March, 4: paint by missiles

The most expensive colouring book in history

What came before:

The opening salvo

March, 1: day two

March 2: No1 to call

March, 3: No1 left to call

More of the same today. More radars gone. More drones hunted. More Hezbollah rockets. More missiles. More timelines extended. More narrative control.

Just another Wednesday in the New Normal.

Hegseth said eight weeks now. Four days became four weeks became eight weeks. At this rate we hit “whatever it takes” by Friday. (Draghi’s still waiting on his commission.)

Tehran took the heaviest bombardment yet overnight. Strikes across the city through the early hours - residential neighbourhoods, police stations, universities, Basij headquarters. Mehrabad Airport hit. Yazd and Tabriz struck. Isfahan and Karaj again. The IDF says 5,000 airstrikes since day one across 1,600 sorties. Iranian state media puts the death toll at 1,045.

That is what bombing blind looks like when it meets a population centre.

Let’s go for the eyes. Or what’s left of them.

Two radars destroyed in Bahrain. Three radomes at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. One THAAD radar in the UAE. Another in Jordan. The billion-dollar early warning system in Qatar I wrote about on day one. And satellite imagery confirmed yet another THAAD kill in Saudi Arabia today. Two more overnight - Abu Dhabi and a Jordanian airbase.

Running tally: over $3.4 billion in ground-based sensors. *Poof*

The IRGC said they did all of this. All confirmed now. By satellite. By the New York Times. By everyone except CENTCOM, who are busy tweeting videos of destroyed trucks. Five days in and I trust the IRGC’s damage assessments more than CENTCOM’s. I need a drink.

Today the IRGC announced they struck the Qatar radar. Again. I guess they wanted to make sure that the corpse stayed dead?

Now, once the ground radars go dark, you go after the airborne eyes. The surveillance drones that loiter over Iran feeding targeting data to strike packages. Yesterday I wrote about the Hermes 900s and Herons being picked off. Today the count is 26 drones claimed downed. But the more interesting story is the one the IRGC captured intact. Armed. Not shot down. Landed under Iranian control with its weapons and electronics. That is not a kill. That is a gift basket with a bow on it.

Radars blind. Drones hunted. And the targets themselves?

Oh. This is where it gets good.

The IDF released strike footage today. “Destroyed Iranian Mi-17 helicopter.” “Destroyed F-14 fighter jets.” Mehrabad Airport. Beautiful precision hits. Million-dollar munitions finding their marks on camera.

2D ones. On asphalt. With heat signature painted on for good measure. The “helicopter” rotors didn’t move on impact. The “F-14s” sat perfectly still through direct hits. Iran had moved its entire air force underground before the first bomb fell, then drew pictures of the planes on the tarmac and let the world’s most expensive targeting systems have at it.

Banksy would have signed it. Then again, nobody’s fired a cruise missile at a Banksy. Yet.

Someone watched this footage, saw a helicopter or a plane that didn't flinch under a direct hit, and approved it for release. That's a trained intelligence professional. Presumably.

Trump told reporters he destroyed the Iranian Air Force. He destroyed a mural. And then bragged about it.

Robert Pape - the man who literally wrote the textbook on air campaigns - said when Hegseth announced a shift to gravity bombs: “we are running out of precision munitions”.

Day one: B-2 Spirits. $2.1 billion stealth bombers flying from Missouri. You send those when air defences are intact and you need to sneak through. Day two: B-1B Lancers with standoff missiles - still keeping your distance, firing from hundreds of kilometres out. Day four: B-52 Stratofortresses. A plane first flown in 1952. Dropping gravity bombs.

The sequence went from stealth → standoff → dumb bombs. That is not escalation dominance. That is either a total degradation of the Iranian AD or the cupboard getting bare and dropping progressively less precise ordnance. On paintings.

Four days of Iran consumed more guided munitions than four years of Ukraine. The Pentagon is preparing to ask Congress for $50 billion more. Patriot missiles take two years per unit.

And above Tehran, an F-35 won a “historic” fight against an Iranian Yak-130. The most advanced fighter on earth against a training plane not designed for combat. First aerial victory since 1985.

Iran’s real jets are somewhere else. Underground, probably. And when the radars are gone. When the AD runs dry and the eyes in the sky are blinded. Those real jets will come out to play...

Hegseth says the US will have “complete control of Iranian skies” in days. Sure Pete. Any day now.

The IRIS Dena was returning from the International Fleet Review in India. Torpedoed by a US submarine. In international waters. 4,000 km from the theatre of operations.

Hegseth was practically bouncing: “First torpedo sinking since World War II!” Like a kid unlocking an achievement in a video game.

Same day. Russian LNG tanker Arctic Metagaz. Mediterranean. Between Malta and Libya. Nearly split in half. Ukrainian USVs are the prime suspects.

Two ships. Separate oceans. Hours apart. Neither anywhere near a declared combat zone. One returning from a peace exercise. One hauling gas.

The age of safe maritime commerce died today and nobody held a funeral.

Maersk suspended all cargo bookings for the entire Gulf - UAE, Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia. COSCO too. Iran torched a container ship trying to cross Hormuz today. Four more vessels hit near the Strait in the past 24h. The IRGC claims over 10 vessels targeted including oil tankers.

They don’t threaten.

Iran fired a ballistic missile at Turkey. At a NATO member. It crossed Iraq and Syrian airspace before NATO knocked it down over the eastern Mediterranean. Debris fell in Hatay province. Target appears to have been the US Incirlik Air Base.

Erdogan went on television with the diplomatic equivalent of “mate, seriously”? He did not invoke Article 5. Hegseth said he saw “no sense it would trigger anything like Article 5”.

A ballistic missile at a base storing nuclear warheads on NATO territory. No sense it triggers anything. Good to know the collective defence clause has a “just vibes” exception nobody mentioned at the signing ceremony.

Minutes after Turkey warned Iran this should not happen again, Iran reportedly fired at Greece.

Again? The first attack a few days ago that hit the British base in Cyprus, and it didn't come from the country everyone's at war with? Hezbollah is the obvious candidate. But the timing - in hindsight - was … peculiar: the exact moment London had to decide whether to allow its bases to be used for offensive operations or not... A strike from "an unknown source" that conveniently strengthens the case for going deeper.

“Western Official Estimates Iran Likely Has Just Days of Missile Strikes Left”

Actual WSJ headline. This afternoon.

I've read this article before. 3 years ago. Different country. Also down to its last missiles. Great CAPS. Great confidence. They’re still firing.

Iran manufactures 100 ballistic missiles per month. Rubio said this on camera. Ten thousand drones monthly. But sure. Days left.

Meanwhile, the US forces in Qatar are firing old PAC-2 interceptors. 26-year-old missiles. The modern stocks are gone. They’re stitching together museum pieces to keep the batteries alive.

Trump’s “virtually unlimited” stockpile is not aging well.

And then the footage that buried whatever remained of the “Iran is running dry” narrative. Flat desert. Sand. Nothing as far as the eye can see. Then fire and a rocket launches from what was an empty landscape two seconds ago. No pads. No equipment. No signature. Just sand, and then fire.

Underground missile cities. Twenty years of construction. For precisely this freakin’ moment. You can’t target what you can’t see. And you definitely can’t find it when your radars are scrap metal and your drones keep getting giftwrapped.

Remember when Hezbollah was destroyed? Pager attack. Assassinations. Israel declared them neutralised. Western media wrote the obituary.

Turns out they were napping. Resting up. Maybe doing some yoga. Whatever destroyed military organisations do between their obituary and 62 combat operations in 48 hours.

Five Merkava tanks hit by anti-tank missiles in southern Lebanon. IDF casualties evacuated by helicopter from Khiam. An IED on advancing forces. Israeli Channel 13 quoted an official saying “we made a mistake regarding Hezbollah and didn’t expect them to launch rockets to this extent”.

Didn’t expect. Hezbollah. To fire rockets. What did you expect? A strong-worded letter?

But the interesting bit is what happened at midday. Hezbollah launched rockets toward central Israel at the exact moment Iranian ballistic missiles were inbound. Same time. Two axes. The rockets from Lebanon cover for infiltrating recon drones while the Iranian missiles force every air defence battery to light up and reveal its position. Within hours the pattern was confirmed.

Today, they weren’t trying to overwhelm the defences. They’re just taking notes.

QatarEnergy declared Force Majeure. Legalese for “we can’t deliver you gas because we’re getting shot at”. 20% of global supply. Restart time: two weeks minimum. Full capacity: a month. Qatalum - their aluminium smelter - shut down too. That one takes six to twelve months.

European gas prices spiked 50% this week. These are the same Europeans that want to be Russian-energy-free by ‘27.
Putin - ever the comedian - helpfully suggested today that maybe Russia should just cut gas to Europe now rather than wait for the 2027 phase-out. Why delay the inevitable?

Serbia’s Vucic said “oil prices will kill us all” and predicted Europe would “plunge into hell”. Dramatic man. Not wrong though.

Brent at $81. S&P closed green. Gold & silver basically unchanged. Thirty percent of global oil offline. Gulf LNG gone. A shooting war across seven countries.

Someone desperately needs the dials to read “everything is fine”. I’ve said it before. And I’ll keep saying it until the dials break.

Dover Air Force Base posted a job listing today. Part-time, on-call “Personal Effects Specialists”. The job: receive, safeguard, inventory, store, process, and ship personal effects of military and civilian casualties from overseas.

Official count: six dead. And Dover is hiring. Seems these guys had a LOT of personal effects.

Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus called Reza Pahlavi - the self-proclaimed Crown Prince of Iran, Maryland resident for 45 years. Posed as advisors to Merz. One introduced himself as “Adolf”. In costume. Pahlavi didn’t flinch. Agreed to more bombings. Offered Iranian oil to German companies. Confirmed his coordination with Netanyahu. When asked if the people being bombed would support him, his assistant panicked and cut the call.

White House press secretary Leavitt told reporters today Spain “agreed to cooperate” with the US military. Spain’s Foreign Minister went on radio within the hour: “I deny this categorically. Not a single comma has changed.”

Sánchez’s position in four words: “No to war.”

The lie had a shorter shelf life than the press conference.

Iran declared today it is shifting to “governing for a prolonged war”. Not fighting one. Governing one. That is the language of a country that has accepted its new reality and is reorganising its entire state apparatus around it.

Hegseth says they’re “just getting started”.

So does Iran.

Still devolving...