@No_one comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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felipec unbelief 1yr ago

Turns out USA did blew out Nord Stream: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.

It was obvious to anyone paying attention, but now it's pretty much confirmed.

Of course I already see the people married to the opposite conclusion trying to discredit the journalist (on of the most decorated and impactful journalists of all time), and his sources: anonymous: (as if established publications didn't use anonymous sources).

Context

Dean felipec 1yr ago

Well, this seems relevant to copy-paste.

https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/63475?context=8#context

Overall, not impressed or compelled by the claims. People have already noted the singular anonymous source claiming, in an era where anonymous sourcing has been as disreputable as ever, but there are other elements that raise eyebrows.

-The claim it was done by the pure navy, as opposed to special forces, to avoid Congressional oversight really suggests someone who is not familiar with the other forms of oversight- and security vulnerabilities- of American military branches. There's a reason that the US black projects generally don't operate from the conventional forces, but in separate elements.

-The mind-reading/framing of motives is projection, or at least certainly not how the western military-security types would view items. I've yet to meet an American in a serious position of government responsibility who frames concerns over Nordstream in terms as abstract as 'threat to western dominance,' as opposed to the more concrete concerns of 'energy blackmail' or 'gas turnoffs.' This is arguing by connotation and pejorative rather than actual positions. If this is the author, that's on him, but if it's from the source, that's indicative.

-The discussion on the German political situation in May 21 is missing some rather significant context- such as the points that Merkel had just retired and there was a multi-month German political paralysis as the government formation negotiations were ongoing, the Russian military buildup adjacent to Ukraine had already started, the Belarusian migration crisis and Russian gas supply slowdown was already starting. The last three are generally now seen as pre-invasion shaping efforts by the Russian government before the invasion- which we know that the Biden administration was aware / observing in 2021. Instead of 'making a concession he knows will be invalidated', however, the author frames the motive as Biden's internal political floundering to war-criticisms.

-The 'planning' meeting that rests solely on the anonymous source is, ahem, silly. Just reverse the sentence order of the paragraph to see how so-

The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.” - The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely.

The proposed plans, as described, don't pass muster in the context of their own paragraph, let alone broader realism. For one, submarines don't "assault". That's the sort of language of someone larping military insight. Similarly, the airforce plan of 'bombs with delayed fuses' makes no sense. Aircraft are incredibly visible, so you'd be guaranteeing a record trail, and either the aircraft would have to bomb land-based targets- which is to say, where timed fuse bombs would be found by the Germans in Germany- or a sea target. Now, this may surprise, but dropping bombs from a bomber entails the bomb hitting with terminal velocity. When very small things hit very big bodies of water at very high speeds, they do not penetrate and then become precision submersibles, they go splat.

This is something deserving of /r/credibledefense, but not credibility inspiring.

-The argument about no longer being a covert option because of the Biden Administration's public statements on Nordstream are nonsense.

"According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”"

This is a red flag for credibility. Covert options aren't covert because you have a known capability, but rather the secrecy. When we read declassified / released examples of covert operations, they almost always involve known capabilities of the actors. It's the who/when/if they are actually doing it that's the secret item. This objection is just about the one part that wouldn't matter, precisely because the Navy diving programs are openly acknoweldged capabilities.

-The whole Norway angle is just comedic. The narrative flops between the need for operational and legal secrecy as needed, without actually explaining why informing the Norwegians is necessary to carry out the operation... except to tell the Americans, who have been reviewing the problem for months, where to hit the pipe. The operational simultaneously needs to be secret, but also incredibly expansive in people and organizations involved.

-The timeline is also all over the place. Biden is alleged to have committed to planning the attack on the pipeline as a result of domestic political pressure before the war, but with target selection only occuring in March after engagement with a foreign nation, with the exact timing being... one of the most observed military maneuverings in the region for the year. Except, now with an even later bomb-on-command requirement, late in the process... which indicates they didn't have a time intended to blow it up originally, even as they were engaging the Norwegians to place it.

And- despite all the effort in creating a command-detonated timing... no reason for the timing is apparent. The article tries to go with a citation to imply it had to be done eventually, but there's a roughly 3 month gap between the alleged emplacement and alleged trigger.

-The argument on Russian mine-detection technology is getting into the military spy-fiction, and not the good kind. Tom Clancy was at least good at not just hand-waving technology. You don't get to just allege that the Russians built an entire undersea surveillance network along the Nordstream pipeline to justify the Norwegians as the only people who can counteract it with their inherent anti-Russian traits.

-The regular appeals to the 1970s is less relevant and more argument by historical innuendo. This is a normal element of conspiracy building, to break down temporal relevance and start building connections between unconnected things while also obscuring temporal and contextual relevant information. This isn't the first part of the article to do this, but it's reocurring enough to note, especially since the 1970s Church hearings drove very significant changes in the American intelligence community... changes that are being implicitly covered over by the appeal to the 70s for narrative continuity.

-The air-dropped sonar bouy is yet another red flag. You could get a better engineer to discuss the dynamics of sound propagation through water, but the real item is the fixation on dropping it out of an aircraft.

There is literally no reason to use an aircraft to drop a sonar bouy if you're trying to have a secret signal. Aircraft are easily observable on a number of sensors or by regional naval traffic. Even if your broadcast device weren't detected by any/all systems in the broader area at the moment it signals- and remember the Norwegians are being involved on the basis of a Russian surveillance system for underwater threats, ie. sound-based detection- the aircraft flight for recote detoation would be easily observable...

...and unnecessary, because you could just sail a boat and drop it over the edge. Boats are far, far harder to monitor for unusual activity than aircraft.

I could go on, but that's kind of enough. There are a number of things in this story that are meant to sound vaguely informed and insightful, but with a pretty clear lack of understanding of the material or the alternatives. The way this is written, this is less written by someone who actually knows how governments work and reads far more like being written for the sort of people who don't.

Really, it's targeting ignorance with a hope of shaping your views without remembering how they were shaped. It hopes you don't remember that it's all based on a single anonymous source, that no motivation is provided for the source providing all this information, that you won't remember the argument by connotations in rhetorical lines not used by the people it claims to reflect the positions of, that you won't dwell on the communication role/purpose of the various time-skips in the narrative, or the omissions of 2021 and awkward time gaps, the mechanical alternative methods, and so on.

Someone else can validate that the last part was written before your post, and was not written with you in mind.

All told, I do not find it credible, and would lower my judgement of someone who found it compelling.

No_one Dean 1yr ago

Solid criticism, however, if you bend the terminology a little, 'bombing' the pipeline from a high flying plane would've been possible, although perhaps risky because who knows how good the resolution of air traffic and air defense radars in the area is.

US recently developed air-deployable versions of the mk 48 torpedo. These glide down to just above the surface and then launch a homing torpedo that could just get 'lost' and accidentaly spoon itself against a pipeline like that mine-clearing charge they found cosied up against Nord Stream in 2015 or so.

Dean No_one 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

Solid criticism, however, if you bend the terminology a little, 'bombing' the pipeline from a high flying plane would've been possible,

This is what I meant by the writing being written for people who don't actually understand what's being discussed.

Bombing the pipeline is not possible from a high-flying plane, because when you drop an object out of a high-flying plane and it hits the water at terminal velocity, it crumples. This is flawed on a conceptual level, like proposing a small child 'aim for the water' when jumping out of a plane without a parachute because water is softer than land. At terminal velocities, hitting water is like hitting concrete.

This is the entire reason that the aviation aircraft for anti-submarine warfare are low and slow... and typically dropping things off with parachute, such as sonar pods. But the advantage of aircraft in these situation is their speed on getting to an area to drop items, not their precision. If you're not in a time-sensitive context, such as a pre-meditated emplacement, there's zero advantage to not just dropping something off the side of a boat.

although perhaps risky because who knows how good the resolution of air traffic and air defense radars in the area is.

Plenty of people. This is the primary naval / aerial conflict zone of a Russia-NATO baltic scenario. The presumption of air monitoring has itself been a regular argument by those who insisted the US must be responsible by virtue of anyone else would have been detected, and is a primary reason why a boat-based mission has been the most probable form of any deliberate sabotage.

As a deliberate means of targetting the pipeline, with ironic quotes around 'lost'? No, because that's not how these things work on a technical level. This is in the 'making stuff up that sounds plausible to those who don't know better' territory.

Homing torpedoes do not home by magic, they home off of sound- specifically ship or submarine sound profiles- whereas the inactive nordstream wouldn't even had the sound of moving gas. The mk 48, according to wiki, does have wire-guidance capabilities, but this isn't usable with aircraft due to the line breaks. There is no GPS navigation like can be done to guide drones to specific grid coordinates because GPS does not work underwater. There are ways for sound-based navigation underwater... but the mk 48 isn't designed for that sort of navigation, and the thing about sound-based navigation underwater is that anyone can hear it, and yet no one has alleged it in this context. Even as parts of this conspiracy are based around the presence of russian underwater surveillance systems, ie acoustic sensors. Additionally, for a deliberately placed device to 'cosie' itself up to the pipeline, it needs underwater maneuver capabilities beyond forward guidance. Torpedoes are generally good at moving forward, and not very well known for moving sidewise and backwards.

And- to return to why it's really, really stupid- there's no need for the airforce to deliver a mk 48 by air. The mk 48 is a submarine-launched torpedo. Even if you invented all the technical solutions, if you were going to try and torpedo the nordstream, you could just send a submarine to deliver it instead. You could use wires for for guiding the torpedo, you could use the submarine's own navigation systems to get close to the target, you wouldn't need to risk any sort of air or surface-monitoring, and there would be no need to alert any foreign partner that you were doing an operation near the nordstream pipeline or bring in people to the conspiracy.

But that would make too much sense and would ruin the conspiracy... for the sort of people who understand why the proposal doesn't make sense. Hence the point of the article being written for people who wouldn't know when it was talking nonsense.

No_one Dean 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

Bombing the pipeline is not possible from a high-flying plane,

You are surely aware of glide bombs and such? There's nothing preventing attaching such to a torpedo to allow high deployment. There were likely parachute systems for torpedo deployment.

the mk 48 is a submarine-launched torpedo. Even if you invented all the technical solutions, if you were going to try and torpedo the nordstream, you could just send a submarine to deliver it instead

I was impressed with your criticism, but are you really saying using a submarine, in a very shallow sea the Russians are reportedly monitoring very closely is such a good idea ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea#/media/File:Baltic_drainage_basins_(catchment_area).svg

Baltic Sea is very, very shallow. It's really not a place where large submarines, such as those that have torpedoes can be sneaky.

Torpedoes are generally good at moving forward, and not very well known for moving sidewise and backwards.

A pipeline is a line. Parking a torpedo next to a pipeline isn't as hard as getting it to a precise destination. Align with the pipeline side, slowly descend, sink ..

with ironic quotes around 'lost'?

That's the official explanation of why a explosive single use mine clearing ROV ended up lodged under a Nord Stream pipeline.

It got lost during a baltic training exercise and just, through sheer coincidence, ended up under a piece of infrastructure Americans just hate.

Dean No_one 1yr ago

This is not only conflating flight profiles, but the navigation implications. The thing about parachute systems is that they're subject to wind drift- which means you're now dropping a torpedo, which can't GPS navigate, to an unknowable GPS grid coordinate, which means that even if you added on blind-navigation systems like gyroscopes that track progression from known points, they wouldn't work because you wouldn't know where you start.

Whereas this problem would be lesser if you flew from a low and slow altitude- to minimize coordinate drift- or just did a non-flight mechanism, like using a boat.

This is really basic capability mismatch that shouldn't be suggested by a senior airforce adviser to the White House.

Compared to using an aircraft? Yes. An aircraft is infinitely easier to monitor and track.

Setting aside the the Russian monitoring capability at that part of the baltic is an allegation unsupported by other parts of the narrative (such as the use of a sonar device as a command detonator- this is exactly the sort of signal underwater detection systems would detect), the reason submarines have difficulty in shallower waters is the vulnerability to active sound systems (ie. sonar).

Who on earth told you that, but not the Russians and the NATO countries that have invested in submarine capabilities for the region for decades?

Again, this isn't how offensive torpedoes work on a technical level. There is no control system to do this, or the mechanical means to know when it is 'aligned' and 'slowly descend.'

This comes back to not knowing the technical capabilities of what's being involved.

If you accept that drift occurred without intent, then it wasn't deliberately placed for the purpose of ending up there, and relying on drift is not credible because there was no plan. Chance events do happen and things that sink do go about the the sea floor until they get stuck. If you reject the premise that it resulted there without deliberate intent, there's no reason to believe it drifted there as opposed to deliberately being placed.

So which is it? You can't have it both ways, that it both drifted and it was deliberate for it to drift exactly there.

You're telling me torpedos have no internal navigation or sense of direction, at all ? That they don't have a depth sensor ?

They likely can't control their buoyancy, but they can descend or ascend at will while moving forward.

The thing about parachute systems is that they're subject to wind drift- which means you're now dropping a torpedo, which can't GPS navigate, to an unknowable GPS grid coordinat

Torpedos can probably tolerate significant g-forces, so late deployment of parachutes would mean its eventual position would be in a very small area, well within its possible range.

What 'submarine' capabilities ? Russians build some submarines in Petrograd, but they barely have a naval base there.

They're certainly not going to fool around with submarines there a year after Americans openly declared they can detect submerged subs by their wake even if they're ~200m down. Baltic is barely 60m deep mostly, it's as unsafe place for submarines as you can imagine.

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Why are you called The Motte?

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