Brad Larkin
15.3K posts
@winincentive
Retired software engineer and entrepreneur, still active as an independent researcher and speaker in the field of genetic genealogy.
1. Your posts got me wondering what Iranian patriots doing to remove the IR regime? And I thought about Ireland's situation under British rule during WWI. Irish nationalists organized the "Irish Volunteers" who started off just holding meetings and practicing some military drills because weapons were banned and they did not have any firearms anyway. Here we see some of them parading in review in Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland in 1915.
Another Russian tusk FPV gores a Ukrainian “Darts” strike UAV, piercing the battery and causing it to catch fire. Once again the FPV survives the attack to be reused. x.com/GrandpaRoy2/st…
BREAKING: Britain has fewer than 50 Storm Shadow cruise missiles left. The stockpile that once exceeded 200 was drained over two years of transfers to Ukraine to help Kyiv strike Russian targets deep behind the front line. The missiles worked. They hit command posts and ammunition depots and naval headquarters across occupied Ukraine and Crimea. They helped Ukraine survive. And now Britain has almost none left for itself, during a war being launched from its own airfields against a country that just hit a British oil facility with drones. Brimstone anti-armour missiles sit at 25 to 35 percent of pre-war stocks. Paveway IV precision-guided bombs, the same weapon the RAF used over Libya and Syria, are at 30 to 40 percent. The National Audit Office estimates that Britain can sustain high-intensity combat operations for three to six weeks before requiring American resupply. Three to six weeks. The Iran war is already in its fifth week. If Britain were fighting it rather than hosting it, the cupboard would already be empty. The Army is 10,000 soldiers below target. Type 45 destroyers suffer chronic propulsion failures requiring six to twelve months of repair. The F-35 and Typhoon fleet operates at 60 to 70 percent availability. The industrial base that would replenish stocks runs on rare-earth magnets manufactured in China, the same China that controls 90 percent of the permanent magnets in every guided missile Britain would need to fire and is currently being asked to broker the peace. Any direct involvement beyond basing would require 8 to 15 billion pounds in emergency supplemental spending. National debt exceeds 100 percent of GDP. There is no majority in Parliament for funding a war the Prime Minister says is not Britain’s, fought with weapons Britain does not have, replenished by supply chains controlled by a country Britain needs to broker the ceasefire. This is why Starmer says “not our war.” Not because of principle. Not because of legality, although his own advisors have told him the strikes are legally questionable. Not because of Iraq, although the ghost of Blair hangs over every press conference. Because of arithmetic. Britain gave its missiles to Ukraine. It gave its bases to America. It gave its diplomatic capital to a 35-nation meeting about reopening Hormuz “after the fighting stops.” And it has nothing left to give except words, which cost nothing and accomplish less. Trump knows this. He mocked the Royal Navy in the Telegraph interview. He dismissed Starmer’s windmills. He called NATO a “paper tiger” because the paper is literal: Britain’s defence capability exists on paper. On the tarmac and in the magazines and in the recruitment offices, the numbers tell a different story. The story says that one of the six largest economies on earth, the country that once ruled a quarter of the planet, cannot sustain a shooting war for longer than six weeks without calling Washington for resupply. The bases are full. The aircraft are American. The missiles are gone. The debt is real. And the Prime Minister stands at the podium and says this is not our war while the war takes off from our runways carrying weapons we could not replace if we tried. Britain is not refusing to fight. Britain cannot fight. The doctrine is not a choice. It is an inventory report. And the inventory says zero. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
Raytheon Coyote drones are now intercepting enemy UAVs over Erbil, offering a cost-effective, sustainable defense solution. Footage from today shows the system in action.
NEW: The combined force campaign targeting Iranian commanders is likely impeding their ability to conduct sizable and coordinated attacks. Officials familiar with US and Western intelligence assessments speaking to The New York Times on March 30 said that the deaths of local Iranian commanders have degraded the ability of local Iranian commanders to communicate to launch large and coordinated attacks. The targeted killing of local commanders has immediate practical effects by removing key commanders who give orders. Decapitation also creates a pervasive fear that can cause targeted commanders to take precautions to survive that impede their ability to execute their assigned mission. Key Takeaways: Iran launched only three missile barrages at Israel since CTP-ISW’s last data cutoff, marking its lowest barrage rate of the war to date. These salvoes also contain only a small number of missiles, which may be a byproduct of Iranian command-and-control challenges highlighted previously. Iran has been firing only a few missiles per salvo at Israel since March 20. The Iranian Parliament National Security Commission passed a bill on March 30 titled the “Strait of Hormuz Management Plan,” which outlines a series of policies that assert that Iran has sovereignty over international waterways in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s parliament has little real power but its decision to pass this bill represents a desire in Tehran to continue to impede international shipping around the Strait after the war. Iran could use these threats to coerce concessions from the United States or its partners or deter them. Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah almost certainly executed the kidnapping of US freelance journalist Shelly Kittleson in Baghdad City, Iraq, on March 31. Hezbollah conducted four first-person view (FPV) drone strikes against IDF armored vehicles in southern Lebanon on March 31. None of the IDF’s armored vehicles that Hezbollah struck with FPV drones appeared to be equipped with improvised top-mounted slat armor to protect the vehicles against FPV drone attacks or anti-tank munitions.
