[KenKlippenstein] Pentagon Prepares for Trump to Go Berserk: Unprecedented number of B-2 bombers amassed for Iran strike
The long-range bombers, which are uniquely suited to evade Iranian air defenses and can carry America’s most potent bunker busting weapons, flew in from Missouri last week in a little noticed operation.
The B-2s carry not just bombs, but a message for Iran: “do you see our sword?,” as one retired general told Newsmax this week.
President Donald Trump hasn’t been shy in threatening Iran, saying that if Tehran doesn’t close the door on a nuclear capability they will experience “bombing the likes of which they haven’t seen.”
“Hell” will “rain down” on the country, Trump has also said. Just today, amidst the stock market meltdown Trump again reiterated his threat, saying that “doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious” — which to the president is undertaking a massive strike.
…Blatant as the threat is, the U.S. government has not otherwise publicly acknowledged the bomber buildup. Though B-2 bombers were used to carry out strikes on underground Houthi facilities in Yemen (both under the Biden and Trump administration), the forward deployment of the bombers to the island of Diego Garcia was only reported when commercial satellite images of the airbase there revealed the six on the runway.
This is a highly visible threat to Tehran, but at least one party isn’t supposed to notice: the American people.
The Pentagon refuses to acknowledge that the deployment is even happening. Trump’s new Pentagon Press Secretary Sean Parnell has only vaguely alluded to “other air assets” being deployed it has announced that two aircraft carriers will stay in the region, the result of a delay in sending one home after its current deployment.
According to Google Trends, searches for terms like “B-2” and “war with Iran” have only modestly increased, indicating that public curiosity has been suppressed despite Donald Trump’s many threats to attack his enemies.
FLEXING
Which brings us to public muscle flexing of the B-2 deployments. I say flexing because what follows isn’t “war,” not full scale war as people think of war. It is more the preamble of the government or the military taking action to “defend” itself, or an occasion by which the Pentagon expresses anger or frustration, or wants to send a signal, even by bombing.
This is the realm where Donald Trump’s stream of consciousness or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s need to stick one of his tattoos in someone’s face plays an outsize role. What the boss says in this world is crucially important, even if it is ridiculous, because the war machine has to know at what speed to operate and what thing it should produce. And it needs to know right now, tonight, which is why the B-2s are there in the region in such large numbers.
When Trump spews, even his tone influences the military “posture,” as those who are out “in the field” seek to gauge what the White House is planning so that they can anticipate what’s coming. (It is hardly ever organized or clear under any administration.) Thus Trump’s bombast and his body language influences U.S. moves, which influence how the Iranians see the dangers, which can provoke Tehran to flex its own muscles, which then triggers the crisis intelligence alerts, which makes Trump and company speak more loudly which pushes the U.S. military to make moves to get ready, which the Iranians see, which we see and which starts a never-ending cycle.
WAR PLANNING
…In the world of war planning, when Trump says “I want X,” the order goes down the chain of command through a mind-boggling number of levels, broadening in scope the further the order goes down the chain until someone (and many someones) say ‘We can’t do it.’ That someone could be anyone, but for simplicity’s sake, think of the ultimate someone as “the Pentagon.” The Pentagon says this and the Pentagon says that.
If the Pentagon wants to do X, they can move mountains to get it done. And that takes time, and lots of resources.
If the Pentagon doesn’t really want to do X, because it thinks the risks are too high or because it thinks the order ill-considered, it has an arsenal of passive aggressive ways of gumming up the works to make sure it doesn’t happen except as it wants. ‘What do you actually mean, Mr. President, sir, that you want to end Tehran?’ the Pentagon asks. ‘Nukes?’ ‘Covert action?’ ‘World War III?’ ‘That looks a lot like Ukraine, or worse, sir. Are you sure?’
You can think of this as calmer heads prevailing, but it is also a game that the Pentagon plays, either to shift responsibility for the outcome to the politicians or as to guide the president’s order so that it ends up looking like it’s asking for what the Pentagon wants, what the Pentagon thinks is possible and will allow it — that is, the Pentagon, not America — to declare victory.
Over the past 24 years, the Pentagon has perfected this game of executing the play it wants to run, not what the coach wants. That’s why the U.S. has become very good at bombing targets and conducting aerial assassinations, and in keeping the ball in play.
Posted by: NoMoreBS ||
04/09/2025 00:00 ||
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#1
Distance Diego-Garcia → Tehran: 3,270.78 mi (5,263.81 km)
Maximum speed: 630+/- mph
Cruise speed: 560+/- mph
Range: 6,900 miles without refueling.
Approx Flight time to Tehran: 6 hrs
Can carry 40,000lbs bombs, or 12+ B83 (1.2MT) nuclear weapons.
#2
4,293 miles as the crow flies from Diego to Beijing - but 6,500 miles to Lop Nor and 8,000 miles to the targets near Qinling - lots of lead time there ...
After constantly staging B52's etc on Diego for the last 40 years wouldn't you anticipate that some nefarious type had wargamed a solution to that threat, just on a contingency basis
#4
There are 19 B2's. Odds are only half of them are O/R at any given time for a combat mission. That'd leave 3-4 operational not in Diego. And of the ones in Diego, how many days can they sit on the tarmac before they start to spontaneously become AOG. Figure 4 available for a mission of 6 are on deck.
[LegalInsurrection] As a 31-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, former submarine captain, and long-time follower of all things military, I became concerned recently when I read the following X post from one of my favorite personalities on X:
There is an enormous problem in our nation’s military, one that I have not seen discussed in depth elsewhere.
I have heard from multiple sources that many active duty officers openly and deeply despise the Trump Administration, and they are not at all shy about expressing their…
The discussion following the tweet is worth reading, too.
I highlight the key parts of Cynical Publius’s (CP’s) post here so you don’t have to read the whole thing (even though you should):
There is an enormous problem in our nation’s military, one that I have not seen discussed in depth elsewhere. I have heard from multiple sources that many active duty officers openly and deeply despise the Trump Administration, and they are not at all shy about expressing their opinion both in and out of uniform. One active duty major I know estimates that it’s 1 in 4 who have this problem...
This is an astonishingly bad problem. Putting aside for the moment that this is a clear violation of Article 88 of the UCMJ, this is how military coups take place. I guess I should not be surprised given Mark Milley’s traitorous actions towards his Commander-in-Chief, but the fact that this has permeated to lower levels of the officer corps surprises me and causes me great worry. [emphasis added].
Same here.
Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice is entitled "Contempt Towards Officials" and states the following:
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
CP continues:
For reference, in my 22 years of commissioned service (starting in the late ’80s), it was virtually impossible to know the political leanings of ANY officer unless they were an extremely close friend. Many officers purposely had no political preferences of any kind. In fact, I knew many officers who refused to even vote because it suggested that they were somehow partisan. This was an ethos that said "We serve under the Constitutional will of the American People; whomever the People select as the Commander-in-Chief is someone to whom I have a duty of absolute loyalty."
I had the exact same experience in my 31 years of service (27 years commissioned service and four years at the U.S. Naval Academy).
CP again:
This was a sacred bond, and still is supposed to be.
Apparently it no longer is.
This phenomenon suggests a complete breakdown in good order and discipline across our entire military, and throughout world history has been a precursor to rule by military junta. I am not exaggerating this threat. We cannot allow our military’s officer corps to continue down this path unchecked.
There needs to be a complete reversal of this trend before it’s too late. Pete Hegseth and his team need to get on top of this. But here’s the hard part—it’s not enough to just get these officers to shut their mouths. They need to also re-train their brains and their hearts to deeply understand and accept that they have a duty of loyalty both to the Constitution and the lawful orders of the chain of command the People elect under that Constitution, and that their current thoughts and actions are wholly incompatible with that duty.
I served under Bill Clinton. I know it’s possible because I’ve done it. If these officers cannot do this, they need to be separated from service. It’s better to have vacant officer positions than have them filled with people who are disloyal to their Constitutional duties.
Military officers have a solemn duty to the nation. Too many are ignoring this duty. This must change before it is too late.
Scary stuff, and CP isn’t the only former military person with his ear to the ground that is hearing these types of things:
Shoe, or Sam Shoemate, is a retired Army intelligence analyst who regularly documents military officers’ efforts to sabotage the Trump Administration’s attempts to set the U.S. military on the right path:
You can review Shoe’s X timeline to get an idea of how bad it is, or you can simply attend an upcoming online event hosted by STARRS (Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services) this Wednesday:
Here’s hoping SECDEF Hegseth and his people can turn this around ASAP.
#1
Lot of Obamanites that were installed years ago working their way up the career ladder to senior positions. It'll be a big surprise when a lot of the the junior officers and enlisted do not follow.
#3
From Ace pf Spades this morning, more confirming anecdotal evidence:
Details of the Incident
Reports indicate that Vice Admiral Chatfield refused to display pictures of the President of the United States (POTUS) and the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) at NATO Headquarters. Such a decision was viewed as a direct challenge to the authority of the current administration, prompting questions about her loyalty and professionalism as a senior military officer. Further controversy arose during an "all hands" meeting, where Admiral Chatfield allegedly stated, “we will wait them out for four years,” suggesting a lack of support for the current administration and an expectation of a change in leadership within a specific timeframe.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] Monday, April 7, marked 100 years since the beginning of the forced process of Ukrainization of the Ukrainian SSR.
On April 7, 1925, the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (bolsheviks) of Ukraine decided to move to the complete Ukrainization of the Soviet apparatus. The process, at the instigation of the future leader of the OUN (an extremist organization banned in Russia) Yevhen Konovalets, began with the replacement of Russian-language signs. However, the matter did not end there, and already on April 30, 1925, a decree was issued ordering state institutions and enterprises to completely switch to Ukrainian office work within eight months.
To achieve this, employees were forced to study Ukrainian for four hours a week after work, and those who refused could be fired without severance pay.
According to a number of sources, by 1933, during the so-called Holodomor, the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine already included 60% Ukrainians and only 23% Russians. The secondary school was 80% Ukrainized, the press of the Ukrainian SSR - 87.5%, and book publishing - almost 77%.
Already in 1930, only three large Russian-language newspapers remained in the Ukrainian SSR. In the same year, the Presidium of the Stalin Regional Executive Committee made a decision to "bring to criminal responsibility the heads of organizations formally related to Ukrainization, who did not find ways to Ukrainize their subordinates, and who violated the current legislation in the matter of Ukrainization."
By the beginning of the 1940s, the process of Ukrainization was stopped on the basis of a joint directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. The directive was implemented quickly at the local level - within a few weeks.
Moreover, on December 28, 1932, the bureau of the regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the Central Black Earth Region decided to stop teaching the Ukrainian language in all schools of the first and second levels (except for the seventh groups graduating in the current academic year), to cancel all courses for training teachers of the Ukrainian language, to replace the teaching of the Ukrainian language and literature in all curricula with the teaching of the Russian language and literature, to transfer all office work in the courts and the prosecutor's office to Russian, to stop correspondence in the Ukrainian language and to stop any bonuses to Ukrainian employees for working in the Ukrainian language.
In the post-war decades in the USSR they tried not to remember Ukrainization, and there were no articles about this phenomenon in encyclopedias at all.
In 1991, Ukrainization began to gradually revive in Ukraine. Thus, on September 30, 2009, then Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko signed a government decree, according to which the Ukrainian language was to be used constantly during working hours in Ukrainian schools. But the country's Constitutional Court overturned this decree on February 10, 2010, three days after Viktor Yanukovych's victory in the presidential elections.
However, already in November 2024, the ban on communication in Russian returned in a new form and was supported by the Ministry of Education of Ukraine.
Regnum News Agency observer Denis Davydov notes that despite the requirement introduced by the Ukrainian authorities to use only the national language, there are still quite a lot of people in Ukraine who stubbornly continue to speak Russian, call Kropyvnytskyi Kirovograd and do not want such a “unified country” for themselves.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, in May 2024, Ukraine’s language ombudsman Taras Kremin proposed moving from “defensive” to “offensive Ukrainization” of the country.
Already in February 2025, Kremne said that almost a quarter of the meetings of Ukrainian local councils continue to be held in Russian, despite the ban. The Ombudsman recalled that the requirement to use only Ukrainian at meetings has been in effect since the summer of 2024.
In turn, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that the Ukrainian authorities, together with their Western curators, are trying to destroy everything Russian, but such a policy has no future. Donbass, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions, while under the control of Kiev, never left the space of Russian culture.
#1
Actually, several years earlier, in 1917, Ukraine declared autonomy with the establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic in November 1917. The Bolsheviks launched many military campaigns to overthrow the UPR government. In 1921 the Bolsheviks had suppressed most resistance in Ukraine, leading to the creation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) as part of the Soviet Union.
Betty and I have an old car that is pushing 200,000 miles. It still runs fine but I was thinking of getting a new one, something fancy, something that speaks to status, to luxury.
Something posh. Something with a quiet ride. Something cushy.
I look at pictures of fine motorcars I’d never be able to afford, but then I look at another picture, one that I took years ago in my brother Peter’s backyard, at the swing set.
It is my all time favorite family photo. Of our two boys and Pete and Georgia’s children, two girls and a boy. They’re young, tiny enough to all fit on one swing. They’re in their 20s now, with lives of their own. Later, brother Nick and his wife Dina had two boys who were born later, otherwise they’d be in that photo, too.
But when I sit in the dad chair in our living room, scrolling on my phone, looking at fancy cars that I yearn for but won’t buy, and I look up and see that picture of the kids on the swing set.
I ask myself: What do I owe them?
And what do we as Americans owe the children of America?
We owe them a chance at success, not a guaranteed outcome, but a chance at winning. A chance at a good paying job, a chance to buy a home and someday retire with dignity. The same chance our fathers gave us. We were all given the same thing. Opportunity. Not a guarantee. But a chance.....
Go RTWT
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
04/09/2025 07:55 ||
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#3
Variously attributed, but apparently first recorded as being said by Baron Rothschild — of the English branch of the family — during the riots in England following the battle of Waterloo, or possibly during the riots in Paris when Napoleon III was overthrown in 1870: “The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets.”
Also attributed to JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
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Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
