IRANIAN CITIES BURN AMID REBELLION

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

THE PLANNED U.S. ATTACK ON IRAN has a hitch: most of the missile-targeting crew are queuing for toilets on the lead vessel, the USS Gerald R Ford.

This is not a joke. A set of emails was obtained by NPR, a US public broadcasting group, revealing that toilet wars have broken out on board the most expensive ship the US Navy ever built. The Wall St Journal followed up to confirm the tale today.

TLDR Summary: There are too few functioning toilets for 4,600 sailors and the problem is worsening daily—there’s no chance of fixing the system without returning the ship to the US dockyards.

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BIG PROBLEMS TO DISCHARGE

Problem one: Design planners screwed up by including too few toilets for 4,600 sailors, leading to 45-minute queues on a daily basis.

Problem two: Engineers screwed up by installing a fragile vacuum system in which a single valve breakdown on one toilet can stop all the toilets in an entire department functioning—making the queues even longer.

Problem three: Some of the temporary repair operations (such as using an acid flush to clear out calcium build-ups) can only be done while the ship is docked: no prospect of that. But with so many toilets out of order, too much pressure is put on the ones still working, so the problem will just spread.

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KEY PLAYER IN U.S. ATTACKS

And the issues have been gradually mounting for more than a year. “A March 18, 2025 email from the engineering department sent out to all chiefs on the ship said there were 205 [toilet] breakdowns in four days,” the NPR reported.

The ship is at the heart of US overseas attack operations, working for months in waters near Venezuela, to support the abduction of the country’s president and the seizing of ships carrying oil to customers, and is now heading the planned regime change operation in Iran. Israel wants a pro-Netanyahu leader installed, as the US has done in many other countries.

But how can they attack Iran while staff are queuing for the loo?

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WAR OF WORDS ON BOARD

One result of all this is war between sailors and on-board sewage staff (called Hull Technicians, or HTs).

One sewage engineering head complained that the sailors put all sorts of problematic material down the toilets, including t-shirts: “Our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed by Sailors on a daily basis. My HT's are currently working 19 hours a day right now trying to keep up with the demand.”

Sigh. And the US taxpayer spent US$13 billion on the ship.

On the plus side, it would be delightful if the carrier’s desperate lack of functioning toilets caused the attack on Iran was cancelled or postponed.

[Dr Strangelove]

Right on time with the wmd bogeyman

[Dr Strangelove]

The USS Gerald R. Ford has been at sea for 241 days.

Her deployment has been extended twice. She is now heading back toward the Middle East for a third time, and the Wall Street Journal just published what the Pentagon does not want you to read.

Sailors are missing funerals. Missing births. Missing their children’s first steps. The ship’s sewage system is failing, requiring maintenance calls every single day and acid flushes costing $400,000 each.

Crew members are telling reporters they want to quit the Navy. Morale is described in terms that defense journalists have not used since Vietnam-era reporting.

This deployment is on track to reach 11 months. The post-Vietnam record is 294 days, set by the USS Abraham Lincoln during COVID in 2020. The Ford will break it. And she is not coming home.

Here is what the human toll tells you about the strike calculus that no OSINT flight tracker can.

The United States Navy operates 11 aircraft carriers. The Ford carries approximately 5,000 sailors and over 75 aircraft. Extending her deployment twice, at enormous cost to crew retention, family stability, and mechanical readiness, is not something the Navy does for leverage.

The Navy fights extensions. Carrier strike group commanders fight extensions. The families lobby Congress against extensions.

Extensions happen over institutional resistance when the mission authority, in this case the Commander in Chief, has determined that the asset cannot leave theater.

The Ford cannot leave theater because nothing has replaced her and the mission she was sent to support has not been completed or cancelled.

Think about what “extended twice” means operationally. The first extension signals that the original timeline was optimistic. The second extension signals that the mission itself has changed.

You do not burn through crew morale, defer scheduled maintenance, and risk retention crises across your most advanced warship for a contingency. You do it for a commitment.

Now connect the dots.

The Ford crossed into the Mediterranean on February 20, adding her air wing to the 500-plus aircraft already in theater. Nine C-17s carrying 700 tonnes of munitions are en route. Hundreds of personnel evacuated from Al Udeid. A P-8A is mapping the Strait of Hormuz.

The IRGC is massing at the Iraqi border. Khamenei has activated shadow government protocols.

Graham is lobbying for strikes. Trump’s deadline expires in days. And Witkoff just told Fox that Iran is one week from bomb-making material.

The Ford’s sailors are paying the human cost of a decision that has already been made in everything but name.

You do not break a post-Vietnam deployment record, destroy your crew’s families, and risk the readiness of your most expensive warship to park it in the Mediterranean as a prop.

The $13.3 billion ship is not a negotiating tactic. She is a weapons delivery platform.

And she has been held in place, at extraordinary cost, because someone in the chain of command has determined she will be needed.

Sailors do not miss their children’s births for bluffs.

The stage is not being set. The stage was set weeks ago. What you are watching now is the cost of holding the curtain.

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

Will Maga accept high casualties? Even if they do the rest of the country will not. This is a lose-lose no matter how they play it. The dog has caught the car, now what?

[Dr Strangelove]

Five days ago the United States lost a $220 million drone over the Strait of Hormuz. And nobody told you.

On February 22, an MQ-4C Triton, registration 169660, transmitted emergency code 7700 at 32,900 feet over the strait and vanished from Flightradar24. Gone. No wreckage announcement. No CENTCOM statement. No Pentagon briefing. The most advanced maritime surveillance drone in the American arsenal disappeared over the most contested waterway on earth during the largest military buildup since 2003, and the silence is deafening.

This is the same location, the exact same coordinates over the strait, where Iran shot down an RQ-4A Global Hawk in June 2019 using a Khordad-3 surface-to-air missile. That incident nearly triggered a war. Trump approved strikes, then recalled them with planes already in the air. Seven years later, another high-altitude surveillance drone vanishes in the same spot, and the Pentagon says nothing.

Defence Security Asia and Defence-UA report Iranian electronic warfare is suspected. Not a missile. Electronic warfare. If confirmed, this means Iran did not destroy the Triton. Iran hijacked it. Seized its control link, overwhelmed its GPS navigation, and either crashed it into the Gulf or worse, landed it intact the way Iran captured the RQ-170 Sentinel in 2011 by spoofing its GPS and guiding it down like a lost bird.

Now connect this to what China has been delivering.

X accounts with intelligence community sourcing report China has transferred advanced electronic warfare systems to Iran capable of jamming carrier-based F-35s. EADaily reports the US “blames Russia and China” for the loss. If Iranian EW systems, built with Chinese technology, can seize control of an MQ-4C Triton flying at 33,000 feet, those same systems can disrupt the communications and targeting links that the entire strike architecture depends on.

The F-22s suppress radar. The B-2s carry bunker busters. The carriers launch strike packages. All of it relies on data links, GPS targeting, and command signals traveling through electromagnetic spectrum that Iran, with Chinese hardware, just demonstrated it can dominate over the strait.

You do not spend $67 billion on stealth and then lose your surveillance drone to electronic warfare five days before a potential strike. That is not a setback. That is a capability demonstration by the other side, proving they can blind you over the waterway you need to control.

The Pentagon’s silence is the loudest signal. When you lose a $220 million asset to a technical malfunction, you say so immediately because the alternative narrative is worse. When you say nothing for five days, it is because confirming what happened reveals a vulnerability you cannot afford to acknowledge while 500 aircraft and two carriers sail into the same electromagnetic environment.

Iran just showed you it can turn the lights off over Hormuz. And Washington is pretending nobody noticed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…