(credit to RomCom1989 for the title)
A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like "in Minecraft") and comments containing it will be removed.
Image is of an Iranian soldier exulting in the launch of a ballistic missile aimed towards the imperialists.
short summary this week: US doing pretty bad and Iran doing pretty good all things considered, Strait of Hormuz is closed and will almost certainly remain so until the end of the war, Trump has no idea what to do, global economic crisis from strait closure is basically guaranteed at this point but who will ultimately benefit most and who will ultimately lose most is still up in the air.
longish summary is below in the spoiler tags
longish summary
While there are still major debates raging about how badly things are actually going right now and what the post-conflict map may look like, as we blaze past the two week mark on this conflict, it's becoming ever more obvious to almost everybody involved that this war is not going according to plan, if there ever was one. US airstrikes are, from what I can best determine, still mostly done with relatively less powerful (but still very dangerous!) and much less plentiful standoff munitions launched from bombers, though certain border and coastal areas are being struck with more powerful and more plentiful short-range guided bombs. This indicates that Iranian air defense is still sufficiently functional throughout most of Iran that the kinds of true carpet bombing done against Korea and Vietnam in the past (and Gaza very recently) is still too risky, though their airspace is still very much under assault, as we appear to have images of small groups of Western fighters breaching relatively deep into the country. Under some kind of Iranian pressure (drones? missiles? speedboats?) one aircraft carrier has retreated to a thousand kilometers from Iran, hiding behind the mountains of Oman; the other is sitting in the Red Sea, rather pointedly out of range of Yemen. As such, the ranges that Western aircraft must travel to bombard Iran is increasing, which reduces their frequency and increases strain on maintenance and logistics in the medium and long term.
While there is tons to say about the current social, economic, and military state of Iran, I don't think I have a reliable enough picture to give a good summary beyond "they aren't close to defeat or regime change". What has instead captured much of the world's attention is the continuing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has inspired some of the most delusional statements I have seen so far in my life, which is sincerely a profound achievement. For those out of the loop: the strait is currently closed to all shipping except those going to very particular countries (I've seen China and Bangladesh mentioned, and apparently India is in the process of working something out and may succeed or fail). This is because most ships are not risking the trip due to the ~20 tankers and container ships that Iran has already struck and disabled in the strait and in the Persian Gulf. Additionally, the threat from Iran's military to Navy ships is such that attempting to create a convoy to guide tankers through it is suicidal to both the Navy and merchant ships. Right now it cannot be done, and it very well might be the case that it could never be done, simply due to the combination of Iran's naval forces (hundreds, perhaps thousands, of armed, specialized speedboats designed for exactly this purpose), their drones (in the tens of thousands), their torpedoes, and if all else fails, their naval mines.
The Western reaction to this has been so moronic that it has almost integer underflowed into being philosophical: what does it truly mean for a passage to be "closed"? Has Iran truly "closed" the strait, or is the risk of traversing it simply too high for these cowardly sailors (who, for some strange reason, seem to care about their "lives" and "families")? How is it possible for Iran to have closed the strait if, according to the West, Iran's military has been totally obliterated? All these questions and more plague the minds of those who cannot accept the now-proven fact that there are indeed military forces on this planet that the US Navy with all its aircraft carriers and destroyers and submarines cannot defeat; and one of those minds is, rather hilariously, Trump himself. His thrice-daily positive affirmations that Iran has been defeated are taking on an increasingly deranged and almost pitiable tone; the lamentations of a man who has finally found a situation where him merely stating that something is true is insufficient to change the situation one iota. Despite stating that some kind of naval compact or alliance is being established to protect shipping, every Western country so far - from the UK, to France, to Japan, to Australia - has publicly stated that they will not risk their ships to do so. All this as the continued blockade yet further guarantees a worldwide energy, production, transportation, and food crisis that will have major global ramifications for at least the rest of the decade and almost certainly beyond.
If the anti-imperialists play their cards right, the US could lose much from this crisis, and others, like China and Russia, could gain a great deal. To quote Nia Frome (co-founder of Red Sails): "An effective Marxist has to be enough of an accelerationist/pervert to treat the obviously bad things that are going to happen as the political opportunities they are."
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
https://xcancel.com/cym27s/status/2033706734682771794
well, you know, planes sometimes just do that
(The thing is, when you have a decaying fleet of half-century-old planes, they do just do that - by the end of this, the US may well have lost more equipment to attrition and user error than to actual combat. It's easy to kind of start dooming about the US's ability to just bomb anyone in the world, but you have to remember that this capability isn't free - all these constant deployments wear down equipment, they wear down people, and this isn't the Cold War anymore, the industrial capability to actually keep regularly replacing this equipment doesn't exist anymore - there were 803 KC-135s built in 10 years, with 376 still in service (soon to be 362, and this isn't counting the losses from this conflict), and they're going to be replaced by the KC-46, of which 110 have been built in a slightly longer period, and of which they plan to procure 179, possibly to be increased to 188)
The KC-46 has become a make jobs corruption programme for Boeing, and a lemon in part because of that. Kicking the can down the road, spending all the money in the budget to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan for decades because there was no "peer threat" after the end of the cold war, and chasing the next best thing, which doesn't exist yet. Same thing happened to many programmes in the USA, from the B-2 and F-22 fleet size cuts, to the AGM-129 retirement, to the airborne early warning mission and E-7 Wedgetail. The US may learn the correct lessons from Iran. If there's a programme to fix the KC-46 issues, the E-7 Wedgetail comes back, and F/A-XX is down selected, along with a focus on improving logistics, that would be worrying. If they go all in on AI, drones, space based sensors, and gibberish, that would be a gift to China.
The reason so many KC-135s were built was to support the US strategic bomber fleet, the US built over 2000 B-47s and over 700 B-52s, with both the nuclear and conventional mission in mind. The industrial capacity absolutely exists to make a lot of bombers of this type if there was interest, and the tankers would follow afterwards, you need aircraft to refuel. Airbus builds 900 airliners a year, Boeing close to 600. But there is no demand to build thousands of aircraft of this type, no mission for a modernised B-52, say a Boeing 777 or Airbus A-350 converted to drop gravity bombs. They would simply not survive on the battlefield. The US is looking to build B-21s for the future of its strategic bombing fleet. A stealth bomber is much more complex to build than aircraft of the past, and enhancements in precision and survivability mean there's no need to build thousands of B-21s. I think the plans are between 100-200. The US will never build as many mid air refueling aircraft as they did in the 1950s.
The B-21 also brings new questions and dilemmas for the US: what do you refuel it with, what do you escort it with? Right now there is no aircraft that can refuel or escort a B-21 in the most heavily contested environments. It has to escort itself, and have the range to get into and out of contested airspace without refuelling just before entering and just after exiting it. It can only refuel from a KC-46 or KC-135 far away from the target. This may change in future (F-47, stealth/unmanned tankers), but that's the current situation.
The Airbus figure I could find was 793 in 2025 (https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/airbus-orders-deliveries-totals-summary-2025/) (failing to meet the 820 goal they had set earlier) - they had 889 new orders, but these aircraft aren't all going to be produced this year, given that they have a total backlog of ≈8700. Now, they forecast production continuing to grow (after the Covid slump), but every capitalist company's constantly saying
- is that actually going to materialize, with rising energy costs in Europe, and continuing supply chain challenges (https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-ceo-says-supply-chains-are-challenge-2026-02-03/)? Performance this year already seems disappointing (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4882509-airbus-weak-deliveries-raise-questions-about-2026-target, https://simpleflying.com/this-bad-already-airbuss-worrying-2026-delivery-numbers/), and the Iran war is hardly going to help them make a rebound.
Airbus is also a company whose primary production capacity is in Europe, so they're not really relevant to a discussion about American manufacturing capacity. Their Alabama plant is stated to have produced over 500 planes since 2016, averaging to an annual rate of ≈55-60 (depending on specifically how many, I assume if they were up to 550 they'd have used that figure, so "more than 500" I'm interpreting as something between 500 and 550).
Boeing's 600 figure is a bit difficult to judge, since some portion of the deliveries were not new production, but already-constructed planes waiting around due to QC problems (now, that's the case for any large manufacturer, but Boeing's case was particularly extreme due to all the reliability issues in earlier years), similar to the F-35 situation. Seems like there were 450 such planes in total, although I'm not sure what amount were fixed and delivered each year since 2019. But anyways, if we average out the 2018-25 figures, we get a ≈455 (and the really high ≈800 2018 figure was presumably so high precisely because of Boeing skimping on QC - so a production rate like that isn't necessarily sustainable if you want the planes to actually work). And whad'ya know, a few months into this year and they're already facing new production troubles! (https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-wiring-flaws-delay-some-737-max-deliveries-wsj-reports-2026-03-10/)
So, again, despite executives claiming
, that won't necessarily materialize. And while this capacity is certainly still impressive, unless the US is going to nationalize the airliner industry, this obviously can't all be mobilized for military production.
I swear to god you two have to start a podcast about military nerd stuff because I'd be the first patreon supporter
a bit more on the attrition: https://xcancel.com/ripplebrain/status/2033730533515993177