US defense head is eager to frame operation as a success – and slam journalists for not portraying it in a positive light
Pete Hegseth on Friday again claimed the US military campaign against Iran has been an unprecedented success, using a Pentagon press conference to accuse journalists of downplaying Washington’s supposed gains on the battlefield.
Speaking alongside the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the US defense secretary claimed Iran had been left without a functioning air force, navy or missile defense network after 13 days of strikes, and said the combined US-Israeli air campaign had hit more than 15,000 targets since the war began.
“The United States is decimating the radical Iranian regime’s military in a way the world has never seen before,” Hegseth told reporters.
I was thinking about this on the drive home and needed to log in to actually share this bit of craziness.
One of the excuses that they’re using for bombing these school kids is to say that their intel on the area was about ten years out-of-date. Which is funny, because ten years ago was Trump’s first term, and a massive data breach happened around that time that cost U.S. intelligence agencies a huge number of agents.
So, no matter how you slice it, this is on the Trump administration for messing up things he’s too stupid to understand. It takes time to build up assets who can provide information on any given area. It’s possible that there was a school there specifically because they knew the location was compromised.
And even if you want to handwave that data breach as not Trump’s fault, (ignoring the fact that he starting this war). He cut more intelligence jobs when he got into office last year. Who knows what USAID was doing, Who knows what paper projects he cut that had aid in the area or fronts for CIA opperations. His military didn’t have current data on the region becuase everything he has done has fucked up opperations for his military.