It’s a weekend, and time for a post. As you may have noticed, the site has undergone yet another renovation, leveraging some more sophisticated pages, as well as being moved from a static generated site to a hosted platform. The static site was great fun and a wonderful learning experience, but it was admittedly pretty plain, not due to technical limitations of the platform, or coding skill, but due to a lack of design creativity on The Dude’s part– it’s just outside of his normal area of expertise to make something pretty. Call it analysis paralysis, laziness, or whatever, the net result is this. All the legacy posts have been migrated, but without comments, just for historical purposes.

The US war with Iran is in full swing, and a F-15E Strike Eagle crew was just rescued some 200 miles inland in a daring raid. It isn’t clear how the plane was shot down originally, but it was in a location very close to where Iran holds ballistic missiles and their nuclear program, so it is safe to assume that it’s a more dangerous region of the country.

Speaking in general, it isn’t clear to The Dude what “winning” looks like here– and it appears at first blush that leadership doesn’t know either, changing the goalposts seemingly at a whim, and with a simplistic strategy of “blow ’em up good”. Regime change of a sort has already occurred, where the old Ayatollah as been replaced by his evidently even more extreme son, and the nascent protest movement that the US claimed to support has all but vanished.

The biggest challenge here appears to be now what to do with the Strait of Hormuz. It doesn’t appear that the United States had much of a plan going in, or had even considered what the goals should be here.

Even with all the firepower that has been expended in the region (roughly one billion $US per day by some counts, or 15 years of ordinance production in a little over a month) the Iranians still seem to have control of that waterway. Iran with a tollbooth role in the area isn’t in anyone’s best interest, except for Iran, who is relishing telling the US how big of a mistake they made starting the conflict.

The current administration’s position is that local governments and global partners who depend upon that energy supply need to step up and do something about it, while those same partners are telling the administration “You broke it, you bought it”.

Escorting the commercial traffic by US Navy warships is currently a disaster waiting to happen, as mines, drones, and short range (and extremely portable) missiles and rockets will make the transit a deathtrap. What is the solution? Hard to know. It’s unclear how many resources the US is really willing to commit to the solution, and “the art of the deal” doesn’t seem to be working.

Watching and patiently waiting in the background is China, taking notes as they prepare for their predicted military takeover of Taiwan.

Interesting times.