Iran's secret weapon revealed as Trump does the unthinkable!

On the night of March 13th, the United States military executed what Trump called, and I quote, one of the most powerful bombing raids in the history of the Middle East. 90 Iranian military targets on Kharg Island. We've been talking a lot about that island of late, including naval mine storage facilities and missile bunkers. They were obliterated. And here's the absolutely crucial detail. Trump personally ordered the Pentagon to spare the oil infrastructure. He said, "I've chosen not to wipe out the oil infrastructure of the island yet. Should Iran do anything to interfere with the free passage of ships through the street of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider that decision." So, you need to let that sink in. The president of the United States just held a loaded gun to Iran's entire economy and said, "Play nice or I'll pull the trigger."

Message from Jim Robinson:

Dear FRiends,

We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.

If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:

Click here: to donate by Credit Card

Or here: to donate by PayPal

Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794

Thank you very much and God bless you,

Jim

Now, if you don't, why is Kharg Island such a nuclear level card to play here? This is a five-mile strip of land sitting about 15 miles off of Iran's coastline in the Persian Gulf. Through that little island flows 90% of Iran's crude oil exports. Iran produces over 3 million barrels a day and virtually every drop that leaves the country goes through Kharg. As energy analyst Don Pickering had said, if you eliminate Kharg's infrastructure, you remove two million barrels per day from the market indefinitely. That's a civilizational gut punch to China, which gets roughly 40% of its oil through the broader Hormuz corridor. And that's exactly why Trump kept the oil infrastructure standing for now. It's not just leverage over Iran. It's leverage over Beijing. It's a message to Xi. We are in control now. China tried for years to tacitly control Hormuz through its Iranian proxy. China was buying up 80 90% of Iran's oil. Now we control it and that control is permanent. We're the ones who will determine the fate of KHARG. And again, there's very little that the Iranian regime can do about this. If they attack their own island, they're attacking their own ATM. They're literally cutting themselves off from billions upon billions of their economically ruined. If they don't attack it, KHARG remains under the effective control of American forces. So, there's no winning here. The one shred of hope that Iranian forces supposedly have is a secret weapon that pro-Iranian voices are claiming they have yet to unleash until.....cont.

...The one shred of hope that Iranian forces supposedly have is a secret weapon that some pro-Iranian voices are claiming they have yet to unleash until now. On March 11th, Iranian military released official footage of their Corormchar 4 missile that they described as a wave of heavy multi-warhead projectiles targeting Iraq, Bahrain, and Israel simultaneously.

These are multiple warheads on a single missile splitting apart mid-flight. This was Iran’s secret weapon doctrine engineered not to outpace American interceptors kinetically but to bankrupt them logistically through what analysts call magazine exhaustion.

So the idea fire one Kormchar 4 missile and the radar screen suddenly shows 40 50 60 incoming objects all moving at Mach 8 all looking identical. defense forces then fire a three to 12 million dollar interceptor at all of them or risk the real warhead getting through. And the math is just it’s catastrophically bad for the defenders because the cost ratio per shot per interception is at best 10 to1. It’s probably more like 60 to 71 in favor of Iran. So this is Iran’s secret weapon. Not so much the cluster bomb itself, but the radical disparity in cost asymmetry that such bombs provoke by virtue of their usage.

Systems like Arrow and THAAD are designed to destroy large incoming objects, a missile body,
12:4812 minutes, 48 secondsa single warhead. When a a cluster of uh missile releases dozens of bomblelets before interception, the submunitions scatter beyond reach. At least 14 Iranian missiles have penetrated Israeli air defenses as of March 12th. 11 of those were cluster missiles. So, they’re very effective. So, with that kind of disparity, you might be asking, why then is Iran’s missile campaign collapsing?

It’s because the United States and Israel didn’t try to out intercept the problem. They went straight for the source. In the opening 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury alone, US forces struck over a thousand Iranian targets, including missile launchers, production facilities, and command and control sites using B2, B1 bombers launched from the continental United States alongside carrier based fighters.

The IDF confirmed destroying over 300 Iranian missile launchers in the first 5 days. Iran went from launching 20 missile barges on February 28th to just six on March 3rd. By March 9th, ISW and Critical Threats Project confirmed that US and Allied forces had intercepted 92% of Iranian ballistic missiles fired and that Iran’s radar tracking or radar targeting attacks on missile defense equipment had failed to degrade interception rates at all. Iran’s missile fire rate has since collapsed by 92% from its opening day. So here’s as it were the strategic punchline in this. Iran’s secret weapon was designed to win a war of attrition.

Exhaust the interceptors, break the shield, force the ceasefire. But America and Israel refused to fight that war. They fought a very different war destroying the launchers before the missiles ever launched The secret weapon in effect never really got to fire.

These cluster bombs have been radically reduced to almost total insignificance. 40 years of engineering, billions of dollars in development, the most sophisticated asymmetric weapon Iran. And in 17 days, it was reduced to a footnote. That’s not just a military victory That’s a statement. And the entire world is reading it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.