Free Range International

There is one point that I have hammered home on blogs and podcast interviews concerning Afghanistan and that is the next round of funding is a game changer. I thought we would be seeing some serious budget slashing in 2020 but it has already started.  Over the weekend the State Department cut 100 million dollars designated for Afghanistan energy infrastructure projects . They are also withholding another 60 million in payments to the Afghanistan’s National Procurement Authority.

The aid is being withheld because of the endemic corruption found in Afghanistan (and every other country in the region). The sums involved look massive but they aren’t, keeping Afghanistan’s  military and government solvent has a price tag of billions annually.  Cutting of programed funds is long overdue, but I am guessing this is a test run to see what happens when the real funding crisis strikes next year.

My concern is that once the Afghan people understand we are doing the old cut and run they may “complicate” our continued presence in the country.

Adding fuel to the fire is yet another ridiculous massacre of Afghan civilians by our armed forces.  A drone strike in Nangarhar province killed 30 workers who were gathering pine nuts. This is not the first time we have slaughtered pine nut gatherers. For 18 years we have been bombing Afghans who were going about their day because people watching drone feeds thought they were up to nefarious activities. We seem to be incapable of learning.

Just yesterday 3 American soldiers were wounded in a insider attack on their convoy by a member of Afghan Civil Order Police. This attack, were I to guess, has something to do with the loss of General Abdul Raziq last year. The Afghans know that the only reason Raziq was in that vulnerable situation was because General Miller invited him to the Kandahar Governors compound.

The guy who perpetrated this assault may well have been a Taliban plant, just like the one who nailed Raziq. Or he could be pissed about the death of Raziq and took it out on those he thought responsible. Who knows? But the timing of this attack is ominous to those like myself (and maybe it is just me) who are worried about pulling the cut and run while thousands of troops and  tens of thousands of internationals are resident in country.

The Afghan people are not stupid. When the news of 160 million dollar cut broke my Afghan friends in Kabul took to facebook to lament an act they knew was a long time coming.  Here are some of their comments from my Facebook page:

Can’t really blame the US for doing this..

That peace deal is coming the conditions are gearing up for anti-USA climate, when the money stops then why are you in Afghanistan? You gotta pay to play otherwise the Afghans are switching their attitudes. Try governing Afghans who haven’t been paid.

But it’s so right! There is no transparency in AFG gov procurement and especially large projects. Nobody can audit NPA, u can’t complain against them and they can award projects to people of their choice.

It’s about time! Bad news for some people.

This is the tragedy; there are plenty of Afghans who want our help, who respect and actually are inspired by the the idea of America, and who, if the Taliban return to total control (which I do not think possible) are in serious trouble.

Afghanistan is a mess but the only way for us to extract ourselves from that mess is slowly. The imperative now for NATO and the Afghanistan Security Forces is to not cede the initiative to the Taliban.  The Taliban continue to attack, they are not going to stop applying pressure because it  is working well for them.

We need to keep hammering away at them too, but when we do that we kill pine nut workers, or smoke check wedding parties. The reason behind that is lack of human intelligence , lack of local atmospherics, and (I hate to say this) lack of American boots on the ground.

I do not see how we are going to square the Afghan circle but know contractors are one option that has potential because contractors can loiter in country longer than military and they can return to the same unit over and over to build cohesion and competence. There are thousands of American combat vets (and contractors)  who would willingly return and stay to see the fight through. I’m one of them.

Like General Mattis I believe we should have bagged bin Laden in 2001 and left the country to its own devices. We didn’t, and for those of us who went to Afghanistan and stayed a bit; there is an obligation to the Afghan we assumed when we decided to stay. I love Afghans (most of them) and I love the country too but (I’ll say it again) – this is not going to end well.

This morning at the Imam Khomeini Space Center in Semnan province, Iran a rocket, reportedly carrying a Nahid-1 telecommunication satellite, blew up on its launch pad.

This is the third  failed launch in a row for Iran. Three times this year they have tried to launch a rocket and three times it blew up in place. I think this might not be a coincidence. Rockets designed to launch satellites don’t routinely blow up, and the Iranians certainly have the human capitol required  to launch satellites safely, but they’re having a moment this year. I think I know why.

I think the Iranians are suddenly having missile dysfunction secondary to a Droney McDroneface infection.. Earlier in the summer I proposed that the sudden appearance and subsequent disappearance of an old washed up RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator) drone I named Drone McDroneface.

That story was picked up by Soldier of Fortune Magazine and trended on twitter for 37 seconds. Media experts, like Alex Hollings, carefully examined my theory and patiently explained why it was ridiculous. It may well be, but it’s a good story, and about as accurate as your average legacy media story about President Trump.

Plus, the Droney story chunks information in a easily understood manner. When you hear that another Iranian missile blew up and killed its satellite you’ll already have a good understanding of why that happened.  Efficiency in digesting complex news about international events can be difficult, so I’m doing my part to make it easier with simple stores about complex things I think I know something about. The stories may or may not be true but you and I wouldn’t know it they were or weren’t true, so who cares?

This Labor Day Americans have much be excited about. But the Oregon/Auburn game will be over by midnight Saturday; what are you going to be excited about then? You can get excited about whatever, but at some point during the weekend festivities,you might might want to take a second to remember the sacrifice of Drone McDroneface.

I know what you are thinking; I’ve been watching Better Than Us on Netflix too. That killer robot, yoga instructor- looking- woman lead character is truly scary. Figures it’s a Russian TV show, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  And who cares about Russian TV shows during Labor Day anyway? If you do, you shouldn’t, you should get outside more and while outside pause, look up into the sky and think about our hero Droney. He (or she or zir…Droney was unarmed and PC)  is giving the Mullahs fits to this day and that is a record to be proud of.

Monday marked the 100 year anniversary of Afghanistan independence. August 19, 1919 marked the end of the third Anglo-Afghan war and joins Al-Faath day(a Muslim military victory) and Mujahedin Victory Day (the victory over the Soviets) as a public holiday celebrating Afghan martial virtue. This holiday was heavily anticipated and the road up to Dar-ur Aman  palace strung with lights and vendor stalls to mark the celebration. My good friend JD wrote an excellent man on the street piece for dpa International that can be found here. It is worth reading.

JD had published an article just yesterday in dpa International that was seething in undisguised rage at yet another bombing targeting civilian Afghans. A bomb went off in the vicinity of Dar-ul Aman road targeting a wedding party  killing 63 people. Hundreds more were injured. What JD could not say (because he is a reporter) was what we both (and everybody watching Afghanistan) knew and that was this was the work of Daesh-K (ISIS). We knew this because the area along Dar-ul Aman road is predominantly Hazara, who are Shia, and thus enemies to the Sunni ISIS movement.

This comes as the United States prepares to significantly draw down its military commitment, just like we did in Vietnam, but this time we cannot pin this on a hostile  congress. Well that is not technically true, we can blame congress for failing to use the war powers act. They could have tied funding to an achievable end-state allowing the military to tell them the forces needed to achieve that end-state. That is how the system is supposed to work, but it never seems to work that way. I think that’s because politicians are much more comfortable making decisions about foreign commitments after they’ve started. Stands on principal are not how congress people get to congress, that they failed to use their own laws to bring some order to the chaos is not a bug in our electoral system, It’s a feature.

As Afghanistan recovers from yet another senseless attack on the people the Taliban leadership received a dose of Kummerspeck inspiring bad news.  This came in the form of a report from Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency detailing their lavish life styles and investments.

It turns out that Taliban politicians are every bit a venal and corrupt as the non Taliban type. But the leaders of the Taliban are not savvy to the ways of media or that bright when it comes to Pakistan because they reacted to this report with undisguised fury. They do not know what they do not know, and one of the knows is that the Streisand Effect is real.

Why the Pakistan Federal Investigation Agency released this report is an interesting topic to speculate about. I doubt the press will do much speculating because most paths are going to lead to the recent statements by President Trump concerning the need for both Pakistan and India to do more about the terrorist in their midsts.

Remember Daesh-K started out as Pakistani Taliban who fled across the border into Nangarhar province to escape from Pakistans military operations Khyber I and II. And calling out India…I don’t think I’ve seen that before and that too is interesting. Maybe there is diplomacy occurring that is actually producing results. Pakistan called out the Taliban leadership and face smashed them. Afghans are excellent volleyball players and they know exactly what face smash is and what it means.

I am running out of things to say about the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan. It breaks my heart because I love the people of Afghanistan. When I arrived in that country I had no knowledge of the place. I learned fast because I was never on a FOB and lived in the ville with the locals for most of my time there. They taught me how to navigate the social systems, they taught what was real risk and what was not. They protected me, feed me and gave my children the experience of a lifetime. I  like to think I returned their investment in spades but who knows? That is not for me to judge.

I’m going to start writing Afghanistan stories about things like having my children there with me, meeting interesting people and visiting interesting places. In the end, the families of the dead, those that served there in the military, and the contractors who served with the military and outside the wire  are always going to ask was it worth it. I say that too is not for us to judge.

We have no idea  how the thousands of acts of kindness towards average Afghans will germinate over the years. Just as we have no idea how the innocents – the collateral which I railed about when I was there – it’s why I started the blog – we have no idea how that will germinate.

I know some of the Afghans caught in crossfire knew we did not do that intentionally. I’ve talked to plenty of them, I too got shot at for getting to close an army convoy, I understand Afghan frustration about that well.

But I bet in 20 years if you are American in Afghanistan you will treated like an American in Vietnam. Which means very well.

Time for the first Afghan sea story.

In the photo above I am with senior Islamic Cleric, but I cannot remember his name. I’m wearing recycled contractor clothes, where there once a name-tag I had a South Park cartoon character saying “You sent me to Iraq You Bastards”.  I thought that was funny because I just came from Iraq. I was to learn that Afghans were not amused by American curse words. But having a stupid shirt on is not why I remember this meeting with embarrassment. That Cleric was one of the most charismatic, wise, men I have ever met. In an effort to impress I remember telling him how quickly we would re-build the country, get the hydro generators working, build the roads and schools, etc…

I remember him looking at me and smiling and shaking his head. He said something like this; “the buildings and the roads and the electricity are not important. It is the people who have been damaged by decades of war that are important and it is the spirit of the people that must be restored. America cannot do this for Afghanistan, we must do this ourselves”.

What do you say to a profound statement like that? I don’t remember what I said, but I never forgot that conversation. It was humbling and a harbinger for the failure our efforts in Afghanistan were destined to have.

July 4th is the perfect day to launch a campaign aimed at uniting Americans behind a national hero of whom we can all be proud. In prior posts I have nominated the RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator) drone that arrived in the Persian Gulf on the 15th June and was shot down by Iran five days latter.

The day after we lost our drone the United States launched a retaliatory strike on Iran, but called it off at the last minute. Concurrent with the feint (or aborted) attack, a real cyber attack hit the Iranian Missile Control Systems and devastated them.

There is an obvious connection between an old surplus drone being sent to the Gulf and then promptly shot down, and the subsequent cyber attack. Cyberattacks on closed systems (like missile control systems) have a limited number of entry routes. Either a human agent or a targeted platform introduced the virus. Given the Central Intelligence Agency’s  record regarding human intelligence the chances they had someone on the inside are beyond remote.

I believe the attack was effective because Richard Fernandez, writing at the Belmont Club, said they were. Mr. Fernandez is a proven source of consistently good geopolitical analysis. He could be wrong, I have no way of knowing, which raises the question of who and what can you believe in this day and age?

In an era when the press and politicians use devise rhetoric to separate and categorize us along racial or ethnic lines it is hard to know what to believe, or who to trust.  I believe in and trust the American people.  At this moment in our history  the American people need a hero and what better hero than a unarmed drone with a story  that inspires and educates?

A hero needs a name that has meaning and on July 4th what could have more meaning than a name that acknowledges the genius and wit of the British peoples?

When Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council decided to allow the British people to name their new 300 million-dollar Arctic research ship the people, recognizing a boondoggle, insisted it be name Boaty McBoatface. The ship is now named the RRS Sir David Attenborough, public opinion be damned, but to me and millions of Brits it will always be Boaty McBoatface.

Thus I propose we name our hero drone Droney McDroneface.

The 4th of July is the perfect day to recognize Droney with a tip of the hat to the British people. But his accomplishment is only important because we are now energy independent. The story our energy independence starts on July 4th, 1845. On that day the Texas legislature held an emergency meeting to accept an offer from the United States to become the 28th state.  For ten years Texans had been pleading with the United States for entry into the Union and for ten years they had been held at arms length due to international treaty obligations with Mexico and the issue of slavery.

The Texans had capable leaders and they had started to flirt with Britain, France and Mexico at exactly the time that the United States realized it need to own the land all the way to the Pacific as a strategic necessity. Texas drove a hard bargain and part of that bargain was the the Federal Government could not claim or own any land in Texas.

As an aside the only member of the Texas constitution committee who had been born in Texas was José Navarro of San Antonio. We’ve been a multicultural country from the start, a point seldom heard in national discourse these days.

The United States is currently the worlds leading oil producer. The modern fracking boom started in Texas specifically because the federal government owned no lands and could not impeded development here. We are the worlds leading energy producer despite, not because of our federal government.

In the words of the immortal historian T.R. Fehrenbach, the founders of Texas thought they had joined a “country so great that even fools could not completely destroy it“.

There are millions of Americans who believe that President Trump is a fool will destroy the country. I felt the same about President Obama. The country survived eight years of Obama, it will survive four or eight years of Trump.

The greatness of America has more to do with the land and the people then specific programs or forms of government. We are in a strategically dominated position because we found a way to extract petrochemicals efficiently using new technology. The people, not the government made us energy independent.

Iran now has no missile defense capability because Americans engineered a way to attack and disable it without shedding a drop of blood. The people, not the government developed that technology.

All peoples remember great events of their past by telling stories that organize the action into a coherent narrative. The narrative behind Droney is easy to map out without triggering any special interest. Droney was unarmed, an outcast scheduled for the bone yard, Droney was bi-partisan, nobody used drones more than the Obama administration. Droney is gender fluid, I refer to him as ‘him’ not to offend any other gender, but  because I too am a him. But Droney could be a ‘her’ or an ‘it’ or a ‘post op transsexual’ drone; it doesn’t matter. Droney can be all things to all peoples.

Droney McDroneface  wasn’t like the other drones, he didn’t fly at 60,000 feet or have weapon pylons or the ability to loiter for hours on end and then rain death and destruction down from on high. He had no crew, he had no mission, he was headed to the desert to be mothballed.

Then one day contractors came and started performing preventative maintenance, they refurbished every system and outfitted him with a special payload. Droney got the mission brief; he was destined to be shot down by the unhinged mullahs in Iran.  But before they got him he was to feed a special packet into the systems that interrogated him. His sacrifice would ensure the flow of oil to Africa, Asia and the Pacific Rim. Granted it would be great for America if the price of oil started to climb but the world economy is bigger than the American energy market so Droney had to go.

Drowney flew to the Al Dhafra Airbase squawking that he was an MQ 4C Triton which he is not. There he sat, in a secluded hanger, as the same techs from Pax River worked him over again but there were now dozens of military officers watching them, taking pictures of his insides, talking in low, hushed tones about something important.

Droney received a new paint job, he was now orange, which was weird. He had new nose art added (a big, sweet , innocent, smile)  and the letters MAGA where US Navy had once been.  There was a large human fist drawn on his fuselage with the middle finger standing straight up. Droney didn’t know what that was all about but the Air Force guys who painted it were laughing the entire time they were there.

Just days after he arrived he rolled out into the evening twilight, rested, focused and fit for the last flight he would ever make. Without a moments hesitation or a drop of remorse he launched into the night sky and into the pantheon of American hero.’s. as the first cyber warrior to deliver a knock out punch without spilling one drop of blood.

That is story of American grit and ingenuity of which we can all be proud. If I can generate enough interest in Droney McDroneface then a merchandising campaign will ensue. I have to come up with some cash for the Rio Grande Valley Marine Corps League Color Guard. Somehow I got put in charge of that detail and I told the guys I’d take care of getting the flag poles and harnesses and stuff because I had no idea how much that would cost. Now I’m stuck, but I think Droney might get me out of a bind and the American people behind a true hero all at the same time.

Happy 4th of July and let me leave you with a smile:

In my last post I speculated that the drone, shot down by the Iranians, was an intentional baited ambush by the United States Navy. My theory is based on the pattern of events and the reported outcomes in current Iranian situation and, as I said in the last post, we may have have arrived here by accident, but we are here.

“Here” is the destruction of the Iranian missile control systems by a cyber attack launched during an aborted air raid. Missile control systems are closed kimono, they are never connected to the internet, all inputs into the system come from filtered targeted data or humans. The system went down one of two ways; through the return from a targeted platform, or through the actions of a human asset.

Given the historical record of the Central Intelligence Agency with human intelligence assets the chances they had an agent anywhere near Iran’s missile defense systems are remote. But it is possible and will cause the Iranians to launch a long, bloody, mole hunt. Mole hunts are an awesome tool to use against adversaries because a mole hunt will always turn up guilty people to be disappeared even when there are not guilty.

The United States had a gigantic Mole hunt in 2001 when weaponized anthrax spores showed up in the congressional mail room. Robert Muller and James Comey oversaw the ensuing investigation hounding one man to suicide while bankrupting another. Neither of the suspects had anything to do with the Anthrax attacks and the one who survived won a 5.82 million dollar settlement  after he was exonerated. That’s how mole hunts work; they find “guilty” people regardless of actual guilt, and right now Iran is in the middle of a big one. What could be better than that?

The simplest explanation for why a demonstrator drone, past its service life and headed for a junk heap, was sent over to the gulf and promptly shot down is the drone was serving a specific purpose that no other platform could serve. That service was (possibly) introducing a virus into the targeting systems. When we sent in a feint raid (pulling the planes back at the last minute) the virus the drone introduced was activated. The resulting damage was catastrophic for Iranian defense forces.

This morning in Kabul, Afghanistan there was yet another horrific bombing. This one targeted the Ministry of Defense offices responsible for administration and logistics. A truck bomb started the attack which was followed up by multiple gunmen who had no intention of surviving the assault. It is a typical Taliban attack in an area with no less than five schools as well as the Ministry of Public Works (across the Kabul River).

At least 50 children were wounded, 43 people killed in the attack and it caused an unknown amount of damage to the Ministry of Defense computer center.

The Taliban, if they were aiming at the computer center, were attacking a legitimate target. One of the most critical vulnerabilities of the Afghan Defense Force is corruption, without addressing it there will be no more money from donor nations. The computer systems that the Taliban attacked are critical to the ability of the Afghan National Army to track and account for donor funds. The funds scheduled to flow into Afghanistan are tied to anti corruption benchmarks, fail to meet them and there will be no more donor dollars.

The Taliban do not have  sophisticated drones that can attack computers, so they used suicide attackers and accepted the killing and maiming dozens of young school girls as necessary for mission success. Yet with all that death and destruction it is inconceivable they did as much damage to the Afghans computer networks as we did to the Iranians missile control systems.

The face of war is changing, incrementally, but significantly. Military leaders have long known that if you want a new idea, read an old book and it looks like somebody was reading up on the Trojan War when they came up with the idea to slip a bug into the Iranian missile systems.

It is important to note that I am observing the situation for afar and have no insider knowlege. I could be wrong about the drone, there could be other explanations for why it was in theater, the drone may have had nothing to do with the cyber attack. But, from my observation post here in McAllen Texas, I don’t see any other explanations for this series of events.

McAllen Texas is in the news these days due to the surge of illegal immigrants flooding across the border. Do you know what I see on the streets of McAllen every day? Nothing, not one sign of migrants because they do not stay here. Once released by the Border Patrol they are dropped of at one of the Catholic Relief Charities where they are fed, allowed to rest and clean up and then given a bus ticket for some point in the interior where they may or may not know somebody. They are out of the valley in under 24 hours.

McAllen is the center of the Rio Grand Valley which is about 95% hispanic and solid blue, the one thing the locals will not tolerate are migrants driving down wages or draining social services. Buses leave McAllen, get through the Border Patrol inspection station in Falfurries before reaching their first stop, San Antonio. Do you know that San Antonio is number 3 in the nation (behind Seattle and San Francisco) for property crimes? See the connection?

If you did see a direct connection it was because I primed your with two facts (migrants are bused out of the valley and the first stop is San Antonio) and a third, unconnected fact, about property crime rates. It may be that property crime rates in San Antonio are sky rocketing because young, unaccompanied, migrants are bailing off the buses there and going to ground. That explanation is probable, but I don’t know it to be true.

I point this out to emphasize a bias in the coverage of the current confrontation with Iran. Most of the reporting I see primes the reader in a negative way regarding the decisions and consequences behind a drone being shot down and an air raid being cancelled at the last minute. We may have witnessed a epochal moment in military history with the attack by Drone on a critical asset but we can’t see it because an acute case of “Orange Man Bad” syndrome in the press.

The more I contemplate the decent of our media into a partisan echo chamber the more determined I am do something about it. It is now time for a national Name Our Hero’s campaign to focus Americans on a positive aspect of being American. The first hero we should name is our selfless kamikaze drone. A hero drone is exactly what we need at the moment because it has no gender or race or political affiliation. Drones came into their own under the Obama administration so I assume they are a bipartisan weapon.

To honor the stunningly successful performance of our first cyber warrior, and in a tip of the hat to the innate common sense of the British peoples, I am naming the drone Droney McDroneface.

The name is in honor of the United Kingdom’s first Arctic Research Vessel Boaty McBoatface and if you don’t know that story hit the link, it’s hysterically funny.

With my next post I’m going to take the Name of Hero’s movement national, but I need some help. I need a meme ninja to take the picture below and make it into Droney McDroneface.  I’m thinking a big cartoon smile and cheerful paint job would do but don’t know how to do it.  DM me if you are able to come up with something good.

Editors Note: The title of this post was changed at the suggestion of a long time fan of FRI, LtCol Robert Brown, the  publisher of  Soldier of Fortune magazine. 

Intentionally or not, in the current contest of wills with Iran, the United States is now in a dominant geo -political and military position. Intentionally or not, the United States now has the most accurate, comprehensive, intelligence on Iran’s order of battle that any adversary has ever harvested from its opponent in history. We may not have arrived at this point due to a clever plan but we are here just the same, so let me describe where “here” is.

Iran was caught seeding mines into the strait of Hormuz in, what many believe, was an attempt to stage a heroic rescue of international sailors who were victims of the instability caused by the reckless actions of the President of the United States. That plan did not survive contact when the freighters did not sink and the USS Bainbridge arrived on scene to stop the Iranians from pushing one the disabled freighters into Iranian waters.

Days later the Iranians shot down a U.S. Global Hawk drone. This was no ordinary Global Hawk, it was a RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator) flown into the area of operations just days prior. It had been the  proof of concept demonstrator for the new navy RQ-4C Triton maritime surveillance drone, but that program was finished and the demonstrators headed to the bone yard. At the last minute that changed and one was sent to the UAE. Why? It did not bring any new capabilities, it wasn’t needed, there are no units set up to crew the beast, what good could it have done?

I’m not sure, but here is a theory. That platform was sent to be sacrificed in an effort to fine tune our intelligence of Iranian anti air order of battle. The drone was headed for demobilization anyway; what is the downside to using it for a baited ambush?

The Iranians shot down a drone for which the United States had no further use. The Iranians contend that we flew the drone into their airspace; we say we didn’t. I say what would you do with the most sophisticated, disposable drone in history? One that is designed to run well below the normal Global Hawk mission profile I might add. One that is so damn big it looks like a jet on radar. What would you do with an asset like that?

I’d run that asset right into the teeth of the Iranian air defense system and record exactly what they do,  how long it takes for them to scramble, and how quickly they acquire and shoot me down.  Let me explain how valuable that intelligence is. Suppose you had very high confidence in your ability to launch a cyber-attack another countries missile control system and take them all out. Very high confidence would be what? 80 -90%? How could you get your confidence level up to almost 100%? Run a drone at the air defense system to watch how it responds.

We then stage a raid saying we will not tolerate any state shooting down our drones. At the last second the President decides to turn the planes around, he doesn’t want to spill blood over a drone. He says any further provocations will be dealt with harshly and is immediately criticized for his indecision. How much intelligence did that feint of a raid generate?

Concurrent with the feint raid was a real cyber attack that knocked out Iranian missile control systems. As Richard Fernandez observers in this  Belmont Club post:

A sucessful cyberattack inflicts considerable financial damage on the target, rendering vital equipment inoperable. It costs money to diagnose the damage, patch it and test the fix. Before the system can be restored it would be necessary to ensure there was no residual malware. Although Iran has denied any damage to its missiles the unbridled fury of their public response indirectly confirms they are hurt.

It looks to me like the President used a large, serious, diversion to cover his actual attack. That is Sun-Tzu level planning and execution, actually winning a battle without firing a shot, something I have never seen at the national command level. There is  another unique aspect to a cyber attack;  it produces no pictures.

Pictures cause problems, and right now President Trump has no problems. Had he gone with traditional strike package he would have big problems from the pictures of dead kids caught in collateral damage. If we had not caused the collateral damage casualties the Iranians would have done so themselves.  That is how the Iranians play the game and we have known that for decades.

The narrative would have been ‘Bad Orange Man strikes because he is unstable. Innocent Persians suffer because Americans need their oil’. The narrative never changes and is impervious to facts. The facts are  we do not need oil from the middle east and we don’t need bombers to deliver a crippling blow to a state in our crosshairs.

Following the script of the traditional Middle East North Africa (MENA)  Kubuki Theater play book President Trump launched a retaliatory strike with air and rocket assets. Congress and the media immediately played their assigned roles by preemptively declaring that congress must authorize any military conflictwith Iran. The bi-partisan duo of Matt Gaetz (R Fl.) and Ro Khanna (D Ca) are correct on this point. BUT, we have been dropping bombs and droning people non-stop over there for 18 years, and now they care?

Congress has removed itself from the oversight of our military by refusing to do the work required, by law, to get proper authorizations for the use of military force. How many times did former SecDef Mattis and the CJCOS General Dunford say, during congressional testimony, that they would welcome and, in fact need congress to do its job with respect to the War Powers Act ? The question answers itself while amplifying, to the American public, serial congressional incompetance at a vital function they assigned themselves with the War Powers Act over forty years ago.

President Trump has used the current crisis to point out inconvenient truths. He has asked why we are protecting shipping lanes we do not need ( without compensation) for too long. Trump has asked why we are shouldering the burden of keeping the straits open to benefit China when the Chinese are stealing us blind and working against our interests.

I understand that keeping the world’s shipping lanes running smoothly and safely is in the best interests of the largest economy in the world. Instability in world markets cause prices to rise and that hurts everybody, who in the world wants to see the price of oil rise?

We do. Oil is selling around $65 a barrel, get that price around $100 and the Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford Shale plays (these fields are in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico) will explode.  The one country in the world that would benefit from a significant rise in the price of oil is the United States. The one country no credible person would accuse of manipulating world oil prices is the United States. The position of being the hegemon, who does not put his thumb on the scale, is one Americans shoulder willingly. But we have been taken advantage of by too many for too long and the American people are sick of it.

Iran just got a good taste of the Tump Doctrine and what has that cost them? Untold millions of dollars and man-hours to replace and repair their missile control systems, which means? They are now Open Kimono. They know we know their air defense system inside and out and that their missile control systems are down hard. If we struck now there is not one damn thing they could do about it. They know it, we know it, and now you know it.

As an aside, the term Open Kimono vis a via Iran was introduced by Jeff Kenney of the world famous All Marine Radio weekly Lynch & Kenny show. We have been on this topic for the past two weeks, those podcasts can be found here and here.

Afghanistan has recently surrendered the cherished institution of official corruption called “The Checkpoint”. As I pointed out in my last post this is a potential game changer. Why, after 18 years of resistance, did Afghanistan choose to do away with the checkpoints? Who knows, maybe it is just coincidence, but I smell the makings of a deal because Afghanistan had to give Trump something to make him stay. The only “something” he has asked for is movement on corruption.

It could be a coincidence that the one thing Trump has asked for is actually happening in Afghanistan. It could be a coincidence that in the only confrontation with a foreign power, with shots already fired, he won without firing a kinetic shot. It could be a coincidence that the one drone Iran shot down was past its service life and heading for the junk yard.

This could be a coincidence, or it could be a response to pressure on the China’s energy supply, they import 90%  of their oil through the straits of Hormuz.

SEOUL (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping said in an op-ed in North Korean state newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Wednesday that China supports North Korea’s “correct direction” in politically resolving issues on the Korean Peninsula.

The front-page op-ed is an honor rarely granted to foreign leaders and comes a day before Xi is set to visit Pyongyang on Thursday and Friday at the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, making him the first Chinese leader to visit in 14 years.

Today President Trump became the first American President to set foot in North Korea. That too may be a coincidence. But the coincidences are piling up and all of them favor President Trump.

Intentionally or not, Donald Trump is transforming, in front of our eyes, into one the greatest presidents in American history.