We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
The U.S. Interceptor Shortage and Its Impact
The U.S. interceptor shortage impacts both the response to the Houthi threat and the sleep of millions of Israelis.
Israel and the U.S. are cooperating to address the Houthi threat. However, due to a shortage of interceptors in the U.S. Navy, some missiles are not intercepted far from Israel's borders. This leads to the activation of sirens in Israel, requiring the Israeli Air Force's air defense system to neutralize these threats.
Even the mighty America faces challenges in managing its armament economy. How did it come to this point? Since the early stages of the war, the U.S. has deployed aircraft carriers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea. These destroyers carry Standard Missile (SM) interceptors capable of neutralizing Houthi-launched missiles during their ascent phase, long before they reach Israel.
These interceptors are quite expensive, costing several million dollars each (more than the Arrow system, though not necessarily superior). However, the shortage isn't due to financial constraints. Throughout the war, American destroyers have had to fire large quantities of these missiles to protect themselves, the aircraft carriers, commercial vessels targeted by the Houthis, and Israel. Additionally, the U.S. assisted Israel in countering Iranian attacks using SM missiles.
These missiles are manufactured by RTX, formerly Raytheon, one of the world's largest defense contractors. Due to their complexity, RTX produces only a few hundred of these missiles each year. The U.S. wasn't prepared for the scenario of two prolonged wars in different parts of the world simultaneously—the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East.
Moreover, stock management is also influenced by the possibility of escalation in the Pacific region, between China and Taiwan. Add to this the fact that more than 10 other countries, in addition to the U.S. Navy, have pre-ordered SM interceptors, and you have a shortage of this type of interceptor.
This is likely one of the reasons the U.S. deployed the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in Israel. THAAD can also intercept ballistic missiles, but since it is ground-based, it does so toward the end of their flight path—in other words, it doesn’t "prevent" the alarms from sounding.
In conclusion, this isn't a 'punishment' by the Biden administration against Israel. The U.S. continues to assist in defense, though their capabilities have diminished, impacting the sleep of many until the Houthi threat is dismantled.
(Tamir Morag on X)
✍️ @beholdisraelchannel
🇮🇷🚫🚢 My analysis of the Strait of Hormuz over the last 24 hours.
If the tankers use the Iran route, they are dominantly Iran-related. If the tankers use the Oman route, they are not, and never sanctioned.
I have heard from ship owners that most tankers cannot use the Iran route because the EU has not lifted sanctions on IRGC. Using the Iran route would risk sanctions, making the Oman route the only viable option.
With more conflict going on between IRGC and the US, the visible AIS data on Oman's tanker route is going to go dark again, which means Iran will have to keep escalating in order to completely halt flows.
For the US, the fact that the Oman route might be blocked presents it with a big ultimatum: either the US escalates or gives IRGC control of the Strait of Hormuz. Logic says there's no way that would happen, so escalation will continue.
Given that Trump has made it obvious that he does not want to escalate, I fear that the IRGC would just keep escalating until ...
🧠 🇺🇸 🖨 Meta introduces Brain2Qwerty v2, a non-invasive brain-to-text decoder with real-time sentence decoding from brain signals. It achieved up to 78% word accuracy in tests and builds on research published in @Nature. Training data included 22,000 sentences from 9 participants using MEG devices. Meta is open-sourcing the training code for v1 and v2, and a partner is releasing the v1 dataset.
📎 AI at Meta
📝 🎥 🎬 What is notable about Citizen Vigilante is that it drags the vigilante genre kicking and screaming from the 1970s to the 2020s. | Millennial Woes
The average liberal instinctively bristles at the tropes of classical vigilante cinema - “soft judges”, “nanny state”, “timid policing”, “moral decline”, “criminal parasites living off hard-working decent ordinary people” - but they long ago came to accept the genre as a necessary sop to right-wing idiots. I think the attitude was: “Let them have their trashy bread and circuses, if it keeps them docile while we remake their world around them.” After all, the tropes referred to realities that were incidental, not fundamental.
But today there are new realities, which today’s liberal cannot stand to see acknowledged because this strikes at the core of his worldview. These realities are fundamental, not incidental.
The first reality is that diversity has, far from improving White societies, degraded them in ...
📵 🇺🇸 👤 US to implement Digital ID if "KIDS Act" passes in the House today
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.
Supporters of KOSA have said the bill doesn’t require age verification. And technically, the KOSA section of the bill does say that KOSA shouldn’t be read to require age verification.
Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as ...
