more like thucydideez nuts, gottem
Image is of a satellite image from MizarVision, a Chinese firm that has recently shown pride in being sanctioned for showing uncensored images of the Middle East. The West is not allowing up-to-date satellite imagery of the region to hide destruction.
As always, my weekly summary/preamble is in spoilers below.
preamble
Military news remained relatively subdued last week, with the main front continuing to be the Lebanon border. With dozens of vehicles destroyed and many more Zionist casualties, they are now desperately searching for a solution to the FPV drone threat, with certain analysts characterizing the whole situation as the entity stumbling foot-first into a bear trap (hence the megathread title). Unfortunately for them, two better and more resourceful militaries have spent the last year or two also searching for a solution and have generally failed - with anti-drone strategies consisting mainly of 1) build your own cheap drones designed to physically intercept their cheap drones and 2) separate your forces up rather than conducting large frontal assaults WW2-style and accept that you're gonna have to fight for many months to gain substantial ground. This also explains why they're so eager to kickstart a civil war in Lebanon, although as I've stated before, I don't personally know whether that would be a silver bullet given how the Lebanese army has been deliberately not allowed to become a threatening force due to Zionist fears, and indeed, I don't know how many Lebanese citizens and soldiers would fight against the only force in their country fighting against an army trying to annex their territory and which murders hundreds of people at a time in aerial bombings on their cities.
Aside from the ever-worsening global economic catastrophe, the main event has been the US visiting China. Trump clearly intended to time the summit such that it took place after subjugating Iran and perhaps also Cuba. However, with the former goal not even remotely achieved, and the latter goal delayed - hopefully indefinitely, though the US still seems pretty intent on it - it all amounted to a big nothingburger. Marxist economist Michael Roberts has written up a great piece on the current state of the US-China economic conflict, stating among things that, despite the last decade of US sanctions and economic warfare, the Chinese economy has done extremely well, building up their own domestic industries to replace commodities lost from sanctions. China has, up to this point, refused to withdraw its aid from Iran, and seems to be looking to start moving its tankers through the Strait via Iran's new tolling mechanism.
China obviously continues to maintain its position on Taiwan, and Trump has continued the US tradition of respecting this in words and disrespecting it in actions, but it's becoming clear to everybody but the most delusional diehards that the US will not be fighting China in and around the Pacific for at least a couple decades, and likely never will. There is little choice. The Ramadan War has definitively proven that the US has been severely militarily and logistically weakened over the decades despite skyrocketing military budgets, and much of their equipment, strategies, and tactics are woefully outdated for the modern battlefield. The prospect of the US fighting a war against China and not immediately losing has gone from "almost implausible" to "hilariously absurd". Unable to meaningfully impede China, the US will have to content itself to increasingly ineffective sanctions campaigns and bullying/overthrowing nations that do not currently have much of a capacity to resist. In that vein, one hopes that Iran and friends will share their expertise in drone technology and underground fortification around the world. The age of the tunnel is upon us.
Last week's thread is here.
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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.
What you're saying was definitely my impulsive response to his statement, but this
so far is not true for nuclear weapons and there is nothing on the horizon that looks like it will change it. It is possible for technological development to circumvent the drive to war by making it too costly. Drones allow for smaller states or even non-state entities to substantially increase the cost of war. No one has come up with a solution that doesn't cost substantially more than the drones. Even the US, with historically unparalleled long-range destructive capacity and functionally unlimited budget, has been unable to come up with even a halfway solution. And it's not like air defense is a new problem. The realities of projectile interception mean it will always be more expensive to take down a cheap projectile than to launch one. One projectile needs to hit a large, stationary target. One needs to hit a small, fast moving target. That's never going to change. How does that get circumvented? It's also idealistic and undialectical to say things always get solved as some absolute rule.
I'm not saying he's right - he's definitely exaggerating - but I think there is a substantial element of truth to the idea that drones make warfare much more difficult to wage.
But that is just not true. Nuclear weapons have to be delivered on to their target by something, whether it's a plane or a missile or a drone. Air defenses can neutralize most forms of delivery of nuclear weapons.
That's exactly what the US was working on until the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed (and what they tried to do again in the Unipolar Moment when they left that treaty). Why was that treaty made? Precisely because the very real possibility that a nation could develop an effective counter to another nation's nuclear arsenal would be devastating and would invite a nuclear first strike from the other side to pre-empt their nuclear deterrence from being lost.
It's why the stationing of ballistic missile interceptors close to Russia and China's borders is so dangerous and why Russia pushed back so hard against the possibility of NATO expansion to Ukraine. If enough interceptors are sufficiently forward deployed they could conceivably pose a real danger to the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent.
Today, a country like the US, Russia or China could most likely defend against a small and less advanced nuclear arsenal if it really came down to it, for instance if the country using them only had a dozen or so of them to shoot. Only by overwhelming defenses with sufficient quantities or with advanced hypersonic missiles like Russia and China now have can you ensure that your nuclear missiles don't get shot down.
That has never historically been the case. Technologies proliferate and eventually every side has them. And nothing is un-counterable.
This is true. So far. Until an effective counter to drones is developed.
Depends. There is always a race between Electronic Warfare and drone shielding/jamming countermeasures. If one side falls behind the other can get an advantage, but this typically doesn't last long. That's the dialectics of drone warfare. With fiber-optic drones it's a little more complicated, but they have other limitations, and even there you can still have counter-drone drones as a possible cost-effective solution.
Again, i would advise being careful with statements that predict anything will always be true. Change is the one true constant.
Once upon a time heavy cavalry had little to no counter on the battlefield. Once upon a time plate armor was impenetrable. Once upon a time machine guns and trenches were supposed to make warfare much more difficult to wage. If you looked at the Western front in 1917 you might have concluded that war in the future would become prohibitively expensive in terms of manpower and that advancing had become virtually impossible. Then tanks enabled mobile warfare again.
Now we're in another period of history where the defending side has a big advantage and where positionality is favored over mobility.
Is this the end of history? Obviously not. The cycle will continue.