And you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are definitely not eastern Washington lol
This is the view outside of Fairchild AFB, which runs the training course in question.
Wikipedia reports that Spokane has a Mediterranean climate, as does Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province where this F-15 is reported to have been shot down.
As an added benefit, enlisted air crew have no restrictions on mustache length or on professional wear of the uniform.
Seems like it's all about vacating the area and busting out the CSEL (or NGSR when materialized) personal SAR comms is the best way out, or it may well turn into a weeks(s) long, nonstop spy-shit ordeal getting out. Perhaps some forethought and packing with knowledge and specific local-appropriate items (and chunk of cash) would help more than MIL-STD Walmart camping aisle prepper bullshit.
Source: lived there.
Military personnel captured as prisoners of war are not hostages. Unlike embassy personnel held hostage during the 1979 revolution, it's unclear if military POWs have any value to leverage against the US, considering how its leader feels about about "people who get captured" and "they knew what they signed up for". We're only hearing about this so the administration can get ahead of the narrative instead of Iran. Otherwise, it's doing everything it can to hide information about the cost of war in terms of monetary cost and casualties.
The hostages here are the so-called "allies" in the Arab world who received no notice of the invasion and were sitting ducks for wide-scale regional retaliation from Iran due to them hosting US bases.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/hegseth-no-quarter-interna...
But, even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, this is clearly very bad for US soldiers (and sailors, airmen, etc). I wonder if they see that.
Even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, a no-quarter declaration is against _US law_, specifically subject to the penalty of death with no other lawful penalty defined: https://www.govregs.com/uscode/title18_partI_chapter118_sect....
The best shot would be to turn them over to the ICC
Where is the check or balance on this? The executive branch can apparently just launder itself wholesale of any crimes committed by its members.
This is not true.
OLC opinions are just that: opinions. They are non-binding and non-promissory. They are an important factor in any assessments as a norm, but definitely not dispositive and not legally binding.
The only real barrier is the pardon power, but I'm personally fine at this point with totally breaking the seal, trying and jailing every criminal in the administration(++), and consider the pardon power gone for good. Small price to pay.
this sounds like the kind of rules we, as a society, decided to dispense with, so the DOJ can absolutely turn around.
Now they even lie about it being a war, while they claim they have already won the war, that isn’t a war.
I wish I was joking.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
This is not an administration run by adults who model consequences.
Everything happens to reassure the Commander in Chief - and the people behind him, like Miller and Vought - that they're exceptionally special and gifted people who can have anything they want and do anything they want, to anyone, without limits.
That’s why he uses such language
This is just stupid, you cannot “fight to win” if you don't have a theory of victory.
And if you adopt Russian doctrines all you'll end up with is Russian military efficiency.
I've found that most of our population has almost no connection to the people that actually fight wars, and therefore have no idea what they think. With the exception of a few criminals, none of us desire to commit war crimes. None of us want to send rounds into civilian infrastructure, seeing regular people struggle to get food, fuel, and water in Iraq did not make me feel powerful and it was obvious it did not advance our goals on the ground.
The jingoistic commentary people hear from politicians and former military podcasters that don't fight anymore is repugnant, and this backsliding in the (at least attempt at) honorable execution of war is not going to bode well for our country. It's probably trite when we're double tapping girl's schools, but I want to think that purposely striking civilian infrastructure, universities, hospitals, water resources... this was all something "we" didn't do.
This is actively devaluing the meaning of being a Marine. Maybe this already happened in Mai Lai, maybe this was further chipped away by Abu Ghraib, maybe letting Eddie Gallagher off... etc etc. But this feels different in a way I've never felt before.
What's different this time is that they haven't bothered with the PR.
I absolutely believe you when you say that none of y'all want to commit war crimes, fire on civilian infra, bomb schools, etc. And yet that's happening right now, in Iran, and the soldiers continue to follow orders and carry out this travesty. I get that refusing an order is not something any soldier will do lightly, but when a school gets hit in Iran, do the soldiers conducting that strike not know what they're attacking beforehand?
Even if they don't, do they never find out? Do they not see that some large N% of targets that have been hit have ended up being civilian targets? When they're ordered to fire on a new target, do they not question whether or not it's a civilian target, given past history?
I ask these questions from near-complete ignorance; I really do not know how this works, or what kind of information any officer or soldier has when they're about to follow the orders they've been given. But it just seems insane to me that people continue to follow these orders, assuming they know how many civilians have been killed through previous actions. I just cannot imagine being in their position, and actually trusting that my superior officers were ordering me to do things that will later turn out to be morally defensible. (If any of this war is morally defensible, which I don't think it is.)
I'm going to bet that pilots aren't briefed to hit a school, they get a target package that says this is a legit target, an IRGC command post or something. There are multiple layers of detachment between the person picking coordinates, entering them into a JDAM, and the pilot releasing that weapon so who is ultimately responsible (and this is by design, everyone can tell themselves a story right now to sleep at night.)
But you do know what you hit, in the version of the military that I was in there would have been a detailed investigation into the chain of failures that led to striking a school with children in it. I'm sure it weighs heavily on the every person involved in that decision. Cold comfort for the parents of those kids, but something like that leaves a life long scar on the people responsible.
At least we're not pretending anymore.
I guess it makes some amount of sense that information isn't always distributed in huge amounts of detail, outside of the specifics on what they need to do.
I hope that those detailed investigations are still happening.
We want them to. At the same time that we sit at our keyboards and philosophize about how soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders, we [collectively] do not really want them spending all that much time pondering it. The most obvious cases, sure, but in general we want them to do what they are told, and do it quickly. That is why there are lawyers in the field to make fast judgements.
The better solution is to try and not routinely find ourselves in the position of the country being led by criminals.
I would really love if we could manage that, and soon.
> Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.
(slop has been around longer than LLMs)
"In 2024’s The War on Warriors, Hegseth argues at length that US forces should ignore the Geneva conventions and other elements of international law governing the conduct of war."
“'What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us?” he asks. “Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.'”
He wrote a book in which he openly advocates for war crimes. Maybe, just maybe, it pays to believe him.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/25/pete-hegseth...
> Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.
March 13, 2026
Poor choice of words. Hostage taking is illegal, but any captured US aviators would be prisoners of war, whose detention is entirely legal as long as they're treated humanely.
edit: I'm baffled by the amount of downvotes pointing out the objectively correct terminology can get. Its not a matter of opinion, military personnel captured by the enemy are pow no matter their treatment. A hostage, by definition, has been abducted.
The point is there are a great deal of people, even in the US, who advocate that it is unreasonable to hold people fighting the west in general and US in particular to the Geneva conventions. I don't know where this idea comes from, because morally it is of course indefensible, but there you go.
I would expect the number to be bigger in Iran. I would expect the number among IRGC extremists to be even higher than in Iran in general.
Second: war crimes have 2 interpretations. First as violations of the Rome treaty which require that the state where the warcrimes happen has signed the Rome treaty. Iran hasn't.
The second interpretation of warcrimes is that they are violations of the Geneva conventions, and the reaction would be that the UN security council intervenes. Well, the UNSC has preemptively declared they will not hold Iran to account for warcrimes (to be exact: France, Russia and China have declared they will veto). So at minimum you can say that Iranian warcrimes will not have any "official" consequences.
The world and the UN have decided that warcrimes "don't count". As in there will not be any consequences unless the government of the country where they happened implements those consequences.
Third: Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage. This is already a violation of the Geneva convention. They have also kidnapped hundreds of foreign nationals of other nations and are also holding them for ransom, which is also a violation of human rights, ie. a warcrime.
So those are my three reasons Iran won't hold itself to human rights standards.
I think I'll need some reeducation on this concept of "dignity" you speak. Could you explain further?
Come on US media tell us the truth, you want to save people by killing them or to just kill them?
My point is there is simply no verifiable numbers because both the opposition, particularly diaspora groups backed by the regimes enemies, and the government have incentives to be inaccurate. So trying to use the death toll as a talking point is not a good idea.
It's completely naive to underestimate the role of Mossad and the United States in the unrest. The former through actual Iranian nationals in their employ, and the latter in engineering the dollar shortage that led to the unrest in the first place (Scott Besant bragged about this).
Expect there to be a lot of operatives of the US in Iran. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it wouldn't be the first time a CIA or something operative is caught and this is the cover.
In war the first victim is always the truth
Also, I dont see UN punishing Israel or American war crimes either ... so it makes sense to not apply "whatever goes" standard to aggressors and different one to the defender.
Iran's use of cluster munitions to attack swaths of Israeli cities is also against the Geneva Convention (though I'd again point out that we started hitting civilian targets in Iran first).
Both sides have violated the conventions, but the US and Israel have violated them to a much greater degree (especially Israel and all their attacks on Lebanese civilians not to mention razing Gaza).
In my view, if someone invades your territory and starts attacking you, you have no obligation to follow any sort of "principles" or "rules" when it comes to how you fight back. Anything you need to do to the attackers in order to defend yourself and your people is, by definition, morally defensible.
(Do note that I said "need". Doing arbitrary messed-up things that don't actually further the goal of driving back the attackers is not ok.)
US exceptionalism is a prominent feature of every republican and democratic president since decades.
It's sad, because if US did, and led by example, it could've pulled serious weight internationally on plenty of matters.
Instead it can only do so by economic or military leverage, which, at the end of the day is not enough of a leverage to avoid confrontation.
In addition to waging continuous offensive militia operations, it’s been cultivating a conventional and nuclear offensive option which it most definitely would use if it had it, because again, the IRGC’s reason for existence is to “resist” Israel and the US, by which they mean obliterate those nations. What Trump recently has been saying about Iran is exactly what Iran has been saying for decades about the US and Israel.
One of those militias went all Leroy Jenkins in 2023 and prematurely initiated the current hot war, which Iran is losing. In frustration, Iran has embarked on a terror campaign of bombing neutral neighbors to punish them for … friendly diplomacy with the US I guess, and bombing civilians in Israel. And annexing an international waterway.
What Trump and folks on this board don’t seem to realize is that war with Iran is more like fighting a bunch of lawyers. You hurt them kinetically and they make you feel like you hurt yourself, get all confused. They slaughter 35k of their own people and shut off the Internet; the US mixes up the boundaries of an IRGC naval base in a much more constrained horror and the UN starts strutting around.
Narratives do matter for winning wars and between Trump derangement syndrome and the IRGC’s natural cleverness at permanent victimhood, it’s the narrative that’s at risk in a war between great nations that, unfortunately, sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades.
Then of course they had to deal with Irak who invaded them using US weapons and intel. Including use of sarin gas, thanks to US intel.
The argument about democracy in Iran is hypocritical given that neither Trump or Israelis care about it at all. They just want weak client States.
The Iranians didn't wake up hating the USA one day and a little techouva would be healthy if we want this conflict to end.
So that's great. Then, of course, anything the US does against Iran's islamist regime is justified according to you! Excellent news, that. Strange, I got a different impression from your tone.
P.S. you are now supposed to say that it merely means "you understand why" they act like this, not if it's justified. Even though you absolutely won't understand the US killing a few hundred Iranians in revenge.
Ending a cycle of violence also requires to accept where you did wrong (i.e "techouva"). The US have been bombing the world since 1943, with for the most part, little effect aside on the suffering of the civilians under fire.
The only intelligent move to stop the cycle of violence with Iran was the nuclear deal framework made by Obama. It was of course was terminated by Trump, which worked very well as the current war shows.
Bombing Iran during negociations, killing their supreme leader and negociators, commiting war crimes, won't clearly solve anything.
When I read such post, I feel that many people supporting the war in the US just have a sadistic instinct that needs to be expressed, whatever the consequences. Hurting (or, as the Trump aides say "fucking") other people won't fix the emptiness of your lives.
Translated to human terms: stop threatening the US and its allies.
The US position is not sadism, it’s how every nation except Iran tolerates one another, live and let live.
Russia and the US— they competed strongly with one another during the Cold War but generally respected red lines. Russia withdrew its kinetic threat from Cuba, the US knew circa 1998 that expanding NATO through the old Warsaw Pact would make no friends in Moscow. Strong, rules-based brinksmanship all the way around.
Iran is just about ideological extremism. Sometimes there are rules, or used to be, but the IRGC signed up a bunch of unprofessional clowns to wage total war on its behalf and, at core, talks like “mutually assured destruction” would be a total “win”, provided Israel was on the other side. If either superpower exposed that kind of philosophy in the Cold War can you imagine the calamity? It’s inherently destabilizing.
Few things:
- Please don't talk about “rules-based brinksmanship” when the US commits bombing and decapitation strikes during negotiations. Or when they send real estate developers to discuss nuclear programs[1].
- Iran had agreed to limit its enrichment and allow inspectors in to verify it. Of course, it was too much for Israelis who didn't want another competing power in the region. The end of the agreement led Iran to restart enriching its uranium at higher rates, having the (expected) complete opposite effect than what was wanted. Who's the clown here? Trump.
- The US' “ally”, Israel, currently has a far-right religious Zionist government that ticks all the boxes for ideological extremism. It also has a MAD doctrine regarding its illegal nukes. [2]
- Hezbollah was born after the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. While it was structured by Iran, its ranks are made of Lebanese citizens. Many non-Shia Lebanese will agree that it's the main defense against the invasion of their country, which is desired by the Zionist right to achieve their “greater Israel” project[3]. While Hezbollah is problematic now, its removal should be accompanied by a commitment by Israel not to invade its neighbors and to stop the illegal colonization of the West Bank.
In general, it's a recurrent strategy by Israel: favor frictions, violence, and fuel the most extremist of your opponents, to justify retaliation, and then allow you to extend your position. For instance, Israel was helping Gulf States to fund Hamas before the recent war started.[4] The US is an accomplice, as Israeli money heavily funds its politicians. It's not an ally.
[0]: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/cia-files-prove-america-...
[1]: https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2026-03-11/us-negotiators-w...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/what-is-greater-isr...
[4]: https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2020-02-24/ty-artic...
I really think this sort of "Israel is in control" thing leans into conspiracy lala land at best, and certain very dangerous and bad territory at worst.
And Israel is, through AIPAC, one of the largest donors in congress. Myriam Adelson, an Israeli billionaire and outspoken zionist, gave Trump $100 million for his campaign. Of course she is outright buying Trump, asking him to support the illegal colonization of the West Bank.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/miriam-adelson-gives-100-milli...
On top of that, evangelical christians, who tend to be radical zionists, are Trump's core voter base and fund directly Tsahal and Israel through donations. You can learn directly from the actors in this excellent israeli documentary:
So yeah, not really a conspiration, it's all out in the open. It's also not just a foreign policy, Trump threatened to end universities' funding if they didn't forbid criticism of Israel and allowed the administration to monitor them. A large part of his aides and government members are also Jewish and zionist advocates, which of course steers the policy.
Jared Kushner even does real estate promotion in the illegal colonies, when he's not sent to fail negociations regarding nuclear enrichment
The IRGC and Iranian leadership assume that since Israel is just one nation, and not a big one, that they really really want to annihilate, it should be no big deal for everyone else to accept. But that is a dangerous, even existential proposal on both sides, as the IRGC knows, partly because the US position worldwide is about projecting security for partners.
Iran actually occupies a mirror position regarding the Palestinians, who have fought and suffered greatly. So Iran strives to reverse the positions of the Israelis and Palestinians— not to raise all ships, but swap them— which isn’t a moral cause from an impartial perspective, it’s just picking a different winner.
The US and Israel sought peace through negotiations for decades regarding the Palestinians, while Iran has continually plotted and waged war, which it now has on its home soil. The US and Israel have genuinely sought to peacefully resolve the situation, while Iran has not, not in my lifetime.
The problem with Israel is that the initial colonization was mostly illegal and problematic. Now, time has passed and countries should recognize its existence, while Israel should also stop its plans of a "greater Israel", including invading and bombing all of its neighbors. And stop the illegal colonization of the West Bank, along with their policies and ideology treating Palestinians like animals.
Israel is a rogue state, with illegal nuclear weapons, that protects criminals from all over the world and refuses to extrade them and commits war crimes in the open. Your way of thinking, which it is a pure white dove in a sea of evil muslims won't solve anything : Israelis have to do techouva if they want peace.
Unfortunately, the current far-right government pursues a religious messianic plan, including the destruction of muslim holy sites to rebuild the temple, so they won't accept a lasting peace.
Iran is however not an existential threat to Israel, as long as it doesn't have a nuke. So the efforts should concentrate on this aspect, to which the Iranians were open to discuss...until the Israelis assassinated the negotiation team and the supreme leader that could have imposed a desescalation deal.
And now there's a new war, without any real reason (other than something something Netanyahu and they don't like the US) against a country that is a much more sophisticated adversary than Afghanistan or Iraq.
"sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades"
Surely by now we know nothing is inevitable? Especially over the range of decades.
It was Trump who ended the anti-nuclear treaty with Iran and the regular IAEA inspections within Iran.
Hamas does get some funding from Iran, but they are also the elected government of Gaza. Meanwhile Israel has destroyed hospitals, schools, and civilian homes throughout Gaza and the US is intentionally and preciselu destroying civilian infrastructure in Iran while Israel complains about missile attacks in civilian areas.
There is also "pride" as a moral code, where appearances of military superiority are what matters. At the start of the conflict the US and Israel appeared 100% invincible, and now they appear ... 99.9% invincible. So ... "victory for Iran" ... I guess.
In reality, of course, in response to "Israeli agression", Iran has severely damaged literally everyone who might have been on their side, with near-zero damage to Israel and US, while their own forces are dying in large numbers, while boasting of it. What an achievement! But that's where appearances matter. If they boast of it enough, maybe they can convince enough people ...
I believe the long term damage this has caused in immeasurable and the only way to remedy this would be that both Israel and the US find some way to investigate who and why started this war - and possibly prosecuting any war crime that may have occurred.
Also, the EU needs to grow a spine, fast.
But alas, I have no hope of that happening. We’re all worse off for that.
Recently, Trump has also said he’ll destroy the entire civilization. Tell me how that’s not planned genocide, per the accepted international definition of the word. I’m pretty sure Iran has made no such statement about Western or even US culture.
yet israel and the US both come out are infinitely worse in comparison, committing massive war crimes, lead by incompetent far-right extremists blinded by ideology and motivated by greed, personal gain and attempting to evade legal issues.
We have to wait and see if Iran is fighting a woke war.
what a fucking mess.
If the US military would like this war to stop they could not fight it, that would be pretty easy I think. Probably not without consequences, but that would show actual courage. Whereas dropping bombs on civilian from afar shows zero.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5150259-u-s-air-force-su...
“He’s not a war hero ... I like people who weren’t captured.”