cellblock73
11.4K posts

cellblock73
@cellblock73
Live and let live. My views are someone else’s. Conscientious Objector. Fuck war.





The USS Gerald R. Ford is now out of commission for at least 12-14 months due to that fire caused by a fluff buildup in a tumble dryer....



Three Australian sailors were lying in their bunks when a torpedo killed 87 Iranians on the other side of the hull. USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, fired two Mark 48 torpedoes at Iranian frigate IRIS Dena on 4 March in international waters forty nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka. One torpedo hit. The ship sank. Eighty-seven Iranian sailors died. Thirty-two were rescued by the Sri Lankan Navy. Sixty-one remain missing. Three Royal Australian Navy personnel were aboard Charlotte. They were embedded under the AUKUS Pillar 1 submarine training pathway, part of a rotation of over 130 Australian sailors learning to operate nuclear-powered submarines that Australia will own by the 2030s. When the order came to fire, the three Australians were ordered to their sleeping quarters. They stayed there for the duration of the attack. Prime Minister Albanese confirmed this on 6 March after a National Security Committee meeting: “Three Royal Australian Navy personnel were aboard. They were ordered to their sleeping quarters. No Australian personnel have participated in any offensive action against Iran.” This is not a story about cowardice or conspiracy. It is a story about the legal architecture of twenty-first-century warfare. Australia is not a belligerent in the US-Iran war. Australian law prohibits offensive military action without parliamentary authorisation. AUKUS protocols, formalised in the 2023 Optimal Pathway trilateral agreement, define all personnel exchanges as non-combat training. The three sailors were aboard to learn. Not to fight. When the submarine they were learning on became a weapon, the command physically separated them from the act of war by putting them in bed. The sleeping quarters order is the legal firewall between training and combat, between alliance and belligerency, between being on the submarine and being part of what the submarine does. It is a fifteen-metre walk from a bunk to a torpedo tube. That fifteen metres is the distance between peace and war for an entire nation. The absurdity is the point. Modern alliance warfare requires partners to be close enough to learn but far enough to deny. Present on the platform but absent from the event. Embedded in the crew but excluded from the mission. The AUKUS framework that will deliver Australia nuclear-powered submarines by the 2030s was stress-tested not in a tabletop exercise but in a live torpedo attack on an Iranian warship with Australian sailors asleep one compartment away. The Iranians who died did not know three Australians were aboard. The Australians who were aboard did not participate in their deaths. The submarine that killed 87 people carried three passengers whose government’s official position is that they were sleeping. The legal record will show that Australia was not involved. The physical record will show that Australia was fifteen metres away. This is how alliances work now. You train on the weapon. You sleep through its use. You wake up in a world where your partner sank a warship and your government says you were not there. Three sailors. One torpedo. Eighty-seven dead. And a legal fiction measured in the distance between a bunk and a firing console. Full analysis below. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…



















After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC. May God bless America.

















The USS Gerald R. Ford is not parked near Iran. It is parked off Israel. And nobody is asking the only question that matters: why. The $13.3 billion crown jewel of the US Navy, the largest warship ever constructed, just positioned itself off Haifa. Not in the Arabian Sea where the Lincoln sits 850 kilometers from Iranian shores loaded for offensive operations. Not in the Gulf where strike range is optimal. Off Israel. Defending Israel. This is not redundancy. This is architecture. Two carriers. Two missions. Two entirely different strategic functions. The Lincoln is the sword, positioned to launch strike packages into Iranian airspace within hours of an order. The Ford is the shield, its Aegis missile defense systems creating an umbrella over Israeli population centers against the retaliation that follows the first Tomahawk. America just split its carrier doctrine into offense and defense simultaneously. That has not happened since the Pacific theater in 1945. But the positioning reveals something deeper than tactics. When Iran retaliates, and every wargame says Iran retaliates, its missiles and drones fly toward Israel. They will fly through the same airspace where a US carrier strike group is now stationed. Every Iranian missile aimed at Tel Aviv or Haifa must traverse the Ford’s defensive envelope. Shooting at Israel means shooting at, around, and through an American carrier group. Iran cannot retaliate against Israel without engaging American naval assets. The Ford’s position makes that physically impossible. The carrier is not defending Israel as a favor. It is positioned so that any Iranian response to American strikes automatically becomes an attack on American forces, triggering the full unrestrained weight of US military response without a single additional political decision required. This is escalation insurance written in steel and seawater. If the campaign goes longer than planned, if munitions run thin in 7 to 10 days, if allies hesitate, the Ford’s position ensures that Iranian retaliation does the political work Washington cannot do alone: it transforms a limited American strike into an act of self-defense that no ally can refuse to support. You do not park a $13.3 billion carrier where the enemy’s return fire will hit it unless you want the enemy’s return fire to hit it. The Ford is not there to prevent escalation. The Ford is there to guarantee that if escalation comes, it comes on terms that make American restraint politically impossible and allied participation politically unavoidable. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…














