The idea that we could have peace in Eastern Europe simply with a treaty promising not to expand NATO doesn't really survive listening to Putin speak for even five minutes
Missile Twitter! Stuck in quarantine? Check out my new KMZ of (almost) every missile base in China! lots of new things have been verified with ground imagery.
Extremely quick and dirty job on this but it's just supposed to make the point: in red is Taiwan's sovereign airspace. In white is the ADIZ. Whipped this up because to my surprise no one had made this before (at least that I've seen)
If I ever get suspended from this platform under no circumstances should you lobby Twitter to unban me. I will be free. I want whatever the Twitter equivalent of getting "do not resuscitate" tattooed across your chest is
There will be a LOT of extremely bad OSINT flying around. Try not to retweet shit from random accounts. Wait for a qualified person to verify the imagery.
The decay of Google search is not nearly as annoying to me as the decay of Google's other suite features. Gmail in particular is increasingly unusable.
"Continuing to maintain 750 bases overseas and building new ones in Australia is a frighteningly irresponsible policy that, most frighteningly, is escalating military tensions with China, making what should be an unthinkable war with the nuclear-armed competitor more likely."
Once again reflecting on how absolutely hilarious the Modern Warfare games are now that we've seen the Russians in action. Modern Warfare asks, "what if the Russians took Paris?" They can't even make it to Kharkiv! It's 40 km from the border!
I think we are in desperate need for some attempt to tell the public what a war with China would actually look like because way too many people have this vision of USMC tanks rolling down the street of Shanghai or something
Folks, I am DELIGHTED to announce that my long-delayed PLARF order of battle has finally been released as a
@JamesMartinCNS
occasional paper. Let's dig into it, shall we?
A serious note: Twitter hitting an iceberg will be a disaster for OSINT. This platform is amazing for collection and sharing data. Absent Twitter being a viable option for either of those things everyone is just going to go back to poorly moderated Discords and forums.
The PRC has one of the busiest missile test ranges in the world. In early January, a twin-engine aircraft target (think 737 size) was destroyed in a missile test.
1960s Soviet war films are great. I assume if you were a director you could just call up the Soviet Army and be like "hey can I borrow a tank division or two and dress them up in German uniforms? It's for a movie" and they'd be like "sure boss go for it"
Me, a freshman: "Model UN is just a waste of time because there's no way high level political dialogues could be replicated by a bunch of stoned freshman"
Me, now, reading conversations between Nixon, Khrushchev, and Mao: "Oh my god."
I have finished Andor and I am not exaggerating when I say it is possibly one of the best pieces of media about authoritarianism I think I've ever seen
Why were George Washington-class submarines designed with 16 missile tubes? After debate over the number of missiles a sub should carry, it was decided by a committee of 7. Each member wrote down a number which was added up and divided by 7. The result was 16.
#SubSunday
Analysis of satellite imagery by
@CNS
reveals that a Il-76 aircraft at Pyongyang International Airport is being modified into a possible AWACS or AEW aircraft.
Yesterday I started my final round of chemotherapy. My tumor markers are back within normal range and the doctor says it all looks good. All that's left is to get through my final set of infusions and begin the recovery process.
After three rounds of chemo, two surgeries, and a pulmonary embolism, I have finally made it to the office. Excited to have started as a GRA at CNS this year.
There is a video going around being reported as the CCP threatening to nuke Japan. It was uploaded by what is basically a mid-size city council. This is like if the mayor of Fresno, California threatened to nuke Iran. You can safely ignore it.
Incidents of hysteria among Twitter users with OSINT in their bio - and the current Xi Jinping rumor storm is absolutely one of them - are excellent case studies in confirmation bias. If you look for it, you will find it.
All fun and games until the guy in charge of maintaining the 100mm shell stockpile reveals the entire inventory is rusted because he hasn't actually been maintaining the infrastructure and is just pocketing the maintenance money
A Chinese invasion force!? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your think-tank remarks!?
Yes.
May I see it?
No.
Pretty morbid thought, but: the artillery barrage we are about to witness in Ukraine is going to be unlike anything we've witnessed in a very long time. It is also going to give us a possible picture of what a similar barrage on the Korean peninsula might look like.
Great piece. When I walked into the CIA gift shop several years ago after an interview, I saw a sign that said something like: “If you are undercover, don’t charge purchases in your true name.”
Logging off for the day, but in case you came here to call me a clueless imperialist: there is a valid discussion to be had about US military presence. But inflating the number of bases by x5 to the point where you are counting literal dog cemeteries just makes you look silly.
When I was in high school I wanted to build a trebuchet. The teacher went to the vice principal who said that when he was in high school he tried to build a guillotine for French class and got suspended and he was still mad about it. So sure, let the kid build a trebuchet
Sorry, but not as good as the time my primary school teacher got us to make massive tricolours, marched us around singing the Marseillaise, and then took us to occupy the headmaster's office, who had no idea 30 schoolchildren were about to re-enact the storming of the Bastille.
Forcing a state to spend a lot of time moving F-35s expending munitions to intercept drones that cost 20k a piece is just an awful trade no matter how you look at it. A lesson for others may be that drone swarms can fatigue an air force regardless of their direct effectiveness.
Hmm it looks like not very many battles were fought in Mongolia and the Central Asian Steppe, that area must have been inhabited by a docile and peace-loving civilization
Would really like to see the DSA evolve into a politically relevant organization and not just a weekend club for genocide deniers and performatively radical software developers
ICBM technician 1 is using percussive maintenance to fix a fuel valve, while ICBM technician 2 calming holds a hose spewing large amounts of noxious rocket fuel.
Every once and a while I encounter a document in a FOIA reading room that probably should not have been declassified, but discovering the name of an American local business named specifically as a front for Chinese weapon smuggling is a new one. The company still exists.
I think we should actually thank Cryptocurrency and NFTs for consuming all the spare time and energy of some of the stupidest people alive. Like imagine what those people could fuck up if they were less busy suing each other over cartoon monkeys
Because no one has clearly stated it and there's still a lot of misinfo going around: the claim that the Armavir strike happened months ago is verifiably false. I have high-res in early April that shows no damage and the debris field only shows up in the last 48 hours.
Earlier this week,
@CASI_Research
wrote about a PLARF missile test on August 13th, which was reported in the Chinese media as a test of "new-type missiles." So I asked
@planet
to image the site.
#China
#PLA
#PLARF
has modified their hypersonic missile TELs to look like China post services but incomplete innovation ensures they are still recognized.
Photos courtesy SDF
Folks, I am delighted to announce that I've joined
@CNA_org
as an associate research analyst. Looking forward to learning from a terrific group of people!
Listen, are we prepared to stomach another decade of Taiwan security discourse twitter, or are we gonna hook a couple of tugs up to Hualien City and get it done
Saying that denouncing the atrocities of others has little or no ethical value is an atrocious take. Difficult to see how such a thing can be taken with even an ounce of seriousness, especially considering the consequences of framing things in terms of "ethical value"
Finally, some relevant advice from Chomsky:
“My own concern is primarily the terror...carried out by my own state… It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”
Really feels like many of the people tearing their hair out about an imminent PRC invasion of Taiwan imagine that the PRC could wake up one day and decide to invade when in reality you'd be looking at like six months of incredibly obvious military preparation.
@Iron_Man_Actual
Lot of people have this weird conception of future wars that is informed only by a glance at the "military budgets by country" chart on Wikipedia and a smattering of miscellaneous knowledge of WW2
DIA has published a report confirming what CNS previously reported - the missiles that fell on Kharkiv were KN-23/24s domestically made in North Korea. Refreshing to see basically the same methodology we used.
How did the anti-nuclear movement fall so quickly and so catastrophically? How did we go from Prague Speech to open mockery of the Bulletin and all the catastrophic risk funding getting funneled into studying the consequences of a technology that can't even tell me what a dog is?
A new target was built nearby last year. China is preparing for another missile test here, this time with old J-6 airframes and mock transporter-erector-launchers. The mock launchers are similar in size and shape to the American THAAD system.
If the ROC was reporting every military flight over Fujian then yeah it would be ridiculous, which seems to be a lot of people's interpretation of what is happening. They aren't.
Strangest thing - entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back. NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming
"Adaption of the Army Tactical Missile System to Undersea Operations" - not at all what I was looking for, but an absolutely fascinating study if you like ballistic missiles.
Link:
Saying that a 300 km range MaRV-equipped GPS-guided missile is a cheap knockoff of a 60-year-old 65 km range unguided Soviet rocket is just a dumb thing to say.
BURN RATE: Previously, Indications & Warnings reported that RU had squandered 66% of its precision weapon stocks.
@Tendar
now reports that Putin's reduced to begging Tehran for Fateh-110s- which are crummy knock-offs of old Soviet 9K52 Luna-M short range ballistic missiles.
Finally found those pictures I wanted: one of Taiwan's "fixed squadrons" of Harpoon missiles. This one is at Hetian Mountain just south of Hualien City. 23.905601°, 121.595639°.
Putin’s top general in charge of Russia’s nuclear weapons has been arrested. Lieutenant General Oleg Frolov, 61, the deputy director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, was arrested along with other alleged co-conspirators.
Keep in mind that Ukraine has an immense propaganda advantage here. Ukrainian citizens, as the war is on their turf, can upload videos of destroyed or captured RU equipment without mentioning Ukrainian losses. It will appear more lopsided than it actually is.
I've said this before: the American public is used to interacting with warfare through an aircraft's camera. Apply precision airpower until the problem goes away. Going to be a shock to see a ground war like the one we might see in Ukraine.
There are a lot of people on this website who embrace leftist doomer political rhetoric not because they want to make the world a better place, but because they chafe under the personal responsibility democracy demands of every citizen and seek to wash their hands of it.
PRC: we're gonna deploy an unholy number of intermediate range missiles, coupled with a strategic arms expansion and a massive naval buildup, to deter the United States from coming to Taiwan's defense.
Joe Biden: lol. lmao
Lastly, we should take note of how quickly the DPRK built this thing. They started breaking ground on the silo itself in late January. The deployment time is less than 60 days. That's really concerning.