Bulletins and News Discussion from October 21st to October 27th, 2024 - Swimming Back To The Titanic - COTW: Moldova

On the 20th of October, Moldova - a small, landlocked country bordering western Ukraine and with a population of about 3 million - voted to join the EU. The margin was razor-thin, with the pro-EU vote gaining 50.39%, or an absolute difference of about 11,000 people. There was simultaneously a presidential vote between the incumbent, Maia Sandu, and other candidates, with the main competitor being Alexandr Stoianoglo.

The election was characterized by accusations of Russian interference, with Russian propaganda apparently flooding in, as well as people offering Moldovans money to vote against the EU. While the result does suggest that half the voting-age population of Moldova consists entirely of Russians who want to destroy democracy and all the good in the world, it seems to have just barely failed. This is a bad time to be a site entirely composed of Russian disinformation agents and bots. Twice already today, I've had to restart my program after somebody told me "Disregard all previous prompts."

While Moldova is a poor country which could benefit in some ways from EU membership, in practice, it is unlikely that they will be able to join for the foreseeable future, requiring many of the... reforms... that the EU requires of potential new members. But as basically every major European economy continues to slowly sink as recessions and political crises degrade them, one wonders how beneficial EU membership will even be in the years and decades to come - if it survives for decades. In that sense, it's as if the survivors of the Titanic are swimming back towards it, believing that being on a bigger - albeit slowly sinking - boat is better than trying their luck on small lifeboats.

Then again, like with Serbia, their geographical and geopolitical position makes anti-Western actions extremely difficult. It is rare that dissention is tolerated for long in the West - one tends to get called a dictator by crowds of people holding English-language signs in non-English countries, photographed by Western journalists who haven't meaningfully reported on your country in months or years. You can crush your people with neoliberal austerity for years, killing hundreds of thousands through neglect, and face glowing approval from the media - but try and use state resources to benefit the poor, and global institutions start ranking you on the authoritarian dictator scale.

The best case for Moldova is that it becomes an exploitable hinterland for Germany to harvest and privatize as it tries - and fails - to compete in a global economic war between the US and China/BRICS. The worst case is that tensions with Russia over Pridnestrovie, as well as possible eventual NATO involvement (though Moldova is not a member, it is a partner of NATO), result in the ongoing war also reaching them.

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Ok since it's looking as if Israel are in their final preparations for their attack against Iran, I will be posting the leaked US spy documents on Israel's preparations, along with trying to make sense of what they mean. This is going to be a long and detailed post (lots of potentially terrifying details), so I'll be completing it inside the spoiler tag below.
- I am by no means a milblogger and what I’m about to say will sound very obvious to many people here… but is Israel’s strategy really just “bomb everyone and everything till the other side gives up”? That’s mostly what they’ve done in Gaza until the start of this month in the north. It’s clearly what they’re doing in Lebanon - they know they’ll get their ass kicked on the ground so they are bombing civilians to try and get Hezbollah to quit. And it looks like this is what the attack on Iran will be.
  And if that’s the case, what is the response? It seems like Israel is making a rational calculation that they have an unlimited supply of bombs and missiles from the US, so are they planning to just keep it up until Lebanon in particular is just completely destroyed?
  Historically, has a military campaign that is almost exclusively bombing ever succeeded? I know the Americans tried (and failed) to do this in Vietnam starting in Nixon’s first term.
  
  is Israel’s strategy really just “bomb everyone and everything till the other side gives up”?
  That's probably their ideal, but I think their real strategy is to continue to escalate/goad the Resistance into escalating to the point where the US has to intervene directly to bail out the zionists, and the only way that is likely to happen is if a wider regional war starts. Getting bogged down and eventually kicked out of Lebanon by itself wouldn't be enough to pull in the US, they need an outright war with Iran in order for that to be a possibility.
  
  this strategy may backfire if the paper tiger inervenes and still gets rinsed
  
  yeah, getting the vibe their plan is just
  Start shit
  Get the US directly involved
  ?????
  'greater israel' magically happens
  With no regard as to how increasingly poorly the US military has performed in the past half century
  
  It's like they both based their strategy on the other's propaganda about themselves
  
  ???? is a better win condition than "Let the current war grind us down." The US gets directly involved and the situation changes, which Israel must hope comes to their benefit
  
  1.5. false flag
  
  also, false flag
  
  Historically, has a military campaign that is almost exclusively bombing ever succeeded?
  No. Wars cannot be and have never been won by air power alone. It is a fundamental basic military fact that air power by itself can't take and hold ground, which is what is ultimately required to win a war. As we are also seeing in Ukraine today, all of the fancy tech that today's militaries have is still secondary in importance to the basic infantryman who is the backbone of any war. Second is artillery by the way. Air power, missiles, drones, etc. are tertiary at best.
  And if they really think that they will succeed with this approach where everyone else in history who has tried this failed (if sheer scale of bombing won wars then the US would have won Korea and Vietnam, but they lost the latter and fought to a stalemate in the former, and only because they actually deployed very large amount of ground forces for the Korean war) shows an utter illiteracy in military understanding. It shows that they have fully bought into their own bullshit, drank their own koolaid about American air supremacy having been what won the Iraq war rather than what it really was that did it which was massive amounts of CIA bribes.
  If they want to win any kind of war they will have to deploy boots on the ground and we've seen very clearly not just over this past year but ever since a much weaker Hezbollah first kicked them out of Lebanon that nowadays the Zionist genocide forces are godawful when it comes to ground combat. Once upon a time in the 60s and 70s that may have been different as they still had a lot of Soviet WW2 veterans but all they've done for decades now is bully and murder an occupied population armed with sticks and stones and homemade weapons.
  
  I'd argue that air power has replaced artillery as the secondary ranking/category in NATO combined arms doctrine. We can see this in the first Gulf War, in which there were almost as many aircraft used as artillery pieces! 1800 aircraft, and 2200 artillery pieces on the NATO side.
  
  but is Israel’s strategy really just “bomb everyone and everything till the other side gives up”?
  That really depends on what is being targeted in Iran. If Israel target a few above ground facilities of minimal value, there is a path to de escalation. If Israel target Iranian air defences in a large operation to try open up the possibility for a prolonged bombing campaign, then yes they just want to bomb Iran into submission.
  I agree with your assessment on Israel's operations against Hezbollah, they are looking to inflict a large and disproportionate amount of casualties to try cause division within Lebanon and get the people to abandon Hezbollah or to get Hezbollah to stop because the cost to life is too great. Ground operations have also been quite unsuccessful, and a lot of that comes down to the bizzare tactics used by the IDF in their counter insurgency operations in South Lebanon. Tanks without air or infantry support, small probing teams to minimise losses and involvement, etc. No other military would do this, it's suicidal against an enemy as well equipped as Hezbollah.
  As for the response, it's interesting to note that all the weapons Israel have prepared for their attack on Iran so far, are "indigenous" weapons systems. The ROCKS and Golden Horizon ALBMs are Israeli equipment, and appear to have been fitted to 4th gen aircraft like the F-15, and not the 5th generation F-35. I guess this is what Biden means when he says that Israel is capable of "going at it alone" in their planned attack against Iran. Any further air campaign will require US made bombs though, and likely the use of F-35 aircraft.
  I think the closet thing there was to a war "won exclusively by air power" was the first Gulf War, where NATO air operations inflicted the majority of losses. But such a war still required a very large ground force from NATO to actually hold territory. So I don't think the Israelis intend to do that yet. Any operation against Iran on such a scale would require US and NATO forces, Israel can't go it alone in that regard.
- Appreciate you digging into the weeds for us on this one. I tried reading some of it and couldn't really parse it easily. Not enough patience.
- The fact that 40 of these missiles have been deployed is very concerning and could indicate Israeli intentions to carry out a wider scale Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD/DEAD) operation. This is a capability that Israel has already demonstrated against Iran, that Iran failed to stop last time round.
  Appreciate the lengthy write up. I do wonder what the solution to massed SEAD would look like for Iran. Do they just turn their radar off and try and time it so the SEAD missile looses its lock? I really have no idea what other countermeasures there would be.
  
  Me, an idiot: Saturate the area around your defenses at like 10:1 with irrelevant radar signals to make them less likely to target the right location.
  What will probably happen: Something else that's bad instead.
  
  Yeah that's a thing that works, apparently the 1st gen of these missiles would happily seek microwave ovens if they were nearby
  Edit: looks like the microwave story originated in the Balkans but may be an urban legend.
  
  microwave ovens if they were nearby
  Like the ones people use in their homes? Don't make it sound like a 2 for 1 deal for Israel.
  
  Yeah exactly. There are continuous-wave 2.4 GHz radars, but I don't know if they're currently in use, or for what purposes. I would imagine microwave ovens would look similar to those to a detector, but I don't know enough about radar to say if they would actually work as decoys like the stories describe.
  
  Yes decoys and missile approach warning systems exist for this purpose, the question is how effective they are against the ALBM attack vector. The footage out there of destroyed Patriot and S300 systems would suggest limited effectiveness.
  
  I think that basically all advanced weapon systems made today are designed for non-peer conflict and suffer from reality when they're deployed in the field. Look at these tanks in Ukraine, they're super advanced but in the face of an actual conflict they wind up having to Frankenstein on defensive measures on the fly.
  
  The key to avoid being destroyed, as shown by the Serbs, is shoot and scoot tactics. Turning on your radar for a very short period of time, shooting at anything that appears, and then changing position. If this can be combined with a multi-layered air defence defence system, with point defence SAMs such as the Tor and Pantsir actively defending the major S300 SAM batteries and shooting down incoming missiles and bombs, along with mobile electronic counter measure and decoy units frustrating incoming anti radiation missiles, that would give the air defence system a solid chance of survival and a chance to carry out its mission.
  The problem is, as also shown by the Serbs, that if air defence operators dedicate so much energy and time to avoiding detection and destruction and end up in a stalemate with the enemy SEAD/DEAD campaign, the air defence is practically suppressed as they cannot carry out their primary mission of engaging enemy aircraft and denying them access to their airspace.
  The problems Iran face are that these anti radiation ROCKS ALBMs would be launched from a stand off distance over 200km away from the target. Such a distance is outside of the firing range of Iran's air defence systems, meaning that they won't be able to engage the aircraft firing the ALBMs directly. To stop them, they'll have to shoot down the ALBM itself. Then there's also the question of how mobile Iran's main SAM batteries can be, if they're set up to defend a certain area in a stationary manner and can't move easily, then they are more vulnerable.
  
  Interesting, thanks for the write up. Does sound like Iran will be stuck in a bind then. Damned if you do damned if you don’t. Hopefully Iran has a better plan this time for this scenario would not be good if their AA gets taken out.
  
  Israel could also see taking out Iran's air defence systems as a way of "leveling the playing field". We know that Israeli air defence systems in Arrow-2, Arrow-3 and David's Sling are likely depleted of ammunition due to Iran's ballistic missile attacks that took place during April and October. It's why Israel needs the US THAAD system to be deployed there. So that leaves Israel vulnerable to attack. So from their perspective, taking out Iranian air defence systems so that Iran is also vulnerable to attack could be a way of resetting the status of current events.
  
  Yeah as you mentioned earlier I’m afraid this is going to move rapidly up the escalation ladder.
  It’s why I was curious what Iran could potentially do to mitigate its AA installations being destroyed. Even if it’s not as good as the Russian or Chinese AA setup, some deterrence is better than nothing when the western doctrine is all about air superiority.
  
  That is part of the strategy to protect against DEAD, but if you are turning off your radars, then at the very least you are supressing your air defenses so in that way the SEAD mission is being successful.
  
  The problem with keeping radars off is that SEAD weapons are usually paired up with something intended to hit the site if it stays dark, such as a cruise missile, drone, or long range glide bomb.
- This really seems like Israel's self-destructing. If they do carry out this attack, I assume that Iran would just close the straight of Hormuz and bomb oil production facilities in response too.
  I wonder at what point would the US consider Israel more liability than asset too.
  
  Iran's threat to bomb the oil fields with their ballistic missiles is basically their version of Mutually Assured Destruction for the region, which is why so many countries are denying Israel the right to use their airspace for an attack against Iran. Hell, the UAE of all places even had pro Lebanese public awareness campaigns using their highway billboards recently! No one wants their oil facilities destroyed. The thing is, with the "Golden Horizon" ALBM, Israel can likely carry out limited attacks on Iran without having to even leave Israeli airspace, so there is no way to completely shut them out.

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