Tag: iran

Iran strike destroys $300M U.S. E-3 Sentry radar aircraft at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia

An Iranian missile strike on a base in Saudi Arabia reportedly destroyed a $300 million U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry, a loss analysts suggest could compromise the military’s ability to detect long-range threats.

The E-3 Sentry — an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) — was one of six units stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base before Friday’s attack. These aircraft are critical for spotting incoming missiles and coordinating complex airstrikes.

At least 10 American service members were injured during the strike on the facility, located approximately 80 miles southeast of Riyadh.

While 16 E-3s remain in the U.S. fleet, a significant portion of them are not currently mission-ready. Notably, this incident marks the first time an AWACS has been destroyed in combat. By Monday, defense analysts were raising urgent questions regarding how such a high-value asset was left vulnerable to the Iranian strike.

“Extraordinary measures are often taken to protect it from hostile enemy fire while in-flight. Sometimes it receives fighter escorts and is never allowed to overfly hostile territory in order to keep it safe,” said military analyst Cedric Leighton.

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, argues that the U.S. should have anticipated such an escalation and better prepared for a prolonged conflict. He emphasized that the military should have bolstered defenses for permanent installations, particularly in a theater where the adversary possesses extensive inventories of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones.

Conversely, Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, expressed a more measured view, warning against underestimating the potential for internal damage within Iran. Ozcelik suggested that at this stage of the conflict, observers should remain cautious and avoid overstating the actual extent of the damage sustained by U.S. forces.

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Beneath the Big Lie About Iran – An Economy That’s Been Shrinking for 50 Years

At some point it is wise indeed to pay heed to the numbers – and that’s overwhelmingly true with respect to the battling narratives about the Donald’s Iran War now raging in the Persian Gulf. The fact is, the Iranian “threat” is almost entirely an ideological and political sham confected by Bibi Netanyahu and his neocon fifth columns on the banks of the Potomac.

They would have you believe that Iran is some kind of super-Evil Empire that is a military threat to the whole world, including way over here 10,000 kilometers from Tehran.

We beg to differ. Completely. And Defiantly, Too.

At the end of the day, a realistic, deliverable, sustainable military threat to the Homeland territory of America – the only valid reason for military action by a peaceful Republic – must necessarily be anchored in a robust economic base of GDP. That’s the only place from which the advanced technology, professional military manpower, abundant tax revenues and other economic resources needed to support a massive War Machine can be obtained.

Yet without massive defense budgets and weaponry – both a nuclear first strike capacity and an overwhelming conventional armada of invasion and occupation – no nation on planet earth would have the capacity to threaten America. Not way over here inside the safe harbor of the great Atlantic and Pacific Moats.

Based on the hard economic data for the last 53 years, therefore, one thing is crystal clear: When it comes to the economic girth needed to support a true military threat to US citizens on American soil from sea-to-shinning-sea, Iran is, was and always has been a Flyspeck.

And, ironically, Washington’s decades of brutal economic warfare against Iran has drastically weakened its economic strength relative to that of the US, even as it has solidified the rule of the religious mullahs, who’s theocratic regime has further throttled Iran’s economy.

Thus, back on the eve of the oil crisis in 1973 and notwithstanding 20-years of the Shah’s systematic larceny, US GDP was only 8.4X that of Iran. Likewise, Iran’s respectable real GDP per capita of $13,239 was nearly half that of the USA at $28,500.

At the time, the Iranian $410 billion economy ($2025 USD) was also the most robust in the middle east by a long shot. Stated in 2025 USD, the Iranian economy was orders of magnitude larger than any of its regional rivals:

1973 Real GDP In 2025 $:

  • Iran: $410 billion.
  • Saudi Arabia:$170 billion.
  • Egypt: $130 billion.
  • Israel:$75 billion.
  • Syria: $30 billion.
  • Jordan: $10 billion.

But that’s all she wrote. For nearly the entire past half-century the girth of Iran’s economy has been steadily and relentlessly shrinking relative to that of the United States. Accordingly, there is now (2025) a staggering difference in the final column, which measures the real GDP of the US in 2025$ versus that of Iran. Today that crucial ratio now stands at 35.4X or more than four times greater than it was in 1973.

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Yes, Iran Is Playing Chess – But Only After Rewriting the Rules of the Game

The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework: the shah (king), the rokh (rook), and shatranj, the modern chess game.

This is not a trivial historical detail. It is, in many ways, a metaphor that has returned with force.

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, political discourse – across Western, Israeli and alternative media – has repeatedly invoked the analogy of chess to describe Iran’s conduct.

The comparison is seductive. But it is also incomplete.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated this framing as early as May 2012. Speaking of Iran’s negotiating posture, he said that “it looks as though they see the talks as another opportunity to delay and deceive and buy time… Iran is very good in playing this kind of chess game, and you know sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn to save the king.”

That statement was not merely rhetorical; it revealed a long-standing Israeli interpretation of Iran as a strategic actor operating within a calculated, long-term framework.

More than a decade later, that framing has resurfaced with renewed urgency. Analysts, policymakers and commentators now routinely describe Iran’s actions as deliberate, layered and patient – defined not by immediate gains, but by positional advantage accumulated over time.

Some observers contrast this with what they perceive as a fundamentally different approach in Washington: one driven by immediacy, spectacle and the politics of rapid outcomes.

But such a contrast, while tempting, risks oversimplification.

Iran’s approach is rooted in historical continuity. It understands the current war not as an isolated confrontation, but as the latest phase in a decade-long process of pressure, containment and confrontation.

In this sense, the battlefield is not defined by days or weeks, but by political cycles measured in years – if not generations.

The objective of its adversaries, however, has remained consistent: Shāh Māt – checkmate – the dismantling of the Iranian state as a coherent political entity.

Yet this is precisely where the central miscalculation emerges.

When the Iranian Revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979, the collapse of the system was swift and decisive. But it was not the result of external pressure. It was the inevitable outcome of a structurally brittle system.

That system was vertical – organized as a rigid hierarchy with power concentrated at the apex and legitimacy flowing downward. When the apex collapsed, the entire structure disintegrated.

If the people are the piyādeh – the pawns – then in that moment, they did not merely encircle the king; they overturned the entire board.

This experience helped shape a strategic doctrine that would later define US and Israeli military thinking: the belief that removing leadership – what is often termed “decapitation” – can trigger systemic collapse.

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Trump, Israel React to France Blocking U.S. Planes From French Airspace

American and Israeli leaders excoriated the cowardly, treacherous French government for preventing American airplanes from flying through the country’s airspace with military supplies for beleaguered Israel.

As the Iranian regime continues to fire at civilian targets in Israel and other nations, and as the United States and Israel take on the world’s worst terror-sponsoring regime (Iran’s), French President Emmanuel Macron and his government are determined to be on the wrong side of history. 

Donald Trump pulled no punches. “The Country of France wouldn’t let planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory. France has been VERY UNHELPFUL with respect to the ‘Butcher of Iran,’ who has been successfully eliminated! The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!” the president posted on Truth Social March 31.

The Israeli government immediately took action to punish the French government for their despicable decision. The Israeli Defense Ministry sent a statement to The Hill confirming:

The Director General of the Israel Ministry of Defense. Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amir Baram has decided to reduce all defense procurement from France to zero, replacing it with domestic Israeli procurement or purchases from allied countries.

France has taken a series of actions that have harmed Israel’s security and the operational capabilities of its defense industry…The Israel Ministry of Defense views the French government’s policy with serious concern, as it undermines security cooperation with Israel, a country that is actively operating on the front line against Iran and protecting the security of the Western world.

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Two Different Wars, Two Different Presidents, But the Same Lies

I’m writing this piece well into President Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least one billion dollars a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the U.S. into a war on a river of lies and greed. I’m thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.

I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn’t know how.

Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.

Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.

Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.

Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days — jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family — in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.

Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.

One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.

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US Mideast Allies including Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Others, Urge President Trump to Continue War on Iran

US Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia, UAE and other Gulf allies urge President Trump to continue war on Iran,

The US allies privately warned President Trump that Tehran has not been weakened enough.

The US Allies say four weeks of bombings has not been enough to destroy the barbaric Iranian regime.

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US Scheme to Seize Iran’s Uranium is Mission Impossible – National Security Expert

Any attempt by the US to capture and extract Iran’s sizeable stockpile does not appear feasible for several reasons, national security and political science expert Dr. Simon Tsipis tells Sputnik.

Iran’s uranium is stored in reinforced underground bunkers; reaching and breaching these vaults would be problematic, to put it mildly

Uranium is a hazardous substance that requires careful handling, and extracting several hundred kilograms — which Iran is believed to possess — would require a significant amount of specialised machinery and equipment

Any such operation is unlikely to go unopposed, and damage to a uranium container during loading could result in radioactive contamination of the surrounding area

Therefore, Tsipis argues, such an operation is unlikely to take place.

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US gas prices soar as Iranian attack hits Kuwaiti tanker off Dubai coast

Welcome to RT’s live coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran and the wider chaos across the Middle East and beyond that the unprovoked attack has caused. Overnight, there have been reports of significant strikes both on Tehran and the Jewish state. While in Dubai there are reports of loud explosions and a strike on a Kuwaiti tanker.

The price of oil has dropped by almost 1% on global markets, while Moscow has doubled-down on its refusal to sell oil and gas to unfriendly nations.

The Pentagon is set to hold its sixth press briefing since the start of the conflict a month ago, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine expected to appear before journalists later on Tuesday.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted on Monday that “a coalition of nations” would secure the Strait of Hormuz by force while Iran’s ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali spoke to RT’s Sanchez Effect and dismissed US President Donald Trump’s claims that Tehran is negotiating with Washington, saying that US and Israeli officials are “planning how to strike Iran” rather than seeking peace.

Trump has also claimed that his goal of regime change in Iran was achieved by killing the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the initial strikes on February 28. 

“The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead, and the third regime – we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before… it truly is regime change… you can’t do much better than that,” Trump said.

The new leadership in Iran is “very reasonable,” he said, claiming that he feels that a deal with Tehran could be reached “soon.”

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What damage has Iran inflicted on US military bases?

The tally of US military bases targeted in Iranian strikes continues to rise, with Washington acknowledging attacks across multiple countries. While Iranian military and media sources put the number of targeted bases at more than a dozen, the Pentagon is apparently doing its best to conceal the destruction.

Within hours of the US launching ‘Operation Epic Fury’ on February 28, Iran unleashed retaliatory strikes against American military bases across the Middle East, with US officials confirming a growing number of sites hit and the Prince Sultan base in Saudi Arabia emerging as a focal point of the campaign.

Behind a veil of censorship, it’s increasingly clear that the damage may be far more severe than the Pentagon is admitting.

The reported damage to high-value assets such as an E-3 AWACS aircraft and an F-35 fighter jet points to a broader pattern of Iran targeting US airpower and surveillance capabilities. An E-3 Sentry was reportedly damaged or destroyed in a March 27 strike on Prince Sultan Air Base. Earlier, a US F-35 was damaged during a mission over Iran and forced to make an emergency landing, while three US F-15E jets were shot down over Kuwait on March 2 in an apparent friendly fire incident, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said.

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Spain Closes Airspace to US Planes Involved in Iran War, Defense Minister Says

Spain’s government has closed its airspace to U.S. aircraft involved in the conflict with Iran, according to the country’s defense minister, Margarita Robles.

“It’s a very clear position: We are not going to authorize, as we have said at the beginning, the use of Morón and Rota bases for any act related to the war in Iran,” she told reporters ⁠in Madrid on March 25.

“And, of course, the use of Spanish airspace.”

That means that Madrid has banned fighter jets and refueling aircraft from using its bases and denied U.S. aircraft operating from third countries access to its airspace.

“This decision is part of the decision already ​made by the Spanish government not to participate in or contribute ‌to ⁠a war which was initiated unilaterally and against international law,” Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo told Spanish radio station Cadena SER when asked on March 30 whether the latest decision could ⁠worsen relations with the United States.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on March 25 in Congress that he would pursue such a course of action.

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