Also not a nuke facility: The Ayatollah's home and his concubines' apartments.

Well, well, well. Remember when Israel agreed to US terms to avoid nuclear sites while retaliating for Iran's massive ballistic missile attack? It turns out that the Iranians' attempts to play cute with the IAEA gave Israel an opening to destroy a key research facility -- and leave the Iranians unable to complain about it.

When the Iranians first began pursuing nuclear weapons, much of that work took place at a facility in Parchin. After their program got exposed, the Iranians shuttered Parchin and moved that work into more defensible locations. The Iranians have insisted ever since that Parchin no longer played an active role in nuclear research, but that turned out to be a lie, Axios reports. And both the US and Israel knew it:

Israeli and U.S. intelligence began detecting research activity at Parchin earlier this year, including Iranian scientists conducting computer modeling, metallurgy and explosive research that could be used for nuclear weapons.

Flashback: Last June, the White House officials privately warned the Iranians in direct conversations about the suspicious research activities, Axios reported.

The U.S. hoped the warning would make the Iranians stop their nuclear activity, but they continued, the officials said.

The concern over the Taleghan 2 facility at Parchin hit levels so high in US intelligence that they stopped reporting that they had no evidence of Iranian nuclear-weapons development. So when it came time to craft the response to the October 1 missile attacks, the Israelis had a golden opportunity to end that threat, or at least severely curtail it, without violating the agreement with the US. In any other administration, this would have had the blessing of the US, and perhaps it did:

President Biden asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities in order not to trigger a war with Iran, U.S. officials said.

But Taleghan 2 was not part of Iran's declared nuclear program so the Iranians wouldn't be able to acknowledge the significance of the attack without admitting they violated the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Now the Iranians can't complain about this target, not unless it wants to admit to pursuing nuclear weapons. The realization of this loss could explain why the Iranians went from shrugging off the Israeli retaliation to threats of a counter-retaliation strike almost immediately. Iran still insists that it will counter-retaliate at some point, in fact, although the outcome of the election in the US might have them thinking twice about it.

Beege Wellborn writes about Trump's plan to set up a board of examination for all currently-serving senior officers to separate the wheat from the woke.

The American public has had enough. The first clue came when the Secretary of the Army's reviled "warrior caste," which makes up the bulk of any recruiting class in most of the armed services, simply stopped showing up to raise their right hands to enlist.

Panic set in, but instead of pivoting to appreciating the tradition of service these families have going back generations -- and yes, they are overwhelmingly middle-class whites -- the administration doubled down on DEI approaches and woke ploys to attract the diverse troops they wanted (and whom they actually already had), but in the new and improved 72 gender categories that they could fly rainbow flags over.

Traditional patriotic Hispanic, white, black, and other families with a history of service were diverse, yes, but the cool factor was sadly lacking.

Needless to say, recruiting tanked.

The Marine Corps made their numbers this year by, like, 1.

What happened next was November 6th and a belief that President Trump and whoever his Defense Secretary turned out to be would go in with a firehose to wash the woke stench from the five-sided building and return it to its proper military bearing. This is going to happen and not a minute too soon.

They will be scrutinizing general officers for performance and booting those who do not meet the parameters.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the Trump transition team is drafting an executive order to "create a board to purge general officers." Such a board, the article's subhead warned, "could upend military review process and raise concerns about politicization of military."

The Pentagon denizens are shaking in their boots and insisting it will be a catastrophe.

There's precedent for this: General George C. Marshall set up a "plucking" committee to purge officers too old or incompetent to continue serving. It worked out well. The world did not end, and the military improved.

See the article for more.