far better military protection for the people of Canada

PROTECTION FROM WHO, DONALD

I love the random capitalization too, Lumber folks, we're going to have so much Lumber , more Lumber than you've ever seen before

https://xcancel.com/maphumanintent/status/1720933055307600231

Fun theoretical exercise I'm currently working on for the @fortisanalysis side of things:

US refineries (total) only store about 40 million gallons of military-grade jet fuel at any given time, or about 36,400 flight hours for an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet launched from an aircraft carrier. For 40 x -18's per carrier, this is about 910 flight hours. A carrier holds roughly 3 million gallons of fuel for its wing, about 68 flight hours per bird. Now consider that a notional mixed complement of 20 x F-35's and 20 X F-15EX's operating out of Kadena AFB would consume about 62,400 gallons per hour combined. Thus, just a single carrier wing and a single AFB wing's complement of fighters (80 combined) theoretically all operating at once would drink 106,400 gal/hr.

So...

The net stores of military jet fuel immediately available from US refiners above the global contingency supplies managed by the Defense Logistics Agency at any time represents about 375 net flight hours for one carrier and one air wing...less than 16 days of high intensity air operations by far fewer assets than the US would throw into an all-out theater conflict in the Pacific Rim. DLA Energy ended FY2022 with 1.68 billion gallons of on hand inventory of jet fuel to serve the entire DOD combined inventory of 14,000+ aviation assets - cargo, fighter, rotary wing, bombers, drones, tankers, and recon. Which begs the question: How fast would two theaters of conflict burn through all contingency supplies of fuel? And what does DOD do when the well runs dry?

Reminder that for the Gulf War's air campaign, the US had nearly 6 months to prepare, move assets into place, build up whole new infrastructure, etc., right next to Iraq without the Iraqis being able to do much to respond. Westerners love to call back on that campaign to justify their belief that the US/NATO could totally destroy any opponent in just a few weeks with their superior air forces, but completely ignore the logistical realities of actually doing so. And today, with the proliferation of long-range precision munitions, actually managing to build up the concentrations of forces and supplies necessary for large campaigns like this is substantially more difficult - we see this already in Ukraine, with Russian deep strikes doing significant damage, taking out ammunition depots and arms shipments, and wiping out various gatherings of Ukrainian troops and mercenaries.

If Iraq had the ballistic missiles that Yemen wields today, things could have gone very differently back then.

a little bit of analysis about Kursk

The only thing I'd want to add to Mikael's excellent analysis here is that the Russians are actually fighting a much more conventional area defense than we've seen in the very static fighting in the Donbass. They're not trying to stop Ukrainian drives at the screen line like we saw in the Hundred Days, they're instead diverting them into engagement areas between their front line of screening troops and the main defensive line 5-10km to the rear and destroying them there. Ergo why we've seen Ukrainian units just go on these long runs in the last couple days - way past where the front line should be - and then get wiped out in what look like complex ambushes. That's... actually just how you do a very normal area defense.

Why have the Russians changed tactics? Two reasons. First, in Kursk they - paradoxically - have space to fight. The Donbass is a cramped theater where real estate is at an absolute premium. They're either backing up into the sea, key lines of communication, or critical urban areas there. There's actual operational space in rural Kursk. Second and relatedly, the "forward" defense we're used to seeing in the Donbass will not inflict crippling casualties on an attacker quickly for the simple reason that attacks often fail in the "cone of fire" in no man's land or even behind the attacker's front line, allowing defeated units to easily withdraw. In a conventional defense the attacker is defeated in a kill zone behind the screen line and it is far easier to annihilate an attacking force. Ergo why we're now seeing huge AFU equipment losses, with entire Ukrainian companies burning out behind the ostensible Russian "front."

Having found themselves in battle with the AFU's strategic reserves, the Russians now very much intend to use the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo to destroy as much of those reserves as possible. Even if that means scaring some war mappers on the internet.

The Bundeswehr is running out of assault rifles (in German, machine-translated quotes below) archived

According to information from WirtschaftsWoche, the force only has 50,000 to 60,000 rifles. “Too few and too broken for almost 200,000 soldiers,” is what military officials say.

The G36 has been in use since 1996. After a dispute over the accuracy of the target in 2014, the federal government at the time stopped the procurement. At the same time, a successor model was a long time coming - partly because of a patent dispute between the applicants for the delivery of a new rifle. Even after the decision for the G95, also from Heckler & Koch, there were delays in the Ministry of Defense until recently, according to industry circles.

One of the problems that caused problems was an additional visor purchased from an external manufacturer whose plastic holder broke off too easily from the G95. In addition, testing is ongoing - even though the French army has been using the weapon for years. Now the government apparently wants to order 119,000 rifles in September and use them for the first time next May.

Turns out, the anti-Soviet propaganda about only every 2nd soldier having a rifle... is now true, but for a NATO country (extra irony from it being Germany specifically). In fact, it's even worse, since 60k rifles to 200k personnel is closer to a 1:3 ratio

Also, the best part is - given how much equipment they inherited from East Germany, they would have probably been just fine if they'd just kept it instead of selling it off and destroying it. Yeah, NATO countries are supposed to use 5.56, but the former Warsaw Pact countries other than Poland either took until the 2010s to start the process of adopting new rifles chambered in it, or haven't even gotten around to it like 20 years after joining (outside of select special forces units).

https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1805450204541284734

I've pointed out on many occasions that the Russians have the capability to launch a strategic offensive in Ukraine basically any time they want to.

But what I have not addressed is conditions. What would they want it to look like? How would they know when to "roll tanks?"⬇️

Critical to this analysis is just how successful the Russian decision to adopt a "ground and pound" approach to destroying the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been. Despite the full and enthusiastic backing of NATO and a Ukrainian numerical advantage for much of the war, the Russians have maintained a lopsidedly positive loss-exchange ratio against their enemies throughout. Ukraine is going into demographic collapse while Russian society at large has barely noticed the war.

@MNormanDavies pointed out some time ago that the Stavka has placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency in this war. Many Russian decisions at the operational-strategic level can be explained simply by their seeking the most efficient means to inflict mass casualties on the AFU with the lowest risk to themselves. Thus, any decision to transition to high-speed, mobile warfare from low-speed, positional war can be expected to follow that rubric. In other words, the Russians will launch an offensive to rout the AFU after its back is broken in positional war, rather than attack seeking to "change the game" and defeat the Ukrainians in mobile war. The "game" heavily favors the Russians and they're not in a rush to change it!

The difference between these scenarios can be seen quite easily by comparing two very successful offensives: Operation Bagration in 1944 and the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Bagration routed the once-mighty Army Group Center - at the cost of 180,000 killed in action, three times the total Russian death toll of this war. I'm sure the Russians would much prefer the 8,000-strong butcher's bill of North Vietnam's war-ending 1975 operation - and they have the strategic insight to see that modern Ukraine, as a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional garrison state propped up by endless foreign aid, is far more akin to South Vietnam than Nazi Germany.

So what does this look like in practice? The Russians are going to keep poking and prodding in their usual methodical way until part of the line collapses "in depth," and then all hell is going to break loose. That could actually be quite soon - for instance, the recent Russian maneuver in Kharkov was likely intended to accelerate this timeline - but regardless, the State Department will be warming up their helicopters shortly afterwards.

As an addendum, it's just occurred to me that the Ukrainian Hundred Days Offensive of summer 2023 could be likened to Lam Son 719 as a poorly conceived and executed offensive maneuver by an army that had no real idea what it was actually getting itself into... perhaps a topic for examination later.

Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan

(archived)

The U.S. has transferred tens of thousands of its bombs and shells to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. But it hasn’t given Israel everything it wants. That’s because the U.S. military lacks the capacity to provide some of the weapons Israel requested, according to Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ... Put simply, the U.S. assesses the health of its own inventories before sending weapons abroad. At times, those stocks don’t have any margin — and in some cases, the U.S. is even dipping below minimum inventory requirements, according to congressional staffers and former Pentagon officials.

"the law requires every graduate to be an officer, so killing officers is actually killing the intelligentsia"

Um, maybe if you don't want that to happen, just... don't have that law? This is like conscripting child soldiers and then complaining that your enemy is murdering children. Like, if you're actually fighting a truly desperate conflict against a genocidal foe, like the Soviets against the Nazis, some desperate measures can be justified, but this is interwar Poland we're talking about here.

We've fully entered the "killing soldiers is actually genocide" phase of rhetoric (except when Western countries actually kill civilians, that's just regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage).

https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1778682534123172215

The MV Dali collided with the Key Bridge in Baltimore three weeks ago and so little has been done for remediation that if this was happening in Russia or China we'd have people writing Ph.D dissertations on this website about poor state capacity and shaken trust in "regimes." ⬇️

Let's look at the current status of things three weeks in:

• M/V Dali remains aground and has not been freed from bridge debris, let alone unloaded, refloated, and evacuated to drydock
• Practically no progress has been made clearing debris, because:
• The handful of small floating cranes on site are obviously not up to the task, because:
• Apparently the Biden Administration decided this would be an ALL AMERICAN salvage effort and refused to bring in foreign crane ships with far greater capacity, thus:
• Workers are being endangered by being ordered to cut the bridge debris into small chunks manageable by the low-capacity cranes on site, complicated by the fact much of this work must be done underwater
• The Port of Baltimore remains closed to all heavy traffic and authorities expect it to remain closed through at least May, which is very optimistic
• Officials expect a replacement bridge might be inaugurated in a decade, which could itself be optimistic

Let's be real - if this had happened in China the port would have been open in days and construction on a replacement span would be underway as we speak. This incident is beginning to illustrate the decline in the real state capacity of the United States of America in the starkest possible terms.

I was reading the latest Simplicius post, and holy shit:

The world can see the US terror regime has no clothes. It looks increasingly weak, particularly given the announcement that Raytheon Lloyd helmed the strikes from—I kid you not—his hospital bed. Yes, he pulled the trigger on a laptop while soiling his bedpan: https://www.businessinsider.com/defense-secretary-lloyd-austin-ordered-strike-on-houthis-from-hospital-2024-1

followed up by this great line:

A decrepit regime led by a senile president and debilitated secretary of state, launching illegal massacres from their nursing homes and hospital beds against the poorest nation on earth—virtually on the same day as their own bloc ally faced genocide and crimes against humanity charges at The Hague.

the pope is a dictator who has the authority to exercise unlimited power

Literally the entire point of Catholicism, there was like a big schism about it and everything. Should have become Orthodox instead if you're gonna whine about that.

also holy shit this has got to be one of the funniest community notes of all time:

twitter thread (nitter alt) about the deteriorating US situation in the Middle East

They all think it's still 2003, with no notion of constraints, nor any respect for or even knowledge of the US' enemies. ... The Iraqis are at the heart of this crisis, and nobody in the official US sphere is talking about it openly. Every "retaliation" for Iraqi attacks on US bases is taking place in... Syria. Now why is that? Is it because the US doesn't care about Iraq and just wants an excuse to go after Assad again? No. Blinken flew under the cover of night into Baghdad, wearing a fucking flak vest, specifically to try to convince the Iraqi government to do something to stop all these attacks!

The reason the US is attacking "Iranian" warehouses in Syria to deter attacks by Iraqis - without EVER mentioning them by name - is because the US deep state is scared shitless of an Iraqi quagmire. The Iraqis go out and officially declare war on US. The US response? Silence. There's constantly escalating attacks inside Iraq. Rockets, drones, now IEDs against US convoys. The Iraqis are totally open about this, they're saying in public "we're at war with the US! We're gonna kick them out!" and Lloyd Austin goes up and pretends these Iraqis don't exist!

... a core feature of the US army today is that it is basically close to unusable, de facto. The US Army has a couple of massive problems right now: first, it's got a HUGE manpower deficit, especially in combat arms. Second, it can't really move very easily! Moving an army corps is a lot of work: it requires a lot of airlift, or - more preferrable - sealift. But US sealift capacity has atrophied immensely since the 90s. Getting an US armor division to Iraq today is a lot more difficult than it once was, due to lowered capacity.

I don't want to dive too deeply into army-specific problems in this thread, so I'll just get to the upshot: the US doesn't have enough men to really put "boots on the ground" in a serious conflict, nor the transport capacity to do so. It's not just a lack of political will. ... the US is basically down to a small garrison presence. You can back that up with air power, but on the ground, the US posture is a few islands of hundreds or thousands of Americans... in a sea of hostile arabs. These arabs have modern small arms. Some of them have night-vision equipment. But most of all, they have heavy stand-off weaponry: Burkan ("Volcano") rockets, used to great effect in Syria, Iranian suicide drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and iranian SAMs.

To further complicate the fairly terrible ground situation, American airpower in the region is very vulnerable. Most Americans still think they have this factory-fresh, high tech air force, but that's not been the case for decades. The workhorses - F16, F15, F-18 - are ancient ... the same kinds of planes used by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. And the Houthis have shot down a lot of Saudi jets. So even the Yemenis - the second most poor country in the region - can now realistically challenge US airpower, using iranian-made SAMs. Today, America has neither the fiscal space or the productive capacity to really deal with airframe attrition ... US bases in the region can now be attacked by stand-off weaponry, and it's long been a known problem that the USAF has never seriously adapted to the idea that airfields can simply be contested by enemy stand-off weaponry from afar. F-35 stealth doesn't work on the ground. ... the entire dynamic of the US actually using airpower in the region has now potentially changed, and changed in a very ominous, depressing way. Carriers can now be hit by anti-ship cruise missiles and drones, which are becoming widely available in the region. Are they guaranteed to work? No. But they're not guaranteed to fail either. Airbases can be hit with cruise missiles and drones; just ask the Americans at Al-Harir!

All of this means that Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon and Tony Blinken at State are in a very, very shitty position right now, to say the least. The openly declared war against the US in Iraq is basically being shoved under the rug, because the US can't afford to admit it exists! To uninformed Americans, the US is still a completely dominant, invincible force. America only loses because it gives up; its planes are invincible, its technology supreme, its forces, untouchable. But this fantasy is a product of the US military's isolation from civilian life. For people inside the military, the view is very different ... Thus, if Lloyd Austin goes up there and says "okay, the Iraqis are attacking us now", he is going to be inundated with calls from moronic GOP politicians and uninformed US civilians to "unleash the American magic!!!" or "teach the arabs why we don't have healthcare lol!!!".

But in reality, that moment in time has passed, and it's not coming back. If Austin goes up there and admits that, admits that the US is now severely limited in what it can do and how much it can fight, he'll lose his job. What's worse, the US will lose imperial prestige! That prestige is fantastically important, for many reasons. Partly, it serves as deterrence against people picking further fights with the US. Partly, it makes the current - completely unsustainable - budget deficits somewhat manageable in the short term. I could go on, but I hope I've made my point by now. The Iraqis are, as the American saying goes, pissing all over the American pant-leg right now. The Iraqis themselves are saying "we're pissing on you, America!", but America is forced to say "No no no, it's just raining!"

It's perhaps somewhat exaggerating how bad things really are, but there's still a lot of interesting points, especially the stuff about air power. Back in the olden days, you did need to actually fly your own planes over the enemy airbases to disable them, but this is no longer the case thanks to advances in missile technology, and the proliferation of cheap missiles among even militia groups means that forces which normally couldn't maintain their own airforce can now still manage to strike at far-away targets, and do so with munitions significantly cheaper than what they'll be destroying. And of course, there's the important logistical reality that Western commentators systematically ignore - how capable is the US, really, at deploying a large ground force, and doing so quickly? Not supplying another military, not flying around and bombing the occasional target, not sending in some special forces team to do a raid, but a proper army corps, of several divisions, the way they were once able to do in Iraq? Even back then, there was still a lot of preparation involved, the invading force didn't just materialize in Kuwait one day, so how capable of repeating that would they be now?

"I like settlers who didn't get captured"