Image is from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ recent article on Kashmir.
It looks like the spat between India and Pakistan could be dying down, due to a new ceasefire. As of the time of me writing this paragraph, it seems both sides want to maintain it (despite some reports of violations here and there).
Both sides have declared victory, which is completely expected given their mutual political parties and nationalist histories. It’s a little harder to say which side has actually won, as both sides seem to have managed to shoot down aircraft and hit military bases. India has, in my opinion, had the more embarrassing moments, but international conflicts aren’t cringe compilations. I feel no good-will towards Pakistan’s comprador government, but it is at least nice to see Modi knocked down a few pegs. Regardless of the final technical victor, it’s obvious that - if the ceasefire is maintained - who won are the hundreds of millions of people who won’t have to live in fear of dying in nuclear hellfire.
This conflict is a good example of what multipolarity will truly entail. Countries that have been previously limited in their nationalist ambitions by American pressure will now take opportunities to revolt, sometimes against America itself, and sometimes against other countries in their regional neighbourhood. It’s also why, as communists, our goals do not stop at multipolarity; it is merely the establishing act of a new era of agitation against peripheral and semi-peripheral capitalist countries that are forming powerful national bourgeoisie classes as the international American capitalists are forced away.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
You may have explained it before, but why does Yemen send so few rockets at a time? It seems like the best option would be to send many at different targets and push the zio’s ability to intercept them to the max
The simple answer is that a Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle (MaRV) equipped medium range ballistic missile (MRBM) is very expensive to produce. The first ever missile of this class, the Pershing-II developed in the 1980s, cost $10 million each. Now costs have gone down and these systems have proliferated, but they still are quite expensive. The IRGC has said that a Fattah-1 MaRV equipped MRBM costs $200 000 just to manufacture, excluding research, development and training costs, upkeep and maintenance, deployment cost, etc. The Palestine-2 missile Ansarallah/the Houthis in Yemen use is a Kheibar Shekan/Fattah-1 variant. So even with costs having gone down by quite a large amount since the 1980s, each Palestine-2 missile costs hundreds of thousands, potentially over a million dollars. Only large state actors such as Iran can afford to fire large volleys of these missiles while maintaining readiness and stockpiles.
Given that, Ansarallah’s strategy is to mostly target countervalue targets in Israel like airports, with very limited strikes on counterforce targets like military installations. Now 100% interception of missiles aimed at a countervalue targets, where even a near miss can cause large economic damage (such as the missile that impacted around 500m from the Ben Gurion airport terminal) is impossible. Yemen just needs to trigger the air raid sirens every few days, and have a missile slip through the defensive net every month or two, to achieve their objectives at this level of exchange. Even if Israeli countervalue strikes (like the Israeli airstrikes on airports, seaports and cement factories a few days ago) do a disproportionate amount of damage, Ansarallah is prepared to absorb that, at least for now. This is what Trump means by saying “they’re prepared to take a tremendous amount of punishment”. It kind of breaks the traditional escalation model, usually if you hit your adversary much harder than they it you, the adversary ceases attacks. That doesn’t work in Yemen for a number of reasons, mainly to do with Ansarallah’s ideological commitment to the Palestinian cause, and the US-Iran situation.
i suspect not the cost, but rather oxidizer (i assume they are solid fuel?) and avionics are a crucial snag, you have to import those fuckers, can’t make them for bullshit lying around (well, you can but it would be rather noticeable installation).
*i actually wonder, avionics with modern powerful step motors can become achievable for diy anti-genocide enthusiasts
At the end of the day, an autopilot system is just a collection of PID controllers. These are systems which are used throughout the world of navigation, industrial machinery, and robotics. The most familiar example would be the cruse-control system on a car. It has one setpoint, and adjusts the throttle to reach that setpoint without severely over/undershooting it. As you drive up a hill, it increases the throttle to maintain speed. As the road levels off and the speed begins to over-shoot the setpoint, it reduces the throttle to bleed off this excess speed.
These things are closed loop systems. They manipulate an output directly (voltage to an electric motor, for instance) while monitoring an input (rotations per minute or angular distance, for instance) which directly influences the output. With properly tuned parameters, they can adapt quickly to changing forces, like transient pressures on a control surface introduced by turbulence. These systems can be built in layers, where one layer might aim to keep the control surfaces at a set position, while a higher level system may adjust those setpoints to maintain some other value like airspeed, altitude, heading, etc., and then an even higher level system may adjust those setpoints to execute something resembling a flight plan.
Stepper motors typically aren’t used for systems like this, but you could effectively turn a stepper motor into a poor man’s servo by simply adding a linear / axial encoder so its movement can be measured, provide feedback, and account for “skipped steps.” They almost certainly aren’t strong enough for jet / rocket propulsion, but if we’re talking DIY and using what you’ve got, the same principles apply.
Thinking to myself: Surely somebody must have started an open source project dabbling with stuff like this. Sure enough: https://ardupilot.org/
Sounds simple but not easy
Also heat shielding, atmospheric re-entry at Mach 14+ is quite a violent experience. The heat shield also needs to be transparent enough to let the GNSS of the guidance system work, while surviving re-entry.
And yes, all solid fuel.
considering the precision, i would think they probably can deal with graphite foam or some shit, they are no exactly precise nor do they need to be for their goals. do they do terminal guidance at all?
*ah but they likely have to to get to 200m, nvm
Guidance for the Fattah-1 and Kheibar Shekan series is INS (Inertial navigation using gyroscopic sensors) and satellite navigation in GNSS at all phases of flight, which also provides updates to the missiles current position to reduce compounding errors in the INS.
Accuracy from the missiles launched by Yemen is the same as those launched by Iran during Operation True Promise II, if not slightly better, mean error radius (known as circular error probable, or CEP) is probably around 400-500m now, if Iran corrected the overshoot issue during Operation True Promise II. I think the issue is that the INS system is not great, and the missiles suffer from GNSS jamming by Israel, leading to such a high CEP for a conventional weapon. The Iranian solution to this has been to mount electro optical seekers (likely infrared cameras) to their missiles for terminal guidance to improve accuracy, their longest range missile in this series is the recently released Qassem Basir, 1200-1300km range. There is no such version of the Kheibar Shekan or Fattah-1 though, so you’re right, no explicit terminal guidance system, just the GNSS and INS for all phases of flight.
ah so they do have inertial, interesting. cameras, as far as i know, is the most complicated way especially for the hypersonics (don’t think they do it due to blinding from plasma tbh) and on reentry as well likely wouldn’t work, you have to do complicated filters and stuff (not germanium windows, but close enough), as well as much more modern electronics to deal with information inputs.
The camera likely only turns on during the glide phase after the pullup maneuver is complete, due to the plasma blinding and other issues. At that point the MaRV is well within the earth’s atmosphere/below 100km in altitude, and velocity is below Mach 5.
Exaggerated not to scale graphic, but it visualises the phases of flight nicely.
I like how Peru is firing a MaRV at Arkansas in this illustration.
i thought camera was for extreme low altitude guidance tbh, below clouds and radar horizons rockets, as expressed in that french rockets ukrainians were using
The goal is extended economic damage against the entity, blockade and strangulation. If Yemen did that they would surely inflict damage but then be vulnerable to the response from the Zionists. This way they can keep shutting down the ports and airports indefinitely
Yemen is in an astonishingly interesting historical position. Despite limited resources and the enmity of the American Empire, they’re waging incredibly successful economic warfare. If humanity survives waves hands at everything, Yemen’s actions right now ought to be required military reading for a very long time.
They build them underground and can barely import stuff or really transport internal resources without being bombed.
I think it’s because they don’t have high volume production capacity and need to build their stockpile. They can probably only do a mass unloading once before they’d deplete what they have. If they lob one of two at a time, then they can keep the zionists on their toes while accruing missiles.