Iran's Drone Attack Failed. What Does That Mean?

Escalation or stepping back from the brink?

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I popped onto Twitter Saturday evening, as I do, and saw screaming tweets that Iran had launched hundreds of drones at Israel. My first thought was, “This sounds like disinformation” because A. It’s Twitter and B. Iran was going to respond to Israel bombing its embassy but a direct attack? That’s crazy.

But a quick check of actual news sources confirmed that a massive drone attack was indeed underway. My second thought was, “Moron, this is exactly what you’ve been worried about for the last two years and you’re surprised it’s happening?”

If you’ve been following me over at The Banter, you’ll know that a few years ago, I started an article about drones, drone warfare, and bringing that technology home. When I started writing, I was pro-drone. Halfway through the article, I had really started to work out the various paths ahead of us and not one of them led to anything less than a catastrophic nightmare that would make Stephen King quit writing forever.

Since then, I’ve watched everything I was worried about start to take shape. One of the specific scenarios that I envisioned was launching hundreds of drones at once and turning a city into a parking lot. Which is exactly what Iran tried to do Saturday night. Maybe.

Very few of the drones and missiles got through and the attack failed. Again, maybe. We’ll get to that in a minute. There’s a lot to unpack here and we’re going to look at three different aspects of Iran’s drone/missile attack on Israel. Was the attack a success or a failure? How will this change the dynamics in the House with regard to funding both Israel and Ukraine? And what happens to drone warfare now?

A win for everyone or further escalation?

Iran’s attack was in retaliation for the bombing of its embassy in Syria. That strike, in turn, was in retaliation for Iran’s role in helping Hamas and on and on and on. It’s very possible, probable even, that Netanyahu is attempting to provoke a war because he cannot keep the war in Gaza going indefinitely and without a war, he’s going to prison.

If so, Israel will launch an attack directly on Iran, thus triggering the war Netanyahu has been aching for for literally decades. The IDF almost certainly would have retaliated by now but President Biden…persuaded…Netanyahu to stand down.¹

It’s important to understand that Netanyahu has been trying to push the United States into a war with Iran for years. Could Iran win a war against the US? No. Can we win a war against Iran? Define “win.” We cannot possibly invade Iran the way we did Iraq. The logistics are unbelievably worse. Holding it? Laughable. We couldn’t even hold Iraq or Afghanistan.

We could, however, burn the country to the ground, send Iran back to the Stone Age, and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process. Which is exactly what Netanyahu wants. Ummmmm…no. Two insane and unjustified wars in the Middle East in one century are enough, thank you very much. Biden is right. If Israel wants to start an offensive against Iran, they can do it without us. Defense? Sure. Attack? That’s all you.

But Iran has given Israel a very large and obvious off-ramp. Despite doing almost no damage at all, Iran has claimed victory and essentially said we got our tit for tat, now walk away:

Through its mission at the UN, Iran said the mass aerial attack, which it called Operation True Promise, was a retaliation for the bombing of an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus on 1 April, and that it now considered the matter closed unless there was further action by Israel.

“The matter can be deemed concluded,” the statement said. “However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe,” the statement on the social media platform X said. “It is a conflict between Iran and the rogue Israeli regime, from which the US must stay away.”

Iran launched drones at one of the most weaponized airspaces in the world. Did they really expect the attack to work? Or did they assume/hope everything would be shot down? With no body count and little damage, Iran can still say they struck a mighty blow blablabla and Israel would not feel pressure to retaliate.

Considering no one died and the damage done was minimal, Israel would have to be insane to escalate. Iran is not the good guy but if they’re stepping back from the edge and Israel is the one to jump? There’s no way to justify it or paint it in a good light.

Israel is already stretched thin. They’re not going to be able to do this without our help and we cannot stand with literal warmongering. Israel needs to take the win and focus on ending Hamas instead of trying to kick off a regional war they cannot successfully prosecute.

Just as an aside, it’s important to note how excited both far-right and alt-left Twitter were at the prospect of WWIII. They were salivating at the idea of a massive war in the Middle East they could blame on Joe Biden and “The Jews.” Honestly, it was difficult to tell the difference between the two groups. Their excitement at how they could use the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to their political advantage tells you everything you need to know about how morally depraved they’ve become. I swear to fuck, when this election is over, I will never forget nor forgive them for this.

MAGA Mike Under Pressure

Speaker of the House Marjorie Taylor Greene Mike Johnson has a problem. He wants to fund Israel. It’s extremely popular with the Evangelical base and popular enough with the Democratic base that Democrats are on board.

But he also wants to fund Ukraine. Sort of. It’s popular enough with the Republican base and widely supported by Democrats that he can do it. Except Russia does not want it. Therefore, the House Freedom Caucus, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kremlin, does not want it.

It’s true that the House Freedom Caucus is a minority of the House GOP but any one of them could trigger a challenge to Johnson’s speakership and it’s not at all clear Democrats will step in and help. Keeping control of the House is already a longshot. Having a protracted leadership struggle 7 months before an election guarantees a wipeout.

So what will MAGA Mike do? I honestly do not know. He has to get money to Israel or the holy rollers will eat him alive for interfering with Armageddon. But now that we’ve seen that drones can be shot down with the right equipment in mass numbers, there is every justification for getting, at the very least, heavy-duty defensive weapons to Ukraine as Russia continues to try and cripple the nation’s infrastructure.²

Democrats will never allow Johnson to split the aid packages. He can promise to put both packages up for a vote until his face turns blue. His word is worthless as long as he is beholden to Russian agents like MTG.

Johnson will have to make a choice soon: Actually do his job and follow the will of his base or kowtow to the people he knows are being controlled by Putin.

Johnson needs to be Speaker come next January if Trump loses in order to help him steal the election. That was always the plan. He cannot risk being removed. But if Johnson sits on his hands and Trump loses and the plan to steal the election fails (again), Republicans will lose 30 or more seats. If they’re lucky.

If hard being a treasonous piece of shit. Which master do you serve? So hard to make decisions!

A Setback For Drones?

At the beginning of this article, I was surprised that Iran directly attacked Israel and then knocked myself on the head for being surprised. The reason for that, if you haven’t dropped everything to read my Banter articles about drones, is that drones make war easy.

You’re not sending in people to die. It’s cheap. It’s (usually) pretty effective. Drones make war impersonal which lowers the barrier to waging war. Why wouldn’t Iran launch hundreds of drones? It’s an attack but it’s not an invasion, right? No need to send in troops and tanks and all that craziness. We can just lob drones and some missiles at each other. Very sanitary and clean.³

This is what I fear most about drones. Once we make mass drone attacks “normal,” anyone can do it. And they will because, well, it’s not “real” war so we can just launch a mass drone attack right back. No need for supply lines and recruiting troops to replace the fallen. Just keep building new drones and send them to blow stuff up. In that world, the country with the most manufacturing muscle and tech-savvy wins. Who might that be? Hint: Not Iran. Not Russia. China? Maybe. My money would be on the United States.

But the Iran attack was a spectacular dud, wasn’t it?

Well…yes? Again, that might have been on purpose. Still, we have now seen an attack using hundreds of drones at once. Up until this point, the largest drone attack involved just 75 or so launched by Russia against Ukraine, only one of which hit its target.

So mass drone attacks are useless, right? Well…no. Ukraine is being pummeled by drones. So is Russia. It’s easy (easy is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) to shoot down drones when you have a ton of firepower to bring to bear and you have several hours of warning. But will that always be the case? In my scenario, 100 or more drones are launched from a ship offshore at New York City or Miami or Washington DC. I can only assume DC has a ton of anti-air tucked away out of sight. It’s the nation’s capital, after all. But NYC? Miami?

What about Baltimore Harbor? One bridge collapsed and cut traffic off to one of our major ports for over a month.⁴ What happens if several drones drop the Verzano up in NYC and cut off all shipping traffic on the Hudson? The Port of New York and New Jersey is the largest port on the east coast. I can’t imagine it would take more than 7 or 8 drones packed with explosives to do the job if you know where to hit.

The US is, lucky for us, mostly geographically isolated from bad actors. Mostly. But Europe isn’t, obviously. Asia certainly isn’t. If China decided to pelt Taiwan with drones, what could they do to stop it? How much of their airspace is protected the way Israel is? How much is ours?

Israel has shown that drones can be defended against easily (easily still doing a lot of heavy lifting). But Ukraine shows how effective they can be. I think the attack on Israel will do nothing to slow down our mad dash toward widespread drone warfare. At best, it might be a speed bump. And we should be very worried the first time an attack like this succeeds because once it does, there will be no going back.

There are 203 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.

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1. That’s going to put a real crimp in the “warmonger” talking point and will therefore be aggressively ignored by the alt-left.

2. That’s aside from the argument that Russia was losing until we stopped giving Ukraine the weapons it needed, which tells you everything you need to know about why the Freedom Caucus cut Ukraine’s funding.

3. Not for the people being killed, of course, but when have governments ever paid attention to casualties?

4. Engineers expect to have the port partially open in a few weeks and fully open by the end of May which is months faster than originally predicted.