Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Israeli Channel 14 news claims that Iranian President Pezeshkian intended to submit his resignation to the Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei today.

Reportedly, the IRGC told him that access to Mojtaba Khamenei is not possible at this time.

Interesting photo, supposedly shot in Shiraz Iran, showing (very indistinctly) what appears to be a delta-winged jet overhead. The US and Israel aren't known to be operating delta-winged jets, but Saudi Arabia (Eurofighter Typhoons) and the United Arab Emirates (Mirage 2000s) do. This has led to speculation about covert Saudi or UAE participation in the air strikes. Given the severity of the bashing that Iran has given the UAE (more than Israel) my bet would be the UAE getting some payback.



Tesla has just made Tesla charging free in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” –Mark Twain

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They promised there would be no boots on the ground in this war. They lied out their asses..

"The U.S. is sending more reinforcements to the Middle East in support of the Iran war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly approved a request from U.S. Central Command for an element of an amphibious ready group and attached Marine Expeditionary Unit to help combat Iran’s regional attacks, the Wall Street Journal first reported Friday.

The supplemental forces would include up to 5,000 personnel and several warships, including the USS Tripoli, which is on its way to the Middle East from its homeport in Sasebo, Japan, the report said.

The Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group includes the America-class amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships USS New Orleans and USS San Diego and the embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit.

The 31st MEU, meanwhile, includes a ground combat element, which features a battalion landing team — an infantry battalion and combat support elements — of around 1,100 Marines and sailors.

Also included is the aviation combat element, which features tiltrotor and fixed-wing aircraft, transport and attack helicopters, ground support assets and air defense teams.

A combat logistics battalion with equipment and personnel capable of sustaining a MEU in austere environments for up to 15 days will also join the effort. This group includes medical, supply and explosive ordnance personnel, among others.

Requests for comment from the Pentagon and CENTCOM were not returned as of press time. The Navy told Military Times it would not be commenting."--- https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-...QR1TkG_2QA

So MR couldn't answer these simple questions: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-19571-...l#pid82653

He wants talk but has no useful input on how to make talks productive, e.g. not completely useless.

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(Mar 17, 2026 09:10 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]They promised there would be no boots on the ground in this war. They lied out their asses..

No, President Trump has refused to promise there will be no boots on the ground in Iran. While he previously stated in 2019 that he was "not talking boots on the ground" during earlier tensions, his current stance as of March 2026 is that he will not rule them out "if they were necessary".
- Google AI

As usual, if you'd do a simple search to play devil's advocate with your ignorant assumptions, you wouldn't keep calling people liars just because you don't know what's going on.

Maybe you shouldn't watch so much MSNOW.

Last night the US Embassy in Baghdad Iraq came under heavy Iranian drone attack. The American C-RAM close-in weapon system intercepted most of the drones, but one or two made it through. Most of the Americans were in shelters and as yet there are no reports of casualties.

The C-RAMs involve a Phalanx rotary cannon that can fire at a very high rate (4,500 rounds a minute). It is essentially a robot controlled by computer that receives radar data about incoming targets, identifies targets threatening areas the system is programmed to protect, and then calculates firing solutions to hit the incoming targets. The Russians, some of the Europeans and I expect the Chinese employ similar systems of their own design.

The fact that several drones got through suggests a vulnerability to swarm attacks. I supposed that employing multiple C-RAM systems programmed to divide the incoming swarm among themselves might be an answer. I know that both the United States and Israel are experimenting with high energy laser systems that can engage many targets very quickly, but they aren't fielded operationally yet.

The system spraying out tracer ammunition over central Baghdad created some science-fiction scenes that are all over the internet today. (Watch this with the sound on!)

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2033990754453098982

Addressing MR and Syne...

The issue isn't really "boots on the ground". The issue is occupying a foreign country where a significant fraction of the population want to fight us. That makes us responsible for the whole country at the same time that it makes our soldiers into vulnerable targets, like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan (and South Vietnam before that).

So the slogan "no boots on the ground" might more accurately be phrased "no prolonged occupation". It doesn't exclude taking over small islands (like Kharg) or quick in-and-out special forces raids (such as making sure the nuclear sites are fully destroyed and the fissionable material is accounted for). Obviously missions like that will increase the possibility of things going wrong and significant casualties. So the risk-reward equation has to be carefully weighed.

Quote:So the slogan "no boots on the ground" might more accurately be phrased "no prolonged occupation". It doesn't exclude taking over small islands (like Kharg) or quick in-and-out special forces raids (such as making sure the nuclear sites are fully destroyed and the fissionable material is accounted for). Obviously missions like that will increase the possibility of things going wrong and significant casualties. So the risk-reward equation has to be carefully weighed.

Sounds like mission creep to me. "We're goin in and disabling Iran's military and will be done in a matter of weeks with no boots on the ground." Now it's "We're going in with troops to fight and kill Iranians." This is how things start sliding into a long-term war. Trump even didn't rule out starting up the national draft again.

(Mar 17, 2026 10:40 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:So the slogan "no boots on the ground" might more accurately be phrased "no prolonged occupation". It doesn't exclude taking over small islands (like Kharg) or quick in-and-out special forces raids (such as making sure the nuclear sites are fully destroyed and the fissionable material is accounted for). Obviously missions like that will increase the possibility of things going wrong and significant casualties. So the risk-reward equation has to be carefully weighed.

Sounds like mission creep to me. "We're goin in and disabling Iran's military and will be done in a matter of weeks with no boots on the ground." Now it's "We're going in with troops to fight and kill Iranians." This is how things start sliding into a long-term war. Trump even didn't rule out starting up the national draft again.

That's only because you either didn't listen to all the mission objectives or didn't understand what some of those objectives would likely entail. 9_9

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(Mar 17, 2026 05:28 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]"Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has resigned from his post over President Donald Trump’s decision to take the U.S. to war with Iran.

Kent announced the move in a post on X, writing he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” because Iran posed “no imminent threat to our nation.”

He added that it was “clear” that the U.S. war on Iran had been started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” In an accompanying resignation letter addressed to Trump, Kent accused “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” of having “deployed a misinformation campaign” to undermine Trump’s policies and “ encourage a war with Iran.”

He told Trump that an “echo chamber” had been used to “deceive” him into believing Iran had been an “imminent threat” to the U.S. and that attacking would lead to a “clear path to a swift victory.”

“This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again,” said Kent, the former U.S. Army special forces soldier and CIA operator."---  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world...Gl6cY_cSPg

The White House has verified reports that Kent was cut out of all intelligence and briefings over allegations of leaks, so he has no inside info to back up his claims.

"From Korea and Vietnam to Iraq, Syria, Gaza and now Iran, the pattern of mission creep is clear.

Korean War: US President Harry Truman framed the 1950 aggression as ensuring collective security, but the conflict escalated into a three-year war, entrenching a long-term US military position in South Korea. The fighting ended with an armistice in 1953, leaving the war technically unresolved.

Vietnam War: US escalation of the war, triggered when the US military reported an attack on one of its warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, expanded an initial “response” into a long and costly conflict whose aims kept shifting. The war, which included large-scale aerial herbicide spraying, ended with a US withdrawal in 1973 and the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. Later investigations revealed that the Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.

Iraq and Syria: The First Gulf War in 1991 ended quickly, but the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq set off a conflict that lasted nearly nine years. The invasion, sold on claims of weapons of mass destruction, continued with new goals, like political stabilisation, after the original justification collapsed.

Similarly, the 2014 campaign against ISIL (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, despite aiming to avoid a large ground war, still embedded the US in a long-running deployment, illustrating incremental escalation.

Historian Max Paul Friedman noted that successive US presidents repeat the mistake of believing overwhelming military power can substitute for a viable political endgame. While the US has the capacity to “smash up states”, ensuring and installing a better replacement is a far rarer case.

While Trump claims the war in Iran could end in weeks, history – as we saw above – warns us otherwise."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/...e-promises

(Mar 17, 2026 10:46 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]Historian Max Paul Friedman noted that successive US presidents repeat the mistake of believing overwhelming military power can substitute for a viable political endgame. While the US has the capacity to “smash up states”, ensuring and installing a better replacement is a far rarer case.

But the Trump admin has already accepted that chaos is preferable to the current regime, at the outset. We're not looking to "install" anyone. Just keep taking heads until some more rational ones prevail in Iran.

While the volume of ballistic missiles out of Iran is way down, they are still managing to fire some. Luckily the Israeli missile defenses, backed up by American Patriots and THAADs, continue to have a high success rate in intercepting them.

Over Tel Aviv - I don't know if this is a cluster warhead, or whether it's fragments from an intercepted missile



Over Dubai - this might be a drone swarm being intercepted



Here's one of the drone impacts near the US Embassy in Baghdad Iraq. It doesn't look like this particular drone caused much damage, just a small fire in an open area.

Syne Wrote:Just keep taking heads until some more rational ones prevail in Iran.

First choice was son of Khamenei - still alive (probably) after nearly three weeks. Seeking a rational head by a process of elimination could take some time.