Global SITREP B15-14: Some Important Military Deployments

Ukrainian 95th Separate Airmobile Brigade

UPDATED 10 March 2014: In the first known major Ukrainian military deployment since the Russian invasion of Crimea, the 95th Separate Airmobile Brigade of the 8th Ukrainian Army Corps has deployed from its garrison in the northern city of Zhytomyr for an unknown operation. The 95th consists of 3 battalions, of which the 13th Airmobile is composed of professional volunteer soldiers. It is considered to be the elite of Ukraine Special Forces (Spetsnaz) and is the most experienced, most interoperable with Western/NATO/US military forces and most battle hardened having served with Coalition Forces in Iraq during OIF-I from 2003-05. I remember these paratroopers and their professionalism during OIF-I. Whatever their mission is I have no doubt it is of the most critical importance to the new government in Kiev which has assigned their finest to see to its completion.

MV KLOS-C in the Red Sea

This past week the elite Israeli special forces unit Shayetet 13 (Flotilla 13), operating from an Israeli Navy Sa'ar C class missile corvette with IAF F-16I Sufa providing over-watch, completed a covert mission in coordination with U.S. intelligence and military forces in the seizure of the illicit, Panamanian-flagged, Iranian weapons carrying merchant vessel MV KLOS-C. The intercept and takeover occurred about 24 hours prior to the merchant vessel's arrival at Port Sudan where the illicit cargo of dozens of Syrian-manufacture 302mm medium range artillery rockets was captured. 

The Iranian smuggling operation was quite complex in its movements. In the first leg, the missiles were flown from Damascus, Syria to Tehran, Iran and then to Iranian port facilities at Bandar Abbas where they were loaded on board the KLOS-C. The merchant ship then sailed to the Iraqi port at Umm Qasr where bags of cement of Iranian manufacture were placed on top of the missiles. The ship then began its voyage to its point of capture in the Red Sea. The truly amazing thing about the seizure of the clandestine Iranian operation, and this has to weigh heavily on the elite commanders of the IRGC as well as Ayatollah Khamenei, is that their entire smuggling operation was literally an open book to Israeli and American intelligence and special forces. One can imagine, and so can Iran's leaders, what we know that they don't know that we know. It also appears obvious that a sea-change has occurred in just a very short time in the US-Israel-Iran dynamic. It appears to this observer that Iran has been put on notice by this operation that our direct military operations against their military operations is now a standing order and all that that implies. Can you say Jeremiah 49:34-39?

UPDATE:  At this point I can reference back to Global SITREP A7-13 as the requisite background reading material. It is that SITREP which goes a long way to explaining the detail behind the dire warning that came from Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu today, as noted in this DEBKAfile article also posted today. Interestingly enough, the original material I wrote about back in 2005 had its origins in Ukraine, with Russian involvement. The Ukrainian government that came to power after the "Orange Revolution" of that same year confirmed all of the details I wrote about, and which, unfortunately, DEBKAfile has gotten incorrect in some key aspects. This is why SITREP A7-13 is critical material to understand why the US and Israel have paid such very close attention to Iranian shipborne movements such as the KLOS-C.  Delivery of a nuclear warhead to a target does not require an expensive missile program when any nondescript Iranian freighter can pull into a port facility and 200kT worth of fission later that port facility and the city it was a part of will have ceased to exist.

F-15C on full aferburner take-off RAF Lakenheath, England

There has been a direct US-NATO military response to the Russian invasion of Crimea. From the RAF Lakenheath deployment of six American F-15C all-weather air-superiority fighter aircraft and 50 support personnel to Lithuania, to the deployment of the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Truxton (DDG--103) into the Black Sea opposite Crimea, NATO forces have begun to assume a more aggressive, forward leaning posture towards a increasingly militarily belligerent Russia under Vladimir Putin. At the minimum these two forward deployments symbolize a NATO flanking maneuver and trip-wire in opposition to Russian military aggression across the breadth of Eastern Europe. This is precisely the type of positive, measured response to continuing Russian military aggression capped by their ICBM launch last week that this observer was hoping to see instead of the initial waffling and weakness first exhibited as the crisis began.