@wesleymorgan.bsky.social
Writing about America’s post-9/11 wars https://linktr.ee/wesleysmorgan Author of THE HARDEST PLACE (2021), another one on its way https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227894/the-hardest-place-by-wesley-morgan/ Signal: https://tinyurl.com/kzmejtaw
NYT reporting found that civilians killed by strikes in the Gulf are almost all migrant workers www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/w...
BREAKING: The Israeli military says it is dropping charges against five soldiers who were accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.
I’ve read The Anarchy! Must’ve forgotten about Richard
Phenomenal!
According to ChatGPT:
“When I first cut my teeth in the unit, the old sergeant told me not to split hairs about every little detail—just keep my eyeballs peeled, pick his brain whenever I could, and eventually I’d make my bones.”
Is there a Sharpe or Sharpe-like novel I can read that features him??
What’s a plausibly sensical sentence that includes all of the following expressions?
• Cut one’s teeth
• Split hairs
• Make one’s bones
• Keep one’s eyeballs peeled
• Pick one’s brain
Yeah but I’ve been reading the Sharpe books, and according to those, that’s also how they got Arthur Wellesley 🤔🧐🫡
This is no different from Putin saying MH17 was shot down by Ukraine or Assad saying rebels gassed themselves.
If we want to compare to recent US air campaigns:
During Operation Rough Rider last spring, CENTCOM struck 1,000+ targets in Yemen over 7 weeks.
At the height of the air war against ISIS, in 2017, the US-led coalition struck 2,000-4,000 targets per month across Iraq and Syria.
(Some maps of areas of Iran where the US and Israel say their strike campaign has been focusing)
Conversely, these figures also illustrate that as heavy as the bombing of Iran is, if you think the US and Israel are doing to Iran what Israel did to Gaza—they’re not. The opening bombing of Gaza was *vastly* more intense, due to its being such a tiny fraction of the size of affected areas of Iran.
Here’s the source for Israel’s strike rate in the first 6 days of Gaza. As I noted at the time, that exceeded the highest *month* of US munitions expenditures during the air war against ISIS (during the 2017 bombing of Raqqa).
…estimated to have a strength of 30,000 to 50,000 fighters and only very light air defenses. And the overall US-Israeli air campaign during the opening week in Iran was only about double the intensity of Israel’s opening week in Gaza.
…meaning that Israel used about the same average daily number of munitions (~1,000) in the opening week of a campaign against a military with relatively sophisticated air defenses and 600,000 regular troops as in the first week in Gaza, which is one-five-thousandth the size and where Hamas was…
In the first week of war, the US struck 3,000 Iranian targets (now up to 5,500) with an unknown number of munitions and Israel struck 3,400 targets with 7,500 munitions.
This allows an interesting comparison to Gaza, where Israel struck 3,600 targets with 6,000 munitions in the first 6 days…
How very British-army-in-India
Paying for rank worked so well for the Afghan army
Funny response by someone who 1) thinks they’re better at verifying these kinds of videos than Bellingcat is and 2) can’t imagine that mountains come in different sizes and the person filming is standing on a higher one
That’s ok, I actually care a lot more about Bellingcat’s verification of them than yours
Crazy video of 20 Tomahawks flying through the Iraqi Kurdish mountains near Sulaymaniyah (filmed by someone standing *above* them), seemingly fired from Navy vessels in the Mediterranean
Click the arrows in the map below to view the verified Tomahawk missile sightings in Iraq last week, including the original footage and geolocation analysis.
bellingcat-embeds.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/2026-march-t...
Compare this to the initial CENTCOM press release about the number and severity of wounds in this strike—5 seriously wounded (presumably including the additional 4 later declared dead or who later died of their wounds) and “several minor shrapnel injuries and concussions…being returned to duty”
bsky.app/profile/wesl...
Exactly right. Can’t really trust anyone who didn’t grow up on Clancy.
Food deliveries and the prospect of access to medical care gave Gazans reasons to think things were slowly improving.
Then, Israel and the United States began hitting Tehran with missiles and everything stopped again.
"An ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings."
Gift link, free article: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/u...
Q: You said the war is 'very complete.' But your defense secretary says 'this is just the beginning.' So which is it?
TRUMP: You could say both
