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The great big United States of America, which has “the most powerful military in the world” as hand-puppet Pete and Trump himself tell us about every seven minutes, have moved the entire fleet of B-1 bombers out of Great Britain back to bases in the United States. The bombers cost $300 million-plus each and were used along with refueling tankers to attack targets in Iran during Trump’s losing war against the Islamic state.
What is wrong with this picture?
I’ll tell you what. Every story about the retreat of our bombers from Europe and the Middle East has been about what Trump, Vice President “Confused as Hell” JD Vance and Hegseth call the “threat” against them. Where did this threat come from? They won’t tell, but leaks say it was Iran. The Washington Post reported this morning that the U.S. was concerned about “the possibility of a swarm drone attack similar to one Ukraine launched against Russia in June 2025.”
There are so many things wrong with this entire clusterfuck, it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s start here: Where are the defenses we should have had around the British base and every single U.S. base on the planet, including those in the United States? All the emphasis has been on a potential drone attack on the bombers. Hell, the five guys drove the vans into a wooded area just several hundred feet from the base itself!
You remember the Ukrainian attack in Russia, don’t you? Ukraine smuggled some trucks into Russia that had been fitted with tops that lifted from their cargo boxes, from which helicopter-style drones carrying explosives took off and attacked a Russian airbase. As far as drone warfare goes, this is by now Walmart-level technology. You buy or manufacture some simple drones and outfit them with GPS guidance and strap on a bomb and fly them into their target. The things travel at 25-30 miles per hour, tops. They were able to destroy a third of Russia’s bombers because Russia wasn’t ready for the attack.
Sound familiar? We’re not ready either. That’s why we had to move the bombers.
A competent military that is run by sane human beings who are not obsessed with transgender troops and beards and testosterone levels should be able to shoot down even a “swarm” of such drones with World War II and Vietnam era anti-aircraft guns. But did we have batteries of such anti-aircraft weapons around Royal Air Force Base Fairford, from which we have been flying bombers for the last six or seven decades? No. Did we have any of our latest technology anti-drone weaponry that is supposed to be capable of shooting down Shahed-style Iranian drones, the kind that use a motorcycle engine to power a delta-wing aircraft armed with about 100 pounds of explosive? No.
Why. The. Fuck. Not.
Because Hegseth fired the generals and the Secretary of the Army who were trying to drag the Pentagon into the 21st Century and get it focused on the kind of drone warfare that is taking place in Ukraine at this very minute, a form of war that is killing and wounding, at last count, about 1,500 Russians a week and destroying hundreds of their combat and resupply vehicles. Russia is doing the same thing albeit less effectively against Ukraine. Hegseth fired General Chris Donahue, who commanded Army forces in Europe and Africa and was focused on studying Ukraine’s use of drones against Russia. Hegseth forced out Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, who had supported Donahue and other generals who were involved in modernizing the army’s warfare capabilities using AI-powered aiming and tracking technology that Ukraine has already been employing against Russia. He fired General David Hodne, who commanded the Army Transformation and Training Command, which did exactly what its name says – modernized weaponry and trained soldiers to use it.
It may sound a little counterintuitive, but responsibility for air defense of the U.S. military resides with the Army, not the Air Force or Navy. The Army has an entire branch, Air Defense Artillery, devoted to that task. So, if we were a sane country with a sane military leadership, we would have had army soldiers defending Air Force bombers in Great Britain.
But we didn’t. Nor did we have adequate air defenses around the more than a dozen U.S. bases in the Gulf region that Iran successfully attacked with drones and missiles in the early days of the war. You will recall that all those bases have been abandoned because we could defend them from Iran’s drone and missile attacks during the war and cannot defend them even today.
It’s bad enough that we couldn’t defend bases that were only one Persian Gulf away from Iran, most of them within a couple hundred miles. But an Air Force Base nearly 3,000 miles away? Stocked with the most expensive combat aircraft the U.S. has? We couldn’t defend that base, and Iran doesn’t even have missiles capable of flying that far.
So, what was the threat to our bomber base in Great Britain, anyway? Well, it appears that Trump and Hegseth and Vance and the rest of the macho men who pretend they are Great Warriors in command of “the most powerful military in the world” were afraid of the five men with the three white vans and a sixth man who was arrested later – none of whom have been identified, but all of whom have been released from police custody. That’s who they were afraid of.
It took Ukraine months of careful planning by dozens, perhaps hundreds of their intelligence and combat specialists to carry out the drones-launched-from-trucks attack on Russian bombers. Ukraine had to smuggle the trucks across the Russian border. They had to make them appear to be Russian delivery trucks or something like that. They had to have spies on the ground in Russia to make sure the tops of the trucks opened properly, and the drones took off and flew away to strike their targets.
Let me put this as plainly as I can. Five men and three vans ain’t that. Iran does not have the capability of smuggling tractor trailers or delivery-style trucks through the entirety of Europe, crossing multiple borders, and through tunnels or aboard ferries across the English Channel into Great Britain. Iran could not have carried out that kind of attack.
But six “terrorists,” as Vance called them yesterday, may have been capable of carrying out some kind of drone or suicide attack on the U.S. bomber base.
That is what they’re afraid of. Six guys and three vans, which by the way contained nothing at all. No explosives. No timers. No detonators. Zip. Zero. If the British had found such explosives in the vans, those six men would still be behind bars.
But the men are back on the street, presumably under intense surveillance, and our 12 bombers are safely back in Kansas or wherever we keep them in the United States. The bombers, right now, as I write this, are sitting on the tarmac of bases on the U.S. mainland with no more air defenses than the British base had.
I said it before, but this madness demands I say it again: What is wrong with this picture?
I’ll tell you what’s wrong. All these nincompoop idiots in their red ties and their blue suits and their government armored cars and big, fancy government aircraft to ferry them around…every single one of them is a self-satisfied, abjectly unqualified, inept, fool who should not be within a hundred miles of a military command. Can you imagine being one of the 18 soldiers in the Middle East who was killed or one of the more than 400 who were seriously wounded by Iranian drones and missiles these idiots were unprepared to defend against?
What were they thinking? That they would fire a whole bunch of missiles and drop a shitload of bombs on Iran, and they wouldn’t fight back? What kind of political or military leader starts a war on that premise? Because we’re so powerful and we’ve got such a huge navy and so many high-tech cruise missiles and so many big, super-fast heavy bombers and stealth fighters, we can just do what we want to other countries and not worry that the entire world, starting with Ukraine and fanning out from there, has moved on from attacking with artillery and bombers and troops on the ground, and now they’ve got thousands of people looking at screens with little thumb-controllers and AI-aided guidance and targeting information flying drones hundreds and even thousands of miles and beating the living shit out of the big guys.
Ask Russia. How are your refineries looking these days, Vladdy? Oh, you had to get out your phone and dial-up your pal Donny and ask him to call Ukraine and tell them to lay off hitting your refineries because of high diesel prices? Is that what you just said? You mean little Ukraine, that you say isn’t even a country, that was so weak you were going to take them over a long weekend back in 2022? That Ukraine? You mean to tell me they’ve got drones that can hit your oil infrastructure in Siberia now?
The rest of the world is living in an entirely new era, one driven by AI and cheap weaponry that can be built in underground factories, drones and inexpensive missiles that can hit targets with an accuracy of 50 feet. The new missiles Ukraine has started firing at the supply areas of Russia’s combat units and at refineries and even their Walmart-style ruble-marts – those things cost about $600,000 to build, about a third to half the price of the equivalent U.S. short range missile, the ATACMS. They are working on a cruise missile that will cost a third of what an American Tomahawk costs. Later this year, Ukraine will have a ballistic missile that can reach Moscow and will carry a warhead weighing more than 500 pounds.
And oh, by the by, Hegseth and Trump et. al. are such grand military planners and tacticians, we are close to running out of our supply of ATACMS and Tomahawk missiles, having wasted most of our stockpile firing them at our enemy, Iran, while Iran was firing $35,000 drones at our bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and Oman and Iraq and causing us to cut and run with our tails between our legs.
So, you wanted to know what’s the whole deal with flying all our big B-1 bombers home from their base in Great Britain? Same old same old. Hegseth is out there in the Pentagon parking lot doing pushups with his no-beardos-no-dudes-in-dresses troops, while six guys in three vans are making us leave an airbase in Great Britain that we have used since we flew bombers out of there during World War II.
Perhaps poetically, that’s about where we’re at. We’re still flying B-17’s, and everybody else is flying drones.
