Category: War

“Ukraine says it has sunk another warship, disabling a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet” (CNN):

Ukraine claims it has now disabled a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet after its military intelligence said it sank another Russian warship in a sea drone attack off the coast of Crimea on Wednesday.

Russia’s landing ship Caesar Kunikov was attacked with “MAGURA” V5 drones that punctured “critical holes” on its left side before sinking, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency said on Telegram.

After the attack on the Ivanovets, CNN interviewed Ukraine’s secretive sea drone unit behind the strike at a location near the Ukrainian coastal city of Odesa. One of the drone pilots behind the attack told CNN that 10 “MAGURA” drones were used in the attack, six of which hit and ultimately sunk the Russian warship.

“MAGURA” drones are only a few meters long and powered by jet skis, a pilot from a special unit in Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency told CNN earlier this year.

But they have a large range of around 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles), so military units can launch drones from across large swathes of Ukraine’s coastline for missions against Crimean targets.

Of course, the U.S. Navy is a more capable force than the Russian Navy, but the future will bring more capable drones than what Ukraine has built and deployed. An adversary with 1/100th of our resources can still build a massive sea drone fleet. Is it safe to bet that drone technology will advance faster than ship technology? If so, why do we want to fund an enormous Navy that could be just as vulnerable to a sophisticated adversary as the Russian Navy has been to Ukraine’s drone tech?

How is the drone below readily distinguished from some of the fast skiffs that Houthis are using and that the U.S. Navy interacts with at close range?

Related:

• USS Cole bombing (“a small fiberglass boat carrying C4 explosives and two suicide bombers approached the port side of the destroyer and exploded … Speakers in the Yemeni parliament ‘calling for jihad against America’ were broadcast on local television each night.”)

A Ukrainian friend shared “Russia has recruited as many as 15,000 Nepalis to fight its war. Many returned traumatized. Some never came back” (CNN):

He is one of as many as 15,000 Nepali men to have joined the Russian military, multiple sources have told CNN, after the Russian government last year announced a lucrative package for foreign fighters to join the country’s military.

The package included at least $2,000 salary a month and a fast-tracked process to obtain a Russian passport. Nepal’s passport is ranked one of the worst in the world for global mobility, below North Korea, according to an index created by global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners, and the Himalayan nation is among the world’s poorest, with a per capita GDP of $1,336 for 2022, according to World Bank data.

Israelis have gotten a huge amount of bad press for fighting against the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other armed groups within Gaza. Critics say that Israeli soldiers have killed too high a ratio of civilians to soldiers (how anyone can know this is beyond me, given that the Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza do not distinguish between civilian and combatant “martyrs”).

What if the noble Palestinians weren’t being attacked by the evil First World Israeli soldiers (most of whom are Jews, though some of whom are Arabs/Muslims)? Suppose that it was a “brown people” v. “brown people” fight. Wouldn’t white progressives who support Hamas have a lot more difficulty criticizing the non-Hamas side?

The Israelis could easily afford to outbid the Russians, paying $4,000 per month, for example, and the noble Gazans do not seem to be as fearsome opponents as the Ukrainians so it would be a safer job.

From “Houthis Vow to Respond After U.S. Leads Strikes in Yemen” (NYT):

What stops everyone in the above photo from coming across the southern border and delivering their response to U.S. aggression here on American soil? They should immediately qualify for asylum merely by saying “I didn’t support the Houthis and they were targeting me”. Who here in the U.S. can distinguish a Houthi-supporting Yemeni from a Yemeni who doesn’t support the Houthi government?

If we’re going to have an open southern border, should we try to get along with everyone worldwide?

We are informed that the typical Gazan has no relationship with the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It is an accident that Hamas governs Gaza, which is otherwise populated by entirely peaceful humans. At the same time, anyone in Gaza who is killed in the latest fighting has been referred to, both by Palestinians and westerners in the do-gooder industry, as a “martyr”. One wouldn’t refer to a person killed in a car accident as a “martyr”. How can someone who wasn’t in any way aiding Hamas or PIJ and who didn’t go into Israel on October 7 be characterized as a “martyr” if he/she/ze/they is, unfortunately, killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

(Note that recent opinion polls show 75 percent of Palestinians supporting Hamas and 85 percent supporting PIJ.)

Here’s an example from a Norwegian do-gooder:

There is an entire Twitter account devoted to stories of peace-loving civilians who have become “martyrs”:

Note the martyr wearing a huge “PRESS” sign on his chest despite the fact that we’ve been informed since October 8 that the IDF Is specifically targeting journalists and killing them via snipers and airstrikes (example). Since journalists don’t need special outfits to do their jobs, if what we’re told about the IDF is true why are Palestinian journalists choosing to make themselves targets with huge “PRESS” signs front and back and unique blue outfits? Are they seeking martyrdom by making themselves readily identifiable from a helicopter or drone? Below a group of “PRESS”-/blue-clad figures gathered in the open where any passing helicopter or drone can see them (source). If they believe what they’ve written, i.e., that journalists are targets for the IDF, they’re endangering the huge crowd of non-journalists surrounding them.

Here’s another example and it includes what seems to be a standard phrase for Palestinians: “rest in power” (rather than “rest in peace”):

(in other words, they will keep (powerfully) fighting the hated Israelis from beyond the grave?)

Separately, could it be that Palestinians are SWATting each other? Here’s a story about a peace-loving family in Gaza with “no verified Hamas presence nearby”… “Why Did Israel Kill My Family in Gaza and Destroy My Childhood Home?” (Newsweek, December 28, 2023):

There were no armed clashes, no Israeli ground troops, and no verified Hamas presence nearby. My family, on both my dad’s and mom’s sides, come from a long line of technocratic professionals who are independent and not involved with any political party.

The death toll surpassed 31. All five of my aunts and uncles who were in the building were instantly killed. Additionally, nine children as young as three and four months old, along with their parents and almost all of my cousins were killed in the airstrike

My vocal opposition to Hamas has drawn the ire of some of the pro-Palestine community, which finds my critiques of the Islamist group untimely, undue, unhelpful, or quite frankly inconvenient to their resistance narratives.

Faulty intelligence, inconsistent rules of engagement, the use of massive ordnances in crowded and dense civilian areas, and the application of overwhelming firepower to support advancing troops are regularly causing the needless loss of Gazans’ lives.

The author says that his previous writings regarding Hamas have “drawn ire”. Perhaps his family (100+ members if 31 were killed by one bomb? (Palestinians have been the world’s most demographically successful humans since the establishment of UNRWA)) was SWATted by a fellow Palestinian who called up the IDF to say that three senior Hamas commanders were at the house that was destroyed from the air.

If an enemy fires a rocket at you it should be reasonably easy with radar analysis to figure out the approximate launch location. ,The Gazans have been trying to kill civilians in Israel for 22 years (partial list) so the Israelis have had plenty of time to tune the software and hardware necessary. The question for today is why the Israelis don’t shoot back at the launch locations. Israel has moved a lot of 155mm artillery pieces into and around Gaza. The range of one of these guns is 13 miles and the shells aren’t expensive by military standards. If a launch is detected, why not at least shoot back with a 155mm shell or two?

Palestinians seem to be confident that no return fire will be directed at them. Gazans fired a salvo at Tel Aviv on New Year’s Eve, for example:

If 155mm shells were a standard response to such launches, you’d expect Gazans to run away from the launch site immediately after seeing a launch. Instead, the audio track of this video records a crowd of Gazans cheering as spectators:

I’m sure that Israel would be criticized for returning fire, but I’m not sure what international law would be broken by doing so. If someone shoots are you, you can shoot back, right? That’s true even in California! If a 155mm shell happened to land on one of the handful of Gazans who opposes war with Israel, that’s a shame, but there is no requirement that return fire hit its target within a specified number of meters (indeed, the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Party of Allah (“Hezbollah”) all sometimes launch projectiles that fall short of Israeli territory and, presumably, hit people who weren’t the intended targets). If the practice of returning fire were standard, presumably the civilian death toll would quickly fall as people learned to run away after seeing a rocket launch.

What am I missing? Why has Israel trained the Gazans to believe that rockets can be launched without any possibility of return fire?