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The military plan known as Operation Epic Fury has been overwhelmingly successful since the strike to decapitate Iran’s leadership began on Saturday. Four American servicemen have lost their lives in the execution of the plan, a number that has been kept so remarkably low in part because of the technological advancements the United States’ arsenal. That primarily means drones, but other technological tools are also at America’s disposal. Kevin Cirilli is a futurist and host of iHeart Radio’s “Hello Future” podcast; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to discuss the technology that America’s military is bringing to this fight.
Cirilli laid out two strategies for host Larry Mendte involving drones that swayed the battle so decisively in America’s favor: “What the U.S. did was, they also deployed some cheap drones, but they modeled the drones specifically after Iran’s drones, which are cheaper than the United States in every sense of the word. And so, that created some confusion for the Irani regime, as they saw these drones that looked like their own flying and dipping and zooming through their air space, so that’s point number one. Secondly, as it relates to the drones, the United States was able to take out the defense capabilities that the Iranians had to detect missiles. Now, that is a cyberoperation, and that is crucial.”
But Cirilli says it was a modern twist on a strategy from World War Two that most impressed him: “We can all remember [dropping] leaflets [on Germany]… What the United States did this time was, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, they were able to hack Iran’s most prominent app, which is a Muslim calendar app with more than 5 million Iranians using, and they said ‘We stand with you; it’s time to support the people’.”
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