@JohnT just posted this in another thread:
Any confirmation from a credible source?
It’s the President?
I mean, yes, it’s Trump, but still…
I have no news alerts, yet.
(My phone gets a lot of news alerts.)
Welp, i went to the NYT, and the headline was about Trump planning to decide in the next weeks, updates here. And when i clicked for updates, it said:
Jesus fucking Christ. War it is. Fucking fucking fuck.
He’s about to find out that Iran ain’t Iraq. Not that he would understand the difference even if it were explained to him in terms a 5-year-old could understand.
This is bad. I feel sick.
CNN has it now (edit, trying to link to the actual post):
It’s been 19 hours since those B2s took off. Their route is over 16,500 miles. The B2 is subsonic. I’m not sure it’s possible for Trump’s twuth to be accurate.
Now, it may be that that’s the mission the bombers were launched on, but if that’s so, it hasn’t actually happened yet, and Trump, in a display of his usual level of competence, just told Iran they were coming.
It might not have been those planes.
One might suppose the ones at Diego Garcia did the attack and flew back to Missouri and the ones launched 19 hours ago are their replacements.
Just speculating…I sure do not know. Few do at this point.
I’m a little surprised. I thought there was a chance Putin would tell Trump directly to stay out.
In this case, it doesn’t really matter much. Iran doesn’t have the air force left to take them out.
If the US could have snuck the attack formation into a friendly regional airfield earlier without being noticed, the strike wouldn’t have come from any of the usual bases.
But that is a huge, probably impossible, “if”.
Not to mention the B2s are built to infiltrate enemy airspace even if the enemy has a working air force/air defense.
Yeah, intelligence is the first thing their air force would need. They have airplanes, but not so many military radars as they used to. They might have moved what they have to defend those sites. But unless they’re covering all approaches pretty thoroughly, there’s plenty of space for something like a B2 to slip between them.
There’s still always room for things to go wrong in war, though, and you never want to make things any easier for the enemy (nor for Murphy) if you can avoid it.
The war could have ended in those 19 hours! I just think this is a big mistake, but I can’t do anything about it.
Now i have four news alerts. Every one of then says, in the text of the alert (without clicking the link) that “Trump says” this has happened. I wonder if there’s any real doubt?
Do you seriously think those planes are not in continuous communications with HQ throughout the mission? This isn’t WW2 any more.
They could have been recalled up until a few seconds before weapons release.