No, he’ll just have his surrogates explain to the media that he either a) never said any thing; b) what he said before doesn’t count; c) both of the above.
I HOPE that’s what he does if his mouth gets him into a bad position. But I’m not sanguine that he won’t let his temper and his inner crazy and clueless side out in such a situation and simply lash out.
Ther’s been plenty of debunking of your main premise upstream. But I’d like to tackle this specific bit of what you think of as “supporting evidence”
I used to be stationed at Luke. This was many years ago but I’ve checked the open sources on what’s based there now. Big picture there have been no functional changes.
The units at Luke are 100% training units. The aircraft themselves are identical to the ones at the combat units. But the personnel there are all trainees or are instructors. In a full scale war they’d be the very last units to be moved into a battle since that’d be eating your very last seed corn. Prior to that *extremis *situation, they’re not going anywhere. They’re ceertainly not anything that’d be moved first or in preparation to opening hostilities.
Most of the maneuver areas for Luke are to the south, not the west. Ref Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range - Wikipedia for more. Immediately after takeoff we tended to turn west then south rather than east then south simply to keep our noise over the uninhabited areas, not suburbia. It means nothing more than that.
As to tempo changes, different units move in and out of different phases of the training program. Some do a couple weeks of night flying. Then go back to day flying. Others have a week working with tankers. Who are usually staged out of somewhere else, but may move temporarily to Luke for reasons of their own.
As to cargo craft, NATO also has training there. And periodically conducts rotation deployments swapping out airplanes and equipment from the home country. That results in an influx of a few cargo and tanker aircraft for a couple days. Then they’re gone and it’s back to business as usual. Don’t worry, it’s just those beastly Germans invading Germany. Sigh … again. Or those beastly Brits invading Britain.
Bottom line:
The idea that seeing some short-term change in Luke’s activity is a sure sign of near-term conflict is about as sensible as seeing some National Guardsman in his desert camo clothing at Home Depot buying a gallon of white paint and concluding that the United States is about to invade Antarctica.
My point being that extrapolating a great distance from a tiny clue or two is almost always an error.
If we want to get super-technical, probably not the BGM-109 itself, but it has certainly been the norm for the US to engage in drone-striking, air-striking, military action of some sort here and there since 9/11; in fact, even before then (think Bosnia, Desert Fox, Infinite Reach, Allied Force, etc. during the Clinton administration).
So for the OP’s prediction of “war” to count, I think it has to be something much bigger than that. Missiles hitting one of Assad’s airfields doesn’t count.
I do not see a war. Maybe an incident or two on Isis. Trump has the rest of the world scared. In this respect, he’s a bit like Reagan.
It’s based on nothing but trying to throw the OP a bone, but do you think we could plausibly theorize that the changes he’s perceived were a result of trying to increase the visibility of our armed forces for propagandist “MAGA” reasons?
Real unlikely. There’s plenty of ways to conduct obvious exercises at real combat bases. Even better, real combat bases in the the theater where the fighting might start. All of which can be fed to the MAGA crowd via social or traditional media.
The Phoenix area has 1 airline airport, 3 bizjet airports, a handful of lightplane airports, and Luke. The airspace within 50 miles of downtown is a 3D spaghetti pile of intertwined tubes leading to and from each airport towards the outside world. Just willy nilly flying Luke’s traffic in a different direction over suburbia for a few days in hopes that some R voters living under the noise might notice and applaud the difference fails the laugh test pretty completely. IMO.
For what it’s worth, I was on a business trip in late fall 2015 and drove from Seattle to Portland. I saw a very long train with tons of shiny military equipment on it too… And that was when nobody thought Trump would even secure the nomination
I also don’t doubt that the Fat Orange Shitstain could bring us to war, but as yet I don’t see any reason to believe preparations have started.
Does anyone remember the thread years back where I said I thought we should take the “Congress declares war” provision of the constitution more seriously, as I didn’t like how much of a free hand the President has to *start *wars? Yeah, about that…