Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 05:42
VIEWED: 15626
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Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons?
Allies that depend on U.S. military equipment need a Plan B.
By Phillips Payson O’Brien | August 3, 2026, 6:56 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/the-us-isnt-making-enough-we
apons/688150/
Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis. Since hostilities with Tehran began on February 28, the U.S. has reportedly used up two-thirds of its Patriot missile interceptors, more than a third of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, and a third or more of its prewar stock of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The rate of consumption is all the more striking because a shaky cease-fire had halted most fighting for months. Based on recent production patterns, replenishing the supply of weaponry will take several years.
Making America’s challenge still more daunting is a major shift in war-fighting technology toward cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf have been forced to use expensive, advanced air-defense systems—such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles that each cost millions of dollars and have a long production cycle—to shoot down Iranian drones that can be swiftly assembled for about $30,000.
The munitions shortfall doesn’t just affect the current war. It also sends a worrisome message to allies around the world: The United States has been caught off guard by the latest evolution of warfare and lacks the armaments-production capacity to adapt quickly. Suddenly, relying on American military technology looks far less reliable as a security strategy than it did before President Trump went to war with Iran. And in the long run, governments that counted on the United States to equip their military are going to need a Plan B.
In the short term, concerns about diminished weapons stocks are already limiting Washington’s strategic options. Because of his advisers’ concern about the adequacy of current supplies, Trump has reportedly been hesitant to escalate the war. If the United States decided to send ground forces into Iran on the scale necessary to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, defending those forces could exhaust the remaining stocks of advanced air-defense systems. After a short period, American troops would be far more exposed, and casualties far more likely.
Trump and his appointees during his current and previous terms bear only part of the responsibility for the current situation. The fundamental problem has been a bipartisan neglect of America’s military-industrial productive base over the past three decades. The United States allowed many of its strategic industries, such as shipbuilding, to wither. Its post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved brief invasions followed by years of relatively low-intensity counterinsurgency warfare that, whatever its difficulties, did not require mass stockpiles of munitions.
Informed by these experiences, military planners appear to have been operating under the assumption that future wars would be short and containable. If China attacks Taiwan and the United States wants to come to the island democracy’s aid, the Pentagon will not be prepared for a protracted war.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration has failed to learn from the war in Ukraine. Iran has learned to mass-produce cheap drones—ones that the Russians first imported and now produce themselves. In other words, their effectiveness had been tested, and their existence was widely known. But that seemed to make no difference to U.S. planners. Perhaps in the arrogant belief that a war with Iran would quickly end in a decisive victory, the Pentagon did not have cost-effective systems ready to intercept these weapons. Neither did the Gulf countries that have counted on American weaponry for their self-defense.
In contrast, Ukraine has proved remarka
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117023461141824050
The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to. This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat. Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL. The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment. Get to work, everybody, and get it DONE. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
And you believe that???
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:I believe Trump is promising what Trumptards want: a massacre.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And you believe that???
When a President Promises a Massacre
Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.
By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/
“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”
Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition,” a horror later retold as fiction in Joseph Conrad’s classic “Heart of Darkness.”
Trump may not advocate for such conspicuous atrocities, but his brand of warfare shares some of the key hallmarks of such unrestrained colonial extermination campaigns. To understand the magnitude of this horror which has mostly gone unacknowledged, take a trip with me into Trump’s own heart of darkness; an exploration of his world of wars that might best be described as a war of the worlds.
— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch
Channeling His Inner-Martian
As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.
Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump’s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter — colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.
“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!” Trump recently announced on Truth Social. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”
This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation — which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law — was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines, like “Trump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.” It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee by Hegseth and Caine.
Trump’s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen’s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania.
White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. “Thousands were hunted down lik
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Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Since when did you turn into REAVERFAN, SIX?
Don't be evil.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Since when did you turn into REAVERFAN, SIX?
Don't be evil.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
They don't need to die. They just need to leave.
The US and The EU.
If they die, that is their choice.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I believe Trump is promising what Trumptards want: a massacre.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And you believe that???
When a President Promises a Massacre
Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.
By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/
“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”
Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition
. . .
As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.
Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude.
Curiously, the remainder of the article fails to mention Israel's campaign of literal genocide (one of our proxies in western Asia), Saudi Arabia's terrorists (our other proxy in western Asia) and Saddam Hussein (our erstwhile chemical warfare-using proxy against Iran, before we killed him).
GENOCIDE AND SLAUGHTER IS NOTHING NEW IN AMERICAN POLICY.
Kissinger armed Sukarno, who killed an estimated 500,000-1 million Indonesians. Later, we supported Indonesia killing up to 300,000 in East Timor.
2 million people were killed in Vietnam.
Our sanctions against Iran killed an estimated 500,000 children; Madeline Albright thought it was "worth it".
Arming the Contras and arming and funding military tyrannies throughout S and Central America.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the way back to the genocide of North America's indigenous people.
There is hardly a place on the globe where we haven't rained death.
THIS IS NOT A FEATURE OF ONLY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION. He's just louder about it than other Presidents.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Signym, you are missing the point that Trump's threats of annihilating Iran are fake because of the reasons in the following article. Trump very much wants to annihilate Iran, but he can't unless he nukes Iran because he foolishly squandered America's non-nuclear arsenal.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
. . . GENOCIDE AND SLAUGHTER IS NOTHING NEW IN AMERICAN POLICY.
Kissinger armed Sukarno, who killed an estimated 500,000-1 million Indonesians. Later, we supported Indonesia killing up to 300,000 in East Timor.
2 million people were killed in Vietnam.
Our sanctions against Iran killed an estimated 500,000 children; Madeline Albright thought it was "worth it".
Arming the Contras and arming and funding military tyrannies throughout S and Central America.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the way back to the genocide of North America's indigenous people.
There is hardly a place on the globe where we haven't rained death.
THIS IS NOT A FEATURE OF ONLY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION. He's just louder about it than other Presidents.
How the U.S. Squandered Its Strategic Advantage.
Idle threats and munitions shortages have boxed Trump in.
By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire | August 6, 2026, 10:28 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/shortage-weapons
-shaping-war-iran/688201/
The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best, the defense officials told us.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week pleaded with Republicans on Capitol Hill for billions of dollars to replenish America’s dangerously depleted stockpiles of missiles and other crucial munitions. Hegseth’s appeal was nakedly partisan—he ignored Democratic lawmakers entirely—but also long overdue.
The Pentagon this year has awarded tens of billions of dollars in contracts to replenish those arsenals. But signing contracts is not the same as delivering missiles. Those contracts will produce munitions over the coming years, not the coming months. The Trump administration has invested in the defense industrial base to accelerate production, as did the Biden administration, but for crucial systems such as the Patriot, supply is not projected to meet demand until about 2030. Meanwhile, Iran has ramped up production of its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, and enhanced their capabilities. The war is now being shaped as much by industrial supply and logistics as by economic considerations and the politics of the midterms.
President Trump raged at the assessment his national-security team gave him at Camp David on Friday, which showed that the U.S. military was running low on the munitions that would be necessary for Trump to order an escalation against Iran, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told us. If the U.S. were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.
The president barked at aides and had some pointed words for the Department of Defense’s leadership. (He is not presently considering staff changes, a White House official told us.) Trump has grown frustrated at his inability to escape the stalemate of the war; he’s seething at its toll on the economy and is desperate to move on. In a post o
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So, to get back to Iran...
Trump can threaten and bluster all he wants, but in reality there isn't much he can do bc we've (apparently) nearly run out of ATACMS (short range offensive ballistic missiles) and have severely depleted our Tomahawk (long range subsonic cruise attack) missiles and Patriot (defensive) missiles. And sending in ships, men, or aircraft would be suicide.
Furthermore, Iran and Ansar Allah in Yemen maintain the capacity to stop all ships, destroy ports, and to devastate all regional nations that host American forces, including their desalination plants and oil/ gas production infrastructure.
So Trump is blasting out threats and bluster to cover up what is, in essence a defeat. Even at expedited production rates, it'll take YEARS for America to build up its stockpiles, and possibly longer since China severely restricted the rare earths and metals needed to make weapons.
And throwing money at weapons mfrs will only lead to higher profits, bc we have LONG-STANDING supply chain and deindustrialization problems that will take a decade or more of focused, diligent effort, not something Trump ... or any of our pols ... are noted for.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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I see we cross posted and, shockingly, we agree.
But I have the strange suspicion that the only reason you object to war with Iran is bc TRUMP started it, and if some Dem had done the same you'd be for it.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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