President Donald Trump revealed a significant and previously undisclosed operational complication during Operation Epic Fury at a White House Cabinet meeting, disclosing that British officials had refused to grant American B2 stealth bombers access to Diego Garcia, a strategically critical Indian Ocean island, forcing US aircraft to undertake grueling 17-hour return flights to their home base in Missouri during the campaign against Iran.
“We were told we can’t use the island to land the B2 bomber,” Trump said. “We’d have to fly back to Missouri, which is a 17-hour flight as opposed to a couple of hours. I said, you got to be kidding. Not good. They made a big mistake.”
Trump attributed the British refusal to what he described as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s political caution around indigenous land rights claims over the Chagos Islands, territory Britain administers and from which Diego Garcia operates as a joint US-UK military facility Read More From Source/Original…