A military historian looked at the photos from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and saw a country in retreat. I looked at them at 4:30 this morning and counted the walls.
The walls held. I had the base damage photos up on the kitchen laptop before Patton’s walk and ran my own battle damage assessment, twice, on a legal pad. CBS News published them Tuesday after active-duty troops sent them in from Camp Buehring and Camp Arifjan in Kuwait and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. You’ll see trailers crushed flat and a building with its windows blown out. An AWACS radar plane lost its tail, which may be something for the Air Force to look at. Every concrete blast wall in those pictures is still standing.
Then I read Phillips O’Brien. He teaches strategic studies at St Andrews, over in Scotland, and on Wednesday he put the same photos in his newsletter under a headline about the end of the American Age. “The US is in retreat,” he writes. I’ve read that line four times now, and I still can’t find one wall in his own pictures that went anywhere.
Name One Grenade That Got Through
A T-wall is several tons of steel-reinforced concrete. CBS reports, as if it were a knock on them, that the walls were counted on against grenades and mortar rounds and did nothing against an attack from the air. Read that again. They were built for grenades, and I defy anyone to find a single grenade in the base damage photos. Even the Pentagon agrees with me about what counts, since its own $33.4 billion estimate of what the war cost through late June leaves out infrastructure repairs, which tells you how much the professionals think a building matters.
Watch the segment CBS posted, all five minutes of it. Jonah Kaplan, the reporter, says maybe 95 percent of what Iran sends our way gets stopped. At my day job in pharmaceutical sales, 95 percent of quota gets a man into President’s Club and two nights in Scottsdale. Newswax reported Monday that the war has used up 65 percent of our Patriot interceptors. Nobody has used up a wall.
Two Concrete Barriers at the End of My Driveway
Kaplan says the troops sent those pictures in as a lesson. I’ve been teaching that lesson from my own driveway since the spring of 2023, when I paid $2,140 to have two surplus concrete barriers set down at the end of it, facing the street. The homeowners association has mailed me three letters about them. In three and a half years, no Iranian drone has touched my house.
Patton reports to the gap between the barriers at 4:45 sharp. He sits and stares straight up at the sky, which is the wrong direction, so every morning I kneel down and turn his head back toward the street.
What the Professor Missed in the Base Damage Photos
Which brings me to the real question. Why does a military historian keep an oil chart in his newsletter? His chart shows Brent crude at its highest point in a month. He also promises a future piece on corruption, so I’ll go first. CNBC calculated that the president’s nine biggest oil and gas holdings gained between $1.5 million and $4.4 million from the eve of the war through August, and the White House says independent managers handle that money. Asking about a commander in chief’s stocks while troops are standing behind those walls is borderline seditious, and I notice the walls haven’t asked once.
He had the base damage photos right there in his own newsletter, every wall in them exactly where somebody set it down. A professor in Scotland can look at concrete that never gave up an inch and still call it a retreat. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
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