by Matt Bracken, Matthew’s Substack:
The American MIC put together an unbeatable military machine, at least when it comes to blasting the ever-loving shit out of 2nd and 3rd tier countries that can’t really fight back. I call it the “Top Gun Maverick Military Model.”
The TGM3 works great in C.G. Hollywood movies, it worked great in the 20th Century against countries like Serbia and Libya, and most importantly of all, it’s fantastic for shoveling endless billions of dollars to our corpulent MIC “defense” industries. And for decades, it kept the rest of the world in line, afraid to test America’s evidently overwhelming destructive military power.
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That is, until President Donald Trump, tricked by Bibi Netanyahu’s false promise of a quick and easy three-day regime-change victory over Iran, blundered into the greatest military disaster in modern history–and thereby exposed the obsolescence of the TGM3 against the 21st-Century Modern Missile Model, or the 21CM3. [I’m making up silly acronyms on the fly, so that the Internet Military Analysts’ Union will take me seriously.]
If the USAF and the IDF/AF launch another massive air blitz on Iran, as Trump threatened a few days ago, the key battle equation will be USAF air tankers vs. Iranian MRBMs, as seen below.
Not directly, of course, but the Iranian missiles can be used to destroy USAF tankers on the ground before they can take off to refuel the USAF and IDF/AF attack planes. This will give Iran the opportunity to spoil any such US-Israel air blitz before it can reach its crescendo.
Iran will not strike first, out of the blue, preemptively, but they will wait until they can see (from Russian and Chinese satellite intelligence, and from agents on the ground), that the main force is launching into the air. When some percentage of the air armada is airborne, say 30 or 40%, Iran will launch a furious missile attack on the air bases indicated on the below map, (and on other bases I don’t know about, but Iran surely does.)
If runways are cratered or even pitted, takeoffs can be aborted, and airborne jets will have to find alternate landing strips. This will upset the careful timing of the air blitz, since returning aircraft will be unable to return to their launching airfields to refuel and rearm and take off for their next scheduled sortie.
Timing is the crucial element in such an air blitz, and in Iran’s counter-attack using MRBMs. The Khorramshahr 4 missile with 80 submunitions seems to me as if it was designed for exactly this scenario. It was demonstrated in Tel Aviv last March, but has not been used since (that I know of). 80 bomblets are sufficient to heavily damage jet aircraft parked close together on concrete aprons, as well as to pit the runways, creating potholes and “FOD,” or foreign object debris, which must be cleaned up for the runway to be put back into full use.
Even if the runways are put out of action for a matter of only hours, this is enough time to spoil the carefully choreographed timing of a major air blitz on Iran. And any aircraft damaged on the ground will not be able to take part in the attack at all.
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