Introduction to The Sanford Report. By: Stephen Sanford

Iran Part One.

Hello, welcome and thanks for taking the time to read this, to learn a little about me, and see what this is about. I’m not great at talking about myself, my apologies. However, in this first installment of The Sanford Report, I will attempt to tell you a bit about myself while we talk about the Iranian military and uranium enrichment program. I’m much better at talking about things that interest me, and that is what The Sanford Report will be, a collection of things that I’ve been researching, know about, or just my take on the military/ geopolitical situation surrounding some nation or region. But be warned, I do fall down the occasional rabbit hole and when that happens, I’ll try and make it interesting for you.

                My wife told me about Sub stack, and if I’m honest, she probably just wanted me to stop trying to explain the Iranian military and nuclear program to her. The woman is patient, but there is a limit to how much of my rambling about centrifugal enrichment or neutron moderation that she can take. I’m hoping to find readers here who will share my excitement on random subjects vaguely connected to military and police forces. Furthermore, all the information contained in The Sanford Report is open source and unclassified…which does not mean you will find it anywhere else, trust me, I looked. I do have sources that I won’t always be willing to disclose for various reasons. Sorry, but people get killed for saying “uranium” in the wrong company.   

We will start with a brief story. I was examining the areas around Fordo Iran in satellite images and something was bothering me. I was looking at power lines and measuring the distances between high tension power poles. (900-1400 feet, never more as far as I found.) I know that the method used to enrich uranium in Iran is centrifugal separation, and the Fordo enrichment facility has 1044 IR-1 centrifuges operating in 6 cascades at Fordo.  They are currently installing more advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at Fordo according to the IAEA. Well, a centrifuge uses electricity, and a lot of it. (Natanz Fuel Enrichment facility is operating some 5060 IR-1 centrifuges in 30 separate cascades.)

Knowing that the facility under the mountain would require large amounts of power, I was looking at power lines. And…I didn’t find power lines running into the facility, at least above ground. Why not? Where are they getting the power? So, I looked. I measured distances between power poles, and I looked at where those power lines were running. Do they have underground power lines? Possibly, but a recently dug trench is fairly easy to see in a satellite image, and I didn’t see those. What I did find was that the power poles were running to a facility several miles west of the Fordo uranium enrichment facility. This facility is interesting, let me show you.

Above: Fordow (Fordo?) Uranium Enrichment Facility. Image Credit: Google Earth. Notice that there are not any visible power lines? Where are they? Also notice how big that mountain is. Now imagine what type of kinetic ordinance would be required to knock it out of service.

Above: What I presume is a missile base, several miles west of Fordo. I stopped counting, there might be hundreds of hardened bunkers at this one location. This isn’t a place you can knock out with a cruise missile or two, but we’ll talk more about that. The nearest power lines I’ve found in the area run to this missile base, not the enrichment facility to the east. Are they buried underground? Would indicate that there are tunnels connecting the facilities?  Image Credit: Google Earth.

Now I’ve given you a taste of the information, and some of the topics we’ll be talking about in The Sanford Report. If I have a question, or I get mentally stuck on something, and I dig, dig, and dig. You get to see what I find. But don’t worry, we won’t just be talking about Iran. We’ll talk about any military. We will talk about fighter planes, and nuclear submarines. We’ll talk about historical military stuff, and military history. We’ll talk about guns, bombs, radars, the salinity of water in the Baltic Sea… How is that relevant you might be asking? Easy, historical naval agreements often restricted ships by tonnage. Every navy then began measuring their tonnage differently to get more tonnage out of the same ship. The pre-war Kreigsmarine of Germany found that if they measured their ships using the specific displacement density of Baltic Sea water… they got a little more tonnage to play with. Don’t be too hard on Germany for that, everyone cheats on arms agreements, and everyone knows that everyone else cheats. It is the nature of things.

Apart from trivia on sea water, we will talk about military training, logistics, propaganda, and world leaders. Military forces mostly don’t just decide to start wars when their generals wake up after a hard night on the town. World leaders start wars; therefore, we’ll sometimes talk about world leaders. It is important to know who is in charge, even when there is some question about who is really running things in some random corner of our little world.

Since my retirement from the army and to keep myself busy, I volunteer as a Reserve Police officer for a small department in Michigan. (When there isn’t a pandemic shutting the world down.) Despite most doctors not believing I would ever walk again, or have children, I graduated from the academy in 2014. And I have two kids… a lesson here is do not take birth control advice from a vascular surgeon. Furthermore, sometimes experts are wrong. I simply could not stand to be in a wheelchair. If I would have been unable to escape that chair, I probably would have shot myself, thrice. I hated that damn wheelchair. My life was on the line, and I found a way to walk again. Sure, I’ve paid the price, I’ve torn ligaments, tendons, and live in constant pain, but I can walk. Never underestimate the ability of people to do the impossible when it is important to them. As Hap Arnold once said, “The difficult we do instantly, the impossible takes a little longer.” I could not agree more.

Because of my association with law enforcement, sometimes we will talk about that subject as well. I even ran for Sheriff of my county in 2020. 2020 was not the year for an unknown with new ideas to win an election, but I tried, and I would have loved to do the job. This sub stack page then is my outlet to share my thoughts, ideas and research with the world. I get bored being stuck at home since my forced retirement from the United States Army, and the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t helped my boredom much. So, I write.

I’ve written several books, and if you’d like to help me out, you can buy a copy or 700 on amazon.com. Mostly I use writing to tackle intellectual problems. Some things are simply easier to conceptualize in the abstract. My first book was terrible, really horrible. The plot wasn’t bad, pretty good in fact. But…I didn’t know how to format, edit, or market myself. Hell, I still don’t know how to market myself. If you can help me out by sharing The Sanford Report with your friends and co-workers, it would be appreciated. Most future posts won’t be as much about me, as this is our introduction to one another. I’ll stick to specific topics in later posts, with the occasional bad pun or dad joke thrown in for good measure.

Speaking of books I’ve written, I’m including a list of titles at the end of this post. My latest work is book number two in a science fiction/ space opera series entitled The Song of Karaticna.  (Problems of Morgan Series.) The Song of Karaticna is about a military invasion of a remote enemy outpost on a desolate planet. The invasion is required because of treaties and international law that the fictional alien empire is required to follow. I based the invasion on the brutal battles of Operation Watchtower, the invasion of Guadalcanal in the Second World War. I even through in a plot twist where the military forces of both sides only held control of the region of space surrounding the outpost for about half the day.

On Guadalcanal, the U.S. military only held regional sea and air control around the island during the day when air support could spot and attack shipping. At night, the Imperial Japanese Navy owned the surrounding sea due to the proximity of their local base, their advanced optics, and their regular night fighting training. In The Song of Karaticna, the military forces face the same dilemma of fighting on a desolate planet that they can only control, support, and resupply for half the day. Of course there’s more to the story. There’s love, loss, betrayal, hardship, and valor. There is sacrifice, and people making impossible choices. I won’t spoil it for you, and I hope you give the series a try.

When I started writing, I had a lot of trouble with spelling, grammar and such. My wife says that my brain is wired differently from most people’s. She is probably correct as well-adjusted people don’t choose to run into burning buildings while under machine gun fire. I did, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. Regardless about my wiring, it has been a challenge to write in a way that is possible for you to understand. As a child I had trouble learning to read. Instead of doing things properly, I invented my own way to comprehend the treasure of information held within the written word. I taught myself to read pictographically. I.E. I would see a word, and that word would be a picture, not a combination of random letters forming a word which formed an idea. Because of that, I had to store the images of thousands upon thousands of words in my mind, recalling them instantly to read a book, sign, or newspaper. Despite that, I managed to convince every teacher or college professor I’ve ever had that I could read. I also digested thousands of books, only tripped up by words I’d never seen before, forcing me to look them up. God forbid I ask anyone for help…

I mention my difficulty in reading because it effects my writing, and this is our introduction to one another. Since I’ve learned I wasn’t really reading, I’ve been working on learning to read properly. Some of my early writing shows the problems I had with spelling, sounding, saying. Since then, I’ve developed a system to edit what I write so that you can read my language, because that is what it’s like for me to write in proper English, it’s writing in a second language. This also means that if you expect anything resembling proper grammar, it takes time. The Sanford Report will not ever be more than a weekly publication, with occasional extras thrown in if I find something interesting. I do not want to produce garbage for you.   

I will endeavor to make it worth your time to read what I write. And I will work hard at editing, though I’m not perfect so read this for the information, not the perfect grammar, formatting and such. I will make the occasional mistake while I try to think in two or more languages, yours and mine. I will also do my best to provide you with at least a small tidbit of information you probably won’t find anywhere else. Because you’re taking the time to read this first post, one or more of those interesting little things is included in this first post to thank you for reading it. Pardon the blurry images, but it will become clear why they are important when I explain. For now, trust me, those pictures are interesting.  

As I mentioned, I’m concerned with Iran lately. Not that Iran has ever done anything to me, I’m simply reading the tea leaves and see how dangerous the situation is becoming in the region.  Israel is pounding the drums of war, internationally the United States is diplomatically weaker than normal following the 2020 election. The other nations of the world are seeing the situation and are pushing their own agendas.  Iran is enriching uranium at higher levels, and all it takes is one little spark for the region to become extremely volatile. Let’s check out those images.

The previous three images are of an Iranian Mig-29 test firing a Fakour-90 air to air missile. Image Credit: Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force.

I found these images by watching hours and hours’ worth of Iranian military propaganda videos and reading Iranian news websites and some other sources... So, why is this important? For several reasons. First, the missile in question is a Fakour-90, and it is made in Iran and meant as an upgrade and replacement of the American AIM-54 missile used on the F-14 Tomcat. Iranian generals have recently been dropping hints in the press about the Fakour-90, even saying that the missile is much improved over the old AIM-54. They have even said the Fakour-90 would be used on the F-14, “…and other airframes.”

Above: Fakour-90 Missile on display at an Iranian military expo. Image Credit: Mehr News. One of the major differences between the AIM-54 and the Fakour-90 is the metal brace running down each side of the missile. This was absent on the AIM-54 but was present on the Hawk surface to air missile. I have not been able to determine what that piece of metal is, from an engineering standpoint. I believe that metal brace is one of the primary reasons why some people believe that the Fakour-90 is a knockoff of the Hawk. Secondly of course is Project Sky Hawk, in which Iran adapted the Hawk Surface to Air missile to be fired from the F-14 tomcat. According to Iranian pilots of the time, the program was a technical success, and at least 2 Iraqi aircraft were shot down with the system. Despite that, project Sky Hawk was never more than a trial/ interim solution to the problem of low stocks of reliable air to air missiles. The Fakour-90 seems to be a much more acceptable solution from the information I’ve been able to obtain.

Despite the claims of some “experts” who underrate Iran, I do not. The AIM-54 was circa 1960’s and 1970’s tech. (at least the missiles delivered to Iran were.) Given the modern state of the consumer electronics market, and the growing state of the Iranian weapons industries, I do believe Iran’s claims that they have made an improvement to the AIM-54. And honestly, getting the missile to fire from a Mig-29 is no simple feat.

While the United States military underrates Iran’s defense forces, it is important to remember that Iran held back Iraq in almost a decade of war. Iraq used chemical weapons on Iran, and Iraq had support from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Iran was mostly alone and fighting for their very survival. They have not forgotten that, and the prevalent idea of military independence for the Iranian security forces is deeply embedded in Iranian culture. Iran takes its national security seriously. This can be easily seen by looking at satellite images of the country. Their air defense sites are mostly well camouflaged, their aircraft mostly in hardened shelters that were build with the assistance of the United States back when our nations were on friendly terms.  

Any military strikes on Iran will be extremely costly. While Israel is pressuring the United States, and the world to do something, Iran is building bunkers and moving forward with uranium enrichment. Traditionally, Israel rarely takes kinetic action without at least the tacit approval of the United States, Iran may be different. Just as Iran hasn’t forgotten that the world stood by and did nothing while Iraq used chemical weapons on them, Israel hasn’t forgotten the holocaust. Israel takes Iran at their word when the Supreme leader says something about wiping Israel off the map. Both Iran and Israel have plenty of reasons to distrust the world when it comes to their national survival. The world ignored both those peoples when terrible, unspeakable horrors were inflicted upon them. Both have plenty of reasons to be paranoid and distrustful of the rest of the world. Honestly, Iran and Israel are much more alike than people might admit.

Iran is a Shia nation surrounded mostly by Sunni Arab neighbors. Israel is a Jewish nation surrounded by Muslim neighbors who don’t always like them. Both nations have been invaded in the last forty years by people who wish to remove them from the map. Both Iran and Israel have put American made fighter planes to very good use in their national defense. The fighter pilots of both nations have a mentality of being tough dog fighters and accustomed to fighting air combat outnumbered. There are numerous accounts of Israeli fighter pilots closing into gun range for a cannon kill. Only recently have some of the Iranian aces of the Iran-Iraq war begun to tell their stories. These stories are worth reading. Iranian fighter pilots, like their Israeli counterparts, are dyed in the wool adherents to cult of the gun.

Iranian pilots would usually fight outnumbered, sometimes alone. Aerial fights with 1 vs. 5 or 1 vs. 8 odds were not uncommon or unheard of during the Iran-Iraq war. Amazingly, most of those Iranian pilots survived those fights, and lived to tell the stories. There is no reason to question the dedication, skill or valor of those Iranian pilots who fought alone against a genocidal tyrant bent on their destruction. The institutional mentality once built embeds itself deeply. The Iranian aces of the Iran-Iraq war, like their counterparts in Israel, are now General Officers, or retired. They’ve both had more than thirty years to teach younger pilots their ways of fighting. Entire generations of Iranian fighter pilots have learned from those old aces, just like Israeli pilots have. Iran is not Iraq.

Any military strikes on Iran will not be a repeat of the Iraq war, except in the never-ending nature of the bloodletting and regional instability. Iranian fighter pilots won’t mostly stay on the ground like Iraqi pilots did in 2003. They’ve been preparing to give their last for their country for two generations. They’ve learned to make do with the equipment they have, altering it or making replacement parts themselves. Iranian pilots will take off to meet any attack against their country by any aggressor nation. Iranian generals watched the United States dismantle two of their neighbors in the last twenty years. They took notes.  They saw what happened to an air force that stays on the ground or doesn’t fight.

The concept is use it or lose it. If the planes are going to be destroyed either way, the idea is to get them in the air and at least make the enemy pay a heavy price. The combination of a very large number of air defense systems, battle hardened air force generals who’ve trained a generation or two of fighter pilots, integrated radar systems and a large nation with plenty of mountains makes any prospect of air attacks on Iran a costly one. If it would not be costly, why didn’t the United States or Israel attack in the last thirty years? Iran isn’t the flat country that Iraq mostly is. They can and do put surface to air missile systems in every mountain pass.

Now, briefly, lets talk about options for any military action against Iran, specifically the stealth aircraft of the United States and Israel. Yes, both the USA and Israel have squadrons of the F-35 jet. And when planning an attack against Iran, the F-35 does not change the equation, in fact, the F-35 makes the equation worse for the USA or Israel. The F-35 does not have the payload to strike at Iran’s uranium enrichment program. The costly procurement of the F-35 has meant that other platforms that are desperately needed by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy have been sidelined. This has left a fleet of airframes worn down by decades of wars in the Middle East, and near constant deployments to counter China in the Pacific region since 2014.

Without a viable production line open for the only actual 5th generation air superiority fighter in the U.S. inventory, the F-22, there simply aren’t enough capable airframes in the inventory. (There are 187 F-22 airframes.) The other types of jets available are essentially “high mileage” and some are well past their expected service lives. Those airframes, such as the F-15E which can carry heavy bunker busting ordinance, are being held together with duct tape and bubble gum so that the D.O.D. can buy more F-35’s which can’t drop a bunker buster like the GBU-28.

One of the primary enrichment centers for Uranium enrichment in Iran is Fordo (Fordow?), the centrifuges at Fordo are buried deeply under a mountain, surrounded by security fences, air defense sites, and patrolled from the air by Iranian drones with infrared cameras. We’ll talk more about Iranian drones in another post, but I do have proof that Iran is flying drones over all their nuclear sites. This layered defense approach makes any prospect of an attack extremely costly. Add this to the depleted and worn out airframes in the U.S. military inventory, and there are not realistic military options open for more than token attacks on Iran’s enrichment program.

For example, while the F-35 is considered a low visibility aerial platform, there are conditions. First, the radar cross section of the F-35 is only low from 60 degrees from the front, only when all weapons are carried internally, and only to X-band radar. But…Iran has developed the habit of stacking their air defense radar systems. Any time I’ve found satellite images of an Iranian air defense radar, there’s almost always another radar set within a mile. (And those are just the systems Iran wants me to see… where are the others?) Iran uses many different bands and types of radars, and they stack them together for overlapping coverage. Those sites are further guarded by spotters using the old Mk1 human eyeball, thermal cameras, and multiple passive radar systems that the USA can’t easily target.  Every S-300 PMU2 site I’ve found in Iran, has another air defense system guarding it. Iran takes this stuff seriously and they are working extremely hard to create an integrated air defense system that will spot, track, and target an F-35, F-22 or B-2.  

Above: An Iranian S-75 (SA-2) missile site near Karajrak Iran. (About 19 miles west south west of Tehran.) Image Credit: Google Earth.

Below: A Sayyad-2 Site near Esfahan (Isfahan) Air Base in central Iran. This SAM site is near a S-300PMU2 site, and Iran claims to have integrated their command and control (C2) to take information from the radars of both systems for a better track and targeting solution. Image Credit: Google Earth.

Below: An S-300PMU2 system set up near Esfahan Air Base. The Sayyad-2 site is about 2 kilometers north of this site, each with their own search, tracking, and fire control radar, all routed to a central C2 post. The sites are overlapping to provide better coverage and making Suppression of Air Defense (SEAD) missions much more difficult. I should note that Iraq never had an integrated air defense system built with this level of dedication. Image Credit: Google Earth.

Don’t mistake my words, I am not claiming that Iran has built a fool proof air defense system. Such a system does not exist. Air defense systems are not meant to give 100% protection, they are meant to make any attack so costly that it isn’t worth it. They exact a blood price on attackers, and limit, but won’t prevent attacks. This then becomes a cost equation, is attacking Iran’s military assets and uranium enrichment program worth the cost in lives, treasure, and regional instability? From the information I’ve dug up, I believe that under the current geopolitical situation, it would be too expensive.

I honestly don’t think that Iran enriching uranium is worth anyone killing and dying for, but I don’t live in Israel. Israeli calculations of risk are not the same as mine, neither are Iranian ones. They have not forgotten the holocaust in Israel, and that memory is deeply embedded into the nation in a way that people like me in the United States will never understand. I’ve heard a rumor that the Hebrew translation of “Never Again” was welded on the first Israeli nuclear bomb casing.

I hope you learned something, and I hope you follow the first series which will be on Iran and the Iranian military. If you have a specific topic, nation, weapon, or military force you’d like me to write about, give me a shout. Oh, and I will occasionally talk about the future of military technology. I will admit to being a writer of cheesy science fiction. One way you can currently help me out is by picking up a copy of my latest book, The Song of Karaticna. The Song of Karaticna is the second book in the Problems of Morgan series. Both books are available on Amazon. I’ll throw a link in at the bottom. If you read those books, or anything I write, please take the time to leave a review and send me feedback. I listen.

The next few posts about Iran will be talking about uranium enrichment and the Iranian Air Force. I have piles of information I’ve gathered on Iran’s F-14 Tomcats, their combat use of the jets, and their modernization programs. There will also be posts with information about surface to air missile systems, and a post about the January 8th, 2020 shootdown of flight 752 near Tehran by a Tor missile system.

                As a heads up, I’ve already written an installment of The Sanford Report called, “Looking at Things Differently.” It is a historically based short story of what some of the experiences of a kid who grew up in Iran around the time of the Islamic revolution might have been. It was meant to show us Americans why the people of a country like Iran don’t much trust us. (With good reason.) It is an attempt to help us see things from their perspective. So, that short story might be the next post, I’m still debating. Some people very much don’t like to be called out on their hypocrisy. Anyway, I haven’t made up my mind on that one yet, so stay tuned.  Don’t forget to subscribe, comment, leave reviews and all that. We’ll see how this goes…

                Stephen Sanford, The Sanford Report.

Sources and information for this edition of The Sanford Report:

IAEA report of December 2020 on the Iranian uranium enrichment program.

The Song of Karaticna. Stephen Sanford. ISBN: 978-1701203457 The Song of Karaticna

MISSILEERS AGAINST STEALTH. Mike (Mihajlo) S. Mihajlovic, Djordje S. Anicic. ISBN: 9781775395362

IRANIAN F-14 TOMCAT UNITS IN COMBAT. Tom Cooper and Farzad Bishop. Osprey publishing ISBN 978-1-84-84176-787-1

Iran Military Power: Ensuring Regime Survival and Securing Regional Dominance. By Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Government Publication. ISBN 978-0-16-095157-2

Google Earth

Here are some links about my military service, including my Distinguished Service Cross citation.