Iran was able to successfully strike Prince Sultan Air Base, which is a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia. And guess who supplied Iran with the targeting data necessary to carry out the strike? The Russians.
The strikes hit an E-3G Sentry, which is one of a limited number of AWACS the U.S. has in operation. These planes are used in drone and missile detection, so losing one of them is devastating. However, the more troubling aspect of this strike is Russia’s involvement.
While Russia has a long-standing tradition of aiding any adversary of America, directly assisting attacks on U.S. forces is a major escalation. Oh, and still no response from the Trump administration on any of this.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado, not a particularly good update from what’s going on in the Iran war. Last Friday, you may remember that there was an attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, which is a U.S. military facility. And in it, several ballistic missiles and drones were able to get through defenses.
Bad for the obvious reasons, is that if there’s any place that should be defendable, from Iranian weapons systems, it should be a U.S. air base. And clearly, the United States is now running out of interceptors itself. Second, even worse is one of the targets that was hit was in, E3G, which is an Awacs through the large jets that have the big radar dome on the back of them.
They basically patrol provide information real time information on enemy aircraft, whether it’s a drone or a jet or whatever else. And they can cover about 120,000mi² at a time. The Awacs have been critical for getting early warning on the drones, because you can’t really put a sonar phone out in the water like you can’t see at the edge of Ukraine and then track them for several hundred miles.
So the Awacs are really the best way we have in order to see these things coming. The United States only has a fleet of 15 of them left, or 14 of them left now, and half of those are down for repairs at any given time. So we’re talking about a significant reduction in the ability of the United States to operate the anti-air operations in anti-missile and anti-drone operations, not just in theater, but on a global basis.
But the real shitty thing, that came out just yesterday is that we now know conclusively that the Russians are the ones who provided the targeting information. The Russians have a military recon satellite system, and we know that they’ve been providing aid to and Intel to anyone who’s been shooting at the United States for 30 years. But now we have the Russians caught providing real time information on the location of specific aircraft that can then be used by the Iranians to target specific pinpoint within American military facilities in the Middle East.
It will be interesting to see how the Trump administration chooses to spin this and say, it’s no big deal, because the Russians are our friends or whatever the angle happens to be. But leaving aside for the moment, all of the other angles about this war, about the energy breakdown, not being at the forefront of drone technology anymore, we now have, America’s oldest adversary, deliberately sharing tactical information on American military hardware and personnel and facilities with the Iranians. To the degree that the Iranians are actually able to penetrate and hit things specifically, there there is any number of ways where that’s a very, very negative development. And we have yet to see it being treated seriously by this administration at all.
