Episode 51 - Never Forget

I always tell people just go to the Institute for the study of war.

They're the best.

Um, they have updates literally every single day, no matter how boring or uneventful things are, or no matter how chaotic things are, they always have their key takeaways, which is a great place to start because it's like digestible, um, points, um, So, basically, some of the things that they've written about here is that Iran has been taking kind of a more concerted effort in recent days.

I'm trying to aggressively target U.S. naval forces because of the blockade that we have on the Iranian ports.

So obviously they're trying to sort of break that.

But I mean,

I

don't think that's going to be successful on their part.

Now, it's interesting.

There was, I guess, some kind of warning from U.S. officials claiming that the Iranians might be using more sophisticated weapons to target U.S. vessels in recent days.

So, again, I don't know if that's like a... recent change or if that's been going on and it's they also mentioned here and I think this is a very important point actually that Iran may be relying upon targeting assistance from Russia or China and basically That's a huge fucking deal.

I mean, I shouldn't have to explain why it's a big deal, but it's a huge deal.

And it's very concerning because I think we have a president who is quite happy to value his own personal relationship with the leaders of those countries rather than putting America's interests first, which is ironic given that... his movement is like referred to as America first, even though it's really just Trump first.

So that, that part of this is also very concerning.

We've, we've heard little bits and pieces about that in the past about specifically Russia helping with the targeting.

And then we've, we've also had, um, some news um on the sanctions i think they're basically um trying to get around um the commercial uh the sanctions on commercial shipping so this that's a part of it too so i don't know granted i'm not saying it's going to be successful i mean who the hell knows but So yeah, there's a number of things going on, but we're not in a crazy hot war portion of this.

So that's some of the key points, at least from the perspective of the ISW.

So what do you think, Mike? Well, let's start with the

targeting.

That's 100% happening.

That's been happening for most of the conflict.

And I think it's one of those things that we just need to recognize and deal with.

It doesn't mean we're at war with those countries.

That's obviously not going to be prudent, but it makes perfect sense that enemies that are aligned with one another would align with one another and act against us.

Iran, Russia, and China are three heads of the same hydra.