Bulletins and News Discussion from March 31st to April 6th, 2025 - Magnitude 7.7 Earthquake Hits Mandalay

Image of destruction in Mandalay, Myanmar, from Al Jazeera.

As if the ongoing civil war wasn't enough, Myanmar has now been struck by a very powerful earthquake, resulting in 2000 deaths and thousands more injured as of the time of writing. Estimates are that the death toll could reach 10,000. Infrastructure like roads and bridges are damaged, and the hospitals are overwhelmed. The earthquake struck during Eid prayers, resulting in even higher casualties as several mosques collapsed. 20 million people already required humanitarian assistance in Myanmar, and now the situation there will be even worse. International rescue teams have rushed into the country, and aid is being raised, though with USAID experiencing the... changes that it is, the United States will be of even more limited help than usual. So far, China has sent $14 million, while USAID has supplied $2 million. In Thailand, the death toll seems considerably lower, though there has still been significant damage; a skyscraper under construction collapsed in Bangkok.

Myanmar is located very close to the boundary between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. In particular, the country is divided in two by the north-south oriented Sagaing fault. This fault is typically strike-slip; that is, each side of the fault moves horizontally past each other. The earthquake's depth was 10 kilometers, which is pretty shallow, and its proximity to the surface amplified the felt force of the earthquake. Additionally, the soft soil in this region tends to further amplify seismic waves through a process called liquefaction. Combine all this with the lackluster building codes due to many years of impoverishment and civil wars, and this explains why the death toll, and the expense to the country in general to repair damage, will probably be extremely high.

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NYT: U.S. Strikes in Yemen Burning Through Munitions With Limited Success
President Trump said this week that Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen have been “decimated by the relentless strikes” that he ordered beginning on March 15.
But that’s not what Pentagon and military officials are privately telling Congress and allied countries.
In closed briefings in recent days, Pentagon officials have acknowledged that there has been only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers, according to congressional aides and allies.
The officials briefed on confidential damage assessments say the bombing is consistently heavier than strikes conducted by the Biden administration, and much bigger than what the Defense Department has publicly described.
But Houthi fighters, known for their resiliency, have reinforced many of their bunkers and other targeted sites, frustrating the Americans’ ability to disrupt the militia’s missile attacks against commercial ships in the Red Sea, according to three congressional and allied officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
In just three weeks, the Pentagon has used $200 million worth of munitions, in addition to the immense operational and personnel costs to deploy two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses to the Middle East, the officials said.
The total cost could be well over $1 billion by next week, and the Pentagon might soon need to request supplemental funds from Congress, one U.S. official said.
So many precision munitions are being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners are growing concerned about overall Navy stocks and implications for any situation in which the United States would have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.
The U.S. strikes, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named Operation Rough Rider after the troops Theodore Roosevelt led in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, likely could continue for six months, officials said.
A senior Pentagon official late Thursday pushed back on the assessments described by the congressional and allied officials.
The senior official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said the airstrikes had exceeded their goal in the campaign’s initial phase, disrupting senior Houthi leaders’ ability to communicate, limiting the group’s response to a handful of ineffective counter strikes, and setting the conditions for subsequent phases, which he declined to discuss. “We’re on track,” the official said.
Someone is lying here to the NYT about how this bombing campaign is actually going. Based on what @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net has been reporting, specifically on the latest and greatest bunker busters being dropped from B-2s, I suspect it's Trump/Pentagon officials, but there's money and political implications to all of this. Depleting US munitions means more money for defense contractors. All I can say for sure is that Yemen continues to learn why Americans don't have healthcare.
- Luckily we are years away from having the arms production capabilities to replenish what we've lost in Ukraine, Israel and our other proxies. The arms industry is salivating at the money they will get to replace what is lost, and half of that will probably end up in foreign bank accounts of arms executives, the rest going into building factories and increasing production capacity that will never be completed. Yemen will still exist long after the missiles run out
- The thing with the munitions is someone at CNN heard from a DoD official that F-18s were launching cruise missiles, and then incorrectly made the assumption that these were JASSM cruise missiles, while in reality they are SLAM-ER cruise missiles. There been no pictures of F-18s with JASSM missiles equipped, and such a long range missile from an air launched platform makes little sense given that the Carrier Strike Group is around 800km from Yemen at most times.
  Yes the US Navy has been using a ton of long range precision weapons for this campaign to minimise risk, and yes they are quite expensive. Each AGM-154C JSOW 1000lb shaped charge glide bomb (the most commonly used weapon, with some F-18s launching 4 per sortie) costs $720K (130km range), each modernised AGM-84H/K SLAM-ER ATA cruise missile costs between $1.5-3 million (270km range), each GBU-53/B Stormreaker 250lb glide bomb costs $220K (110km range against stationary targets, 75km range against moving targets), each Tomahawk cruise missile costs $2 million. Each AGM-88E AARGM HARM fired by an EA-18G Growler to suppress or destroy a SAM site in Yemen costs $870K (148 km range).
  The big cost though, is the B-2 deployment. Each GBU-57 MOP bomb is around $20 million (yes that's the actual cost, that's not a typo) once factoring in the total program research cost (each bomb costs $3.5 million just to build). Cost per flight hour is around $200k in today's money per B-2. Given the B-2s have started missions on the early morning hours of April 1st, this explains the ballooning costs. The deployment of a second aircraft carrier is also significant.
  EA-18G Growler armed with AGM-88E AARGMs:
  F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet armed with GBU-53/B Stormreakers:
  F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets armed with AGM-84H/K SLAM-ER ATA cruise missiles, in the air and on the carrier:
  
  F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet armed with AGM-154C JSOWs:
  
  Sorry, it it wasn't clear, I was referencing your comments about the GBU-57 and the B-2s because, if they are breaking those out, then I suspect that, contrary to what the unnamed Pentagon officials said, things likely haven't gone "better than expected" in the initial phases, and that the reporting about the cost of all this by the NYT is likely correct.
  
  It really depends what is meant by "initial phases". During the first night where the US caught Ansarallah by suprise, yes they managed to kill some important people, acknowledged by pro Ansarallah Yemeni media themselves. The APKWS guided rockets appear to be successful in stopping drone and cruise missile attacks on US Navy warships. I think, and you'll probably think this as well, that calling the first few hours of strikes an "initial phase" is stretching the truth quite a bit. But media outlets like the NYT, Atlantic, CNN, etc, love to stretch the truth.
  But after that, everyone important to Ansarallah was likely sent to the underground facilities, and fighter jets like the F-18 don't exactly carry bombs big enough to make a 400ft wide crater in a mountain. This is the problem the Saudi coalition faced for over a decade. So during that phase, I think the death toll for Ansarallah figures from airstrikes went from 37 to 41. Not exactly a resounding success, only managing to get 4 people in over two weeks. The only objective accomplished during this phase has been stopping the ballistic missile launches towards Israel. Otherwise, Ansarallah military capabilities went unchanged. ASBM capability remained intact, their air defences can still take out MQ-9 Reaper drones, and the leadership regrouped. So yeah, that phase of strikes didn't accomplish much aside from protecting Israel, which is pretty unsuccessful if the goal is to stop the naval blockade of the Red Sea by Ansarallah. So not exactly a successful "initial phase".
  The B-2s have changed things somewhat, now the US can target underground facilities and Ansarallah have stopped releasing casualty figures, and have cracked down on the sharing of footage and information on US airstrikes. The US is also conducting a targeted assassination campaign now, bombing vehicles with suspected Ansarallah senior members in them. Though I don't think that wil do much, aside from restricting their movement. Maybe this is meant by "setting the conditions for subsequent phaess".

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