Warlord's Sensible Caveats

I’ll be turning in soon, and tomorrow will be a busy day. I’ll close today with these reasonable caveats from Armchair Warlord:

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

1h

Israel seems to have launched an attack on Iran while I was AFK. Clearly Netanyahu decided to go ahead anyways without the element of surprise.

It's likely the effectiveness of this strike will be quite limited - recall that "explosions" heard can be air defense or sonic booms.

Be extremely wary of mis- and dis-information in the coming hours. False reports are going to FLOOD in as information warfare campaigns go online.

I'm going to monitor things until the smoke clears a little.

As an aside, I wish Netanyahu would stop starting a new war every time his political coalition starts looking shaky. He has one move and it's to set more and more of the Middle East on fire.

This second tweet explains something that puzzled me—the report of a senior general being killed. I was puzzled because, given the tenor of the rhetoric over the past few days, I would have expected all key/senior personnel to be have made alternate arrangements rather than bunking at home.

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

30m

With the smoke clearing the impact of the attack seems to have been modest in real terms, with only a few fires and secondaries caught on film and most of them small.

An Israeli attempt to decapitate the Iranian military leadership also appears to have largely failed, with only one reasonably confirmed senior casualty at this time - GEN Salami, commander of the IRGC since 2019. I've seen a report that he was quite ill and thus remained in his home unlike the rest of the Iranian senior leadership. Recall that Khamenei was taken to a secure location some time ago, so it's not like the Iranians didn't have warning or were complacent about getting into shelter.

Two or three people connected to the Iranian nuclear program also seem to have been assassinated, but in real terms this isn't going to affect a program that is already largely - if not entirely - complete. The Iranians don't need a lot of theory work at this point to develop a bomb if they don't already have one.

The most likely course of events over the next few days, I believe, is for the Iranians to launch another large-scale missile raid on Israel and the parties to go back to staring angrily at each other.

Of note when evaluating reporting - nobody in Iran or Israel knows what an "arrival" actually sounds like. A lot of reports of explosions around various critical sites are likely sonic booms given the IRIAF is tearing holes in the sky looking for intruders at the moment. Similarly air defense missile launches were misreported as ballistics earlier tonight. Also recall that missile flares can be visible for hundreds of kilometers on clear nights in the Middle East, leading to single "packages" of missiles being reported as numerous separate strikes because people have little ability to judge the distance of lights in the sky.

If Warlord is correct, then the purpose of the attack could have been heavily political—both in terms of Israeli domestic politics as well as Anglo-Zionist politics more generally. OTOH, any “missile raid” by Iran will not include advance warnings and will likely be on a much larger scale this time.

A further caution. Trump and Witkoff have been very openly threatening attacks on Iran based on their “no enrichment” position. Trump made a comment earlier today that may be significant. He said that an Israeli strike could actually help with a deal, although he also professed to prefer doing a deal through negotiations. That certainly has the appearance of Trump being complicit—as well as deluded. This attack will not change minds in Teheran. It’s more of the bombing-will-solve-our-problem craziness. It never works.