heraldmage

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The Pentagon is hunting for new ways to protect its bases from cheap drones. On the table are camouflage, fake decoy buildings and even moving key sites deep underground. The push comes after Iran showed just how much damage drones can do. During this war, its missiles and drones have hit hundreds of buildings at U.S. bases in 8 Middle East countries. The worry has spread to Europe too, where the U.S. pulled 12 bombers out of a British base earlier this month. That was over intelligence of an Iranian drone plot, which of course Iran denies. Either way, cheap drones are changing how even big militaries protect themselves. Source: The Intercept / Writer: Daniyal

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The Iran strike is on hold until after Nov. 3... and the same ballots will decide who writes the checks for it Trump has three carriers in range and a decision parked behind the midterms, but the vote also hands out the gavels that fund the next round. Susan Collins chairs Senate Appropriations, voted against Hegseth, and is in a dead heat in Maine against a logger whose website lists no tax dollars for Israel's military as a top priority. Mitch McConnell, the Senate's defense appropriator who's been warning that paying for the war through reconciliation is unsustainable, is retiring either way. In the House, the top defense appropriator Ken Calvert is fighting a fellow Republican for a redrawn California seat while two Palantir executives put $900,000 behind him, and if Democrats flip the chamber, Adam Smith takes back the Armed Services gavel. The war has already cost $45 billion with interceptor stocks at 61% and no way to rebuild them before 2030, and every dollar of the next round has to come through those committees. A Republican Congress keeps the money flowing on reconciliation and lets Trump finish the job on his schedule. A Democratic House can't stop a strike, but it can slow the replenishment bill, demand the base-repair numbers the Pentagon is still hiding, and make every escalation a floor fight. So the order of events is set: the Pentagon's 96-hour window opens Nov. 4, and whether the strike that follows is funded for a month or for a year gets decided by voters in Maine, Michigan, Texas and one Republican-on-Republican district in Orange County. Source: Breaking Defense, OpenSecrets / Writer: Daniel

🇷🇺🇺🇸🇮🇷 Russia is offering to MEDIATE between Trump and Iran, and Moscow says it could even take Iran's enriched uranium. Russia is prepared to help broker talks between Washington and Tehran if requested, while working to prevent another military escalation in the Gulf. The Kremlin added that Iran is already a regular subject in its communications with Washington. Source: Al Jazeera / Writer: Samuel

🇮🇷 Pro-regime accounts are back at it, and this time they’re coming for the Gulf’s Wi-Fi Would Iran really pull the plug, or is this all for show? Writer: Daniyal

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇱 The Patriot battery the Pentagon pulled out of Texas for the Iran fight is going to Israel Two officials reportedly told the Wall Street Journal the destination is Israel, and flight tracking backs it up. The choice makes sense inside the Pentagon's own plan: it told the Gulf to expect a short, intense campaign after Nov. 3, Iran has promised to answer by hitting across the region, and Israel is where the heaviest retaliation lands. But the US Army has already burned through 61% of its pre-war Patriot interceptors, leaving roughly 39% with no way to rebuild before 2030, so every battery moved is a battery not somewhere else, and this one was taken from the homeland and handed to the one ally that already has Arrow and David’s Sling. Source: Wall Street Journal, @shelbyholliday / Writer: Daniel

🇺🇲 Trump’s reverse psychology on inflation and the Iran war is wearing thin. “[We had] the worst inflation in American history…when the war ends, it will be down very quickly... It could be over whenever I want it to be over.” Translation: I have no way of stopping the Iran war and inflation be damned. Writer: Marie