Intercontinental Ridiculous Bullshit Media

The media are failing us AGAIN.

Allllllrighty …

Here’s the deal. A lot of you range between somewhat young to really heckin’ young. I think the birth year cutoff for remembering a short run TV series from 1991 entitled Scud Busters might be … late 1970s? Here’s a trailer from this Desert Storm era classic, in which Saddam Hussein’s regime tried to drag the rest of the Muslim world into supporting them … by showering Israel with the Scud IRBM - Intermedia Range Ballistic Missiles.

So Iraq sprayed Israeli, Dhahran, and King Khalid Military City with the INTERMEDIA, not INTER-CONTINENTAL, ballistic missiles. The sun went down, the mobile Scud launchers came out, and the hurriedly modified MIM-104 Patriot batteries blazed away, stopping a limited percentage of incoming warheads.

There was an attempt to reboot the series in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Patriot was much improved by that time, so much so that I didn’t even really recall this happening. To be fair, I was a late draft age male for the first one, and a late thirties father of two, with a brand new ex-wife who had come unzipped from objective reality, for the second.

The Israelis had the means to retaliate and clear memories from the 1967 Six Days War and the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Getting them to sit still while the coalition forces dealt with the problem was a nightly news diplomatic spinoff from the action/adventure Scud Busters series.

Fast Forward 2024:

Here’s a notable event from last spring - an Iranian IRBM getting nabbed via the first ever combat exo-atmospheric intercept. This is NOT an Iron Dome hit, that’s an Arrow.

There’s been a lot of breathless reporting about the use of an ICBM to hit Dnipro. It was not an ICBM, it was an IRBM. The only substantial, interesting change is that the model the Russians used has a feature known as MIRV - multiple independent reentry vehicles. Here’s CNN, actually doing its job - blaring headline about ICBM use, but immediate “it’s an IRBM, not an ICBM” in the piece itself. And note the six pieces falling - six independent warheads. They’re super inaccurate, 90m to 250m CEP, but they’re meant for nukes, not conventional precision strike.

And here’s some reporting fail. I’m surprised to see CNN get it right and France 24 soiling themselves, but there are strange days we’re livin’ …

Implications:

Israel has a couple of systems - Iron Dome and Arrow, that have been recently extensively exercised.

South Korea had been resolutely not involved in Ukraine … until a North Korean division showed up in Kursk.

Israel has designed and field tested a top quality interception, but they don’t have a deep manufacturing capability. South Korea has U.S. designed systems and no experience using them in combat. You connect Israeli know-how to South Korea’s prodigious manufacturing capability, that’s a bad day for China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, all at once.

Conclusion:

Russia’s saber rattling is echoing loudly … because their armories and barracks have been stripped clean. They don’t even HAVE a competent, dispatchable brigade sized unit to reclaim Kursk, so they got 12,000 slices of cannon meat from North Korea … which set off a string of secondary strategic kabooms.

Trump is coming for China. The vast majority of what his administration is planning makes no long term sense (but it does facilitate asset stripping). Tipping China into chaos, which IS within easy reach, is a bad idea when we’re 1) not ready and 2) about to shit all over the NAFTA zone that would have been our fallback position had China just organically failed …

We’ve gotten used to the notion that “Putin owns Trump”. While that WAS true, I’m not at all sure that’s the case now. Trump doesn’t need Putin, he’s coming back into power, and the locus has shifted back here. Just look at what’s happened to Rudy Giuliani … and scale that up a bit. The cruelty is the point for someone with the sort of character disorder Trump has … and while it will be extraordinarily dangerous for our species, it will do my heart good if Putin gets a fatal dose of that.