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Staging for a Strike? US Quietly Moves Bombers as Israel Prepares to Hit Iran

In April, Donald Trump remarked that Israel would “lead” any such operation. That comment was interpreted by many as a nod of support, if not a green light, from Washington. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, has repeatedly warned that his government will not allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state.

a growing consensus across Washington’s think tank circuit: that Tehran is vulnerable, and now is the moment to strike.

By Robert Inlakesh / MintPress News, 24 May 25, https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-deploys-bombers-israel-iran-strike/289846/

As threats of an Israeli strike on Iran grow louder, the United States is making quiet but unmistakable moves of its own. Over the past month, Washington has quietly repositioned strategic bombers and fighter squadrons to Diego Garcia, a remote U.S. military outpost in the Indian Ocean, squarely within striking distance of Tehran.

The official rationale is force protection. But the scale and nature of the deployments have sparked speculation that Washington is laying the groundwork for potential military involvement in an Israeli-led operation, or, at the very least, sending a message to Tehran that it won’t stand in the way.

Roughly a month ago, the U.S. Air Force deployed six B-2 Spirit bombers to Diego Garcia, a third of its active fleet of nuclear-capable stealth aircraft. These bombers, capable of flying directly from the U.S. to targets across the globe, don’t require forward deployment to be effective. Which is why their presence on a remote island in the Indian Ocean is raising eyebrows.

The B-2s have reportedly been used in prior strikes against Ansar Allah targets in Yemen, though with limited strategic effect. Following the declared conclusion of U.S. operations in Yemen, at least some of the B-2s were replaced by four B-52 strategic bombers, another long-range platform associated with show-of-force missions.

But then, additional firepower arrived. An entire squadron of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets was flown to the base. While these jets have strike capabilities, open-source intelligence analysts suggest they were likely deployed for base defense. That assessment, if correct, underscores that the Pentagon sees Diego Garcia not just as a staging ground, but as a potential target in a broader escalation.

Meanwhile, intelligence signals point to real movement on the Israeli side. A CNN report this Tuesday cited intercepted communications and activity on the ground indicating that Israel is preparing to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. U.S. officials reportedly believe the plans are active and serious.

In April, Donald Trump remarked that Israel would “lead” any such operation. That comment was interpreted by many as a nod of support, if not a green light, from Washington. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, has repeatedly warned that his government will not allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state.

Yet even as diplomatic channels remained open, the introduction of new U.S. “red lines” appears to have derailed progress. U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff recently declared that Iran must halt all uranium enrichment, a demand not included in the original 2015 nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Iranian officials rejected the move outright. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reiterated that enrichment is a sovereign right and a non-negotiable issue. Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei dismissed the new U.S. conditions as “nonsense.”

And on May 22, Araghchi issued a sharper warning: Iran, he said, would take “special measures to defend its nuclear facilities” if Israeli threats continued. The statement was deliberately vague, but left little doubt that Tehran is preparing for contingencies.

In Washington, meanwhile, influential think tanks are ratcheting up pressure for a hardline approach. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) has called for the complete dismantling of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has urged more sanctions. The Atlantic Council argues the U.S. must avoid “reviving Obama’s Iran deal.”

Simultaneously, Dana Stroul, a former Biden official now at WINEP, has argued that Iran’s current weakness presents an opportunity for military action. Her view echoes a growing consensus across Washington’s think tank circuit: that Tehran is vulnerable, and now is the moment to strike.

These are the same voices that helped shape past U.S. interventions in the region. Their resurgence now, alongside tactical military deployments and rhetorical escalations, suggests a familiar pattern.

What’s missing from the conversation is any real public debate about the consequences. Not just for Iran, but for U.S. interests, regional stability, and the American public. A confrontation with Iran would carry significant consequences, yet few in Washington have publicly questioned whether such a conflict serves America’s national interest, save for outliers like Rep. Thomas Massie, who has drawn fire from powerful lobbies simply for asking whether this is our fight to begin with.

The buildup at Diego Garcia may be interpreted as precaution. But it’s also a reminder of how quickly precaution becomes policy, and policy becomes war, especially when shaped by proxies, pressure groups, and allies with very different interests.

Wars don’t always begin with votes. In fact, they often begin with quiet deployments far from view, and even farther from the American people they will ultimately affect.

May 26, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump’s Golden Dome Is a Combover

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 21, 2025, https://worldbeyondwar.org/trumps-golden-dome-is-a-combover/

According to world-leading war-profiteer Lockheed Martin, its Golden Dome, marketed for it by Donald Trump, “stands as a layered defense shield, safeguarding the American homeland with unwavering precision, ensuring the security and resilience of our nation.” But it doesn’t exactly “stand” anywhere in the present day or what some of us like to call “reality.” Rather, it’s one of those scientific research projects Trump loves to defund if they might succeed or do anyone any good. In the words of Lockheed Martin, the Golden Dome will try to “develop game-changing tech – like space-based interceptors and hypersonic defenses.” In case you’ve been in a daze since Ronald Reagan was pushing non-functioning space-based interceptors, Ronald Reagan was pushing this same madness, and it’s never gone away.

The Golden Dome is guaranteed to waste vast resources desperately needed by people.

The Golden Dome is guaranteed to do tremendous environmental damage in production, testing, and accidents — and especially if ever used.

The Golden Dome is guaranteed to kick start a crazed race to weaponize space by a number of governments, all but one of which have long been trying to ban space weaponization by treaty. It will also fuel arms races to develop new weapons to evade defenses, and to duplicate and out-do the Golden Dome.

The Golden Dome is highly unlikely to actually ever protect anyone from anything.

The Golden Dome is definitely going to be perceived as an aggressive threat by most of the world — already by China, no matter how many times the word “defense” is uttered. It will therefore be a blow to disarmament, cooperation, and the rule of law.

The Golden Dome is the belief in militarism taken to its logical extreme, so it’s very interesting that most of the militarists don’t like it any more than I do.

Here’s the BBC doing its level best to report on this insanity with a straight face:

“An initial sum of $25bn (£18.7bn) has been earmarked in a new budget bill – although the government has estimated it could end up costing 20 times that over decades. There are also doubts about whether the US will be able to deliver a comprehensive defence system for such a huge land mass. Officials warn that existing systems have not kept pace with increasingly sophisticated weapons possessed by potential adversaries. A briefing document recently released by the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that missile threats ‘will expand in scale and sophistication’, with China and Russia actively designing systems ‘to exploit gaps’ in US defences. . . . ‘Israel’s missile defence challenge is a lot easier than one in the United States,’ Marion Messmer, a senior research fellow at London-based Chatham House, told the New York Times. ‘The geography is much smaller and the angles and directions and the types of missiles are more limited.’ Shashank Joshi, defence editor at the Economist, told the BBC the Golden Dome would probably work by using thousands of satellites to spot and track missiles and then use interceptors in orbit to fire at the missiles as they take off and take them out. He said the US military would take the plan very seriously but it was unrealistic to think it would be completed during Trump’s term, and the huge cost would suck up a large chunk of the US defence budget.”

Here’s The Independent not even trying:

“[T]he Golden Dome is overly ambitious in a way that is typical of Trump. Like his infamously unfinished and useless wall along the Mexican border, it is supposedly ‘visionary’, but is, in reality, flawed and vastly expensive. There is no reason why the relatively small Iron Dome system, designed to frustrate short to medium-range missiles, could be scaled up in anything like the way necessary to withstand a sustained attack from intercontinental ballistic missiles or rockets from space itself. Even if it could be made to work, it may not be 100 per cent effective, as is the case with Israel’s Iron Dome – and you wouldn’t want to be in a position where you’d need to find out. By that point, you’d have spent far in excess of Trump’s optimistic costing of $175bn finding out. Maybe he should ask his now strangely absent friend Elon Musk about whether the Golden Dome is a good use of American taxpayers’ money. This brings us to the next typically Trumpian problem: it’s not very well thought through. When Reagan proposed his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) in 1983, it was obvious who he had in mind – the Russians. Yet now Trump wants to befriend them and partner up with Putin, and maybe even Presidents Xi, Kim and others in a global strongman alliance. If Golden Dome is protecting America, who is it protecting it from? As yet unknown and unforeseen enemies would be a rational answer, but not if Trump wants to make friends with them all.”

That last argument would be stronger if Trump and his supposed allies were disarming, rather than rapidly building up weapons to slaughter each other’s people and the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, the Golden Dome is a giant declaration that the United States will never be part of global cooperation and disarmament.

May 26, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ Is Impossible—and It’ll Make Defense Companies a Ton of Money.

A new study detailed all the problems with plans to shoot a missile out of the sky.

By Matthew Gault Gizmodo, April 6, 2025

The Pentagon is expected to deliver plans for a “Golden Dome” to Trump this week. In the crudest sense, the Golden Dome is a missile defense system that would shoot nukes, missiles, and drones that threaten the U.S. out of the sky. A scientific study published earlier this month detailed the scientific impossibility of the scheme

America has tried to build a missile defense system since before Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan wanted to put satellites into space that would use lasers to blast Soviet nukes out of the sky. What we built was somewhat more pedestrian. It also probably won’t work. But defense contractors made a lot of money.

“When engineers have been under intense political pressure to deploy a system, the United States has repeatedly initiated costly programs that proved unable to deal with key technical challenges and were eventually abandoned as their inadequacies became apparent,” explained a new study from the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs.

Under Trump, we’re going to do it again.

Trump signed an executive order on January 27 that called on the Pentagon to come up with a plan for an “Iron Dome for America,” which the President and others have taken to calling a “Golden Dome.” According to the EO, Trump wants a plan that’ll keep the homeland safe from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”

The dream of the Golden Dome is simple: shoot missiles out of the sky before they can do any damage. “It’s important to not simply think of Golden Dome as the next iteration of the ground-based missile defense system or solely a missile defense system because it’s a broader mission than that,” Jonathan Moneymaker, the CEO of BlueHalo, a defense company working on Golden Dome adjacent tech, told Gizmodo.

Moneymaker was clear-eyed about the challenges of building Golden Dome. “Everyone looks at it as a replication of Israel’s Iron Dome, but we have to appreciate that Israel’s the size of New Jersey,” he said.

Israel’s Iron Dome has done a great job shooting down Hamas rockets and Iranian missiles. It’s also covering a small territory and shooting down projectiles that aren’t moving as fast as a nuclear weapon or a Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missile might. The pitch of the Golden Dome is that it would keep the whole of the continental U.S. safe. That’s a massive amount of territory to cover and the system would need to identify, track, and destroy nuclear weapons, drones, and other objects moving at high speed.

That’s like trying to shoot a bullet out of the sky with a bullet. The missile defense study, published on March 3, detailed a few of the challenges facing a potential Golden Dome-style system.

Trump’s executive order is vague and covers a lot of potential threats. “We focus on the fundamental question of whether current and proposed systems intended to defend the United States against nuclear-armed [intercontinental ballistic missile] now effective, or could in the near future be made effective in preventing the death and destruction that a successful attack by North Korea on the United States using such ICBMs would produce.”

Stopping a nuke is the primary promise of a missile system. And if one of these systems can’t stop a nuke then of what use is it?

The study isn’t positive. “This is the most comprehensive, independent scientific study in decades on the feasibility of national ballistic missile defense. Its findings may shock Americans who have not paid much attention to these programs,” Joseph Cirincione told Gimzodo.

Cirincione is the retired president of the Ploughshares Fund and a former Congressional staffer. He investigated missile defense systems and nukes for the House Armed Services Committee. “We have no chance of stopping a determined ballistic missile attack on the United States despite four decades of trying and over $400 billion spent. This is the mother of all scandals,” he said………………………………………………………………………………………………..

So we’re talking about ringing the planet in thousands of munitions-armed satellites. And remember that this is just to handle one nuke launched by North Korea. Imagine scaling up a similar defense shield to guard against all the nukes in Russia and you’ll begin to see the size of the problem………………………………. https://gizmodo.com/trumps-golden-dome-is-impossible-and-itll-make-defense-companies-a-ton-of-money-2000584372

May 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment