Image is of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Ansarallah.
The death of Zionism has just massively accelerated.
previous preamble
BRICS has expanded to include Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Argentina is currently experiencing technical difficulties due to the election of the ancap clown Milei - once he’s out of office, maybe they can try again.
I don’t really have much to say about this one way or another. BRICS has, so far, made only nervous and small steps towards challenging US hegemony. This isn’t really that unexpected, as only China and Russia are the real “true believers” in ending US hegemony (and even then, China’s government either believes, or is pretending to believe, that reconciliation is still possible). Brazil, India, and South Africa are less enthralled by the concept of dethroning the US, most especially India, who had to make a firm decision in 2023 whether they were going to be on the side of America, or on the side of the Global South, and chose the former, strengthening their military relationship. They’re still best of friends with Russia, but they are very obviously the sussy imposter of the BRICS group.
The prospects of BRICS are only really loosely correlated with the prospects of multipolarism, though. It’s not a process that hinges on BRICS’s successes or failures. It is coming because the contender states (in Desai’s terminology) are irreversibly rising, and the US is irreversibly falling. If it will not be BRICS that leads, it will be a different organization. A better world is not only possible, but inevitable - unfortunately for the US.
I’m taking a week off the updates because I’ve been swamped lately, and also feel the need to reconfigure (and find new) sources. Needless to say that I’ve grown tired of Financial Times headlines, even if they do represent the actual views of the bourgeoisie.
The Country of the Week is Ethiopia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
twitter thread about lacking US missile capabilities (nitter alt)
The United States has approximately 3500 Tomahawk missiles on hand - so few that at-sea reloading capability is pointless because in the event of war the USN will actually run out of missiles before it runs out of launchers.
First of all, the Tomahawk is an old system and has been manufactured in several blocks since its introduction in the 1980s. Block II missiles have long since been taken out of service and Block III missiles appear to have left service recently - the only models currently in use are Block IV (produced since 2004) and Block V (remanufactured Block IV missiles “produced” since 2021).
Now let’s apply this data to operations. This is almost entirely a naval missile, although there is some work to bring back a surface-fired capability that once existed in the 1980s. The USN has 73 Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyers and 13 Ticonderoga-class missile cruisers in service, as well as 4 converted Ohio-class cruise missile submarines and 48 nuclear attack submarines with VLS silos. Obviously the surface units will fill only a portion of their silos with land attack missiles - I understand the load is generally 32 missiles (graphic courtesy Sal Mercogliano). The attack subs have 12 tubes each and the SSGNs have 154 tubes each, all loaded with Tomahawks. As such to completely load the USN battle force with Tomahawks requires 3,944 missiles. There is thus a shortfall of some 500 missiles, which makes sense given that a portion of the USN battle fleet is in the yard at any given point in time and cannot be made ready to sail even in an emergency.
Now to the question of reloading VLS tubes at sea, a capability which the USN got rid of in the mid-1990s when it was rapidly drawing down after the Cold War and the writing was very much on the wall about how much ammunition Congress was willing to fund going forward. The takeaway here is that the United States Navy doesn’t “need” an at-sea VLS reload capability because our current policy appears to be to only buy enough missiles to fill the Navy’s magazines once. There will be nothing to reload the silos with, at least in the immediate term, so including extra equipment to do it at sea would be pointless.
As a final aside, given that Tomahawk production since 2021 seems to have been remanufactured rather than new missiles, I have questions about whether the US actually retains the capability to make new missiles of this type.
a comment points out:
Um so did the USN burn like 3% of their tomahawks bombing targets previously bombed for 8 years …
critical support to the US military in its valiant anti-imperialist effort to disarm… itself?
I had an argument with a friend who thinks in a peer war the Arsenal of Democracy is waiting only for the injection of capital to ramp up again.
I don’t know what expertise either in machining or organisation actually remains to guarantee that gets done. I compare it to the West’s inability to successfully produce a hypersonic missile.
If anyone has any reading about this I would appreciate it.
what expertise either in machining or organisation actually remains to guarantee that gets done
there was another article I recently found about nuclear missiles, and, uh… the “remaining expertise” situation is not looking good, in fact it’s heading into Warhammer 40k territory
“We can’t do it at all. … That thing is so old that, in some cases, the drawings don’t exist anymore [to guide upgrades],” Richard said in a Zoom conference sponsored by the Defense Writers Group. Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”
also another one about steel manufacturing, with the amazing bit that the US has taken like 13 years to start thinking about planning about starting to manufacture some ships that they needed. As for expertise and machining…
The machinery and skills to build the hulls of most oceangoing vessels aren’t sufficient for the specialized icebreakers. The hull plates need a bespoke alloy and specialized heat-treatment, with a process to form and weld massive curved plates. … In addition to the technical challenge, American yards are reckoning with a shortage of shipwrights. Employment in ship and boat building totaled just 154,800 in July after peaking at 1.3 million during World War II, according to data from the Federal Reserve.
The thing about the “Arsenal of Democracy” is that the US actually had a lot of elements of economic planning during WW2 - not on the level of the Soviets, but still, there was a whole lot of government intervention, which I simply don’t believe can be replicated under neoliberalism. The real economy isn’t like an RTS video game - “injection of capital” doesn’t magically transform into real workers and factories.
I don’t think liberals and left-liberals (but I repeat myself) have really internalised how degraded technical and managerial skills (actual skills rather than cost cutting and hiring consultants) are in the West, and think big GDP numbers are automatically fungible to any set of appropriate use-values they think western governments might need.
The U.S has burned more money fucking around in the middle east than it did fighting ww2. Sure you could argue that there’s a difference in spending since one was spread out over two decades and the other was four years. But both periods allowed for the possibility of increasing manufacturing capabilities, and only the ww2 period with the State directly managing the means of production could properly organize a proper war footing.
Injection of capital isn’t what’s needed, you’re right infinite money will just lead to missiles costing infinite dollars. There’s no shortage of capital, the US military gets a combined trillion+ dollars a year easily. The corrupt public-private partnerships system of bidding would need to be excised, all weapons manufacturers are grifters of the highest degree and pocketing most of it.
What the US would need to do to even stand a chance is to directly seize all their productive facilities and use command-and-control and standardized engineering to mass produce drones, missiles, artillery, mines, manpads, RPGs, etc.
They need to give up their obsession with wunder weapons and billion dollar jets. That shit is expensive as hell to maintain as well. They need to learn from Ukraine and go hard into the weapons stated above. This is basically what Russia did and it’s why they are winning.
The Arsenal of Democracy is waiting for a wartime economy. I have little doubt in the US’ ability to fight a hot war a la WW2, particularly because there’s basically no way for any hot war to touch the American mainland.
The US can do what it did in WW2: sit around, bleed territory in the Pacific, support literal genocide (by Japan), fuck over private industry, and build up domestic industrial capacity.
Wait, US used over 100 missiles in this attack? How many targets were bombed?
The first day of strikes Friday hit 28 locations and struck more than 60 targets.
early Saturday struck another Houthi-controlled site in Yemen that it had determined was putting commercial vessels in the Red Sea at risk
Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday’s U.S. strikes were largely in low-populated areas, and the number of those killed would not be high. He said the strikes hit weapons, radar and targeting sites, including in remote mountain areas.
The strikes involved more than 150 precision-guided munitions and Tomahawk missiles.
