeactual. I’m sitting here fat dumb and happy thinking that someone that is way yonder more up to date with what needs to be done for the security of a major oil refinery complex in the most violital part of the world is doing their job. Duh huh. When all these baby drones started hitting the toy market I thought then that it wouldn’t take much to make a nice terrorist weapon out of a bunch of them. How many could be bought & launched for just 1% of the 150bil USD we (oblowme) turned over to them. Maybe we’ve been right before when we commented…”Nuke ’em from space!”
“RC Airplanes” were a thing back in the 70s. The ones a buddy flew were capable of carrying a pound or more of payload. They were pricy for the radio gear, and time consuming to build.
Not no more.
Now, the Iranians have their own vulnerabilities. The good ones may require somewhat larger toys to wreck, but their opposition has lots of cash.
I worked over in Saudi Arabia for 2 1/2 years as a contractor for Vinnell Arabia (they have the contract for training the Saudi National Guard). The Saudi’s love to spend all sorts of cash on weapons, but can’t be bothered with using them (they are so arrogant, they know how to do everything, until it gets screwed up, them they blame it on the “infidel” for not training them).
There was a story going around that the Saudi’s were looking for a new field artillery system, and settled on a French one. They spent some mad money to get it, them found out that they didn’t buy the rounds for the weapon, so the French screwed them a second time for the stuff that goes boom.
Best guess is that any C2 is being “suggested” to a Saudi by an “infidel” advisor… and radar coverage is probably done by a foreigner with a Saudi “supervisor” over them.
Amen. The stories I could tell about Middle Eastern students in general at NTC Great Lakes back in the day did not fill me with overwhelming confidence in their abilities.
NOW will somebody realize we need a strong anti-drone capability? The bad guys are not stupid, and you do not need NASA or DARPA to build them. It was only a matter of time before some group of bad guys got around to using drones on us.
It should also be noted that this is not the first drone attack on Saudi oil facilities.
Some nice maps—
http://energy-cg.com/OPEC/SaudiArabia/OPEC_SaudiArabia_EIA.html
We need common sense drone control!
Six ways to stop a drone:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2016/03/16/six-ways-to-disable-a-drone/
I don’t recommend shooting one down because you might hit a bird like a goose in the middle of a training flight, which would be bad for the goose’s offspring. Or you might hit a hummingbird or a hawk, and we need both of them.
I was surprised that not one of those recommendations included using a trained falcon to bring down the drone. They are extreme flying hunters!
As an old Screaming Eagle, ol’ Poe is partial to the eagle option…
🙂 🙂 🙂 !!
“We need common sense drone control!”
AMEN, now let’s get the D-rat pols AWAY from Gun Control and send them out to confiscate DRONES, who’s with me…
Sarcasm? How do you stop manufacture? Ban model airplanes? Radios? The raspberry Pi computer-on-a-miniboard? The GoPro camera? Tell all the world “now don’t build these kids toys and adult playthings! Someone might get hurt!”
I hope that was sarcasm I missed. Because that ship sailed in about 1970.
It was sarcasm on my part, a pathetic attempt at humor. In regards to what Timactual actually said, “strong anti-drone capability”, I think that will become a necessity.
Noted.
Then again, those “clay target” shotgun sports now have a National Defense angle.
“Drones! Four o’clock close!”
BLAM! BLAM!
“Dead pair.”
Man portable shotgun laying radar.
Yeah, you’d think C-RAM could easily be adapted to drone defense, since they can interdict a mortar round. And if they’re not “launch and forget”, you’d think jammers could be effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CzURm7OpAA&t
If they’re using off the shelf drones, it’s really not too hard to knock them out of the air.
Japan would not surrender after the Little Boy A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki by Enola Gay’s crew. Japan’s government refused to surrender.
A few days later, Boxcar dropped Fat Man on Hirshima.
There was a third bomb (Tokyo Joe) was readied to be sent to Tinian, for dropping on Kokura, but was stopped when the Japanese government agreed to surrender. This ended the war in the Pacific.
That is not the same thing as Iran’s poke-and-run tactics, the kind used by schoolyard bullies.
They haven’t been frightened out of their wits yet. That needs to happen to them, because if it doesn’t, the constant poke-and-run stuff will go on until someone finally says ‘drop The Big One on Teheran’.
It isn’t going to stop, otherwise. 10,000 years of making war on everyone around you, which is the history of that entire area, won’t come to a freaking end until Iran and those they support (and who support them) are spooked into ending it.
They are frightened. They are getting desperate, as they are losing rep fast, and running out of money faster.
Good analogy though. Japan got very desperate when we screwed up their oil supply. Their response was…messy, but ultimately futile.
My mother told me that one reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was that their oil reserves were down to a 6-month supply. I don’t know if Yamamoto decided to turn around and go back to Japan or if Nagumo told him to do so, but the Japanese fleet had barely enough fuel to return to Japan.
We had also stopped selling them our scrap steel.
Between the two Japan could not exist as a country if they didn’t look to elsewhere for their industrial base.
Hence the invasion of China and the West Indies, the Mariana’s and the entire Southwest Pacific area of Planet Earth.
It’s just fascinating to read about.
Whoops.
We cut off their oil and steel (40) after they invaded China (31) not before. Folks were a bit annoyed with the “rape of Nanking” (37) and assorted other outrages.
They had approximately three years planned of oil reserves at war-time consumption, and were off by only about six months. The fleet that hit Pearl Harbor was well provisioned and easily made the round trip.
Got it backwards Hon.
Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Little Boy was a Uranium Gun design. Dropped from 42,000 feet the Enola Gay quickly turned away from the bomb in a steep dive trading altitude for speed and safety. Col. Paul W Tibbets B-29 named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay because he wanted to make sure that no other plane in history would ever have the same name as the plane he flew.
August 9’Th was the date that Bock’s Car dropped the Plutonium Implosion design bomb named Fat Man on Nagasaki.
Both bombs were detonated at 1800 feet above the ground which made the blast wave punch buildings about ten feet into the ground.
I’ve read about the Atomic Bombing since I first read John Hershey’s book Hiroshima in 9’Th grade.
The verdict passed by the snowflakes of today and even that day say that it wasn’t necessary to drop the bombs as Japan was on the verge of starvation and would have folded within the next few months…
The same issue was put to the Marines and others that would have had the dirty job of invading the Island of Japan.
None of those men voted to not drop the bomb as the expected casualties for Operation Downfall were expected to be at minimum of a million with at least 500,000 deaths, including their own.
Needless to say, they were all quite happy to have had the bombs dropped so they were spared from the consequences of such an operation…
Even Ike said that the bombs shouldn’t have been dropped. The Marines told him to put his ass on one of their boats and ride into the mess…
Not trying to be a know it all, I have just read a ton about WWII and love the topic.
Sorry about that. Point remains the same. (No, I do not know how I got those two mixed up when I know better. My bad.)
I agree with the point and I wasn’t trying to point out the mistake. I just simply enjoy talking about that part of American history.
It’s still nothing short of a miracle that we won that war…..
Our military was all fucked up, the enemies military was even more fucked up….
War is all about arrogance, the arrogance of one person as in Hitler or the arrogance of a certain race or country, as in Japan in WWII…
Agreed, and I think it will bring about Iran’s downfall in our lifetimes. (Hope so, anyway.)
Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9’Th from the B-29 Bockscar.
It was named after the Commander of the plane.
Frederick C Bock. Ironically, Bock was not the pilot as Major Sweeney piloted Bockscar and Bock piloted The Great Artiste. The Great Artiste was filled with all manner of scientific instrumentation, cameras and only the Lord himself only knows what else.
Sadly, Ike was much more of a politician than a soldier, and based on many of his statements, a leftist one at that…
Of course he was named Supreme Allied Commander by another serious leftist, who along with his VP allowed communists to significantly infiltrate all levels of government.
Yep…..
One thing though, Ike was a great manager and had the ability to deal with the greatest egos in history and make them do his bidding even if they didn’t want to.
To me, Montgomery was the worst with Patton pulling a close second…
Then the free for all begins for the biggest ego oin theatre…
While I’d argue that he gave into “Monty” a bit too much,and by diverting resources to him instead of Patton, probably lengthened the war.
The Brits had to have their piece, both in money and blood. It was an Allied effort. It couldn’t be just the US, even if on the Western Front that would have been more efficient.
I get how a balance needed to be maintained, but putting politics in play when it’s obviously going to lead to more fatalities is a bad road to go down. If Monty had been more successful / aggressive, I’d suggest he should have gotten the bulk of support. Performance, not nationality should have ruled the day, IMO…Add to that him not viewing Berlin as a priority certainly helped the Russians…And in that, Churchill opposed that strategy.. He just never impressed me much, as military, or politician
Monty was aggressive. Unfortunately, the repeated frontal attacks he was forced to make did not gain much ground. From June to the end of August the British/Canadian forces suffered over 80,000 casualties.
Time and place definitely have something to say about performance as well. The enemy does get a say after all.
MacArthur is said to have remarked that “He [Eisenhower] was the best clerk to serve under me.”
Was MacArthur’s snarky comment about Eisenhower made before or after MacArthur made his exit from Corregidor and left behind 10,000 of his troops to twist in the wind?
I’m no fan of MacArthur, but I believe his exit was ordered by FDR, so while shitty, he was doing as an officer should, and following orders. I could be wrong..
FDR basically blackmailed him into leaving. MacArthur was a lot of things, egotistical asshole included, but he was not a coward by any means.
If you haven’t already, look up MacArthur’s interaction with 1LT Harl Pease of the 19th BG. MacArthur would later attach his own handwritten endorsement to General Kenney’s recommendation for Pease’s posthumous Medal of Honor.
I concur with you Thunderstixx and I genuinely believe that the use of the A-Bombs SAVED more Japanese lives than they did American. It’s a known fact that the Military Junta that ruled Japan in the closing days of WWII had issued propaganda demanding that ALL Japanese People, Women and Children as well, fight to their deaths to repel the anticipated Allied Invasion of the Japanese Islands.
The decision wasn’t made in a setting of “Japan is about to give up.” It was made as the war was about to escalate to an unprecedented level. Japan’s government was taking full advantage of the fanaticism they had cultivated for decades to ensure that any invasion of the home islands would require nothing less than a genocidal extermination of the Japanese race. Leaving that regime in power to rebuild and restart the war later was not an option.
The atomic bombs were the only option that offered the chance of reducing the bloodshed required to end the war. The nastier side effect of nuclear warfare (fallout, etc.) were not yet known, evident by the fact that Oppenheimer and his team were walking around the Trinity blast site in t-shirts the following day. It was a gamble aimed at sparing millions, and almost failed when IJA hardliners attempted to storm the Imperial Palace in a failed coup attempt following Nagasaki.
If it hadn’t worked, I think you’re right TOW, Halsey’s comment from earlier in the war, “at the end of this war, the Japanese language will only be spoken in hell” (paraphrased) would have come true.
Of a couple things, I am pretty certain:
1- They will figure out who did this or use ‘evidence’ to pin it on an organization/state actor (at this point we ‘know’ who’s in the crosshairs)
2- there will be a retaliatory strike.
3- when the IRoI gets f*cked up there will be an escalation.
4- as it has been, so will it go: oil will be targeted on both sides.
And long game: $100+/bbl and the world economy goes past Shit Station and steams headlong into Fuctville Junction.
I’d expect if they really trade blows we could see $200/bbl, I wish I was kidding.
Blackswan-type mess ain’t an outlier either, like drastic change o’ the map type stuff.
Have a plan and food for months, jic.
Currently, Iran and Russia have a trade agreement in place, i.e., oil for Russian equipment and agricultural products. It appears to be strictly barter, no cash involved.
https://en.radiofarda.com/a/russian-and-iran-turn-to-barter-trade-/30008556.html
They aren’t one bit well of, no matter what they pretend, with their sole exportable product being oil. If Iran is behind the drone attack on the Saudi production facilities (no surprise there) they may not have much more than the poke-and-run platform.
Maybe they want to be bombed into oblivion. Then they could be the world’s victim. I’ve heard of stranger things.
TAH: We need to leave the Middle East, we’re tired of war!!! Enough is enough!
….Saudi oil at risk….
TAH: Bomb those Iranians off the map! Wipe ’em out!
Also:
TAH: The government is a deep state bunch of liars!!!!!!
Government: We think maybe Iran was responsible for this, but we’re not sure.
TAH: Bomb Iran off the map!!!
You are a fanboy for Iran? How unexpected.
The “Mad Mullahs” are a blight on humanity. Folks in Iran deserve better. Folks here ought to know better than to support those murderous nincompoops.
I took it that he is a fanboy of logical consistency.
I don’t think anyone here was a fan boy of Saddam Hussain or the Taliban, yet, in hindsight, maybe we should have used a different strategy. One that would have not mired us in a pointless War for a decade.
HM, just how many tubes of model airplane glue did you sniff before you thought of that?
Haven’t you already slammed your dick in the door enough, Helpful Medal?
Apparently not. He doesn’t strike me as being particularly bright.
There is no rush for the U.S. to attack Iran.
Let the Saudis react to an attack on their country. Let our so called allies defend their oil supplies.
We are energy independent.
President Trump needs to get re-elected first.
Another potential forever war in the middle east can only hurt his chances for re-election.
We can support a Saudi led attack with supplies. Leave our troops out of this mess.
I concur, let the Saudis wipe their own asses for a change.
With BOTH hands!
Here, here.