A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is of the USS Abraham Lincoln arriving at Thailand, looking worn after a very long deployment to the Arabian Sea.

My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

To start briefly with Iran, there’s been two significant developments over the last week. First is that Iran is now beginning to put into practice its policy that allows preemptive strikes - a policy which was authorized by the previous Khamenei a while before his death but has so far gone unused - to strike at Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan without a corresponding American aggression immediately beforehand. The second development is that Iran is now taking a firmer stand against the US Navy in the waters of the Arabian Sea, beginning by testing anti-ship ballistic missiles against the US fleet - so far without confirmed hits as of me writing this sentence - as it is obviously disadvantageous for Iran to simply not do anything against the blockade even with US logistics under strain. The US has attempted to dissuade these new strikes by striking Iranian oil tankers, to which Iran has responded by striking oil tankers aligned with the West. This is very much not a shooting war that the US wants to get into as oil stockpiles continue to decline and diesel prices are at all-time highs (though if adjusted for inflation, we still have a little more time before we hit absolute highs). The overall picture is of an Iran growing in confidence.

There’s also been some encouraging news out of Yemen, where Ansarallah has been conducting a ground offensive weaken the enemy occupation of the western coast, including some breathtakingly precise drone-drop operations combined with using recon drones to guide ballistic missiles at enemy formations. As far as I’m aware, the blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb to Saudi tankers has been very successful, although stopping Saudi tankers from heading north towards Suez has been understandably trickier. I suppose if push comes to shove, they can continue to strike the very immobile coastal oil facilities rather than trying to hit moving ships at a great distance.

The news out of Russia/Ukraine has been quite miserable for particularly Ukrainian civilians over the past month or two, with Ukrainian strikes on Russian civilian logistics and warehouses being met with much greater Russian responses on Ukrainian civilian logistics and warehouses. Ukrainian ports are now effectively blockaded, making exporting agricultural products in the same quantities as before essentially impossible, and within the cities including Kiev, food suppliers are scrambling to find smaller warehouses to place goods in so that they aren’t as easily destroyed like the larger warehouses have been. I find it sincerely upsetting that the war has progressed to this point, though it’s always worth noting that, first, Ukraine had a few opportunities to sign pretty good negotiating terms with Russia; and second, in comparison, Western wars begin at the step of making a conflict about hurting civilians, even to the extent of it being a detriment to strategic goals by not solely hitting military targets (most famously in Gaza, but also e.g. during Obama’s term by bombing weddings and hospitals).

I will confess to not being as up-to-date on the situation in Europe, and especially Germany, in regards to the Ukraine War as I would like, but as a general statement, nothing I’ve seen over the last few years has demonstrated to me that Europe is capable of fielding a conventional force which would provide a formidable, let alone existential, threat to Russia at this stage. There’s been lots of embarrassing stories about European missile, drone, and shell production being well below standards in both quality and quantity. My thoughts are now that I think the age of the US/NATO posing an existential conventional threat to China, Russia, and probably Iran (and perhaps others like the DPRK?) is now conclusively over, with Western bases proven to be indefensible with existing missile defence programs, their logistics very vulnerable to disruption, and their aircraft not being safe to use over airspace at least as well-protected as Iran’s. The US can still do cataclysmic, nation-destroying damage to smaller, less defended countries like those in Latin America and Africa, but for the anti-US squad in Eurasia, the vast majority of the threat from the US is now a combination of financial/debt offensives and covert intelligence. We still have a long way to go on both those fronts, however - a minimum of a decade or two, I believe, even with Trump’s inadvertently anti-imperialist accelerationism.

Lastly for this preamble, the annual SCO summit took place on September 1st in Bishkek, with the leaders of China, Russia, Iran, India, Türkiye, Pakistan, and others in attendance. A lot of the usual statements were made: down with hegemonies, down with militarising space, down with unilateral sanctions, up with local currency exchanges, up with cooperation, up with peace, etc etc. The big proclamation this time around was the Bishkek Declaration, which reiterated all those points I just mentioned. Overall, it’s one of those documents where the content is mostly cool and indirectly jabs a lot at the US, but I find that paper is a generally ineffective barrier of protection against bombs and missiles, which is a pretty major avenue of… let’s say, “international communication” in the current day. And I would like to see some real contenders to the World Bank and IMF taking shape soon if we’re gonna truly start fighting hegemonism, but I digress.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ 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.
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.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.

  • Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    58·
    10 hours ago

    https://archive.ph/zZhVH

    The US may lack the engineers to rebuild space assets in a future war: RAND

    Industry is already short of skilled engineering personnel.

    more

    The defense industry would likely struggle to rebuild the U.S. military’s crucial space capabilities during a war with China or Russia because it will have too few skilled engineers to do the work, according to a new report from RAND. Today, the country’s space-focused defense companies employ roughly 3 percent of its engineers, and competition for skilled personnel means many jobs go unfilled. If an adversary destroys space-based intelligence, targeting, and communications assets, that shortfall would likely keep the military from getting them back online quickly. “Modern warfare relies on space-based capabilities; therefore, a key question is how quickly then United States can replace those capabilities during a conflict,” the report said. “Although much attention has focused on making these systems more resilient, far less has examined how fast they can be rebuilt after an attack, especially within 12 to 24 months. China and Russia have shown they can threaten or destroy U.S. space assets, potentially weakening U.S. and allied military operations across many domains. In a prolonged conflict, the ability to restore these capabilities on a short timeline could be critical.”

    Various commissions have long warned that U.S. dependence on space could become a vulnerability. In recent years, concerns have arisen over Russian and Chinese nuclear anti-satellite weapons. Rebuilding devastated constellations could require more engineers than the country has available, RAND wrote. While recent Space Force and White House initiatives aim to turn the tide, it doesn’t match the demand the administration is putting on the military space industry and, ultimately, more creative solutions are needed to grow that workforce, the report said. “Being able to reconstitute after a conflict is absolutely essential, and that’s not just business as usual for people who are working in the space industry. That’s a massive surge in production,” Alexandra Gerber, the report’s lead author, said in an interview. “Think like World War II, Rosie the Riveter, everybody’s on the line, and this is not just you can teach somebody how to work in a factory after one day. The timelines for creating people to work in the space industry are much much longer than that.

    So, we need to be thinking about what the space workforce might need to look like to support reconstitution during a conflict, 10, 20, 30 years in advance. Not just six months.”

    hmm, a plan, for several years in advance… like some kind of… N-year plan? hmm, where have I heard that before…

    Software development, data analytics, and artificial intelligence will be compete for future engineers, the report said. It can take at least 15 years to develop some of the more highly-skilled, space-focused experts. RAND researchers found “there are approximately 30,000 job openings per year for technicians and technologists, but only 11,000 individuals are credentialed annually. The space industrial base annual demand is approximately 5,000 of the annual openings (17 percent).” For the 244,000 assembly-related job fields hired for annually, there are only 13,000 people credentialed. “The space industrial base constitutes about 11,000 (5 percent) of the annual openings for assemblers, and competition for the 13,000 credentialed workers will be fierce,” the report said. Other major hurdles to growing the talent include security-clearance delays for six months or more, and a limited pool of qualified experts — foreign nationals hold 70 percent of electrical and computer engineering doctorates, making them unavailable from most national security-related work, the report said. Gerbet told Defense One the workforce isn’t needed just for a possible wartime surge. Last month, the White House released a new space transportation policy which aims to reach “more than 1,000 launches and reentries” by 2030. Building new launch infrastructure to meet that demand requires more skilled workers. “We’re currently at about 200 launches per year in the U.S. And they’re talking about timesing that by five, but who are the workers who are going to build all of this infrastructure to support that?,” Gerber said. “Then what happens if there is a conflict on top of that. Then you’re talking about a double surge.”

    Last week, President Donald Trump announced plans to create a U.S. Space Academy to “educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators.” “Think about what the volume throughput of the space academy is likely to be. I mean, you’re only talking about what, a couple hundred graduates a year,” Gerber said. “This is not sufficient, right? I mean, that’s not really happening at a scale that would impact what we’re talking about.” RAND researchers recommended that the Space Force and Pentagon focus new policy on growing workforce development by funding additional internships and vocational, bachelor’s, and advanced degree levels scholarships for science, technology, engineering, and math students, investing in fellowships, and promoting space engineering careers. Researchers said the Space Force should also “allow Reserve Officers’ Training Corps graduates and specialized program scholars to fulfill service obligations by working in qualifying” space defense firms. Additionally, researchers said the defense industry should also look to automation as a supplement to those workforce challenges. “Notably absent from these discussions were mentions of process automation, robotics, or artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled productivity tools as means to reduce the inherent labor intensity of space manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing,” the report said. “Stakeholders appear to be addressing a structural productivity challenge primarily through volume-based hiring and training strategies and giving little weight to automation as a complementary surge enabler.”

    • orlando [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      8 hours ago

      what are the prospects of this?

      process automation, robotics, or artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled productivity tools as means to reduce the inherent labor intensity

      • NewOldGuard@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        3 hours ago

        ChatGPT designed satellite comes hurtling down because it hallucinated how math works

        “Oops — you specifically requested I design a stable satellite for low earth orbit using correct physics formulas. I did the opposite, and I’m sorry. It’s not just wrong of me — it’s a failure of epic proportions. Would you like me to draft a follow up federal grant request?”

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      44·
      9 hours ago

      Turns out you can’t rely on the market to magically pop out engineers and state initiative and funding are crucial in skills formation and transfers