Title is a reference to Resistance imagery about how Israeli soldiers will enter Gaza alive but leave it in coffins - the same is true for American soldiers in the Middle East if the regional war expands.
The image is of the Fattah-1 Iranian hypersonic ballistic missile, which its creators boast can overcome any missile defense system on the planet, has a range of 1400 kilometers (and thus Iran can strike Israel), and has a terminal impact velocity of Mach 13.
Dozens of American soldiers have been injured and 3 have been killed on a base in the Middle East. There has been confused reports about whether the attack was on Syrian territory or Jordan's - the Al-Tanf base is in Syria, but Tower-22 in Jordan is another base that helps supply Al-Tanf, and Tower-22 is the one that is alleged to have been hit. These is the first confirmed deaths of American troops since the conflict began, though it's not likely that this is actually the first deaths after hundreds of drone/missile strikes throughout the region on American bases, unless you think American soldiers are having extremely timely heart attacks just after a missile hits.
The attack is certainly impactful, though it does also have considerably symbolism. Courtesy of John Helmer:
The operational success of the strike for the attackers is strategic. Tower-22 is a logistics, supply, and rear guard post for the Al-Tanf base which US troops are operating thirty kilometres north across the border in Syria. The attack demonstrates that both Tower-22 and Al-Tanf, Jordan and Syria, are newly vulnerable to weapons which the US forces have failed to detect and neutralize. Just as significantly, the massive US airbase called Muwaffaq Salti, 230 kilometres west across Jordan, is also vulnerable now.
It indicates that Iran now possesses Russian expertise in countering American equipment:
“This is a significant accomplishment,” one of the sources said. “Was the bypassing of the US air defence system at Tower-22 pulled off with Russian assistance? US bases generally rely on the C-RAM [Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar] system. It was sent to Ukraine last year where the Russians have been learning to defeat it. What now of American EW [electronic warfare]? They’ve been doing a fair job of knocking drones down up to now. It seems a ‘coincidence’ that, not a week after the meetings in Moscow with Arabs and Iranians, we see this success. It’s a success the circumstances of which, we can be sure, Biden and Austin are not keen to advertise.”
I am putting my take on the table right now: I am 99% certain that the US won't attack Iran directly. I think we are still quite a while away from that being a possibility. Much more likely is that Iranian officials in Iraq or Syria will be hit by a retaliatory strike, as Israel has done recently. It is a significant escalation nonetheless. And it comes as Israel seems to be gearing up for a suicidal war with Hezbollah.
The Country of the Week is Iran! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Updates continue to be AWOL - but I am cooking something. Hopefully.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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 happens if Ansar Allah decides to launch like 10 Shahed drones at the same time / in the same tight window at a US military boat ?
Genuinely asking, these interceptor mechanisms must have an incoming throughput limit, right ?
Also and not to mention, IIRC some of those interceptor missiles cost a million+ bucks a piece. They can't have an unlimited number of them onboard.
The red sea is already closed to genocide-axis shipping. Trying to actually obliterate a US warship would be a needless escalation considering the already successful blockade.
Using the example of USS Gravely though, it has 96 missile cells (that must be rearmed at port). They contain a mixture of cruise missiles and interceptor missiles. Gravely has been firing cruise missiles, so it doesn't have a full load of interceptors. The Aegis system as standard fires 2 interceptor missiles at each incoming target (they cost $2.5M each), so if half of the ships cells are loaded with interceptors, it has enough to intercept 24 incoming objects before having to go home to rearm. If Ansar Allah keeps firing small raids of missiles, they can deplete the US Navy's ability to remain in the area without actually having to escalate in a flashy way by destroying a genocide-axis warship.
One implication of this is that the US Navy would not be able to operate for very long in a war with China before suffering total depletion of interceptors.
That answers the amount over time (thank you !), but out of curiosity and if you know: what if it's 10 incoming objects at the same time ? can their missile cells thing fire 20 interceptors at the same time ? are they all constantly loaded and ready to fire, no intermediate storage ?
Also:
lmao
Just looked it up: The average Shahed drone is worth about $20,000
Cost isn't the factor here though, it's production capacity.
Yeah. Sometimes it can be a good shorthand for figuring out the complexity and how much of that productive capacity might be taken up, at least within a couple orders of magnitude. But the usefulness of citing such figures is pretty limited.
It's a nice flex to say "I can take out millions of dollars of your military hardware with a pretty cheap and mostly commercial device" IMO. But don't get caught up with it.
Missile based ships can fire their missiles pretty quickly, it's just a block of vertical tubes in their hull. I imagine it depends on range and crew training, at 2.5m a pop I'd hope they have some degree of programmable guidance.
The major advantage of vertical launch systems is that they can dump their entire load of missiles within a few minutes.
The problem with intercepting large numbers of missiles is that you need to start intercepting them far away from the ship, because if, let's say your missiles work well and hit 70% of the time, your first wave of interceptors soaks 7 incoming objects, your second wave of interceptors gets 2 out of the bleeders from the first wave, and ideally you have time to launch a third wave to get the last target, or, if you're out of time, the CWIS/Goalkeeper intercepts it. But the smaller the incoming object is, the later you'll detect it, and the less waves of missiles you can fire. Small drones made of lightweight materials might not give out much of a long range radar signature, meaning you're only getting a chance to launch one or two waves. -- This is probably what caused a Yemeni missile to get through the interceptor missiles of the USS Gravely.
Sure, you could over react and fire like 20 missiles at 10 incoming objects and hopefully down all of them in one wave, but then you'll only be able to defend yourself against a couple of those attacks before you have to go home, and your ship is effectively, mission killed.
Here's an interesting future problem though: China is the sole industrial superpower. They can actually produce enough missiles for a protracted naval war, which the US can't. The US couldn't actually fill every launch cell in the fleet with a missile right now, technically. Given that Vertical Launch Systems are self contained units, they can be manufactured elsewhere and just dropped into a random cargo ship hull. The important part of a warship is the sophisticated radar and sonar suites. Given that China has about 2000 times the shipyard capacity, and triple the industrial manufacturing capacity of the USA, they could just fit cargo ships out with hundreds of missiles that are aimed by an actual PLAN warship.
Thought about making super cheap "empty" missiles to draw out the enemy defence missiles, but payloads aren't actually that expensive compared to the cost of the rest of the missile.
I think if they wanted to sink a ship right now, they absolutely could. However, if they do that, Yemen will either be invaded or completely reduced to rubble.
The current strategy seems to be to make Zionist military presence in the Red Sea untenable, and they appear to be succeeding. Those interceptors are surely more expensive than the things they are shooting down, not to mention production is fundamentally limited.
Conspiracy theory: I almost wonder if the reports of the CIWS (ship's last line of defence) shooting down a missile were a sort of warning to Ansarallah that they might be "allowed" to hit a US warship, which would give the US a cause for full-blown war. I guess that would require the entire crew of the ship to be "in on it" and risking their lives, so maybe it's a bit of a stretch.
This is exactly what I've been suspecting and why I asked; and also, I halfway expect, the reason why half the EU countries immediately pulled out of the initial operation lead by the US weeks ago (even if sometimes keeping some assets there independently) - they realized they could very well loose a very expensive ship and even worse, a very expensive "strong navy" image in the useless and very uncertain venture.
Indeed, I imagine the general position in Yemen is "keep impacting the colonialist entity's commerce", but until the empire itself escalates, they won't.
This whole thing, as well as the Ukraine war, has been incredibly eye-opening about both modern (look at how many drones are constantly in the Ukrainian skies) and asymmetric war, and the imagined strength of the military of the capitalist entities.
Lol
We've all been wondering that for 22 years since the US did an exercise called "Millenium Challenge". I forget the exact scenario, but the group playing the US forces issued a 24hr ultimatum. The general running the opposing force responded by immediately launching enormous salvos of cheap anti-ship missiles and, in the exercise, killed the entire US surface fleet in the region immediately. Now, admittedly, he did cheat and bend the rules to their utmost to do that, but the challenge was also rigged for an easy, clean US victory. People have been arguing about the legitimacy of the outcomes and whether the flaws it revealed are real, and how they could be countered. The US is very insistent that it's point-defense weapons can defend an infinite amount of ships from an infinite number of incoming weapons for an infinite amount of time, but those spiffy radar guided point defense guns only have so much ammo and drones are real cheap these days.