Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

SINK ‘EM ALL: CDR Salamander: The Sinking of the Dena Was Textbook …the chart don’t lie.

Take a look at the chart above that I yanked from NYT.

What it represents are the Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC) out of the Persian Gulf/Arabian Gulf. Each of those dots is a tanker delivering the hydrocarbons that enable modern civilization to exist and keep three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the stable.

The one center-screen? That is the SLOC our warships and their logistics chain use to move from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean and on to our fleet.

See the city of Colombo? That is the main commercial hub on the island nation of Sri Lanka. The very center of the SLOC that flows south of Sri Lanka lies about 40 nautical miles south of the island.

Until you understand the above, you really should not be even starting a conversation about the sinking of the Iranian frigate, IRIS Dena, by a US Navy SSN. . . . No naval leader in the last three thousand years would have looked at this scenario and said, “No, leave that warship alone.”

This was probably one of the most justifiable sinkings of a warship in recent history.

Read the whole thing.

FIGHT THE POWER:

THE NARRATIVE IS ALWAYS A LIE:

WHY HAVE SO MANY PEOPLE GONE TO THE DOGS MORE OR LESS AT ONCE?

JOSH BLACKMAN:

This is a stunning exchange, not because of the briefing from the Florida Supreme Court, but because of how poorly Bostock has been received. I don’t know if there is any decision in recent Supreme Court history that has aged worse than Bostock. As a matter of substance, the Court has walked back the ruling in Mahmoud and Mirabelli, and will walk it back further in Chiles and the Title IX cases. As a matter of doctrine, not a single conservative would hold up Bostock as the proper way of doing textualism. The pirate flag of textualism barely flutters.

At this point, Bostock has become a laughingstock, so much so that a conservative judge asks a conservative litigant to disavow a Supreme Court precedent on how to read statutes. Of course, that ruling is not binding on the Florida Supreme Court. It is a fun academic question whether the Supreme Court can even set a precedent of how to engage in originalism or textualism. (Tara Grove suggests that the Court lacks the power to impose any methodology.) But I couldn’t help but chuckle at this exchange to see how Bostock fares in the real world.

It was not Gorsuch’s finest hour.

LET IT BE SO. MAKE IT SO.

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

“EXPERTS:”

AMERICA IS REMINDING ITSELF, TOO: America and Israel Remind the World How Wars Are Fought to Victory.

The U.S. has joined the IDF in that enterprise, but Americans have not seen their military fight that kind of war in a long time. For some, it is a disorienting experience.

The United States Navy is the subject of withering criticism, for example. CENTCOM seemed rather proud of itself when it revealed that a U.S. attack sub used a heavyweight torpedo to break the hull of an Iranian frigate — a first for U.S. submariners, according to Pete Hegseth, since World War II. But this “cowardly attack,” according to a detractor, disregarded the fact that the Iranian warship was “uninvolved in the war.” In addition, according to the “historian” Craig Murray, the attack amounted to a crime of war. “Despite there being no threat of any kind, the US submarine sailed away with no attempt to pick up survivors, leaving them to drown,” he wrote.

“Literal Nazi behavior,” the British journalist Richard Medhurst said of the U.S. Navy for executing that attack “in international waters” well outside “the combat zone.” Contrary to those who have convinced themselves that the Iranian ship was no threat to U.S. forces, however, the IRIS Dena, one of Iran’s newest warships, “was armed with heavy guns, surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles and torpedoes.”

Naturally, every platform that allows Iran to project power is a legitimate target in this war, and the advanced American attack sub didn’t surface because that would expose its position to the enemy. These are best practices in combat if the objective is to defeat an enemy force.

For some, the U.S.-Israeli air campaign is just as vexing as the war at sea. “They are just carpet bombing a place more dense and crowded than New York City,” Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King said of the attacks on Iranian regime targets in Tehran. We can at least comprehend King’s ignorance. He just doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.

King doesn’t seem to know that the vertical pillars of smoke erupting from these strikes are indicative of penetrating ordnance (the column shoots upward because it is funneled in that direction by the crater the munition had just made). Nor does he seem to know that virtually all of America’s gravity bombs are fitted with Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits that transform them from “dumb” bombs — the sort once used in “carpet bombing” raids designed to level a discrete area — into precision-guided weapons.
Indeed, the whole operation is “a war crime,” according to “human rights barrister” Geoffrey Robertson. “There can be no peace without justice, whatever happens to any future government,” he wrote, gesturing impotently in the direction of “international law.” The “warmongering powers” America and Israel “should have no say over a set of rules that should instead reflect the values of decent democracies,” he declared.

But the U.S. and Israel will have not just “a say” but unrivaled influence over the direction in which a post–Islamic Republic Iran progresses, because that is the spoil they will have won for themselves on the battlefield. Have we forgotten? That is how wars work.

What we’re witnessing is an informative exhibition of how complex military engagements are actually won — through the application of overwhelming and ruthless force.

We’re also demonstrating that “Human Rights” and “International Law” are just tools for ensuring that the United States doesn’t win. They have no relation to actual humanity, or to law, they’re just slogans aimed at intimidating the United States into an unsuccessful “limited” war. And to be fair, that approach has worked since Korea.

Chinese analysts, meanwhile, have been saying that it turns out the U.S. wasn’t so much in decline before as unwilling to use its power, and now that it’s willing the decline seems to be a figment.

Well, not an accidental one. It’s all midwit jabber from the NGO-Administrative Complex.