Intel Update - March 7 - Shock and Awe REUPLOAD

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for March 1st through the 7th of 2026. Just when we thought it couldn't possibly get any crazier in the world, it got crazier. And this week, the obvious focus has been on the war in the Middle East. Right up front, it must be noted that other things have happened this week. Crazy times still persist within the American homeland, which should obviously be the primary focus. This week, however, my main focus has been on the Gulf War because this is a generational event that I thought would be worth dedicating a couple of weeks to. For those who are more concerned about the events in the homeland, I understand. I get it. I have not lost sight of the domestic problems that we face. So, before we get into the Middle East, I wanted to briefly mention the fact that there are things happening within the United States that are explicitly not getting any press because all eyes are on the Middle East. Such as the Epstein files being slowly taken offline. After the DOJ began posting the millions of pages of documents, many of those documents have been deleted from their website without any comment or explanation. Comparing the missing documents with the site rips that many people conducted when the files were first published, the DOJ has deleted roughly 47,000 files so far. Don't know why, there's been no explanation, but they are slowly whittling down the list to remove the most inflammatory documents that implicate very powerful people. So, that is something to be aware of, and I wanted to make that note just for posterity's sake, so that when we look back on this in a few years, we can say that yes, we knew that the war was being taken advantage of to hide things. Similar story on issues like immigration, fraud investigations in Minnesota, illegal immigrant truck drivers killing people, Chinese bio labs creating potential chemical and biological weapons, rampant and brutal crime, to include a possible serial killer being caught this week in Utah, and all of the other domestic issues that were paramount before the war. We're even expanding counter-narcotics operations in Ecuador. We actually conducted a drone strike in Ecuador the other day, but that's been deprioritized by events in the Middle East. There are also two American pilots that are rotting in a West African prison because they got dealt a bad situation, and the US State Department has basically abandoned them now that the news stories are not talking about them anymore. I haven't forgotten about this case and they're going to stay on my slides until we get them home. At the moment we're starting to transition into the get a yellow ribbon magnet for your car phase of the war and everything that happens in the US will be competing for attention from the media for at least a few years if the war drags on that long. As we settle in for the long haul, I will begin to shift focus back to a mostly domestic homeland centric perspective, but this week I did a lot of work to map out and manage the war and it's been a little overwhelming to be honest, but we're here now, so I guess we have to make the best of it. As of this morning, the United States is entering into the eighth day of this conflict and the grand question is how goes the war? On the ground, the first week of the war has mostly been a direct repeat of the shock and awe campaign of 2003 which sought to neutralize and destabilize the Iraqi regime with overwhelming firepower from the air. This time around, the United States has conducted the same exact campaign in Iran, though with much more substantial munitions. The other day, General Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that so far the United States has dropped twice the number of bombs in Iran as were used during the shock and awe phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That is a pretty big observation that has gone largely unnoticed, so I did want to mention that that is exactly what they said. In terms of what this has translated to on the ground, it's anyone's guess. The large-scale bombing of a heavily mountainous country where a good quantity of military combat power lies underground, it's hard to assess. We can certainly look at the satellite imagery as it rolls in to see that the US has in fact struck a lot of bunkers and blown up a lot of stuff. This was the assumption from the very start going back 40 years. It has always been assumed that the conventional armed forces of Iran would be neutralized or heavily degraded within the first few days of a conflict. The United States has done as expected and dutifully cratered most of the runways in the country with every single military installation that I found being hit at least once. So, most of their conventional military is pretty much offline. The $64,000 question is, how much has the United States degraded the ability for the Iranians to launch a Shahed drone from the back of a pickup truck? That I do not know, and I speculate probably not that much. Right now, the biggest threat that the Iranians pose to the region are drones and ballistic missiles. Their air force is not a factor. Their navy is not a factor. Whatever ground army that they have is not really a factor either. It's the drones and ballistic missiles that we're going to be talking about for the next few weeks and months. How big is this threat? Well, no one really knows in the open source world, and I suspect that the Pentagon probably doesn't quite know themselves with 100% certainty. And it is these drones which have been the most effective targeting measure by far. Satellite imagery indicates that shortly after the war began, the Iranians were able to hit several American radar installations around the region, to include the radar arrays of three, possibly four, THAAD batteries. Several other more strategic radar sites and communication centers were also hit, and the American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait have been hit pretty hard over the past few days. As of this morning, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who is still alive for the moment, has stated that Iran will cease targeting of nations throughout the Middle East which are not involved in this conflict. He stated specifically that comms had been degraded during the initial phases of the war, and that local commanders were acting with autonomy to launch at whatever military target was within range. His statements have implied that command and control capabilities have recovered somewhat over the past few days, and that the Iranians will be more deliberate with their targeting efforts. But again, this is a really loaded statement, and the Iranians saying these things don't mean too much because nearly every Gulf state is allowing American hardware to be stationed on their terrain. So, the Iranians say, "Hey, we're not going to shoot at you unless you allow the Americans to shoot at us." And it turns out the entire Gulf region allows the Americans to shoot at the Iranians. So, essentially, this is not really that much of a change from what's going on right now. This was confirmed about 30 minutes after this statement was released as Asia had 136 slammed into the Dubai Airport. So, we'll have to see how that works out. If the Iranians are starting to get more C2 or command and control capabilities back, they may start to organize a little bit more, but right now things haven't really changed that much despite the rhetoric on all sides. Throughout the region, the biggest way that this war can affect the homeland United States is on the economic front. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed because every company is too scared to run the gauntlet, which is a rather ironic development. Now, that phrase, "The strait is closed," is a bit of a biased statement because it's really all about power and control. From a more military perspective, when we say the strait is closed, we usually mean that it's mined or something like that, which has not happened. This has been the Iranian policy for a long time, and generally speaking, when we go back about 10 to 15 years when a lot of this uh doctrine was being written in the US military at least, if we were to say, "Ah, the strait is closed," this would mean that the Iranians have made the decision to mine the strait and actually physically using, you know, military hardware, make sure that no one can pass through the strait. However, all of these surface vessels that would enforce the strait being closed have been sunk. Most of them were sunk pier-side. So, that's not really a concern anymore. What is a concern are the missile and drone attacks, which is what makes this so ironic. For decades, the fear has always been that the Iranians would mine the strait and close it off to the world, but now the strait is effectively closed and not because of a direct naval threat, but because of insurance policies. The insurance companies are not willing to insure ships because they know that they might get struck going through the strait, so they're just not willing to accept that risk. Money and warfare often go hand-in-hand, and the Iranians have proven that you don't need a mine layer to cause a lot of problems, particularly with the oil and gas industry, which has taken a huge hit since the war began. Petroleum refineries, natural gas liquefaction plants, and oil terminals at the major port facilities have all been targeted by Iranian forces since the war began, which has prompted several Gulf states to halt or reduce production, even in places where they haven't had any strikes. Kuwait, for instance, is drawing down production not because their refineries have been hit, but because the ships can't carry the oil out of the Persian Gulf, and they are running out of storage supplies. So, they have to shut down or reduce production, even though their refineries are perfectly fine. So, tactically on the ground, the situation is quite debatable. Many people will argue about what certain losses mean for the Iranians, what certain losses mean for the Americans, so on and so forth. But, by and large, as with any nation-state that is built around a strong insurgent-style national defense strategy, it is challenging to describe the effects of a conflict against a modern military like the United States. Obviously, the United States can and very easily did sink the majority of the Iranian surface fleet within the first couple of days of the conflict. This is without question, and is a great victory on the part of the United States. However, the real challenges lie with what targeting efforts the Iranians are still able to maintain. And, 8 days after this war began, the drones keep flying. It is extremely impressive that the US Air Force and the US Navy were able to sink the majority of the Iranian Navy almost immediately. But, this does not mean that it's also impressive for the Iranians to spend roughly $30,000 on a Shahed drone that they built themselves, taking out radar arrays that cost billions. This is modern war, and the Gulf states and the American bases within them are nowhere near ready for the realities of modern budget-friendly drone warfare. Strategically speaking, Iran does not have to win any direct fight against the US military, which they certainly will not do. It just has to survive long enough to make the entire affair so costly to the United States that the US ends up fighting a real challenge. The war lasted approximately 15 minutes before the Iranians had settled on this plan, because this has been the plan for them for about half a century. Iran is what it looks like when a nation-state builds their entire defense strategy around an insurgent style of warfare. Roadside bombs now fly through the air at 100 miles per hour and can be launched from the back of any pickup truck in the country. Instead of an insurgency of a few thousand hardcore fighters hiding in the hills from the Americans in their own country, Iran has a population of 90 million people and they still control ground. This is most important now that billion-dollar radar arrays are probably out of action and it only takes one drone attack to cause problems, which not only makes it particularly complicated, but it also means that every day it drags on the targeting will get harder. As with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and now the Persians, the stupid ones were killed on the first day. From here on out, it will be a great challenge to meet the success of that first strike on day one. Whoever survives will be a much more substantial threat and the United States will find that the grand gamble of destroying and killing everything that could be a threat within the country might be a harder challenge than first realized. On the messaging front, there is a very sharp disparity of what's being discussed and is disclosed by American officials and the situation on the ground. The Department of War has been on a media blitz to show the results of the extreme combat power that has been used throughout this operation. However, what has been ignored is the fact that the Iranians have gotten their licks in, too. Again, no one on Earth would ever suggest that the Iranian Navy would stand a chance against the US Navy. Likewise, the US has dropped a lot of bombs on a lot of military targets throughout the nation. However, the Iranian Navy and Air Force were never really the biggest concerns in this war. It's not the toppling of a Middle Eastern nation that's the hard part. The challenge is getting out afterwards. Yesterday afternoon, Secretary of War Hexter held a press conference to discuss the great victories achieved so far during this war. During his remarks, he stated that within a few days the United States will achieve total air superiority in the skies over Iran and the airspace will be completely uncontested. While it is true that the Iranian Air Force is absolutely no match for the United States, this statement tacitly admits that the US does not already operate with uncontested airspace throughout much of the country. Now, of course, air defense is a layered approach. My guess is that they do control most of the airspace because probably every S-300 within the country has been struck so far. But, there are also probably more low-altitude SHORAD or short-range air defense systems that are probably going to cause problems or at least some level of risk. This is why you can see pictures or videos of MQ-9 Reapers flying, you know, low and slow over Iranian cities. Well, that's because that place has been dealt with so far, but there are probably other pockets of air defenses that have not been taken offline just yet. So, the Iranians are still fighting, and they are definitely transitioning into a long-haul fight. Recognizing the facts of the war does not take away from the success of the United States, but these observations must be noted for posterity because even if we stop the war and go home right now, the history books will look back to this day, right now, and wonder if we knew about the indicators that we were observing today. No one knows what the future will bring, but in a few years, hindsight may ponder whether or not we could look at the events of the day in the present right now and know what was about to happen. We can all look back at the news broadcast and press conferences from 2003 where everybody said this war will be over in a couple of days, couple of weeks, tops, right? And we obviously know how that turned out. I'm concerned that right now, as we're living through this present moment, we may actually be stacking up for the same thing happening all over again. In the information space, propaganda is flying all around as all sides seek to sway the world into thinking that they are winning. The conventional side of the Iranian military has almost zero ability to challenge the US in an open fight, but a large part of the Iranian military is centered squarely in the realm of insurgency. They have entire military service branches dedicated to this style of warfare. When we fought the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda splinter groups in Iraq, those organizations had to get going from nothing. And since we had boots on the ground in both countries, they couldn't really operate out in the open. Iran is three times larger than Iraq and has a population that's about a third the size of the United States. And they have an entire government ecosystem that supports them. Despite killing most people with authority in the country over the past few days, the Iranian regime is still there, such that it is. And all of the messaging over the past few months was intended to get us to believe that the nation would collapse on day two after taking out the Ayatollah. Well, as of today, this has not happened. And it's absolutely certain to not happen in the way that the United States has been portraying. The classic line of lay down your arms signals that the upper echelons of the US government don't really have coherent messaging. Like, what are the Iranians supposed to do? Are they supposed to just drop their AK in the dirt and like hold their hands up to a drone? It makes no sense. Within Tehran itself, there are basically no indications that any demographic is looking to overthrow the government right now. Now, ask me again in 6 weeks and I may say, "Ah, well, things may change." But right now, we're 8 days into this and those protesters from a few weeks ago have basically evaporated for now, at least while the bombs are being dropped. I don't think the locals are actually interested in changing their system of governance as much as we might think they would be. And bombing them so heavily, especially in their capital city where a lot of cultural sites have been hit, has probably pushed anybody on the fence squarely to the side of not really siding with the Americans. Right now, from the Iranian perspective, their goal is simply to survive. Specifically, they have to survive the bombings that are intended to turn Tehran into Gaza, but their system of governance has to survive as well. From the Iranian perspective, the longer this war goes on, the better it is for them. It would be in their best interest to force the United States to conduct a ground invasion. That would be the absolute best course of action for the Iranians and the worst possible course of action for the United States. And so far, I don't see any indication that the US is not going to put boots on ground at some point. I think that unless something major changes, which could always happen, I think the United States is going to have to put boots on ground. Specifically a beachhead and probably a few fobs along the Strait of Hormuz. Now, with assessments like this, we want to maintain balance, right? There will be people who say, "Oh, the sky is falling. It's the end of the world." And there will be also be people on the other side that say, "Ah, this war doesn't really matter, right?" And we're winning every second of the day. We just can't stop winning. We've got too much winning going on. Well, neither narrative is true, right? The world's a more complicated place than that, and it's going to take a lot of discernment to determine how things are really truthfully going, and where this conflict might lead. By far, the most important thing to remember moving forward, the most important thing that I wish everyone involved in this war would understand, is that despite all of the gung-ho statements from the Pentagon, despite all of the victories, the enemy gets a vote. Hubris and overconfidence in one's own abilities has led to nearly every military misfortune throughout history. And right now, the entire decision-making apparatus within the upper echelons of the US government are getting high on their own supply. And I'm not really getting a super great feeling for where this is headed. So, with all of that on the table, I'll wrap things up with a little bit of a cliffhanger today so that I can get back to plotting more points and trying to catch up with what's been going on throughout the homeland. I really do hope it isn't the case, but I think we're settling in for the long haul with this one. And there are many other things that are going to take precedence over this over the next few weeks, which I would like to focus on a little bit more. So, I was already pretty tapped out before this war kicked off, and now my other projects have been set back a couple of weeks at least. But, that's okay. We'll get back on track soon. I'll get back to the normal slides this week. Now that we've gotten the bulk of the war out of the way, hopefully, we'll we'll have some time to reassess and get back to normal, hopefully. So, thank you for all of your support. Thank you for bearing with me as I try to organize the flow of information a little bit better. Sorry, it's been a little bit disjointed lately. It's a lot to handle. It's a It's like tracking G 1 all over again, the first few weeks of it at least. So, hopefully by the end of next week we'll be back to normal as best we can be. But, in the meantime, thank you for all of your support. I really could not do all this stuff without you. So, I really do appreciate you all for that. And I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.