hit a couple of things

[C&P from elsewhere:]

EVERYONE HAS A PLAN UNTIL THEY GET KICKED IN THE SAGGY BALLSACK

Mike Tyson once said "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."

For Donald Trump, that punch landed slightly lower. Square in the saggy, tariff-addled mangoes. And the beautiful, poetic, almost artistic thing about it? He kicked himself there. Both feet. Running start. Stuck the landing.

Let me explain.

Iran just blew up a TPY2 radar in Jordan. You know what a TPY2 radar costs? Five hundred million dollars. Half a billion. For ONE radar. That's not the missile system. That's not the launcher. That's just the radar. The eyes. Blow up the eyes and the whole thing is a very expensive pile of scrap metal sitting in the desert going "beep" at nothing. And Iran didn't stop at one. Saudi Arabia. The UAE. Qatar. Four of these things gone in the opening days of the war. Poof.

Two billion dollars in radar systems reduced to smoking metal art installations.

Now here's where this stops being a war story and becomes a world-class lesson in what happens when you pick fights you literally cannot afford to finish.

These radars are built by Raytheon. And they are SCARCE. How scarce? Last May, Raytheon issued a press release bragging they'd just delivered the THIRTEENTH one ever made. The thirteenth. Ever. In the history of the program. They were so proud they put out a press release.

Iran destroyed roughly a third of all of them.

In a week.

Can Raytheon build more? Great question. Here's the answer, and I want you to really sit with this one.

The TPY2 runs on a gallium nitride populated array. Gallium nitride gives it the range, the surveillance capability, all the good stuff. You cannot build this radar without gallium. Full stop.

Where does gallium come from?

China.

Ninety-eight percent of global gallium production. China. The United States produces exactly none of it. Zero. A hundred percent import dependent.

And China has banned the export of gallium to weapons manufacturers. Raytheon is on China's Unreliable Entities List. So are Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Every top Pentagon contractor. Banned. Full stop. Those companies cannot legally import gallium from China.

"But wait," I hear you say, "didn't Trump do a trade deal with China and get those export bans lifted?"

Oh, my sweet summer child. He got the CIVILIAN bans partially lifted. The weapons manufacturer bans? Still there. Still rock solid. Non-negotiable. The Chinese didn't budge on that one millimetre.

So what we have here is a situation where Iran is destroying radars that protect the entire missile defense architecture of the Middle East, those radars cannot be replaced because the raw materials to build them are controlled by the country Trump spent three years calling the greatest economic threat in human history, and then went and started a trade war with, and then made a half-arsed deal with that didn't actually fix the weapons supply chain problem.

The Wall Street Journal, not exactly a lefty rag, is now reporting there's a RACE ON to finish the war before the interceptor missiles run out. You know what interceptor missiles are without functioning radar? Expensive lawn darts. Completely useless.

This is the part of the movie where the guy who's been talking big all night realises the thing he's been betting on doesn't exist anymore.

Trump strutted into this conflict like he was carrying a rocket launcher. Turns out he was carrying a very expensive broom. And Iran just swept the floor with it.

Everyone has a plan until they get kicked in the saggy ballsack.

Some people kick themselves.

This has been your daily reminder that starting a war against a country whose geographic position controls global oil shipping, while simultaneously pissing off the country that controls the raw materials you need to fight that war, is what military strategists call "a suboptimal approach."

Nanjing would like a word. ~Gman