The footprints of the destroyed buildings are preserved as memorials, surrounded by the names of those killed, starting with the 1993 parking garage jihad.
The museum is nearly all underground:
The museum has a lot of touch screens:
A cornerstone plaque was preserved, dedicated to the thousands of legacy Americans who constructed the World Trade Center:
Generally speaking, the destruction and deaths that occurred at the site are attributed to motive-free “terrorists” with no relationship to any religion. Example:
A drawing from Alexandra, age 3, whose father was killed in the not-related-to-Islam attacks:
The remains of Ladder Company 3’s truck were preserved:
All 11 members of Ladder Company 3 were in the North Tower when it collapsed and all were killed.
One fight that New Yorkers will apparently never give up on is the struggle against SARS-CoV-2. More than five years after coronapanic began, the “one person per bench” rule still applies:
The gift shop reminds us that most of the heroes of 9/11 were female:
Some were Canine-Americans:
We are reminded that “Love is Stronger than Hate”:
A last look at a tower foundation:
A few steps away, it’s back to the average New York City streetscape:
The front page of the New York Times, exactly 25 years ago:
Some excerpts, not in quote style for readability (modern correction: the Langley-based F-16s arrived in D.C. closer to 22 minutes after the Pentagon impact):
The forces or ideas that transformed Mr. Atta are not clear. What is clear, however, is that two years ago his habits began to change. He requested a prayer room at the university for himself and 20 other Arab students. He grew a beard. He listed himself at the university under a different family name, el-Amirals.
Mr. Atta, who was registered in Germany as a native of the United Arab Emirates but appears on other documents as an Egyptian, was for most of his years in Germany an apparently secular man. Then ”something changed in him,” said one of his teachers, Alptekin Ozdemir, a Turk who has lectured at the university for 15 years and helps advise the foreign students there. Perhaps 40 to 50 of them are Arabs, out of a student body of 3,600.
Rescue workers in lower Manhattan carried body bags from piles of wreckage to refrigerated trucks. One worker said he had found the remains of people strapped into what seemed to be airplane seats. Another reported finding the body of a flight attendant, her hands bound.
But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation’s airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners’ having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
The 9/11/2001 jihad was 25 years ago. See A visit to the United Flight 93 crash site for last year’s post in remembrance. Today, though, we’ll look at the intersection between jihad and artificial intelligence.
The U.S. response to the explicitly Islamic attack on 9/11 was to declare that Islam was the “Religion of Peace” and that we would, therefore, use our military to try to find the, perhaps, 1 Muslim out of 10,000 that might be somehow involved in violence, contrary to all Islamic principles as we understood them. We would also expand Muslim immigration to the U.S. because, again, only 1 out of 10,000 might want to perpetrate a spectacular attack on Americans and it would be straightforward for our police state to find this tiny minority before anything bad happened.
The latest “silver bullet”, so to speak, in the “sift through what previously would have been called ‘the enemy’ one by one and occasionally arrest or kill someone” is to build a computer program that will sift through what previously would have been called “the enemy” one by one. In other words… Artificial Intelligence.
Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company’s involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.
The letter, which is circulating inside Google and has garnered more than 3,100 signatures, reflects a culture clash between Silicon Valley and the federal government that is likely to intensify as cutting-edge artificial intelligence is increasingly employed for military purposes.
Google eventually shut off the Department of Defense from its cloud services and abandoned the DoD as a video analysis customer. The exception to the globalist “we’d be just as happy to help China, Hamas, or anyone else” perspective was Palantir under Alex Karp‘s unabashedly pro-America leadership. The result of Karp being an outlier was that Palantir achieved the dominant contractor role for military AI software (Anduril is today a serious rival, however). After Palantir’s years of work, the Trump v2.0 administration was able to deploy the software to monitor people crossing the southern border, to help find suspicious boats to summarily sink, and to pick targets in our “slow-motion surrender to Iran” project.
The book is worth reading if you want to understand how warfare is being transformed and also just how cumbersome and inefficient the U.S. military is. Even today, despite Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump being all-in on AI, our military budget for AI is tiny compared to what we’re spending on legacy technology and personnel and on what commercial companies are investing in AI, e.g., to build data centers. (For most of the time period covered by the book, the AI budget was about 1% of what we’re spending on veterans, such as monthly checks to 100% disabled Graham Platner).
The author of Project Maven never questions the effectiveness of the “sift through a large civilian population, many of whom likely support the fighters, one by one” approach to warfare. Let’s step back, though, and consider whether this approach, including in its AI-enhanced form, leads to decades-long or centuries-long war. From New Yorker 2010, regarding the founder of modern nursing:
Humanitarianism also had a godmother, as Linda Polman reminds us. She was Florence Nightingale, and she rejected the idea of the Red Cross from the outset. “I think its views most absurd just such as would originate in a little state like Geneva, which can never see war,” she said. Nightingale had served as a nurse in British military hospitals during the Crimean War, where nightmarish conditions—septic, sordid, and brutal—more often than not amounted to a death sentence for wounded soldiers of the Crown. So she was outraged by Dunant’s pitch. How could anyone who sought to reduce human suffering want to make war less costly? By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable.
Nightingale (1820-1910) seems to have been amply proven correct by the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians”. They’ve stayed at war for more than 75 years, 100 percent of their basic needs (shelter, food, health care, education for as many children as they want to have, etc.) paid for by humanitarian aid. Yemen seems also to prove Nightingale correct. They’re 12 years into a civil war in which nobody has to concede defeat because Western aid keeps pouring in. No matter how many times subsets of Yemenis threaten or attack Western countries, none of these countries will follow the proven approach of flattening enemy cities and cutting off food shipments to the enemy (even if the Yemenis did not surrender, they’d have to concentrate on agriculture rather than war in order to avoid starvation) because… we have no enemies. We start from the assumption, never questioned, that 99.99% of Yemenis love everything about the West. The attacks on the West will stop when we have used our fancy technology, including AI, to find the 0.01% of Yemenis who aren’t our best friends.
With the rise of precision weapons and targeting policies that forbid significant harm to civilians, there is no reason for a civilian population to choose peace, especially when combined with a policy that anyone at war is entitled to massive shipments of humanitarian aid. Not everyone in a society will be brave enough to carry a rifle, of course, but there won’t be any downside to allowing those who do carry rifles to live in one’s apartment building, set up headquarters in the local hospital, store ammo in nearby schools, etc. The Germans and Japanese repudiated war for generations after they suffered a defeat by non-precision weapons. Civilians who can rely on the enemy’s AI refraining from killing women and children are civilians who can encourage and support their fighters for decades if necessary.
What would we have done after the 9/11 attack if we didn’t take this approach to fighting back and didn’t presume that everyone loves us except for perhaps a tiny percentage of some population? The question doesn’t make sense because, absent the idea that only a negligible percentage of Muslims support jihad, there almost certainly wouldn’t have been a 9/11 attack. After the 1993 World Trade Center jihad, we would have shut down immigration by Muslims, flights to Islamic countries, and temporary visas for most Muslims. Here’s how the 1993 jihad unfolded, according to Wikipedia:
Yousef arrived illegally in the United States on September 1, 1992, traveling with Ahmed Ajaj from Pakistan, though both sat apart on the flight and acted as though they were traveling separately. Ajaj tried to enter using a forged Swedish passport, though it had been altered and thus raised suspicions among Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport. When officials put Ajaj through secondary inspection, they discovered bomb-making instructions and other materials in his luggage, and arrested him. The name Abu Barra, an alias of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, appeared in the manuals. Yousef entered on a false Iraqi passport claiming political asylum, and was given a hearing date.
(Imagine a group of people dumb enough to run an immigration/asylum system that allowed a foreign soldier to stay in the U.S. long enough to attack the U.S. and then dumber enough to continue operating that immigration/asylum system even after the attack.)
Our response to both the 1993 and 2001 jihads was to expand the pool of potential jihadis resident in the U.S. (current Muslim population is three times the 1993 level) and legally visiting the U.S. (All of the 9/11 hijackers received visas to enter and stay in the U.S.; a handful of them overstayed their visas, but no effort was made to deport them.) We drew from a pool in which roughly one third of those polled said that the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. were either “somewhat,” “largely,” or “completely” justified (Gallup World Poll of Muslims; a respondent who answered that the 9/11 attacks were “mostly justified” was classified as a “moderate”).
We’ve had multiple domestic jihads already in 2026, all of them perpetrated by U.S. citizens (Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi; Mohamed Bailor Jalloh; Ayman Mohamad Ghazali; Ndiaga Diagne). The book was written before these jihads occurred, but the author cites Aimé Césaire’s “imperial boomerang” idea, in which technology developed to deal with a restive colony will eventually be deployed back home. In other words, Americans desperate to be safe will accede to the use of Maven-like technology domestically, e.g., to ingest all security camera footage and follow suspected attackers. It is unclear that this would have helped with all of the 2026 jihads. Only Mohamed Bailor Jalloh had ever been looked at by the FBI (he was actually imprisoned for eight years and then we were wise enough to release him back into U.S. civilian life rather than stripping him of the citizenship that we were wise enough to give him and deporting him to his native Sierra Leone; certainly there wouldn’t be any reason to update our laws so that people convicted of terrorism automatically had their naturalization reversed). Perhaps the answer will be to track all residents of the U.S. via a Maven-style AI. Cash will be outlawed so that any purchase of any material useful in making a drone or a weapon can be tracked. For drone ingredients, especially, whatever is purchased will need to have some kind of signature to make it possible to track a homebuilt drone weapon back to the buyer/builder. What if someone 3D-prints parts, you might ask? 3D printers will have to be outlawed for consumer ownership and/or include built-in reporting functions.
Monica Rodriguez Smith, killed in the 1993 World Trade Center jihad on what was supposed to be her last day of work before maternity leave:
(The death of her “child” was and is considered the result of a criminal act, yet a pregnant person at seven months of pregnancy today is able to receive abortion care in Massachusetts for any reason at all (one doctor’s judgment) and in New York if a health care provider determines that abortion care would improve the pregnant person’s “mental health”. The human who is subjected to abortion care is, in that circumstance, considered a “fetus” rather than a “child”.)
An MIT graduate school classmate:
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, [Danny] Lewin was stabbed by one of the hijackers, likely Satam al-Suqami, who was seated directly behind him. The Commission speculated that Lewin, being a veteran of the Israeli military, may have attempted to confront Atta or Omari, who had been seated in front of him, unaware that al-Suqami was sitting behind him.
The first victim of 9/11 was Danny Lewin. Born in Denver, raised in Jerusalem. Captain in Sayeret Matkal. Mathematician. Co-founder of Akamai – the company that still carries a huge share of the internet.
Twenty-five years ago at 10:03 am, United Flight 93 was crashed into a field after a struggle between four jihadis (from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia) and a group of passengers and flight attendants that included at least Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, and CeeCee Lyles.
The last portion of the CVR transcript, which ends with “Allahu Akbar”:
As I noted then, RIP especially to the crew: Lorraine Bay, Jason Dahl, Sandra Bradshaw, Wanda Green, LeRoy Homer Jr., CeeCee Lyles, and Deborah Welsh. Airline crews enable us to live richer lives by assuming a higher level of risk every day than those of us who earn our wages by flying desks.
I know that everyone here has tickets to visit The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (don’t forget to show ID if you want to pay the Illinois resident rate). While visiting this celebration of our greatest president, don’t forget to walk a few steps to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and see U-505, one of only two German U-boats captured and towed away by the Allies intact during WWII.
First, why did Ken Griffin abandon Chicago due to crime and disorder and then give the museum, renamed in 2024, $125 million? The gift was in 2019 and Griffin began moving during coronapanic and the mostly peaceful BLM protests of 2020. Proving just how wrong Griffin was about crime and disorder in Chicago, the police send three officers, each with a firearms and explosives-sniffing canine, to the museum all-day every day:
The sub, launched in 1941, is enormous (251′ long):
The torpedoes are also huge and, unlike U.S. WWII torpodoes, weren’t incompetently engineered. The German torpedoes were undersea Teslas, powered by batteries, and were guided by acoustic homing.
If you want to feel better about your job, the U.S. Navy guys who forced U-505 to surface off Cape Verde raced into the sinking vessel as soon as the Germans had evacuated. They expected 12 timed explosive charges to be set and also a massive pipe letting in seawater. Their heroism is explained in Codename Nemo. A big part of the solution, after the pipe hatch was closed and the timed charges were diarmed, was to let the propellers spin while the sub was being towed. This charged the batteries and, thus, enabled the sub’s own pumps to clear out the water.
After some years in now-tax-free New Hampshire, the sub was towed past Maine on her way to Chicago and they picked up some Graham Platner campaign items:
The museum also has a good exhibit, including original artifacts, of Enigma machines.
Capturing a submarine turns out to be a great way to start a birdwatching club:
What’s it like inside? Photos from the guided (by Jessie, who was awesome!) tour:
One thing that we learned on the tour: the U.S. violated the Geneva Convention by not allowing the captured crew of U-505 to send letters back home nor notifying their relatives that U-505 had been captured rather than sunk. The Red Cross was not allowed to visit the 58 prisoners in Ruston, Louisiana. We wanted to keep the June 4, 1944 capture a secret so that the Germans wouldn’t know that we had their codebooks, etc.
Where did the museum folks get the money to build an underground bunker big enough to preserve the submarine from the Chicago weather? From a foundation established by Robert R. McCormick, founder of the Chicago Tribute and famously opposed to U.S. involvement in Europe’s second huge war within one generation. The bunker celebrating U.S. involvement in WWII is named “the McCormick Tribute Foundation Exhibition Hall.”
You can spend an entire day in this museum. I’ll write some more about it.
Loosely related… the 2020 Tom Hanks movie Greyhound, about the poor chances that Allied convoys had of crossing the North Atlantic in early 1942.
They reminded us that the B-52, which first flew in 1952, was considered a temporary aircraft that would hold us until we had a full fleet of supersonic bombers. The requirements that turned into the B-1 (“B-ONE” or “Bone”) were first set forth in 1955. The B-1 evolved so slowly, changing from a very fast high-altitude machine to a barely-supersonic low-altitude machine, that Jimmy Carter, running for office in 1976, was able to promise to strangle it in its crib. During the Carter administration, the USAF managed to continue some testing of the prototype B-1s against Russian radar systems that Israel had captured in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. (Oshkosh is pretty much the opposite of New York City; speakers referred to “our friends in Israel” when mentioning various forms of military cooperation, e.g., Israel providing the U.S. with MiG fighters to seed a secret training and testing squadron in Nevada. Nobody enthuses about river-to-the-sea liberation, Queers for Palestine, or anything else that is sacred in the Mamdani Caliphate.) The B-1s got through much better than the B-52s.
The machine that first flew in 1974 (more than 50 years ago) is still in use today, e.g., as part of our gradual surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran (maybe Jimmy Carter was right; he surrendered to Iran in 1979 and if our foreign policy is to surrender to anyone tougher than Grenada then why do we need the B-1 or, indeed, an air force?).
The WSO (“Wizzo”) talked about bombing Iraq in 1973. Bombs and missiles are loaded into a rotating carousel and if conditions change, e.g., someone thinks there is a chance to drop a particular bomb on Saddam’s head, it is necessary to jettison other items in order to get to the desired munition. Here’s how this is loaded up:
A couple of B-1s made low passes, but none stopped to visit this year (2018 was the last time?).
It was common in airshows and talks at Oshkosh for those who’ve served in our military to be praised. Of course, a percentage of these folks exhibited remarkable bravery and took significant risks. Guess who didn’t receive any praise, though? The taxpayers who made it possible for the machines on display to be designed, built, and operated! Eighty percent of federal income tax receipts come from roughly 20 million tax returns (Tax Foundation). Even assuming that over half of these are joint returns, that’s just 10 percent of the U.S. population that is dumb enough to work and pay significant tax. Would it be so difficult to say “If you paid tax on more than $150,000 in income last year, thank you for your service and for enabling us to have F-35s, F-22s, B-1s, aircraft carriers, and all of the other amazing stuff that we’ve been using as part of our surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran”? Speaking of the F-22, here’s one parked at the FBO:
Circling back, so to speak, to the B-1… what is a likely role for the aircraft in a world of ever-more-advanced drones?
How much do attendees at Oshkosh love bombers? Have a look at the simulated bombs that are an essential part of every airshow at EAA AirVenture:
Somewhat related,
“The destruction of Germany’s great war industries was accomplished almost entirely from the air. No one can stand among their ruins without a feeling of awe for the devastating power of such attacks. The courage and skill of our pilots and their crews in these operations is legendary. They deserve the highest tribute of our people.”
— The Honorable Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War
Found on the cover of a book about the B-24 at the Aeromart within EAA AirVenture:
(We seem to have chosen the opposite approach with the Islamic Republic of Iran, i.e., allow them to continue as an industrial power and ask them nicely not to use their industry to make weapons.)
Boeing now takes credit for the B-1B, which was entirely developed and built by North American Rockwell. Boeing lost the design competition circa 1970 and acquired Rockwell in 1996, 22 years after the B-1’s first flight. What else does Boeing take credit for? At the Boeing pavilion’s gift shop, the Black Americans who won World War II:
ChatGPT, regarding the Tuskegee Airmen:
the display in your photograph is best understood as modern corporate and cultural messaging
they did not fly Boeing aircraft operationally (the Stearman was used for primary training, though)
No Tuskegee Airman officially qualified as an ace during World War II (vs. 1,279 non-Tuskegee pilots)
The group encountered enemy aircraft on only 35 of its 179 Fifteenth Air Force bomber-escort missions, partly because it entered that campaign relatively late, as German fighter opposition was declining.
Elsewhere on the field, we are informed that the “fearless” pilots who fly the B-29, an actual Boeing plane, were not the men who plowed through 16 hours of thunderstorms round-trip to Japan, but rather “fearless women” who operated the B-29 over the Continental U.S.
ChatGPT:
Many male test pilots, instructors and crews were already flying the B-29. [Enola Gay pilot Paul] Tibbets himself trained the women, and a male instructor or aircraft commander was involved in their qualification. The aircraft could not have been developed, tested and fielded otherwise.
The reluctance concerned a troublesome new aircraft, not a universal refusal by men to undertake danger.
The women were selected partly because Tibbets expected the gender comparison to embarrass reluctant male crews. The stunt depended upon the period’s assumption that a man ought to be ashamed if a woman undertook a flying risk he avoided.
Fresh out of a 7-year restoration in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, this sub-killing PBY Catalina is my pick for the most beautiful warbird of EAA AirVenture 2026:
(Also a very welcome sight in 1945 for sailors from the USS Indianapolis who were abandoned to exposure in the Pacific Ocean.)
The 35,000+ lb. plane belongs to the American Heritage Museum in Maskachusetts (their press release), but will live for a year at the EAA Museum in Oshkosh. Some details on the plane’s history:
Credit to the folks in New Smyrna Beach, Florida who handled the 7-year restoration:
In other seaplane news, as soon as we got to the EAA Seaplane Base, a 30,000+ lb. Grumman Albatross flew over our heads and splashed down. A bit later, a Grumman Mallard took off and then did a fly-by:
We encountered the plane on wheels a few hours later, back at KOSH, and the owner invited our boys to climb up into the cockpit and then down through a tunnel into the bow:
Any other fun warbirds? A Boeing B-52 in Boeing Plaza next to the Boeing pavilion:
A couple of B-1s flew by. Some additional aggression, but apparently not enough to stave off surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran:
The A-26 Invader and Al Franken:
EAA AirVenture also has some hardware related to potential civil war. Suppose, for example, that Ayatollah Mamdani’s Red Guards come to your house to arrest you for being part of the bourgeoisie. You might be able to flee down I-95 in the $465,000 BEC Defense Renegade APC, built on a Ford F-600 4×4 chassis:
It’s perfect for “family protection”:
If you prefer speed to armor, Piper is ready with a Corvette:
(Parked in front of the “Fury” makes sense since anyone in South Florida would be furious that this isn’t at least a Z06 version. 495 horsepower is insufficient for the trip to Publix.)
Just don’t try to flee the Mamdani Caliphate in a Joby. As in previous years, they showed up with something that does everything except fly:
One of the many interesting talks at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) 2026 was by James Schreiber, a U.S. Navy veteran-turned-IBM-patent-lawyer with a passion for seaplanes.
First, there is no reason that seaplanes can’t be part of a modern navy. The ShinMaywa US-2 is a four-engine monster with tremendous range in service with Japan (source):
Here’s the radius of search and rescue action:
Contrary to what we tell MIT students, a seaplane actually can land in real waves (up to about 10′ in this case):
(If the Canadians weren’t sending so many of their tax dollars to Hamas, they could have purchased water bombing versions of this magnificent 120,000+ lb. beast and preserved U.S. air quality.)
We learned that one of the most interesting periods of our U.S. Navy was the 1950s. The USAF had gained ascendancy in government and the doctrine was to destroy our enemies via strategic bombing from land-based airplanes, such as the then-new B-52 (considered a short-term solution at the time, a stopgap until the glorious age of supersonic bombers), and ballistic missiles. The Navy’s funding requests for new aircraft carriers were denied and, thus, the Navy tacked (so to speak) toward submarines and sea-based airplanes. The Navy had designs for jet-powered fighters, bombers, and transport seaplanes. The Convair F2Y Sea Dart is the most famous example, a supersonic fighter that first flew in 1953. For raining down destruction on our enemies (back when we actually wanted to win wars!), the Martin P6M SeaMaster first flew in 1955. For moving troops and vehicles from harbor to harbor, the Convair R3Y Tradewind, which first flew in 1954 (a little heavier than the above-mentioned Japanese seaplane and, therefore, potentially even better for our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters trying to fight fires in Canada with whatever funding scraps they have left over from serving as the Palestinians’ logistics arm).
Part of the 1950s rationale for a fleet of sea-based aircraft was that they’d be more challenging for the enemy to find and target than runways and monster-sized aircraft carriers. Perhaps that rationale is even more, uh, rational today? Let’s consider our gradual surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran (can’t be called a “war” because we apparently don’t have any ambition of winning, in which winning would be defined as destroying the Islamic Republic’s oil and electricity industries so that they wouldn’t be able to rebuild and run weapons factories). The ships of the Iranian Navy that were larger than an aircraft were quickly destroyed by the U.S. On our side, our fixed bases, such as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, have proved vulnerable to Iranian missiles.
Readers: What do you think about resurrecting the 1950s idea?
As the world’s aviation nerds gathering for EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”; July 20-26), let’s think a bit about the impact of aviation on human conflict…
The Dambusters Raid, one of the most famous uses of aircraft during World War II, was the brainchild of Barnes Wallis, an aeronautical engineer who sought a clean-sheet-of-paper answer to the question, “What’s the most effective way to reduce Germany’s ability to fight?” Sir Arthur Harris‘s plan was simple: kill as many German civilians as possible via firebombing of cities because a factory whose workers have been killed isn’t going to be productive (and the productivity of workers who survived would be reduced since they’d be homeless). Wallis settled on the idea of destroying hydroelectric dams in Germany’s industrial heartland, thus simultaneously denying German factories the electricity, coal, and water necessary to achieve full production. He looked at the inputs to German manufacturing, especially energy, and tried to destroy those inputs so that it wouldn’t matter how effective Germany was at dispersing factories.
The vulnerability of a dam seems to have been understood by both the Germans and the British, i.e., an explosion right up against the interior wall at a time when the dam was nearly full. As such, the Germans had strung torpedo nets in their reservoirs to prevent traditional torpedoes from being used. Barnes Wallis came up with the idea of a bomb that would skip along the surface of the lake impounded by the dam, roll down the water-side dam wall, and explode. A tremendous number of engineering problems needed to be solved to make this a reality. Paul Brickhill’s classic book is excellent, especially since the author was himself a WWII military pilot, but I recently listened to a 2013 book by James Holland that adds much interesting detail and makes it clear that Barnes Wallis wasn’t quite the lone inventor that we meet in Brickhill’s earlier work.
Arthur Harris was initially skeptical, to say the least: “This is tripe of the wildest description. There are so many ifs and buts that there is not the smallest chance of it working.” A combination of engineering persistence and incredible bravery and sacrifice by 617 Squadron, however, proved that Wallis had been on the right track. Revisionist historians later minimized the damage done to Nazi Germany by the 19 planes sent out on May 16, 1943 by noting that the Germans successfully scrambled to rebuild the dams, as well as many washed-out bridges and factories, before winter. James Holland points out in his book that forcing the Germans to divert tens of thousands of workers and perhaps $10 billion adjusted to post-Biden dollars. The breached dams had terrible consequences for German arms production just when they needed to support their campaigns against the Russians and against the Allies in Italy. The breached dams also took labor and money away from beefing up the Atlantic Wall against the invasion that actually happened in 1944.
Another passion for Barnes Wallis was precision bombing with 10-ton bombs that he designed. These pioneering “bunker busters” were used to good effect against various German installations, including for submarines and V-2 rockets, as well as to sink the battleship Tirpitz. Any time that we’re bombing fortified infrastructure in Iran, therefore, we’re channeling the spirit of Wallis.
What Would Barnes Wallis (WWBW) do with Iran? More or less the opposite of what the U.S. has been doing. Wallis would almost surely have recommended taking out the Iranian oil industry, a critical energy input to everything else that happens in Iran, and the industrial-scale electric power generation currently available to the Islamic Republic to run any factories that it still has and/or rebuilds. Wallis probably would also try to destroy Iran’s ability to move energy and materials, e.g., by taking out bridges, railroads, airports, etc. At a minimum, this would keep the Islamic Republic busy rebuilding and people who are busy rebuilding can’t put their energy into weapons production or military facility construction.
Maybe the U.S. strategy of slowly surrending to Iran will, in the long run, prove to have more merit. I hope so!
We’re informed that a peace deal with Iran is coming any day now. Some of the terms seem worse than what Carthage had to give when they surrendered to Rome. For example, “Trump’s $300 billion problem on the Iran agreement”:
In an interview with CBS News Monday morning, Vice President JD Vance seemed to tacitly confirm the premise that Iran could be given “access” to a reconstruction fund worth as much as $300 billion.
Ever since that interview, the administration has strained to clarify things. It has emphasized that this money wouldn’t come from US taxpayers. Instead, it would be money from other Gulf countries that would only be available if Iran complies with a peace deal.
Vance said late Monday on Fox News that “we would invite other countries — not us, but other countries — to invest in” Iran. He echoed that Tuesday, telling Megyn Kelly that the US wouldn’t let the United Arab Emirates, for example, “invest in Iran, unless the Iranians change their behavior.”
When the Obama administration and other countries cut a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, it included giving Iran access to billions of dollars. In that case, it wasn’t money from other countries, but instead Iran’s own assets that had been frozen in foreign banks under sanctions. Estimates generally placed the dollar figure around $50 billion.
The Islamic Republic of Iran still officially hates the U.S., right? They’ve been chanting “Death to America” for 47 years. To the extent that they have money and sovereignty, therefore, won’t they use that money to build weapons factories? To the extent that they have electric power, won’t they use that power to run the factories 24/7?
One purported benefit is oil can flow through the Strait of Hormuz without interference from the Iranian Navy that, we’re informed, no longer exists. But if the U.S. is an oil exporter, how do we benefit from the ability of competitors in the Persian Gulf to export through the Strait?
Maybe Donald Trump is doing this for immediate political gain? The price of gasoline will go down a little and, therefore, Democrats who were previously climate alarmists and wanted higher gasoline prices to discourage consumption will stop their recent complaints about the higher gasoline prices that they previously advocated? This explanation seems implausible because surrendering to an enemy, even if you call it “winning”, doesn’t usually make a politician more popular. Wouldn’t Trump enjoy more popular support, at least among Republicans, with round-the-clock bombing of Iran’s oil industry (thus denying the ayatollahs the money they need to build weapons factories) and electricity plants (thus denying the regime the grid-scale electric power that it needs to run its weapons factories)?
Separately, if the goal is to keep the non-existent Iranian Navy out of the Strait, couldn’t we use robot submersibles to make the waters unfriendly to those whom we don’t like? Here’s an example from Anduril that can endure for 10 days:
