no, that's a different (and apparently rather bawdy) sketch

https://archive.ph/3pP4t

No time to waste: NATO chief urges rapid industrial mobilization

As the U.S. and its allies in Europe pledge to ramp up defense spending amid mounting global threats, the supreme allied commander of Europe is calling on industry to deliver real capabilities to the field in record time. “We can tell industry exactly what it is that we need for all the leaders that are out there. It’s our job, I think, to hold industry accountable to deliver quickly and to hold ourselves accountable for giving industry the ability to deliver quickly through our acquisition processes,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich said July 17 during his first public speech since taking command at the Association of the U.S. Army’s inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.

"hold industry accountable"? Uh, yeah pal, it's called nationalization and economic planning, but I'm afraid that's all lost technology, even the Adeptus Mechanicus can't figure out what it was all about. We just don't know!

“We’ve got to do this fast. We need real capabilities and we need them delivered as soon as possible. We can’t afford to wait, future pledges are no longer enough,” he said. “To do this, the defense industrial base on both sides of the Atlantic is going to have to become fully activated.” Grynkewich stressed there’s plenty of work to go around, it’s not a matter of investing in one or the other. “It needs to be one seamless industrial base that can deliver capability and capacity for the alliance,” he said. Moving quicker is easier said than done. Every country will have to contend with their own budget approval process and work through red tape across borders.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made a pledge earlier this year on a trip to NATO headquarters that the U.S. would conduct major foreign military sales reform. Even so, the U.S. military and NATO have developed solid regional plans beginning with a clear one focused on the Baltic States that will help guide government and industry in getting capabilities to units there. The U.S. Army Europe and Africa commander, speaking a day earlier at the conference, said the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line” plan aims to enhance ground-based capabilities and drive military-industrial interoperability across the alliance.

As part of the plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable, global deterrence, the Army and its NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers and cloud-based coordination. The plan includes a system to share data. NATO has already procured that system – Palantir’s Maven Smart System – an artificial intelligence platform that takes a vast amount of data and rapidly analyzes information to help military commanders make decisions. U.S. Army Europe and Africa officials have also adopted Maven at headquarters, using it for mission command and visibility across the theater. The system has completely replaced PowerPoint briefings and offers information to commanders in real-time.

you know what's going to drag us out of our deindustrialization quagmire? that's right, THE CLOUD! AND AI!

On NATO’s wish list, according to Grynkewich, are capabilities that mirror a Ukrainian brigade. “How do we get our brigades to have the same level of capability where we can match what they’re able to do today?”

ah, so they're finally admitting that the Ukrainians are way ahead of them in terms of adaptation to the modern battlefield... but wait, aren't those guys, like, not doing too good? Uh oh!

Additionally, Grynkewich said he wants to focus on air defense. “There’s never enough air defense. You always want more, but it’s an acute requirement, whether it’s counter-[unmanned aircraft systems] or counter-ballistic missiles,” he said. And there will also be a continued focus on long-range fires, Grynkewich noted. “We need the capability to hold things at risk.”

Industry now has real incentives in place, Grynkewich said, with the new commitment made by NATO nations at the last summit to spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2035. “I would ask industry folks who are here and elsewhere to realize that sustained commitment should be a powerful signal to do the things you need to do, to expand production lines, to increase [research and development] spending, etc., so that we can get where we need to go,” he said.

"a signal to do the things you need to do" y'know, maybe you shouldn't need to fucking "signal" industry, like "oh pretty please expand your production lines, c'mon guys!", maybe you should be able to, I dunno, order them to do so?

Leadership is now moving to deliver new and emerging technology to the battlefield along with legacy technology that is still relevant and will work to make things interoperable. “I challenge each of the chiefs of defense, land forces commanders and every leader in here to hold themselves to account for that. There’s no time to waste,” Grynkewich said.

this guy really loves holding stuff accountable I guess

https://archive.ph/FyIgD whoops, MIC machine broke!

US diverts Patriot systems from Switzerland to Ukraine

U.S. officials have told the Swiss government that Patriot air defense systems in the production pipeline for the alpine country would be diverted to help defend Ukraine, according to a Swiss announcement. The July 17 statement by the Swiss, which said the notification from the United States arrived the prior day, illuminates some of the hasty mechanics behind Washington’s newfound emphasis on helping Ukraine repel near-constant Russian attacks with missiles and drones.

Switzerland ordered five Patriot systems, made by Ratheon, in 2022. Deliveries were set begin in 2026 and go through 2028. The U.S. foreign military process, which governs the sale, makes the diversion of defense goods possible, the Swiss announcement notes. No information was available about how many systems would be affected and what the new timing for future deliveries would be. Switzerland’s Patriot pick was part of a lengthy air-defense and air-policing review by the government that also led to an order of 36 U.S. F-35 fighter aircraft.

Last year, the United States told Switzerland that a batch of ordered PAC-3 MSE interceptors, the most advanced interceptors fireable with Patriot, would similarly be diverted to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Germany this week offered to buy two Patriot systems from the U.S. and give them to Ukraine. One Patriot setup costs roughly $1 billion, depending on the number of interceptors, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said during a visit to Washington on July 14. Details for the purchase are now under discussion with the U.S. administration, Pistorius said following talks with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Outstanding questions surrounding the transaction are all “solvable,” he added.

Speaking at the LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on July 17, top NATO commander U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich signaled a new dynamic in supplying Kyiv with the defensive weapons. Grynkewich said he would bring European nations together to work on delivering Patriot and other capabilities to Ukraine. The idea is to “look at what’s the art of the possible” in orchestrating the flow of new production equipment to Ukraine’s defense, he said.

Unlike Russia with its weak economy having to delay deliveries of equipment, the Western MIC is going strong!

Syrian Year of 4 Emperors incoming?

(although more seriously, who would even take over at this point if HTS collapses?)

They took a gamble at ending the war immediately, while also engaging in the rest of Ukraine on the assumption that gamble would fail

Yes, this is the part that people keep missing. I really don't get it, why is the idea of "gamble that's not an all-in move, but actually involves a backup plan" apparently so difficult to grasp?

And this indeed reflects Soviet planning. A lot of people look at stuff like the 7 Days to the Rhine plans and assume that Soviet Cold War planning was all about blitzkrieg-style moves, which is an assumption that just falls apart upon the slightest further examination, given that everything else about the Soviets - the way they designed their equipment, the production rates, the massive stockpiles (so large that 30 years after the collapse of the Union, these old stockpiles made up a substantial portion of the equipment used in Ukraine), the massive bomb-resistant underground industrial complexes, the designing of civilian industry that could quickly convert to military production, etc. - indicates preparation for long attritional wars, not quick campaigns. Those WW3 plans are exactly such a style of move - a gamble to knock out the enemy quick, with the preparation for that gamble to not work and the conflict to shift into a conventional attritional phase (unlike the Nazi WW2 plans of "a gamble to knock out the enemy quick, and if that doesn't work... well, no need to worry, it is going to work!")

It took the lessons learnt from the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan/Global War on Terror, and applied them

I'm not sure this is really what the Armata was doing - in a lot of ways, it was a continuation of existing Russian (inherited from the Soviets) design philosophy.

There's two aspects to the Armata program - the tank itself, and the Armata Universal Combat Platform, which is meant to be a common chassis for many different systems - tanks, artillery, APCs, IFVs, etc.. The later is an obviously appealing idea and has already been practiced in a more limited sense for a long time by both the Soviets and the West (like using existing tank or APC chassis for recovery or engineering vehicles, or self-propelled artillery). There is however an ambition to extend it further (an American example is the Future Combat Systems program), but it keeps running into the same problem - that APCs/IFVs have fundamentally different needs for their chassis than tanks, so actually uniting them would mean you either get a tank that's too lightly armed-and-armored, or APCs that are way too heavy and expensive. In the Armata's case, the T-15 IFV seems to have been even less successful, the T-14 at least did do some actual combat trials in Ukraine and was eventually withdrawn, but I'm not sure if the T-15 has been seen anywhere outside of parades. So for now at least you're kind of stuck needing at least two main tracked chassis designs (or three, if your APCs and IFVs are separate, but some countries have recently shifted to a unified chassis at least for those two classes of vehicle, like the AMPV being essentially a turretless Bradley, or the still-ongoing (and rather troubled) British Ajax program which includes both an APC and an IFV variant).

For the tank itself - I'm not sure it really is that based on GWOT experiences, beyond the inclusion of active protection (which I feel like isn't informed so much by the GWOT but by Russia's own experiences with urban counter-insurgency in Chechnya, which naturally leads to trying out ways to protect oneself from a guy with an ATGM hiding out somewhere managing to take you out; these experiences also led to the BMPT Terminator and its concept of a "tank support" vehicle, something on a tank chassis but armed more-so to fight infantry, with good optics so it can spot and quickly respond to such threats much better than a tank can), but there's nothing about the APS concept that requires the development of a whole new vehicle (and most APS systems are indeed designed as add-on upgrades), aside from perhaps a new hull/turret being able to accommodate some of the sensors better than trying to kludge them onto an existing one.

I think part of the narrative around it has been that it's more "Western" in design, but it really isn't, beyond just being expensive (and contrary to the pop-history view, the Soviets were perfectly willing to spend more on fancier equipment in certain contexts that merited it, like aircraft or nuclear submarines, and even in ground forces - the widespread fielding of autoloaders is obviously quite a technological advancement, and while Soviet tanks are generally viewed as simpler compared to Western ones, the post-T-64 designs are quite a bit more complex compared to previous Soviet designs). This perception seems to come from the propagandistic narrative of those evil Soviets who just didn't care about crew survivability, and since the Armata makes improvements on that front, it represents the Russians shifting away from the Soviet philosophy to a Western one.

But the actual main part of the Armata (and seemingly where a lot of the issues stem from) is the idea of fully-remote turret, with the crew moved to a special armored capsule in the front - and this development comes from a Soviet program that started in '88, so it definitely precedes the GWOT era. This is where that "Western design" assumption comes in again - people assume the purpose of the capsule is purely crew protection, and thus it indicates the Russians moving from the (supposed) Soviet "eh, just let 'em blow up" philosophy to the Western "every tanker is sacred" one. But if we consider this in continuity with the history of Soviet tank design, it actually seems like the natural next step in their philosophy of minimizing the volume of the crew compartment, thus minimizing the surface area that has to be protected by thicker armor, allowing you to cut weight (and cost, since you're just spending less on materials). This philosophy informed the proliferation of the autoloader, and it's that design choice which allows Soviet tanks to be so much lighter compared to Western ones - by eliminating the loader (who's the crew member needing the most space to work in, due to the wider movements required for his role), you can substantially reduce the crew compartment, which in turns allows you to make a much smaller turret, one which will be lighter by simple geometry - there's just less of it that you need to cover with armor. For example, one of the only Western MBTs to also use an autoloader - the French Leclerc - is indeed a decent bit lighter compared to the Abrams and Leopard 2 (although still heavier than the T-90), and pretty comparable to the Chinese ZTZ-99A.

So where do you go from there? Well, what if you could remove the crew from the turret altogether, and stick them in the front of the hull somehow? That way, you'd have an armored "capsule" containing just the crew, which is where most of the armor would be focused, allowing the rest of the tank to be made much lighter. That's how the Armata can be so much bigger than the T-90 while being of comparable weight - the actually heavily-armored part of the Armata is much smaller.

But the obvious problem with this is - how does the crew actually command the turret from their little capsule? Well, you need a whole bunch of sophisticated electronics and optics to make that viable - and that makes the vehicle more complex, expensive, and fragile. The tech just isn't there yet.

because who wants to get into a war of attrition

Someone who wants to actually defeat their opponent for good.

What did American shock-and-awe campaigns actually accomplish? A decade-long counter-insurgency quagmire, and the Americans eventually just picking their bags up and fucking off? Conversely, why did post-WW2 Germany not see any notable insurgency, despite being a state with one of the most radicalized populations in history, complete with dedicated genocide squads and indoctrinated child soldiers? Because they were defeated not in a lightning-fast campaign, but in a brutal years-long war of attrition, which, in the end, left the majority of German men either dead, crippled, or captured - there was no-one left to fight (until a nascent NATO released a whole lot of those prisoners, so they could again be used against the Soviets).

A timeline where the initial Russian offensive works and Ukraine surrenders is a timeline where Russia gets its own Iraq, except it's not halfway across the world - it's on their doorstep. It's a timeline where Azov ghouls, not having been slaughtered in a long war, are driving vans into crowds in the Donbass and setting off car bombs, where schools are being shot up, where there's a dozen Crocus City Hall attacks, where there's a constant trickle of covert Western support (that, unlike the current shipments of tanks and planes and missiles, cannot be found and destroyed on the battlefield).

How often, in history, has an opponent actually been truly defeated, not set back for a couple of years, but thoroughly removed as a strategic threat, by a quick military campaign?

There's this bit from a Big Serge article which stuck with me

Much is always made of Russia’s propensity for “suffering”, with interpretations ranging from a romantic Russian-patriotic notion of sacrifice for the motherland to an anti-Russian criticism of the Russian tolerance for casualties. Perhaps it means both: the individual Russian soldier is more willing to sit in a freezing trench and trade shells than his adversary, and the Russian state and people are able to lose more and last longer in the aggregate.

I rather think, however, that Jünger’s metaphysical “titan of suffering” is not so metaphysical at all. It rather refers to a mundane power of the Russian state, namely its excellence and willingness across the centuries to mobilize huge numbers of men and material for war, at the expense of other social goals. War with Russia sucks. It means mass casualties, cold trenches, scarred earth, and long nights of shelling. The Ukrainians have coped with this as well as anyone (because they are themselves quasi-Russian, however much they deny it), but it is an awful thing to trade shells for years on end. The Russian power of suffering is to willingly fight wars that devolve into bat fights, knowing they have a bigger bat.

also who remembers the T-14 Armata? that was fun

Russia ditching a wunderwaffe and re-focusing on producing well-proven and reliable equipment is, if anything, a testament to them being smart, and adapting well to the conditions of the war. It's the "Germany should have just ditched the Tigers and made more Panzer IVs" hypothetical playing out in real time (although admittedly, Nazi Germany's case is a bit more nuanced, since even if they had made larger numbers of cheaper tanks, they wouldn't have actually had the manpower of fuel to use them - so making a smaller of amount of more capable vehicles was perhaps the right choice for them, or at least it would have been if said vehicles actually were capable and didn't tend to break down before even getting to the battlefield).

Conversely, Western militaries are just sticking their fingers in their ears about this whole war - they mocked "cope" cages for a couple years, until they started installing them themselves. They're still doing the "drones aren't a problem, we'll just knock them out of the sky with jamming/lasers/magic" cope, years on. They just whipped out a microwave cannon (which, well, hope you're one of the maybe 10 units that gets one of these, sucks to be all the other guys who have nothing and still get blown up since something like this would be exorbitantly expensive to field and deploy), and the batshit new Army manual about, uh... waving your hands frantically and shooting drones with tanks?! They're far behind on integration of drone teams, despite the fact that the Ukrainians are literally sitting right there doing it.

I think it's bakelite, but I'm not sure.

https://archive.ph/QLFo4 weapon line go down

France, Italy, Czech Republic, Hungary don’t plan to participate in NATO program to purchase weapons from USA for Ukraine

Denmark and Germany have so far agreed to participate in the new format of arms supplies to Kyiv, proposed by US President Donald Trump, while France, Italy, the Czech Republic and Hungary have refused, Western media reported on Wednesday. In addition, Bloomberg noted on Wednesday that Europe increasingly feels the need to end its dependence on American weapons.

"Europe relies heavily on the US defense industry. However, due to trade tariffs, President Trump's attitude toward NATO and his lack of commitment to defending the alliance's countries, European countries will increasingly prioritize investments in their own defense complexes," the agency's sources said.

According to the European portal Politico, France has refused to participate in the purchase of American weapons for Ukraine. The publication's sources reported that the country's government intends to focus instead on increasing its own defense budget, which last weekend the president of the republic, Emmanuel Macron, promised to increase by 2027 almost twice as much as the 2017 budget. In addition, Paris wants to support European manufacturers who previously supplied Ukraine with anti-missile systems and other weapons.

Italy also does not intend to purchase weapons from the USA for delivery to Ukraine, but will continue to provide military assistance to Kyiv. Unnamed representatives of the Ministry of Defense told the ezine La Stampa - the department has never discussed purchasing American weapons for Kyiv. The ezine also notes that Italy does not have the means to carry out such operations. According to the publications’ sources, this problem is so acute that the only purchase from the USA that Italy has planned for the next ten years is a batch of F-35 fighters for its own needs.

The Czech government, in turn, stated that military aid to Kyiv would continue, but through participation in other initiatives and purchases from Czech, not American, manufacturers.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said that Budapest does not intend to participate in the purchase of American weapons for Ukraine.

Official consent to purchase weapons from the USA has so far been given by Berlin and Copenhagen. Danish Foreign Minister Lars Rasmussen has declared his full readiness to join in the financing. The Dutch Foreign Ministry, in turn, said that it was considering the possibility of participating in the program. However, despite the government's positive assessment of the initiative, Amsterdam has not yet confirmed its commitment to direct participation in it. According to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, it is expected that Sweden and Norway, as well as the United Kingdom, may join in the funding.

On July 11, Trump announced that USA’s NATO allies would buy weapons from Washington that could later be transferred to Ukraine. Rutte, during a press conference with Trump on Monday, called it "logical" that European countries would pay for the supply of American weapons to Ukraine. The head of European diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, said on Tuesday that EU countries would prefer Washington to provide some military aid to Ukraine free of charge. "If we pay for these weapons, it means that it is we, and not the United States, who provide this military aid," Kallas said at a press conference in Brussels. She stressed that Brussels "would like to see a distribution of these costs."

https://archive.ph/xZ6Kr

Second Israeli ultra-Orthodox party to quit government in blow to Netanyahu

The ultra-Orthodox Shas party says it will leave the government in response to dispute over mandatory military service. A key partner in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government says it is quitting, dealing a major blow to the Israeli prime minister that could leave him heading a minority coalition in parliament. The ultra-Orthodox Shas party said on Wednesday that it was leaving the cabinet in protest against lawmakers’ failure to guarantee future exemption from military conscription for religious students.

“Shas representatives … find with a heavy heart that they cannot stay in the government and be a part of it,” said the group in a statement. It was not immediately clear whether the decision would leave Netanyahu with a minority in parliament. Without Shas, Netanyahu’s coalition would have 50 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

Shas, which has long served as a kingmaker in Israeli politics, said it would not work to undermine the government once outside it and could vote with it on some laws. It also said it would not support its collapse. The departure of Shas from the government comes one day after another ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ), resigned from the government over the same issue, which has prompted an explosive debate in the country after more than 21 months of war with Hamas in Gaza.

While ultra-Orthodox seminary students have long been exempt from mandatory military service, many Israelis are angered by what they see as an unfair burden carried by other groups who serve. The moves by Shas and UTJ come just before the Israeli parliament starts a three-month recess on July 27, giving the prime minister several months of little to no legislative activity to bring the parties back into the fold.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders say full-time devotion to holy scriptures study is sacrosanct and fear their young men will turn away from religious life if they are drafted into the military. Last year, the Supreme Court ordered an end to the exemption. The parliament has been trying to work out a new conscription bill, which has so far failed to meet the demands of both Shas and UTJ. Religious Services Minister Michael Malkieli, a member of Shas, said on Wednesday that rabbis were angered after Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein reneged on promises regarding the bill, according to a report in the Times of Israel. Malkieli, reading from a statement by the Council of Torah Sages, also hit out at actions taken by the Israeli military and attorney general to pursue draft dodgers, describing the move as “nothing less than cruel and criminal persecution against yeshiva students”.

I think that's a problem with the more recent P320. The P220 series (which all of these are members of - the 220 is a single-stack, the 226 a double-stack, and the 228/229 are the compact variants) is known to be pretty reliable and durable, and as good old-fashioned chunky hammer-fired pistols, there's not much that can go wrong. Apparently the 320's issues mostly come about from its particular implementation of a striker-fired design.

https://xcancel.com/johnkonrad/status/1945308143212249566

Massive shipbuilding changes in DC. None of them good. @gCaptain has confirmed from a White House source that Trump has closed the shipbuilding office at the NSC. Reuters reports that Ian Bennitt, the President’s Special Assistant for Shipbuilding at the White House, has been fired. Favored candidates for Provost and Superintendent positions at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy have received denial notices. At a recent USNI shipbuilding conference, it became clear: major shipbuilding primes are actively fighting plans to expand commercial shipbuilding.

Sources inside the Pentagon say Admirals and SES are digging in their heels on several key shipbuilding objectives. Some Jones Act companies now expressing fear that building new ships could devalue their current fleets.

lol. lmao

Congressional sources say progress on the SHIPS Act is stalling in committee. It’s also unlikely the new Commandant will be confirmed before the August break. We’ve confirmed that the French billionaire who offered to invest $20B in U.S. shipping sent a letter to Trump saying he’s not getting the support he needs to move forward. The U.S. Coast Guard is slashing cutter orders left and right.

Reports from my sources in Korea say the new far-left, pro-China president is chilling U.S.-Korean shipyard cooperation.

man, I love when Americans will label the most milquetoast of libs as communists for simply not being frothing-at-the-mouth psychos

Nobody has seen or heard from @SecDuffy’s new acting Maritime Administrator. The plan to centralize shipbuilding under the Department of Commerce is apparently stalled or stalling. I spoke with half a dozen senior sources in DC—every single one is frustrated. Yes, there’s still optimism around @SECNAV’s commitment to shipbuilding but his plate is full with emerging priorities. Not a single Admiral has publicly supported the SHIPS Act or the White House’s “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” plan.

Deadlines are being missed or pencil-whipped on the Maritime Executive Order, and with the NSC shipbuilding office closing, no one knows how the next deadline will be met. Zero follow-through on Trump’s State of the Union promise to open a dedicated White House shipbuilding office. New intel confirms more Navy shipbuilding delays, including further slippage in carrier programs. ... It’s been 252 days since the election, and not a single new ship has been ordered.

...

The Baltimore Bridge removal is delayed another 9 months, and retrofits to prevent future bridge strikes around the nation are postponed. Still zero word from @PeteHegseth on fixing the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for inland rivers and dredging. What am I missing? The number of panicked and/or depressed calls I’ve received from DC in the last few days is unreal. I’m struggling to find a silver lining.

https://xcancel.com/witte_sergei/status/1945276561529180182

Primordial NATO: The Delian League

I was thinking recently about the similarities between contemporary NATO and the cloaked imperialism of Athens. It’s not a perfect parallel, obviously, but the similarities are quite strong. Like NATO, the Delian League was formed as a defensive alliance against a hostile foreign power, with the Persian Empire as a stand in for the USSR. Polities in Northern Greece, fearing that Sparta’s strategic standoff in the Peloponnese would render them an unreliable protector, formed the Delian League to wage a continuation war against Persia.

Athens was obviously the preeminent naval power within the alliance, but it was nominally governed by an assembly in which each member state had an equal vote. This system became a thin veneer over de facto Athenian hegemony. The league became a vehicle for a creeping Athenian imperialism through its unique system of military commitments. Member states were obligated to either maintain a requisite number of ships and men, or make an equivalent cash contribution. As time went on, more and more members opted to contribute cash rather than maintain forces, which Athens used to raise the equivalent forces for themselves. Rather than fielding a coalition navy, the league became a revenue stream for the growing Athenian fleet.

This in turn made the lesser members more and more subservient to Athens as the military power disparity grew. Despite the nominal system of equal votes, Athens was more and more able to impose its will. Members who attempted to defect were severely punished. Within a relatively short period of time, the Delian League became a de facto vehicle of Athenian Empire: a mechanism for extracting resources from tributary states and subjecting them to Athenian political domination.

NATO is very similar, as this week we see European members agreeing to buy more American weapons as part of a shell game to arm Ukraine. Revenue from Europe flows to American companies, and Europe bends to American foreign policy. Like the Delian League, NATO ostensibly has a consensus-driven governance and nominally consists of a coalition of forces, but in reality Europe is unable to make autonomous foreign policy choices. NATO has also helped to hollow out European defense manufacturing, and instead funnels money into the US as Euro members scramble to purchase HIMARS, Patriots, aircraft, and more.

As a mechanism for aggrandizing state power, this is a very effective and very ancient model which works for the US just as it worked for Athens. The comity implied by the word “alliance” is a diplomatic narcotic that numbs the tributaries to the reality of empire. As a coda, the connection is even deeper, because Donald Kagan, who wrote a magisterial history of the Peloponnesian War and was an absolute gem of a historian, was also the Father in Law of Victoria Nuland. So, make of that what you will.

We can come up with reason after reason, that gets more and more unlikely about why Israeli aircraft weren't actually over Iran

At no point did I assert that no Israeli planes were ever over Iran, in fact the bulk of my post was arguing that there definitely could have been, just via a different route. It was specifically about the June 16th attack that I questioned the planes. We don't know if the attacks portrayed on that video are the same attacks that the Fars report is about.

And ballistic missiles being used doesn't imply that literally every strike was ballistic missiles. It could have been a combination of missiles and bombs - it's the proportion which matters. Again, I'm not denying that there were bombs dropped, but every strike being an F-35 flying directly overhead is a very different thing from, say, 60% being that and the rest being missiles, or some other ratio.

We have video evidence, although not the highest quality, is conclusive enough to state that a JDAM or SPICE 2000 was dropped on Tehran on June 15th, a day before

See, this is my problem, which I brought up in my original comment - "trying to guess vague bomb or missile shapes based on grainy footage doesn't exactly seem like sound analysis to me"! The evidence in question?

The conclusion of this being a JDAM or SPICE is by the OSINTer in question (and I feel like the whole past several years should have really taught us to take these guys with a grain of salt). But I'm not really seeing the frontal fins or little rear wings of a SPICE (but depending on the angle, we wouldn't see the wings anyway, and the fins might well be not visible at this resolution...):

A GBU-31 seems more likely, there seemingly is the wider central portion, but again, at this video resolution, actually determining the exact shape of the projectile is iffy - compression can throw of shapes depending on what the algorithm decided to color in a pixel as (and there could also just not be enough detail in the original video either, where again a pixel being chosen as one color over another could throw things off)

Telling the size is also pretty difficult, we don't have any sort of distance estimation from the video to the projectile with which to figure that out.

So, why couldn't this be some kind of missile? Here's a LORA for example, this is during its ascent so we can see the exhaust, but on its descent there wouldn't necessarily be anything visible:

Modern cruise missiles generally have less bomb-like, more rectangular shapes, and more uniquely-shaped noses, but again, at this video quality, telling the precise shape is difficult. Here's an Icebreaker for example - as with the SPICE, we wouldn't necessarily be able to see the wings depending on the angle, and the nose is the the most smudged-up part of the Iran image, so we can't tell the precise shape of it either.

The other bit of evidence seemingly doesn't feature any strikes, but their aftermath. The higher-detail video (with the guy cheering the strikes for whatever reason) has several explosions going off, but I wasn't able to see any actual projectile in the footage, so I assume it was just traveling too fast to be picked up? So again, what are we basing our conclusion on what munitions were used there, that these were bunker busters specifically? The amount of debris kicked up can help us estimate the power of the explosion, but that's hardly a foolproof method - an explosion could kick up a lot of dust without necessarily doing that much damage. Additionally, strikes going off in the mountain doesn't have to mean they were using bunker busters specifically, couldn't they have used more conventional munitions to strike just entrances?

I've seen you post these two several times, and I assumed that you had many more images and these were just the ones you picked for illustrative purposes, but you keep coming up with just these two. I tried looking up what else you had posted, but I can't navigate Hexbear search results very well, so I may have missed stuff, but I didn't find that much more footage of strikes over Tehran, and especially not much from which we could accurately judge what munitions were used.

and I don't think Israel has enough stock of air launched ballistic missiles with 1000lb unitary warheads to do the kind of bombardment that took place. Even Russia who produce hundreds of Iskander ballistic missiles a month (and get plenty of KN-23s from North Korea) don't perform such attacks.

What about the past few years has given any indication that Western countries actually make rational decisions, weighing the long-term impacts of their ammunition expenditure? There's European countries with barely any artillery left at this point. The Israelis may well have used a dangerously large amount of their stockpile, confident that the US will make up for their losses with later military aid.

The Russians also do use ballistics pretty extensively, including to target Ukrainian vehicles like missile launchers. They're not doing daily attacks because they're engaged in a years-long attritional conflict - the Israel-Iran war was barely two weeks. It could well be that the Israelis were just about to finish their stockpiles as the ceasefire was signed. It's speculation, sure, but that's a lot about this war.

I just think that the most likely explanation is the true one.

Why is "Israeli planes managed to fly over a large swath of territory and completely avoid Iranian air defense" a more likely explanation than "Azerbaijan, a comprador state with open military ties to Turkey and Israel, and essentially the only Muslim country to support Israel during the Gaza genocide, aided Israel"?

You've also repeatedly downplayed the damage Israel itself has sustained (which we cannot accurately judge on account of censorship, and yet you confidently assert that they must not have lost anything important), and have also uncritically reported literal IDF propaganda (https://hexbear.net/comment/6271486 - not sure how many people actually opened up the link instead of assuming that the "Over 50 aircraft" was your own analysis, but it's a direct citation of a statement by the IDF). I guess we can trust their propaganda, even though we confidently dismiss Iranian/Resistance propaganda about the damage inflicted on Israel?

Your estimation on Iranian equipment losses is based on an Oryx-style list by a pro-Ukrainian propagandist - have you audited that list to make sure there's no duplicate footage being passed off as different strikes, as Oryx did? This user has admitted to blocking those who question his numbers - now, he's of course framing it as if they must have all been trolling assholes, but this is a classic online tactic: use the trolls as justification to silence people who might actually damage your narrative.

When it comes to damage assessments for Iran, you confidently assert that the real numbers are likely higher than what's on the list, but when it comes to damage assessments for Israel, you confidently state that the limited footage we have available is painting a complete picture and nothing else was blown up.

I've asked this question in another thread already, but I'll ask it again - if Israel was ostensibly performing so well, easily bombing targets all over Iran while sustaining minimal damage themselves, why did they accept a ceasefire?

Mk 70 containerised systems

But wouldn't such systems be incredibly vulnerable? The containers themselves obviously cannot move - you need to be on a vehicle, but ships are big and not very fast-moving. Ground-based launchers are really key to allow them to reposition and conceal themselves in order to avoid being taken out by counter-battery fire, or airstrikes, or drones, or ballistics. Ships seem like they'd be sitting ducks.

The Typhon system also includes a battery operations center - I assume this is pretty important, and just the containers without all the extra stuff related to programming and commanding the missiles won't be very effective.

Sending a bunch of Mk 70 containerised systems to Ukraine is not a complicated endeavour

Sending them might not be complicated - actually getting them to the country and using them is different. The Russians have struck numerous Ukrainian ammunition sites, including some alleged strikes on Western shipments. These containers are pretty big, and would likely attract attention. I guess the idea is to commit perfidy and disguise them as regular civilian cargo, but the Russians have already struck several vessels carrying grain (according to the Ukrainians of course), so they're not above just blowing up anything suspicious.

Bringing them by sea on the whole doesn't seem likely (in fact, isn't the Black Sea extensively mined at this point, at least around the Ukrainian shore?). I guess you could try bringing them via trucks over the Romanian border, straight to Odessa or something like that? But can regular civilian-seeming trucks carry such heavy containers? The US military itself is using one of its heavier models of truck for the Typhon.

The F-16s have been doing this for months, and one aircraft has been lost to Russian ground based air defence

Have they inflicted much actual damage? You're not at as much risk if you're not lobbing bombs at actually important targets, and the ability of Russian infantry to keep advancing doesn't seem to indicate they're being suppressed much by bombardment.

Is it this Fars report? Because that states nothing about aircraft specifically - why are we discounting ballistic missiles here? The Tucker interview also doesn't say anything, it was just Pezeshkian repeating "it's God's will when I die" like 5 times for some reason.

The problem with this whole narrative is that we are assuming bombing in Tehran to imply complete penetration of Iranian air defense. That implication makes sense if we are assuming that Israeli planes flew from Israel, through Syria, Iraq, and then half of Iran - but with those drop tanks getting fished out of the the Caspian, and accusations that Azerbaijan allowed its airspace to be used by Israel, it might imply a different story. Interestingly, June 16th specifically had a report of drones being detected flying in from Azerbaijani airspace

But anyways, presented with amateurish Paint drawing - these two paths of attack are very different, and imply very different things about Iranian air defense. Keeping close to the Turkish border, using geographic features to avoid radar, and then going through Azerbaijan, the Caspian and finally attacking Tehran from the North only implies a penetration of that specific sector of Iran. This is still a problem for the Iranians, but nowhere near the complete collapse of their air-defense network that is implied by F-35s flying the "direct" route.

We're also still not clear on exactly what munitions were used - trying to guess vague bomb or missile shapes based on grainy footage doesn't exactly seem like sound analysis to me. Use of shorter-ranged bombs implies greater penetration of Iranian airspace - usage of longer-ranged standoff munitions and cruise missiles doesn't indicate it to the same degree.

Y'know, I wouldn't exactly consider US military command to not be grifters, given the whole history of US military procurement, and I'm not sure why we should consider them to be significantly smarter than the typical US politicans given the performance of the US military in, like, everything since WW2? It isn't '91 anymore, the guys "understating" capabilities may well be right for the wrong reasons (like, the military facing a recruitment crisis is objective fact, and is already having effects - but it's obviously not because of "woke").

Does the Tomahawk have ground-launch capability? From what I read, there was the old Gryphon system from the Cold War, but that was dismantled as per the INF treaty, and more recently, with the INF becoming irrelevant - the Typhon system, but that was only introduced in 2023, and there's still just a handful of them around so none are going to Ukraine. Tomahawks don't have air-launch capability either, so... this is entirely irrelevant to Ukraine?

The same applies to the SM-6, although that one has an air-launch variant in development, but only the F/A-18E/F seems to be capable of carrying it, and it's too fresh of a system to send to Ukraine. So again, not relevant.

JASSMs could work, but how likely is it that Ukrainian F-16s could actually manage to successfully launch them? Just recently an F-16 went down down while doing air defense, has the F-16 fleet been able to fly any particularly extensive bombing missions?

Do we have precise numbers on how many ATACMS were sent until now? The Ukrainians did manage to destroy some air-defense systems and planes with them, but how effective that counts as really depends on the numbers they expended for such results. What I could find was "at least 500", which they have mostly expended by now. The Russians have also shown themselves to be capable of both intercepting ATACMS, and efficiently destroying the launchers themselves, so again - if the Ukrainians receive them, could they actually perform more than a handful of effective attacks with them before their launchers get tracked down and got?

The PrSM has been in service for a year-and-a-half, I highly doubt they'd send something this new. It literally just entered mass production, and the numbers for it up until now that I could find seem to be 42 (in 2023) + 110 missiles (2024), and some proportion of the 230 planned for 2025 - so, let's call it ≈270 up until July of 2025, and some of these would have been used up in testing and military exercises. Hardly a sufficiently large stockpile for the US to start handing these out willy-nilly, and the more advanced Increment 2 phase of the procurement process has already been delayed once.

Yeah, StarCraft 2 massively improved the pathfinding, plus it removed the unit selection limit, leading to a tendency towards big clumps of units effortlessly gliding around the battlefield and smashing into one another, since it's no longer a battle against the UI to actually move those big armies around.

This is an idea I actually find very interesting, the "actually, the game needs to be shit in order to be good" principle (well, that's it stated hyperbolically of course, I guess a more proper phrasing would be something like "the game requires a certain degree of friction in order for its mechanics to work"). Another example of this is Deus Ex - the original game infamously had some pretty clunky shooting mechanics, so Eidos-Montréal "fixed" that in Human Revolution - except, they promptly realized that by making the shooting good and effective, they actually just made it the easiest and most direct approach and kind of negated the point of stealth, so they then had to run a fucking surveillance program on ammo pickups to make sure the player doesn't have too much ammo at any given point.

The original Deus Ex didn't need to worry about that and was free to give away some pretty juicy rewards for exploration, because it knew that you wouldn't be able to actually use all that ammo to casually headshot every enemy in the level with the starting pistol without first having invested a substantial amount of points in getting your respective weapon skill up to that point, and weapon mods in improving the gun's stats itself. Removing friction from games, while intuitively an obvious improvement that makes the game "smoother" to play, can in fact have all these weird knock-on effects that mess up some other gameplay system.

Starcraft has waypoints too (also with Shift, I assume this was a UI convention just taken from Windows)

But in this particular case, what's happening is an element of pathfinding where if something goes wrong and the unit ends up in an invalid state/location, it's bumped in a random direction to get it out. Here, I think the SCV and Dragoon end up accidentally occupying the same space, which causes the Dragoon to get bumped downwards - except that bumps it into the water, which is also unpathable terrain for a ground unit, and so it keeps getting bumped down until it eventually occupies a valid spot of land.

I think people are just hungry for big arrow moves, the "okay, but now the Russians will do a big arrow offensive!" has been going on for a while now, but it seems like the Russians are quite content to slowly grind Ukraine (and a substantial amount of NATO equipment) into dust.

There's a quote I like by Soviet chess grandmaster Karpov (of the final boss of chess memes):

People just love those "beautiful tactical blows", and those unfamiliar with more attritional styles (in either strategy games or actual war), when actually seeing one in play, tend to assume that the attritional player is just bad and missing opportunities for such blows - rather than considering that the player saw the opportunity perfectly well, and chose not to take it, because he's playing according to a different style and strategy. Now, in games at least, the argument can be made that one style is more entertaining to watch (Karpov himself calls it "beautiful" after all), but war is serious business, and should be driven by "ruthless logic" rather than trying to make sure the historians writing about your exploits in the future will have big beautiful arrows