<![CDATA[I'm old enough to remember when we were promised by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, that when the fireworks began in Baghdad, launching the Iraqi phase of the Global War on Terror, you'd know it by the shock and awe of it all. That was March 19th, 2003. And it was shock and awe. The true number is classified to this day, but that wave of strikes conducted on targets in the Saddam Hussein Baathist regime of Iraq numbered around 300 and covered an area roughly a third of the size of what was undertaken over this weekend. It was shock and awe, but Hussein survived the initial hit, as did many of his most trusted loyalists. It took nine months to finally pull the Iraqi despot out of his spider hole. Nine months. All day Friday, beginning with his brief White House lawn gaggle, and then continuing with remarks to the press while at a rally in Texas, Donald Trump's rhetoric regarding negotiations with the Iranians had taken a very sharp turn. Instead of saying they want to make a deal and leaving the rest hanging in the air like an Iranian dissident, he began to speak in terms like, 'it would be nice to not have to use the military, but sometimes, you have to use it.' It was not hard to predict that the curtain was going to rise on kinetic action very, very soon. The Iranian regime has been so thoroughly compromised by Israeli and American intelligence that an opportunity arose sooner than expected, and the American and Israeli forces were nimble enough to capitalize on it very late in the evening Friday/Saturday in the States, mid-morning Tehran time. The American military owns the night. This has been a truism for a few generations of war fighters. We operate at night better than any military on Earth ever has. Everyone outside of the President's decision loop expected the action to begin in the middle of the night in Iran, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his military commanders. But Trump patiently waited for the right moment of opportunity, and he was rewarded for that patience. Believing that since they saw sunrise on Saturday meant they had at least until nightfall Saturday night to meet, plan, and then get some rest, Khamenei and much of his leadership in the IRGC and Basij forces met at his compound at the same time. Why? Well, those thanks go to the Israelis, who infected the Iranians with what would become terminal paranoia about being tracked by mobile devices, or worse, blown up remotely by mobile devices. Technology was no longer trusted, so they went back to what they figured was a more secure method of communication - face to face. They apparently had no idea that they were being watched and tracked in real time. Not one, not two, but thirty pieces of ordinance that go boom were dropped on the Khamenei compound in the first wave of Shock and Awe II: Shockier and Much More Awesome. Thirty. And the eyes and ears on the ground were so prevalent that the photographic proof of the Supreme Leader's dead body had reached Jerusalem and Washington, and then the rest of the world, before the Iranians could find somebody who knew someone who had once met someone else they believed was once in the chain of command somewhere. Five hundred distinct targets were struck from land, sea, and air over a surface area roughly the size of Alaska. By mid-day Sunday, that number of targets had reached well over 1,000. The U.S. claims to have sunk nine ships in Iran's Navy. Mobile missile launchers were quickly targeted and dispatched by the hundreds. Iranian inventories of F-4's and drones dwindled with each precision strike. By Sunday night, American B-2's had come calling to blow up several underground ballistic missile storage bays. Estimates are early and often subject to correction, but the numbers being thrown around now are that roughly half of Iran's entire ballistic missile capability, between last summer's Operation Midnight Hammer and this weekend's opening salvo of Operation Epic Fury, is no more. ]]>
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