this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 22nd to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Empire In Zugzwang
(hexbear.net)
Image is one of many rallies in Iran in support of the government and the leadership.
short summary here, longish summary in spoiler tags below: Western standoff munition stockpiles now substantially depleted, therefore Western aircraft activity directly over Iran increasing (as is footage of attempted and actual hits against them) as the US attempts to transition more to using bombs dropped directly onto targets, Iran is increasingly in the driver's seat and controlling the conflict, world economy is fucked and yet could still get much worse very soon, if you require a car to live (especially if it's not electric) and cannot work from home then you have my sincere condolences
longish summary here
While I've seen several estimates on the current stockpiles of US and Zionist missiles and interceptors - somewhere in the realm of a third depleted, perhaps even up to half - it seems like we're reaching the point at which the US does not want to commit even more standoff munitions and is trying their luck against the Iranian air defense network directly.
We have already seen footage of Iran attempting to shoot down, and sometimes actually striking Western fifth generation planes like the F-35, and more footage along those lines is appearing for other plane models (with one side claiming that they evaded interception and the other claiming they hit it, etc etc, propaganda is everywhere, you know the drill). How much the US is willing to test their planes against Iranian air defense is a matter of debate. Strictly speaking, a few fighter jets and bombers shot down would be no catastrophic loss in the grand scheme of things, as the US has hundreds. However, the narrative of such a thing would be quite bad for the US - "You're telling me an OBLITERATED Iranian military can shoot down some of our most advanced equipment?? What are we gonna do against China?!" - and given Trump's deranged jingoistic rhetoric aimed to buoy markets, it's clear that he cares very deeply about narratives. Additionally, with Chinese exports of several critical metals to the US banned, the prospect of replacing these aircraft (and indeed the standoff munitions and the interceptors and the ground radars etc) is looking questionable.
All the while, Iran continues its strikes across the Middle East. Missile and drone strikes are reportedly on the uptick again, demonstrating that Iranian military capabilities have by no means been "destroyed" as Western propaganda claim, though it's impossible to sure there was ever a significant downtick due to Western censorship and outright fabrications. People around the world are gradually realizing the magnitude of the economic disaster that is occurring and may yet occur. Refineries and factories which deal with oil and gas directly are starting to slow down or stop production, and those who make products downstream of those are starting to follow them like dominoes. Outrage at gas station prices is rising, and many countries are considering limiting civilian driving and implementing work-from-home policies akin to the coronavirus pandemic. And now, threats are being made by Trump against both Kharg Island (where most Iranian oil is shipped from) and the Iranian electrical grid - which is highly decentralized and would require a prolonged bombing campaign to completely take out -and the promised Iranian reprisal would be apocalyptic to the Middle East. It would make oil prices rise to previously unfathomable heights as oil infrastructure turned off and remained off for months, perhaps years, and set in motion one of the world's greatest humanitarian catastrophes as the desalination necessary for tens of millions of people is shut down. It would also not be a symmetrical problem, as Iran does not rely on desalination for its water supply.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
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.
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Some notes on the sustainability of the strategic bombing part of the campaign:
Bomber strain
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First, let's look at the bombers themselves. For the B-1B - 12 have been deployed to RAF Fairford, from a total fleet of 45 (although I think it might actually be 44 since one crashed in 2024? I'll use the 45 number for my calculations, for now) - except, the B-1 has a dreadful readiness rate, 43.44% in 2024 (it was 52.8% in 2019, so that's an over 9% drop in just 5 years, without there being any major military operations involving the B-1s, AFAIK - so you can expect this current war to also have a pretty significant impact on readiness rates). So, on average only around 19 planes are actually mission-capable at any given time, meaning the current deployment is of over 60% of the actually airworthy B-1 fleet. Now, they're not actually flying all 12 on each mission, they seem to go for 2-3 at a time, so they're letting the planes rest, but this is just against Iran.
Oh, and btw, the available fleet can dip down significantly lower than even that in certain moments, if they just get dealt a bad hand with a ton of planes happening to go into maintenace all at once - USAF has only 6 Fully Combat Ready B-1B Strategic Bombers, Jul 31 2019 (and this was when the fleet was 61!).
The B-52 is somewhat better, at a 53.77% readiness rate in 2024 - so out of a fleet of 76, that's around 40 being available, with 6 of them currently being based at Fairford. The B-2 had a 55.04% rate in 2024, with the fleet being 19 (after 2 crashes), leaving 10 available. So, in total, the US has around 70 strategic bombers available at a given time, with over half of those being ancient Cold War legacy tech (admittedly modernized a bunch, but there's only so much you can do on an existing airframe), and that's a number likely to go down as a consequence of the wear-and-tear of this war, and as some bombers are just retired altogether. I don't foresee B-21 production scaling up very fast, given, like, everything about the claims of rearmament and reindustrialization from the last few years and how they actually seem to be turning out.
cont'd in response
asked for "bomber strain" and munitions strain" at my dispensary and they had no idea what I was talking about, please advise
On the B-1Bs, it's safe to say that half, or over half of the deployable fleet in in RAF Fairford as you said. Very, very expensive deployment. On readiness rates, there's likely been a lot of work to surge deployments here. I think the US Air Force is required by law to keep a minimum of 45 B-1Bs in service until replaced by the B-21s, so they've been pulling aircraft out of retirement from the boneyard, including one unpainted in January of this year. The B-1Bs are worn out from flying CAS missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, where'd they'd loiter slowly at medium altitude dropping JDAMs. Something they were never designed to do. The B-1B was designed as a low altitude transonic penetration bomber to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union. The slow medium altitude flights were very hard on the swing wings. The fleet is worn out and full of maintenance issues. They've been repurposed as cruise missile carriers and high altitude bombers now, banned from low altitude flight and supersonic flight unless it's an emergency or required by a mission.
On munitions use, I think it's fair to say that the B-1Bs have been dropping JDAMs since pictured. Flying over the sheer quantity of JDAM munitions pictured by spotters, including C-5M flights of munitions (the C-5Ms nickname is FRED: fucking ridiculous economic disaster, very expensive to fly that giant plane), is very expensive, I'd say way too expensive for a psyop. There are cheaper ways to do psyops. Psyop is possible still, but it would be a ridiculously expensive one.
The JDAMs pictured aren't JDAM ER, those have external wings not seen here, and are for foreign customers. The US doesn't use them as far as I know outside of the quick strike mine kits. The US has JSOW, and seem to have lost interest than that middle ground type of standoff weapon outside of the Navy. US bombers can load JSOW, but they don't.
Think tanks are inaccurate on munitions numbers, they've even listed munitions not even in service like AARGM-ER as used up, and completely skipped munitions like LJDAM and SDB which have been widely used. To actually fact check the think tanks would take days of research.
The best source on munitions numbers is this journalist on X/twitter, a lot of the big news outlets have started stealing his information and even misinterpreted it
I wasn't able to find that many, but twitter's search is kind of dogshit. There's this video https://x.com/MonitorX99800/status/2032435265487212625, showing a dozen, and a couple more photographs (https://x.com/Chris1603/status/2033888007455977795, https://x.com/Chris1603/status/2034584754473861399, https://x.com/Chris1603/status/2033137135511806083, https://x.com/Chris1603/status/2034195591215927485). So, maybe 50-60 from all these? Even if we triple that number, let's say 180, that's like 8 B-1 sorties with a full JDAM load (or a larger amount of combined JDAM/JASSM loads), out of 27 so far (since the JDAMs were first spotted, so not counting the first week-and-a-half).
Are there some telegrams with more spotters sharing stuff?
Do we know what munitions the C-5M was actually flying?
I didn't find anything about JASSMs with regards to the current conflict. The only relatively recent thing I found was him citing the 1100/y JASSM/LRASM production figure (https://x.com/ColbyBadhwar/status/2008901511841976553), which I don't find particularly believable - Lockheed gave a 720 figure in 2024, with the trajectory to grow to 1100 - but has that actually happened? FY25's procurement adds up to 755 (and those are orders, not necessarily reflective of yearly deliveries), add in some trickle of foreign sales and maybe it could be 800-and-something, but 1100? And FY26's buy is way smaller (although apparently that's because of some bureaucratic budgetary fuckery, presumably more will be approved eventually). JASSMs procurement averages out to around 550-560 over the past few years, LRASM production was pretty glacial for a long while, at around 10-30 yearly, but kicked in to around 110-120 for the last two fiscal years, and foreign sales probably bring you up to 700-something. So I really doubt this ostensible increase - it doesn't matter how much money Lockheed pour in, they're bottlenecked by a rocket motor subcontractor anyway.
I wouldn't consider uncritically regurgitating MIC advertisements as "journalism". Here's, for example, him giving planned Rheinmetall production figures, quite uncritically, Rheinmetall being a very trustworthy company (https://hexbear.net/post/6624062/6655336, https://hexbear.net/post/5685239/6366434, https://hexbear.net/post/7461691/6871241)
And he, uh, seems very normal
what the hell is his beef with South Korea? I mean, we hate them too, but for being lapdops of the US empire while he's apparently convinced they're like, traitors or something for not supporting Ukraine enough?
lol. lmao
and speaking of uncritical regurgitation, here's him regurgitating totally real production figures Zelensky gave that he has absolutely no incentive to lie about
I'm not talking about the guy's crazy political beliefs. 99% of people in that space have wild politics. It is what it is. People who obsess over weapons that kill people generally are not the most sane.
For example this thread on emergency arms sales to the UAE has better information than you'll get anywhere else. That's what I mean. So many people got all the basics on that wrong, saying that the UAE was buying AN/TPY-2 radars and all other kinds of incorrect things. Getting the facts right is important, on this topic, I'd rather follow a guy I disagree with on practically everything politically that gets the facts correct, than someone I agree with politically who says stuff that's just not true. I'm not following these people for political takes.
There's big differences between what production is facilitated for vs what's actually bought. For instance, the THAAD Talon production line has been facilitated for around 100 THAAD Talon interceptors per year in recent times. But the US, during the Biden administration, barely bought any, and foreign sales to Saudi Arabia kept the production line going and prevented it from being shut down. There are similar stories of not maxing out facilitated production for other munitions, the Tomahawk cruise missile being one of the most infamous examples. Because all this costs money, which is poorly allocated in the US due to all kinds of political considerations and so forth. That's different from cases where there are legitimate hardware constraints like the SM-3 missiles, where solid fueled rocket motors and their components have hard limits. On JASSM and LRASM I think the 1100 number is the maximum facilitation. There is a hardware limit on the turbofan jet engines (Williams F107 I think, same as the Tomahawk), which is why a lot funding is going towards multiple engine sources for the future to increase JASSM production, as it will be necessary. The older JASSMs used a less efficient turbojet of some kind from the Harpoon anti ship missile, but those JASSMs are long out of production.
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Munitions strain
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The B-52 can carry 20x JASSM, the B-1 - 24x. Bomber tracking, from https://hexbear.net/post/7856493/6979733, https://x.com/DefenceGeek, https://x.com/ArmchairAdml, and assuming full loads (which isn't always true, there have been some B-52s at least spotted carrying 10 JASSM externally rather than 12, and internal loadouts can't be known from photos, but for the simplicity of calculations I'll go for this)
So, what's the JASSM stockpile like? I found a 3500 figure in some places, but that seems a bit outdated, or it's perhaps counting something else, more on that in a bit. From https://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/Portals/84/documents/FY26/FY26%20Air%20Force%20Missile%20Procurement.pdf, pg. 79, we get 5569 as of June 2025 (at least that's what I assume the "Prior Years" number is for, the number as of when this document was published, but maybe it's for prior fiscal years? These documents get published some months before the fiscal year they concern actually starts), and another 144 budgeted for FY26 - however, note that this is a budgetary document, concerning procurement orders, not actual deliveries - for example, from https://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/Portals/84/documents/FY22/PROCUREMENT_/FY22%20DAF%20J-Book%20-%203020%20-%20Missile%20Proc.pdf, pg. 55, we get a 3654 figure for May 2021 (or pre-FY22 fiscal years, but either way it it won't line up with the next figure), while from https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Selected_Acquisition_Reports/FY_2021_SARS/22-F-0762_JASSM_ER_SAR_2021.pdf, pg. 5 we have 3329 actual deliveries of December 2021 :edgeworth-shrug:. But anyways, as for the 3.5k figure - this same document perhaps gives us an explanation, since it mentions that 2034 of those deliveries were of the baseline JASSM, and I think by this point production had fully switched to the extended-range JASSM-ER variant, so there shouldn't have been any new baseline missiles from this point on. So, counting just the ERs, the number would indeed be ≈3.5k - I'm not sure what proportion of the missiles used here are baseline vs ER, so for the sake of simplifying calculations I'm going to use the total figure, but keep this in mind, the real percentages could be way worse if they're primarily using up the better longer-ranged variant.
There has also been some prior JASSM usage in the fighting against ISIS, and against Yemen, but I'm not aware of any specific numbers. So, let's just go with 5600 as a nice round-ish figure for now (5569, plus some of the alloted FY26 ones given that the war started 5 months into it, minus the ones used in prior conflicts).
As for annual production, if we look over the past several years' budgetary documents (just google the name of the above .pdf replacing the FY for the one you need), we generally see yearly figures hanging around 500-550 (although for whatever reason FY26 has a pretty reduced order, and the FY26 document lists a 1140 figure for FY24, even though the FY25 document lists 550 for the same FY, so, uh, don't know what's going on there, surely figures for past years can't retroactively change? The FY24 document on the other hand lists 8512 for prior years, which is a completely ridiculous number and the FY25 document goes back down to 4970, so I dunno, was it just clerical error? I am going insane from looking at all these damn tables, I don't know how accountants do it). Note that total production is somewhat higher, since there's some foreign clients, but I think the bulk of the deliveries are indeed to the US (and we're talking about US inventories here after all)
So, our conservative estimate of 600 JASSM is 10.7% of the total stockpile in about 3 weeks, or 109% of the highest so-far yearly procurement rate of 550 (disregarding that weird figure mentioned above) in about 6% of the whole year.
The larger estimate (which likely isn't met by the strategic bombers' expenditure, but may well be met or even exceeded depending on how many F-15s/F-16s/F/A-18s are also launching them, especially if the CSIS's 786 for the first 6 days estimation holds up) of 1200 represents 21.4% of the total stockpile.
One additional note - the earlier JASSMs could be nearing expiration, https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Selected_Acquisition_Reports/FY_2022_SARS/JASSM-ER_SAR_DEC_2022.pdf states an assumed 15-year shelf life for the baseline JASSMs, and they started getting delivered in 2003. So the ones delivered up through 2010 have already expired, and each next year a bunch more are going to expire. So really, my 5600 number could have even been very optimistic! The actual percentages could be way worse... and from this perspective, the latest B-52 being seen with JDAMs isn't necessarily an indication that they've finally achieved enough air superiority to start freely using B-52s now, but could well be because they've genuinely eaten through so many JASSMs that they have no choice
To be honest the main part of munitions expiration comes from the chemical components which probably could be swapped out.
Maybe exposure to temperature cycles could cause degradation in the mechanics and electronics? But I doubt they're just storing these on open shelves.
It is primarily fuel-related, but also, I don't think replacing the fuel is exactly trivial, they don't exactly have a gas lid like a consumer car, I assume you'd basically need to disassemble and reassemble the whole thing.
Theoretically it's probably possible to design a missile that can be easily fixed up (here's a '89 patent for something like this, although it's still only for the motor case to be reused), but in practice I don't think it's something much effort has been invested into, since when large missile stock piles are being built the people involved will tend to assume that they'll just keep being manufactured until the next level of tech comes along, and don't really worry about them being a perishable item - no-one expects deindustrialization (which is why Western militaries are in the rut they are)
I see, I stand corrected then.
Also, cryocooling the rocket propellant to shatter it with sound waves then remove it from the casing is a pretty creative way of dealing with this lmao.