Image is Israeli interceptors trying and failing to intercept missiles over their cities.
Israel just carried out a widespread bombing of Iran, which has killed a number of senior officials inside Iran (though it seems the leadership is more-or-less intact) as well as a number of civilians. Important facilities have been targeted, but the amount of damage is unknown so far (note that many important Iranian facilities are deep underground, making them both hard to damage but also hard to determine if they are damaged from just satellite imagery, so reports of damage will be he-said-she-said).
It appears the attack took Iran by surprise, given that a residential block was targeted that contained some senior officials - if one saw an attack coming, one would imagine they'd be in bunkers. Nonetheless, like the rest of the Resistance Axis, I suspect that Iran has adapted their military structures to be resistant to decapitation strikes by ensuring that replacement figures are ready to take the place of killed officials.
Iran has delivered a massive missile barrage in response to Israeli aggression, even though Israel is continuing to bomb Iran. Iran is now aware of the location of many important Israeli sites, including secret nuclear sites, due to their recent intelligence haul, giving them a distinct edge.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
OK missile nerds, lots of people are IDing missiles that go really fast when they impact as hypersonics, is this correct? From what I understand, the impact speed should be the higher for the modern generation MRBMs; Natopedia says that Haj Qasem goes at Mach 11 while people talk about hypersonics in the 3-5 Mach range. Isn't the main draw of hypersonics the trajectory rather than raw speed? I know that a missile hitting at mach 50 looks super cool, but is that actually whats happening?
Those maximum velocities are from peaks at burnout or at the start of atmospheric re-entry, once the missile enters the thicker air of the atmosphere it slows down a lot. Here's a velocity vs range chart from a Chinese research paper on Pershing-II/DF-21 trajectory planning. Note the two velocity peaks.
The reason for this slowdown is due to the increased density of air at lower altitudes, particularly below 30km. Aerodynamic drag.
The missile that people are IDing as a "hypersonic" is most likely a Khorramshahr series ballistic missile from Iran, given that the explosion appears to be a lot bigger than previous ballistic missile strikes. This is an Iranian missile heavily upgraded and derived from the Soviet R-27 Zyb, a Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile first fieled in 1968. And before anyone asks, no, the Iranian version is not launched from a submarine, but from land.
Hypersonic weapons are usually referred to as weapons that spend a majority of flight time within the earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds on a non ballistic trajectory (Mach 5+). Ballistic missiles don't do that, these longer range ballistic missiles spend a lot of their flight time exoatmospheric, even those with Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicles.
Here's a graphic from that same paper showing a to scale altitude vs range chart of a ballistic missile equipped with a Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle performing two separate pull up maneuvers, one at 20km altitude, and one at 10km altitude
Do you happen to have a link to the article or a title?
I managed to find this page with reverse image search, but it seems like a journalistic article, not the original research publication
https://bemil.chosun.com/nbrd/bbs/view.html?b_bbs_id=10044&pn=1&num=224630&order=reco
Does this work
Yes! Thanks for digging that up
Pretty sure the resident missile nerd has corrected the record that none of these are technically hypersonics. Not the nerd though so grain of salt
Discussion here https://hexbear.net/post/5200244/6241697
Not much of a war nerd but from my basic understanding the term hypersonic isn't referring to a class of weapons that can go hypersonic speeds but rather those that have a high degree of maneuverability at such speeds. Common missile technology in the modern era should always have result in hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase as at that point the problem is reaching the target fast enough to avoid any terminal phase antimissile defense systems. Insofar no "real" hypersonics have been used as the general trajectory of these missiles should not be in the classical arc pattern we've been seeing in the videos. Instead they would be blitzing over almost horizontally towards the target while moving vertically to avoid any defensive weapons.