The UFOs Are Ukrainian
'Hoo boy' was my first reaction to the outpouring of commentary treating a Ukrainian drone attack on parked Russian aircraft as the greatest military revelation since the Trojan horse. The U.S. had been warned, warned, warned and warned by events on its own shores of this turn in military tactics. In February, I cadged assurances from the leadership of Barksdale Air Force Base, home to many of America's irreplaceable B-52s, that it was employing countermeasures against the drone threat.
My second reaction was to wish the revelation had been of intimate U.S. and allied involvement in planning and executing the attack, along with a second Ukrainian attack a day later on Russia's vital Crimea bridge. A truly transformative prospect would be a deliberate signal from the U.S. and its allies to Vladimir Putin that his gains are at an end, his costs will be going up and he should settle.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
11 minutes ago
- The Hill
Hundreds protest in The Hague against NATO, days before the Dutch city hosts alliance summit
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Hundreds of people protested Sunday against NATO and military spending and against a possible conflict with Iran, two days before a summit of the alliance in The Hague that is seeking to increase allies' defense budgets. 'Let's invest in peace and sustainable energy,' Belgian politician Jos d'Haese told the crowd at a park not far from the summit venue. Although billed as a demonstration against NATO and the war in Gaza, protesters were joined by Iranians who held up banners saying 'No Iran War,' the day after the United States launched attacks against three of Iran's nuclear sites. 'We are opposed to war. People want to live a peaceful life,' said 74-year-old Hossein Hamadani, an Iranian who lives in the Netherlands. Look at the environment. 'Things are not good. So why do we spend money on war?' he added. The Netherlands is hosting the annual meeting of the 32-nation alliance starting Tuesday, with leaders scheduled to meet Wednesday. The heads of government want to hammer out an agreement on a hike in defense spending demanded by U.S. President Donald Trump. The deal appeared largely done last week, until Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that committing Madrid to spending 5% of its gross domestic product on defense 'would not only be unreasonable, but also counterproductive.' U.S. allies have ramped up defense spending since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago, but almost a third of them still don't meet NATO's current target of at least 2% of their gross domestic product. The summit is being protected by the biggest ever Dutch security operation, code named 'Orange Shield,' involving thousands of police and military personnel, drones, no-fly zones and cybersecurity experts. ___ Associated Press writer Molly Quell in The Hague contributed.
New York Post
18 minutes ago
- New York Post
Miranda Devine: Trump's ‘spectacular' Iran strike could carve his place in history as most courageous leader since Ronald Reagan
What an impressive sight it was Sunday, when the futuristic B-2 stealth bombers sliced through the powder-blue Missouri sky on their triumphant return to home base in the American heartland after dropping their Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Iran's underground nuclear sites. The strikes were 'a spectacular military success,' President Trump told the world Saturday night, after emerging from the Situation Room. 'Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' he said. Advertisement While Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan 'Razing' Caine said Sunday it was 'way too early' to know the full extent of damage at Iran's Fordow uranium-enrichment complex, satellite images show several large holes and a layer of gray-blue ash where all 14 massive 'bunker buster' bombs, each weighing 30,000 pounds, hit their target Saturday night in Operation Midnight Hammer. The strikes were also a spectacular political calculation by the president who ran on no new wars, and managed to keep a poker face all week as he was given advice by all and sundry. 'Unconventional' He made the right decision, and it appears to have been executed flawlessly. A limited strike, in and out. Iran's nuclear capability has been eliminated or at least severely degraded. No regime change. If the nuclear threat from Iran is indeed neutralized, leading to the extension of the Abraham Accords and peace in the Middle East, Trump will have achieved what countless predecessors failed to do. Advertisement If he pulls it off, without embroiling us in a larger war, he will have carved his role in history as the most courageous and consequential leader since Ronald Reagan. The man who rose from the stage in Butler, blood pouring down his face, raised his fist in the air and said, 'Fight, Fight Fight,' is exactly who you want as commander in chief at a time like this, especially as it's not his first rodeo. Photographs released by the White House show a serious-faced Trump inside the Situation Room Saturday night, wearing his trademark suit and red tie, not cosplaying a flyboy as his more casually-attired predecessors liked to do. His only bow to informality was a red MAGA hat with '45-47' on the side, representing his bifurcated presidential terms and the relentless grit it took to come back from the political dead. Advertisement So much for 'TACO Don.' He outfoxed everyone. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, just after emerging from the Situation Room last week where he watched the president deal with the complexities of the Iran-Israel war, likened Trump to Winston Churchill. 'He has a strategy and it's not a conventional strategy, but what conventional person has ever done great things?' said Bessent, in an interview for my new podcast Pod Force One. 'Does anybody think that Winston Churchill was conventional? '[Trump is] also so flexible in terms of the way he looks at things,' Bessent said. 'We've just spent basically the past 24 hours in the Situation Room over the Iran-Israel conflict, and I can tell you that the American people should know, and the American troops should know, that Donald Trump is doing an incredible job looking after their interests in what could turn, without someone like him, could turn into a widespread conflict that US soldiers and interests could get sucked into.' New team Advertisement In one fell swoop, Trump also restored the prestige of the US military, which had plummeted under Joe Biden. Most welcome was the upgrade from Gen. Mark 'Thoroughly Modern' Milley of 'white rage' fame, whom Biden had to give a preemptive pardon on his way out the door, presumably for his Trump-deranged outbursts to the Chinese. In Milley's place we now have 'Razing Caine,' once a daring F-16 pilot, and as cool and contained a general as you could find. 'This mission demonstrates the unmatched reach, coordination, and capability of the United States military,' he told reporters in a Sunday news conference alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, another veteran whose rapport with 'war fighters' has helped revive recruitment to record levels. 'In just a matter of weeks, this went from strategic planning to global execution,' said Caine. 'As the president clearly said last night, no other military in the world could have done this.' Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here! What a contrast to the previous administration. Under Biden, our military was humiliated. Preposterous wokery and weak leadership led to a breakdown in discipline embodied in online displays of perverts in uniform dolled up in kinky dog masks and bondage gear. Advertisement Under Biden, incompetence was the order of the day, from the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving behind $7 billion of equipment, to the failure to bring our astronauts home from the International Space Station, to the $230 million Gaza pier debacle which resulted in the death of one young soldier and dozens of troops injured while delivering minimal aid. The morale and reputation of our armed forces was severely depleted, making a mockery of Biden's frequent refrain' God bless our troops.' Under Biden, Obama's benighted Iran deal that Trump axed in his first term was reanimated. Trump 1.0 left Iran on its knees, unable to fund its proxies to attack Israel. Biden, in his wisdom, empowered and enriched Iran, reappointing Robert Malley, Antony Blinken's childhood friend from their prestigious Parisienne école, as Iran envoy. Malley was then suspended without pay pending an FBI investigation into an Iranian influence ring and his 'mishandling' of classified information. Naturally, the Ivy League came to his rescue, giving him gigs at Yale and Princeton. That is Biden's legacy. Advertisement But instead of thanking Trump for saving the world from a nuclear Iran, Democrats are pretending that he did something unconstitutional, and are whining because he didn't inform Democrat leaders in Congress before the top-secret operation. They only have themselves to blame for proving to be so unreliable with secrets in the past. Hello, Schifty Schiff. Dems were fine with Obama bombing Libya, Syria and Pakistan an estimated 13,000 times, killing thousands of people, without asking Congress for permission. Remember then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cackling over Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy's gruesome end when he was sodomized and brutalized to death on camera as she watched lasciviously from afar: 'We came, we saw, he died,' she said. Strong stance Advertisement Democrats should sit this one out. Despite their threats to impeach him, Trump has seized the moral authority and no doubt his already buoyant approval ratings will soar. That's the political dividend of strong leadership. What GOP senator could refuse to pass Trump's beloved Big Beautiful Bill now? And as with everything Trump does, the visuals were impeccable. The icing on the cake was his brand new 100-foot flagpole out the front of the White House, with Old Glory waving languidly in the night breeze as the B-2s worked their magic half a world away. Advertisement You're paying for radical Zoh New York, we have a problem. How could a candidate as toxic and radical as Zohran Mamdani be so close to victory in Tuesday's Democratic mayoral primary? An antisemitic socialist who is running to defund the police and raise more taxes for illegal migrants should be a political impossibility, yet he has surged to second place behind Andrew Cuomo in the polls. Attorney Denise Cohen, who writes a substack as 'Rational New Yorker,' has figured out this dangerous man 'could attain the highest office in NYC using public money that most of us didn't approve through a slush fund that we unwittingly paid for.' Mamdani has the highest social media engagement of all mayoral candidates with almost 6 million likes on TikTok, and has created the false appearance of a vibrant grassroots campaign with tens of thousands of small dollar donors, she writes. But he didn't amass a $8.4 million war chest from grassroots donations. Eighty percent of it came from taxpayers thanks to a New York campaign finance law in which the New York City Campaign Finance Board matches small donations by $8 for every $1 raised. If Mamdani wins, you and I probably paid for his campaign.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Americans react to US strikes on Iran with worry as well as support for Israel
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — One of Layton Tallwhiteman's earliest memories was watching the news at his uncle's house in Montana in 2003 and seeing the U.S. bomb Baghdad to launch the war in Iraq. Recollections of that war — waged in part to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist – flooded back for Tallwhiteman after President Donald Trump ordered weekend bombing strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities amid its escalating conflict with Israel. The administration has indicated it wants to avoid getting pulled into all-out war. Tallwhiteman, who grew up on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation southeast of Billings, is skeptical. 'Their idea is to eliminate the threat. Like Bush said in Iraq, 'We're going to eliminate the threat. We're going to find weapons of mass destruction and eliminate them.' Did that work the way he planned? No, obviously it didn't,' said Tallwhiteman. The 30-year-old driver for a food distribution company said he usually votes Libertarian, but backed Democrat Kamala Harris over Trump last year. Across the U.S. on Sunday, Americans expressed a mixture of support, apprehension and confoundment at the bombings, which officials said caused severe damage to Iran's nuclear sites. Administration officials said the strikes left room for Iran to return to negotiations over its nuclear program. Yet if the conflict spirals, it could test Trump's foreign diplomacy skills and also his support at home. 'It had to be done' B-2 bombers that participated in the weekend strikes returned home to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri on Sunday. Nearby, retired Air Force veteran Ken Slabaugh said he was '100% supportive' of Trump's decision and the military personnel who carried it out. Slabaugh said Iran has showed resistance to negotiations over its nuclear program for decades, a problem that he said Trump inherited. Iran can't be trusted, Slabaugh said, nor allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. 'It simply had to be done,' he said of the strikes, adding that he's now concerned for members of the military around the world. 'I'm proud of the guys and the gals that are doing the work out there. Nobody in the world does this like we do, and we have the freedom and liberty we enjoy because of that,' Slabaugh said. In Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Andrew Williams, 18, said he was surprised by the timing of the attack given that many Republicans had expressed opposition to U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran war. Still, he thought it was necessary if Iran was building nuclear weapons. 'If we are able to get rid of that, that is something we should do,' Williams said. Robert Wallette of Billings said Trump had 'good reason' to conduct the bombing as a demonstration of American support for Israel. 'Iran's evil, evil people. They hate Americans,' he said. Concern about conflict spinning out of control Wallette, 69, a retired contract specialist at the federal Indian Health Service, said he hated Trump when the Republican was first elected because of his arrogant style. His perspective started to shift after Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In 2024, Wallette voted for Trump based on his promises to curb illegal immigration, putting him among the 60% of voters backing Trump last year in Yellowstone County, which includes Billings. Notwithstanding his support, Wallette was unsure if Trump can avoid the U.S. getting drawn into a deeper conflict with Iran. 'Other countries are getting involved and this may be out of his control,' he said. Kent Berame, 32, of Davie, Florida, said it was a little outrageous for Trump to go rogue and approve the attack without explicit support from Congress. He said he doesn't agree with the United States supporting Israel's recent attacks on Iran. 'There's concern that we're putting troops in danger,' said Berame, a Democrat who owns his own marketing company. 'And obviously there's a retaliatory response toward all of our bases over there.' Berame said it's frustrating that the U.S. might be increasing hostilities with Iran just a few years after finally ending the war in Afghanistan. 'I don't want to see any U.S. soldiers in harm's way or in danger,' he said. Back in Billings, Trump voter Patty Ellman said she worries about the U.S. getting sucked into another extended conflict. 'We have enough going on in America to get into other countries' wars. Let's just take care of us right now,' she said. Ellman, a 61-year-old who stepped in as caregiver for her ex-husband after he suffered a stroke, said the U.S. should retaliate if attacked, but otherwise stay out of Iran's conflict with other countries. 'That's their business,' she said. 'We need to worry about Americans and how we're going to survive and are we going to have Social Security.' With contributions from David Fischer in Davie, Florida; Nicholas Ingram in Knob Noster, Missouri; and Mingson Lau in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
