In the wee hours of the morning on June 21, a man going by the name David Shayani took to his X account to reply to another user who saw flight tracking information for a group of eight American tanker aircraft departing Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri. He wrote that he’d seen a total of nine B-2 Spirit bombers passing over his Warsaw, Missouri home, “headed due East.”
Shayani, who describes himself on the social media site as “an average guy” and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, had inadvertently spotted what we now know was part of a grand deception by the Trump administration ahead of what the Pentagon revealed to be called “Operation Midnight Hammer,” a blitz attack on a trio of Iranian nuclear facilities that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called “an incredible and overwhelming success” during a press conference Sunday morning.
The former Fox News weekend host turned American defense chief, who was appearing in the Pentagon briefing room for the first time alongside Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, said the operation had required “misdirection and the highest of operational security” to permit seven of the stealth bombers spotted by Shayani, as well as an untold number of what Caine said had been “fourth and fifth-generation” fighters, to penetrate deep into Iranian airspace and drop a total of 14 Massive Ordinance Penetrator bombs — bunker busting weapons designed to take out hardened facilities — in the first operational use of that weapon.
Caine, the four-star Air Force general who Trump called out of retirement and promoted to serve as the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair upon his return to the White House in January, noted that a number of the B-2 bombers seen in Missouri had taken off from Whitman “at midnight Friday into Saturday morning.”
Of those stealth bombers, Caine said “part of that package” — including two of the nine spotted by Shayani — were sent westward towards the Pacific region as a “decoy” and part of a “deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders” in Washington and at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
According to the general, the remaining seven stealth bombers, what he called “the main strike package” manned by two crew members apiece, spent the next 18 hours proceeding “quietly to the east with minimal communications throughout” while refueling in-flight en route to the “target area” in Iran.
Once there, Caine said the bombers “linked up” with a fleet of escort fighters and support planes in what he described as a “complex, tightly timed maneuver requiring exact synchronization across multiple platforms in a narrow piece of airspace, all done with minimal communications.”
By 5:00 pm ET on Saturday, those planes were on the cusp of entering Iranian airspace. That’s when a U.S. submarine — which Caine suggested was one of the U.S. Navy’s four Ohio class guided missile submarines — launched “more than two dozen” Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles aimed at “key surface infrastructure targets at Isfahan,” one of the three nuclear program locations targeted in the attack.
Then, the U.S. planes — including decoy aircraft in the form of “fourth and fifth generation” fighter jets — flew “at high altitude and high speed” in front of the B-2 bombers to draw out any Iranian Air Force fighters or ground-based air defense missiles.
The Air Force general said the “strike package” continued with support from a number of U.S. combat commands and services, including U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Space Command, the U.S. Space Force, and U.S. European Command as the “protection package” fighters used what he called “high speed suppression weapons” in “preemptive suppressing fires against any potential Iranian Surface to Air threats” to ensure that the bombers could proceed unmolested.
It appears that goal was achieved, as Caine told reporters that the U.S. was “currently unaware” of any shots fired at the bombers on their way to their target sites.
The first bombs, a pair of the 30,000 pound MOP bunker-busters, were dropped by the lead B-2 bomber at approximately 6:40 pm Eastern Time, targeted at one of “several aim points” on the Fordow facility, which had been constructed deep in a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom.
Caine said the remaining six bombers dropped 12 more of the massive weapons against their respective targets at Fordow and the Natanz site, with the last bombs hitting home around 7:05 pm ET and the Tomahawk missiles, which had been fired just before the bombers began their run into Iranian airspace, hitting their targets shortly thereafter.
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