Tag: war

No Coalition of the Willing 2

The US is sending more troops, specifically, the 101st Airborne Division if the rumors are correct, to the Middle East:

The US is deploying a “small number” of additional troops to the Middle East after Israel launched a large-scale military operation against Lebanon, The Pentagon has announced. Spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder announced the move on Monday but declined to provide further details on the number or mission of the American troops.

”In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional US military personnel forward to augment our forces already in the region,” Ryder said. “But for operational security reasons, I’m not going to comment on or provide specifics.”

The US currently has around 40,000 troops stationed in the Middle East, along with several Navy warships and aircraft carriers, including the USS Harry S. Truman and the USS Abraham Lincoln. The assets are positioned in multiple locations to respond to potential attacks against Israel or American interests.

It appears that the USA and its Greatest Ally are not going to wait much longer for Hezbollah and Iran to break discipline and give them an excuse to claim that they had no choice but to go to war. Which means another false flag is almost certainly in the works, presumably one in the United States.

However, Spain clearly doesn’t want any part of it. There is noticeably less enthusiasm in Europe for war on behalf of Israel than there has been for war on behalf of the Kiev regime.

“The Spanish government expresses its deep dismay and condemnation of the Israeli bombardment of southern and eastern Lebanon today, which has left hundreds dead, in response to Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel over the weekend. The spiral of violence must stop.” – the Spanish Foreign Ministry

UPDATE: 101st Airborne confirmed.

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The War That Wouldn’t Start

Ron Unz suspects that the pager attack was supposed to be a preemptive first strike to disrupt a Hezbollah attack that never came:

Mossad certainly achieved a brilliant tactical victory, one that its members and pro-Israel partisans surely intend to boast about for years. But many aspects of the attack seemed very puzzling to me, and experienced military analysts wondered whether any long-term gains had been achieved.

After Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas raid last October, Hezbollah and its Israeli enemies soon began trading cross-border fire, bombarding each other with missiles, rockets, drones, and artillery shells, and those exchanges have now continued for nearly a year. As a result, some 160,000 civilians on both sides of the border have fled their homes, with perhaps 60,000 of these being Israelis.

With so many tens of thousands of Israelis having become internal refugees, displaced from their communities in the north of the country and spending the last year living in temporary accommodations, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under enormous political pressure to attack and invade Lebanon in order to drive the Hezbollah forces away from the border, thereby allowing those Israelis to return home. In addition, the most extreme religious elements among his supporters regard portions of southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s God-given lands and wish to see them conquered and annexed, with their local Lebanese residents expelled and replaced by Jewish settlers.

However, the last time the Israelis launched a ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006, their forces suffered a severe defeat at Hezbollah’s hands, and during the last eighteen years that organization has become far more powerful, with many of its troops having gained a great deal of military experience during their successful intervention in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, a year of fighting against Hamas in Gaza has left the IDF exhausted, so despite Israel’s command of the air, it’s not at all clear how well such a ground assault would go. Moreover, Hezbollah has reportedly amassed an enormous arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, and these could be used to inflict devastating damage upon most of Israel’s cities and towns if it chose to do so.

The combination of these two conflicting factors has led to repeated indecision on Israel’s part. For months, media leaks have reported that Israel had made the decision to invade Lebanon and that the attack was imminent. But nothing has ever happened, presumably because the military risks of such an operation were considered too great.

Those booby-trapped pagers and other devices might have played an absolutely crucial role in an Israeli ground invasion. If they had all been detonated at the beginning of such an attack, Hezbollah’s forces would have been left dazed and confused, with their entire communications network knocked out, thereby preventing them from mounting an effective defense or retaliatory measures. This would probably have allowed the IDF to win a major initial victory on the ground.

But instead those explosions occurred alone, with no invasion taking place. So Hezbollah has merely licked its wounds and is surely now putting in place a replacement communications network, presumably based upon a large shipment of carefully vetted pagers received from Iran or China or Russia. Israel thus lost the element of surprise, with little to show for it except wounding a large number of Hezbollah members. Thus, the exploding pagers merely produced a tactical victory instead of a potentially strategic one.

This raises the obvious question of why the Israelis chose to shoot their bolt when they did instead of waiting until the pagers could be detonated in conjunction with a major invasion.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that it is Israel that desperately wants a war while Hezbollah and Iran understand that time is on their side. Now that the technological attack has failed to spur either of the latter into action, Israel has proceeded to engage in another round of air strikes against Lebanon.

Israeli missiles slammed into the Lebanese capital of Beirut in a strike said to be targeting a senior Hezbollah commander this afternoon, after the southern suburbs were buffeted with hundreds of missiles. Hezbollah commander Ali Karaki was the target of strikes late Monday as Israeli attacks edge deeper into Lebanon, according to a security source speaking to Reuters.

Attrition warfare always favors the more numerous side. It appears that China isn’t the only one learning from watching how the Russians execute their strategies.

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The End of Awe

The Western militaries are just beginning to understand that asymmetric warfare has not only undermined their historical advantage over their adversaries, but has eliminated it completely.

You just need to be a little bit aware of what the so-called “US air force glory” consists of. And it consists of such specific “feats” that completely explain all the current troubles with the training of Ukrainian pilots on the F-16. The fact is that the US Air Force, as well as all other NATO countries, fought all their previous wars at the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st centuries in such fabulously comfortable conditions that they could even fly there on brooms, and with a good chance of completing a combat mission. All those countries that they designated as targets for their bombing in the last thirty years were very different. But in one thing they all look the same. All these countries either did not have any air defense at all, or even had it, but in such a quantitative and qualitative state that it was enough for a very short time. And then, after the suppression of this almost symbolic air defense, a real massacre of the innocents began. This happened twice in Iraq, once in Yugoslavia, and finally in the most defenseless Afghanistan. In the latter case, there was absolutely no air defense, which, firstly, allowed bombing this country with absolute impunity. And secondly, sending the newest F-35B carrier-based strike fighters there to test their combat capabilities.

The problem with the US CAS (Close Air Support) on the modern battlefield of the 21st century is that it is not survivable against immediate frontline distributed AD based on a staggering plethora of advanced and networked hardware such as S1 Pantsir, Tor M2, Buk-M2-3 and AD artillery systems such as Tunguska et al. It will also be severely jammed and denied accurate approach in the absence of GPS. The whole idea that the USAF will be defeated even before it even takes off and then defeated before completion of the mission doesn’t sit well with US generals whose combat record even against supremely inferior enemy is dismal. This is not an exaggeration, it is hard cold reality and that is what drives these sore losers like Hodges into the arms of sheer delusion. Then, let it be no surprise in observing Ben Hodges and his “colleagues” such as Keane, Petraeus and others resorting to the name calling and offering military “advice” which no responsible competent military leader would ever give, especially when having no clue about Russia and her historic warfare experience which dwarfs that of the United States. USMA at West Point used to be a decent engineering school. Not anymore…

The US Air Force hasn’t fought any air battles that came anywhere close to peer status since the Battle of Midway in 1942. In the Korean War, the US had 1,172 aircraft in the Pacific to oppose a North Korean People’s Air Force (KPAF) that consisted of only 132 aircraft. While the US and its allies lost 8,540 aircraft during the Vietnam War, almost all of them were lost to anti-aircraft artillery; the North Vietnamese captured four times more South Vietnamese aircraft than they lost during the war: 877 to 159.

The great Israeli general Moshe Dayan attributed the formidable reputation of the Israeli Defense Forces to “fighting Arabs”. In like manner, US military might always relied upon the fact that it was fighting armies without air forces. In 47 years, the US Air Force was never once put to the test by its sole rival, the VVS of the Soviet Union.

So, for 82 years, the US military enjoyed complete air supremacy over the battlefield. But the relentless advancement of air defense technology has now rendered the modern battlefield unflyable and strategic air-to-ground bombing campaigns impossible. If the NATO air force were to attempt to strike the Russian ground forces the way the Israelis are launching air strikes on Lebanon, it would be wiped out. And Israel can’t enter Iranian or Syrian air space anymore without having its jets shot down.

Since their primacy was based on the assumption of permanent air supremacy, the NATO militaries are now as barren strategically as their arsenals are empty. But it is clear that the generals and strategists of Clown World haven’t even begun to think through all the implications of the new military realities that the Chinese and Russian practitioners of the art of war have been gradually bringing about in the 25 years since Unrestricted Warfare was first published.

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Clown Nose On

Israel appears to be on the verge of openly taking up arms against Russia:

Israel is becoming a “party” to the Ukraine war.

Intelligence Community information indicates Israel is setting-up “Iron Dome-type” missile defenses in and around Kiev and Nikolaev, to fight-off Russian Missiles. Here’s the rub: The systems WILL BE CONTROLLED EXCLUSIVELY BY ISRAEL.

Moreover, Israel will be implementing “mobile radar installations” in support of these missile defenses, and their (very quietly kept) intention is to “gather as much data as possible on Russian missiles because . . . . they expect Iran to have such technology soon, if not already.”

I wouldn’t say I consider the source to be particularly reliable, but things were always bound to reach this point eventually. Clown World revolves around the Tel Aviv – New York – London axis, and so despite the historical ties between the Soviet Union and Israel, Israel was always going to find itself in opposition to Iran’s allies in Russia and China.

Given the Iron Dome’s inability to stop missiles from Gaza, Hezbollah, and Yemen, I very much doubt the Israeli assistance is going to delay the fall of the Kiev regime by so much as a single day. But it would definitely make sense for them to gather as much data on the Russian missile systems as possible before Jerusalem or Tel Aviv are the targets.

One by one, the veils are being removed. It may not be too long now before the gloves start coming off, and the next phase of WWIII begins in earnest.

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The Economic Decline of Germany

The suicidal decision to increase energy prices is now causing centuries-old German breweries to shut down:

The decline of the traditional German brewing industry shows no signs of slowing down. Recently, several breweries have filed for bankruptcy or closed permanently, resulting in the loss of centuries-old brewing traditions.

The latest victims are the Gambrinus Brewery in Weiden, Upper Palatinate, and the Gesellschaftsbrauerei Viechtach, about 100 km southeast. Both are located in the Bavarian border region with the Czech Republic, an area often described as structurally weak. The nearly 100-year-old Gambrinus Brewery filed for insolvency on Friday at the Weiden District Court due to unpaid bills and outstanding wages. The brewery’s decline is attributed to rising costs, pandemic-related sales losses, and internal issues, with current production at around 15,000 hl, half its peak output.

On Thursday, it was announced that the insolvent Gesellschaftsbrauerei Viechtach would close permanently after nearly 500 years, ceasing production. Despite intensive negotiations, no investors were willing to continue operations. Remaining employees have been let go, and the Viechtacher brand will continue to be produced at the nearby Hofmark Brewery in Loifling, located in the Cham district of the Upper Palatinate.

Last month, the 672-year-old Karmeliter-Bräu from Salz near Bad Neustadt an der Saale (about 75 km northeast of Würzburg) permanently closed its doors. The brand and distribution rights were acquired by Oettinger Brewery, one of Germany’s largest brewery groups, mainly active in the entry-level segment. It is speculated that the brand, named after a monastic order, will be used to establish the group in the higher-priced segment, similar to other well-known brands like Trappist, Augustiner, Paulaner, Franziskaner, Benediktiner, and Kapuziner.

In addition to various external and internal factors, the wave of brewery closures is also due to declining beer consumption in Germany. Recent figures show a significant drop in sales in June 2024 compared to June 2023, with a total decrease of 11.2% or nearly 1 million hl. The Federal Statistical Office reported that beer sales in June 2024, at 7.77 million hl, were the lowest for June since the Beer Tax Act was revised in 1993.

Prosperity is never a given. This decline, and in some cases, inevitable collapse of various societies is the direct result of the national elites being subverted and converted to false and foreign ideologies that promote dyscivilizational dysgenics. Diversity is not a strength, it is a fatal cancer to every society, as is readily observable in the histories of every fallen empire. The migrants are no better for the Germans than the Spaniards were for the Incas, or than the Arabs were for the Byzantines. In the end, it’s not the armies that eradicate a human society, but the women and children who normally follow them and eventually replace the native genetics with their own.

A Germany full of Germans is an economic powerhouse. An area of 357,022 square kilometers in the middle of Europe populated primarily by German-speaking Turks, Arabs, and Africans will be neither German nor an economic powerhouse. This is not rocket science.

The dirt is not magic. The ideas are not material. People will always live according to their own natural preferences. The transplantation of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to the New World is what made America what it was in the place of the American Indian societies that preceded it. Neither geography nor ideology nor language nor even religion are determinant in the end, as genetics ultimately and always dictates the destinies of nations.

As the great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has written, immigration is war. To be more specific, it is war on the native people and their culture.

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Pager Terror Attacks

It is generally accepted that Israel is to blame for a mass terrorist attack that injured more than 2900 people in Lebanon.

Israel carried out a pager bomb attack that left roughly 2,800 people injured and 12 dead in Lebanon and Syria yesterday fearing that Hezbollah was on the cusp of foiling their deadly plot, a new report has claimed.

Pager devices recently introduced by the group to beef up security exploded en masse yesterday, causing chaotic scenes and devastation in Lebanese hospitals. Israel is believed to have orchestrated the attack but has not claimed responsibility. Security sources believe Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, intercepted devices en route to Lebanon months ago and attached explosives to be used when needed to cripple the Iranian proxy group.

Still, questions remain as to why the attack was carried out on Tuesday. One American official told Axios it was ‘a use it or lose it moment’ as Hezbollah were understood to be getting close to uncovering Israeli espionage.

Three US officials told Axios that Israel decided to blow up the pager devices carried by Hezbollah members on Tuesday as they feared the group was close to uncovering their operation.

A security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives had been hidden in the new pagers and had gone ‘undetected’ by Hezbollah for months.

One senior Lebanese security source told the news agency he believes the devices had been modified by Mossad ‘at the production level’ before arriving in Lebanon. ‘The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means,’ the source said.

Hezbollah earlier this year ordered thousands of pagers to conduct communications after leader Hassan Nasrallah declared smartphones would be more susceptible to cyber attacks by Israeli forces. As many as 5,000 devices are believed to have affected, though not all went off on Tuesday, according to the Lebanese source. The source claimed Hezbollah ordered the pagers from a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo, but executives there said the devices were actually manufactured and sold under licence by BAC Consulting in Budapest, Hungary.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, later said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. The pagers appeared to receive a coded error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate and beep for some 10 seconds. When the user pressed the pager’s button to cancel the alert, the explosives were detonated – a design that would ensure the pager was being held by the user at the time of the blast to inflict maximum damage.

The months-long operation by Mossad and the IDF represents an unprecedented security breach for Hezbollah, which vowed to exact revenge on Israel and continue its support for ally Hamas amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

First, this was obviously an own goal by Israel, which doesn’t seem to grasp that it is already considered to be a genocidal terrorist state by most of the world now due to the Gazacaust. The obvious probability of collateral damage, the trivial amount of military damage that could potentially be inflicted, and the indifference to civilian casualties make it a clear and obvious act of terrorism. There is no way this is going to improve the diplomatic crisis that Israel presently faces.

Second, there are three major implications in the Unintended Consequences department. One, who in their right minds is going to buy any Israeli technological product now or in the future? For all my opposition to anti-boycott laws and policies in the USA, I don’t follow the BDS movement and I’ve never had any issue with Israeli products in the past, but there is no chance I will ever buy or utilize any Israeli product that is capable of containing explosives in the future, and I very much doubt I am alone in this.

Two, Hezbollah’s leadership already wanted its fighters to stop using mobile phones. This mass attack on pagers has underlined the wisdom of the leadership’s position and will further reduce the likelihood that Hezbollah’s fighters will violate operational security.

And three, this should put a nail in the coffin of transhumanism. Only morons are going to put a chip in their hand, or in their head, in the knowledge that there is a genuine possibility that someone will have the ability to make it explode? It may even have a negative effect on device and smart phone sales over time, particularly if it is ever repeated.

These attacks were moderately successful. But they strike me as very ill-conceived and essentially non-military in conception. They are the sort of thing that Smart Boys in intelligence always concoct because they think it would be cool and clever, not the kind of operation that is conducive to actually winning wars.

UPDATE: Israel doubled down on its exploding device attacks:

Thousands of walkie talkies used by Hezbollah fighters have detonated across Lebanon, killing nine and wounding hundreds of people including mourners at a funeral, witnesses and security sources have reported. The second wave of carnage comes a day after thousands of exploding pagers used by the group left almost 3,000 people injured and a dozen dead, including civilians and children. Lebanese media has also reported that home solar energy systems have blown up in several areas of Beirut. The latest explosions this afternoon have hit the country’s south and the capital Beirut, where dramatic time-lapse video shows multiple plumes of smoke rising above the skyline in different locations almost simultaneously.

This really doesn’t bode well for devices such as the iPhone that don’t permit users to change their own batteries. How can you trust that there isn’t an ounce or two of high-explosive attached to your battery if it’s in a sealed-off department?

It’s certainly an object lesson in “build your own communications equipment” for everyone around the world.

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Douhet Wept

There’s an amount of discussion of the potential ramifications for the Middle East of the Yemeni missile that was used to strike the Gezer power plant from 1,265 miles away.

The Israeli air defense failed to intercept the Yemeni missile primarily because it is capable of changing its course suddenly – Israeli Channel 12. The US Navy failed to intercept the missile in the Red Sea as well. Great possibility that this was hypersonic.

Yemen confirmed that they used a hypersonic ballistic missile in the attack on Tel Aviv Yemeni Armed Forces says it hit an Israeli military target in Yaffa (Tel Aviv) with a new hypersonic ballistic missile that traveled 2,040 kilometers. This is the first time that an Iranian-made hypersonic missile has been used in an attack on Israel.

No doubt this has some ominous implications for the prospective Israel-Iran war. But of far more concern to Americans should be the fact that the military force that just drove the US Navy from the Red Sea has just demonstrated the capacity to hit a target from long range. Which means that both Iran and Yemen, to say nothing of China and Russia, almost certainly possess the ability to sink the US Navy’s carriers at will from longer range than the carriers’ own air assets can reach.

We are rapidly entering the post-airpower age, which has considerable implications for the applicability of seapower. A considerable amount of strategic rethinking is now in order.

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Israel Invades the West Bank

Apparently the Gazacaust wasn’t enough, so the IDF has entered the West Bank in force now.

Having failed to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, Israel on August 28 began a war on the West Bank, dubbed ‘Operation Summer Camps’.

This Israeli assault on West Bank areas is the largest since 2002, with thousands of Israeli soldiers, supported by helicopters and drones, invading northern West Bank cities, particularly targeting the refugee camps of Jenin, Tubas, and Tulkarem.

I don’t know how much longer the US media is going to be able to pretend this isn’t a long-planned ethnic cleansing. I suppose the Israeli government figures they’ve gotten as much as they can out of the “helpless victims” routine and so it’s time to switch to mask off mode.

But this primarily strikes me as an escalation meant to encourage Iranian action before the Palestinians can further attrit the IDF and its US supplier.

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How to Get Your Ship Sunk

US Navy officers were caught putting a contraband Starlink satellite dish on their ship so they could stream TV and movies:

Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment. For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.

But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.

As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.

So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.

It’s like the idiotic mercenaries in Ukraine who carry their cell phones around with them until Mr. Kaliber or Mr. Iskander comes to visit, only on a grand scale. I think we can definitely say that this officially marks the end of the Pax Americana and the US Navy ruling the oceans. This navy will be lucky if any of its ships survive contact with the enemy. I mean, it’s already lost one battle against the landlocked forces of Yemen.

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Clowns are Falling

Sweden’s Foreign Minister unexpectedly resigned on the same day that the Kiev regime fired what seems to be about half of its cabinet.

Tobias Billstrom, who oversaw Sweden’s accession to NATO, has announced his resignation as foreign minister and retirement from politics, offering no reason for the move. Billstrom, 50, was first elected to the Swedish parliament in 2002 and was appointed foreign minister in 2022… As his biggest achievement over the past two years, Billstrom listed Sweden’s abandonment of its 200-year neutrality to join NATO “after a long and sometimes challenging process.”

I suspect the reason for his sudden resignation is that more Swedish “instructors” were killed in the recent double-Iskander missile strike in Poltava than have been reported. The number of KIA is officially 41, but Ukrainian locals are reporting up to 760 bodies in the morgue. To go from 200 years of safe neutrality to losing dozens of military officers in a single Russian strike is a catastrophe that the leading advocate of abandoning neutrality would have to be held responsible.

One hopes that the utterly deluded Swiss politicians who are so desperate to follow Sweden’s lead will learn from Billstrom’s example and abandon their insane campaign to sign Switzerland up for the same sort of military and economic devastation that is facing the NATO slave-nations.

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