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.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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.
Is the marines group that's being sent to Iran the same group that kidnapped Maduro?
If yes, theory: They're being sent as a threat to the new leadership ahead of upcoming attempts to talk down the war. Or they intend a kidnap operation to gain leverage in talks.
No, not the same ARG for the Marines. The USS Tripoli is days away from Iran, and the USS Boxer almost a month away. The USS Iwo Jima was the one near Venezuela. The USS Tripoli is rather unique as an LHD/LHA, it lacks a well deck and has bigger hangars for aircraft, making it more suitable to either act as a mini aircraft carrier with over 20x F-35Bs, or to load up a large number of tilt rotor aircraft and helicopters for an "airborne amphibious" assault.
There's no need to kidnap Iranian leadership when the US and Israel can kill them, and have done so. The distances involved are much bigger than Venezuela, you'd need to use tilt rotor aircraft most likely, or provide helicopters with aerial refuelling deep inside Iranian territory.
As for 160th SOAR and Delta force who kidnapped Maduro, they're most likely already there, they were in the UK in January. But any mission deep into Iranian territory would likely make use of the CV-22B Osprey tilt rotor aircraft operated by the US AFSOC(Air Force Special Operations Command), instead of the modified Chinhooks and and Black Hawk helicopters of 160th SOAR. Because of this reason:
Tilt rotor aircraft would fly much further on a single tank of fuel. But any operation deep inside Iran to say extract nuclear materials is going to require excavation, it's not something that can be done in a few hours at night. Multi day or multi week operation. Which is going to need supplies forward loaded, or resupply. Which would be very complicated. The MC-130J Commando II can do this resupply, and mid air refueling of helicopters and tilt rotor aircraft. It can even help set up temporary airfields inside Iran. But now that requires flying a slow fixed wing aircraft deep inside Iran. Even if it's designed for this, very risky mission.
Even though this has been on the cards since January, I still can't believe it's actually real. Like the US actually might do this. Could easily be an operation eagle claw 2.0. There is so much risk involved, this isn't just bombing with aircraft.
Oh so they're just going to try to kill Iranian leadership again, but this time by crashing a bunch of Ospreys instead of wasting perfectly good JASSMs
Ok so it's probably not a kidnap op then or they'd be sending in the kidnap specialists.
What do you think is happening? What are this marines being sent in primarily good at? There's not that many of them so it has to be some small scale operation right?
I want to hear marmite speculate
https://hexbear.net/comment/7037416
It's not just Marines, a whole bunch of units are being sent. 82 Airborne is the big one, maybe Rangers, Seal Team Six/DEVGRU, etc. Lots of high tier units seeing potential movement. The "kidnap specialists" in 160th SOAR and Delta force are probably already there too.
Also the US cannot leave Iran with 60% enriched uranium after this war from a US perspective. If they do this, Iran will weaponise it, it's the logical option from Iran's perspective. So the US will either try a deal or a military operation to seize it. Lots of MC-130J Commando II movement in the UK and the Middle East, because any operation to seize the nuclear materials will require time, maybe weeks, and supplies, resupply, excavation equipment, etc.
Deploying just 5000 troops onto an excavation site that could take weeks to excavate that's only 50 miles outside of Tehran seems like the stupidest possible thing they could do.
This site couldn't be anywhere more dangerous in the entire country.
EDIT: If they can't secure any military bases anywhere in the middle east hundreds and hundreds of miles OUTSIDE of Iran how the fuck are they going to operate in a fixed location performing an excavation for several weeks?????????
By untying the hands of warfighters to act with maximum lethality and minimum legality - it's not woke warfare by backstabbing politicians, but a president who has the will to exact unlimited force on the enemies of America
Ok Hegseth's ai speech writer but how are they gonna not get hit by drones lmao
warrior ethos
Warfighters getting turned into maximum pink mist.
Huh, never thought about that part
Are they actually a competent division, or are they just coasting off of prestige from WW2?
They could be an entire division of John Wicks, but the simple material reality is that they're light infantry - they don't have tanks or any other armored vehicles. They once had the M551 Sheridan, but those have long since been retired. They were going to adopt the M10 Booker, but that program got cancelled (although I think the few dozen vehicles that were produced are technically still in inventory, but whether they'd get used in a real conflict or not is not known). Back in the Gulf War they borrowed some LAV-25s from the Marines, so that's something they could get at least, but either way, with all these vehicles, they couldn't actually get brought into combat until they've already secured an airstrip for planes carrying them to land - unlike the Russian VDV, they don't have vehicles that can be airdropped, or are at least small enough to be transported by helicopter rather than plane (which would be able to land outside of specially-designated airstrips) like the Germans
Best thing they could do is some LAV-25s by helicopter winch
Their most recent successful adoption of a vehicle is... the ISV, one that not only is completely unarmored, but is completely open to the point of not even having a roof. An artillery shell landing in your general vicinity is enough to shred you with shrapnel in one of these
This is the classic problem facing airborne forces - it's really cool that they can deploy very flexibly, but they just don't have staying power. They're only really viable when regular ground forces follow through very promptly - the Airborne operations for D-Day worked because they only had to hold some select positions for a short while before the regular infantry came in, and the air-force had done a thorough job delaying German reinforcements, while the ones in Market Garden conversely failed because the armored forces were delayed, and the paratroopers just got rolled up by the Germans. The Germans themselves had a disastrous, albeit eventually successful, airborne operation early in the war, which led to them swearing off paradrops for the remaining duration.
It looks like my old Honda Civic would've provided more protection than this. Yikes.
And I remember the Soviets having a similar problem, trying to deploy glider tanks with their airborne divisions, but any tank heavy enough to be useful on the battlefield was also too heavy for the suspension to handle the landing, but any tank able to handle the landing didn't have the armour needed to actually be useful, so they also abandoned the project.
Thanks for this write up, it was very informative!
The German vehicle drives all enemies away simply through its incredibly intimidating presence. They really made a Wunderwaffe.
They're like the Marines in that they coast off prestige; are extremely arrogant with nothing to back it up; are entirely unnecessary and should be dismantled; and leadership is a concentrated caustic cesspool of machismo running entirely on kool-aid.
All the forces listed for are are either light infantry or special operations forces. It's not like the US is planning to send in the tanks.
Technically a C-17 could transport some Abrams tanks and Bradley IFVs, but it'll need to land and offload.
Has anyone gamed out whether their idea could be to do the minimal work necessary to turn the material into a dirty bomb? Claim as part of some recovery mission Iran's "nuclear weapons" buried underground were accidentally set off? They get the chance to spread fallout to Tehran while maintaining narrative cover that patriotic Americans died trying to save the Iranians from themselves, at least for Western rubes? I think I'm too blackpilled at this point.
This is literally the plot of Call of Duty 4 surely that cannot be manifested into reality
Eagle Claw 2 ft. notoriously reliable aircraft the Osprey
Imagine if the US deployed the military just to excavate the place for Iran
Has the group used in Venezeula even been identified yet? Looked very briefly but couldn't find anything.
It was 160th SOAR with the helicopters. They brought Delta force in and out.
I wonder if they're called Delta Force because they're used for regime change. (∆)
Jeez, it really would be something stupid like that.
@MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net would know this i bet
I wouldn't be shocked given this started with the murder of children if they didn't abduct family members of leadership and threaten them with being thrown into the darkest US prison on bullshit charges or just put in Gitmo as it's right there and there's nothing to stop them from using it AFAIK for whatever they want as long as victims aren't US citizens.
Is Cuba allowing gitmo to have fuel to power it right now?
It's got its own grid
Solar? Wind? Nuclear?
https://www.same.org/tmearticle/energy-self-sufficiency-at-guantanamo-bay/
So they aren't self-sufficient. They're dependent on diesel imports, that may or may not be blocked given the embassy is being blocked.
It’s a naval base, who is stopping a ship from docking with fuel there? The US isn’t blocking themselves.
Cuba.
I don’t think Cuba is able or willing to stop the US from docking ships at the naval base in Guantanamo.