The Bunker: Three strikes in Iran
This week in The Bunker: The destruction of a girls’ elementary school in Iran is just the latest in the U.S. military’s too-long list of accurately hitting aim points that never should have been targets; the U.S. stumbles in the Strait of Hormuz, again; saving money by scrapping parachutes; and more.
MIS-STRIKES WERE MADE
Unfortunately, hitting the wrong target is nothing new
We are all Iranian schoolchildren now.
At least 108 of the more than 175 people killed inside that elementary school in the opening hours of the U.S.-launched war against Iran were kids, Iranian officials said. Just like those schoolkids, shredded by a suspected U.S. Navy-launched Tomahawk cruise missile that hit their classrooms and cubbies February 28, Americans also have been dragged into a war they didn’t want.
The terrorism-sponsoring Iranian government the U.S. is trying to oust is opposed by most Iranians. And most Americans oppose the war President Trump unilaterally launched to destroy it. Yet the blood of those killed at the Shajarah Tayyiba Primary School near the Strait of Hormuz is on the hands of all Americans, because we let our government do this. Whether you like it or not.
Let that crimson stain soak in between your fingers and on your palms for a moment.
War is hell, and it’s even worse when it goes awry. Unfortunately, such civilian deaths are all too common. And while they’re rarely deliberately deliberate, they are often sloppily deliberate. They tend to involve highly-accurate munitions that hit where they’re aimed, and boneheaded decisions that send them to the wrong address (if such “boneheaded” decisions are deemed “reckless,” they may constitute war crimes).
The Bunker has been reporting on these tactical tragedies for decades. Among the most notorious:
- In 1988, the USS Vincennes fired two Standard missiles and shot down(PDF) Iran Air 655, a commercial airliner, over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 aboard. The Pentagon concluded the crew had mistaken the Airbus A300 for an Iranian F-14 fighter.
- In 1991, two U.S. Air Force F-15s guided a pair of GBU-27 Paveway III laser-guided 2,000-pound bombs into the Amiriya bomb shelter in Iraq, killing more than 300 civilians, according to Iraqi officials. The Pentagon believed it was a dedicated military command center, unaware that civilians shared it.
- In 1994, another pair of F-15 pilots misidentified two U.S. UH-60 Black Hawks flying over Iraq as Iraqi Mi-24 choppers, shooting down both and killing all 26 aboard.
- In 1999, a B-2 mistakenly dropped five 2,000-pound bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, killing three, after a string of snafus led to targeting the wrong building.
- In 2015, an Air Force AC-130 gunship destroyed an Afghan hospital that had been misidentified as a Taliban outpost, killing 42.
There are common threads woven through such disasters. Hasty decisions lead to a rush to pull the trigger, or a rush to assemble target lists that didn’t get adequately vetted (the U.S. and Israel attacked more than 1,000 targets a day during the war’s first two weeks). The school that was attacked, for example, was next to a compound linked to Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and was a part of it until about a decade ago.
But Tomahawk missiles are like the dutiful children who attended that Iranian school: They do what they are told. Rarely do they veer off their assigned course. But their targets, programmed into their silicon brains, are only as good as the humans who put them there.
These Pentagon investigations into attacks gone horribly wrong tend to follow an all-too-tiresome trajectory:
- In its immediate wake: “That’s terrible. We don’t target civilians.”
- Followed shortly by: “It wasn’t us. We don’t deliberately target civilians.”
- After press reports raise questions: “We’re investigating.”
- Then, as the probe proceeds: “It might have been us.”
- Followed by: “It was probably us.”
- Then, once the investigation concludes: “It was us,” followed by pledges to reduce the chance of it happening again.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has gutted the Pentagon office dedicated to reducing civilian casualties. He denounced “stupid rules of engagement” that limit U.S. attacks on March 2, shortly after the war began. But he has changed his tune as evidence mounts that the U.S. is probably responsible for the destruction of that Iranian elementary school. “No nation takes more precautions to ensure there's never targeting of civilians than the United States of America,” he said March 10. “Where things happen that need to be investigated, we will investigate.”
That’s why Hegseth announced an investigation into the elementary-school attack on March 13. It’s a safe bet the inquiry will conclude that a mapmaker’s error led to the schoolchildren’s terror.
STRAIT TALK
Garroting gasoline
The Bunker remembers standing on the bridge of a U.S. Navy warship 40 years ago, cowering behind a mammoth oil tanker as the two crept through the Strait of Hormuz. While the USS Fox was supposed to be defending the tanker SS Bridgeton from Iranian attack, it was the Bridgeton that ran into a suspected Iranian mine on July 24, 1987. Within minutes, the mighty Fox was steaming in the Bridgeton’s wake, eager to let the 400,000-ton tanker shield the 8,000-ton warship from any more mines.
Hard to come up with a more perfect metaphor than that long-ago embarrassment for what is happening today in the Strait of Hormuz.
The strait is the Achilles’ keel of the Middle Eastern oil trade. About 20% of the world’s oil flows through the passage, which is only about 30 miles wide at its narrowest point. That renders ships easy prey for Iran, which borders the strait’s northern shore. Tehran’s efforts to halt the flow, boosting the price of gas in U.S. by 24% since the war began, were predictable. Once again, the U.S. military was caught flat-footed.
Even a handful of Iranian attacks, from mines that have eluded U.S. attacks, or surviving shore-based drones and missiles, is sufficient to force maritime insurance companies to halt the vessels they insure from traversing the passage. To unplug the resulting blockage, Trump pledged, “the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water.”
As we saw in the Red Sea just two years ago, Iran-backed Houthi rebels were able to cripple shipping through that vital waterway with their rudimentary weapons. Iran’s arsenal is bigger, and better.
Fifteen years ago, The Bunker asked — presciently, as it turns out — “how good a trump card” were Iran’s threats to close the strait. The consensus was, and remains, that it can do it, but probably not for a prolonged period of time. Now that it has happened, the big question is: How long will it last?
“We have been dealing with it and don’t need to worry about it,” Hegseth said March 13 of Iran’s petrol chokehold.
What a difference a day makes. On March 14, Trump called for “War Ships” from “China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others” to help keep the strait open. “This should have always been a team effort,” said the president, who went to war without any allies except Israel. Turns out they’re less than enthusiastic. When the first President Bush drove Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, 35 nations joined the U.S. in the effort before it began; when his son invaded Iraq in 2003, 30 other nations signed up in advance.
Turns out even bullies sometimes need allies.
BULLCHUTE
Crews on doomed tanker used to have parachutes
The six aircrew who died aboard an Air Force aerial refueling tanker supporting the war against Iran likely lacked parachutes, which were stripped from such planes to save money 18 years ago. The KC-135 went down March 12 in western Iraq after a mid-air collision with another KC-135. “A lot of time, manpower and money goes into buying, maintaining and training to use parachutes,” the Air Force said in March 2008. “With the Air Force hungry for cost-saving efficiency under its Air Force for Smart Operations in the 21st Century Program, commonly known as AFSO 21, the parachutes were deemed obsolete.”
The crash remains under investigation, which makes it difficult to know if having parachutes on board might have saved the lives of the crew aboard the KC-135 Stratotanker, a large plane based on Boeing’s 707 airliner.
The ‘chutes’ removal “doesn’t make any sense — it’s just another way of saying that money is more important than people,” Joseph Heywood, a one-time KC-135 crew member, told The Bunker in 2014. He should know: the former Air Force captain parachuted from a KC-135 in 1969 after it ran out of fuel over Michigan. “The day after I bailed out I took a bottle of booze — I think it was Chivas Regal, actually — to the guy who packed mine,” Heywood recalled. “I’d rather have a slim chance than no chance.”
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
Jinjoo Lee explains in the Wall Street Journal March 17 why the Iran war hasn’t boosted the stock prices of big Pentagon contractors.
The Air Force has finished the first construction project associated with its new $141 billion Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle reported March 11.
If you’ve had trouble parsing what Trump means when talking about the Iran war, Will Saletan produced a handy-dandy glossary March 13 at The Bulwark.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson, a national security analyst for the Center for Defense Information at POGO, has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
