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The ways Iran is dismantling the entire American military ecosystem across West Asia with an extremely disciplined strategy are something to behold.
The whole CENTCOM support infrastructure is (devastating) fair game: from costly early warning radars to full air defense systems; from hangars to logistics hubs; from fuel and ammunition storages to forward operating bases; from naval and maritime surveillance assets to intel collection and communications nodes.
There’s already a Greatest Hits playing all across the spectrum. Featuring, for instance, Tower 22 – which supports ops in al-Tanf; Muwaffaq Salti Air Base – which hosts U.S. aircraft for multiple ops; Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, which supports intel and special ops; Bahrain, which as everyone knows hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet HQ; Kuwait – a massive logistics and staging area; Qatar – which hosts the forward HQ of CENTCOM and the largest U.S. air base in West Asia.
Hits on all these nodes relentlessly undermine the myth of American power projection. New rules determine these nodes are essentially being rendered deaf, dumb and blind. Unlike The Who’s classic, Persia is now the kid in the (military) candy store, playing a mean pinball against the Empire of Chaos, Lies, Plunder and Piracy.
Iran knows where everything is located – to the millimeter. No need to go for flashy photo ops Shock’n Awe-style monopolizing the news cycle. What matters is the Chinese torture of steadily degrading the enemy’s capabilities; the strategy is painfully methodical, and painfully precise.
No wonder the Empire of Piracy is catatonic. What to do when your massively expensive and nearly irreplaceable sensing and monitoring hardware is being reduced to ashes? When your screens go deep dark? When the arrogant imperial confidence of the entire chain of command is being torpedoed in real time?
The Iranian Way of War is a sophisticated mix that may eventually be studied in Western military academies. All logically interconnected – from destruction of enemy support infrastructure to steady degradation of intel, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities; from attrition of air defense and interceptor inventories to widespread disruption of logistics.
And all that is supremely cost effective – but certainly not for the attacking Empire, as every (malfunctioning) Patriot costs millions of dollars, and simply cannot defend scores of different locations simultaneously.
In a nutshell: this is how a systematic degradation of the whole regional architecture that allows the U.S. and its vassals to project military power across West Asia looks like. Played out in front of the whole Global South. The manual is available for all, live, in real time.
Everything is running out
Iran’s precision, restraint and reach is shutting up the whole vociferating spectacle emanating from the Empire of Narratives – as Iranian missiles and drones relentless strike fighter jets, Black Hawks, data centers (as in the Amazon central hub in Bahrain), logistics depots, power plants – and more.
The Global South just needs to check the satellite images of proverbial craters across Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and UAE. And Iran hasn’t even started yet. Were Iran to obliterate Qatar’s remaining LNG trains, that would leave most of the planet with no LNG from Doha for at least a decade – not to mention the helium for making microchips.
The massive humiliation of hitting and disabling one of those multibillion-dollar sitting ducks is being kept for the appropriate time. And as everyone knows, Iran runs the clock, and time is on its side.
None of that, of course, minimizes the risks of the escalation ladder; and we are still in the middle of what could become the Mother of All Escalation Ladders.
But then, suddenly, the imperial machine stops – and CENTCOM refrains from bombing Iran for a few days. At a closed meeting in Washington last Friday, someone with an IQ over room temperature (J.D. Vance? Gen. Caine? Both?) dared to warn neo-Crassus that his Mother of all Escalations was destined to fail.
And that was due to a bunch of obvious reasons; from no Patriots available to widespread Gulf petromonarchy panic; from the risks to the global economy to a massive oil crisis just around the corner.
Does that mean that neo-Crassus will return to the MoU that he signed and then bombed? Of course not. Pln B may look more like intensifying “economic pressure” via extra embargoes and sanctions, as recommend by the real estate Talleyrand of the times, Kushner, the Epstein lite family “advisor”.
So it’s not only global oil reserves – and the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) that are running out. THAADs, Patriots, JASSMs, Tomahawks, everything is running out.
Hit the Ansarallah groove
And then there is Ansarallah and the Yemeni Armed Forces – now in full flight drawing Saudi Arabia into a suicidal escalation after breaking the equation of unilateral air deterrence.
The cost of any confrontation between Ansarallah and Riyadh spells Devastation Row for the empire: the toxic double tap of turbo-charging oil prices plus the proverbial joint “disruption” of navigation and trade in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab. There’s no way the Saudis can escape this strategic trap – which they brought on themselves.
The last time the oil refining behemoth Abqaiq – handling as much as 7% of global crude processing – burned in 2019, Riyadh surrendered to Sana’a in no time.
Aramco has already suspended operations in Abqaiq. Translation: at least 7 million barrels of oil a day off the global market.
Even empty tankers headed to Yanbu port in the Red Sea are denied passage by Yemen through the Bab al-Mandab. Couple that with the East-West pipeline under de facto strangulation, and Saudi Arabia is totally imobilized, no matter the torrents of spin.
Yemen hit where it really hurts. Saudi Arabia has only four main oil terminals, and ten main refineries. Apart from Jizan – whose fuel storage tanks were already set ablaze – they are grouped into three extremely convenient target zones. Yemen can easily incinerate the western part, the Iraqi resistance the eastern part.
Yemen has all it takes to cripple the East-West pipeline corridor/Yanbu oil terminal loading plus the Suez canal detour with just a few ballistic missiles, saving their best and their ISR for whatever may come next.
In the bigger picture, the Russia-China-Iran interlocking strategic Eurasia partnerships remain in full effect. That’s Russia-China in practice supporting the Axis of Resistance.
Iran uses the Russian Murmansk system – inexorably jamming GPS and blinding U.S./Israeli missiles.
Iran also uses Chinese Beidou – the equivalent of GPS, unjammable by the Americans and rendering precision to the centimeter to Iranian missiles and drones.
And Iran uses the Russian Kometa: electronic chips equipping missiles and drones wreaking havoc on American electronic warfare.
Meanwhile, in the diplomatic front, Tehran rejected every other U.S. ultimatum. Iran’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kazem Gharibabadi, revealed there have been indirect talks with Washington in both Islamabad and Muscat – also confirmed by Pakistani mediators.
Team Neo-Crassus even demanded, in Muscat, that the U.S. should keep “managing” the southern route of the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran refused: it’s back to the MoU or nothing. Imperial deafness, dumbness and blindness is set to worsen.
