On August 6, 2026 a Town Hall Meeting between Navy officials including Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and more than 200 family members of the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln took place at the Naval Air Station on North Island, San Diego.
Carriers need periodic refurbishment, that usually takes close to two years. Training then adds extra down time. Plus the Navy is always experimenting with upgrades and new systems, so less than half the fleet is at sea normally.
Given what drones are doing to Russian airbases, there probably is furious debate in the military leadership about the long term viability of the carriers, because their expected life is 50+ years.
Do they retain effectiveness in 2040 and beyond? Or does the Navy need to invest elsewhere, drone ships, subs, long loitering drones or comparable transformative technology?
The unacceptable logistics going on, are that all of this was not thought of already after 90 days of deployment and fixed after 180 days of deployment. Simply send 10-20 vessels with spare parts, rotation staff and food etcetera, if only for motivation. This is not difficult to predict and prepare. I am sure many competent (permanent) officers emphasized this, but some incompetent (temporary) politicians were not listening.
There aren't ten or twenty suitable vessels sitting around waiting to be put to use. There aren't rotation staff available because that isn't the system in place as mentioned in the article.
Replacement parts are not available in large quantity because they are extremely expensive and some of them are proprietary which means the manufacturer has to be consulted about what happens with.
Fresh food has to come from the nearest possible supply depot which does not itself have fresh food so that it has to be supplied from a thousand or more miles away, before it can send the hard to get supply ship loaded to travel two thousand miles to the fleet.
The procedure for transferring fresh food for five thousand people while at sea in a combat zone where you can't sit around making yourself a juicy target is another constraint.
Of course these are all valid limitations. But we are talking about 90-180-240-365 days here: that is a lot of time and potential flexibility. Even before the USS Lincoln and USS Bush and USS Ford were deployed, they could have started planning refreshments that sail all the way from the US.
Only if the US imagined that this war would be over in two weeks AND they refused to spend any money on replenish, it could result in the present situation. Not good.
The military doctrine of the U.S. is that wars they engage in *will* be over in two weeks except for the shouting. Everything from public expectation, strategy, tactics, weapons, training, warehousing, supply chains ...... everything about the U.S. military says it will be over in short order without much effort except for spending a lot of money.
Maintaining a large just in case capacity undermines the entire point of spending trillions of dollars on really expensive, really difficult weapons systems. The doctrine is based on ...do or don't do.... Because of p.r. and Hollywood every one has forgotten the don't do part. Case in point: most of what you want done that is being done currently is done almost entirely with commercial shipping. Only the tiny point at the in theater operational end is still military and half of that is actually hybrid commercial/military.
The real cause of the current decline in the U.S surface ships, especially those in in the Gulf is the result of Iran closing to U.S ships and then targeting and methodically destroying the Bases, specifically the Bahrain Base for the 5th fleet, from whence replenishment and stores would be sourced and transhipped to the fleet, no longer because, Iran blew it all to bits.. just as they strategically blew up and took out the U.S military’s eyes, its radars across the gulf, what we have witnessed is pin point accurate dismantling of U.S infrastructure in the Gulf, destroying in the process the U.S military and Centcoms ability to prosecute offense… thus deprived of stores and replenishments is it any real surprise the problems that abound U.S surface ships are prevalent?
We ought give credit where credit is due, Iran don’t blow up civilians, school girls, children, university dormitories, nope, they act as a professional military, compare that to the Zionists and U.S militaries, behaviour that is reprehensible and truly repugnant…
There will be an awakening and it seems U.S military know they’ve been suckered into fighting a war none want a part of… one last thing… chew on the following, it poignant,y and presciently underscores who humanity’s true enemies and terrorists are… clue, no PhD or Masters required, and it’s closer to home than you likely think…
The Data Doesn’t Support the Charge: Iran and the “Number One Sponsor of Terrorism” Claim
Summarise: By Former CIA Senior Analyst Larry Johnston analysis as good as it gets, hard to refute, Why? it’s based on Fact sourced Dept Of State…
Larry C Johnson
Received Aug 19, 2026 NZPST Filed Colour Coded “RED”
(NOTE: I decided to try to synthesize the various articles I have written debunking the claims that Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are the primary sources of terrorism. I hope you find this useful and can share it with friends who have been bamboozled by the conventional wisdom.)
Every administration reaches for the same line. Iran, we are told, is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — a claim now central to the case for war. It carries the weight of an official designation: Iran has sat on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism since January 19, 1984, the longest-running designation currently on the books, alongside Cuba, North Korea, and Syria. The supporting figures get repeated as settled fact — more than a billion dollars a year in terror financing, and somewhere between 140,000 and 185,000 IRGC-Quds Force partner fighters spread across Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
The problem is that the government’s own record doesn’t back the headline. The place to test the claim is the data the State Department itself publishes — the statistical annex to Country Reports on Terrorism, and before it Patterns of Global Terrorism, the congressionally mandated series that has catalogued international terrorist incidents year by year since 1990. When you actually read those tables, a different picture emerges from the one sold on cable news.
Who commits the attacks
The annex doesn’t sort attacks by sect, but it doesn’t need to. The identity of the top perpetrator groups tells the story on its own. Year after year across 2004–2023, the most active and lethal groups are Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Shabaab, the TTP. On the order of nine in ten attacks in the reporting trace back to Sunni extremist actors operating out of the Salafi-jihadist tradition. None of them answer to Tehran. Most regard Shia Muslims — Iran very much included — as heretics, and target them accordingly. ISIS has spent years at open war with Iran and its allies.
A separate French dataset, compiled by FONDAPOL over a longer 1979–April 2024 window, lands in the same place. The five deadliest Islamist groups over that period account for better than 80 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorism — and every one of the five is Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda.
Where are the Iran-linked groups in all this? Largely absent from the top of the tables. Hezbollah and the Iran-aligned militias tend not to appear, in part because their operations are directed mainly at military forces rather than civilians, which places them outside the working definition of terrorism the reports use. The Houthis are the main Shia-linked group to surface in recent editions, and only as a small share of the total.
It is only in 2023 that three groups in Iran’s orbit — the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah — break into the top ten at all. They do so because of their attacks on Israel, and those attacks were aimed primarily at military targets. Before 2023, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah ranked among the groups responsible for the most attacks worldwide. That is a remarkable fact for two organizations routinely described as among the planet’s most prolific terrorists.
The Israeli numbers
Take the definition of terrorism that Benjamin Netanyahu himself uses — violence against civilians for political ends — and apply it to Israel’s own government data, drawn from the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s record of victims of Palestinian violence covering 2000 through April 2024. (That dataset predates and excludes the October 7, 2023 attack.)
Two things stand out. First, Palestinian attacks have trended downward since 2003. The peak sits in the 2000–2005 window — the Second Intifada. Across the full 24 years, 1,552 Israelis were killed and 5,595 wounded, and the violence is heavily concentrated in that early-2000s spike: roughly 76 percent of the deaths and 92 percent of the wounded fall within the Second Intifada years. Second, Hamas is not the terrorist engine the public imagination makes it out to be. Only about 15 percent of attacks over the 24-year span are attributed to Hamas, acting alone or with another faction. None of this makes Hamas a peace movement — it isn’t — but it is not an organization waging ceaseless slaughter either.
The rocket fire is the clearest case of rhetoric outrunning arithmetic. Hamas and Hezbollah have launched thousands of rockets at Israel over 25 years. The death toll specifically from those rockets across 2001–2025 is on the order of 50 to 75 people — not the “thousands” the coverage implies. The gap between the two numbers is the whole point.
Set against this is the asymmetry no honest accounting can skip. Israel killed an estimated 11,200–11,500 Palestinians between 2000 and October 6, 2023. Since October 7, the figure in Gaza has climbed past 73,000 by the Gaza Health Ministry’s count — a number an Israeli military official effectively conceded in January 2026, accepting more than 71,000 killed by direct Israeli fire.
Who actually funds the perpetrators
If the metric is real, it points somewhere other than Tehran. The Sunni groups that dominate the casualty tables have drawn financial support from the Gulf Arab states — and, more awkwardly, from the United States itself. The paper trail runs through Syria: US and allied money reaching outfits spun off from ISIS, including the al-Nusra lineage that produced Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose leader Washington once had a $10 million bounty on before quietly retiring it. The same government that brands Iran the foremost sponsor of terrorism has, at various points, been a facilitator of the very groups doing the most killing.
The bottom line
The designation is doing political work, not analytical work. Iran is not, by the government’s own incident data, the major driver of global terrorism; the perpetrators overwhelmingly belong to a Sunni jihadist current that is hostile to Iran and financed from elsewhere. A serious campaign against the sponsors of terrorism would start with the Gulf states, not with Tehran. Instead, a charge the data won’t support is being used as the pretext for an unprovoked war. A country living in a glass house should think twice before throwing rocks.
“But Hamas and Hezbollah entered the top ten in 2023, so Iran’s proxies aremajor terrorists.” They entered in a single year, and only because of a war with Israel in which their fire was directed mainly at military targets — soldiers, bases, the IDF in the field. The State Department’s own definition turns on violence against civilians for political ends. A spike driven by attacks on an army during an active war is not evidence of sustained civilian-directed terrorism; it’s evidence of a shooting war. For the two prior decades of the reporting, neither group cracked the list of the world’s most active perpetrators. One year inside the top ten, produced by combat with a state military, does not overturn twenty outside it.
“You’re leaning on data that excludes October 7, 2023 — the deadliest single day in the whole record.” The exclusion is stated plainly, not smuggled: the Israeli Foreign Ministry dataset runs through the period before that attack, and October 7 is the largest single event on the Israeli side of the ledger. Grant it in full. It changes the total for one day; it does not change the structure of the twenty-year record, in which Palestinian violence trends downward after 2003 and Hamas accounts for roughly 15 percent of attacks. Nor does a single mass-casualty event convert Iran into the foremost global sponsor of terrorism, when the groups filling the casualty tables every other year — ISIS, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab — remain Sunni, anti-Shia, and unconnected to Tehran. October 7 is a real and terrible data point. It is not the trend, and it is not the sponsorship question.
“Body counts don’t measure sponsorship — the designation is about the support a state provides, not how many its proxies kill.” This is the fairest objection, and it’s worth meeting directly rather than dodging. Concede the distinction: state sponsorship is measured by money, weapons, and training, not by proxy casualty totals. But the “foremost sponsor” claim is almost never used that narrowly in practice. It is deployed to characterize the threat — to argue that Iran is the principal engine of the terrorism Americans should fear. Measured against the actual distribution of terrorist violence, that characterization collapses: the threat is overwhelmingly Sunni jihadist. And on the sponsorship axis itself, the framework is applied selectively. The Gulf states that financed Sunni networks, and the U.S. and allied money that reached groups spun off from ISIS in Syria, never draw the “number one sponsor” label. A designation that is consistent only when it points at Iran is a political instrument, not an analytical finding.
“Calling Hezbollah’s targets ‘primarily military’ whitewashes real atrocities.”The claim is about the pattern the reporting captures, not a denial that Hezbollah has ever killed civilians — it plainly has, from the 1980s bombings to attacks abroad.
The point stands at the level of the aggregate data: across the reporting period, the group’s operations register mainly against military forces, which is precisely why it sits outside the top perpetrator tables that are built on civilian-directed attacks. Acknowledging the exceptions doesn’t move the aggregate.
Sources: U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism (statistical annex, 2004–2023) and Patterns of Global Terrorism; FONDAPOL, dataset on Islamist terrorism 1979–2024; Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, victims of Palestinian violence and terrorism 2000–2024; Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures. I have synthesized this from my previously published Sonar21 essays.
A related factor -- China's ship-building capacity is 200 (two hundred!) times that of the US. And of course that huge difference extends all the way back into the supply chain -- steel mills, engine plants, electronics factories. This also means that China has a civilian shipping industry incomparably larger than the US, with all that means for having trained sailors.
Starting in the 1970s, the unrepresentative individuals in Congress created a few profitable years for their backers by de-industrializing and importing cheaper goods from countries which did not care about workplace safety or environmental standards. Now we are beginning to pay the price for those short-term profits.
Whether it is aircraft carriers or ammunition, the US today is not the Workshop of the World it was back in WWII. The only practical approach is to fire all the lawyers, close down the NGOs, and begin to re-industrialize. It will likely take about 50 years! In the meantime, let's give the rest of the world our blessing and pull all forces back to the US -- starting with pulling out of NATO and leaving the Ukraine to its fate. End all those entangling foreign alliances.
100% on point, see my posts above especially the cross post posted as to who is behind the worlds terror attacks, clue, Iran doesn’t figure in the top 10 according U.S State Dept Data, result, more lies justifying the destruction perpetrated, the assassinations, the schoolgirls, volleyball teams, female students killed sleeping in their dormitories in Iranian Universities, civilians killed in Gaza, it’s sick, you are 100% correct, read the posts by CIA Analyst Larry Johnston I’ve posted in reply above, fact based refutation successive U.S Lies, this conflagration is all about securing Oil and Gas, securing the same to replace Petrodollars, if you don’t have the dollars, get the real thing…. Hence Venezuela, except Iran, is a far better prepared adversary than Venezuela…hopefully this is the end of empire, American Citizens will welcome it, the money wasted spent on themselves… about f..king time….. just saying
The US can't support the few carriers that are deployed right now, so adding more carriers will only add to over-stressed logistics chain as the tail is stretched around the globe. It seems like this would need to be fixed first. By neutralizing regional logistics Iran has been able to apply pressure on the US' greatest vulnerability. Keeping AD robust enough to prevent the US from transitioning to a direct attack air campaign requires intensive standoff weapons re-supply which added even more stress on the long tail. Clearly Tehran has put a great deal of thought into their defense strategy.
On the first sentence of the last paragraph: I think the writer means "projection" instead of protection, of course (good luck with that today). Alas, given how de-industrialized and corrupt the U.S. military procurement system is and the extraordinary ignorance and carelessness of Trump and top military officials, starting a hot war on Iran at the behest of Israel has demonstrated Iran's prowess to take out U.S. bases in the Gulf states dramatically underscoring the failure of the U.S. to re-supply ships, aircraft and produce ISR, leaving both the U.S. and Israelis to retreat and scramble. The upshot, so far, is that Trump with the "help" of Israel has demonstrated the weakness of the obviously outdated U.S. military machine to the rest of the world. Uber neocon Robert Kagan (who now calls himself a "Liberal" is on record calling the U.S. branded Trumper/Israeli war on Iran the "greatest strategic blunder of the 21st century . . ." No question that the global "Liberal Hegemon" of yesteryear is fading as multipolarity gains traction.
We should build smaller additional carriers and place Marine corps F35 on them to supplement the existing carrier force. We did this already in the latter part of the pacific campaign against Japan.
Joey Jones, a former SEAL, said in July of 2010 he would have traded a block of C4 to the Taliban for a hotdog. Compared to the deployments of soldiers and Marines, the 205 odd days are nothing. They need to suck it up.
To make America Great Again, as the C-in-C realizes, you need to ditch 'crazy electric' on carriers back to steam catapults.
OK, it will cost billions and delay deployment for years, but like a tiny bit more on gas prices, it's worth it, and the Great Leader (80) says he's in no hurry anyway.
Heavy check, recovery from deployment, preparation for deployment. More importantly from my point of view - does that mean we are paying the salary for 8 carriers worth of sailors to "train" on shore duty for - what 2 years while waiting for their ship to be ready?
Globalsecurity dot org has a regularly updated page "where are the carriers"
Carriers need periodic refurbishment, that usually takes close to two years. Training then adds extra down time. Plus the Navy is always experimenting with upgrades and new systems, so less than half the fleet is at sea normally.
Given what drones are doing to Russian airbases, there probably is furious debate in the military leadership about the long term viability of the carriers, because their expected life is 50+ years.
Do they retain effectiveness in 2040 and beyond? Or does the Navy need to invest elsewhere, drone ships, subs, long loitering drones or comparable transformative technology?
It is hard to see how a Chinese saturation attack doesn't send them straight to Davey Jones' locker.
Nothing just one Oreshnik on the engine room couldn't fix.
The unacceptable logistics going on, are that all of this was not thought of already after 90 days of deployment and fixed after 180 days of deployment. Simply send 10-20 vessels with spare parts, rotation staff and food etcetera, if only for motivation. This is not difficult to predict and prepare. I am sure many competent (permanent) officers emphasized this, but some incompetent (temporary) politicians were not listening.
rogier
There aren't ten or twenty suitable vessels sitting around waiting to be put to use. There aren't rotation staff available because that isn't the system in place as mentioned in the article.
Replacement parts are not available in large quantity because they are extremely expensive and some of them are proprietary which means the manufacturer has to be consulted about what happens with.
Fresh food has to come from the nearest possible supply depot which does not itself have fresh food so that it has to be supplied from a thousand or more miles away, before it can send the hard to get supply ship loaded to travel two thousand miles to the fleet.
The procedure for transferring fresh food for five thousand people while at sea in a combat zone where you can't sit around making yourself a juicy target is another constraint.
Of course these are all valid limitations. But we are talking about 90-180-240-365 days here: that is a lot of time and potential flexibility. Even before the USS Lincoln and USS Bush and USS Ford were deployed, they could have started planning refreshments that sail all the way from the US.
Only if the US imagined that this war would be over in two weeks AND they refused to spend any money on replenish, it could result in the present situation. Not good.
rogier
The military doctrine of the U.S. is that wars they engage in *will* be over in two weeks except for the shouting. Everything from public expectation, strategy, tactics, weapons, training, warehousing, supply chains ...... everything about the U.S. military says it will be over in short order without much effort except for spending a lot of money.
Maintaining a large just in case capacity undermines the entire point of spending trillions of dollars on really expensive, really difficult weapons systems. The doctrine is based on ...do or don't do.... Because of p.r. and Hollywood every one has forgotten the don't do part. Case in point: most of what you want done that is being done currently is done almost entirely with commercial shipping. Only the tiny point at the in theater operational end is still military and half of that is actually hybrid commercial/military.
In Reply 1 of 2
Rogier,
The real cause of the current decline in the U.S surface ships, especially those in in the Gulf is the result of Iran closing to U.S ships and then targeting and methodically destroying the Bases, specifically the Bahrain Base for the 5th fleet, from whence replenishment and stores would be sourced and transhipped to the fleet, no longer because, Iran blew it all to bits.. just as they strategically blew up and took out the U.S military’s eyes, its radars across the gulf, what we have witnessed is pin point accurate dismantling of U.S infrastructure in the Gulf, destroying in the process the U.S military and Centcoms ability to prosecute offense… thus deprived of stores and replenishments is it any real surprise the problems that abound U.S surface ships are prevalent?
We ought give credit where credit is due, Iran don’t blow up civilians, school girls, children, university dormitories, nope, they act as a professional military, compare that to the Zionists and U.S militaries, behaviour that is reprehensible and truly repugnant…
There will be an awakening and it seems U.S military know they’ve been suckered into fighting a war none want a part of… one last thing… chew on the following, it poignant,y and presciently underscores who humanity’s true enemies and terrorists are… clue, no PhD or Masters required, and it’s closer to home than you likely think…
The Data Doesn’t Support the Charge: Iran and the “Number One Sponsor of Terrorism” Claim
Summarise: By Former CIA Senior Analyst Larry Johnston analysis as good as it gets, hard to refute, Why? it’s based on Fact sourced Dept Of State…
Larry C Johnson
Received Aug 19, 2026 NZPST Filed Colour Coded “RED”
https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/p/the-data-doesnt-support-the-charge?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1225061&post_id=211807887&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1iecun&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
(NOTE: I decided to try to synthesize the various articles I have written debunking the claims that Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are the primary sources of terrorism. I hope you find this useful and can share it with friends who have been bamboozled by the conventional wisdom.)
Every administration reaches for the same line. Iran, we are told, is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — a claim now central to the case for war. It carries the weight of an official designation: Iran has sat on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism since January 19, 1984, the longest-running designation currently on the books, alongside Cuba, North Korea, and Syria. The supporting figures get repeated as settled fact — more than a billion dollars a year in terror financing, and somewhere between 140,000 and 185,000 IRGC-Quds Force partner fighters spread across Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
The problem is that the government’s own record doesn’t back the headline. The place to test the claim is the data the State Department itself publishes — the statistical annex to Country Reports on Terrorism, and before it Patterns of Global Terrorism, the congressionally mandated series that has catalogued international terrorist incidents year by year since 1990. When you actually read those tables, a different picture emerges from the one sold on cable news.
Who commits the attacks
The annex doesn’t sort attacks by sect, but it doesn’t need to. The identity of the top perpetrator groups tells the story on its own. Year after year across 2004–2023, the most active and lethal groups are Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Shabaab, the TTP. On the order of nine in ten attacks in the reporting trace back to Sunni extremist actors operating out of the Salafi-jihadist tradition. None of them answer to Tehran. Most regard Shia Muslims — Iran very much included — as heretics, and target them accordingly. ISIS has spent years at open war with Iran and its allies.
A separate French dataset, compiled by FONDAPOL over a longer 1979–April 2024 window, lands in the same place. The five deadliest Islamist groups over that period account for better than 80 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorism — and every one of the five is Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda.
Where are the Iran-linked groups in all this? Largely absent from the top of the tables. Hezbollah and the Iran-aligned militias tend not to appear, in part because their operations are directed mainly at military forces rather than civilians, which places them outside the working definition of terrorism the reports use. The Houthis are the main Shia-linked group to surface in recent editions, and only as a small share of the total.
It is only in 2023 that three groups in Iran’s orbit — the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah — break into the top ten at all. They do so because of their attacks on Israel, and those attacks were aimed primarily at military targets. Before 2023, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah ranked among the groups responsible for the most attacks worldwide. That is a remarkable fact for two organizations routinely described as among the planet’s most prolific terrorists.
The Israeli numbers
Take the definition of terrorism that Benjamin Netanyahu himself uses — violence against civilians for political ends — and apply it to Israel’s own government data, drawn from the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s record of victims of Palestinian violence covering 2000 through April 2024. (That dataset predates and excludes the October 7, 2023 attack.)
Two things stand out. First, Palestinian attacks have trended downward since 2003. The peak sits in the 2000–2005 window — the Second Intifada. Across the full 24 years, 1,552 Israelis were killed and 5,595 wounded, and the violence is heavily concentrated in that early-2000s spike: roughly 76 percent of the deaths and 92 percent of the wounded fall within the Second Intifada years. Second, Hamas is not the terrorist engine the public imagination makes it out to be. Only about 15 percent of attacks over the 24-year span are attributed to Hamas, acting alone or with another faction. None of this makes Hamas a peace movement — it isn’t — but it is not an organization waging ceaseless slaughter either.
The rocket fire is the clearest case of rhetoric outrunning arithmetic. Hamas and Hezbollah have launched thousands of rockets at Israel over 25 years. The death toll specifically from those rockets across 2001–2025 is on the order of 50 to 75 people — not the “thousands” the coverage implies. The gap between the two numbers is the whole point.
Set against this is the asymmetry no honest accounting can skip. Israel killed an estimated 11,200–11,500 Palestinians between 2000 and October 6, 2023. Since October 7, the figure in Gaza has climbed past 73,000 by the Gaza Health Ministry’s count — a number an Israeli military official effectively conceded in January 2026, accepting more than 71,000 killed by direct Israeli fire.
Who actually funds the perpetrators
If the metric is real, it points somewhere other than Tehran. The Sunni groups that dominate the casualty tables have drawn financial support from the Gulf Arab states — and, more awkwardly, from the United States itself. The paper trail runs through Syria: US and allied money reaching outfits spun off from ISIS, including the al-Nusra lineage that produced Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose leader Washington once had a $10 million bounty on before quietly retiring it. The same government that brands Iran the foremost sponsor of terrorism has, at various points, been a facilitator of the very groups doing the most killing.
The bottom line
The designation is doing political work, not analytical work. Iran is not, by the government’s own incident data, the major driver of global terrorism; the perpetrators overwhelmingly belong to a Sunni jihadist current that is hostile to Iran and financed from elsewhere. A serious campaign against the sponsors of terrorism would start with the Gulf states, not with Tehran. Instead, a charge the data won’t support is being used as the pretext for an unprovoked war. A country living in a glass house should think twice before throwing rocks.
In Reply 2 of 2
Anticipated objections — and the answers
“But Hamas and Hezbollah entered the top ten in 2023, so Iran’s proxies aremajor terrorists.” They entered in a single year, and only because of a war with Israel in which their fire was directed mainly at military targets — soldiers, bases, the IDF in the field. The State Department’s own definition turns on violence against civilians for political ends. A spike driven by attacks on an army during an active war is not evidence of sustained civilian-directed terrorism; it’s evidence of a shooting war. For the two prior decades of the reporting, neither group cracked the list of the world’s most active perpetrators. One year inside the top ten, produced by combat with a state military, does not overturn twenty outside it.
“You’re leaning on data that excludes October 7, 2023 — the deadliest single day in the whole record.” The exclusion is stated plainly, not smuggled: the Israeli Foreign Ministry dataset runs through the period before that attack, and October 7 is the largest single event on the Israeli side of the ledger. Grant it in full. It changes the total for one day; it does not change the structure of the twenty-year record, in which Palestinian violence trends downward after 2003 and Hamas accounts for roughly 15 percent of attacks. Nor does a single mass-casualty event convert Iran into the foremost global sponsor of terrorism, when the groups filling the casualty tables every other year — ISIS, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab — remain Sunni, anti-Shia, and unconnected to Tehran. October 7 is a real and terrible data point. It is not the trend, and it is not the sponsorship question.
“Body counts don’t measure sponsorship — the designation is about the support a state provides, not how many its proxies kill.” This is the fairest objection, and it’s worth meeting directly rather than dodging. Concede the distinction: state sponsorship is measured by money, weapons, and training, not by proxy casualty totals. But the “foremost sponsor” claim is almost never used that narrowly in practice. It is deployed to characterize the threat — to argue that Iran is the principal engine of the terrorism Americans should fear. Measured against the actual distribution of terrorist violence, that characterization collapses: the threat is overwhelmingly Sunni jihadist. And on the sponsorship axis itself, the framework is applied selectively. The Gulf states that financed Sunni networks, and the U.S. and allied money that reached groups spun off from ISIS in Syria, never draw the “number one sponsor” label. A designation that is consistent only when it points at Iran is a political instrument, not an analytical finding.
“Calling Hezbollah’s targets ‘primarily military’ whitewashes real atrocities.”The claim is about the pattern the reporting captures, not a denial that Hezbollah has ever killed civilians — it plainly has, from the 1980s bombings to attacks abroad.
The point stands at the level of the aggregate data: across the reporting period, the group’s operations register mainly against military forces, which is precisely why it sits outside the top perpetrator tables that are built on civilian-directed attacks. Acknowledging the exceptions doesn’t move the aggregate.
Sources: U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism (statistical annex, 2004–2023) and Patterns of Global Terrorism; FONDAPOL, dataset on Islamist terrorism 1979–2024; Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, victims of Palestinian violence and terrorism 2000–2024; Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures. I have synthesized this from my previously published Sonar21 essays.
The US is bust.
It hasn't got the $ 1.5 trillion Hegseth and Trump want to spend on the Pentagon.
It has neither the equipment, nor the staffing (recruits), nor the budget for Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan.
Someone tell Trump? They already did!
A related factor -- China's ship-building capacity is 200 (two hundred!) times that of the US. And of course that huge difference extends all the way back into the supply chain -- steel mills, engine plants, electronics factories. This also means that China has a civilian shipping industry incomparably larger than the US, with all that means for having trained sailors.
Starting in the 1970s, the unrepresentative individuals in Congress created a few profitable years for their backers by de-industrializing and importing cheaper goods from countries which did not care about workplace safety or environmental standards. Now we are beginning to pay the price for those short-term profits.
Whether it is aircraft carriers or ammunition, the US today is not the Workshop of the World it was back in WWII. The only practical approach is to fire all the lawyers, close down the NGOs, and begin to re-industrialize. It will likely take about 50 years! In the meantime, let's give the rest of the world our blessing and pull all forces back to the US -- starting with pulling out of NATO and leaving the Ukraine to its fate. End all those entangling foreign alliances.
100% on point, see my posts above especially the cross post posted as to who is behind the worlds terror attacks, clue, Iran doesn’t figure in the top 10 according U.S State Dept Data, result, more lies justifying the destruction perpetrated, the assassinations, the schoolgirls, volleyball teams, female students killed sleeping in their dormitories in Iranian Universities, civilians killed in Gaza, it’s sick, you are 100% correct, read the posts by CIA Analyst Larry Johnston I’ve posted in reply above, fact based refutation successive U.S Lies, this conflagration is all about securing Oil and Gas, securing the same to replace Petrodollars, if you don’t have the dollars, get the real thing…. Hence Venezuela, except Iran, is a far better prepared adversary than Venezuela…hopefully this is the end of empire, American Citizens will welcome it, the money wasted spent on themselves… about f..king time….. just saying
Kia Kaha from New Zealand
The US can't support the few carriers that are deployed right now, so adding more carriers will only add to over-stressed logistics chain as the tail is stretched around the globe. It seems like this would need to be fixed first. By neutralizing regional logistics Iran has been able to apply pressure on the US' greatest vulnerability. Keeping AD robust enough to prevent the US from transitioning to a direct attack air campaign requires intensive standoff weapons re-supply which added even more stress on the long tail. Clearly Tehran has put a great deal of thought into their defense strategy.
On the first sentence of the last paragraph: I think the writer means "projection" instead of protection, of course (good luck with that today). Alas, given how de-industrialized and corrupt the U.S. military procurement system is and the extraordinary ignorance and carelessness of Trump and top military officials, starting a hot war on Iran at the behest of Israel has demonstrated Iran's prowess to take out U.S. bases in the Gulf states dramatically underscoring the failure of the U.S. to re-supply ships, aircraft and produce ISR, leaving both the U.S. and Israelis to retreat and scramble. The upshot, so far, is that Trump with the "help" of Israel has demonstrated the weakness of the obviously outdated U.S. military machine to the rest of the world. Uber neocon Robert Kagan (who now calls himself a "Liberal" is on record calling the U.S. branded Trumper/Israeli war on Iran the "greatest strategic blunder of the 21st century . . ." No question that the global "Liberal Hegemon" of yesteryear is fading as multipolarity gains traction.
Let all the Admirals and the SecDef have Nintendo?
We should build smaller additional carriers and place Marine corps F35 on them to supplement the existing carrier force. We did this already in the latter part of the pacific campaign against Japan.
Joey Jones, a former SEAL, said in July of 2010 he would have traded a block of C4 to the Taliban for a hotdog. Compared to the deployments of soldiers and Marines, the 205 odd days are nothing. They need to suck it up.
Steam won WW2.
To make America Great Again, as the C-in-C realizes, you need to ditch 'crazy electric' on carriers back to steam catapults.
OK, it will cost billions and delay deployment for years, but like a tiny bit more on gas prices, it's worth it, and the Great Leader (80) says he's in no hurry anyway.
"By law the US Navy is required to have 11 aircraft carriers"
If only three are functional, what is going on with the other eight?
Heavy check, recovery from deployment, preparation for deployment. More importantly from my point of view - does that mean we are paying the salary for 8 carriers worth of sailors to "train" on shore duty for - what 2 years while waiting for their ship to be ready?
Globalsecurity dot org has a regularly updated page "where are the carriers"
No crews to man these behemoths. Few Sailors are willing to deploy for a variety of reasons. Bottom line; and no draft.