Iran has had a few critical setbacks on their quest for regional domination recently.
As Professor Jacobson reported, small Israeli copter-drones blew up key Iranian missile equipment in heart of Hezbollah stronghold.
Then on Thursday, a commercial satellite exploded on its launch pad.
Satellite imagery provided to Fox News suggests that an Iranian satellite launch this week failed quite spectacularly.The rocket blew up on its launchpad or shortly after launch.This is good news for the United States and regional security. Iran claims that its satellite program is peaceful and designed only to monitor the weather, but the reality is very different. Iran’s satellite program is just a cover for the regime’s development of a competent ballistic missile program. Because satellites are launched from Earth into a controlled orbit trajectory, they help Iran better understand how to get ballistic missiles onto their targeting course. smaller launch pad, and that it failed,” Dave Schmerler, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute told CNN.
Afterward, in perhaps the trolliest tweet in the history of Twitter, President Donald Trump shared an image of the aftermath of an accident and expressed his ‘sympathy’.
The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.
Of course, some pundits are clutching their pearls over the message.
But the image shown in the president’s tweet appears to be of far better quality, says Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, who specializes in analyzing satellite imagery. “The resolution is amazingly high,” says Panda. “I would think it’s probably below well below 20 centimeters, which is much higher than anything I’ve ever seen….Panda says that the tweet discloses “some pretty amazing capabilities that the public simply wasn’t privy to before this.”The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions about the image to the White House, which declined to comment.
Meanwhile, it is being reported that a secret cyberattack against Iran in June wiped out a critical database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm to plot attacks against oil tankers traveling in the Persian Gulf.
Iran is still trying to recover information destroyed in the June 20 attack and restart some of the computer systems — including military communications networks — taken offline, the officials said.Senior officials discussed the results of the strike in part to quell doubts within the Trump administration about whether the benefits of the operation outweighed the cost — lost intelligence and lost access to a critical network used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s paramilitary forces….Cyber Command has taken a more aggressive stance toward potential operations under the Trump administration, thanks to new congressional authorities and an executive order giving the Defense Department more leeway to plan and execute strikes.The head of United States Cyber Command, Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, describes his strategy as “persistent engagement” against adversaries.
The retaliatory strike by U.S. Cyber Command against the system was approved by President Trump, who that same day called off a military airstrike against Iran.
I strongly suspect that the Iranians have not recalibrated their approach to the US from how they dealt with the previous administration. Perhaps they will use these incidents as learning opportunities, for the sake of peace and the people of Iran.
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