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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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It's come to my attention that in addition to the F-117 everyone acknowledges that they had shot down, Serbian military records list a shoot-down of a B-2 , which crashed in Croatia, using a similar method - booting up the radar extremely briefly during a NATO bombing mission. Saw loads of targets - one of them was ~ 15km away, looked very peculiar. Fired two S-125 missiles at it. The plane immediately started evading but was damaged by either or both 60 kg blasts, and then crashed just outside of Serbia, in Spačva basin.

Here's the fairly pretty interesting in-depth account on how it supposedly went down. It opens up with claiming that after may 20, 1999, all B-2 bombing missions of Serbia ceased, that the Spirit of Missouri was withdrawn from combat operations on May 20 and also presents a possibly verifiable claim that a section of near border woods in Croatia had an unusually heavy military presence.

At the end is they also present a Serbian hypothesis that the 2008 crash of B-2 in Guam was staged by crashing a remote-controlled B-2 test article that was secretly assembled at Guam, crashed via stall at takeoff and then passed off as the plane lost in '99.

Found this interesting bit of information on Quora, from a Serbian.

The story regarding B2 is very strange also. Supposedly it was shot down, but went down just near the border in Croatia near Spačvanske šume (forest). I recently watched colonel Zoltan Dani (commanded the battery that shot down F-117), during his interview about the downing mention, and later on in the show explain how he came to be convinced that a B-2 was shot down.

Basically, to cut this short, there were reports, in the military, that a B-2 was shot down (by a brigade that he was assigned to, but not his battery) but he didn't believe them. He later heard the stories from some villagers that live near the border with Croatia that something big had passed over their village and was making strange sounds like it's engines weren't working properly. Later on, on a funeral that he attended (this was after the bombing), some people were present (Croats) who live in Croatia and were working for police department said that at that time they were assigned to a guard duty, so no one could get close, near this forest. They weren't told what they were guarding but they said that a lot of military (American) transport trucks went in an out. They said that even the ground was dug out, as they said, to a depth of 1,5m. This B-2 was, again supposedly, Spirit of Missouri.

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EDIT: interesting info on in New York Times from 1991.. Full article.. I was previously unaware B-2 was ever found insufficiently stealthy in tests.

Strange and convenient coincidences of this kind happen more than you might think. Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.

Carrier groups fighting the Houthis in the Red Sea suffer all manner of random bad luck. Bad luck that strangely always seems to coincide with Houthi claims that they have struck American carriers. The USS Eisenhower had to be towed out of the Red Sea due to unspecified mechanical issues a day after the Houthis claim to have struck it. A few months later several members of its air wing died in a helicopter training crash. The USS Truman suffered extensive damage due to a freak collision with a civilian merchant ship just days after its Red Sea deployment. It also lost a fighter a few days after that because... because it just fell off the ship ok??

An American Marine general was mysteriously found dead in his quarters at 29 Palms Marine Base in California. Coincidentally he had just returned from unspecified duties in Ukraine. Coincidentally there had just been a particularly large round of Russian ballistic missile strikes against Ukraine, many of which OSINT analysts theorized were targeting NATO military advisors in Kyiv.

Members of elite special forces units tend to die in helicopter crashes during training exercises off the East and West coasts. Usually these training mishaps happen a few days or weeks after major Ukrainian offensives. A particularly nasty one claimed the lives of several Delta Force soldiers about a month after October 7, 2023. It was confirmed that Delta Force was assisting the IDF during raids to rescue hostages held in Gaza, but this crash is of course completely coincidental and did not happen anywhere near the Middle East.

While some US troops presumably die in Ukraine, Fort Bragg has been having huge numbers of deaths even pre-22. Deaths didn't seem to increase much since the war began like one might expect. Incompetence and just being grossly dysfunctional is a big part of it.

In total, a staggering 83 active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg died in the 18 months ending June 2021, according to data obtained by Rolling Stone. Only 11 of these deaths were from “natural causes.” Many, perhaps a plurality, were suicides. But in no fewer than 33 cases, the Army has classified the cause of death as “undetermined.”

In other words, the Army can’t or won’t say how a whole platoon’s worth of soldiers died at its largest installation, home of the Special Forces, the Airborne Corps, and the Joint Special Operations Command. Over this same 18-month period, just three Fort Bragg soldiers died in overseas combat, meaning these elite troops are a dizzying 27 times more likely to die stateside than in war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

I wouldn't trust the US navy to sail in uncontested waters or avoid burning down in port, they managed to lose a light carrier to fire during refitting. When you think about US military performance in the last few decades, it's not really a cluster of excellence. Much of what they're covering up might just be embarrassing skill issues rather than black ops skulduggery.

40,000 people and mostly young men, the feistiest demographic. They'd be dying from random young male crap (suicide, drinking, beefs)even if the leadership were perfect

Add to that not great leadership focused on the wrong things