Ritter’s Rant 080: The Double Tap
Источник: https://scottritter.substack.com/p/ritters-rant-080-the-double-tap
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Hello and welcome to this edition of Ritter's Rant.
Today we're going to be talking about the double tap.
Now the double tap is...
a reference to tactics that you can either talk about close quarter combat,
double tap is just hit your target twice to make sure it goes down.
But more recently, it's taken on sort of a propagandist element.
When you have regimes like the Assad regime in Syria,
they were accused of the double tap regime.
dropping a bomb on a facility,
having civilians gathered to rescue the wounded,
and then dropping another bomb to ensure maximum casualty effect.
And over time,
many regimes,
that's what we call governments we don't like,
have been accused of carrying out double taps.
Even today,
in the ongoing conflict between Iran and Israel,
Iran is often accused of a double tap.
The absurdity of carrying out a double tap using the weapons that Iran is using is
beyond description,
but it doesn't matter.
The double tap is considered to be the manifestation of evil.
Only nations with the most psychopathic intent to murder carry out double taps.
On the opening day of the American-Israeli aggression against Iran,
an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer operating in the Arabian Sea,
400 miles off the coast of Iran,
was given instructions to fire a certain number of tomahawk prisoners.
And the way this works is it's part of a operations order
series of targets that are described and they'll have coordinates put down that are
then loaded into the missiles by an onboard control unit manned by sailors.
And then they will be fired in a specific sequence.
The idea is when you have different ships off the coast,
there's different distances,
but the idea is you want your missiles to arrive on the targets at about the same
time.
You don't want to
sequence them because you give advance notice.
You want them to arrive at once.
So you'll salvo these missiles off.
And this Arleigh Burke destroyer was given amongst the target set.
The target of a Revolutionary Guard Command naval base located in Minah,
a southern city of Iran.
And between four or five missiles were allocated to this target.
um they they fired the missiles and uh the first three or four missiles uh went in
and they struck their targets now um what is this it's a naval facility um that you
know has buildings of a certain size certain dimensions
And through satellite imaging,
it can be determined that these cruise missiles struck pretty much center mass.
The idea was to punch a hole in the building, destroy what's ever inside the building.
And they struck two warehouses in the facility,
and they struck a medical facility in the facility.
I'm just curious because it was always identified as a medical facility,
and you're not supposed to bomb medical facilities.
But there was a fourth target that was struck.
This was a facility in the upper right corner.
A number of buildings of a certain dimension that seemed to be related to the same
dimension of the buildings that were struck elsewhere.
And a cruise missile was sent into this facility,
punching a hole in a collapsing part of the building.
A fifth cruise missile then operated overhead.
You see, these are the modern block four cruise missiles of the United States Navy.
They're very precise.
They have a range of 1,600 kilometers, and they can strike their targets.
But they also have the ability to loiter over a site and collect imagery that is
then relayed back to the control center on the ship where people can do battle
damage assessment.
And so this cruise missile's job was to loiter over the facility,
sending imagery back so people could determine if there was a need to re-attack.
any of these facilities to achieve the desired effect.
They noticed that the two warehouses that their holes
There was no secondary explosion, presumption, buildings empty, no need to re-attack.
The medical facility had some smoke coming out of it,
but there was no other indication it looked like success had been happening.
The floor target,
while the building was collapsed,
the imagery showed that there was an accumulation of people.
There were people running,
gathering,
people coming from outside the facility,
heading towards the facility.
And for whatever reason, the
The people observing this determined that that meant that there was a significant
activity of interest,
that the facility had not been neutralized.
So they ordered this cruise missile to attack the site.
They went up, got to altitude, and came down and struck.
Now, this cruise missile has a special warhead on it.
It's a warhead designed to penetrate bunkers.
So it has an initial explosion that blows through concrete.
and then a follow-through one that destroys what's inside but the designers of this
weapon went a step further you see there's fuel on board this cruise missile cruise
missile as i said has a range of 1600 kilometers and yet there's a lot of unused
fuel on this cruise missile and so what the weapons designers did is say that you
could click a switch and you could turn this cruise missile into a fuel air
explosive you could take the unused fuel
and vaporize it and create a thermobaric type explosion that would basically kill
anything within its radius,
burn them to death.
And so this building, this cruise missile down, struck this building.
And in addition to the penetrating effect of the normal warhead,
it did the thermobaric effect,
which generated a giant fireball incinerating everybody in the target.
But what was the target?
You see, it wasn't part of the base.
We know that in 2016, this part of this base had been walled off and separated.
In that year,
the Iranians opened up a secondary school,
a girls school,
and that has been functioning as a school since 2016.
There are media reports about this school.
It wasn't secret.
It wasn't classified.
It was a school.
And yet we bombed it.
Why?
Well, we bombed it because we no longer have targeting done the right way.
You see,
the law of war requires that when you create a target,
and when I say the law of war,
I'm talking about the 1977 additional protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
The United States adopted these in our law of war manual,
so it is applicable to the United States.
And one of the key aspects in targeting is the concept of distinction,
that we have a duty and responsibility to distinguish between civilian targets and
military targets,
and that we have to go the extra mile to ensure that we don't conflate the two,
we don't mix the two,
we don't confuse the two.
This is a problem of intelligence collecting.
Now, as I said, this became a school in 2016.
We'd had 10 years to collect on this,
and there could be no doubt in anybody's mind,
had they done normal intelligence collection,
I used to do this kind of targeting that we would have known that it was a school.
But what happened is we stopped doing the human interface.
Instead, we delegated this targeting requirement to artificial intelligence.
There is a system that's used by the US military,
Claude and Palantir Assists,
that basically just scrubs databases looking for targets of a certain dimension.
So you will ask,
how many warehouses affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command of the
following dimensions exist?
They will put up a database, and then you target each one.
And then those coordinates are sent out to the Navy, and they're told to strike.
you've got to do the distinction analysis, and that wasn't done.
But in 2023,
the Biden administration passed a Department of Defense directive,
creating what was called the civilian harm and
a civilian harm and mitigation response team.
And this made as the DOD directive a requirement for each command to create just
this,
that human interface.
This team's job was to go through the target deck with the courses of action,
go through individual targets and do this distinction analysis to basically look at
a site,
determine whether it's civilian,
could be related to civilian activity,
or if it was blown up,
there could be collateral damage to civilian activity.
This is good.
This means we are complying with the law of war.
We are doing the right thing.
In comes Donald Trump and his new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.
Pete Hegseth cancels this directive.
It determines that it is woke,
that it is unnecessarily constraining on the lethality of the American force,
and directs forces to proceed without civilian harm mitigation response capability.
Basically directing the U.S.
military operate outside the framework of international law,
outside the framework of our own law of war manual,
which has suddenly become inconvenient to Pete Hegseth.
Had we had
a civilian harm and mitigation response team working this target,
they would have determined that it was a school.
They would have determined that when you put that first missile in,
what happened was the survivors of the strike,
the teachers and the children,
gathered in the one remaining building for safety.
It was a prayer hall.
and uh and what the fifth cruise missile saw was these teachers guiding these
children into this hall uh the school also notified the parents who live in the
immediate area and said come and get your children so parents started to arrive and
started to move in and so there was a gathering of forces there gathering of human
beings that was misconstrued misinterpreted by military who was no longer
constrained by the law of war no longer
concerned about the issue of distinction,
no longer worried about distinguishing between civilian and military,
purely intent on being the most lethal fighting force known to mankind to kill,
kill,
kill,
kill,
kill.
They see accumulation of human targets and they order,
this was ordered by the people on the ship for this missile to strike,
activating a thermal warhead that burned 170 children to death along with their
parents.
It was a double tap, a classic double tap, murder, most foul.
done by the United States of America against innocent women,
children,
fathers,
parents,
teachers,
because we have a government that no longer complies with the rule of law,
a government that operates outside the framework of the laws of war,
a military that is unbound in committing horrific
crimes in the context of an illegal war of aggression.
Justice Jackson, who's the prosecutor at Nuremberg, warned about this.
He said the greatest war crime of all is an illegal war of aggression because from
this crime,
all other crimes are committed.
The United States and Israel
initiated an illegal war of aggression against Iran.
And from this comes all the murder that follows.
The double tap that we committed against the children,
a girl's school in Minah,
killing 170 plus innocent little girls,
age 6 to 12,
and their parents.
The only crime was going to school that morning.
The double tap made in America.
That's my rant.
Next time I thought crosses my mind, I'll be sure to let you know.