A Bit of Information War

Yesterday, the news services carried a story about four Russian cruise missiles crashing in Iran.  This is an odd story to begin with, but a general location is shown.  Whether that happened or not - is a question of fact.  Iran says it did not.  Russia says it did not.  Our press says it did, and they have sources, unnamed of course.  Facts will come out eventually, and both the Russians and Iranians hope everyone will have moved on to something more interesting by the time those cellphone videos leak out to the rest of the world.  So, whether it did happen is a matter of facts not shown. 

This is the kind of Information War we are fighting with Russia, China and Iran, places that control what news services say about almost everything, and a free press which controls less than it should sometimes.  Why is it even important? 

Probably the first big issue is reliability of the Russian missiles.  The Russian arms merchants are just like ours and make a profit selling weapons to military units in their own country and their allies.  If they are not very good, nobody buys them.  The news stories, which the Russians posted and promoted with live-action video, said 26 missiles were fired.  We can take their word for that, but probably should look into that number.  They might have fired 50 and reported half that number.  Some of them could have fallen into the water after they left the ship, or blown up in the air without crashing on any land.  But, that number of launched-reached target is important to whether they can sell more.  I can just hear the Generals in the Kremlin saying, "What? You launched 50 and only 20 of them made it to their target?   These suck!  We are not buying any more."  So, the number they actually launched is important, and so it the number that actually hit the target they were set to hit.  That last thing is not that they struck ground in Syria, but that they hit the target they were supposed to hit.  A missile that hits a village 25 miles from that town it was supposed to hit, is not a good missile to keep in our inventory. We will never get those numbers, but those Russian Generals will.  

The second part is the missiles crashing in Iran.... 

So, the  Iranian government knew they were launching missiles and allowed them to overfly Iran.  This is not big news  to anyone, but not something Iran puts on the front page of its newspapers.  It makes people who don't like the Russians - and there are plenty of them in Iran - think twice about their government cooperating with another Satan.  Yes, and that Satan is firing missiles over our heads, and these may or may not fall out of the sky without warning.  This alone is a good reason for keeping that out of the papers. 

So, eventually we will see facts to support the story that  Russians missiles "crash landed" in Iran.  This euphemism is kind of like “water landing” that airlines use to make you feel like landing on the water is just like landing on land, except softer.  All those explosives that fell into that field are going to be hard for the tractor to plow around, not to mention the metal fragments.  We will get details at eleven.    It won't  be today, but it will be soon.  Don't forget about it in the meantime.