Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.

In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn’t been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.

Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal’s adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.

It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.

After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Okay, look, I got a little carried away. Monday’s update usually covers the preceding Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but I went ahead and did all of last week. If people like a more weekly structure then I might try that instead, if not, then I’ll go back to the Mon-Wed-Fri schedule.

Links and Stuff

The bulletins site is down.

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists

Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Add to the above list if you can.

Resources For Understanding The War

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.

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.

Telegram Channels

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

Pro-Russian

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

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.

Last week’s discussion post.

  • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    44·
    1 year ago

    US Army Cancels Flight Test of Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon Bloomberg

    • Pentagon seeking to catch up with China on hypersonic arsenal
    • Defense Department doesn’t say what led to scrapping of test

    The US scrapped a test on Wednesday of what’s meant to be the Army’s first hypersonic missile in its arsenal, a setback as the US looks to catch up with China for a crucial weapon of the future.

    “The department planned to conduct a flight test at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida to inform our hypersonic technology development but as a result of pre-flight checks the test did not occur,” the Defense Department said in a statement to Bloomberg News, referring to the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon.

    It didn’t say what led the test to be canceled. Yet the decision raises questions about the program’s schedule and whether the Army can meet its goal of declaring the weapon initially combat capable by Sept. 30, which would also mark the Pentagon’s first hypersonic weapon.

    The US Defense Intelligence Agency said in March that China was in the lead as far as developing hypersonic weapons, which can fly fast and low and may carry nuclear warheads.

    The statement added that even without the flight test, “the department was able to successfully collect data on the performance of the ground hardware and software that will inform the continued progress toward fielding offensive hypersonic weapons.”

    lmao

    more

    “The Army has experienced a number of test delays and ‘no-tests’ since 2021,” according to a Congressional Research Service report.

    An Army spokesperson had no immediate comment. Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Doug Bush told reporters early last month that the Wednesday test was to be the “most important one” of two as it was to be an “end-to-end evaluation” of the system. Lockheed Martin Corp. is the prime contractor on the project.

    The Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon has a reported range of 1,725 miles and consists of a ground-launched missile equipped with a hypersonic glide body and associated transport, support, and fire control equipment. The Army’s 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, is to operate the first battery of eight LRHW missiles when they are fielded.

    I’m telling you the project is dead in the water. They can’t do it.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      35·
      1 year ago

      time for another round of articles on why hypersonic missiles aren’t actually important anyway

      would love to know why they keep fucking it up. Like, the DPRK has them, right? I would assume that the technological expertise of the collective West could at least match that of the DPRK? or is Juche just that powerful?

      really does feel like American military supremacy (or at least its perception, one can argue that it was never really that good as they keep losing wars of course) is coming to an end. just like with that stupid article that was making the rounds a few days ago about making a shitload of drones to counter China. they’ll make like 300 drones named something like Freedom Avalanche and then the company making them will be bought by some ghoul who then turns 95% of its revenues into stock buybacks and then they’ll make like 5 shitty drones per year, and in that same time, China will make like a hundred thousand drones and missiles

      • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        37·
        1 year ago

        I have zero expertise in this so take everything I am about to say with a huge grain of salt:

        I believe that it has to do with metallurgy and material science. A big problem with hypersonic missiles (unlike ICBMs) is that they’re maneuverable, and you have to be able to control their trajectory precisely while under strong air resistance (drag) at such high speed, so you need to have the technical know-how to create a material that can actually withstand the challenging environment.

        I believe that the USSR had mastered the necessary foundations of metallurgy and material science that the US had never been able to catch up. I offer two examples here:

        1 ) The USSR constructed the Alfa class submarine in the 1960s which had a titanium hull. It is extremely difficult to weld titanium because it absorbs oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen at high temperature and will cause imperfections that compromise the material strength. The CIA actually dismissed early reports of this project for 7 years because they thought nobody had the capability to weld titanium (certainly not the US). The Soviets solved the problem by building an entire warehouse and fill them with argon (inert gas), and had welders dressed up in space suits, which is very technically challenging and also very impressive for a heavy industrial project like building a full-scale submarine.

        2 ) During the space race in the 1970s, the Americans gave up quite early when trying to build a closed-cycle staged combustion liquid propellent rocket engine because they thought it was too difficult to master (no metal could survive such oxygen-rich gas from the preburner at high temperature), and they actually thought what the Soviets did was just another Cold War propaganda. Well, it turns out that the Soviets did end up mastering the metallurgy and went on to create the infamous RD-180s (used for powering the American Atlas V rockets after the USSR collapsed) and the RD-170s (used for the legendary Energia-Buran flight).

        After the Cold War, the Americans act shocked when they saw a full warehouse of RD-180s and bought them up for cheap, and by that time, the American economy had been sufficiently neoliberalized that they no longer needed to build up their own industries when they can just buy ready-made components from other countries for cheap (a path which Russia also went on to take and destroyed its own space and aviation industry in the process).

        In fact, after the USSR collapsed, Russian scientists - who thought the Cold War has finally ended - were generous enough to share their hypersonic missile (scramjet engine) tests with NASA document 1 document 2 but it seemed like either NASA wasn’t interested or couldn’t actually replicate the Soviet test results.

        I will remind you that nobody else in the world has a functional scramjet engine used for missiles except for Russia’s Zircon, which has achieved Mach 8-9 flight at its terminal velocity.

        Given that Russia is currently so far ahead of everyone in the hypersonic race (Zircon being the world’s only hypersonic cruise missile at this stage), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Chinese and the North Koreans were able to learn something from the former USSR.

          • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            8·
            1 year ago

            For the titanium hulled Alfa SSN story, google “Unraveling a Cold War Mystery” and go to the first result hosted on the CIA website. I am not linking it for obvious reasons but it’s a very good read, definitely worth your time.

            For the Soviet space program, google “Rockets and People by Boris Chertok”, which is possibly the most detailed account of the entire Soviet space program written by someone who was actually part of it. You can download all 4 volumes for free from NASA’s website, no need to buy them.

            • charlie [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              The CIA document was really interesting, thank you. They name drop a German Cross awarded Nazi submarine engineer in the document and can’t help but call him “distinguished”, fucking gross.

              The ALFA’s high reserve buoyancy, as well as a sophisticated rescue system, implied Soviet Navy concern for crew survivability. There were other indicators: the Soviet Navy had one India class submarine rescue submarine each in Northern and Pacific fleet areas, had several “hard” compartments in submarines, and now had fitted a sophisticated survival system in the ALFA. This was another item that did not square with our view that the Soviets had little concern for human life.

              I need to shove this down the throat of every lib calling Russians Orc’s. It’s quite literally Nazi propaganda. I believe the same people who worked in the Nazi propaganda machine were brought to the US to continue their anti-soviet activities.

              Just started Vol 1, really interesting from the start, thank you for the recommendations!

    • meth_dragon [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      1 year ago

      patchwork-chimera had a good thread on lcd from about a year ago regarding the taiwan situation and in it iirc he said something along the lines of the US hypersonics program being a bit behind in some places but ahead in others. obviously i’m not privy to the specifics but just from the PR it doesn’t seem like shit’s going great. there are like a billion different projects that keep getting cannibalized by each other or going MIA and nothing but failed launches and tests for the ones that don’t go underwater, wtf is happening?

      you get the impression they’re swooshing their missiles around in wind tunnels doing pugachev’s cobras at reentry speeds but haven’t figured out a reliable ignition mechanism yet. real cart before the horse shit.