Now in our second week of the conflict, we have seen continuing damage to both Israel and Iran, as well as direct US intervention which nonetheless seems to have caused limited damage to Fordow and little damage to Iran's nuclear program. Regime change seems more elusive than ever, as even Iranians previously critical of the government now rally around it as they are attacked by two rabid imperialists at once. And Iran's government is tentatively considering a withdrawal, or at minimum a reconsideration, of their membership to the IAEA and the NPT. And, of course, the Strait of Hormuz is still a tool in their arsenal.
A day or so on from the strike on Fordow, we have so far seen basically no change in strategy from the Iranian military as they continue to strike Israel with small barrages of missiles. Military analysts argue furiously - is this a deliberate strategy of steady attrition on Israel, or indicative of immense material constraints on Iran? Are the hits by Israel on real targets, or are they decoys? Does Iran wish to develop a nuke, or are they still hesitating? Will Iran and Yemen strike at US warships and bases in response to the attack, or will they merely continue striking only Israel?
And perhaps most importantly - will this conflict end diplomatically due to a lack of appetite for an extended war (to wit: not a peace but a 20 year armistice) or with Israel forced into major concessions including an end to their genocide? Or even with a total military/societal collapse of either side?
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
some comments by the Polish osint guy from yesterday...
About Iranian drones... Iran sold Russia the license and documentation for producing the Shahed 136. Russia paid Iran in gold. The first 1000 were delivered by Iran, Russia also builds them in a factory cluster in Alabuga/Yelabuga. When Russia does drone attacks on Ukraine they use 300-500 for a single operation. Russia uses around 100 a day. Iran used around 500 drones in 12 days and 99% of them were shot down. Some were shot down by US missiles which were supposed to be going to Ukraine but were diverted to US bases in West Asia instead. Jordan agreed for its airspace to be used. Syria didn't but Israel didn't care and flew AH-64 Apache helicopters and F-16 Sufa jets over the airspace to shoot the drones down. The fact that Iranian drones didn't play a larger role in the conflict is puzzling. One explanation is Iran was expecting a long war of attrition against US military bases in the region so they were saving them for after the US officially entered the war. Another theory is Israel destroyed them before they could be used. It's also possible Iran didn't have many to begin with because they didn't think they would be needed. When they did strikes on Saudi targets in the past they only used 3 or 4 per operation (I guess he's talking about 2019 here... looking around a bit and it seems that was Yemen launching them though, not Iran)
About the Iranian airforce... The Iranian airforce might not be modern but since the country is large and mountainous they should still have been able to orchestrate some ambush attacks in valleys and by flying close to the earth (similar to North Vietnamese MiG-21 attacks on US forces during the Vietnam war). There were no air battles during these 12 days. There is some footage of Iranian F-4 phantoms flying by, but not much else. Iranian airport runways were damaged, and 10-12 Iranian F-14s were also damaged while on the ground. Also since most of the Iranian airforce planes are old they rely more on coordination with on-the-ground operators/air command, which in turn relies on long range radio-location stations to get info about where the enemy is and directs the Iranian planes where to ambush the enemy. A lot of that on-the-ground infrastructure was damaged or destroyed by Israeli commandos so the pilots were left in a fog without guidance from the ground. Iran's radio-location stations are also dated technologically so they didn't detect the F-35s, which have modern stealth tech.
About Iranian ballistic missiles... Around 4-7% Iranian missiles hit their target in the beginning, the rate increased to 35% and then 50% toward the end of the war, while the missile count went down to 20 per attack, and they were launched every second day. If we average it across the 12 days it was around a 25% hit rate, even taking into account US support like THAADs, MIM-104 Patriots, SM-3s. Since each incoming missile requires a few attempts to shoot down, Israel was starting to run out of missiles fast and some experts say they had enough left for 2 or 3 more days. Iran entered the war with 2000 mid-range (1300-2000km) ballistic missiles, used around 600, around 300 were destroyed/disabled/blocked, so they still had around 800-1000 left. Israel damaged the entrances to Iran's missile launch sites but attempts were made to re-open them during the war.
While 65% of Iranian anti-air was destroyed, footage of Israeli F-15s and F-16s shows them carrying 3 or 4 fuel tanks each, so that's 70-80% of the load occupied by fuel. It's a long flight to Iran. They were usually carrying maneuvering missiles like Delilah used for precision strikes.
Israel did more damage to Iran overall but if the war was going well for them they wouldn't have agreed to a ceasefire/pause. Western media and doctors in Israel are reporting obsessive censorship around damaged targets so that suggests they got hit hard and are trying to hide it. None of the parties in the war felt like they were winning so they decided it's better to stop for now.
I think it was over a thousand one way attack drones used, not 500, which does work out to 100 a day. Arash 2, Shahed 136 and 238. They just weren't effective, even the jet powered 238 ones were almostb all shot down, some even over Iraq. The distance between Iran and Israel is too big, the drones are too slow, and the US has gotten very good at intercepting them. Those missiles previously sent for Ukraine are actually laser guided Hydra rockets, called APKWS. One F-15E fighter jet can carry 42 of these APKWS rockets, along with 8 regular air to air missiles, for a total of 50 engagements. These were deployed to Jordan to defend Israel. Ukraine has no fighters that can use these, and are limited to ground launched systems.
Modern fighters and AWACS have much better look down radar capabilities (and look down shoot down for fighters exclusively) and clutter rejection than Vietnam war era jets, making nap of the earth low altitude infiltration much more difficult for Iran than Vietnam. Any Iranian air attack would have been a suicide mission, and Iran did the right thing not to engage and have their very limited air force wiped out, it would've made no difference in the end. No AWACS aircraft really hurts Iran here as pointed out. With Israel having a monopoly on airborne radars, it was actually Israel that used geography against Iran, using the mountains in the Northwest by Tabriz to shadow them from Iranian ground based radars, and using the Caspian sea to fly around air defences in the centre of the country.
F-16s and F-15 would be carrying 5 extra stores of fuel, 2 conformal fuel tanks along the fuselage, and 3 external fuel tanks taking up hardpoints/pylons. However, an F-16 in this loadout can still carry 8 SPICE-250/GBU-39 glide bombs, or 2 SPICE-1000 or 2 2000lb JDAMs/SPICE-2000. An F-15 can carry double that. This is still a lot of ordinance. The F-111s that destroyed over 1500 Iraqis tanks during the Gulf War only carried 4 GBU-12 500lb Paveways each. With the improved precision (no need for 500lb bombs anymore) and massively improved range with glide bombs since then, 8 SPICE 250s or GBU-39s is double the payload, and covering a much larger distance with modern targeting systems/pods and range. GBU-12 had a maximum range of 15km, SPICE-250 and GBU-39 have a range over 100km, and can still hit moving targets with ease. This massive increase in effective coverage radius and area coverage is what made TEL hunting (destroying ballistic missiles on the ground before being fired) feasible now, when it was a complete failure during the Gulf war.
The Delilah cruise missile was used, but mainly for taking out Iranian air defences thanks to it's stand off range of 250km and ability to loiter and relay targeting co ordinates back to the launch aircraft, so other systems can then hit all the targets spotted by Delilah on the way to it's main target. It only has a 30kg warhead and bulky datalink pod that takes up a valuable hardpoint slot, so it wasn't used much outside of that. A lot of SPICE glide bombs and JDAMs were used. The SPICE glide bombs can make use of human in the loop TV guidance, the person in the second seat of the aircraft van effectively pilot the bomb from a first person perspective, so a lot of people were confusing this FPV footage for Delilah cruise missile or drone footage. The SPICE glide bombs (1000 in particular, unsure of 250) use the same guidance interface as the AGM-142 Have Nap/Popeye missile, so if you see any FPV strike footage from this targeting interface, it's most likely from a SPICE 1000 glide bomb, maybe a SPICE 250 or Popeye, but definitely not a Delilah cruise missile or FPV drone. The footage of the strike on the inactive Arak heavy water nuclear reactor made use of this targeting interface, so most likely a SPICE 1000.
Arak footage:
The Delilah cruise missile uses a different FPV targeting interface (very green), shown here:
As for ballistic missiles and interceptor numbers, too much unknowns to make an accurate estimate. But I do think the situation was more critical for Iran than Israel, as shown by the last waves of attacks before the ceasefire. 6 waves of ballistic missiles fired, and only one hit. Is it feasible to continue a war in this way?
thanks for the corrections and extra explanation, answers a lot of the questions the guy was posing, the bomb stuff gets detailed so Ill have to stew on it for a bit
I generally don’t even like military stuff but I feel like I should have an understanding of the capabilities and limits of the western military + their proxies because their plans and decisions are based on these capabilities, I don’t see a lot of military analysis in online left spaces/media, EI and Justin Podur’s sitreps I guess, and the posts here of course
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: