Before the end of the weekend, the US military base in the Middle East made big news again.
According to CCTV News, citing FOX, CNN and other media reports in the United States, on January 28, local time, a suicide drone attack occurred at a US military base in Jordan. According to information obtained by the media from the US Central Command, the attack has killed three US troops and injured more than 40, and the number is expected to increase. It is unclear who was responsible for the attack at this point...... It is not clear what the follow-up will be...... It is also unclear what the United States will do in response.
How to view the attack on the US military base
In Ivan's view, the attack on the US military base in Jordan is really a house leak that happened to rain overnight for the United States and the US military, which can be divided into several levels:
The National Guard transports tanks and infantry fighting vehicles by rail to the Texas border
From the perspective of the entire United States, this week, the conflict between the state government of Texas and the federal government of the United States because of the management of the border area continues to ferment. The latest news is that the federal government has shown signs of mobilizing the armed forces, and at the same time, Biden has also choked Texas' natural gas exports, which has actually formed economic sanctions against Texas.
The Biden administration originally wanted to concentrate on solving domestic problems first, giving some benefits to the Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives, and seeing if they could reach a consensus, so as not to make it so ugly, but I didn't expect that the matter in Texas has not stopped, and the Middle East has made another three US military deaths.
The Republican Party lost no time in jumping out, here Trump's "yin and yang weirdness" Biden is messing around in the Middle East, so he shouldn't care about these in the desert, and Graham, the Republican bigwig, accused Biden of being too weak and strongly demanded that the heavenly soldiers go down and raise Iran. In fact, openly and secretly, everyone is pointing the finger at Biden, and when such a big thing has already happened in the United States, everyone is desperately mixing with each other's ghosts, which is a mess.
And from the perspective of the US Middle East strategy, Big Ivan's current feeling, the US Middle East strategy, can be described in three words, non-stick. To put it simply, it is "both, want, and want, more, must, and all of them...... But they don't want to pay too much price, they still have to support Israel, they still want to maintain the face of the United States in the Middle East, and they also want to maintain the petrodollar to ensure that the global hegemony of the United States does not collapse.
To put it more simply, it is that it does not want to end, but it does not want to pay the price of not ending, and the result is that the more the United States does not want to end up in the Middle East, the more it is dragged into the quagmire of the Middle East. From the beginning of unconditionally and brainlessly siding with Israel, to recklessly firing at the Houthis, and now finally causing a murder case, it can be said that the current US Middle East strategy has been an extreme failure, offended almost everyone, and is far from achieving its intended strategic goals.
Finally, judging from the current battlefield situation and tactical situation facing the United States in the Middle East, it is even more unfavorable, and judging from the current attack on the US military base in Jordan, it is not even clear who attacked it after the attack. Of course, it goes without saying that there must be an arc of resistance militia behind it, but which faction came out to fight? Whether it is the Iraqi Shiite militia, the Syrian tribal militia, or the recent series of resistance groups in Jordan, Palestine, and the Sinai Peninsula, and so on, the United States itself is at a loss.
If you want to deal with it, how do you deal with it? They are not a state or even a political entity at all, but a very loose and decentralized organization united by basically the same political demands. What's more, these organizations are deeply rooted in Middle Eastern society, and if you kill some people, more people will immediately come up to fill the position, and even if you knock out one organization, there are many more organizations that you need to deal with.
The US military machine is of course very powerful in the face of inter-state wars, but in the face of such armed organizations that are like flowing water and air, it is inevitable that there is a confusion that "the 40-meter broadsword does not know where to cut." After all, can your broadsword cut through flowing water, can your cannon blast the air away, and now Graham and others are clamoring for the United States to directly attack Iran, in a sense, they have seen the core of the problem, but the United States really wants to fight Iran, guess how many countries in the world have to wake up laughing in the middle of the night, how is this possible?
From the perspective of the tactical situation, this drone attack is a wake-up call for the US military, that is, these armed militias in the Middle East have the ability to make the US military see blood. Judging from the US military base that was attacked, it is said to be located in the border area between Jordan and Iraq, codenamed Tower-22. Judging from the satellite map, this base is located on the side of the highway from Iraq to Syria through Jordan, and the area of the base is not large, only a few hundred meters from north to south, east and west, and there are no complete air defense facilities.
To go into more detail, this is a devil's turret, more than enough to deal with Arab militia units that lack heavy offensive equipment such as heavy artillery and tanks, and can only maneuver on foot or in Toyota pickup trucks, and in such combat conditions, the base is almost impregnable. But now, the Shiite militia have obviously learned a hand, don't I don't have a pickup truck, don't I don't have heavy artillery, it's the same when I get on a drone! The drone carries dozens of kilograms of explosives, and its lethality is no less than your precision-guided bomb, and my drone is also very cheap, you can save one for a few thousand dollars, the cost is not too big with your shell, and the key is that it also has its own precision strike function.
And a small US military base like Tower-22, it is obviously impossible to put a complete air defense system in a base, otherwise the cost is too high, and this air defense system itself will become the target of the militia, and it will be enough to set up a mortar and bombard two guns at that time. Therefore, the emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and cruise missiles is equivalent to giving the militia the ability to attack these small US military bases and carry out personnel killing, which does not need to be high.
How the U.S. military will act next
After the attack on the US military base in Jordan, what the United States will do next is the focus of attention. As we write this, the latest news comes that the U.S. Military Transportation Command has begun to mobilize air tankers to the Middle East. And rumors began to circulate on American social networks that the Biden administration was going to make the "most important decision", as well as news that Iran's air defense forces were starting to enter combat mode, Iran continued to seize oil tankers from Western countries in the Persian Gulf, and so on.
Big Ivan's point of view, at present, for the United States, it is really not a fight, it is not a fight, it is not a dilemma, and it is completely set up in this place. After all, if we want to say that the United States really starts fighting, who will it fight, and will it fight the local armed militia? As we have analyzed earlier, it is useless to fight, and the 40-meter broadsword of the United States was not originally designed to deal with this kind of militia, and if you finish beating people in one wave, it will only create more, more troublesome, and more determined resistance forces, so it will not solve the fundamental problem by fighting in vain. Guess if countries like Russia will say, I'll wait for you this day, guess if the chaos in the Middle East will spill over further, and guess if Iran's ballistic missiles will appear in southern Lebanon, and really get to Tel Aviv in 400 seconds?
At present, the United States has deployed an ARG (Amphibious Readiness Group) in the Mediterranean, and it also has to take into account the situation between Russia and Palestine and Israel at the same time; there are two CSGs (Aircraft Carrier Strike Groups) on standby in the coastal waters of the United States, and one CSG in the Red Sea to deal with the Houthis, and the remaining two CSGs and one ARG are all deployed in East Asia to avoid problems in North Korea during this period. If the United States really wants to deal with Iran, guess how many CSGs and ARGs can be mobilized to help, and guess whether there will be pus in other hot spots around the world after mobilizing so many mobile troops? There is no doubt that this is a high probability event, so the current situation is obvious, the empire is already old, and if something happens in one place, it will happen in other places, and it can't be covered.
And if the United States really doesn't fight, then this matter will be settled? Obviously, it won't work, people have already bombed your base, and this time they have already exploded, killing people, and you are still pretending to be ostriches in the back? Then, believe it or not, people will dare to throw ballistic missiles and other weapons of mass destruction directly into your base? So for the United States, the current situation is that if you can't open this punch, the next hundred punches will definitely follow, but this punch is going to be hit, how to fight, who should be hit, I'm afraid that the Americans themselves don't know the bottom now. Although the fleet of tanker aircraft has been sent to Europe, what kind of measures the United States may take next, and what kind of air strikes in the end, will be left as it is, Big Ivan thinks that it will be necessary to see again.
In fact, in the final analysis, isn't it because Israel has created a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip and refused to implement the 1967 resolution to allow Palestine to establish a state? But we still say the same thing: Does the United States still have the ability and courage to make such a decision? Obviously, it can't, so it can only go this way, and there will be no turning back on the road of destruction.