DONALD TRUMP WAS A FOOTBALL EXECUTIVE.

As such, he was likely aware of the Bart Starr special.  Short yardage situation, line up as if to run, fake the pitchout, then comes the bomb.

So it appears to have gone with Operation Midnight Hammer.  "More than 125 aircraft, including 7 B-2 stealth bombers, snuck into Iran while other B-2s were sent to Guam as decoys."

Unlike in a football game, the preparation included the pre-placement of air and naval assets in a way that didn't look out of the ordinary.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the operation “took months and weeks of positioning and preparation,” with General Caine further stating that “in a matter of weeks this went from strategic planning to global execution.”

In the days before the strike, the USS Nimitz battle group was positioned as the third carrier strike group put in theater as an apparent back up. It arrived on June 20, right before the fireworks got started. The Nimitz joined the USS Carl Vinson and USS Gerald Ford.

The technology involved was in preparation much longer, dating back to when National Technical Means noticed the Iranians doing some serious rock mining.  That's for another day, we'll focus today on the play action fake.

Two flights of B-2 Spirits, callsigns MYTEE 11 flight and MYTEE 21 flight, each comprising four aircraft, departed from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, in the early hours of Jun. 21, 2025. Their destination was confirmed as Andersen Air Force Base, located on the Pacific island of Guam.

The decoy B-2s were supported by KC-46 air tankers from Travis Air Force Base.

Kramer and Thurston pulling and Taylor pretending to take the handoff.

Would you believe somebody noticed Dale and Dowler sneaking out downfield?

Seems possible if not probable that while every open-source reporter in the world was watching very public and eventually government-confirmed B-2 flights westward, a guy in his backyard in Missouri saw the real, undisclosed and untracked mission heading east https://t.co/fFd2pkRSyk

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) June 22, 2025

There's a fair amount of Monday morning quarterbacking, if you will, on that post.

Time On Target has become a lot fancier in the eighty years since Sgt. Karlson was on a commo line out in front of the front lines.  Now you work out flight times for Spirit bombers and launch spots for submarine-based cruise missiles.

Once the entire strike package was assembled and “fenced in,” the green light arrived to begin the action.

“At approximatively 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time last night, and just prior to the strike package entering Iran, a U.S. submarine in the U.S. Central Command Area of Responsibility launched more than two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles against key surface infrastructure targets at Esfahan,” [Gen^l Dan] Caine explained.” As the Operation Midnight Hammer strike package entered Iranian air space, the U.S. employed several deception tactics, including decoys, as the 4th and 5th generation aircraft pushed out in front of the strike package at high altitude and high speed, sweeping in front of the package for enemy fighters and surface-to-air missile threats.”

The green light? Required clearance from Israeli forces, who own the skies over Persia.  The general also noted, "As part of a plan to maintain tactical surprise, part of the package proceeded to the west and into the Pacific as a decoy, a deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders here in Washington and in Tampa."  Did that include Our President, who gave himself two weeks (that's a standard time unit in real estate, ask anyone who has had a house built) to decide whether to take out Iran's nuclear weapons facilities?

Mediaite types, borrowing from New York's Times, suggest the Bart Starr special might have been an audible called in the Pentagon.

The Pentagon reportedly orchestrated an elaborate decoy mission to keep President Donald Trump from blowing the cover off impending covert strikes on Iran’s uranium enrichment infrastructure because top military officials feared his social media posts would give away the plan.

Despite Trump publicly claiming he would take “up to two weeks” to decide whether to join Israel’s war effort, preparations for an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities were already in motion.

According to advisers who spoke to The New York Times, Trump was floating the idea of using “massive bunker-buster bombs” on Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment facility just hours after Israeli bombs fell on June 13. Within a day, one adviser told reporters, it was clear: “Trump seemed to have already decided to go through with it.”

But the greatest threat to operational secrecy wasn’t Iran or hackers, sources told the outlet, it was Trump’s social media posts.

In the lead-up to the attack, Trump posted provocatively on Truth Social: “Everyone should evacuate Tehran!” A day later, after leaving a G7 summit in Canada, he wrote he had departed not to negotiate a ceasefire but for something “much bigger.” He added: “Stay tuned!”

Planners inside the the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command were deeply concerned that Tehran would catch wind of the plan, according to The Times, and scrambled to implement a decoy mission.

The outlet detailed how two fleets of B-2 bombers were dispatched from Missouri – one headed west, visible to flight trackers; the other east, crossing the Atlantic silently in the night.

The westbound bombers acted as distraction while the real strike force flew undetected into Iranian airspace.

If the mullahs weren't already cognizant of Our President's intentions, none of that would have mattered.  If the mullahs had the possibility of some kind of strike in mind, that they had already lost their air defenses is more salient than whether Our President inadvertently spills the beans or the Times "sources" might have leaked the plans to some Democrat who passed the word to some contact in the Iranian mission to the United Nations.  That didn't happen.

Packer opponents knew about the Bart Starr Special, but Bart Starr ran it anyway.  Moreover, if there weren't plans to pre-position the tankers and conceal the strike flights with some public deception, that would be a more troubling possibility than the alleged "scrambling" to set up the play action fake.

It's all to the good.  Yesterday I observed, "Does anyone seriously think that after two score years of unproductive palaver about Iran's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't nuclear program, another few weeks of 'peace process' would have changed anything?  That nuclear program needed killing."

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein offer a similar verdict.

The world stood on the edge of nuclear conflict as a U.S. president held firm and took radical action to end that threat while the world held its breath. That president was John F. Kennedy over two weeks in 1962. And last month, President Donald Trump, for the first time in many decades, took similar action, and again, it worked.

Contrast that with the results of so many well-meaning presidents and European leaders who urged peace and offered appeasement through actions such as Obama took in shipping billions of dollars of cash to Iran in a secret airlift. Under their stewardship, threats to the world have grown consistently larger and the global framework became increasingly insecure as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all grew in strength and took actions to control their people and suppress all internal dissent.

The parallel to the Cuban Missile Crisis (which meant Mickey Mouse being interrupted for live coverage of the arguments at the United Nations to my eight-year-old self) is strained.  Those paragraphs, though, are a diplomatic phrasing of "unproductive palaver."