Radiant Realm

Hovering over Georgia this summer, National Guard helicopter crews flew from field to field searching for ma*****na being grown illegally on private property.

The Georgia Guard calls part of the mission “probable cause generation,” a role in a decades-old counterdrug partnership with civilian law enforcement where military helicopters provide police an aerial platform to search for ma*****na. This summer, officials say they took a different approach in how they conduct those searches. Civilian law enforcement officers aboard Guard helicopters conducted searches over general areas in all 159 Georgia counties rather than limiting flights to previously identified properties.

Depending on aircraft availability and what police request, the Guard sends up either a UH-72 Lakota or UH-60 Black Hawk with a three-person military aircrew. The guardsmen perform the missions under Title 32 federal counterdrug authority. A civilian police officer rides aboard the helicopter as guard pilots and crew fly over general areas in every Georgia county, Guard officials told Task & Purpose. The officer scans for ma*****na from the air and, when a grow is spotted and verified, uses that observation to establish probable cause for a search warrant.

In one operation this summer, a civilian law enforcement officer aboard a UH-72 spotted ma*****na growing behind a private residence in Dalton. The National Guard said the observation directly enabled law enforcement to obtain a search warrant. Police ultimately seized 17 plants and two pounds of processed ma*****na from the property, valued at more than $40,000 in total

Georgia National Guard crews helped state and local agencies seize 343 ma*****na plants across the state this summer alone.

In the eighty years since Pearl Harbor, nobody has dared touch an American aircraft carrier. Iran has now done exactly that. The BBC's report says

- The US aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer successfully evaded multiple attacks

Look at that word — evaded. Not destroyed, not intercepted. CENTCOM itself acknowledged that the USS George Washington had to perform evasive manoeuvres under Iranian missile fire. The nuclear-powered carrier of the most powerful navy on earth had to move out of the way.

The IRGC's Aerospace Force fired ballistic missiles at that carrier and a destroyer. Iran claims both vessels were damaged and forced to leave the engagement area. CENTCOM says no ship was hit. There is still no independent confirmation of the Iranian claim — let me say that plainly.

Now the question is
- Can Iran actually sink a carrier?

Former US intelligence officer Malcolm Nance rejected Iran's claim with an argument that is technically solid — hundreds of interceptors work around a carrier, and that vast steel structure does not sink to three or four missiles. To sink it you have to breach the hull from below.

Here I partly agree with Nance. Technically he is right. But sinking was never Iran's objective. Render a carrier non-operational and it is out of service for years. And politically, the picture of a burning American carrier in the Strait of Hormuz is worth more than the physical damage.

Danny Citrinowicz, the Iran analyst at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, put his finger on it. In his view, the very act of targeting a carrier proves that Tehran is now willing to take a risk it once deliberately avoided. I agree with him. Iran has stopped caring about the consequences.

Within hours, America answered. CENTCOM said two Iranian tankers were permanently disabled and a third completely destroyed in the Gulf of Oman. The IRGC Navy then counter-claimed hits on several tankers and a US naval drone.

Now to US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. He announced on social media that if Iran fires on American ships, America will sink Iran's oil tankers. He described Iran's tanker fleet as

- defenceless

In CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper's words, shoot at two ships and three will be taken in return. One thing has to be said plainly here. Publicly identifying defenceless civilian commercial vessels as easy targets, announcing it, and then striking them falls within the definition of a war crime. Iran's foreign ministry has called it a clear violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

Now hear what is happening inside Washington. A New York Times investigation reports that in August around 50 Joint Staff officers were made to sit for polygraph tests. The question was a single one — had they leaked the news that America's mu*****ns stockpiles for the Iran war were running dry. CBS says dozens of CENTCOM officers took the same test. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said they do not comment on internal investigations.

This is not how a winning side behaves. An administration that claims it is winning a war does not strap its own officers to a lie detector. Hegseth has denied the shortage reports, and Trump has called critical coverage of the war treasonous.

Look at public opinion too. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll has Trump's approval stuck at 33 percent, the lowest of either of his terms. In the University of Massachusetts Amherst poll, 80 percent of Americans expect a long war, and support for military action in Iran has fallen to 31 percent.

But the most important words of the day came from former CIA director and former CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus. He acknowledged that the strikes have badly damaged Iran's military capacity — much of the navy sunk, the air force effectively non-existent. But then he raised the real question: can Iran come out of this militarily weakened yet strategically stronger? His answer — that depends entirely on who ends up controlling the Strait of Hormuz.

From a former CIA director's admission you can work out where America stands. Trump began a war to change a government and is now stuck in a war over a waterway. This will not be settled by counting missiles. Whoever controls the flow of oil and gas is the winner.

And the claim of control does not match the facts. Last month Trump said the strait was fully under American control. Yet by Kpler's count, an average of just 13 ships a day now pass through Hormuz.

In parliament on Sunday, Iran's speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said the era of proportionate response is over. Any blow to Iran's interests will now be answered faster, heavier and more painfully. Look at the past — after Soleimani was killed, Iran fired a few missiles at bases in Iraq and stopped there. Qalibaf is saying those days are gone. By firing at a carrier, Iran has already shown it means it.

IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebi said the same day that for every dollar of damage America inflicts on Iran, it does several times that to itself. That is Tehran's doctrine — not military victory, but economic bleeding.

Finally, a word about ordinary people. The interceptors being spent over Hormuz are the same ones Ukraine no longer has to protect its power grid. One war is eating another, and the shock in oil prices lands in shopping bags from South Asia to Africa. That is geopolitics — there are no spectators here.

For eighty years nobody dared look that carrier in the eye. This week it had to move. Who sank what is not the point. The point is that the fear has broken.

Flying across the world with modern GPS is not much harder than using a navigation app in your car, which is why most military planners expect the global satellite system to be knocked out early in any major future conflict.

To prepare for a no-GPS sky, a Pentagon test flight last month over Alaska made a major leap toward how the U.S. military plans to fly to and from targets without the satellite system, overseen by the Pentagon’s newest technology unit.

Flying a modified Embraer 170 over the Pacific Ocean, the test crew flew from Seattle, Washington, to southern Alaska and back — a four-hour flight — navigating with quantum sensors that read a sensitive magnetic map of the Earth not used in any other navigation technology.

The test was overseen by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, an office aimed at getting new technology into military use. Though the Embraer 170 was a specially modified civilian plane, the Air Force plans to test the technology on a C-17 later this year, the Pentagon said.

The system works like this: the crust of the Earth is not a smooth billiard ball of even rock, but is rather a patchwork of large deposits of different minerals and elements. For instance, coal mining or oil exploration occurs where large deposits of coal and petroleum are available for their mines and wells. Mountain ranges are often made of granite, while vast veins of iron ore sit in the Canadian north.

For more than 40 years, American Airlines didn’t really paint its aircraft silver.

They were actually silver.

From 1968, generations of American jets flew with most of their aluminium skin exposed and polished until it shone. The look became so closely associated with the airline that its aircraft were known as “silver birds.”

Then the Boeing 787 arrived and made the tradition almost impossible to continue.

Unlike the aluminium jets that came before it, much of the Dreamliner’s airframe is made from composite materials. There was no aluminium fuselage to polish into American’s trademark mirror finish.

American had hundreds of modern aircraft coming and admitted in 2013 that “the polished metal look was no longer an option.”

So after more than four decades, the bare-metal American disappeared. Silver paint replaced polished aluminium and the famous AA eagle tail gave way to today’s striped design.

American received its first 787 in January 2015.

The Dreamliner helped take American into a new generation.

But one of aviation’s most recognisable liveries couldn’t come with it.