Originally Posted by
Lonewolf_50
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Suggest that instead, in the context of this thread, you pay more attention to what the spokespersons for CENTCOM say, and also pay attention to what they don't say.
In other words, use your brain and use critical thinking.
Note that in the War of Words adhering to this conflict, the Iranians claim to have shot down an F-15.
But they didn't.
Did you believe them when they claimed that? If you did, why?
You are a target, and I am a target, in the Information Campaign being waged by multiple parties to this conflict.
What defenses have you chosen to deploy?
Interesting, perhaps, to consider the matter of defenses in the Information Campaign specifically in the air domain context. Of course, the Info Campaign is part of Multi-Domain Operations, yet that fact doesn't invalidate a close look through an aviation lens. Or at least an effort to do so.
Anyone (well, anyone serious and mostly unbiased against the United States) who has read Dr. Sean McFate's book, The New Rules of War - Victory in the Age of Durable Disruption (2019), would have been trying to track the battles in the information space at least since Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025. Without making any political statement at all, anyone with at least a secondary school education would acknowledge that a great many words in the English language have a number of denotative meanings, as well as connotative meanings.
Nevertheless hours of airtime elevated "obliterated" to a kind of absolutist pinnacle, capable of only one meaning. Rare was the admission that the contents of the sites struck in that operation were seriously enough destroyed so as to be compared to an old fraternity friend of mine who, when prompted to describe the voluminous amounts of alcohol consumed over the weekend, was fond of responding that he had got "obliterated." As a skirmish, if not a more pitched battle, in the Info Campaign, this adjective manuever was instructive. Specifically, instructive about so many otherwise ostensibly intelligent persons chasing after verbalizaions without thinking why they may have been spoken in certain words and not others.
So just reflecting on the range of meanings conveyed by any given word or phrase is one line of defense. Then there is the defensive value found not in what we know - what is said publicly - but in what we do not know. In the operation to apprehend and extract the Maduro husband-and-wife dictatorship from Caracas, ordinarily reliable press reports noted that special forces activities were involved. I doubt that many among the cadres of veterans of such units have much trouble deducing what weapons, maneuvers and capabilities were deployed and utilized. But the public in general - minus Tom Clancy imagery, I think most folks imagine little more than Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High (1949). So as a line of defense, this is a reminder to constantly, always, keep in mind that by necessity, CNN or Fox (etc.) aren't reporting on the totality of what's happening or has happened.
And recall that the Caracas operation involved heavy presence of aviation assets. It is significant, imo, that the operation followed the several obliterations (yes, using the word on purpose here) of alleged drug-running boats. Much hue and cry resulted in the information space, and noting this in no way, shape, manner or form detracts from or negates the several important questions these boat kills implicate. And obviously aviation assets were deeply and fundamentally involved. And then note, the Caracas operation followed.
Is there a parallel looming, larger in scope and consequence? First massive infliction of destruction and degrading of adversary military capacities and capabilities through correlatively massive air power, then, another special forces strike enabled, supported and protected by high-capability airborne and MEU elements? I have no crystal ball and I especially don't have one that speaks, reads or thinks in Farsi. In other words, keeping an open mind about what has happened - because it isn't all reported and so much reporting is driven by agenda, beyond bias - and about what may be coming, is a deliberate mindset. And more intensely so, with regard to aviation assets and the air domain.
[Edited to correct media reference & minor typos]