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Notes -
Netanyahu speech to Congress
Wonder what his goals were here - are 2000 pound bombs really that necessary still? Getting republicans to clap like seals while his own generals are telling him to make a peace deal isn't going to do much to advance real war goals. Biden also gave his own speech hours later, perhaps intentionally to overshadow it - full respect to joe if that's what he was going for.
Seriously though why do Rs love this guy so much? He has like a 20% approval rating in Israel. Is it just because of his historical track record of disrespecting dems?
It's just good Republican strategy.
Just this very day in DC we saw protestors – many of the white and overeducated variety – take down the American flag, burn it, and then raise the Palestinian flag in its place.
If Democrats are the Palestine party then Republicans are the Israel party. They don't really care about Netanyahu specifically. But the war has driven a wedge between key Democratic Party interest groups. So many of our nation's richest and highest performing people are Jewish. The leftist fetish for Palestinian terrorists has been eye-opening to a lot of Jews who would have previously counted themselves as important Democratic donors and allies.
At some point Kamala will have to make a statement. And whatever she says is going to piss off a lot of her supporters. The contradictions in the Democratic Party are too strong. It's a brilliant wedge issue for the Republicans.
To piggyback on this comment rather than starting a new thread....
Lost in news last week, we just saw a major development in the Middle East conflict.
First, a little background... Yemen is a country just south of Saudi Arabia. It has territory on the eastern end of the Bab Al-Mandab strait, a 20km passage through which ships must cross to go between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. For over a decade, Yemen has been in a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. The Shia were supported by Iran, the Sunnis by Saudi Arabia. In any case, despite great odds against them, the Shia group (known as the Houthis) were able to hold out. Today, they control the capital and most populous regions of Yemen.
Caring naught for money or comfort, only the glory of paradise, the Houthis are trying to fight Israel in their own stupid way. Ever since the start of the Israel/Palestine war last year, the Houthis have been on a nuisance campaign against shipping in the Red Sea. They have attacked dozens of ships and managed to sink 2 or 3. As a result, transits through the Red Sea have fallen off a cliff. Instead, ships are forced to travel all the way around Africa adding significant time to their voyage. As a result, shipping rates are skyrocketing, approaching levels seen during the post Covid crisis of 2021/22.
The U.S. tried to stop the Houthis by sending the USS Eisenhower into the Red Sea in operation "Prosperity Guardian". This did approximately nothing. After a few months, the Eisenhower sailed back to the U.S. and the sailors all got medals. No worse for wear, the Houthis continued to attack shipping using cheap suicide drone boats.
Many thought the Houthis would stop after Israel and Palestine had a cease fire. For awhile, that looked close at hand, as Israel has killed a significant percentage of Hamas leadership. Then the Houthis directly attacked a Tel Aviv high rise with drones. They only killed one person, but it was a shocking development, as Yemen is 2000 km from Israel.
Israel retaliated on Sunday, bombing and incapacitating Yemen's largest port in a massive air attack which employed U.S. made F-35s. This is the port through which Yemen imports most of its food. It is devastating to Yemen, and by far the largest escalation so far.
In any case, the Red Sea is closed for a lot longer now. Israel must not only defeat Hamas, they must defeat the Houthis, over 2000 km away, who had previous fought and won against Saudi Arabia. Iran seems eager to give the Houthis drones and other supplies. There are rumors that Russia might supply them with hypersonics.
And just last week, U.S. secretary of state Blinken suggested that Iran was only weeks away from being able to make nuclear weapons.
Israel has defeated Hamas, but they still have to contend with Hezbollah, the Houthis, and ultimately Iran. Things are going to stay interesting in the Middle East for quite awhile still.
I'm not the most familar with the story here, but I'm pretty sure the Houthis are the Iranian proxies. The Saudis were fighting a war with the Houthis until the Biden administration removed their designation as terrorists and loudly brokered a ceasefire. While I'm not going to question that terrible humanitarian things were going on, this seems like another example of poor statecraft by Biden (or his advisors) coming home to roost. The choice to weaken sanctions on Iran sure has made everyone involved play nicely.
I really don't like violence. It's always a terrible option, but it does feel like for all our advanced weapons (see "Prosperity Guardian"), we -- or at least our current leadership -- are unwilling or unable to actually bring them to bear to serve The Greater Good (or at least Pax Americana, which I'd argue is a pretty great good) against various powers that largely sell themselves as fetishistic death cults, because someone might get hurt. I don't like people getting hurt. I really don't. But to allow the enemies of Peace-Loving Western Civilization to dictate the terms of conflicts because of it might produce some tearjerking journalism seems like it's demonstrably causing worse outcomes for everyone.
It seems to me with a growing frequency that a willingness to wield The Big Stick and strike back hard, rather than dribbling out anti-materiel strikes peacemeal might sometimes be a better strategy. If you want to put "Death To America" on your flag and take pot shots at US-flagged warships, nobody should be surprised when we return the favor. In spades. If you want to invade foreign nations, why should we trickle in aid while the body counts stack up? At some point, it saves lives to swing the stick around more heavily: say, mass forces at the border, issue an ultimatum to withdraw, or we send you Back to God. If you want to take American (or Western, more broadly) citizens hostage, you should be prepared for a reckoning from a civilization that cares about its own -- because that's what I'd want my leaders to do for me in that situation.
But that doesn't seem to be the times we live in: our mealy-mouthed leadership, and to be honest, a decent fraction of the electorate, seem more interested in de-escalation and appeasement even at the cost of actual peaceful outcomes. It doesn't feel like it's working: it feels like we're spending lots of effort tracking local focus groups opining on faraway violence and choosing the action that polls best, and pat ourselves on the back while conflicts simmer and boil over.
I'm not here to endorse any particular candidate or platform, merely voicing frustration. I don't want an aggressive foreign policy, but I'm also tired of what feels like peaceful overtures being taken advantage of.
That’s all well and good but ever since Al Qaeda the strategy of roping the behemoth into a long and costly quagmire has been shown to be effective, particularly for Islamist groups who can play the insurgency game against a superior foe year after year. That’s what the Houthis are, that’s what all the other Iran proxies are. Going in with the attitude you describe makes it easy for these types to rope a dope into another forever conflict. Israel lives in all this and has no choice in the matter. But the US is wise to only intervene in small ways like if international shipping is affected. Stay out of it. There’s bigger threats elsewhere that are more pressing to actual American interests. It might be naive of me but I feel that we could forget about the entire region and it probably wouldn’t even matter that much.
I think the point being made was that our ship-based artillery would be enough to neuter Houthi capabilities and make them reconsider the ROI of trying to rope the West into their local conflict.
And it would be relatively cheap. Though artillery rounds themselves are about $10,000 each, which at first I found shocking until realizing they’re about 100 pounds, and 100 pounds of HEI ammo would cost about that much as well.
No munition is cheap. Artillery cheaper is cheaper than a missile only due to scale of production and complexity, but if you need 60 shells to decisively destroy a target you're shit outta luck compared to a high precision shell. CEP for GPS guided artillery is still not great, so precision missiles are best. The problem of course is that precision missiles are very hard to even get deployed in the area of operations, what with pilot skill and airframe being a very substantial barrier to entry.
Right now the meta is for cheap kamikaze drones, especially COTS DJI FPV kits which have the best in class flight controllers. These drones are all super vulnerable to electronic warfare, but even if that is solved the issue is that you need 1 operator per killshot. Max flight time is about 20mins per drone, so it is 1 guy for 2 shots per hour at best. An absolutely insane ROI by current military standards, but it is actually super taxing on the pilots. If you want to experience how draining it can be to be an FPV pilot try playing any flight sim game on oculus - the headset weight and physical disorientation can be extremely taxing.
A cost is borne to kill someone else. If it falls to a container full of sweaty dudes in killpods chugging DMD and an army of minions prepping new killdrones, it may be more expensive than a single fighter pilot with a full loadout.
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