The missing US pilot HAS to be rescued to stop a nightmare scenario

Suddenly the whole US military apparatus is focusing on one thing, the rescue of the missing crew member of the downed F-15E Strike Eagle over Iran. The legendary Combat Search and Rescue Teams who are trained for this eventuality, will find him if anyone can. But they have to do it before some wandering Iranian comes across the pilot and contacts the security authorities. The worst possible sceanrio is for the crew member to be detained, ill-treated and put on state television so that the Tehran regime can gloat. His survival chances would be minimal. We have had this terrible scenario before. Saddah Mussein held people, including children, hostage and flaunted their suffering on television. And of course, Gary Powers, the U2 spy pilot shot down in 1960 by the Soviet Union on a secret CIA surveillance mission, was paraded before the cameras when he was picked up and brutally treated. Why the missing American crew member has not been found is a mystery. Fighter aircraft crews always have personal radio beacons to pinpoint their position if shot down, and undergo intense training for what action to take if parachuting unharmed into hostile territory. The missing American will be hiding somewhere and he may be worried that his personal radio beacon could be spotted by the enemy and might have switched it off. If so, that will make the task of his rescuers much more difficult. But he HAS to be found. Iran would be granted huge leverage over Donald Trump if the airman is captured. With the Strait of Hormuz card already in their pocket, a captured airman would raise hopes among the regime that Trump can be defeated. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES

What happens when the war in Iran is over?

Despite all the predictions that the war in Iran would only run for four to six weeks, or will be over in another two or three weeks, or has nearly been completed, etc etc, there is actually no sign yet of a slowing down of the strikes by the US and Israel, and no sign of Iran stopping retaliating. It could go on for weeks or months with mnore and more destruction throughout Iran and in the Middle East countries targeted by Tehran. However, when it does all come to a halt, what if anything will Donald Trump do to repair the massively damaged relationship between Washington and the whole of Europe? Or will he wait for Europe to make the first move? Right now, Trump is angry about Europe's attitude and wants to leave Nato, and Europe is angry at the way Trump has been treating all European governments, berating them for daring to go against him and preventing the US military from using European bases for offensive strikes on Iran. Actually, Britain is effectively allowing its RAF bases to be used as a transit point for bombers and ground-attack aircraft flying in from the US, and Keir Starmer's condition that they only be used for "defensive" operations is looking pretty woolly. Nevertheless, Europe has not welcomed Trump's war and relations now are so bad that whenever he speaks about his European partners he has nothing but insults for them. When the war is over, this will all have to stop. For everyone's sake. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTOMES.

The toll of damage at US bases in the Middle East

Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth admitted at the start of the war that some Iranian missiles and drones would get through the layers of air defences spread out in the Middle East. What he did not acknowledge was that the US has appeared unprepared for the mass of long-range Shahed-136 killer drones launched by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) against US bases in the region. Now into the fifth week of the war, the IRGC has succeeded in causing extensive damage to many of the 13 US bases, despite the pre-war deployment of some of America’s most expensive defensive systems capable of intercepting every type of ballistic and cruise missile. The cost of the destruction after the first month is now estimated to be nearly $1.5 billion and the injury toll is more than 300 US service personnel. In addition, 13 have been killed, although six died when two RC-135 air reuelling takers collided in midair over western Iraq. Much of the destruction has been caused by long-range drones; and even though the rate of drone attacks has dropped, the threat they still pose has become increasingly clear. The US is struggling to stop them coming. The IRGC’s principal UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) is the 11.5ft long kamikaze Shahed-136, each carrying a 50-kilo explosive warhead. They fly low and fast and have too often beaten the sophisticated US anti-missile systems on land, on warships and on fighter aircraft. To add to the American military’s challenges, Russia has been supplying the IRGC with US base location coordinates, and more specifically the daily position of aircraft out in the open, as opposed to in hardened shelters; and is now providing its own variant of the Shahed, the Geran-1 and Geran-2 which are armed with a 90-kilo warhead. Iran launched nearly 4,000 of these one-way attack drones in the first few weeks of the war, and about a dozen US bases in the Middle East have been hit. With Russia’s help the IRGC still seems to have sufficient stocks of these “suicide” bombs. “The failure of the department of defence [Pentagon] adequately to incorporate the lessons of the war in Ukraine, as opposed to just studying them, particularly counter-drone warfare, is a bipartisan failing across two administrations [Presidents Biden and Trump],” a former top US defence official told The Times. The audit of destruction at US bases or sites where America has a military presence is sombre reading for the Pentagon. *Prince Sultan airbase, 60 miles south of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia: On March 27, the base was targeted by 29 drones and six ballistic missiles. An E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft suffered a direct hit and was demolished. Several KC-135 tankers were also damaged. Fifteen American soldiers were wounded, five seriously. The AWACS was one of six in the region, each costing about $300 million. March 13, five KC-135 tankers were damaged by a drone attack. March 1, a US serviceman was killed by a drone strike. *Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, forward headquarters for US Central Command, with 100 aircraft and 10,000 troops: A long-range radar located at Umm Dahal, in the vicinity of Al-Udeid, was hit and damaged on March 7. The radar cost more than $1 billion. *Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet., headquartered at Manama: February 28, the base was hit by drones, causing damage to radar and communications equipment, estimated in a report by the Pentagon to Congress to be around $200 million. *Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, a US Army base and logistics hub: On March 1, six US soldiers were killed at a logistics operations centre in Shuaiba port, ten miles from the US Army base, after it was hit by a drone. *Ali Al Salem airbase and Camp Buehring base in Kuwait. Both were hit by drones, on March 1 and March 5 respectively, causing significant damage to communications systems and buildings. *Al-Dhafra airbase in United Arab Emirates: The base, hosting F-22 Raptor stealth aircraft and MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drones, has been targeted on multiple occasions. Nine Reapers are reported to have been destroyed in separate incidents, although most of them while flying over Iran from the UAE base. A Reaper costs about $30 million. *Muwaffaq al Salti airbase in northwest Jordan: The base was targeted on March 4, causing extensive damage to an air defence radar system. A radar of this type costs around $500 million. *Erbil airbase in northern Iraq: The base where US and British special forces are operating, has been regularly hit by drones. Most have been shot down, although some damage has been caused. *Al-Assad airbase in western Iraq: Targeted by drones and missiles, the damage has not been revealed. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.

Trump wants out of Nato!

Donald Trump has many times warned that he might take the United States out of Nato because, apart from the US, the rest of the alliance had failed to spend enough on defence. It kind of worked because everyone rushed to promise to spend more. Most of the other members of the alliance have committed to more and more spending over the next few years. We will see if that happens. But now the US president is so mightily angry with every member of the alliance for failing to join him in the war against Iran that he is seriously considering exiting Nato to punish all the allies for being ungrateful, cowardly, weak and a whole lot of other things. Europe, as far as he is concerned, qan go hang and can look after themselves, no longer with the US umbrella over them. He might just mean it and might just do it this time. His argument, I guess, which is not actually an unfair one, is that Iran with nukes and long-range ballistic missiles posed a real threat, not just to the Middle East, but eventually to the whole world. So, in other words, it wasn't just a problem for the US and Israel to confront but was a threat tp the whole alliance. But that argument has been given the cold shoulder by the alliance. They all said it wasn't their war. Theoretically, they are right because this was a war chosen by Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, it wasn't a Nato war as such. The trouble is, because of the squeamishness of all of America's Nato allies, we are now in a position where Trump will for ever regard Nato as as a weak organisation that can't be trusted to help out when called upon. So, why, he will be thinking, bother with the organisation? It could happen, the US cold-shopuldering Nato. That would be a serious moment for the rest of the alliance. Very very serious, which is why a lot of phone calls need to be made to persuade Trump to drop the idea. Otherwise it will be a triumph for Putin! PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.