MarmiteLover123

While I'm not great on politically why such a move will be considered, militarily there is a possible reason. What makes this round of Israel invading Gaza (Operation Gideon's Chariots as Israel calls it, operation final round of genocide is more apt) different from the previous rounds is that Israel is actually sending in IDF soldiers and special forces into the underground tunnels, to try clear them out and then blow the up from the inside out. Senior IDF members confirmed this at the start of Gideon's Chariots, and recent videos have emerged of tunnels being blown up by engineering teams. Without the tunnels, and with Israel operating in 70-75% of the land area of Gaza currently (according to the evacuation notices), it becomes very difficult to even conduct the limited guerilla style operations Hamas has done over the past few months. Moving through Gaza above ground, when Israel has air supremacy from 0ft upwards, with only an occasional quadcopter drone getting shot down, is an enormous challenge.

If it's the deal that's been speculated on for weeks now and if Israel agreed to it as Trump said, it would be about implementing the next phases of the previous ceasefire deal, the ones to do with the governance of Gaza post war and post the next rounds of a 60 day ceasefire. Under this model, Hamas will disband and disarm, and Egypt, Qatar, and potentially the UAE and Jordan will take over governance of the Gaza strip, with emigration from Gaza to other nations being a possibility for those that take up the offer. (That's the "official" line of reasoning). The so called "second and third phases" of the previous ceasefire, which were never detailed, especially on long term governance. The problem last time round was that Egypt and Qatar were not willing to play as active a role as the USA wanted, which ultimately led to the collapse of the deal as Israel resumed airstrikes on Gaza as the US begun airstrikes on Yemen, as it became more clear that the deal was not progressing, Israel was unwilling to give up further leverage. Hamas unwilling to hand over governance once it became clear that was intended.

I think Hamas might shock us all and agree to the deal if they can get safe passage for their surviving leadership to Qatar. This is a possibility. Israel with the GHF and supporting other armed groups in Gaza are laying the groundwork for a post UN and post Hamas ran Gaza.

why hasnt russia delivered jets

They're at war with Ukraine and have lost at least 8 Su-35s so far. Production is prioritised for this. The original lot of export Su-35s Iran was set to receive were first headed for Egypt, then Iran, and finally ended up in Algeria. Algeria has the cash to pay upfront and then some, they can even overpay for certain features, apparently the Alegrian export specification Su-34s will be better than those fielded by the VKS.

how much does this strategically change the equation for iran

Quite a bit once fully operational and integrated, Israel will have to think twice before a future attack. J-10CEs have quite advanced AESA radars, active radar guided missiles (Fox threes) in the PL-15E that are at least on par the AIM-120C, probably better. Ultimately Israel will still have the advantage with the F-35s, 5th generation capabilities such as stealth and sensor fusion are legitimate "game changers". But any future attack by Israel would have to dedicate a lot more resources to countering Iranian J-10CEs, should Iran accquire them. How effective the J-10s will be depends on the integration with airborne sensors (AWACS) and a ground based integrated air defence system, Iran has neither at the moment, so this will also require significant investment. Pilot training in realistic scenarios is also vitally important.

Is iran having a strong airforce feasible economically for them

It's an existential issue at this point, either Iran exists in a permanently weakened state vulnerable to Israeli airstrikes, or they put serious effort, with foreign partners like China, into reconstructing the state's security. Airborne (fighter jet squadrons) and ground based air defence is a big part of that, arguably more important than nuclear weapons in an Iranian context.

The TACO thing is so wild to me. We had Schumer calling Trump TACO for not bombing Iran in April, when Schumer was likely getting some classified briefings on the 250+ fighter aircraft sent to the Middle East. Then Trump actually goes and does the one thing every post 9/11 US president has been desperate to do but never did, bomb Iran. And now I guess the Democratic party line is either that it's "unconstitutional", or that it's another case of TACO Trump because no full scale war with iran? I can't keep up this anymore. By 2027 libs will be saying "see, no worldwide nuclear apocalypse, TACO Trump at it again " as the first bombs drop on Beijing.

Seen videos of gun based air defence going off every day in Iran since the ceasefire. The explanation of a gas leak or air defence test is usually given by the Iranian government. My guess is over cautious air defence operators, or some Mossad infiltrators are trying to use one way attack drones or loitering munitions.

Think people are tired and really don't know what to make of current events, especially with regards to Iran, Palestine, Yemen, there's a lot of uncertainty about what will happen next. While I expected the US and Israel to attack for a while now, I didn't think it would take them only 9-10 days to be able to bomb the underground nuclear facilities (with not a single manned aircraft shot down, I expected at least some lucky shots), followed by a symbolic Iranian attack on the US military base in Qatar, and then ceasefire and everyone just stops fighting, but ready to resume at a moment's notice. Very much uncharted territory now. There's not much to say because so much is not known. My best guess is Israel does a mass bombing campaign in Yemen, they need to continue the war somehow, and pivoting back to Yemen makes sense for Israel and Iran, Iran might see Yemen as a safer area to rebuild than their own country, given the internal security issues in Iran.

It looks like someone in Idaho started a wildfire to ambush and shoot at firefighters as a sniper.

Thread on that here

NBC News link

Why would anyone want to snipe firefighters responsible for putting out wildfires? Very disturbing.

I think it was over a thousand one way attack drones used, not 500, which does work out to 100 a day. Arash 2, Shahed 136 and 238. They just weren't effective, even the jet powered 238 ones were almostb all shot down, some even over Iraq. The distance between Iran and Israel is too big, the drones are too slow, and the US has gotten very good at intercepting them. Those missiles previously sent for Ukraine are actually laser guided Hydra rockets, called APKWS. One F-15E fighter jet can carry 42 of these APKWS rockets, along with 8 regular air to air missiles, for a total of 50 engagements. These were deployed to Jordan to defend Israel. Ukraine has no fighters that can use these, and are limited to ground launched systems.

Modern fighters and AWACS have much better look down radar capabilities (and look down shoot down for fighters exclusively) and clutter rejection than Vietnam war era jets, making nap of the earth low altitude infiltration much more difficult for Iran than Vietnam. Any Iranian air attack would have been a suicide mission, and Iran did the right thing not to engage and have their very limited air force wiped out, it would've made no difference in the end. No AWACS aircraft really hurts Iran here as pointed out. With Israel having a monopoly on airborne radars, it was actually Israel that used geography against Iran, using the mountains in the Northwest by Tabriz to shadow them from Iranian ground based radars, and using the Caspian sea to fly around air defences in the centre of the country.

F-16s and F-15 would be carrying 5 extra stores of fuel, 2 conformal fuel tanks along the fuselage, and 3 external fuel tanks taking up hardpoints/pylons. However, an F-16 in this loadout can still carry 8 SPICE-250/GBU-39 glide bombs, or 2 SPICE-1000 or 2 2000lb JDAMs/SPICE-2000. An F-15 can carry double that. This is still a lot of ordinance. The F-111s that destroyed over 1500 Iraqis tanks during the Gulf War only carried 4 GBU-12 500lb Paveways each. With the improved precision (no need for 500lb bombs anymore) and massively improved range with glide bombs since then, 8 SPICE 250s or GBU-39s is double the payload, and covering a much larger distance with modern targeting systems/pods and range. GBU-12 had a maximum range of 15km, SPICE-250 and GBU-39 have a range over 100km, and can still hit moving targets with ease. This massive increase in effective coverage radius and area coverage is what made TEL hunting (destroying ballistic missiles on the ground before being fired) feasible now, when it was a complete failure during the Gulf war.

The Delilah cruise missile was used, but mainly for taking out Iranian air defences thanks to it's stand off range of 250km and ability to loiter and relay targeting co ordinates back to the launch aircraft, so other systems can then hit all the targets spotted by Delilah on the way to it's main target. It only has a 30kg warhead and bulky datalink pod that takes up a valuable hardpoint slot, so it wasn't used much outside of that. A lot of SPICE glide bombs and JDAMs were used. The SPICE glide bombs can make use of human in the loop TV guidance, the person in the second seat of the aircraft van effectively pilot the bomb from a first person perspective, so a lot of people were confusing this FPV footage for Delilah cruise missile or drone footage. The SPICE glide bombs (1000 in particular, unsure of 250) use the same guidance interface as the AGM-142 Have Nap/Popeye missile, so if you see any FPV strike footage from this targeting interface, it's most likely from a SPICE 1000 glide bomb, maybe a SPICE 250 or Popeye, but definitely not a Delilah cruise missile or FPV drone. The footage of the strike on the inactive Arak heavy water nuclear reactor made use of this targeting interface, so most likely a SPICE 1000.

Arak footage:

The Delilah cruise missile uses a different FPV targeting interface (very green), shown here:

As for ballistic missiles and interceptor numbers, too much unknowns to make an accurate estimate. But I do think the situation was more critical for Iran than Israel, as shown by the last waves of attacks before the ceasefire. 6 waves of ballistic missiles fired, and only one hit. Is it feasible to continue a war in this way?

Iran wiped the floor with Israel and their only mistake is they stopped attacking.

This is just not true. At most, Iran managed to land dozens of hits on population centres in Israel using ballistic missiles (only one out of the thousands of one way attack drones launched at Israel even landed a hit), with no impact on Israeli military and air force operations or their sortie rate, an abject military failure. Meanwhile, Israel had fighter aircraft dropping JDAMs on Tehran within 48 hours of the start of the war, and did not lose a single manned aircraft throughout the entire conflict. Israel was able to suppress Iran's missile launch facilities in the west and forced Iran to switch to an attrition strategy instead of firing large salvos of missiles at Israel. Iran had their top military leadership decimated through decapitation strikes and assasinations which prevented an initial counterstrike, none of the Israeli leadership were even bothered. Iran had massive internal security issues with Mossad commandos launching anti tank guided missiles and FPV drones at crucial elements of Iran's defensive infrastructure (such as the fire control radars of air defence systems), Israel did not have any notable internal security issues. By the end of the war, Iran had their most valuable state assets directly bombed by the United States and Israel bombing as far east as Yadz, 1850km from Tel Aviv. Just look up how many models of Iranian ballistic missiles have a range greater than 1850km, it's not many. Iran retaliated (retaliation is a strong word here) with 14 old SCUD C based missiles fired at a single US military base, with all being intercepted or falling short.

This was as one sided as a military conflict gets between two regional powers. Militarily, Iran were completely outclassed. You can talk about if Israel accomplished strategic goals or failed strategically, that's a different issue. It's certainly possible to be vastly superior militarily and fail in accomplishing strategic goals. If Israel's goal was regime change for instance, that failed obviously.

I don't care what Trump says or pay much attention to it. But the reality is that this war went very poorly for Iran. Bombing Tel Aviv does not do anything to degrade the military capabilities of Israel, or deter them at this point. Israel went into this war knowing very well that Tel Aviv would be bombed, and chose to attack anyways, the Israeli military leadership clearly does not care about civilian casualties. Unless Iran can credibly threaten Israel's military and air force, there is nothing stopping Israel from doing this all over again, with the same result.

The bars are almost empty (on a Friday night of all nights), and the pizza places full, near the Pentagon and White House at the moment, for those who care about tracking that. I know some people on here do use it as an indicator.

Source

There's a lot of unknowns right now. Maybe Iran is extracting the enriched uranium for a handover to the USA, though that would shock even me, one of the more pessimistic people on Iran. Maybe they're doing it for their own purposes, to further nuclear development. Maybe nothing was extracted, who knows. But if you were Iran, you would transfer most of the enriched uranium to Isfahan before the strikes as it's your deepest underground facility. And you would do this to extract it, that's not a open top dump truck on the satellite imagery. This is the one card they can play right now.

Three recent events to do with Iran that I believe may be interlinked:

First, Iran has begun excavation operations at Isfahan, the underground nuclear site where only the entrances were targeted. No GBU-57 MOPs deployed here. They have opened one of these entrances today, visible on satellite imagery. It is no longer entombed. Iran may have transferred enriched uranium and centrifuges stored inside the facility, likely undamaged. Unless this movement has been co-ordinated with the United States for a potential handover of enriched material (I doubt this), this is an important development, as it could be considered a breach of the ceasefire.

The virtual US embassy in Iran has released a statement advising US citizens to leave Iran immediately while the airspace is open to commerical and civilian aircraft. Archive source to avoid data capture by a US government website

Event: As of June 26, 2025, Iranian airspace has been partially reopened, although commercial travel from Tehran and other major hubs may be disrupted. U.S. citizens should monitor local media and consult commercial airlines for more information on outbound flights from Iran. U.S. citizens planning to depart Iran should proceed by land to Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, or Turkmenistan, if conditions are safe.

Leave Iran immediately. Have a plan to leave Iran without relying on U.S. government assistance. If you cannot leave Iran, choose a safe place in your residence or another safe building. Take some food, water, medicine, and other essential items with you. Keep your cell phone charged and stay in touch with family and friends to keep them informed of your situation.

Another E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft has been transferred to Saudi Arabia. Remember, there are still many US fighter aircraft (likely over 200) forward deployed to the Middle East, and the 4x B-52 Stratofortress bombers and 6x F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft have not left Diego Garcia.

Trump's tweet about Khamenei is likely not about him or his speech at all. I'd guess it's a signal to Iran given the developments at Isfahan. This is a developing and dynamic situation, if the US or Israel do believe Iran has excavated enriched uranium and intact centrifuges, without oversight by the USA, it could escalate fast. Again, could possibly based on these assumptions, not will.

Update: preliminary and unconfirmed reports of explosions or air defence activity in Tabriz, Malard, Eslamshahr, Karaj, and the Western parts of Tehran. Updating to say it's most likely over cautious air defence.

Video of said activity

Wonder if this is just the usual events since the beginning of the ceasefire (air defence firing as a precaution), or something else.