No, they turned their AIS on on the far side of the strait to prove they’d transited, they left AIS off while they transited, presumably so as not to give Iran an easy shot if they decided to attack.

Iran claimed (on state media i.e. likely for internal consumption) they successfully turned back the destroyers but the AIS track on the inside of the gulf would seem to bring that claim into question.

Iran claims it launched a drone at them - they also claim they turned the ships back despite the evidence to the contrary (I.e. two destroyers on the inside of the gulf that weren’t there before).

*According to Iran and even then they just say that he “has accepted these principles as the basis for negotiations”. AFAIK the only conditions the US had acknowledged is the opening of the strait.

This ain’t over yet and you (and the internet in general) really need to be less ready to swallow whole whatever Iran says just because they don’t like Trump either.

F-16s flew a little over 13,000 sorties during Desert Storm with fewer losses and (importantly) a higher mission success rate. Also Chuck Horner was on record as saying that he kept A-10s away from anywhere the Iraqi Republican Guard was operating as they had access to actually functional air defenses that would have shredded the A-10s.

Basically A-10 pilots bragging about Desert Storm is like someone being sent to go wrestle some toddlers and coming back with a bloodied nose and broken bones and bragging about how tough and resilient they were not to have bled out.

Not to mention it is no longer 1991 and the A-10 is even less useful on a modern battlefield.

Extremely rare.

Not really, A10s have the highest loss rate of any post-Vietnam US aircraft.

That wouldn’t solve anything - Europe doesn’t actually get much oil through Hormuz, the issue is that the closure raises global oil prices regardless of where they come from. This isn’t a situation individual countries can carve out exceptions for themselves from - hence why the worst affected by this will be poor countries that had fuck all to do with Trump’s decision to fuck everyone over. And why America as a whole needs to start sorting its shit out for everyone’s sake and stop just telling the rest of the world to ignore Trump if he’s being a pain like he’s a doddery old relative and not the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world.

since 2021

Surprised it took that long, https://xkcd.com/624/ is from 2009

It also specifies “refining capacity” which is really not the same thing as “energy infrastructure” in a region that exports so much crude…

Civilian energy use may be switching to renewables but militaries still run on oil with no viable alternative on the horizon so the currency oil is sold in will remain strategically important for the foreseeable future.

Well we wrote a lot of it…

Eh, if you fly it within range of a heat seeker you get what you deserve. Looks like a skill issue tbh.

Ed is the standard text editor.

Nobody is running a carrier through Hormuz and no one aboard would think they might be heading there, that’s not how any of this works. Escort/freedom of navigation work would be done by destroyers or smaller vessels.

North Korea is a terrible example of this, they were only able to get nuclear weapons because they never actually needed them. North Korea is left alone because they have hundreds of artillery pieces sat in range of Seoul and the backing of China to ride out the sanctions.

Without that their nuclear program would have gotten the crap bombed out of them (again) long before it resulted in a bomb.

I really wish the Kurds the best but I have a horrible feeling it’s only a matter of time before they get fucked over by the US again here…

That was my first thought but the BBC are reporting the school was ~600m from the IRGC base which is well beyond the CEP of modern guided munitions (even if they lose GPS signal, JDAMs should have a CEP of <= 30m on inertial guidance alone). So I dunno, catastrophic intelligence failure or a result of an attempted interception seem to be the leading theories that I can see now.

This is a dumb take, this happened in part because Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. Not just giving the US and Israel a casus belli but also the amount of resources pumped into the program was a major contributor to the economic issues behind the protests.

Well you can’t make peace if there’s no war. You know full well he’s going to add this to his tally when it ends.

He called people “goyims,” which come to find out is an Israeli supremacist term to refer to non-Jewish people

You need to lay off the conspiracy theories and go touch grass. “Goy” (plural goyim not goyims) is just the Hebrew/Yiddish term for non-jews (gentiles in English), it’s not “Israeli supremacist”.

they spent a lot of time sidestepping action

That’s sort of my point though, they spent years protecting him and then suddenly a few months ago something made them turn on a dime and strip him of his titles very rapidly. I suspect that “something” was being told the police had enough evidence to arrest him.