Claudio Coloma
3.3K posts
@ClaudioColomaRI
🇨🇱 Post-Marxist IRT. PhD @cIDA_essex @Uni_of_Essex. Investigador at @COMYARTESUDLA; rt ≠ endorsement. Author of Pluralising the Meaning of China in Global IR
Pete Hegseth presents Washington's “Greater North America" concept of dominating everything from Greenland to the Panama Canal
Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid has made a whole career out of typing out bogus articles about how the US president and the Israeli prime minister are secretly mad at each other. Some sample headlines from the final year of the Biden administration:
BREAKING: Zelensky just landed in Doha to defend a gas field that Qatar shares with the country bombing it. Iran and Qatar share the North Field / South Pars, the largest natural gas reservoir on earth. It holds 1,800 trillion cubic feet of gas, enough to supply the world for 13 years per Reuters and the IEA. Two-thirds sits in Qatari waters. One-third in Iranian waters. It is one geological structure divided by a maritime border. On March 18, after Israel struck South Pars infrastructure on the Iranian side, Iran retaliated by hitting Ras Laffan Industrial City on the Qatari side per CNN and QatarEnergy. The facility that processes all the gas from Qatar’s share of their joint field was struck by missiles from the country that shares the field. QatarEnergy declared force majeure. Seventeen percent of Qatar’s LNG capacity is offline for three to five years. Fourteen percent of Qatar’s helium exports have been cut. Qatar supplies 30 percent of the world’s helium, the gas that cools quantum computers, MRI machines, semiconductor fabs, and SpaceX rockets. Iran bombed the other half of its own gas field. Now Zelensky is in Doha offering to protect what remains. And the weapon Iran is using to attack Qatar is the weapon Zelensky spent four years learning to destroy. Iran designed the Shahed-136 kamikaze drone. Iran gave the design to Russia. Russia industrialized it, upgraded the navigation, added anti-jamming modules sourced from Chinese components, renamed it the Geran-2, and fired thousands of them at Ukrainian cities for four years. Ukraine developed the $2,100 FPV interceptor that kills the Shahed at a 70 percent rate per Forces News and Militarnyi. Ukraine trained over 7,000 operators on battlefield-proven simulators. Ukraine deployed 201 specialists across the Gulf states per Zelensky’s own count. Iran invented the drone. Russia upgraded it. Ukraine learned to kill it. Iran is now firing it at Qatar. Zelensky just arrived to close the loop. The cost arithmetic makes the circle complete. Qatar and its Gulf allies have been intercepting Iranian Shaheds with $3.9 million Patriot missiles per Military Times. The cost exchange ratio is 114 to 1 in Iran’s favour. Zelensky is offering Sting interceptors at $2,100 per unit, 1,000 per day, inverting the ratio to roughly 10 to 1 against Iran. He told The National: “No matter how many Patriots, THAADs, or other air-defence systems are in the Middle East, that alone is not enough for fully effective air defence.” He is right. And the reason he is right is that the drone Qatar is trying to stop was designed in Tehran, upgraded in Moscow, and defeated in Kyiv before it ever arrived over Ras Laffan. Nobody on earth has more operational experience against this specific weapon than Ukraine. Not America. Not Israel. Not the Gulf states. Four years and thousands of engagements built the institutional knowledge that Zelensky just carried into Doha. Zelensky told reporters: “Real security is built on partnership.” In return he wants Patriot missiles for Ukraine’s own defence against Russia, financial support for reconstruction, and investment in Ukrainian drone production per Al Jazeera. The country that invented the drone is bombing the gas field it shares with its neighbour. The country that learned to kill the drone just arrived to defend that neighbour. The weapon has come full circle. So has the man who defeated it. Full analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
BREAKING: Zelensky just landed in the UAE and signed a defence cooperation agreement with President MBZ. The deal on the table changes everything about this war. Ukraine is offering Gulf states 1,000 drone interceptors per day. Each Sting interceptor costs $2,100. Each Patriot missile it replaces costs $3.9 million. In exchange, Ukraine wants the Patriot missiles the Gulf states are burning through, because Kyiv cannot get enough of them to stop Russian missiles. Read that again. The country America refused to arm fast enough is now arming America’s allies with a weapon that costs 1,857 times less than the one America cannot produce fast enough. The National reported on March 27 that Zelensky told reporters: “We’d like to quietly receive the Patriot missiles we have a deficit of, and give them a corresponding number of interceptors.” AFP confirmed the UAE agreement on March 28. Eleven countries have formally requested Ukraine’s drone defence expertise per Zelensky’s own count. Over 200 Ukrainian military specialists are already deployed across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. Here is the arithmetic that should terrify every Pentagon procurement officer on earth. The United States fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first four days of the Iran war per a US Congressional study cited by the Jerusalem Post. That is eighteen months of Lockheed Martin’s annual production consumed in 96 hours. Each of those 943 shots cost $3.9 million. Total expenditure: $3.68 billion in four days on defensive interceptions alone. Iran produces 10,000 Shahed drones per month per Reuters. Each drone costs $20,000 to $50,000. The cost exchange ratio is 114 to 1 in Iran’s favour per Military Times. Ukraine’s Sting interceptor inverts this arithmetic entirely. At $2,100, the cost ratio flips from 114-to-1 against America to roughly 10-to-1 against Iran. Ukraine can supply 1,000 per day. That is 30,000 per month against Iran’s 10,000 Shaheds per month. For the first time in this war, the defender’s production rate exceeds the attacker’s production rate at a fraction of the cost. And the country that built this weapon is the same country that Trump publicly rejected. “No, they are not helping. We do not need their help. We know more about drones than anyone else” per Fox News. He doubled down: “The last person we need help from is Zelensky.” Meanwhile the Pentagon notified Congress of plans to redirect $750 million in Ukraine-bound Patriot missiles to Gulf states per House of Saud reporting. America is simultaneously refusing Ukraine’s cheap solution and cannibalising Ukraine’s expensive one. Zelensky framed this explicitly. He told The National: “No matter how many Patriots, THAADs, or other air-defence systems are in the Middle East, that alone is not enough for fully effective air defence.” He told the UK Parliament: “When it comes to shooting down massive Shahed attacks, only Ukrainian experience can really help with this today.” The Pentagon is spending $3.9 million per interception, raiding Swiss fighter jet accounts to cover shortfalls, and diverting Ukraine’s own Patriot supply to the Gulf. Zelensky is offering the same result for $2,100 and producing 1,000 units per day. The market has a word for this kind of disruption. The $2,100 drone is the most important weapon in this war. And the country that built it is the one America said it did not need. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
