u/Axelrad77

WSJ has a new report from onboard the USS George Washington, as it conducts blockade operations and replenishes supplies for a possible escalation against Iran. One interesting tidbit to come out of this video is that the two carriers on station are operating in day/night shifts, with the USS George Washington operating at night while the USS George HW Bush operates during the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToGXm1r198U

When the British flanking maneuver gained the Plains of Abraham, they deployed in a way that blocked the main road connecting Québec to its supply depot at Batiscan. British ships were also blocking the route down the St Lawrence River. Québec was dangerously low on provisions due to a series of poor harvests and Wolfe's devastation of the surrounding countryside, so Montcalm had to keep his supply route open in order to keep the siege going. That meant forcing the British from the field. He immediately sent word to Bougainville to bring his flying column of 2,000 men up from Cap Rouge to attack the British from the rear, but he knew it would take hours for them to arrive.

And from Montcalm's perspective, it looked like the British were already beginning to dig in and entrench their position. They weren't, they hadn't even brought entrenching tools with them, but Montcalm mistook their movements in the distance - probably aided by sleep deprivation, as he had spent the entire night awake at the Beauport defenses, where he had expected Wolfe's landing to actually take place. Instead, the British made a noisy diversion there, and the actual landing took Montcalm completely by surprise, because he thought the cliffs at Anse au Foulon were unscalable by any substantial number of men.

So if you look at things from Montcalm's perspective - if the British are allowed to entrench, then pushing them off the Plains of Abraham would become impossible. And then you're trapped inside Québec with no food left, and the land-facing walls of the city were weaker than the river-facing fortifications that Montcalm had focused on holding (partly due to Vaudreuil's earlier insistence not to bother fortifying the city). So allowing the British to capture the Plains of Abraham could effectively hand them the battle. In hindsight, the smart thing to do might have been to wait for Bougainville to arrive and attack the British from both sides, but Montcalm had no way to know where Bougainville was or when he might arrive. Montcalm appears to have panicked somewhat, and grew anxious that any attack would become impossible if he waited too long and allowed the British to dig in. Notably, this was the first time in the entire war that Montcalm found himself outmaneuvered, and he was having to respond to it on very little sleep. As it was, Montcalm waited about 3 hours for Bougainville to arrive, which was how long he guessed such a move would take. When Bougainville still had not appeared, Montcalm decided he had to attack on his own - only for Bougainville to show up about an hour later, just after the battle was over.

Tellingly, Montcalm is quoted just before the battle as saying: "We cannot avoid action; the enemy is entrenching, he already has two pieces of cannon. If we give him time to establish himself, we shall never be able to attack him with the sort of troops we have. Is it possible that Bougainville doesn't hear all that noise?"

The major opposition candidate is Eisenkot, who is also very hawkish against Iran and its proxies (as is most of Israel), but he disagrees with the specifics of how Netanyahu has been doing things. He argues that economic pressure and targeted strikes on Iran's nuclear program are the best approach - Eisenkot is a big supporter of the "campaign between wars", ie using covert operations and targeted strikes to erode enemy capabilities without enduring the costs of a full-scale war. Whereas Netanyahu argues for an all-out regime change war (which is clearly what the initial goal of this conflict was).

Eisenkot is a former head of the IDF, responsible for implementing some important training reforms, strengthening their cooperation with the US military, and solidifying the Dahiya Doctrine of disproportionate response as deterrence. He later joined Netanyahu's Emergency War Cabinet in the wake of the Oct 7 attacks, but then resigned 8 months later after becoming increasingly critical of what he saw as Netanyahu's failures of strategic leadership - accusing him of prolonging the war for political reasons.

From a foreign policy perspective, he's promising a lot of the same stuff - keep Iran from getting nukes, destroy Hamas and Hezbollah, etc. But he promises a more effective way to do it, leaning on his military planning experience in opposition to Netanyahu's increasingly partisan populism. It's worth noting that Netanyahu was a Sayeret Matkal commando, which is prestigious and all, but he never rose to a command role and is arguably out of his depth trying to direct foreign policy in the way he does, while Eisenkot has years of experience planning entire military operations and is arguing that makes him better suited to defend Israel.

A lot of Eisenkot's differences are domestic policies, where he's much more centrist than Netanyahu's far-right positions. Things like reducing cost of living, education reforms, an independent judiciary, and setting term limits for Prime Minister. He's promising an inquiry into the failures that allowed the Oct 7 attacks, with full accountability - something Netanyahu has desperately avoided doing. He also promises to extend military conscription to all citizens, whereas Netanyahu relies on exempting Haredi Jews from conscription to secure their support. He's also vowed to crack down on settler violence and Jewish terrorism, accusing Netanyahu of preventing the IDF from doing so for political reasons.

Eisenkot used to be broadly supportive of a two-state solution, but has turned hard against that ever since the Oct 7 attacks. Now he seems to support more of a semi-autonomous Palestinian territory under Israeli military control. The two-state solution in general is something that's popular in the West, but incredibly unpopular within Israel and Palestine, which is why it's always faced such issues being adopted.

The general consensus is that Montcalm's forces punched above their weight throughout the conflict, so it's difficult to see how simply changing one commander could have much of a positive effect. The issues that New France faced were more systemic in nature, rather than something that could be solved by one "Great Man" in the right position.

New France had an enormous population disadvantage - roughly 70,000 French colonists were facing roughly 1,500,000 British colonists. Apart from anything else, this meant that even just local recruitment gave the British a weight of numbers that was difficult to resist.

New France also suffered a lack of reinforcements from abroad, due to British naval superiority. What regular troops could arrive from France mostly did so in the first years of the war - from 1757 onwards, the British blockade of France became so effective that it largely cut off further French reinforcement, resupply, and naval support. French forces in New France began to starve due to poor harvests, while more British troops kept arriving from across the Atlantic, along with more ships to carry out amphibious operations.

New France also had a terribly divided command structure. Montcalm was in command of the regular French troops in the field, but Vaudreuil, the Governor-General of New France, was actually the overall theater commander, and had control of the militia and the marines and the alliances with the Native Americans. The two men did not agree on matters of strategy, and constantly clashed over the direction of the war. Vaudreuil thought that aggressive frontier raiding was the answer, to force the British onto the defensive and deter them from invading, and that utilizing Native American allies was the best way to accomplish that. Montcalm was convinced that their numbers disadvantage necessitated a defensive war, with regular troops fighting from fortifications to simply preserve territory until the peace treaty.

As Vaudreuil was his superior, Montcalm obliged to conduct large raids against Fort Oswego and Fort William Henry. These campaigns were certainly effective and saw Montcalm command a mixed force of regulars, marines, militia, and Native allies - where the irregular troops were used to support more conventional siege operations by the regulars. Montcalm went into these raids with a mixed opinion of Native allies, as he was frustrated by their lack of discipline and command issues (being of so many various tribes and languages), but he also recognized their superb skill as light infantry, saying: "in the midst of the woods of America one can no more do without them than without cavalry in open country." However, he came away from the raids disgusted by what he viewed as their savage and dishonorable conduct - namely the torture and massacre of noncombatants, including cannibalism - and sought to rely on them less in the future.

Vaudreuil had no such reservations, and recruited thousands of Native Americans to raid into the British frontier. 1756-57 saw the most successful recruitment of Native allies ever in New France, with the sheer numbers arriving for service overcoming even Montcalm's reservations. This influx of Native allies was used in both the Fort William Henry campaign and dispatched to conduct small-scale raiding across the frontier, which was so effective that it largely caused the abandonment of frontier settlements and forts in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. This did not have Vaudreuil's expected result of deterring invasion, but instead led to the mobilization of American militia to defend against the raids, and the realization that only by striking into New France could they cut off the raids at their source. Ironically, it also led to a massive smallpox epidemic among the Native tribes who took part, which severely curtailed their participation in later years of the war, regardless of how much the French wanted more of their help.

When that British invasion came, Montcalm was able to successfully head it off at Fort Carillon, where he was able to fight in his preferred method of regular troops entrenched behind fortifications (with just a handful of militia and Native allies for scouting), and won a decisive victory against a much larger force. But the British numerical and naval superiority showed, as they had also sent two other invasion forces that managed to successfully capture Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne. Montcalm could only defend one place at a time, while the British now had the ability to attack from three directions at once. That move opened up the path to Québec and forced Montcalm to withdraw north to defend there.

The defense of Québec really highlighted the division in French command. Vaudreuil planned for a guerrilla war, where the city itself would be abandoned, allowing French forces to disperse around the region and take control of interior supply lines, raiding and harassing the British to make their occupation too costly to maintain. Whereas Montcalm planned to improve the city's fortifications and conduct a conventional siege defense that concentrated French forces around Québec, aiming to hold out until a peace treaty was signed.

It was only on May 10, 1759 that France finally intervened in their feuding, with new instructions arriving that placed Montcalm in overall command - prompting a sudden shift in orders to recall dispersed troops and fortify around Québec. Montcalm's fortifications proved extremely effective at hindering British General Wolfe's efforts to conduct a siege, leading Wolfe to become increasingly despondent about his chances of success. This led Wolfe to resort to a month-long campaign of raids and harassment of his own, burning much of the surrounding countryside in an effort to lure Montcalm into a pitched battle. But Montcalm was committed to holding out until the war was over, causing Wolfe to grow so desperate that he attempted his bold flanking maneuver (which even Wolfe does not seem to have expected to work). It did work, however, cutting off Québec's supply lines and finally forcing Montcalm into the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. By that time, the French regulars were in much worse fighting condition than earlier in the war - likely a result of malnutrition, poor morale, and militia levies - whereas the British forces had only become better trained as the war went on.

I think this all gets at the point of why the Lévis hypothetical doesn't hold water - simply replacing one commander doesn't change the overall strategic situation. Vaudreuil would still be in overall command and his strategy would still be pursued until 1759. Even if we imagine that Lévis does so with greater enthusiasm, the resources to do so simply aren't there. There's also the cultural divide at play - much of the animosity between Vaudreuil and Montcalm came from Vaudreuil being a Canadian-born "colonial" and Montcalm being a French-born "metropolitan", and the prejudice each had against the other for that. Lévis was another metropolitan, very much in the Montcalm camp in that regard.

To be clear, the British also suffered from some divisions in their command, between the local colonial committees and the British Army, but they had a more centralized command structure with the Newcastle-Pitt ministry running the war from London, giving each campaign season a clear goal and working to smooth over those divisions. They saw the invasion of New France as a primary war aim, while maintaining a more defensive posture in Europe. France was content to let Vaudreuil and Montcalm feud for so long because they viewed things exactly the opposite - that the war would be won in Europe, and that New France (which they saw as essentially indefensible) could simply be negotiated back in the peace treaty once the war was won.

To quote Fred Anderson on the matter:

What neither Vaudreuil nor Montcalm realized was that the king and his ministers regarded their disputes as trivial because they were quietly writing North America out of France's grand strategy. In the late winter and spring of 1758, the attention of Versailles and the military resources of France were both coming to center on the army in Hanover, the defense of the Channel coast against British raids, and the potential of mounting an invasion of England. No flood of foodstuffs, no tide of troops, would relieve the shortages that crippled New France. Insofar as warships would be employed in American waters in numbers large enough to be decisive, they would defend the valuable sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, not succor the hungry, unprofitable colony against which the English were about to fling such overwhelming force.

From 1758 onward, the French would fight to maintain their influence in continental Europe while the British would fight to conquer an empire, a difference in goals that would eventually prove decisive.

Sources:

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson

The French-Indian War 1754-1760 by Daniel Marston

I feel like I've seen more and more of these hypothetical posts as a karma farming thing lately. Usually we'd just see news posts like this after something happens, even if the numbers are really cherry-picked, but "If this unlikely thing happens to happen, it would be very unlikely!" is not high quality content imo (rule 2).

Well you're talking about two different things here. Resistance movements blending in with civilians might be viewed as more effective, but it's also against international law, and specifically forfeits many of the protections that international law normally grants. So it's always quite hypocritical to invoke international law and talk of "legitimate targets" when allowing a special exemption for one side to break that same law because you agree with them.

Edit: well now I see that this comment has been ghost edited to be completely different. Originally what I replied to was something like "do you expect armed resistance to wear uniforms? how do you think that would've went in WW2?"

In response to the edited comment, which reads "Un says otherwise, youre free to take up armed resistance against and occupying force" ...

No. No they don't.

International law says that people have the right to fight against foreign occupation, that much is correct. But international law also says that fighting has to be conducted in a certain way - distinguishing resistance fighters from civilians, avoiding terrorism and hostage-taking, only attacking military targets, etc. So the UN explicitly outlaws the act of not wearing a uniform and blending in with civilians, and resistance groups that do this forfeit much of the protection that international law normally affords both combatants and civilian areas.

The confusion here is from the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Basically, the law for starting a war, and the law for actually fighting a war. You can be in agreement with one but in violation of the other. The Iran War is a great example of this. The US-led attack is widely accused of violating jus ad bellum - having no legitimate cause - but the US conduct of the war itself has been in keeping with jus in bello. Whereas Iran's right to self-defense is widely claimed as jus ad bellum, but its actual conduct of the war has been rife with violations of jus in bello.

We dont know how well maintained Russian is. Theres wild speculation. 

Not among nuclear arms experts, there isn't. The consensus is that Russia's nukes work just fine. Russia is pouring tons of money into them to keep it that way, rather than use that money on other parts of its military or economy. Because Russia knows that its nuclear deterrent is the only thing keeping it alive at this point.

Ukraine's issue in the 1990s was that it had no money to put into its nukes, so its own military said they couldn't keep them working. Hypothetically, we can imagine a scenario where Ukraine turned itself into a North Korea or Iran style dictatorship in order to fund maintenance of its nuclear deterrent, but then the question becomes if Ukrainians would think that's a good trade.

That wouldn't have made a difference. If anything, keeping them would've made Ukraine into another Belarus - more dependent on Russia in the end.

Nuclear deterrence does work, don't get me wrong, but the issue in this case is was that Ukraine couldn't afford to maintain the nukes it inherited, and didn't have the ability to launch them itself. The cost of everything was a major problem Ukraine had to deal with when it became independent - it inherited both a massive military and a terrible economy, which did not pair well together. So it had to downsize its military in order to afford anything.

At the time, Ukraine did a study on the feasibility of keeping the nukes. The launch controls were all in Moscow, but Kyiv assumed that they could figure out a workaround if needed. However, the Ukrainian military reported that they only had the ability to maintain the nukes for a few years, and they likely wouldn't function for more than a decade or so. It ultimately came down to money - nukes are expensive, and Ukraine had basically no money when it first became independent.

Then the USA stepped in and offered Ukraine a shitload of money in economic aid, but only if they agreed to hand over the nukes for safe disposal. The USA has always been really concerned about nuclear proliferation, and as the USSR was collapsing, there was a lot of worry that it would break up into small warlord states that were more willing to use nukes before they went bad.

Thus the dilemma Ukraine faced - keep the nukes and have guaranteed deterrence for a decade or so, but a struggling economy, or give up the nukes and get a huge cash infusion into the economy. Ukraine looked at Russia - the country it would need to deter - and saw that its military was also falling apart at the time, so ultimately decided that having a few years of deterrence wasn't as important as rebuilding the economy and strengthening ties with the West.

A decision that I think was ultimately correct, as Ukraine's thriving tech sector and improved Western ties were things that have helped it defend itself from the Russian invasion. Whereas a Ukraine with a worse economy would've likely been forced back into the Russian orbit to survive, like we see with Belarus and its terrible economy leading it to basically become a vassal state. Especially since Ukraine's nuclear deterrence would've stopped working at about the same time Russia was rebuilding its military.

Sal Mercogliano at What's Going on With Shipping has a new video tackling a lot of the online disinformation going around concerning Hormuz transits and tanker attacks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOMk6xf1yus

The name comes from wartime Chrysler ads, but was never used in the military. Basically a marketing stunt.

Source: M10 and M36 Tank Destroyers, 1942-53 by Steven Zaloga

This title is a great example of how subtle propaganda can be.

Describing the Yemeni government forces as "Saudi forces" or "pro-Saudi forces" is a purposeful thing the Houthis do to make them seem less legitimate, like they're just a proxy for foreigners. Of course, the same argument can be used for the Houthis, who are very much an Iranian proxy force. The reality is that both sides of the civil war have substantial foreign involvement.

So a neutral title would simply say "Houthis" and "Yemeni forces". If we really wanted to highlight the relative foreign leaning, we could say "pro-Iran forces" and "pro-Saudi forces". But choosing to only do that to one side is either the result of bias, or a deliberate choice meant to influence people.

Imagine if the title was reversed, talking about "pro-Iran rebels attacking Yemeni government troops". You can probably hear the spin in that easier, since it's coming from the other side.

Labels during civil wars are something thing that really do effect how people view the warring factions. For instance, studies have shown that when teaching the US Civil War, using "US Army vs Confederate Army" framing causes people to view the Confederacy more negatively, whereas using "Union Army vs Confederate Army" framing causes people to view the Confederacy more sympathetically. The latter elevates the Confederacy to an equal cause with the Union, while the former positions it as a rebellion against the USA. Which is why we're seeing academia of recent years gradually move away from "Union" framing and towards "USA" framing when discussing the US Civil War. (The old-fashioned "North vs South" framing preferred by the Lost Cause narrative is even more extreme in this grab for equivalency - in many ways the "Union" label was an academic compromise of its time.)

We see similar word-wars going on with Yemen, and all these "Saudi" labels trying to elevate the Houthis to the status of the legitimate government, while delegitimizing the existing Yemeni government as simply being a Saudi proxy. But we should not lose sight of the fact that this is ultimately a Yemeni Civil War, even though foreign militaries are intervening on both sides.

The point of obstacles isn't to stop attacks by themselves, but to slow them down and redirect them into preferred kill zones. Obstacles by themselves can't do jack shit, they have to be supported by fire.

So in an example like these anti-tank obstacles, what they're supposed to do is bog down the lead vehicles and force the following tanks to either 1. bunch up while waiting for a breach to be made, or 2. detour into the easier-to-access kill zone that the defenders have prepared. In either case, it helps give the artillery and drones and whatnot a more vulnerable target.

That's not what "open source" means. The term you're looking for is "technology transfer", which is the standard military terminology for this happening - when blueprints are shared so that the customer/partner nation can produce a weapon domestically. The UK and France still have final say on how Ukraine uses them - ie the "kill switch" conspiracy language you were using.

France has also agreed to a technology transfer of Aster interceptors with Ukraine, and the USA has agreed to a technology transfer of Patriot interceptors with Ukraine.

Yes, it gives a great look at both the operational planning and then how the battles actually went.

Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Felix Salten (HM)

I particularly recommend the Zipes translation that came out in 2022, which is much more faithful to the original German than the 1928 Chambers translation is. Not just in the language & dialogue, but the Chambers translation cut out the more mature content (against Salten's wishes) in order to market the book in the USA as an animal story for kids, which is what became the basis for the Disney movie.

Zipes preserves the original German tone of the story as a darker allegory for antisemitism - something Salten himself had experienced, and would wind up fleeing Austria to escape. There's a reason that Nazi Germany banned the book.

There definitely were - in addition to the Ka-52 and Mi-24 helicopters, Russia also sent two Su-25s to provide close air support. Ukraine had two Su-24s and one MiG-29 doing attack runs on the airfield once the Russians had entrenched there - the Su-24s dropped bombs, while the MiG-29 used rockets.

There was also an air battle north of Hostomel, as the air assault force approached. Ukraine sent five MiG-29s to intercept it, but it was escorted by a screen of Russian Su-27s and Su-35s that fought off the Ukrainian attack, downing two of the MiG-29s.

AFAIK there's no actual footage of the aircraft in action during the battle though.

Source: Kyiv 2022 by Mark Galeotti

The argument put forth by biblical scholar Bart Ehrman in his book The Triumph of Christianity is that this spread is a natural result of the exclusive nature of these religions. That just a gradual growth in monotheism over time has led to the takeover of the world religions.

Ancient polytheistic religions did not really compete for conversions. They instead tended to syncretize with each other - adding new gods to the pantheon, or having your gods take on attributes of foreign gods. Greco-Roman writings give us the most well-known examples of this in action, with many descriptions of foreign gods interpreted as simply being "their version" of existing Greek or Roman gods. Romans gradually incorporating the Greek god stories into their own mythology has given many people nowadays the mistaken idea that the Romans just copied the Greek pantheon wholesale, when it was more about adding elements of Greek religion to an existing Roman religion. And when syncretism wasn't possible, new gods could simply be introduced - such as the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Iranian god Mithras both eventually becoming part of the Roman pantheon.

I used Greco-Roman examples here because of their popularity, but this was something that happened across the ancient world. Some non-Greco-Roman examples to look at would be Carthage adopting Heracles (and syncretizing him with their existing god Melqart), or the Israelite adoption of Yahweh (and syncretizing him with their existing gods El and Baal.)

All of that is to say, when ancient polytheistic religions encountered new gods, it wasn't typically a choice between religions. They had more adaptive methods of dealing with these encounters, where the pantheon of gods itself was often reshaped in a way that placed all these new gods firmly on your side. So for instance, you could be a follower of Jupiter, and still worship Apollo. No harm there.

What changes with monotheism is that these religions become exclusive. If you're a follower of Apollo and want to become a Christian or Muslim, well you can't worship Apollo anymore. So once someone converts to a monotheistic religion, there is now one less polytheist in the world. In practice, there are actually several fewer polytheists, because entire families typically worshipped whatever religion the head of the household chose.

Ehrman argues that even with a relatively slow conversion rate, this sort of gradual replacement leads us to the modern situation of mostly monotheistic belief, as polytheistic religions simply found themselves out-competed by the active proselytizing of monotheists. And while both Christianity and Islam began with slow conversion rates, they both experienced greater conversion rates once they became state religions backed by impressive military conquests - which convinced many people that their gods were the ones who had real power.

Guy Gavriel Kay's books are a good example of how this can be done successfully. He basically writes alternate history with the names changed and sprinkles subtle bits of magic into the worldbuilding. The fantastical elements of his books are so subtle, in fact, that fantasy readers are sometimes disappointed that the books are so much like historical fiction. You can look at his bibliography on wikipedia and see that they list the historical analogue for every novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Gavriel_Kay#Novels

Another good example to study is the way that Lois McMaster Bujold approaches The Curse of Chalion and The Paladin of Souls. Both of these books are set in an alternate version of Medieval Spain with all the names changed, but they include a greater magic component that influences the story. It's really insightful to look at how she replaces the historical religions of Christianity and Islam with her fictional religion, but maintains the religious war of the region by making them into two differing interpretations of the same gods (which is basically what Christianity and Islam are irl, and why it works so well.)

As for the major role that religion played in ancient societies, that can be genuinely difficult for a modern secular person to grasp. It was a part of everyday life in a way that we just no longer experience post-enlightenment. I'd still recommend trying to grasp it, though, as understanding how a religious society functions can help with fantasy worldbuilding as well, and especially help avoid religious cliches. Obviously studying history and religion would be the biggest help, but an unorthodox recommendation would be to play Kingdom Come Deliverance - a role-playing video game set in 1403 Bohemia, which does a great job of just letting you roam around a medieval setting and interact with lots of characters, who all take religion as an assumed truth.

Because their management is incredibly incompetent.

I have no idea why anyone here would still be excited for Medieval 3 or WH40K, after CA has repeatedly shown they have no idea what they're doing anymore, and especially have no respect for their playerbase.

Yeah, I don't think the psyop stuff is allowed here - it's not technically "combat" per rule 4.

So this sub only sees the results of it in some videos of prisoners being taken, like one back in 2022 when a Russian BMP crew arranged to surrender themselves and their vehicle by calling the number on a pamphlet.

I imagine that most of it doesn't qualify as combatfootage per the sub rules, though I know there have been a few videos of the results - when Russian troops turn up to their arranged surrender location and then follow a Ukrainian drone into captivity.

There was an early video that got a lot of views, back from Kherson in 2022, where a Russian BMP and its entire crew surrendered to Ukrainian forces after calling the number on a pamphlet to arrange the surrender.

Why would you assume that Ukraine doesn't? There's been tons of pamphlet drops, going back to the beginning of the war, as well as other psyops like loudspeaker broadcasts, contacting family members, or hacking into Russian communications to broadcast messages. Basically always calling on Russian troops to surrender and giving them instructions on how to do so.

Ukraine runs a hotline number that Russian troops can call in to arrange a time and place to surrender, where they are met with a Ukrainian drone that then guides them to Ukrainian forces. There's been a few videos of such operations posted here - Ukraine claims to get around 60 surrenders a week through that system.

The US blockade of Iran continues to block Iranian oil exports, leading to record inflation and rolling power outages inside Iran. Iran is now struggling to pay salaries and pensions for jobs across its economy, including the military and IRGC. This has reportedly led to sharp debate within Iranian leadership about how to further prosecute the war - whether to escalate attacks or try for a more negotiated settlement.

Meanwhile, Middle East oil exports have finally reached pre-war levels. Exports going through the Strait of Hormuz are up to ~80% of pre-war levels, due mostly to a lack of Iranian oil exports, but also some attrition due to Iranian attacks on shipping. But this gap is being made up by increased exports via alternative routes, particularly via the Saudi East-West pipeline and the Red Sea. It'll be a while before global prices reflect this increased outflow, however.

There are continued indications that some sort of US and/or Israeli strike campaign may be planned for after the US midterm elections - especially looking at movements of aircraft and evacuations of bases. Israel reportedly planned to strike Iran on its own earlier this month, but the USA persuaded them to wait until after the US midterm elections. The thinking appears to be that the blockade has Iran on the brink enough that a major strike campaign against Iranian energy infrastructure and weapons industry would be enough to force them to a negotiated surrender.

However, there are reports of airstrikes along the southern coast of Iran today, as well as Iranian fighters patrolling over Tehran. As I write this, it's not entirely clear what happened, but early indications are that US aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone launch sites as they were preparing to attack shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

On the Yemen Front, the Houthis have completely encircled Taiz, but have been unable to make advances into the defenses of the city itself. Meanwhile, Yemeni forces have captured the Dhubab Airport, and made gains west of Marib, in the direction of Sanaa.

Houthi missile and drone attacks continue to target Saudi airports and oil infrastructure - relying on Iranian advisors for how to defeat Western air defenses.

The UAE has agreed to resume financial and logistical support for Yemeni forces, after a previous falling out with Saudi Arabia over the conflict. Egypt is also moving to send troops and supplies to help defend Saudi Arabia, with Egyptian President al-Sisi pushing his Parliament to authorize the deployment next Monday.

Russia lost two Su-30s today.

Perun has a great new interview with Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military, where they discuss the evolution of the Russian military in recent years - how Russia wound up with the army it had for the 2022 invasion, and how Russia went from that force to the one it has now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBFMOiBBsE