Razia (She/Her)

The real problem isn’t rebuilding the ammunition exactly. The reality is that the US is facing two crushing problems from a military angle.

One is that the entire 1980s era doctrine that they’ve built their military around has been shattered, in the air, at sea, and on land. Nothing they had on hand had an answer for fortified underground facilities, for dispersion as a general strategy, for cost efficient drones, and for an at-scale ballistic missile programme. Their ships can’t approach, their planes can’t operate freely over dispersed ambush air defences, and their military isn’t built for countering fiber-optic FPV drones and one-way drones. Every aircraft will need to be underground or in hardened shelters. Every ship needs covered docking space, if they’re operating anywhere in range of an enemy with these capabilities. And they need an actual answer to the issue of being able to penetrate and destroy underground facilities.

The second problem that they have is that they have to solve these massive problems and pivot their entire military establishment around the solutions they find, using a deeply corrupt and monopolistic military-industrial complex that exercises deep political influence both in government and in the military bureaucracy. This entity has already proven increasingly incapable of delivering next generation equipment across all domains. There is a reason that the US is operating ageing 80s equipment. The Zumwalt programme failed. The mobile artillery programme failed. The light tank programme failed. The LCS programme failed. They have failed to develop effective and practical hypersonics. They have yet to introduce a truly current-gen ship-to-ship missile. The constellation programme failed. Their 6th gen aircraft programme is limping along, massively behind the curve. Ukraine has generally found their drones to be impractical and ineffective. The next generation naval fighter was entirely cancelled. Both the F-22 and F-35 programmes have massive issues around cost, maintenance, availability, and more. On top of that, the US is continuing to suffer from a significant decline in industry, education, and research.

Given all this, the reality is that the US is not equipped to face any country wielding these next generation warfighting capabilities - they’ve gone from asymmetrical responses to the future of warfare.

So they can slowly rebuild their tomahawk inventory by hand over the next 5 years to bomb more schoolchildren if they like, it doesn’t change the fact that their complete inability to fight Iran, China, or Russia has been exposed.

That sort of blockade would definitely not work for the reasons provided. What they could do however, is hunt down ships shipping oil from Iran and shipping items to Iran from further away than Iranian drones and missiles can target.

The problem with this is that it will further exacerbate the global energy crisis and piss off multiple countries benefiting from Iran’s exports. Iran can also respond to this kind of blockade with strikes on US and US allies assets elsewhere to inflict harm, while continuing to keep hormuz closed. That’s assuming China, Russia or another country doesn’t apply pressure or send its own ships to help transport Iranian oil and trade, which the US could not target without it being an act of war it can’t afford.

So this is really not a good option from multiple angles.

I despise our illegitimate fauji (army) government with all my heart and everyone in it, with a fiery passion, but I have to admit Khwaja Asif’s drunk tweeting has produced some absolute bangers. People call him unprofessional, and he is, but everyone knows that under army rule the defence minister is powerless anyway, it’s all a farce, and it’s nice to see him treating it that way.

Brian Berletic has been delivering good solid analysis on the US empire’s behaviour and intentions towards its rivals and towards the global south for quite a while now and I have to say he is very often proven correct - I’d recommend his articles, interviews, and videos to anyone interested in exploring these topics.

It’s absolutely wild seeing Iran make these claims directly on Presstv (which has had remarkably honest and reasonable reporting throughout the war and has pretty excellent writing and reporting in general, keeping their biases and loyalties in mind) because hitting the Tripoli and Lincoln with drones and missiles and confirming damage (they misspelled it as CVN-74, which is the Stennis which is not deployed, but they almost certainly mean CVN-72, the Lincoln) and forcing them to retreat to the Indian Ocean is a huge deal. The headlines are so busy with the ceasefire buzz that they haven’t yet caught up to what Iran is saying about wave 100 of Operation True Promise 4. They’ve hit around 10 large refineries, drone plants, IT targets, Israeli facilities, US bases, many targets strongly.

It’s pretty clear that this is a message from Iran - either the US must reign in Israel or there is no ceasefire of any kind and Iran is able and willing to continue.

The thing is, airstrips are really hard to disable fully in the same way that a port is hard to disable. The key infrastructure is huge expanses of concrete and asphalt and that’s really easy to repair and hard to appreciably damage. It’s a poor target for drones and even big ballistic missiles. You can take out supporting infrastructure, like maintenance halls, barracks, command and control, fuel, a dozen other things, but the US (and by extension Israel) have a huge supply chain behind that and massive transport capacity, and can continue flying planes over to airbases, dispersing them and putting them in shelters, and supplying them even after Iran has pounded the base to dust.

It’s why Iran hasn’t focused all its efforts to totally disabling the airbases, and goes for more vulnerable and cost effective targets while hitting only carefully chosen things like the capabilities I mentioned above. It’s about making air operations harder, more expensive, less secure, and harder on the airframes, and eventually that combined with casualties, picked off aircraft, and a loss of radars and air defence makes bases too vulnerable to use and the US withdraws.

So, Iran’s waves are definitely having an impact, but it’s not something that can be disabled with a couple of painful strikes, it is an extended effort and while Iran is winning that contest it takes time.

You’re welcome! As someone with an amatuer interest in naval analysis and a naval brat, I had to call family members in excitement to celebrate when I heard this, it’s a historic event and massively embarrassing and worrisome for the US. It also puts them on the back foot in their naval competition with China, which it was decisively losing even before this war and now the gap is widening.

It’s surreal to see when the US seemed untouchable for so long. I suspect that this is going to be remembered as one of the headline events of the war looking back, and a significant moment in the overall decline of the US empire.

I’ve seen pictures on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive channel in an interview with Larry C that were apparently of the rear of the USS Ford in dock. It was completely blackened with signs of fire damage and damage from hits of some kind. That, plus this statement by Trump, leads me to believe that the ship was actually hit multiple times by most likely drones and had a significant fire lasting 30 hours. If this was the scale of the damage, there were also likely many casualties that were initially covered up by the ‘laundry fire’ story. Very likely damage to aircraft too since it seems to have affected the hangar as well.

Trump could be talking about it because the US needs to soften the reveal of the information, because this isn’t something that can be hidden for very long when the ship is sitting damaged in port in Greece.

If this is all the case, and at this point I think it is, this is a huge achievement by Iran; apart from the severe prestige damage (this is literally largest and most expensive capital warship in the world) and the loss of vital functionality for the US because they can’t bring all 11 carriers into use at the same time, in the long term this was the first of the next generation of carriers and older Nimitzes are heading for retirement, while newer ships building and commissioning normally takes around 10 years (longer for the Ford) so this creates a gap in US carrier capacity for potentially years.

He speaks like an academic, he admits when he doesn’t have enough information about something. He’s definitely speaking on behalf of the government but I have yet to hear anything from him that was not based on the facts; reasonable predictions, which often prove true. He also speaks well and passionately, and I quite admire him.

I found out that he fought in the Iran-Iraq war as a 16 year old, which comes through in the way he approaches things. I dearly hope that he survives all this, wouldn’t put it past the Zionists to come after figures like this, might even hit his university like the bloodthirsty monsters that they are.

Western media in general has reached the point where listening to it is likely to do the reverse of informing you, it will actively misinform you and confuse your picture of the situation. I only check it for the biggest most verifiable facts these days and note the spin and move on. It’s as bad as Pakistani media these days, no point listening if you actually want to understand what’s happening.

Lmao, a girl can dream!

I’m genuinely impressed by the way they’re playing their cards.

The inherent disadvantage of ballistic missiles is that the cost of delivering a particular explosive payload to a given location is quite high. The advantage, is being able to strike at great range at short notice and being able to hit the enemy without them being able to easily defend the entire threatened area and without exposing your forces to easy counterattack.

So the IRGC is playing a careful game of demonstration and pressure. They demonstrate they can hit their targets, show that defensive systems are ineffective, deplete their magazines and remove their early detection capabilities. Now the US-Israel complex can’t predict when and where they will be hit, and recognize that anything can be destroyed at any time. Suddenly, by applying 20-30 missiles and a relative handful of drones per day, striking randomly without giving respite, announcing target lists (as above), picking and choosing the most vulnerable, cost-effective targets, Iran is able to completely paralyze the economies and normal life of essentially all of their enemies across West Asia while also degrading their military capabilities.

I’m convinced that we’re witnessing a major evolution in the future of warfare centered on drones and ballistic missiles across Ukraine and the Iran war and the IRGC is currently defining military history in a way that will be studied for a long time to come.

It’s very impressive, and it’s so satisfying to see the imperialists cowering for once!

Thank you for introducing me to this site, great analysis from Indi and so well written!

I’m pretty sure that this one is from the 12 day war, I remember seeing it last year. https://www.douyin.com/video/7613044092256075369

Great compilation though, I’ve got my eyes on Rednote for videos dodging Israeli and US censorship.

The fact that the actual community has no real recourse on who gets to moderate it is a major and deliberate problem in the platform because it allows the head mods to effectively silence things on the platform they don’t like, mainly stuff that goes against US imperial interests.

This is so incredibly disappointing, but not surprising, it was one of the few real socialist subs and it was posting information about likely hits in Israel and on US facilities and Reddit is desperately trying to silence that.

It’s definitely both very complex, with layered mechanics, and also honestly things aren’t always well explained in game. I have a lot of time in it and I still run into new systems that I can’t get to work without looking through answers from other players and guides etc. I find it rewarding now that I can make sense of it and understand a lot of the core systems, but it took a while to get there and I also didn’t play the game for a long time after buying it because trying to build something for the first time is like hitting a brick wall.

But, if you’re interested in more accessible city builders, I can recommend a couple - try out frostpunk, the original one, great vibes and music and it’s generally much easier to pick it up while still having lots of room to optimize.

For something completely different, Per Aspera let’s you terraform mars as an AI and make narrative choices while building huge systems of industry and extraction across the whole planet. Very satisfying although be warned that it’s impossible to make nice and neat cities because of the way its road building and placement works.

At the risk of being stereotypical, I’m playing Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. I just recently finished setting up oil industry and rail for exporting fuel, alcohol, and food. The alcohol is only for export and no-one is addicted. I’m determined to achieve self-sufficiency and am working on the steel industry next!

I’ve also reinstalled Morrowind with a monstrous Vanilla-Extended Mod Pack from the Open Morrowind Modding community and spent last night sleepily clicking my way through 440 mod downloads. I’ve succeeded, and am now slightly terrified of the monster I’ve created.

It’s an interesting thing to think about - I would argue that you have a point, but unlike economics, which is by definition social because humans are fundamental to the economy - statistics can be focused on non-human subjects across the natural sciences. But, when statistics is applied to humans and societies e.g. through sample surveys, I would argue that in those situations it is operating as a social science.

I’ve not delved deeply into the definitions around this, my work is usually in programme evaluation in the development sector, but I’d be interested to look up academic writing around this question.

I’m unfortunately one of those crazy people who is genuinely enthusiastic about the philosophy of science and abstract definitions.

Back when I used to watch them, I found that Max himself and others under the greyzone umbrella are outright transphobic.

There are some examples in this article: https://socialistcurrents.org/?p=4428

I noticed this on some of their videos on youtube as well. I think that they do valuable reporting on a number of anti-imperialist causes, particularly with respect to Palestine, but I’m not going to watch people regularly who are outright bigoted against trans people like me.

Ben Norton does great work though, I watch him regularly, the Geopolitical Economy Report is well researched and well presented and I’ve yet to get a whiff of this sort of bigotry from him. Glad he went his own way.

It’s incredibly self-defeating to desperately want manufacturing to come back to the US, and then punish the Chinese when they do actually go and invest, I love how consistently the US is pulling the rug out from under its own feet these days.