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Radio War Nerd EP #438 — Iran-Israel Air Wars (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-16 23:20:18
Imported:
2024-04
Tags:

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Content

Recorded: April 16, 2024

The War Nerd & Ames break down Iran's weekend drone-missile attack on Israel, and make the mistake of trying to guess what comes next.

FIRST: We chat about home drones, Trump's Gettysburg Address & parrots...

AT 22:51 —  We discuss Israel's April 1st bombing of Iran's embassy in Damascus and Iran's drone-missile response...

AT 1:01:04 — Music interlude by Brendon Anderegg. Check out his band Mountains here. 

AT 1:03:30 — We make some bad predictions about Israel's response...

Total time: 1:19:09

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Files

Comments

PostmasterFenian

Gary Brecher enters the drone age! very timely i look forward to listening to this. I still think you guys should have a hardware expert on (or maybe multiple over two or three eps) to discuss Chinese and Iranian missle tech. TP Huang is one of the few people who fits the bill in that he has a lot of technical expertise and is fluent in mandarin. Another good option would be Lyle Goldstein who spent most of his career teaching at the US Naval Academy and specializes both in Chinese military capabilities as well as emerging nuclear powers initial breakout period. Finally Theodore Postol would be another great option given his work at MIT, NORAD and the pentagon (cribbed all these sources from manifold one).

NYCM&AHole

Really hoping part 2 of Kursk was pre taped and I don’t have to wait for schedules to align for it.

Michael S. Judge

Trump famously has somebody make condensed movie edits for him – on his 2016 campaign, he apparently spent most airplane time watching a version of Jean-Claude Van Damme's BLOODSPORT that was fight scenes only

William

I thought I had read the cost was around 20k, not 200k, but I also don’t remember where I read that. Sounds like some helicopters need to get outfitted with flak guns or something

NYCM&AHole

That rules. I hope they dubbed it over with the song kung fu fighting

William

It’s out of character for sure, but I’d love to hear that John started to do surgical airstrikes on noisy neighbors by suicide droning the grill, or the stereo system, etc

CR

When doing an accounting of Israeli defense spending, the money quote is from Carl Reiner in The Slums of Beverly Hills. "If he pays the check, it's still me."

Sean Atkinson

More evidence that the primary role of the US armed forces is to money launder the cash printed by the Fed directly into Pentagon suppliers pockets. That it does very well. The secondary objective is to pose as a military operation. That it does well too. Its objective is not to "win" wars.

Patrick Reilly

I suspect that the Iranians and (at least the Russians as well) gathered treasure troves of ELINT and SIGINT in their recent aerial feints. Israel (and the U.S. at least) would not have pulled any punches. So future defensive moves will be much more easily countered.

xnfec

Does anyone know who much all this is costing? At the moment, it looks like the Iranians are sending over flying rocks and the West is responding with giant, flaming bags of money.

Hilary is Pant-suited Syphilis

I feel like the Israeli response to the counter attack will be a massive escalation because the stupidest, most bigoted and insane people are now fully in control of all levers of power in Israel. The Americans must be telling them how much damage Iran could do if they really wanted, but my guess is that is falling on deaf ears and the Americans aren’t setting any red lines so it’s only emboldening the yahoos.

NYCM&AHole

This was a great episode, but i was hoping it was Kursk pt 2 when I saw “new war nerd episode”

Karl Childers

yeah parrots make me nervous as hell, those beaks are POWERFUL and those fuckers might even be smart enough to steal my identity online for all i know. all corvids are cool tho

Karl Childers

most estimates i've seen of hardware expenditure in this exchange were about $1.2 billion for USrael and about $200 million for Iran. but i'm not sure if economic attrition can ever be effective against a nation whose entire economy is predicated on bloated military industry contracting. remember that under capitalism the goal is to set as much money on fire as possible. what actually matters here are quantities of hardware in the theater and rates of replacement. i don't think the production rate on advanced interceptors is fast enough to keep up with sustained attacks like this one, but for that math to come into play a full scale regional war would have to have already started.

Randy Long

I totally agree. I think this spins out of control

ploob

John 'accidentally' describing hunter killer drone from Dune 🫢

John Waaben

I’ve seen crows play “keep-away” with a flattened potato-chip bag before. They have a real sense of fun and curiosity.

Karl Childers

one time at a public pond i saw a crow that was quacking like a duck -- it seemed to have figured out that people gave bread to ducks but not crows, so it taught itself to quack and let me tell you that crow was getting ALL the bread

Doug Cartel

As we all know, he shouted this as he ran towards Little Big Top, waving his arms trying to get the troops' attention

Doug Cartel

I would assume Mediaite is just doing what they're told. The editor goes "figure out a good anti-trump angle for this boring sound byte" and the best they can do is "he used a positive adjective to describe Gettysburg, we can turn that into him being some kinda war junkie" Israel has a 10:1 over Hezbollah as far as airstrikes and kill count goes, so it is kinda funny that the settlers are still to afraid to go back and try to steal more land

Adam Murphy

With Republicans in control drones will blare Ride of the Valkyrie. With Dems it will be a loop saying 'I see you. I hear you. This hurts me more than it hurts you' before launching Hellfire missiles.

Christopher Small

Thanks for the three episode blitz. I enjoyed the Sudan episode and appreciate that you’re trying to keep on top of the rapid pace of development. You know what would be a good topic to cover would be how the lessons learned in the Iran-Iraq war shaped Iran’s current military doctrine, because it’s really coming back around when you think of, say, the war of the cities, the tanker war, or the surprise capture of the Al Faw peninsula as a model for infiltration tactics. Alternately, it’d be interesting to do a deep dive into the IRGC in Iranian civil society, which as John pointed out is a path for lower class people to climb the ranks. It's not just the military, but the government and civil service as well. In a lot of ways it's kind of a long term project on the part of conservatives to create a more friendly bureaucracy/political class for them

J P 3

Biden's unconditional support for the Netanyahu government is really the biggest risk at this point as far as a regional war is concerned. I know Netanyahu is not an outlier in terms of his hawkishness, but the sense that I get is that the other leaders -- Gantz, Lapid, et al -- will have a much more collaborative approach with the U.S. and the Biden administration in particular. If the U.S. government is telling Israel to put the brakes on, they will put the brakes on. Netanyahu is more inclined to take the initiative, and ask for forgiveness later and he knows that Biden is an enabler. If the Netanyahu government thought they might have to go it alone against Hezbollah or Iran, I suspect we would see a lot more restraint on their part. With Biden the only real challenge is just to find a sufficient pretext and provocation to get the "correct" response out of Hezbollah and Iran first.

Josh Link

I actually did go to a movie in between the drones being launched and when they arrived with time to spare.

Demented Avenger

Mark's description of how the Israeli military operates can really just be summarized in his usual phrase about them: they're meatheads.

William Brame

I think they will go after the president of Iran. They have to do something worse than what they did to initiate Iran’s attack

Aiden

Thank you

Adam Murphy

I've seen a few places mention 7 hypersonic missiles were fired by Iran and none of the 7 were destroyed by Israel or the US. I have a hard time believing 7 were fired due to the astronomical cost of hypersonic missiles, but if 7 were fired and all 7 did evade air-defense systems then that would be quite the deterrent to escalation.

J P 3

Iran has claimed to have developed a hypersonic missile, but it does not sound like these were used in the attack on Israel. e.g.I have read that it was a Shahab-3, which has been around for 20 years (likely an update version).

PostmasterFenian

you'll get your slop in due time hog calm down

NYCM&AHole

Lol I’m not complaining just saying how excited I am for pt 2 of Kursk.

Jonathan Penn

Another fine episode on a breaking news item. As many listeners doubtless remember, US attempts to build an ABM system in the sixties/seventies (the Spartan/Sprint duo) ran up against what may be a law of missile warfare almost as unbreakable as the laws of thermodynamics- it is a lot cheaper to toss a missile at something than it is to catch that missile. It is a lesson every military seems to need to learn for itself but the truth, which you wisely pointed out in the conversation, is that it cost Israel and the US a heck of a lot more money to intercept these drones and missiles than it did to build and fire them. I would not be surprised if many of these drones and missiles had their warheads removed before launch, making the discrepancy even greater. Although Clausewitz is over-quoted, the line that war is politics by a different means is applicable here. And if one remembers that economics was often labeled political economics in early texts on the subject, the high cost of defense versus offense takes on another dimension. Iran can keep throwing unarmed cheap drones at Israel for a lot longer than Israel can afford to keep knocking them down. I doubt Biden understands this. As I haven't heard the fat lady sing yet, I very much doubt that this is over. Keep up the great work!

Connor

I know times are rife and you guys don't like talking about WW2, but I'd be interested in an ep or series about Yugoslavia in WW2. The eastern front is not studied well in America, but I think the partisans in Yugoslavia are studied even less.

Nic Bodiford

Mark, you just let him get by without commenting on “closet of forgotten adult toys”?