hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for friday the 18th of february 2022 and it is being recorded the day prior on the 17th we've got a lot of stuff to talk about today so let's jump right into the geopolitical update i'm not going to spend too much time talking about geopolitics because there's just way too much going on there's a lot of stuff going on out there and most of it's really not that helpful so i'm just going to touch on the stuff that is interesting first up are the nations that have either closed their embassies or moved their embassies to the western parts of ukraine the united states has closed their embassy in kiev and are moving a temporary uh a temporary embassy out west to levov it is unclear as to whether or not that's going to be an operational embassy i haven't really looked into it that much but when it comes to americans in ukraine the good news is that poland is now allowing americans to cross land borders into poland without any prior authorization or visas or stuff like that you can just get all your stuff there right at the border which is good for those of you who are looking to get out of ukraine speaking of evacuations we're also seeing an unprecedented number of private jets leaving ukraine if you're following a lot of the flight tracker and like open source uh ads adsb trackers you'll notice there are an awful lot of private planes leaving uh ukraine uh one-way trips and going to other countries like romania hungary places like that so i thought that's kind of interesting that a lot of the um senior like economic leaders in the country have left actually ukraine the the current political leadership had issues statements urging their uh people to come back people who are civil servants uh to come back to the country so um that's just kind of the way things work out and kind of hints as to what people in very powerful positions are thinking about the potential for invasion speaking of air travel a few airlines mostly klm is the biggest one have canceled their flights to ukraine so they're avoiding all ukrainian airspace and this kind of makes sense because ukraine has a very long history of of civilian airliners being shot down during this conflict most european or really every airline has been avoiding the eastern part of ukraine for a very long time now because of that but now it looks like a few airlines are extending that to the entire country so if you're trying to escape ukraine if you're trying to leave you know airline travel might not be just like what we've been saying is airline travel might not be that reliable something also of note uh in russia is or or really rather disputed territory is the american submarine incident between the united states and russia so a lot of people aren't aware of what went on with this and we still really don't know the full story really all we're getting is russia's side of the story but the short version of this is that the russian navy intercepted detected and intercepted an american virginia-class submarine operating in their territorial waters off the kuril islands this was a few days ago the russians claim that they you have used kinetic measures to sort of you know encourage the united states submarine to leave their waters and the u.s submarine left at high speed now if this sounds a little fishy that's probably because it is there's a lot of things wrong with the russian version of the story for one the virginia class submarines are very hard to detect and the vessels that were in the area the russia claims detected the submarine that's going to be a hard task for those ancient vessels so there's that i don't doubt for one minute that the united states does not have submarines shadowing the exercises off the curl islands the russian naval exercises but it just doesn't sound right the us navy has of course denied the entire thing and russia has refused to give any kind of proof as to knocking the american submarine out of their waters or something like that the reason i'm having a hard time defining it is because russia has used very shady language they've said they used special means to get the united states submarine to leave i don't know what that means it can be anything there's a lot of different things that go on in the sub-world diplomatically so it could be everything from some kind of special acoustic measure or even some kind of kinetic measure to uh to warn the us submarine off but again they're being very vague about it and it sounds a lot like russian propaganda at this point and really the kind of the kind of nail in the coffin for this is this image um which has been circulating around a lot of russian language chats and a lot of russian media claiming that this is an american countermeasure an acoustics countermeasure for an american submarine as in the russians scared the american submarine and they deployed acoustic countermeasures to escape and distract and cover their retreat and here's proof right well here's the problem this is actually not american this is a russian anti-submarine or submarine countermeasure system uh this is a very actually a this this image pulled up on the internet quite a long time ago and it's very interesting because it's kind of a classified system for the russians so this torpedo-like system is is really an electronic countermeasure right it's a an acoustic countermeasure system that can deploy other countermeasures at least we think in the sub-world these are not particularly new they've been around for a while but they're new to most people i think but the interesting part is is that this image of one kind of washing up on the shore there is russian it was due to their russians testing on their own systems and yet a lot of russian language platforms are claiming that this is american so kind of interesting and kind of the nail in the coffin that proves that probably didn't occur did a russian surface vessel or other submarine detect an american submarine yeah probably maybe who knows it's literally impossible to know submarine diplomacy is one of those things where you're never really going to know what actually happened until probably 40 years later but it was kind of interesting so i wanted to mention it also russia has got an exercise coming up which is kind of a regular exercise for them that most people call the grom exercise it's basically their exercise for world war three it's to test their nuclear triad and the communication systems between their submarines their bombers and their land-based systems so a lot of people are thinking that this russian nuclear style exercise is really a way to deter nato from doing very much when russia invades ukraine so ukraine gets a ukraine gets invaded by russia nato gets a little squirrely russia uses exercise as a way to kind of dominate or try to encourage nato to not do very much so i thought i'd point that out because it's it's kind of an important thing moving on to our naval update don't really have much for the ga uk gap or the north sea so i'm just going to skip right to the med where there's a lot of activity now this slide is outdated we've been updating the slides in between briefings as some of you probably know i've been uploading these slides as regularly as we can between the videos that come out and this has changed quite a bit so at the time we made this slide there were a grand total of 12 russian landing craft or landing ships in underway in the black sea a few of them have come back and a few of them have gone back out again so we're still counting to figure out who's where but roughly speaking there's still a lot of activity going on in the black sea as well as the med there's been a lot of activity it's really hard to kind of track where these vessels are at because usually by the time that we get either a satellite image of where they're at or an ais pain of where they're at they've already moved so that's just something to keep in mind but right now in the med and in the black sea there is a lot of steel in the water moving to the overall update for ukraine we've kind of had to simplify this graphic a little bit it's still not perfect of course it's very far from perfect but i just wanted to show you the major units that are that are here in theater because this is going to be a high level map we just have too many icons at this point so let's go ahead and jump to the actual fronts on the northeastern front this is where we're seeing most activity as of the past 48 hours that's why we've drawn a little flat there a little frontline enemy troops just so people understand what's more likely to occur right over the border just on the other side of the border of kharkiv in russia we're seeing a lot of units move to what we think are their final staging positions this is something that the us government has also backed up if you trust them which you shouldn't honestly but even ocean trackers on twitter can show you pictures of these units moving to their final staging locations we're seeing units move really really close to the border in this particular area so this is kind of the highest tension part of the entire ukrainian border at this time but we have other things to mention as well so let's jump a little bit closer into the car key front and see what's going on so like i mentioned we're seeing a lot of units being staged in belgrade and then moving out from belgrade to other further locations closer to the ukrainian border such as certino vessela lopez and the shebacchino depot these are basically just fields little either defunct old soviet bases that they're revitalizing or places like that we can get more into specifics to some of these as time goes on but i also wanted to point out that in belgrade we're starting to see a lot of the tos ones mlrs move into the area as well now these are some nasty weapons i wanted to point that out because it's an interesting concept that not a lot of people think about and these are like your standard mlrs but the warheads that they're being used that they that these systems use are they have the capability for using newer thermobaric types of weapons basically it's very comparable to our highmars system here we have in the us the the grid square eraser right but this does it with thermobaric weapons and that's just really really nasty the reason that i want to mention this specifically is because we saw during the battle for the donetsk airport a lot of ukrainians claiming that thermobaric weapons were used against them and that these specific weapons were used against them and there wasn't a whole lot of conclusiveness to that i would say it's pretty conclusive based on the the pictures of the bodies it's something that you really don't want to talk about at the dinner table to be honest but the international community was like i don't really know well now we're seeing these units being kind of openly transported not even you know being covered whereas the first time they were allegedly used it was very secret so now we know that not only do these units exist but they're also exist in this theater and they also exist with the kinds of weapons that we think they have so again confidence level in this is you know moderate i guess but we've seen these on trains being unloaded from bell garage so you know take it for what it's worth i guess so jumping into a couple of specific locations i wanted to talk about belgrade farp for a second this is an interesting one uh because this uh this is a jump farp a a forward arming and refueling point for helicopters this points to russia's recent i shouldn't say doctrinal change which is just kind of what they do now which is rely heavily on helicopters for movement and this is a perfect location for it it's only 36k from the ukrainian border it's a nice safe area this is an old cold war base that's just kind of in the middle of nowhere even though it's on the outskirts of belgrade there it's still really a remote location um but that's what they're they're using this location to stage a lot of their helicopters so similar situation over here in vessela lopen uh this is just a normal civilian town uh interestingly enough when the russians got here they weren't actually using the camp that's uh to the northwest of town they were actually uh staging their t-80s and different kinds of ifvs like bmps and such along the railway so civilians were able to get really close to these um parked vehicles and get a lot of good pictures of them so something very interesting but now we're mostly seeing them staged just to the northwest of town there just wanted to mention this because again we found out about this camp and really the ocean community found out about this camp right as russia was claiming that they were pulling back and we're seeing you know videos on twitter of tanks being offloaded um quite clearly uh and then sent to this camp here moving out east we've actually seen a little bit of an increase in conflict along the eastern front now when it comes to the actual conflict it's hard to say where the conflict has occurred there have been a lot of ceasefire violations over the past few days but the international monitoring group for the ceasefire has actually started to pull out of this area so they're getting ready to evacuate so it's really hard to say how effective the international monitors are um at checking out the conflict in eastern ukraine so they haven't said that they've fully left yet but it's kind of it's kind of obvious that everybody in eastern ukraine is thinking about leaving so i guess we'll have to see how effective they are at monitoring the conflict over the next few days also diplomatically we're seeing a lot of things uh being claimed by the russians that i'm not quite certain how to think about just yet for instance the russians are claiming that they have discovered a lot of mass graves in eastern ukraine and as such a lot of western analysts are thinking ah this is russia's excuse to invade um to stop the genocide right because putin himself has used the word genocide a lot to describe what's going on in eastern ukraine never mind that it actually has been the russians shelling civilians this entire time but anyway just wanted to point that out that we are aware of the rhetoric and the language that's being used um it's just really hard for us to kind of narrow that down at this time and say do we know definitively what this true story is along the southern front like i mentioned lots of vessels out in the water there have been a lot of aircraft being staged in the crimean peninsula as well mostly at defunct air force bases we've got over 70 helicopters at one old old school soviet base so yeah again southern front looks like it's preparing now again i should mention that the russians have put out statements saying look we're withdrawing from our positions we're leaving we're coming back they're sending troops back and they publish videos of trains loaded with equipment and soldiers being moved back east across the crimean bridge here's the problem with that though a lot of those units um they're actually closer to ukraine's border when they go home to their home units they just move right around to the eastern front uh they're closer to ukraine when they go home than they are in crimea which is interesting also we're seeing a lot of those units that russia has in their own videos popping up closer to the border again either to the north or to the east so again it's really hard to say what's going on but it sounds a lot it sounds to me like there is a lot of russian gaslighting going on when it comes to yeah we're pulling our forces back when we can clearly see ourselves that that's not the case and that's completely irrelevant of of any american rhetoric on this like i can download the satellite images and and i can go on twitter and count tanks just as well as anybody else can and i can myself can see that ah the russians aren't pulling out anybody just yet under the western front really not a whole lot going on other than the united states issuing do not travel orders for transnistria and moldova and beginning like sort of evacuation processes for those countries as well but i'm not really sure how how significant that is other than maybe a push for odessa if it comes to that like i mentioned the the reason that we're talking about this front is because it's it's it's important especially for odessa so we'll definitely keep an eye on it but there's really not a whole lot going on there at the moment moving to the northwestern front we have a lot of activity here as well and a very interesting story that has unfolded over the past few days so let's dive in a little closer first up i wanted to talk a little bit about bufgorka camp from last time just to show you some updates to it so here's the overall satellite image here's the image we showed last time and here is imagery as of the ninth showing that vehicles have moved this is something that we expected as soon as we dropped the video on it and as soon as other uh ocean entities became aware of this location it's not particularly new these guys have been there for a very long time but again just because we're talking about it in a video does not mean that we just discovered it these guys have been there for quite a while so i don't want to say that russia moved these assets due to we here you know exposing their position but that would also not surprise me so to those out there in the intel or operations world don't think that we're naive in this regard we are fully aware of who's reading these products i just wanted to point out that we here are thinking about these things and being as considerate as possible towards the planning efforts of those who are more better suited to doing good than we can if nothing else a little healthy competition coming from ourselves and agency in the open source world with almost no resources can encourage the us intelligence community to up their game after all no commander wants to see that some guy on youtube with an internet connection has better intelligence than their active duty s2 shop that's the way it should be i wouldn't want that either ocean is a tool in the toolbox not the entire toolbox so if our work can encourage our active duty counterparts to be better instead of stealing paragraphs or grants them that nobody will read or sitting on merc chat all day long with a bag of cheetos that's a good thing in our book and now moving to a big bit of news that has been taking the osant world and the journalistic world by storm for the past couple of days that is this pontoon bridge that has been set up in belarus now for those of you that keep up with ocean and know what has happened to this bridge hang on for just a minute and let's take a look at the overall area of this bridge because this really doesn't show us that much moving out we can see the ukrainian border up there the chernobyl exclusion zone there in orange and the pontoon bridge itself as you can see it is very close to the border it is six kilometers as the crow flies uh to the border there within the belarusian side of the uh chernobyl exclusion zone and as we can see it's very close to kiev as well so let's jump out of the satellite image and go to a street map image so we can talk a little bit more about this location one of the reasons that the world is all abuzz about this bridge is that it's kind of a big deal with regards to wet gap crossings in other words militaries have to cross bodies of water and pontoon bridges are the way to do that and if you put a pontoon bridge here it looks an awful lot like you're trying to move forces or enable the freedom of movement for forces really close to the border because the next bridge that can be used by armored vehicles to actually cross the pripyat river is all the way north in missouri so as the crow flies that's 66 kilometers so one might think that hey if troops are trying to move in this direction they're going to need to cross this bridge and then they can punch right through in across the border into the exclusion zone very good way for troops to move around otherwise they would have to go all the way over here to measure and then head south right so that's why people are thinking about this is like holy cow this is like the smoking gun when it comes to russia trying to invade ukraine this is like the most important news ever right well not really for one the biggest bit of evidence kind of against this pontoon bridge being any kind of use whatsoever is that russia is already on the other side of the river that's where these units are right now that's exactly what they did they went to major they crossed over and now they're right there and yelts right across the border so they're kind of already on the other side of the river another bit of information is that when you look at a map like this you tend to forget something and that is what the weather's like so let's zoom in a little bit and take a look at some recent sentinel imagery here's where the pontoon bridge is and here's the rest of the pripyat river it's kind of frozen now granted the ice in the pripyat river might not be thick enough to drive a tank over you need a many inches of ice for a tank to be able to drive across it right and the thinning patches of ice that we see up to the northern parts of the pripyat river that kind of you know indicates this it's probably not thick enough for for a tank to drive across but i also find it pretty hard to believe that the russians wouldn't be able to find a better spot to cross they clearly chose this spot because of the open water for a reason so taking all of this into account and just kind of absorbing all of the information that's out there about this pontoon bridge we come to a few different conclusions or really a few different explanations uh for why this bridge can be there the first of which is the one that everybody's saying which is that this bridge is a legitimate attempt for russia to be able to increase their freedom of maneuver right next to the border so that they can strike fast and strike hard right you know even though they can use the bridge up in measure it's probably a little bit easier to have a bridge a little bit closer down to the border if they're trying to invade somebody again i don't think this is likely i think this is extremely unlikely knowing what we know now but i'll get to that in a minute the other immediate thought that comes to mind is that this is something shiny for the americans to look at right it's a distraction in other words it's something for a ukraine to get all upset about because it's six kilometers from their border that should be a hint in and of itself because you don't want to build something that close to the border when even light even light artillery can take it out right so the fact that it's so close to the ukrainian border is presents a risk so something to think about right another big hint but again this could purely be a distraction with no intention of russia using it whatsoever but really what i think is most likely is that this bridge serves multiple roles for one russia benefits by keeping tensions high right now right they look like they're the ones who are in the right and the west is in the wrong they're able to keep their propaganda machine going in overdrive it keeps the morale for troops high and it again allows the americans to be embarrassed once again russia time after time even just over the past couple of weeks russia's actions have been very good at getting the west to react to them when in actuality russia is just sitting back and letting the west you know make fools of itself again russia has gotten really good at gaslighting the united states for one but also making western leadership look like fools through their own actions russia is really good at pinpointing something and then doing something to make the west react and then the west looks like an idiot so this is a good way to do that a pontoon bridge is pretty cheap to install it's it's very easy to do and it's very very public and it's also good legitimate practice because let's face it russia is going to have a lot of wet gap crossings in ukraine if they choose to invade so you've got the denipa river you've got a lot of other smaller bodies of water that still require you know engineers to get across so it this is a good way to practice for that and like i mentioned earlier right when we started talking about this bridge there's more to the story as of this morning the bridge is gone we can tell this via sentinel imagery that was downloaded uh as of last night and the bridge has now been relocated so that's that i guess this whole exercise in talking about the bridge really isn't about the bridge it's really to show that even though the intel handbook indicates x some common sense is also required just like the us government and governments around the world were dead set on telling the world that russia is going to invade on the 16th of february and since it's now the 17th or 18th when this video goes out and no invasion occurred the us intel community looks foolish and speaking of that date a lot of people have been asking well how did the us government know with such certainty that russia had planned the invasion for the 16th and why would they say this openly well the reason for saying it openly is is a quasi-legitimate i suppose if you say hey if you have unrefuted undoubtable proof that russia is going to invade on the 16th and you tell the world this well obviously russia is not going to invade on the 16th they're going to not invade on the 16th because you've discovered their plans and now they have to change their plans or they were never planning on invading on the 16th and now you just look like a fool in any case we will never know what intelligence the us government had to indicate with such certainty that russia was going to invade on the 16th it's a win-win for both because now the biden regime gets to claim that ah we stopped them invading on the 16th and russia gets to claim well the us looks like fools because they said we were going to invade on the 16th and we never invaded on the 16th so it's a win for both sides which is why you don't really hear too much about it based on my own speculation i think i know how they got that date if they didn't have any really concrete proof it's pretty easy to come up with the 16th as a date and this is just my own personal guess right so my guess is that they either had some kind of comment you know some kind of communications interception or some kind of document right some top secret document from the kremlin that indicated that date plus the 16th was during a green illumination cycle in other words the moon was very bright and therefore more conducive to nighttime airborne operations which is what russia would use right which as a side note is why we talk about this stuff because lunar illumination is important for things like this but it's not the only factor right and at the same time i can look at that assessment of the 16th and know that it was made by a junior analyst or somebody who doesn't know what they're doing in other words if i were back at the intel schoolhouse and i had a class of soon-to-be analysts in my classroom and i were to ask them to assess what date russia would choose to invade i would expect every one of them to say the 16th that's just what you come up with if you're a junior analyst that's the textbook answer and it's not it's not a wrong answer right if you're a junior analyst that's what i would expect and you use the intel cycle you process information and you come up with 16th as a date it's not textbook wrong it's just that if you know more about the situation you're not going to come up with that date unfortunately in today's intel community most analysts are incapable of giving anything other than the textbook answer either way this is all just a gut feeling on my part and i think i've beat this horse enough i just thought that this was a fascinating illustration of so many different ideas that it was worth sharing because this bridge has become more of a proverbial wooden horse than a wooden bridge it is a great example of analysis gone awry and how it's good to think for yourself and really it's an allegory of the deception that's taking place everywhere with regards to ukraine right now when this bridge first became public it swept through the ocean community like wildfire as it should this is important stuff right wet gap crossings and pontoon bridges in this context are something that should grab one's attention but it shouldn't consume one's entire attention span we shouldn't be scurrying from event to event just like the russians and the american defense industry want us to we need to see the whole picture but we also shouldn't ignore the indicators of an invasion keeping calm and keeping a cool head is very hard to do especially when you have so many intel gaps there's so much that you don't know but it's still important to do the world isn't going to end because you waited a day to form an opinion on something and it's always better for analysts to be unconventional in their thinking and speaking of invasion potential and looking at the whole picture right the team here found an interesting article that comes from a ukrainian think tank which outlines a few critical points that argue against the possibility of an invasion they think it's not likely with everyone arguing about the will they want they nature of the russians invading i wanted to offer at least one legitimate counterpoint to our opinion that the invasion is imminent right now opinions regarding russia invading are mostly coming from a perspective of american domestic politics a lot of people are rushing to fill the opposite space of whatever their political opponents are saying so the biden regime comes out and says russia is going to invade the people who are opposite to the biden administration come out and say russia is not going to invade they only want to have that opposition they don't want to actually look at the situation on the ground and the situation in the world they just want to be the opposite of whatever their enemies are and sometimes that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but if you shove america's domestic situation and the military-industrial complex aside we can clearly see russia's actions as inflammatory this paper which i would encourage you to read the link of which will be in the description of course and on the sources slide for this uh goes into detail on why they think russia won't be invading in any significant way so rather than highlight their points for them i'll let you read through them on your own but i would like to address some of the ideas that they had first up is the potential for a large-scale combat operation or lsco also known as world war iii at least in this context right so is russia prepared to launch a large-scale combat operation i don't think so but like we mentioned in an earlier brief russia has left her own territory laughably vulnerable to pretty much anyone who wants to strike her all of the units that have been deployed by russia have been either meant for a conflict in ukraine or as a deterrence for nato in other words if russia was preparing for a knock down drag out fight they're doing it all wrong because they haven't deployed nearly enough troops but is it enough to handle ukraine absolutely i think so i think russia's choice in style of warfare from everything from unit composition to their diplomacy is the perfect choice for going into combat for ukraine if i myself were planning an invasion of ukraine i would do exactly what russia has done so far now the other point that the paper makes is meant to address the follow-on question that people have right now people are asking okay russia is going to invade like that seems pretty clear at this point but how far will they go i like anyone else don't know the answer to that question but my guess is that russia probably will not go whole hog and launch a total invasion without any concerns for nato my guess is they won't do that but i also think that based on the units we've seen maneuvering they won't exactly go for a minor incursion either a byproduct of the world's eyes on ukraine right now is that russia will not be able to use their little green men or separatists at all this time right with everyone all hyped up and watching this is going to reduce a big advantage that the russians love to use secrecy that might be enough to deter them or it might not what do i think they're going to do i think they're going to invade how far will they go i don't know what limitations will they place on themselves to keep tensions with nato as low as possible while still meeting their objectives in ukraine i don't know that either how long does russia plan for it to take to reach their objectives i don't know but based on their logistics or lack thereof probably not very long i think what would be interesting is for russia to do a sort of double bluff and pretend to draw back forces or just leave them forward deployed for a few months until nobody cares anymore and then use the slow approach like they did in 2014 when they were more or less able to operate in the shadows and the world didn't care that would be pretty slick it would make the us leadership look foolish for all their recent sky is falling rhetoric and it would leave russia in a better spot for an invasion later in the year of course i'll be the first one to admit that as an analyst one has a very strong urge to put caveats on things every analyst has an escape sentence in every assessment just so that in the event that they're wrong they don't look like a complete idiot and i'm not perfect i do that too i try not to do that so much because i think it's cheap and dirty and i think that analysts being afraid of being wrong is why the intel community sucks so bad and why bad analysts or yes men keep getting promoted but i would also have to argue that man if this all turns out to be a massive military deception campaign on russia's part they certainly fooled me and here's what they did to fool me russia deployed more people and equipment to their borders than have ever been deployed since world war ii and they spent millions of dollars and countless resources doing it they deployed most of their naval forces for no reason and moved vessels around the planet all the way from the arctic and from the pacific just to fool us they established ford positions and hidden staging areas on their borders that we didn't know about letting us see where russia would deploy if an invasion were to occur for real in other words if russia did this this massive deployment just to test nato's responses and get nato to reveal their wartime tactics well nato certainly learned vastly more about russia than russia learned about nato these actions on russia's part are why i think russia is going to invade if we were to flip through the checklists of what russia would have to do to invade ukraine almost every box has been checked there are only a couple of criteria that haven't really been satisfactorily met and the weather isn't super great nor are their logistics thus the uncertainty but right now i would and am making decisions based off of russia invading ukraine and whatever effects that might have on us here at home in addition to being a vital look into what a modern large-scale war might look like we do not often get chances like this to learn without experiencing casualties of our own and since ukraine is about to pay the price the least we can do is remember and learn the lessons that have been learned the hard way by others at this stage russia has a lot to lose if they don't invade there are a few things that russia gets out of this deployment so far like embarrassing nato and the knowledge that nato will back down in the face of russian aggression that's quite clear i think this was i think that was clear before this whole ukrainian situation launched i think it was clear in 2014 when the ukrainian conflict sort of kicked off in earnest but if russia doesn't invade look what she will have gotten she will have strengthened nato presence in eastern europe along a whole host of other things right we're talking new alliances forming more equipment flowing into ukraine and nato being more likely to accept ukraine into their memberships so regardless of whatever u.s politicians or defense industry executives are saying about this this is really it russia has a lot to lose if they don't invade at this point they have a lot to lose and very very little to gain unless there is some other kind of secret objective that russia is trying to go for and i something that i don't understand right of course nobody's perfect and i might be a total idiot on this i might be missing something completely huge right but i just can't see at this point what russia would have to gain other than some very minor things if they don't invade and before we closed out for today i just wanted to remind everyone that there is a lot happening around the world in fact it's maddening to try to keep up with it all keeping an eye on what's going on in europe is important because it affects us here at home but so is keeping an eye on what's happening here in the us or with our brothers and sisters to the north so do not think that we are neglecting our own backyard at the expense of talking about ukraine because it's interesting we are certainly watching what's going on in canada as well because very few people are talking about what's going on in canada and the the implications that this has on our entire western civilization um and we're going to be talking a lot about that in the next brief as well the next non-ukraine brief so i just want to let everybody know we're watching this stuff and we're trying to figure out what this stuff means for all of us here at home as well so thanks again everyone thanks for your support and remember to not let this stuff stress you out too much it's pretty easy to be overwhelmed with a lot of the stuff that's going on these days so taking some time to unplug and unwind is just as important as being informed so thanks again and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for March 30th through April 5th, 2025. So let's get right to it. Starting off with our new slide again. It has been a very busy week for strategic movement around the world. On the home front, obviously the biggest concern this week has been largely economic in nature as the White House has released its reciprocal tariff plan, which we'll get to in a moment. The effects of this are largely still working out. Things are happening very, very quickly. So it's probably going to be a few more days before we see any real solid changes. Right now, things are just too fluid to to determine exactly how things are going to stand. Nevertheless, over in Eastern Europe, the war continues in Ukraine as before. Ukraine has very much fallen out of the news cycle as the economic impacts and things in the Middle East are heating up. But unfortunately, no developments on that for this week. Over in the Far East, the Chinese naval drills in the vicinity of Taiwan have concluded, largely without any big changes other than every time China does one of these drills, they learn something new. And this time around it it was really more of a focus on combined arms warfare and getting service branches to work with one another and improve communications and logistics and command and control things like this things that you would absolutely need to to be very sharp on if if you're going to invade a nation like Taiwan. So China has most certainly been practicing that and they have learned quite a bit. But most eyes around the world have been focused on the Middle East this week as what I'm hesitantly calling the surge has continued. Cargo flights from both Europe and from Southeast Asia have most certainly been flooding into the region, adding to the concerns that this whole force buildup in the Middle East might not actually be a bluff or any kind of power projection role primarily. But we'll get into that in just a moment. Speaking of strategic movements, I've created a a very rudimentary fleet tracker here just to add a little bit more context with regards to what is going on with regards to strategic movement. So the past week has been host to significant American naval activity on the west coast. The USS Nimttz carrier strike group has deployed on a standard rotation to the far east. The Carl Vincson CSG was the one that was stationed in the Pacific. However, Sentcom announced uh earlier a few a few days ago that they will be taking operational control of the Carl Vincent. So, there will be two aircraft carriers in Sentcom's AO until further notice essentially. So, right now in the Middle East supporting various operations in the Middle East are the Harry S. Truman carrier strike group and the Carl Vincson carrier strike group. The Vincent's probably going to make their way into the Indian Ocean right about now, right as this brief comes out. So having two aircraft carriers in the Middle East is not entirely an oh my gosh, we're going to war tomorrow kind of indicator, but it is something to be mindful of, except for the fact that there aren't two aircraft carriers in the Middle East. There are actually three. The French are also in theater. The Charles Zagal carrier strike group is wrapping up her deployment to the Middle East. It was a standard training deployment. Nothing out of the ordinary, but as of I think this morning, she was still spotted in Djibouti. So, uh, you know, she's still on station kind of in the region, and it's going to be interesting to see if we're expecting some kind of shenanigans to go down in the Middle East over the next couple of weeks. You may see her either kind of linger on station for a bit or shoot and scoot really quickly back up uh to her home waters to to rest and refit so that she could come back out again if needed. Once again, this is really the only carrier in NATO that's uh you know operationally like deployable at the moment as far as I know. So something to keep an eye on for sure. Also unconfirmed reporting this week. I I did want to mention it because even though we can't confirm it, this is one of those closed source things, but uh some closed source reporting that, you know, mainstream media journalists are getting directly from their contacts in the Pentagon states that at least one THAAD battery and at least two Patriot batteries have been deployed from Paycom to the Middle East. The THAAD battery looks like it probably came from South Korea because there were a lot of uh there was a a boost a noticeable increase in C17 and C5 traffic out of South Korea a few days ago which was a little bit odd and now we're kind of just putting two and two together. It's a very loose assessment but it makes sense that a a THAAD system would be deployed from South Korea to the Middle East. Same thing with the Euima. I've been keeping an eye on the USS Euima LHD7 which is once again not slated for deployment anytime soon. She just wrapped up a pretty big exercise uh in the Atlantic a few days ago or a couple weeks ago at least and she's going through various modernization processes right now. So right now she's been moving around a lot though. There are a lot of indications and warnings that she may be getting ready for a deployment and it's nothing scheduled as far as I know. So that'll be something to keep an eye on. unscheduled deployments of very large naval assets or non-standard deployments of naval assets or transferring one aircraft carrier from one AO to another that these are big indications for something going on. Of course, there are always counter arguments for that, but this is the real deal as it stands right now. Drilling down a little bit more specifically to the North American continent. I have continued to update what I'm I'm very loosely calling the domestic terrorism tracker. My goal for this is maybe a little bit hard to convey at the moment, but but generally speaking, this data set uh among others that I'm working on, this data set in particular is meant to track all of the things that are not necessarily just routine street crime, but a little bit a little bit more high-profile than that. It started off as tracking all the various domestic terrorism events, but as we all know, I I don't particularly like that word terrorism because, well, it can be used in a bunch of different ways and it's a very very loose definition. So, if anybody has any better idea for what I should call this, please let me know. But yeah, this is uh kind of the good baseline I'm laying down. And and the reason that I'm I'm trying to do this is so that we can look at charts like this. Uh again, this is very primitive. I've got much prettier ones in the works, but we can see that the latter half of the month of March experienced a burst of vandalism activity, but also other types of activities. You can start to see more colors come into the chart there at that point in time as well. we can start to see a diversification of these styles of more political politically motivated attacks. So again, I know it's super boring. It's not super helpful for most of you out there. I know a lot of you just want the just want the story, right? But these are the things that I'm working on kind of behind the scenes that will paint a more clear picture later. I promise it will make it will make sense later on. So switching gears back to the economic front, let's talk about the North American trade tariffs as they are being implemented by the White House. These are the charts produced by the White House. So, you're seeing the primary source material for which trade tariffs are going to go into effect with which nation. Again, it's a lot of data to take in, but really we only need to take a look at uh the first chart here. Even though we've got a total of eight charts, really the the first one is where most of the data is centered. So, now let me state right up front and I am most certainly not an economist. I really can't comment on a lot of these economic things with any accuracy. And as with anything in the world of economics, there is a lot of very vicious and vitriolic debate on a lot of this stuff. But let me just share with you two things that I'm kind of thinking about that might be helpful for you over the next week or so while we're still waiting to see how these things kind of shake out. First of all, the immediate impact is largely going to be with industries which can't easily and quickly bring manufacturing back home. So all of this aside, let's talk solutions for a moment. It's never a good idea to panic. Panic is never helpful. it's it's it doesn't really help us at all in any situation really. But being mindful of the impacts that could happen very very quickly uh in the world of logistics is very very helpful. Bottom line, if you need to buy something, know where that thing is made. Again, I don't have to tell you guys this. This is all just common sense kind of stuff. But considering that we are uh crossing the Rubicon or looking at the Rubicon in many ways these days, it's just important to recognize where we are at and take it from there, right? But anyway, we shall see, I suppose. So, let's move over to our favorite island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia. As many of you noted this week, I updated some products regarding the V2 spirits that have been observed at Diego Garcia for deployed. This imagery is not open source imagery. Well, technically it is, uh, but it's not free. you got to pay for it. This is commercial satellite imagery from March 30th showing five B2s. And we got some imagery a little bit more recently from April 1st that shows all six. So, at the moment, we have confirmed that at least six B2 Spirit bombers are for deployed to Diego Garcia along with at least six KC 135 Strata tankers for refueling, obviously. Now, we can get way down into the weeds with this, but I did want to briefly mention because I forgot to mention last time, these uh pillshaped objects uh just to the north of the runway there, these are indeed hangers for B2 Spirit bombers. So, when it comes to numbers, theoretically, technically, there could be as many as 10. Four in the hangers and six out on the runway. Now, I personally do not think this is likely. I think that the six that we see are the six that are there. Why do I think this? Well, essentially because we were able to bean count. Uh this is something that kind of goes back to the world of intelligence and the Cold War and essentially looking at satellite images and counting the beans as they move around on the map. In this case, airframes. Many an imagery analyst has made their living off of bean counting for their career, tracking the Soviets and Russian ships in and out of port like the Hunt for October, things like that. So, we can do the same thing nowadays with things like strategic aircraft. So, I will state that it is technically possible for four more B2 Spirit bombers to have sneakily taken off from Whiteman Air Force Base and flown halfway around the world to land here and not be imaged by a satellite and very hush hush gone right into the hangers. I don't think that's very very likely. Uh because all six of these we were able to track and we were able to know how many were on the way because of the aviation traffic as they were able to uh they had to communicate with air traffic control transiting various airspace uh corridors and things like that. Like I mentioned last week, there are only 20 of these around the country. So we only have 20 B2 bombers in existence. But I failed to mention last week that not all of them are operational. And as of the congressional hearings on various military budget stuff from last year, the Pentagon states that their testimony is at least that 11 are operational. So this means that right here on this image, you are looking at over half of America's entire long range stealth bomber force. That's a pretty big deal. B2s do fly around the world. They are seen doing exercises. Uh they even targeted the Houthis a while back couple of months ago, as a matter of fact. So, they do get around, but four deploying six to one base, I mean, these that's pretty rare. I don't I don't know if I've ever seen that before. I don't think I've ever seen this many B2s in one place outside of Whiteitman Air Force Base. If it's a bluff, it's one that we've never made before. So, that's all I can say so far. But, but more generally speaking, if we just acknowledge the fact that there are these six bombers are here and we've deployed such a huge number of these bombers to this one base in the middle of nowhere. What are they for? Well, in short, probably this place. This is Iran's Natan's nuclear site. So, this is one of, I believe, two facilities, which are kind of like the main nuclear facilities for the uh Iranian development of nuclear weapons. The Iranians have a lot of nuclear sites sprinkled all around their country, but this is one of the main ones that would probably be used. And and let me explain why. So, if we add some overlays here, we can see this is you normal nuclear facility, right? We've got the standard stuff that you might expect, of course, processing facilities for all kinds of precursor materials. We've got underground enrichment halls and uh facilities for enriching uranium and the processing of various minerals and all kinds of administrative buildings and power plants and transportation facilities. All kinds of stuff. It's just a military base that conducts enrichment of uranium, right? No surprises here. Well, well, the real secret of why these B2s are probably at Diego or Seia lies a little bit to the south. So, if we shift our map just a little bit to the south, we can still see the main base at the top of the slide here. We can look down into the mountains a little ways. And this, my friends, is probably why these B2s are a dig a Garcia. It may look like a nondescript mountain to to you and me, but rest assured, there are a lot a lot a lot of underground facilities here. And as we can see by the hardened bunker entrances here at the bottom left, there is an entire labyrinth of underground storage facilities that may or may not already contain nuclear weapons. So either way, this is probably why the B2s are here. Because if we take a more datacentric approach, we can just do 5 minutes of research on the internet and find out that to target an underground facility that's potentially hundreds of feet underground, you would need exactly one type of munition, the GBU57, otherwise colloquially known as the bunker buster. Now, there are a few other munitions that work as as well with these types of things. However, this is the tool for the job. If you're trying to use the correct tool for the correct job, this is exactly the only tool you would probably use to take out these facilities. Again, there are other options, but if we're thinking like a general, this is what you would need. You would need a bunch of B2s carrying a bunch of GBU57s and dropping these bombs not on, of course, not on the entrances, but on where the main underground storage halls and facilities are located. So, this is the deck stacked, right? We have half of our bombers overseas at some Podunk Island in the middle of nowhere. And these bombers, the B2s that are at Diego Garcia, fun fact, they are the only bombers that are currently, at least publicly, currently certified to carry the GBU57. So, we've got the right tools for the job, the right platforms to carry those tools in the theater and stationed at a base which is within range of these facilities. So, this is why we're trying to unfold the mystery. Is this a bluff or is this something else? This is where the grand question comes in. Has the Rubicon been crossed? Because as far as I can tell right now, there are many different theories about what's going on in the Middle East. Not just with the B2s, though that is a fascinating aspect of it. The B2s, the carriers were moving around, moving THADs and and Patriots around. You know, we're we're starting to add up a lot of random facts and random details that are starting to paint a picture. And so far there are two main theories. So the first theory is that this is all power projection. The United States doesn't really intend to do this. But we want to make the Iranians think that we will. And because of that, the Pentagon and Sentcom is undergoing this very elaborate, very very elaborate demonstration of power, which still by the way falls into the aspect of military deception because uh demonstration is a type of military deception, right? It is it is an ambiguity decreasing operation. meaning that it's a it's an operation that is intended to make your adversary more certain of what your plan is. Right? So, if you're an Iranian general right now, it sure does look like the United States is getting ready to bomb your country, doesn't it? So, that's kind of theory one. Theory two is a lot more nefarious and it's a lot more black pilling, if you if you will. So, the the other theory is that this is not a a bullying move. This is not a move intended to force the Iranians to be scared, but this is actually a legitimate wartime preparation. This is what we would see uh if we're actually going to war with Iran and uh that's really it. It's not really I mean if they're scared about it, then that's you know a side benefit. But essentially the second theory is that the Rubicon has been crossed. And just as a side note for those of you who don't know what this this reference is to crossing the Rubicon, this is an analogy that goes back to the time of Julius Caesar back in uh 48 49 BC I believe in which Julius Caesar, right, was kind of puttering around with his army in the district of Gaul uh where he was governor at the time and and an actual river really more of a small stream than anything else separated his district from the administrative boundary of Rome. And at the time it was illegal. It was an act of war. it was a huge deal to cross over that river Rubicon uh with an army. And Julius Caesar knew this and as his army was crossing over this river, he knew that he that that once he crossed over to the other side that he would essentially be committing treason and he would be committed to his attack. So there was no turning back once you've crossed the Rubicon. You've kind of committed to your military advance. So today, in short, the term crossing the Rubicon is essentially synonymous with crossing a point of no return. Now, the second theory, like I mentioned, is that maybe the White House is standing in the Rubicon right now. Maybe they're not fully committed right now to a war with Iran. Or maybe they are. Who knows? I mean, if a decision had been made, if Trump had secretly and covertly made a decision weeks ago to go to war with Iran, and all we're doing is checking down the calendar, you wouldn't see anything different. So, that's kind of one of the big bits of evidence uh that's stacking up to say that maybe theory 2 has a lot of weight as well. Of course, we want to think it's just power projection. We want to think that it is indeed just a just a posturing move to get the Iranians to do what we want. Um now, again, the original question of why are we involved in any of this at all? Well, that's another story for another time. But seeing as we're here now, the American people are trying to figure out is their government trying to bluff Iran or is their government committing them committing the American people to another Giwat. And at the moment, I'm sorry I don't have a good answer for you. There are a lot of other sub theories that that maybe come about. Like for instance, there's a lot of credence to the theory that well maybe it's not for the Iranians. Maybe it's not for any of these complexes, underground bunkers where the Iranians are storing nuclear material. Maybe that's not what we're going for. Maybe it's the maybe it's the Houthis. I'm not going to say there isn't a lot of evidence to say, well, maybe we maybe we deployed half of our long-range bombers to, you know, take out the Houthies. I mean, it would definitely be using a cannon to kill a mosquito, but I don't know. It's a new era. It's a new Pentagon. Maybe they're maybe they think they can do it. I don't know. The Rubicon idea is definitely a central aspect and will be important to think about over the next few weeks as more and more evidence starts stacking up. It's all based on a balance. What do you think? Where is the reasonable doubt? Is there more evidence in pile A or is there more evidence in pile B? So, all in all, I know this is not particularly helpful, but uh generally speaking, this is kind of where we're at. There are going to be a lot more indications and warnings uh come about over the next few days, weeks, months, years. and uh trying to keep a a more neutral perspective and acknowledging the the very serious concerns when they do appear is is going to be critical because I think a lot of times we're tempted to stick our heads in the sand and say, "No, this isn't happening and no, it's just a big bluff." And that may not be the best uh perspective moving forward. If nothing else, that's why I'm kind of paying attention to this because, you know, I I I I'm not saying it's happening. Don't don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that it's happening, but I see the potential for us to get dragged into another very bad conflict in the Middle East and I'm I'm a little bit concerned about that. So, that's why I buy these satellite images. That's why I keep an eye on this. And, you know, hopefully I'll look like a fool. You know, I would I would really be happy if I look like a complete idiot for spending so much time on this in a few weeks and all these planes go home and everything's hunky dory again. I would be the happiest person in the world. But until that happens, uh, I've got to keep buying satellite images. So, so wrapping things up for today. I know I've talked way too long, too much coffee today, I'm afraid. But wrapping things up with the ghost net. I'm afraid that I missed the ghost net window this week. I was preoccupied with some other stuff. And uh, by the time I got on, I only heard a few uh, SNR requests. So, that's to that's totally my fault. But anyway, the propagation by the time I got on wasn't too wasn't too great anyway. So, if you were out there, I probably wouldn't have heard you anyway. I'm trying to work on my antenna, doing a little bit of uh spring cleaning with antenna work and things like that. So, you guys know how it is. I'm I'm no different than than all of you who make this network a great thing. So, I've still got to get my practice reps into just like everybody else. So, so that's pretty much all I have for today. Uh here are the sources as usual. And you guys know the drill. Clickable links are on my Obsidian page for each day of reporting. Thank you all for watching. Thank you for sticking with me this time. I will keep working on the projects I'm working on. I've got some other irons in the fire, too, and we'll see how that pans out next week. But hopefully we'll get some more good news next week. So, thank you guys all for watching. Thank you for all of your support. I couldn't do it without you. I seriously mean that. And I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the Underground. This is the Intel update for March 29th through April 4th, 2026. Happy Easter one and all for those who celebrated this week, and I hope everyone is able to find a little bit of peace this weekend, because around the world the flavor continues to be war and the follow-on effects of it. It's already become a very crazy year, so let's get right to it. The global impact of the two wars in the Middle East continues to be felt as the second and third-order effects are starting to become more serious. On the diplomatic front this week, things are getting pretty complicated as most of our European allies have either refused to take part in the American foray in Iran, or they have otherwise denied the use of their airspace or staging bases for continuing the war. This has complicated the situation quite a bit and made things a little bit more challenging on the American front as the United States has had to figure out logistical means of continuing the fight. On the economic front, supply chain disruptions are underway as raw materials are either unable to transit the Strait of Hormuz or the production facilities themselves throughout the Middle East have sustained damage during the war. So, continuing the theme from last week, the Strait of Hormuz being restricted is really only just half of the problem. The other half of the problem is that fertilizer, aluminum, and helium production facilities have been hit with ballistic missiles and are therefore severely damaged. This has resulted in about 46% of the world's supply of fertilizer being cut off right during the peak planting season for most crops around the world. Agricultural news is not exactly the most exciting thing these days, however, this is going to be a major, major problem in the next few months, especially through out Southeast Asia and the rest of the Third World if shipments of fertilizer are not resumed. A bit closer to home this week, terrorism concerns remain paramount here in the United States. Obviously, for the past month or so, we've all been kind of more focused on things popping off in the Middle East, or at least I've been more focused on that due to the seriousness of that situation, but here at home concerns are probably even more important for us in the homeland, things that are going to affect us more on a day-to-day basis. This week within the United States, most of the news has been centered around general crime as the warmer weather is usually correlated with an increase in crime season. Mass shootings, which are mostly of the gang shooting variety, crime sprees, and the general states of standard unrest are pretty common nationwide, which has become fairly standard this time of year. One detail that would be wise to monitor over the next few weeks is the sharp decline in immigration enforcement operations, as well as fraud investigations. Again, just a couple of months ago, we were really on the edge of our seats wondering if Minneapolis was going to be a major problem for the nation, and all of that civil unrest stopped when the federal government stopped the aggressive counter-illegal immigration efforts. I hate to say it, ladies and gentlemen, but the mass deportations are over. Minneapolis was the peak, and we can argue about how effective all of this was, for sure, but we're basically done with the high-profile ICE surges. President Trump himself has made it exceptionally clear that his priority is to reduce focus on illegal immigrant workers, and also reduce ICE operations to return to more of the low-level, low-intensity raids and efforts like this. And now that the war in the Middle East is on, the focus on fraud has been reduced as well. The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is basically non-existent at this point, and the focus on scandals such as the Somali fraud situation, is basically just a local law enforcement issue right now. Vice President Vance has been placed in charge of the anti-fraud initiatives, but he has been very quiet on social media over the past few weeks since the war began, which is understandable, I guess, but it's hard to determine how serious of an initiative this is. So, even though the kinetic activity in the US has been comparatively light as we are focused on other stuff, we will certainly have to be on our toes over the next few weeks, as always, because we can't really know how world events are going to impact the homeland. Moving to the Middle East for this week, we can see that the conflict continues to expand, and at this point, more or less the entire globe is involved to to degree. Maybe not directly, but indirectly for sure. Within the Middle East itself, no one is safe as missiles and drones are continuing to target most of the region. Iranian attacks have not decreased at all. They have actually increased substantially this week, at least according to the various ministries of defense for the Gulf states. Just taking the UAE as an example, this week they reported intercepting 108 missiles and 269 drones, which is a sharp increase from last week, which reported only 57 missiles and 124 drones. So, roughly double the number of drones and missiles uh being used for attacks in the Middle East in just one country. So, remember, this is just the interceptions that are being reported. The UAE does not report the missiles and drones that make it through their air defenses to actually impact their targets. So, we're definitely dealing with incomplete information, but even just taking what they have intercepted as a benchmark, Iranian missile and drone attacks on the UAE have doubled from last week. Concerning the American military presence in the region, Iranian targeting efforts have also increased substantially. Many of the missiles and drones that have been reported by the UAE, for example, came from the Iranians targeting Al Dhafra Air Base, which has been getting pounded every single day. Similarly, Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia has been yet another Air Base heavily targeted by Iranian attacks, most notably this week by taking out the E-3 Sentry parked on a taxiway at this installation. Following that attack, American forces are still using this Air Base and are still using the same parking areas, even knowing that the Iranians can hit this location rather easily. In Bahrain, what is now the former headquarters for the US Navy's Fifth Fleet in Manama has been more or less completely destroyed. In the early days of the war, right after the missiles started flying, it became very clear that this naval base was a main target for the Iranians. So, the US military dispersed their personnel to civilian hotels around the city, which did work to reduce casualties, but once those hotels started getting hit a few weeks ago, the Navy started pulling everybody out of the city. So, over the past week or so, the decision was made to relocate the last remaining service members and their families who were told to grab only what they could carry in a go bag and get on a plane, which indicates the urgency at which this movement was carried out. As of this morning, the withdrawal has completed and the command of Fifth Fleet's headquarters has been relocated from Bahrain to Norfolk, Virginia. Other bases around the region have been getting hit hard as well in a similar manner as on the first day of the war when the Iranians were just hitting everything in range. Due to American HIMARS missile strikes being launched from Kuwait, bases throughout the country have been hit very hard. Camp Arifjan, Camp Buehring, and Ali Al Salem Air Base have been struck daily this week, which is significant because all three of these bases are not really that fortified. I didn't want to point this out earlier for obvious reasons, but it's kind of a moot point now as the Iranians have figured this out. These bases are traditionally not considered to be front-line bases, so there aren't really many defenses at these locations and terrain-wise, it's just open desert. There really normally aren't any efforts to dig in here. These are, or at least were, staging bases for movement around the region. For example, Ali Al Salem Air Base has an ice cream shop and Arifjan has a Pizza Hut and a Burger King last I remember. I think a KFC as well. Concerning fortifications, after the invasion of Iraq, not much was done to harden any of the bases in Kuwait and nearly all of them just rely on the simple T-walls for fortifications. No HESCO barriers, nothing underground, basically it's just what you see is what you get. Again, I wasn't going to mention this initially, but the Iranians have figured it out and various former CENTCOM officials themselves have gone on TV and spilled the beans on how little these bases are actually protected, so I guess it's kind of a wash at this point. The Iranians already know. But anyway, these bases are not really combat bases and what's even worse, the Iranians have somehow figured out that the United States did not fortify these bases at all before the war either because the United States did not think that the Iranians would strike our bases in the region. This is directly what President Trump himself said. He directly stated that he didn't think that they would hit our bases. And if that was not clear and confirmed enough for you, the Pentagon has posted emergency solicitations for pre-fab concrete bunkers for immediate delivery within just a few days. So now we're backtracking and actually trying to get our guys some protection over there because they're not getting it where they're at. So concerning the situation in the Middle East, it's not good in terms of our bases there. We have bases that are normally filled with fobbits such as myself, which normally would be basically a garrison environment. Now these bases are being hit daily. Bases which used to be in the rear are now front-line fighting positions. It must be quite a unique phenomenon and I I don't think anybody who's ever been stationed in Kuwait during the GWOT era has ever thought about digging a fighting hole to sleep in at night because there are literally massage parlors and green bean coffee shops on these bases. But now they're going to hit with missiles and now they're having to sandbag their positions, right? They're on the front line and there's really not much that can be done to fortify these positions quickly enough to defend against a ballistic missile strike. As much as OPSEC is definitely a concern, there's always going to be some private schmuckatelli who gets on TikTok and posts a video of the missile hitting his base. So yeah, it's not good. They've been pretty good about OPSEC so far, but we can definitely see that there's not a whole lot you can do if you get hit or you know, your if your ticket's about to be punched by an Iranian missile, there's not a whole lot you can do about it. Bunker or not, concrete or not. But either way, it's become quite clear that our bases are not super great right now and there's not a whole lot we can do about it. But these are just our static positions. Again, we also have other positions as well around the region and of course we have the air war which continues on as before. This week the war has gotten quite tense as we've had several American aircraft shot down either over the over Iran itself or over the Strait of Hormuz or somewhere throughout the region, right? I don't want to comment on that too much at the moment because rescue operations are ongoing and we don't want to impact that negatively in any form or fashion. So, we're just going to have to wait and let them do their job and get those guys out of harm's way as best they can. But, just suffice it to say for now that the situation is is rather rather tense. So, all of that being considered and recognizing that this week has pointed out that this is in fact a pretty hard fight here. This is a hot shooting war. This is not an insurgency. This is not a counterinsurgency. This is a shooting war here. All of that in consideration, what comes next? What grand strategy are we working with here? And considering the events of this week, how is this war likely to develop over the next week both in terms of the war on the ground and the impacts to the homeland even? Well, to get to these impacts, we have to backtrack a little bit and understand a little bit of warfare doctrine that I failed to cover last week. If we want to understand how this is going to impact our ability to live our lives in the homeland, we have to keep our eye on what the general plan is. Our lives within the homeland are going to be changed based on the plan ahead. We are in this 9/11 era of generational change. You're living in it right now. And so far, no strategic plan has been conveyed at all. And here's exactly what I mean by that. Cracking open a bit of warfare doctrine, we can see that there are three levels of warfare. Many of you have probably seen this before, but for those of you who are not aware, we have strategic, operational, and tactical levels of pretty much everything from planning to communications and even goals and objectives that we might want to meet. Some people might consider a fourth level grand strategy at the a way at the top which provides the overall strategic vision for the war. But, generally speaking, if you crack open any warfare publication, you're going to see probably this chart: strategic, operational, and tactical. Now, I know that this might also be a little bit hard to understand without an example. So, let's use the Vietnam War as a sample for what we're talking about here. Starting at the very top, we have grand strategy. As our friend Carl von Clausewitz once said, "War is a continuation of politics by other means." Well, at this level, at the grand strategy level, we're starting to blend this political strategy and this military strategy together. This is at the stage where a politician says, "This is the grand strategy that I want to implement and we're looking for a military solution for this problem." So, using the Vietnam example, we might say that the grand strategy of the Vietnam War or sending troops into Vietnam is that we will reduce the USSR's power and influence around the world. Again, this is a grand strategy idea. So, we're going to reduce the Soviet Union's power around the world. Again, we're being very, very wave top at this level. Getting into the pyramid itself with a strategic example, to achieve this grand strategy, the military strategy here is that we will reduce the overall communist influence within Southeast Asia. For those of you who are Vietnam history buffs, you might recognize this as containment theory. But again, we're at the very wave top strategic level where we're starting to get a little bit more specific with what our goals are. Moving down the chart, we get into operational. This is where we get that word operations from, right? So, now we're talking what military operations are we going to conduct in order to meet this objective. And in this case, we might say something along the lines of we're going to destroy the enemy's ability to move freely within North Vietnam. Again, this is a military objective, cause and effect. We have a mission and we have a desired end state for that mission. And finally, at the very bottom, where most of us tend to think most of the time because we tend to not be a military strategist in our everyday life, something that we might say on the tactical level of warfare is, "Hey, we're going to go drop bombs on that enemy encampment over there or we're going to carry out this bombing campaign on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to ensure that the North Vietnamese cannot carry out resupply operations during the monsoon season." That's what we might say on the tactical level. And once again, with all of this in mind, let's take a look at what the United States has said our strategic goals actually are. The first goal is to obliterate Iran's missiles and production capacity. The second goal is to annihilate its navy. Number three is to sever its support for terrorist proxies. And number four is to ensure that it never acquires a nuclear weapon. This is what the United States has said our strategic goals are in this fight, and if we look at this in terms of what everyone would consider to be warfare doctrine, the levels of warfare, strategic, operational, and tactical, we can see that not a lot of these are actually strategic goals at all. These are more tactical level things. And maybe we can see why nearly every single military strategist offering commentary on the war has stated that the United States has not actually stated what the grand strategy or the overall strategy actually is. We have only been given tactical level goals by the Pentagon and the White House. We're going to blow up your bridges, we're going to blow up your civilian power plants, we're going to blow up your missile sites and things like that. That's all tactical level stuff. So, that's what the United States is trying to do. These are the four bullet points that they keep putting out there in terms of saying what their grand strategy is. Now, let's take a look at the other side for a moment. Let's see what Iran's strategic goals are. What are the Iranians trying to do? Well, mostly overall, their grand strategy is simply to survive. Again, they are the defender. The defender always has the advantage over the attacker. And in this case, their goal is simply to survive. More specifically, their goal is to keep the regime in power, right? That's how they're going to survive this war. And to do that, to keep that regime in power, and to supplement their national defense, they're going to have to maintain missile and drone production. Yeah, even though we're bombing them, they're going to have to keep up their supply of drones at some point. In addition to these like hard requirements for them to sustain their their operations for any length of time, they're also going to have to keep control of the Strait of Hormuz to some degree, or at least maintain a lot of influence over it. They may eventually capitulate, or they may eventually strike a deal with the United States and open up the Strait of Hormuz to the United States and Israel once again, but what they really need to do is keep the fear in the global markets that they can blow up any ship that goes through the strait if they so choose, right? So, in terms of controlling the Strait of Hormuz, they don't necessarily have to physically go out there and, you know, halt who goes there, anybody who tries to go through it. They just have to make everybody scared that they might start shooting ships again. That would be enough to control the Strait of Hormuz for them, at least. And finally, they also have to maintain freedom of maneuver within their own territory. That's just kind of a boilerplate expectation of any nation-state that hopes to survive a conflict. They have to maintain movement within their own country. So, finally, we come to the ultimate question. Are we winning? Well, again, we cannot really say with any certainty because the United States has not actually conveyed any strategic goals. Everything on the list is on a tactical level, except for maybe objective three, the severing support for international terrorist proxies. That could be more of an operational thing. You could probably argue that, but everything else is just a target list of things to bomb, and that's not a strategic plan. A list of targets to bomb in H- in HPTL, a high-priority target list, or a high-payoff target list, that is not a strategic plan. That is a means to achieve that strategic plan. You can only assess whether or not a nation is winning a war based on whether or not they are meeting their strategic objectives, and we have no strategic objectives to assess. So, it's kind of a moot point. But, nevertheless, we have to analyze what we've been given. So, let's rephrase the question to align with more doctrine that's harder to refute. Is the United States meeting her declared military objectives? Well, let's bring up the chart and find out. So, first up, the United States has not obliterated the Iranians' missile and drone supply. I really do, in fact, hate to be that guy, but if we're going to be trying to be as correct as possible here, we have to use doctrinal terms, and obliterate is not one of those. Normally, what we have to use is one of what we call the five D's: deny, disrupt, degrade, destroy, and/or deceive. So, if we were to rephrase the White House's question, I don't know exactly what they mean. Do they mean to destroy the Iranians' ballistic missile supply? If that's their goal, then the answer is no, you're not going to do that. You're not going to destroy all of the Iranians ballistic missile and drone uh stockpile. It's just not going to happen. But, if the White House means to obliterate as in disrupt, yeah, they could disrupt. They We've already done that for sure. If we blow up a single drone, that's a drone they can't launch, right? And we've done a lot of that. We've blown up a lot of bases that they use to uh make these drones as well. So, disrupt, degrade, sure. Deny them the ability to launch missiles? Yeah, maybe we can even impact that. But, destroy? I don't know. Uh and I guess it really gets into semantics land of what do they mean by that word obliterate? But, anyway, since we have to live in a world where we have to go off of something, we have to make decisions and make assessments, and we have to form opinions based off of incomplete information, we have to just admit that the United States is not reducing the number of missile and drone attacks that are striking our bases in the Middle East. We're not doing that. So, if that is the standard by which this first bullet point is being met or is intended to be met, the answer is no. We are not meeting this objective. So, what about the next one? Uh annihilate the Iranian Navy. Again, we're not using doctrinal terms here. This is more emotional language. Annihilate, what does annihilate mean? I don't know. And also, we have to be specific. The Iranian Navy, which Navy? Because there are two of them. There is the IRIN, the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy, which is more of their conventional surface fleet of frigates and corvettes, things like that. And then, they also have their IRGCN, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, which is their fast boat Navy, their uh what we might call a brown water Navy, but they are the actually the more formidable force when it comes to the Iranians. Again, the Iranians have a very different uh military structure than most Western nations would have. And when we say annihilate the Iranian Navy, we have to be really specific because, and again, this is debatable. I'm sorry for all the squids out there who might get a little upset about this, but destroying the IRIN, all of the corvettes and the frigates and sinking them with your submarines and things like that. That's not the impressive part. Sure, this is combat effective. It is. However, the surface fleet of the Iranians was never really the biggest threat. Sinking a lot of older frigates is not as as significant in terms of maintaining control of the Strait of Hormuz as sinking a lot of their smaller fast boats that they have in caves and things like that. So, has the United States Navy destroyed the IRIN? The answer to that is probably yes. However, were those naval forces intended to be used in warfare? No, because most of them were sunk pierside. So, even the Iranians were not planning to use them against the United States and the Iranians knew we were coming. So, if you're asking yourself, "Well, why did the the Iranian Navy not put to sea when they knew we were going to attack?" Well, mostly because they wanted to front-load the their effort into the IRGC-N, which is the bigger navy. And as far as I know, the White House and the Pentagon have completely ignored the fact that the IRGC-N exists and is not really being targeted. So, for any journalists out there who wants a free news story, just look up the difference between the IRIN and the IRGC-N and then ask the Pentagon, "Hey, you know, we know that you guys have been advertising really heavily that you're you've sunk a bunch of Iranian ships, but what about the IRGC-N? What about those fast boats? Have you been able to effectively get good effects on target with those guys?" Because so far they're acting like the Iranian Navy is one succinct thing when in essence they're not. They're two completely different navies, two completely different command structures, and two completely different rules of engagement and authority and all that stuff. So, when we talk about annihilating the Iranian Navy, we have to be very specific again, and this is why I have to give this one a partial. This is a partial success because yes, we have destroyed a good chunk of the IRIN. So, yeah, the Iranian surface fleet, the traditional navy that they have, yeah, those guys are combat ineffective. So, that is a success. However, what is the bigger threat right now to shipping? The IRGC-N. That has always been the biggest threat and the United States sinking the lesser threat does not really help us get an idea of what the bigger threat actually is. So, I have to give this one a partial. Next one up, next goal is severing support for terrorist proxies. Well, this one has not happened at all as the Iranian proxies in Iraq and in Lebanon are mobilizing and they're conducting targeting of their own right now. So, this goal is a this this goal right now is a hard no. We're nowhere near reaching this goal at the moment. And finally, we arrive at our main goal or at least the goal that has really just been most of the focus for most of the talking points and speeches on the war, which is the goal of not allowing the Iranians to achieve a nuclear weapon. Now, this one's a hot button topic, I know. This one many of you are going to debate, I know and this is going to be a pretty nasty knife fight in the comment section, I know. But, let's come at it from as objective of a of a position as we possibly can. So, if you were in the camp of the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapon and they were not really trying that hard to get one, then you will say that technically, yes, this goal is successful. We have achieved the goal of no Iranian nukes because the Iranians were never trying to get one in the first place. So, mission accomplished. However, if you disagree with that and you think that the Iranians were trying to get a nuclear weapon, first of all, it's going to be rather hard to square the circle of Operation Midnight Hammer because I myself got berated by a lot of you out there for daring to suggest that Operation Midnight Hammer might not have been a success despite the White House leading, literally, they literally led with the high with the headline of Iran's nuclear facilities have been obliterated and suggestions otherwise are fake news. People like me read that and said, "Okay, all right, fair enough, but, you know, um whatever, I guess." But, you're going to have to pick which one is true because you can't have Operation Midnight Hammer being true and this war being true at the same time. It's it's hard to square that circle, I'll say. You can probably, you know, lawyer your way around it, but for the most part, you've got to figure out which one you're going to try to support here. If you want to know what I personally think, I think that the Iranians were trying to straddle the fence. I think that they were trying to enrich to a certain point, to a certain percentage, whatever that percentage is, you can debate, but then they were going to stop short of actually building a gun-type nuclear device. This was so that they could be dangerous enough to be a strategic deterrent to avoid Gaddafi's mistake, right? But not so dangerous that they're going to warrant a full-blown international, you know, ISAF corporation, you know, co-cooperative effort like we gave Saddam. So, they were trying to prevent Saddam's mistake, too, right? This is not a particularly groundbreaking theory, right? This is This is actually been the boilerplate textbook explanation for the Iranian nuclear program for pretty much everybody, every agency, for the vast majority of time, right up until midnight hammer last year. But, again, this is all very debatable. Form your own opinion, I don't care. But, what I think that pretty much all of us would agree with right now, after the war has begun, is that the Iranians are certainly going to get a nuclear weapon now, or at least they're going to try. They would be complete idiots to not get a nuclear weapon at this point. And honestly, they don't actually have to make one themselves. There have been rumors flying around for many, many years that Pakistan would be willing to give them enough enriched uranium to make a gun-type device. Maybe not an implosion device, okay? But probably a gun-type device, or maybe even a fully built weapon to test or something with Pakistani advisers on scene, who knows? So, getting back to our handy chart here, you know, are we meeting the goal of ensuring that Iran would never get a nuclear weapon? Again, it is subjective, but I would argue not only no, are we not doing that, but we are guaranteeing that they are going to build one now. So, that's it for the American objectives and the American goals in this war so far. This is what we are saying our goals are, We're not meeting those objectives, anywhere near those objectives just yet. So, on the other hand, let's bring up the Iranian chart. Let's crush through this one right quick. The Iranians' goal of surviving, yeah, they've survived. Keeping the regime in power, yep, they've maintained that goal, yeah. Killing their leadership, the killing the Ayatollah, we have not removed the position of Ayatollah, we have just made a new one. So, the regime and the system of governance, the their political system is still in place, so they have achieved that goal. Their goal of maintaining missile and drone production, maybe. I'm going to say maybe on that one because we have destroyed a lot of their factories and drone production facilities. However, I'm not sure if anybody else caught this, but the other day Marco Rubio alluded to the Iranians being able to still build and produce new drones. So, maybe I'm reading too much into that, I don't know, but I think the Iranians are still able to build these things to some degree. It's not like they're dealing with a static supply, right? are not working through just a stockpile of drones in crates that they have way back in the back of a dark cave. No, they're able to produce drones to some degree still. But, I don't have any data on how much of or what type they're able to produce. I don't think I mean, it can't be that much. Surely, if they had the ability to build 100% of their drone supply underground, why would they have above ground factories at all, right? So, surely we're doing something by blowing up most of their country, but I don't know what it is and it's going to be debatable. It's not going to be at the open source anyway, so I'm going to give this one a maybe for now. And finally, the last two, control the Strait of Hormuz, yeah, the Iranians absolutely indisputably control the Strait of Hormuz. The US Navy is not able to get within 100 miles of the Strait. And of course, maintain freedom of maneuver within their own terrain, yeah, absolutely, they control their own territory, at least for now until we put boots on the ground, if that is the chosen course of action. So, that's where things stand right now. The United States is struggling to meet her own stated military objectives while the Iranians are able to undeniably meet most of theirs. It's unfortunate. I don't like saying this because I am American and I hope that we win just on principle, I suppose, because you going to you have to root for the nation that you're in. However, we have to be clear about this. And we have to be realistic if we're having any any chance of success. So, one thing that I would also like to mention is the gigantic elephant on the slide here, uh which has been down in the corner this entire time, which is uh the list of Israeli goals for the war. Again, the United States is not in this war by ourselves, are we? So, we don't have to worry about the American strategic goals or the Iranian strategic goals alone. There's another player that's involved in this. Remember, multiple White House officials and even Trump himself admitted that this war was only carried out because of the Israelis. You don't have to like it. You don't have to agree with me. But, no matter how much they try to walk it back, that's what they said. And in this case, uh what is undeniable is that the Israelis have different goals than the United States, as any foreign nation would be expected to have, right? There may be overlap on some things, which we can argue about, I'm sure, but by and large, separate nation-states have differing goals. They just do. When Russia went to war in Ukraine, Belarus was right there, weren't they? Belarus was right there. Lukashenka was right there. But, Belarus and Russia, despite being on the same side during the Ukrainian war, they also have different military objectives. They just do because they're different countries. If they were the same exact country, they would have the same exact objectives, but they're not. And the same thing is uh the case with the United States and Israel. And I think that many people, please don't shoot me for thinking this, but I think that most people right now are starting to realize that the United States and Israel have vastly differing objectives. Maybe we can get into this a little bit later on if I can figure out how to talk about this without assuming too much danger on my part. But, for right now, I just want to make it abundantly clear that when it comes to the strategic goals of the war, there are three main entities here that have a lot to say in how the war goes. So, with all of this being said, what do we do? What are we going to do now? The United States has not met her goals for the war. So, how might we meet these objectives? Well, throughout the past few weeks, I've been doing a lot of wargaming myself to try to figure out what the United States might actually do. After all, things don't seem to be going super well in the war and they raised the enlistment age. So, I'm technically eligible again and if things go sideways in this war and I myself get drafted, I'm going to be rather upset that I didn't think these things out beforehand. Anyway, that's a long way down the road, I think, for for sure. But anyway, there are three main plans that I can think of, which according to very leaky media are actively being considered. Once again, I want to remind you that I am not supporting any of these. I'm just trying to analyze what I think that might be done. So, the first one, course of action one, COA1, is a direct assault on the islands. Again, this is something not particularly surprising. The United States has been floating this for a while. A lot of strategists and military generals have floated the ideas of maybe taking some of the islands, Qeshm Island, Khark Island, Larak Island, the Strait of Hormuz, maybe Hormuz Island itself, who knows. Maybe Abu Musa is another target as well they might go for. Either way, island assault, right? Island hopping throughout the Strait of Hormuz with the eventual goal of trying to seize some terrain in the strait and maybe somehow stop the Iranian missiles that are being launched at commercial shipping through the strait. It could also be more of a confidence thing as well because personally I I don't think that anybody would ever realize that taking an island in the strait is going to do very much because the missiles and the drones, the anti-ship cruise missiles and the drones that are used to target the merchant shipping, they're being launched from the mountains about 15 miles back from the coast. So, you're going to have to go kind of a long way in uh to to actually open up the Strait of Hormuz. But anyway, that's COA 1, direct assault on the islands. COA 2 is a little bit more sane, uh but also harder to do. And this is a new concept that the Marines came up with, a comparatively new concept. It's It started being put into the fleet back in I think 2017, 2018, but it has been theorized for a very long time before that. And this is the idea of the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, or EABO, or EAB, depending on how you want to say it. EABO is a new concept, again, from the Marine Corps, which was developed for the Pacific. This is uh the one of the core components of their island hopping theory for a potential conflict with China. And the goal of EABO uh kind of stuff is to have distributed bases set up. So, learning from what's going on in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where our bases like, you know, Camp Arifjan, Camp Buehring, Camp Al Asad, Al Udeid, Al Dhafra, these these bases which are just big bases with a big fence They're getting hit pretty hard, aren't they? Because the enemy can find out where they are. Well, the core tenant of EABO is to distribute that stuff. Spread out, disperse. That is the goal of EABO. And since we have good comms and we have pretty uh variable logistics, we can set up little miniature bases that are not necessarily one specific location. We could spread that stuff out over a long period or or or a wide space. In the Pacific, the goal of this is to say, drop a couple of platoons of infantry on an island and they hold that for a period of time, and the next island over can hold their logistics, and the next island over can hold their uh forward arming and refueling point, the FARP. And next, another little island can be the airstrip, and they can just spread out so that a Chinese cruise missile can't come in and ruin their day so easily. Well, considering that this is a new idea, this has just entered the fleet in in terms of doctrine for the MAGTF, the Marines might be uh chomping at the bit to put this into action because I'm looking at this through the lens of the MAGTF and I'm looking at this through the lens of the MEU and I think that the Marines think they can do it and I think that's what they're probably trying to plan for. Use the EABO concept to establish command and control throughout the region so that they don't necessarily have to have one base in one place. This would be smart. This is what I would do. Uh kind of what the Iranians actually did. The Iranians already did this over in Syria. For those who don't know, during the bulk of the GWOT, most of Syria was used basically as a playground for the Iranians and they ran supplies, they had little fobs of their own and all conveniently they were all along the border. There were a lot of little fobs, little bases, little supply shacks, right? Just just inside Iran that were they would use to send missiles into Afghanistan, missiles and rockets and things like that. Rockets really. They knew that we couldn't touch them, they knew that we couldn't bomb them so that's what they did. Same thing in, you know, Cambodia and Laos during Vietnam. The Viet Cong did the same thing. Well, why can't we just reverse uno card these bad boys and do it to them, too? Set up a few EABO um hubs, I guess as you should say it. Set up a few EABOs throughout Iraq and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and all these other places, right? And start just carrying out an insurgent style attack against the Iranians. This is not a grand a secret here that I'm revealing. This is actually literally in the textbook. So, if you want to go grab yourself a smart book, one of the MAGTF smart binders, you'll see that this is a bulk of that publication and I think that's probably what the Marines are pitching to the White House right now. It's probably one of the one of the lead COAs. Now, here's the thing. One of the critical aspects of the EABO is the fact that you could do this while within range of the enemy WEZ, you know, the weapons engagement zone. So, basically you're talking about setting up a an infrastructure of military posts, bases and ecosystems when the enemy can hit you at any point. That's why this is such a delicate process here and this is why this is such an important thing the Marines have been trying to hammer out. It's not really been combat tested. So, let's think about that. It's not really been combat tested. This is still more or less general theory than uh any kind of practicality thing, but it's it's doctrine now. It's in the book. There's books written on it. So, the EABO is kind of an it's it's technically more of a newer thing, but it has been talked about for a while. So, the Marines, I know out there have been we've been talking about this for 10 15 years, but really it's just been kind of cemented in doctrine over the past I don't know five or so years, maybe. And I think that they may think they could drop a few EABOs throughout the region, take a few islands in the strait, uh and this would this would uh work with the next uh rather unfortunate COA, which is COA 3. Uh so, I'll move to that one now, which is what a lot of the mainstream media's going with, and uh this is the hairbrained theory, uh which is the idea of pushing in a helicopter assault force or a half into somewhere like Natanz or Fordow or maybe uh some of the more remote areas of eastern Iran and start coming out at them from the eastern side of the country. Now, I I should not have to uh point out how serious of an idea this is, but let's just take the events of the past 24 hours as kind of a bit of a case study sample to figure out what what how bad of an idea this this potentially is. So, regarding the combat search and rescue operations that are uh kind of ongoing in the western part of Iran, think about it like this. Uh we sent two Pave Hawks and a C-130 or MC-130, whatever, uh into western Iran. Standard C's are a package with a very special dudes who are the absolute tip of the spear, the absolute best of the best. These guys are the best at what they do, and we sent these guys into Iran, and two of their Pave Hawks got shot up to the point of where they sustained quite a bit of damage. So, at least that's what mainstream media's reporting. Is that true? I don't know, but the idea remains. We sent a bunch of special forces into western Iran on a standard rescue mission, and they got shot up pretty bad. And they're continuing to get shot up pretty bad. So, I don't think we have uh too much success uh in in store if we end up sending a bunch of conventional army airborne air assault UH-60s into Iran somehow. Now, for those of you who don't necessarily have a military background, and you're not exactly a uh an expert on things like the concept of the air assault or airborne operations, let me just convey to you that anybody out there who's got a copy of the 101st Airborne Division's gold book, their uh air assault manual, if you've got a hard copy of that in your house somewhere or on your bookshelf, chances are your eyes right now are the size of dinner plates as I explain that they're trying to launch or they're trying to set the narrative for a half into Iran. Now, of course, it is possible. Anything's possible, right? We can put anybody anywhere. The question is, how long can we keep them there, and can we keep them there without killing everyone involved? And so far, uh unfortunately, we have to kind of take what Fox News is pushing as some sort of indicator of policy because that's how it's worked out so far, and it does seem like they may uh have on the table some kind of half raid somewhere in the country, maybe not into mainland Iran, maybe into an island. I don't know. Either way, these are the three COAs that I'm seeing floating out there in the ether sphere, which are seriously being considered. So, once again, just for the record, I want to be on the record stating that I don't think that these courses of action, these plans that are currently being floated out in the open at least, I don't think any of these are viable military objectives. I don't think any of these are good idea, and I hope we don't do it, but I think that the reason that I'm talking about this is because I I can see through the doctrine that they may try this. The EABO concept would work in a partner nation. That's one of the keys to the EABO working. You can't just put an EABO behind enemy lines in Iran itself, but they may try. Again, the helicopter assault force, traditionally we do not conduct half raids when the enemy force maintains over the horizon targeting capability and the landing zones are going to be saturated with targeting. We don't typically do half raids in that environment, right? There has to be some level of permissiveness for a conventional helicopter assault force raid to actually work. Or we have to limit or reduce the enemy capacity or capability at those landing sites and I don't think we can do it. Or rather, we can do it. We can put guys anywhere on the ground in Iran. We can put them probably on the ground right outside the Ayatollah's new apartment, but getting them back out again, that's the hard part, isn't it? Now, I must also state that I do have other plans that I have identified and I'm working through just purely based on my own scouring of the maps. I've been conducting terrain analysis. I have really just put the magnifying glass to every place in Iran as best I can and just for my own research in conjunction with what targets are being struck or more accurately not being struck, there are a few other places they could go. So, for the moment, I don't want to give the Iranians any ideas. Again, this would not be a super great idea to put this out in the open. So, I'm going to keep my thoughts to myself on that for now, but there are a few other options out there. They have equal chance of success with this, which is minimal. This is a high risk, minimal success, high risk, low reward mission set and that's just the way that it's going to be until you can reduce the ability for the Iranians to stop their missile and drone attacks and so far we're not even close to doing that, at least based on what we've seen so far. So, while the drones and the missiles are still flying, we still have these concerns and it's just not going to be feasible to put boots on ground, but again, they may try anyway and definitely keep everybody in your prayers if that's the case. But in a more grand sense, coming back again, wrapping this up in terms of grand strategy, all of these plans are possible. They're all possible. They're just not feasible and none of these plans that are being floated right now would actually assist in achieving the goals that have been stated, at least not without a military mobilization, the likes of which the United States has never seen before. Imagine the invasion of Iraq like times five. Like they're going to have to draft people. You want to go scoop the last Iranian Shaheed drone out of a cave? You're going to have to mobilize a million people, and I just don't think they're going to do that right now. It's preposterous. Maybe if things drag on for a little while longer, I don't know, but at the risk of using, you know, unnecessarily do humanizing language, it's kind of like, you know, an antiseptic, right? You can have some bleach hit a, you know, hit a cleaning service with 99.99% effectiveness, but that last .01%, you know, that's going to be some pretty nasty stuff, right? So, you know, again, I don't like using language like that, but it's best I can think of. And right now, the Iranians, yeah, you could knock out 90%, you could knock out 95% of their missile production and drone capacity, but all the Iranians have to do, the Iranians just have to hit one merchant vessel in the Strait That's all they got to do, and that's enough for Lloyd's of London to cancel insurance policies. That's all they got to do. They just got to hit one target a day, and so far they've been hitting hundreds of targets a day since this war began, and now it's starting to ramp up in effectiveness now that I suspect, again, speculation, but I suspect the Iranians are getting a lot of intelligence, a lot more intelligence than the Russians and the Chinese. It's impossible to know this for sure, but their missile attacks are increasing in both number and in their effectiveness. So, again, coming back to what the United States might do, you know, these plans, yeah, they're in the textbook, to be sure, but none of these plans are viable military objectives without a lot of pre-shaping fires that have not yet been conducted. We would need to build staging areas before we could get within helicopter range of any significant Iranian target, because again, our staging areas right now, which is basically every single base in Kuwait, is a staging area, that's what it was intended for, and that's what those bases are meant for. They're getting hit. So, you can't start putting tens of thousands of troops on the ground in these places, establishing a beachhead near the coastline, launching waves of helicopters from either Kuwait or Aldhafra. This is just not going to be feasible while the Iranians still possess a significant over-the-horizon targeting capability. It's just not going to be feasible. This is why it's it's so unfeasible that this is why most people don't seem to think that any of this will ever come to pass. This is why I used such serious language last week because conducting some sort of raid within Ir

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for April 20th through the 26th, 2025. It's been a busy week as usual, so let's get right to it. Starting off with the global overview here on the home front. Most of the concerns this week have been really related to various immigration issues such as a couple of judges who are arrested for aiding and abetting illegal operations. And the fallout from that will probably be a little bit more concerning as time goes on, but we'll get to that in a moment. Overseas, various diplomatic efforts continue via the pen and the sword, depending on where you're at in the world. Diplomatic negotiations continue with regards to the war in Ukraine. As things are happening rather quickly with that conflict, higher and higher levels of diplomatic activities are being conducted. For instance, President Trump met with Ukrainian leader Zalinski at the Pope's funeral and American diplomat Steve Woodco has been taking part in various peace talks and uh negotiation efforts in Moscow over the past few weeks. Nothing really solid either way though. It it does look like we're entering the final stages of the war when diplomatic activities are starting to become a little bit more common and the restrictions and face saving activities of the past few years have kind of fallen away. Now we're just getting essentially down to brass tax with this. It will probably take a couple of more weeks for things to reach a good point of stability, but right now Russia is at the table, Ukraine is at the table, and the United States is kind of facilitating the whole thing. NATO is keeping quiet as they probably should at the moment and we're actually starting to make good progress by getting all of the belligerents involved in this. So when it comes to things like this, peace is very very close, but it can also be very very far away. So we will have to see how things shake out. But right now things are tenuous at best, but it's uh it's continuing. Diplomacy is continuing which is probably a good thing. Similar story with the Iranians. really nothing of of note has come from the past few weeks of talks, negotiations, rhetoric, all that kind of stuff. There have been some casual remarks and rumors, but for the most part, there really hasn't been any major development there. Same thing in Yemen. The United States is continuing to bomb pretty much everything there is in Yemen. I will mention that there are local rumors uh or at least there are statements being made that the actual Yemeni government as in not the Houthis like the actual elected quote unquote legitimate if you want to call them that government of Yemen is attempting to take on the Houthis with the sort of passive help of the United States along with Saudi Arabia and all the other nations that are involved in this conflict. I don't know how legitimate that is. We're talking maybe 30,000 20,000 at best of uh Yemeni citizens who are not Houthi who are not ethnically Houthi and they don't really control hardly anything. They're just out in the eastern part of the country whereas the capital city all the major ports they're all controlled by the Houthis who control the country. So this really gets way down into the weeds and it's not super critical to understand the the minute details of this to understand the larger picture which is that conflict continues in Yemen. The United States is losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drones because of Houthies keep shooting them down. So, you know, the United States military is learning a lot of defense lessons here and I would be very curious from a more doctrinal standpoint the lessons that are being learned in Yemen. But so far, the status quo remains more or less in the Far East. The various retaliatory actions undertaken by China with regards to American trade and the tariffs that they are potentially facing. These efforts continue. This situation deserves a lot more time than I can give to it today, but both the United States and China might be speaking past each other and not necessarily to each other with with regards to what's actually happening in the diplomatic space on this one. What I mean by that is the United States is speaking to China and is approaching this issue purely from an economic situation, purely from a fairness, from a tax, from a tariff perspective, whereas China is speaking a different language on on their outlook on the world. So the Chinese economy while it is not purely a communist sort of Soviet Union style economy, it's not that it's definitely something different. However, we always have to remember that China is in fact a communist nation. The Chinese Communist Party is running the country, right? So you can't entirely say that the Chinese economy is a free economy. It's most certainly not. Now, it may not be as strict as the Soviet Union was back in the day, but still it's uh it's hard to get any sort of reliable economic data out of China because again, they are a very much closed society. They have a lot of closed cities. It's, you know, they've they've brought the era of secrecy to their modern economy and it's really hard to determine how an economic trade dispute will impact China. People will argue about this till they're blew in the face, but the bottom line for now is that things are not as simple as they seem. I'll just I'll just leave it like that. That China may be approaching this whole trade dispute from a more military angle than the United States is, even though the United States is most certainly trying to treat this tariff situation as a sort of soft embargo. So, there's a little bit of military uh tactics going on here, a little bit of military strategy sprinkled over the top of what most people seem to think is purely an economic thing. And it's not a purely economic thing. And because of that, it's uh complicated. And it's really hard to describe both what is actually happening and what is going to happen. So something to keep in mind for the future, but for now we're just going to have to leave it there. And finally, in India and Pakistan in the Kashmir region, it would seem that war is most certainly on the menu at the moment. Whether or not straightup hostilities will commence again like in 2019 is hard to determine at the moment. But right now the diplomatic situation definitely seems worse than in 2019 when the fighting flared up in Kashmir after a period of lull and a sort of tepid peace. Right now the diplomatic situation is much worse. India and Pakistan have traded much u more increasingly serious rhetoric over the years. So now we're kind of at the moment where we're just kind of waiting to see how India and Pakistan go at it. So that's pretty much all I wanted to focus on this week for the global overview. Let's move over to the strategic movement. Again, very little change. The Truman carrier strike group is still uh cutting circles in the Red Sea along with the Carl Vincent in the Gulf of Aiden. And the Nimits is somewhere in the Pacific just like usual. No change from last week. Everyone's still kind of doing their their thing. The new addition this week is of course the Indian aircraft carrier, the Vicrant. I'm not sure if it would qualify as a carrier strike group. It it appears to doctrinally be so, but I'm not entirely sure about their capabilities. Either way, they're off the coast of Pakistan right now. We could see them via satellite imagery and but yeah, it seems like there are military drills, very serious military drills underway in Pakistan and India along the border. That's kind of how this conflict has worked out for the most part over the past few years. So, I'm not entirely certain if the Vicrant is on an operational deployment or if this is just a show of force. So, it's one of those things where India can easily one up Pakistan in that regard with regards to military force. So, that's pretty much it for strategic movement. Moving to the kinetic activities tracker for the past seven days. I'm just going to start covering the past week or so we don't overload with all of the icons on the map. For those of you who have not uh checked it out so far, if you're wanting a deeper dive into what I'm doing with this mapping project, I just put out last night a video explaining all of the little details or at least most of the major details that I'm kind of working on with regards to this mapping project. Those of you who watch the video will also know that I launched a tipline system so that you can contribute to this data project if you wish. There are a series of tip lines. If you want to submit a report of something, you can do so. It's very easy to do. It may be a little bit longer than you you might be used to. But for those of you who want to send me something, make me aware of a situation or maybe something that I didn't see or didn't cover. You know, I'm I'm only one person here, right? So, I can't have eyes and ears everywhere. So, if you see something that I maybe missed or think I might be interested in, you can certainly submit it to me via the tip lines. But again, a longer explanation is in that video I dropped last night. For this week, most of the new icons are clustered in New York City, specifically Manhattan. So, let's go ahead and jump to the specific regions and let's talk about what happened in New York this week for a bit. It's been fairly kinetic. It's again protest season, so we're starting to see some of these uh climate groups, these uh anti- Doge or anti-Eon Musk groups come out. Uh I don't know how well funded they are, but they are starting to conduct a few more operations this time of year. And this week is no exception. And in this case, it's rather interesting. Something to to take note of is that a lot of these protest movements are not entirely easy to determine what exactly they are protesting. So just running down the list, the Trump Tower was vandalized by a guy going in spray painting something, getting his picture taken as usual. There was a protest on Billionaire's Row, specifically outside of Bill Aman's apartment building. He has been targeted by a few groups over the past few weeks. It's been more along the lines of a long-term siege kind of thing, but every now and then they'll go and they'll protest at his uh his residence along with a few other people. It's a much larger effort than just one guy, but he's kind of the the main face of this. And finally, in Midtown Manhattan, there was a Tesla showroom that was vandalized in a variety of ways for a variety of means. Like I mentioned, all of these incidents are kind of tied together, and you can see this based on the graffiti that they leave behind. The vandalism at the Tesla showroom was not simply just an anti-D Doge, anti-Eon Musk thing, but it was also a climate thing and also a anti-Trump thing. So, all of these things are kind of getting lumped together. The climate issue, the anti-Trump thing, the at this point, I'm just going to have to call it pro-corruption because they're it's very hard to argue against the Doge idea. And now people can argue about how it's like being done, but anti-corruption efforts in government are very I mean it's a hard thing to to protest against, but they're making an effort, right? So a lot of these groups are protesting multiple things. They're they're bundling all these ideas up together in a general uh political left bubble kind of thing. And a lot of times it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. And a lot of times when it comes to some of these demonstrations, you'll see people target each other at the same event. So we saw this more palpably when it when it came to the whole Israel Palestine thing a few months ago when it kind of heated up at some of these places after you know before it got shut down really you would have protesters showing up to like say a climate protest you know to protest against global warming or climate change or whatever right and they would want to bring in their like support for Gaza and then the other people who are pro-Israel would clash at the same event so they're there to protest some sort of climate issue but their other interests are conflicting. So, we're starting to see that a little bit more with regards to some of the protests and things that are kicking up. But, you know, whenever you bundle together a lot of very different issues into the same protest crowd, it's a hard cell uh to kind of get everybody on the same page when you've got radically different ideas all the way around. So, all of that is to say, this will be a very interesting summer for kinetic activities. Also in the northeast region, the New Jersey wildfire, the Jones Road fire, has reached 60% containment as of I think last night. The cause of the fire has been announced as arson and one arrest has been made. One Joseph Clling, a local who lived in the area. So, this does highlight the risks that arson brings this time of year especially. One detail I wanted to mention because I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information on this and this pertains to the nuclear power plant. So, Oyster Creek nuclear power plant is well, it was in the fire zone. So the fire uh went right up to this nuclear power plant. This is a defunct power plant. It's not used anymore. So it's it's shut down, but there is a lot of nuclear material at the side. There are spent storage pools there. So there was a concern at a certain period of time that this facility would be at risk for this wildfire. So saw a lot of hysteria about that, but it was mildly concerning for a little bit there. But of course, firefighters prioritized defending this particular structure and this this compound really. So, it was never really in any very serious danger, but it is something to think about. You know, some crazy guy uh setting fire to the woods can cause a very severe incident or complicate things quite a bit. So, something to keep in mind. Moving to the Midwest, a comparatively rare instance this week of a judge being arrested was reported in Milwaukee. A Milwaukee County judge was arrested on charges of obstructing justice for her role in helping an illegal alien escape custody. Details of this incident are hard to verify, but the general gist of the story and and perhaps hinting as to why this arrest took place. This was a little bit more brazen than normal, especially considering the context of what actually happened that day. So, once again, details hard to verify, but the general gist of what happened is she had an illegal alien in her courtroom who was facing charges of assault. A guy who uh beat his roommate, his roommate's girlfriend, and one other person. He put three people in the hospital uh by beating them so severely. and he was subsequently arrested on assault and battery charges and that's what he was doing in the courtroom. So, it wasn't any kind of uh immigration thing. However, the feds found out about it and showed up with a lawful warrant to arrest him in the courtroom on federal charges. This is a very standard thing for the feds to show up and and and nab somebody in court. U it's just a common place for arrest to take place. Either way, uh once the judge learned that the feds were outside, uh she had what can only be described as a mental episode. So, she took it upon herself to leave her courtroom and started verbally abusing the federal agents out in the hallway, shouting at them and forcing them to leave out, you know, leave the hallway. She went back into the courtroom and took the defendant back into her private chambers and allowed the defendant to escape from the facility down a hallway that led to an outside door. So, once again, this is a trial taking place, right? So the prosecution had no idea what happened. The defendant just disappeared along with his attorney. And once everybody figured out what was going on, the judge had let this guy escape. Uh the guy was uh on foot. So there a foot pursuit took place outside the courtroom and the feds ended up nabbing him immediately anyway. So he didn't get very far, but this is one of those situations where left, right, or center, this is very, very illegal. So this is probably why the charges took place. This has happened several times before in the past by several other judges as I've noted before, but this one was a little bit more brazen and of course there's new uh leadership in town with regards to the federal agencies. So these are starting to be cracked down on a little bit more. Similar story down in the southwest this week. The infamous judge Keno, Joseé Luis Keno, he goes by Joel Kano, but his real name is Joseé Luis. He and his wife were arrested on federal charges for again aiding in abetting not just an illegal uh who they let they let an illegal alien stay at their guest house. So he was living at the at their home with them but also he was a known uh trenda member or TDA member and they also provided uh this individual with firearms. So the local uh neighbors uh report that the known TDA member was observed handling firearms several times on social media and also by neighbors. So most citizens who live in these areas are not surprised in the slightest. My guess and this is just just pure speculation, but my guess is that the feds probably have something on this judge with regards to his own membership in some sort of organization. So it's probably not just because he harbored an illegal alien, even though that is of course illegal. can't do that sort of thing even though you're a judge. I find it very very hard to believe and most people who uh are in the region find it very hard to believe that a judge would get rolled up for something like that. Now maybe forced into retirement, sure, removed from the bench even that might happen. Sure. But getting rolled up and arrested is something that would only normally happen if there's a little bit of a story that we have not seen yet. So it may be surprising for some, it may be completely unsurprising for others, uh such as myself. It's not surprising at all. The most surprising part for me is that he actually got arrested, which makes me think that there's probably a little bit more to this story than meets the eye. But either way, we will see. So that's all I have for the United States. Let's move over to India and Pakistan and briefly discuss what's going on there because as one might imagine there there's a lot of information flowing and not a lot of it is particularly helpful. Anyone who has spent any time on social media anytime soon, especially on uh platforms like Twitter, will know that a substantial portion of internet traffic on these platforms comes from India. Right? So since that is the case, it is very hard to determine what is true and what is untrue. Uh but I can generally uh use statements by officials, government officials in both nations, both India and Pakistan to determine essentially what has happened so far. So earlier this week, there was a terror attack in Pahogam up in the Kashmir region. This is a resort town, if you want to call it that. I'm not sure it qualifies as a resort town, but either way, it's it's definitely a tourist destination for Indians in particular. So, there was a small arms skirmish. I have not been able to pin down exactly where the skirmish took place. Again, we're seeing a little bit of manipulation of information here, which may be a clue as to what's going on. But what is relatively certain is that government agencies and government officials have stated that 26 people are dead from the attack and there are many uh wounded. There were quite a few survivors from this attack and uh the testimony has been hard to verify. So verifying any of this is challenging. Similar story with figuring out who actually conducted the attack. There are several insurgent groups at this point who have claimed to have conducted the attack. Some of these groups are more traditionally Muslim terror groups. Some of them are Kashmir groups that are solely uh really supportive of Kashmir independence from both nations. Some of them are Indian groups which are ethnically Hindu but they don't like other uh casts. So it's a cast system thing. So I don't know who actually conducted the attack. Pakistan claims that it's a false flag attack that this really was the Indian government who shot up their own people as a way of justifying a war with Pakistan. Again, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's it's it's impossible to verify either way at the moment. In a larger sense though, in this part of the world, it it honestly really doesn't matter who started it or who's legitimately behind it because what's happening is happening. Very significant events have taken place on both sides of the border. So here are the things that I have been able to track down and verify that both nations have done to each other. Both nations have closed their borders to each other. There have been some exceptions on both sides for the seek population which is kind of an interesting development. Both nations have closed their airspace to each other's commercial airlines which is kind of a big deal because there's a lot of aviation traffic between India and Pakistan. Uh commercial aviation that is when that tends to happen it's not necessarily for a trade thing but it's to keep civilian airliners out of the way in case missiles start flying. Likewise, both nations have canceled all of the visas for each other's population, and they have issued deportation orders for each other's population. How likely are they to carry this stuff out? I very strongly doubt they're going to deport each other's citizens. There are just too many Pakistanis in India and there are too many Indians in Pakistan for this to occur like reliably. But either way, they've issued the order. So, we'll see how it works out. Likewise, both nations have ordered their own citizens back to each other. So Pakistan has ordered Pakistanis to return to Pakistan. India has return has ordered Indians to return to India. Same song and dance as always. And continuing the fairly standard tradition in the region. Pakistani and Indian border guards have been shooting at each other with rifles fairly regularly since this thing began really. So that's pretty much what both nations have done to each other. Uh India has has oneuped Pakistan as usual. For those who are not familiar with the region, India is generally considered by most military experts around the world to be the superior uh military fighting force. They've got a larger military, more technologically advanced. They're supported by the west uh such as the United States and Israel. So you can see how they would have the technological upper hand and also India has terrain on their side. So one of the things that India has done specifically that Pakistan can't really do anything about is they have uh cancelled the Indis waters treaty of 1960. Anyway, India has shut down uh the slle gates on roughly a dozen or so maybe 18 or so rivers that flow into Pakistan. For those that are unaware of the geography of the region, India is uphill of Pakistan or at least Kashmir is the Indian uh administered parts of Kashmir and Pakistan is very heavily reliant on the water that flows down from the Himalayas, the Anaperna range into Pakistan. That's where they get most of their water for agriculture. So India just by closing a few sloo gates has shut down 80% of the water used for irrigation purposes in Pakistan which is going to be very devastating. Of course Pakistan has vowed to bomb those slle gates to open them back up again but it's debatable as to whether or not they can they can actually do that. The Indian Air Force isn't actually any better. Uh so far there has been one reported casualty on all sides from this and this came from an Indian aircraft dropping a drop tank a fuel tank from a fighter jet. Uh they dropped it over a city and uh fuel tank landed in someone's house and killed an Indian. So that's why you'll see a lot of proakistan accounts saying that India bombed themselves. That's not entirely true. That's just Pakistan kind of, you know, poking at India. One of the Indian Air Force pilots who's been doing patrols in the area just dropped their drop tank at the wrong moment and that tank landed in an Indian village and killed an Indian. So India is negative one in terms of casualties so far in this conflict. So for those of you who don't know or don't understand why this is both a very serious situation but also not that serious and why a lot of the claims of open war uh on Twitter are probably not entirely that accurate. Let me just explain some of the common tactics that are used. I I'll just call them standard third world warfare tactics. These are things that a lot of these lesser capable militaries to include India and Pakistan tend to do to each other when they go to war. One of the major things that is occurring right now is both sides are shelling random uninhabited areas. So this is something that both nations tend to do. The even the US army tends to do this. we call it terrain denial fires, meaning you're just shelling a random mountaintop to make sure the enemy doesn't go there or in some cases just shelling the a random mountaintop for deception purposes or to confuse an enemy or something like that. Right? So when the western world does it, you know, when when more traditionally western militaries do terrain denial fires, it's more of a doctrinal process. However, India and Pakistan are very well known for the past well since artillery has been invented. Both of these nations will lob artillery rounds at each other, but not really at each other. They'll they'll pick an uninhabited area and just shoot randomly. They're not even they're not even plotting where the shells go most of the time. And this is just something that's very very common. It's you'd only know unless you're like familiar with how these militaries kind of operate, but I I'm not entirely certain if you would classify that as a serious war. But it sure does look good when they video uh themselves, you know, firing artillery rounds. Well, where did that round go? Well, you know, and you can verify that this is what's happening because both India and Pakistan have been shelling each other for 3 days and not a single person has reported a casualty yet. A lot of villages up in Kashmir. They're reporting, man, serious fighting going on, but there's not even any wounded. That's cuz they're not really shooting at each other. They're just shooting at random areas. So, similar story with uh fighter aircraft. So both Pakistan and India are very well known for taking their own, you know, air force and flying their own air force over their own villages to make it look like, you know, from the ground locals look up and see, oh wow, you know, Indian fighters in a dog fight or something like that. And really, they're just doing low passes over their own villages to make it look like they are fighting the, you know, Pakistanis or they're fighting the Indians. So again, it's more of a show of force to their own people than anywhere else. Another common tactic that is going on right now, which is very, very common throughout this half of the planet, is belligerent, soldiers, border guards, whatever, shooting at each other. But they're shooting at each other from so far away that it doesn't matter. Anybody who's deployed to the Middle East knows exactly what I'm talking about here because this is something that happens in a lot of these nations very, very routinely. And I'm seeing this or seeing reports of this occurring up in Kashmir right now. So they will get uh several miles away from each other and just spray and prey the air and they will claim that they got into an engagement with the enemy, but they're so far away that they couldn't possibly hit each other. So this tends to happen very very commonly like on a regular Tuesday up in Kashmir. It's happened like that for decades now. So it's not out of the ordinary. But would you call that a skirmish? I don't know. You know, two, you know, two platoon shooting at each other, you know, five, six miles away from each other. like that's that's not really war. That's just, you know, very dangerous uh uh power projection and things like that. But either way, both sides shoot at each other. They'll loose a few belts of, you know, HMG fire or heavy machine gun fire towards each other miles away. They'll fire off a few, you know, AK mags at each other and both sides will go home and claim they killed the entire enemy force, but in actuality there were no casualties. So, this appears to be going on right now in Kashmir. Now, of course, this isn't to say that at some point this could actually be a legitimate war, but right now it's it looks like it's just a standard power projection. There haven't really been any reports of any casualties yet, and they've been, you know, fiercely fighting. If you follow what, you know, Indians and Pakistanis are saying on Twitter, they've been fiercely engaging in an open war with each other for 2 days now. And there's there no reports of any casualties. So, I don't know. The reports may flow in. It's a very tense time. It's way more tense than in 2019 when they when they engaged in in Kashmere and there were casualties then. So, I don't know. It's probably just going to take a few days for for information to trickle down out of the mountains. But I I just um I'm seeing this really panicking style of uh rhetoric being pushed all over social media because the third world monetization of places like Twitter has really kind of destroyed the ability uh for us to get accurate information sometimes. So one of the bigger impacts which does matter and the reason why I talk about this is that the various diasporas of these populations around the planet are protesting too. So you're going to start seeing because India and Pakistan start fighting each other. You're going to start seeing Indians and Pakistanis in various western nations start fighting each other and that's exactly what's happened. So there were various riots uh outside the Pakistani and Indian embassies in London this morning and it's it's just a mess. So that's something that's going to definitely take place over the next few days and weeks. How bad it will get is anybody's guess, but we all know how this goes. So I guess we'll have to keep an eye on it. So that's pretty much all I have for today. This week I've been really focusing on some of the more historic data, so I haven't had time to dig in as much as I'd like. But uh let's go ahead and roll up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. very good week for Ghostnet. Uh it was fantastic to see a lot of really good information coming out of a lot of different places. People talking about things that I haven't that I haven't seen anywhere else. So very very interesting. Um I'm going to try to start looking at plotting a lot of this information on uh specific mapping layers, but don't want to uh spoil it for when I come out with with something on that front. So yeah, fantastic. Really appreciate all of you who contribute to the ghost net. Uh even if you're just one of the guys who just listens, uh that's a really good step in using one of the more reliable tools that we have just in case there's some sort of communications outage. I know it's not entirely the most entertaining thing in the world and it's not easy to understand a lot of times, but this is a very powerful capability that I hope to improve on in the future. So that's all I have for today. Thank you again everyone for watching. Here are the sources. If you want a slightly easier to click link, you can of course go to my Obsidian page and find all of these links underneath all of the daily wire reports that I have made throughout the week. So, it's already shaping up to be a very busy summer. So, I hope that uh some of these more organizational efforts will will pay off in the future when things start getting a little bit more crazy than they already are. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for watching and I will see you next time. And as always, bite in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for May 4th through the 10th of 2025. So let's get right to it. Starting off with the wavetop level. It has been once again a pretty busy week as pretty standard this time of year. However, a lot of loose ends have been tied up this week and a few others have begun to unravel. As one might expect this time of year. Summertime violence throughout the United States has started to pick up. It's hard to determine if this is any more elevated than usual for this time of year. But anyway, it's just something to keep an eye on, especially considering the more more serious kinetic events that seem to be happening around the country. Overseas, there have been some major developments in the Middle East, but most of them come from a more rhetoric ccentric standpoint and not something that we can really sink our teeth into. There really isn't anything set in stone. And there's just been a lot of rumors and mumbling, of course, going back and forth between various nations in the Middle East, but mostly between the United States and Israel regarding the Gaza issue. So, President Trump is scheduled to make a visit to the Middle East. So, I'm certain that by uh Monday, we'll have a lot more uh fidelity on what's actually going on, what the United States official stance is, but right now there's a lot of rhetoric going around. There's a lot of rumor and I personally don't really believe a whole lot of what I'm hearing, but I guess we'll have to see. Regarding the brief war that broke out between India and Pakistan, it is over just as quickly as it started after both nations traded missile strikes back and forth and a few dozen dead or so on all sides. A ceasefire agreement has been reached as of uh last night. So, we'll get more into that in just a bit, but for right now, that seems to be pretty much over and done with. Regarding strategic movement this week, not a whole lot of change from last week, at least with regards to uh US Navy aircraft carriers and carrier strike groups, but there has been some major strategic movement at Diego Garcia, which we'll get to at the end here. Moving to the kinetic activity tracker for this week. Again, pretty hot summer. Uh it's already starting to get pretty violent in certain places around the country. Quite a few small arms attacks, quite a few bits of rioting and civil unrest around the country, but but that's fairly standard at this point. And regarding all the other layers I have turned on year to date, it's starting to be a little bit of a full map. So hopefully this will help organize things a little bit to kind of break things out into different layers. But again, I'll uh I'll have a better update on the mapping project when I get through my next hurdle of uh how to organize the data. So with that out of the way, let's get into the regions themselves and we'll start off with the Northeast region. Starting with New Jersey first. There was again another instance of systems outages at Newark airport, specifically in the air traffic control tower at that airport. All of the screens in the entire tower went dark for about a minute and a half the other day. It's the same thing that happened last time uh about a week ago or so. So, this is becoming a rapidly serious thing. It's hard to determine exactly what's going on. There have been a lot of a lot of outreach being done by air traffic controllers in this particular sector trying to urge the general public to pay attention to what's going on here so that we can more or less get to a solution. Suffice it to say, things are not all right at Newark airport. And there have been quite a few uh leaks of information that have really encouraged people to just not fly out of Newark. A lot of these are hard to verify because they're from confidential sources or whistleblowers or things like that who would like to remain anonymous, but for the most part, there's not a whole lot of uh confidence being instilled in the air traffic control abilities at Newark Airport. I hope that we have uh some more fidelity on that next week. Really, all I've got is a bunch of unconfirmed rumor that I I don't really have any ability to confirm. The only thing that seems relatively certain at this moment is that it's a very risky time to be flying in and out of Newark. So that's something to keep in mind. Moving over to Pennsylvania, there was a new story that was of course varied by the legacy media which involved the detonation of an IED inside St. Terresa of Kolkata Catholic Church in Manoy City. Once again, anytime there's an attack on a Christian center or a Christian church, most media groups, even a lot of independent media will want to bury the story. So I did want to highlight it, especially considering the asalant was caught at the scene. And as we can tell by the physomy of this guy's mugsh shot of what this dude was all about. Local police said he was a known troublemaker. That's the quote they gave to the local media about this guy. So apparently he's known for this kind of thing. So something to keep in mind. Uh this will probably keep happening. I'm certain that a judge will probably let him out at some point if he isn't already out. But yeah, it was fairly it was a fairly kinetic blast in the church. It destroyed a good chunk of the altar and blew out a few windows. So, it was definitely something to to keep in mind, especially considering this was a 24-hour uh church. They were actually open uh all the time uh for people who needed to pray in the middle of the night or something like that. You know, a lot of churches have these kind of facilities, which is normally a very wholesome thing uh to allow people to worship at whatever time of day they they uh they need to. But unfortunately, malign actors take advantage of this and uh we either have thefts or um like this guy just wanted to attack the place. So, once again, something to be aware of. It's unfortunate that we do have to be aware of this, but this is kind of the thing that tends to happen nowadays. So, moving over to the Midwest, it has been a rather interesting week for the Midwest this week. There have been two revenge killings, or at least one killing and one attempted killing. And we'll start with the one in Cincinnati first. This was a little bit more high-profile. And this resulted from a shooting instance that occurred last week. This case really arose from your fairly standard u police shooting that seems to be quite justified based on the body cam footage. But this is again a tale as old as time. Cops were on the lookout for a stolen car. They've located the stolen vehicle. It was full of black males. They attempt to of course apprehend the individuals inside the car. They all scatter and one of them attempts to shoot at the police officers while uh he was trying to escape. Police officers open up and fire on him, kill him. Uh and that was pretty much the first police shooting. So, this was the shooting of Ryan Hinton. Well, as you might imagine, uh this became a rather high-profile shooting and uh they were preparing the body cam footage for release to show that this was a legitimate thing. So, the Cincinnati Police Department decided to show the uh body cam footage to Mr. Rodney Hinton Jr. here. Again, the father of the individual who was shot by police. I'm not entirely certain if this is a standard thing showing the family first uh or if they were just trying to kind of quell uh any kind of social unrest over this. Either way, that's what happened. Uh they showed Rodney Hinton Jr. the footage and he promptly left the police station and proceeded to murder the first police officer he could see. So, he intentionally drove his vehicle into a traffic control officer uh killing him at the scene. So, that's where things kind of stand at the moment in Cincinnati. This will probably be a fairly high-profile instance. Uh both the original shooting and this instance as well, mostly because they're trying to go for an insanity defense. Uh the attorneys for Mr. Hinton here have essentially said he wasn't in his right mind. Um and that's their defense. So, we'll see how that works out. I think we know how this is all going to go, but I guess we'll have to see. Over in Indiana, a very, very different type of revenge killing was attempted to be undertaken just outside of Indianapolis a few days ago in Hendricks County. So to understand this one, we have to go back a little bit further a few months ago in which the individual Sedani Pettis here was arrested after a high-speed chase. Once again, man tries to flee from police in a stolen car. Tail is old this time again, but in this case, he decided to flee and engage in a high-speed chase with two infant children uh in the car with him. Of course, this guy ended up crashing the car, killed one of the uh infants and uh wounded the uh other child who was a little bit older. So, he was arrested at the scene. Fairly open and shut case with regards to that. However, a few days ago, he was due to be in court uh to face charge the official uh charges for this. And the great-grandfather of the child that was killed and the child that was wounded uh decided to try to kill him as he was being brought into the courthouse uh that morning. So, for what I can gather, uh the local media is stating that Pettis was not actually being transferred at that time. So, this uh attempted vigilante killing uh revenge killing situation wasn't really effective. But either way, Mark Vulture here, the great-grandfather, he took out a pistol and um tried to fire into the crowd of inmates being brought into the courthouse. Of course, police promptly shot and killed him at the scene as well. So again, rather tragic stories this week coming out of the Midwest, but uh unfortunately this uh appears to be fairly common these days. So that's pretty much what I have for the United States. Let's move over to the IndiaPakistan conflict for a bit. Uh because I know that's been kind of a tense situation for a lot of people to to follow. But overnight there were significant targeting efforts by both India and Pakistan. I have not been able to verify uh what Pakistan struck in India. But from what I can tell, Pakistan mostly struck sites that are fairly remote in Kashmir. Maybe some Indian outposts or something like that. I will try to drill down and figure out what what they targeted a little bit more accurately just for posterity sake so I can put it on the map. But uh what was a little bit easier to verify are the photographs from what was struck in Pakistan. So uh three major air bases were struck by India overnight uh with surfaceto-surface cruise missiles. And this was following whatever Pakistan did in India. So just as a very very rough and brief timeline of events, terror attack occurs in Kashmir killing a couple of dozen Indians uh tourists up there. India promptly blames Pakistan, more specifically their intelligence services ISI for supporting insurgent groups and terrorist groups in Kashmir. India then conducts missile strikes in Pakistan striking around nine or so different targets in in that country. Pakistan responds at the moment of those strikes by shooting down a couple of Indian aircraft. Couple of days goes by till last night in which Pakistan decided to launch some missiles of their own to strike unknown targets in India. Whatever they hit, I will I will figure out. But as soon as Pakistan launched, India launched as well and they struck a few air bases in Pakistan. A few hours after that, so early this morning, 2 or 3 in the morning, uh, Eastern time here locally, the White House announced that uh, a ceasefire had been reached between India and Pakistan. So, essentially, it's an immediate effect ceasefire. So, I know we were all kind of waiting on whether or not this is going to fit the definition of a war. Uh, I don't know if you'd call it a war or not. I suppose you probably should uh considering the events of last night, but wars between India and Pakistan are very very interesting in that they tend to not have that many casualties. So all total over the past week or so from what I can tell again casualty figures are impossible to confirm with any accuracy. But since this entire thing started there were around 30 to 40 victims of the initial terror attack. And after that the strikes between India and Pakistan all total we're talking less than 50 fatalities on all sides. And this is after a week of heavy heavy artillery fire on the border. This is after multiple cruise missile strikes between both nations. And of course, most of the casualties are civilians. So there's probably 36 to 40 uh civilian casualties throughout both countries. So heavy fighting, few casualties. That's just kind of the way things work between India and Pakistan. So that's it for the subcontinent. Let's move down to the Indian Ocean proper and talk about Diego Garcia. There have been some pretty significant movements there this week. As we can see from the world's bluriest open source satellite imagery, we have some new arrivals. Uh, so as of May 7th, there were two B-52 strata fortresses that had arrived at Diego Garcia. And from what I can tell, there were two other B-52s headed to Diego Garcia as well. I don't really know what these B-52s are doing here. Maybe it's just a standard deployment training exercise, something like that. I don't know. But it does continue the trend of force buildup in the region. However, there is another major change that occurred this week. It's not on this image, uh, but in the wee hours of the morning yesterday, three of these B2s were picked up off the coast of Hawaii. So, the B2s are going home. From what I can tell, the other three followed very shortly after. And as of this briefing, uh, the the B2 spirits, the six bombers that were deployed to Diego Garcia, and thus the source of much consternation over the past few weeks, they're all home. Uh they're all back at Whiteitman Air Force Base. So make of that what you will. I hope that over the next few days we'll get some more satellite imagery to confirm that they did in fact go home. Uh we know they went home because we can we can track them. They took a very public route and it's not like they were trying to hide their presence uh when they were coming home. But I'm personally more curious about the B-52s at this point because this is a non-standard deployment for these guys. I want to know if those B-52s are still there, if they've kind of hot swapped out and uh the B-52s are going to be running out of there from now on for, you know, carrying out targeting in either Yemen or wherever uh they're needed. I don't have any commercial uh paid imagery of this uh over the past few days. There haven't been any passes that I could see, and it would take uh far too long for me to task the satellite myself, and it'd be a little bit uh little bit on the costly side as well. So, we're just going to have to make do with the free stuff we've got for now. But I think this kind of shows us uh that there's uh a lot of movement and a lot of uh things changing with regards to the Middle East rhetoric. And what it all means, I don't know. I can just tell you where the aircraft are or are not. And for now, it looks like the B2s have gone home. And before we wrap things up today, I briefly wanted to show you guys some of the imagery that I got back last week. As I mentioned before, there are a few sites I'm I'm watching around the world. as hard and as subjective as it is to do from from my own wheelhouse. I'm trying to just kind of keep feelers out there and see if uh see if anything interesting is is taking place around the the world. And one of the places that I have been covertly watching for a while is Tinian Island. Now, once again, this is certainly not groundbreaking. I have not located some kind of secret lost u US military base in the Pacific. A lot of other people have been aware of this and have been kind of tracking this for a while. The US Air Force in particular is actually quite public about what they're doing here, but uh I think it's interesting, so I thought I would share it. And I had the image anyway, so I might I paid for it. I might as well show you guys what I got. So Tinian Island is the site of an old Japanese air base uh that was originally created during World War II. Now, Tinian Island itself is located just south of Saipan and just north of Guam in what we generally call the second island chain. The island chain theory really goes back to I think the 1970s and really is uh to describe what might happen if China decides to expand uh their territorial aspirations into into the Pacific. And these aspirations are best clearly benchmarked I suppose by what we call islands chains. Generally speaking the Pacific Ocean is a very very big body of water. And it turns out that even in our modern age, even with all of our strange and horrific tools of war, we still need some dry land to put our feet on, right? Generally speaking, the prevailing theory for a while now is that if China invades Taiwan, they're not going to stop at Taiwan, but they're going to have to push through the First Island chain. Taiwan being one of the islands in this chain. some of the um southern islands of Japan, the Philippines, all of these are in the first island chain and they will have to progress uh outward across the Pacific if they are to to hold that that first uh island chain. So, this gets really complicated. It gets very hotly debated. People uh get very very very strong opinions about this sort of thing. But all of this is to say that the United States is certainly aware of China's aspirations and is taking efforts to counteract it somewhat. And one of those efforts is to bolster the American presence in the Pacific. We also refer to this as the Pacific pivot. The shift from a fighting wars and deserts GWAT, you know, global war on terrorism kind of era in into a war in the Pacific kind of mentality. The US Marine Corps is most uh heavily involved in this, but the Air Force is definitely getting involved as well, particularly U ASOC. Obviously, the Air Force is going to have to have a lot of planes to shuttle a lot of people around. So, one of the things that they have been doing is building airfields. And if we take a look at the image that I have, uh, this brand new shiny image shows all of the progress they have made at Tenian Island. Now, I'm not entirely certain if this actually has a name yet. I'm just going to call it Tenian Island Airfield until we have a official name for it. But, uh, right now it's not operational, but you can see they've made some pretty good progress. And just to show some of the work that's been done over the past few uh weeks and and months, uh you can clearly see they're trying to build a camp here in the northern uh side of the base. We're just going to call that northern camp for now. They've also got similar efforts down in the south. You can see very clearly they've staged an awful lot of logistics down there. That's uh a pretty substantial deployment of logistics to this to this base. And uh we can also see there's been a lot of work on the runways and airfields and taxiways and all that stuff. So, I thought this was a very cool image. It took me a long time to get it. The first few passes of the satellite were rejected. I had to retask and uh it was just kind of a nightmare getting this image, but I I was able to actually get it. And I think it's uh really in informative with regards to what the United States priorities are in the Pacific. And just for a comparison sake, we can look at what Google Earth has and what Google Maps has for this specific location. And you can see that it was essentially an abandoned air base uh for many many decades and now uh it's getting pretty close to being functional. So I would be willing to bet over the next few weeks this this air base is probably going to uh be functional again. So how useful it will be, I don't know. Guam's not that far away. Um but again, the United States Air Force is going to need every stretch of dry land they can get to uh to carry out a a war if they so choose uh to carry out a war in the Pacific. Whether or not that's the plan, I don't know. I can just show you the pictures. So, I guess we'll have to see how this works out over the next few weeks. And um I'll try to see if I can get another image to maybe compare uh in a few weeks time. But it it takes a while to task a satellite. It takes sometimes generally speaking, if you don't want to pay too much, it generally takes about a month or so to task a satellite. So, I'm still waiting on a few images to come back. And of course, uh cloud cover is a problem. So, we've got to wait for weather. So, a lot of images get rejected due to cloud cover. So, this was the first good clear shot that I've had uh of this location so far. So, I haven't seen anybody uh who has this image before. So, you are definitely seeing it here first. So, with that, I think we'll roll things up today and talk about the intercepted ghost net reports. Again, another great week for the ghost net. Uh quite a few people talking about local uh news in their area. Uh somebody sent a message out to the ghost net uh tag. You can actually uh send radio messages out to whoever is following a certain tag. So, even though I got this screenshot from my receive only rig, I was using my web SDR to, you know, monitor a radio through the internet, I was able to actually get the message in my inbox because someone sent their news as a message. So, I thought that was pretty neat. Uh, it's a little bit hard to understand how this all works together, but again, I hope to have a lot more on the ghost set in the future, especially now the weather's getting nice. people are more motivated to get outside and start testing and uh making sure they don't get complacent with regards to communications. As we all know, outages are are not too far away sometimes. So, keeping on top of your skills and uh doing the best you can is is a very good thing to do. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for watching. Thank you for all of your support. I really do appreciate it. It's certainly always good to see a week where things are are calming down a little bit, but uh I definitely will uh be watching out for whatever escalations occur this this coming week and we'll see how it goes. So, thank you all again and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Kind: captions Language: en hello everyone and welcome back to part three of our series on escape and concealment so uh we were going to have part three be a continuation of the uh restraint escape and we're going to talk about different kinds of european style russian czech style handcuffs and hand restraints but we've actually hit a little bit of a snag uh it turns out that we in our training exercises you know internally here at the shop have snapped off keys and all of the keyways of our foreign style handcuffs so that's going to have to wait for a little bit while we get some more imported in from europe so yeah that should sort of tell you as to how that episode is going to go but in order to put out as much content as possible we already had this sort of part four ready um but we're going to go ahead and put it push it out as part three and this series this particular episode in the series is going to talk about our sort of seer kit type stuff so this is the episode we're going to talk about um that we think is probably going to get a lot more traffic because everybody likes gear a lot more than you know sort of education or training right so we're going to go over all of the gear and stuff in our sort of seer setup now uh the reason that we're talking about this and where we sort of got our motivation from is a few years ago quite a few years ago in 2013 uh this whole seer kit ideology became very very popular and this happened because a a time magazine article was written about in response to special warfare group navy devgrew seal team six whatever you want to call them they put out a solicitation for a brand new survival kit and it was very intriguing because it was something that had not been well it it was kind of a new generation of survival kit and in that kit were a few things like you know handcuffed keys and handcuffed shims and things like that and that was very unique because that had not been seen uh as a military survival kit for a very long time in fact most of the survival kits from the military looked sort of like this you you know your vietnam era you know um line drawing you know typewriter written survival kits and that's you know that's something that the military had been working on for a very very long time and uh hadn't really sort of jumped past that cold war slash vietnam you know anywhere from the 60s to like the 80s style of survival kit they haven't jumped into a new uh era yet so um you know dev grew was looking for a new type of survival kit and that sort of that solicitation was written into a time magazine article and then quite a few different other entities jumped on board as well and they thought hey this is pretty cool because this has got a lot of new technology in it um so that exploded like i said and a lot of companies sort of created um their own versions and this is where we sort of see the spinoff and the creation of a civilian style survival kit slash seer kit type thing really because seer isn't in and of itself um is not necessarily a civilian uh civilian sort of program if you will and we we talk about this in part one so if you haven't already i forgot to mention check out part one and part two because that talks a lot about why we don't think necessary necessarily is it is a perfect fit for a civilian type setup but like i mentioned there are lots of survival kits on the market today and a lot of them include seer type components so that's where we sort of start to see the birth of this seer it's restraint escape style kits for the civilian sector now here's where they fall short a lot of these searches are based they are that they either have a plastic container or a metal like suma container like on the previous slide um they're they're going to have some kind of physical container all the little bits and bobs are put in this one container and that's your sear kit right well you know what if you know this is not really a sort of you know rabbit hole what if scenario this is a very likely scenario you're not going to have time to get to your kit if you're going to get you know snatched and grabbed off the street you're not going to have time to take those items out of your kit and layer them on your body somewhere you need to have that already pre-staged so we find that a lot of times people are going to go out there and they're going to spend you know 100 hundreds of dollars in some cases on these searches and they're just going to like put them in their pocket and go around like they're like they're perfectly fine they can escape any situation well that's not necessarily true um you know these seer kits are are great and it's better to have one than to not have one but let's be real when we're talking about the the adversaries we're going to be facing we're simply going to be you know grabbed off the street and we're not going to have chance to implement our escape plan right you know in the even worst case scenario uh what if you are uh you know taken and uh put in a a situation where there is no sort of westernized standard of human living right you know you're not going to have a lot of the tools you think you might have and you're going to have a lot more than you you know you didn't think you would have as well so the situation can be highly dependent on where you're at so like this image shows uh an isis prison in i believe syria at the time i think it was right there in the merv on the uh iraq syria border but uh the point is is that we sort of have a romanticized view a lot of times of what seer is going to look like and what a restraint escape situation is going to look like and it might not live up to your you know expectations so we need to to to take some considerations uh when it comes to actually the what the stuff we actually use you know is right so this is why we came up with this sort of system we have conventional survival kits right that are built for survival like solcoa is a company out there that's right at the cutting edge of if you're going to buy a pre-made survival kit you know soulcoa makes the best ones they're the ones who won the the solicitation for the original stuff and they've just been doing great stuff with all their civilian kits so if you buy one of their pre-made survival kits you'll be pretty you'll be sitting pretty right and then there's also dedicated sear kits that don't have quite so many survival components but they are dedicated for restraint escape and things like that well we wanted to kind of merge the two and and not necessarily create just one big kit that's both a survival kit and a sear kit we wanted to incorporate both sort of ideologies into the same thing uh the same system right we're not talking container based we're not talking like uh you know gear based we're talking a sort of survival escape system really is what was what we're looking at and that's how we're kind of approaching it so really um we're looking at not just one container but multiple containers like you know it's the layer throughout our body you know so that if we have you know all of these components together we'll be most prepared but if we can't necessarily take our survival kit with us but we can take our search kit we'll still be sort of okay you know we'll be able to make do and then we have a lot of specialized gear that not very many people are talking about when it comes to even seer kits a lot of people don't necessarily uh think about some of the things that we're going to talk about here in this which is probably going to be a very long video um but yeah that's why our main sort of system is we have a survival kit component um with with some seer tools in it so we have some bare bones stuff in it with that then we have a sort of seer capsule sort of mentality which has some survival tools in it as well so a little bit of each in each kit so that you can function both both ways and then we have sort of escape aids which are not in any container but they are layered on our person in various spots um you know concealed on our body somehow that we're and this is a daily thing so that we're not necessarily relying on the ability to layer these items uh from our circuit on our person you know if we get yanked out of bed in the middle of the night we'll still have stuff on us that's that that's the mentality with it and then finally of course the most important part by far is the knowledge part the knowledge part is most is the most important because not only is it the hardest to find but it's also the hardest to learn very few places and and and sort of government entities are going to talk about seer you know the seer courses that the military has are of course classified and even some of the tactics that are in those classes are classifieds and you know nobody can talk about them really a lot of the technology itself is classified as well so we don't exactly we're not exactly dealing with an open source um sort of system here you know we're not you the culture is not open source when it comes to seer even from seer from other countries like good luck finding any data whatsoever on russian seer courses and we know they exist um we know that you know from our professional atmosphere that they do exist we just you know in the civilian sector you're gonna you're not gonna find any information on them at all um so that's something to to consider is moving forward is that the knowledge part is the most important but it's also gonna be the most hard to find so when it comes to most seer kit contents you know like i said before we we don't necessarily think that seer is a good mentality from or seer as a concept isn't necessarily a good lens from which to view this in a civilian capacity it's not a perfect fit uh but the tools are so you're gonna see you can google you know buy search it or something like that and you're gonna find a bunch of different ones from a bunch of different companies and most of the time they're gonna have these four things inside them first of all you're going to have restraint escape tools next up you're going to have containment escape tools so once you get out of your hand restraints you're going to have to get out of your cell or container that you're in somehow and third up is barter slash trade components now a lot of times these this doesn't exist in a lot of commercial sear kits i can't think of any actually that have bartering tools in them but we'll talk about that in a minute and then lastly survival components things like ferro rods you know fire starters things like that you know those are are quite common to put in kits because they're quite cheap and very small to to put in there so that's what most sear kits have and it's kind of roughly the the categories from which we approach um the the sort of search it concept right so let's go through each of these categories and let's talk about some of the specific tools that we keep in our seer kit specifically now first up is restraint escape so handcuff keys like we mentioned before absolutely crucial there's two main kinds that we personally use there are many out there but these two are the are the really the two big ones for one on the left is the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key and the one on the right is the uh the delta key the one on the left uh the the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key really the only selling well there's two selling points for it one it has it has a clip on it and that allows it to be clipped into things like underwear t-shirts and the rolls of fabric all kinds of in your sock and you'll never know it that's a huge selling feature that not many handcuff keys have because the attachment point is really the crucial part you know you can have you know 50 different handcuff keys on you but if you have to sew them into your clothing every time that gets tedious and you're not going to do it unless you leave them permanently sewn in your clothes but then you have to buy an awful lot of handcuff keys whereas this one you could buy three or four of these and just clip them in your t-shirt clip them in your underwear as you go about the day and you know just continuously you know when you take your clothes off you know and change clothes just move the key over to this new set of garments and that works quite well and it's pretty cheap to do the other handcuff key is the delta key and for obvious reasons it's preferred in some areas because it works on a lot more cuffs than the than the plastic one however it's also metal now granted it is titanium so it is very metal detector resistant but it's not completely irresistible to metal detectors whereas a plastic key is so that's something to keep in mind we keep both we use one we have one or two of each in the little survival capsules that we use um but yeah it's just something to keep in mind is that if you're trying to go for a zero metal content that's you know the delta key is is kind of it's gonna have to go out and then uh another type of key which we have not seen anyone at all talk about is the um the the sort of uh and hua if that's how it's pronounced anhua cuffs from oscar oscar delta they met oscar delta is i believe a british company that makes these keys and these keys are the only ones on the market that work for the chinese police handcuffs now we had of course planned to show these handcuffs in you know part three but that's going to have to come later so we'll show you how these handcuffs work specifically but the short version is you can't use a normal american handcuff key on them you have to use this tube-like thing because the key is actually has to be a try hollow triangle shape now so these uh handcuffs are obviously the only thing on the market that work for these handcuffs so you're if you're in you know southeast asia most southeast asian nations use these handcuffs and a lot of middle eastern nations use these handcuffs as well and you cannot shim them the only way to get out of them is using this type of key now that being said you know oscar delta is is doing a great thing by offering this the only company that offers it so far but keep in mind is that their keys aren't quite perfect so if um as you can see here on this image the key on the left has been used one time and the key on the right in this image has been used not at all as you can see the one on the left is rounded out quite significantly and that's because the turning force the torque needed to to actually open these chinese police handcuffs is quite significant it is double or triple the amount of effort required to turn the key on an american style set of handcuffs and that's important because the key is made out of copper this uh delta uh you know oscar delta and hua key is made out of copper and it's basically a one time use tool and in some cases like these two keys here that i have that i'm showing you right now they didn't ever open the handcuffs so as you can see on the image on the right where the three keys there on the on the coin the one on the left we took a pair of pliers and bent it into more of a triangle shape and those work fine uh those work a lot better than you know just crimping it just a little bit into more of a triangle permanent triangle shape uh that works out quite well on these chinese police handcuffs so if you buy these and put them in your kit just recognize that you're going to have to do that because these keys as they come from oscar delta some of them work some of them don't some of them work flawlessly on certain chinese handcuffs but the as you know as we were going to talk about in the video on about these specific handcuffs their machining tolerances vary widely like some of these handcuffs like we have a pair of these handcuffs that the key that comes with the handcuffs cannot open like that's how bad these are manufactured and so if you're trying to cover the most tolerances the the most different kinds of of these chinese police handcuffs you're going to have to adapt your keys to do that so that's just kind of an aside you know we wanted to talk about this in a different video of course but that's going to come out a little bit later but yeah a a dedicated key for chinese police handcuffs is crucial if you spend a lot of time in those areas not so much a concern for america but these are used widely around the world and then up next is of course the um the the ubiquitous handcuff key shim now this is just an example one that we have sort of it's the key style handcuffed shim where it's got a little bit of a little bit of a grip to it and we bent it so that it can fit in a kit a little bit better you know you can buy these you can use these you can use the split paul kind of the russian kind depending on where you were taught um they uh those work as well actually those are the ones i use in my own personal kit but this is just an example of a handcuff shim or our hank of shims are quite crucial especially if you are you know sort of uh using up against a blue box type system it's really the only thing that's going to work you know you know if you can take advantage of the fact that nobody can you know double lock the cuffs right so uh take a look at um parts one and two for talking about more about shims but yeah shims go in the kit um also um extra kevlar cordage and i have this as an example a size reference next to this sort of crushed up dollar bill and kevlar cordage is a great escape tool now you can put this in your kit you can also sew it into your clothing very loosely so that you could just pull it out like i've got it on a couple of pairs of pants i've just got it you know wrapped around the inside of the waistband so that i can reach around behind and pull it out from inside the pants it's just like pulling a you know the thread loose on a sweater but instead of pulling the pants loose it pulls the kevlar cord out so that's a good way to do that as well if you didn't want to store it in the kit and then up next is something that not a whole lot of people well a lot of people talk about the normal ceramic razor blades but you can also buy ceramic razor blades are becoming very very commercially popular and this company called slice makes like holiday gift wrapping you know cutting tools and things like they're a craft company and they make a great escape innovation tool which is basically their version of an x-acto knife but it's all plastic now it must be noted that on the inside of where this razor blade is held in it's held in by a metal spring but you can you can pull that out quite easily and make this entirely plastic and this is great because a lot of people are used to buying these little six dollar ceramic razor blades with little hole in them and things like that and those are those are good there's work but why not have why not have a tool with a handle on it because a tool with a handle on it uh can fit inside the small survival capsule we're going to talk about in a minute and it it greatly greatly expands your capability so that's something to keep in mind and it can also function as an improvised improvised defensive tool if need be has a cap on it and things like that so that is a great tool to use if you're in if you're looking to get into it it's expensive it's quite expensive the razer blades are roughly double what uh normal razor blades normal ceramic razor blades cost um and i think the whole tool itself is like gosh i hate to quote a price on film that's going to change let's say you get anywhere from 15 to 30 bucks one of these um razor blade tool x-acto knife things and it comes with a couple of blades uh so depending on where you get it from so yeah that's that's something to to look into ceramic razor blades non-metallic absolutely uh crucial for a kit like this then up next are lock picks now these are the absolute smallest lock picks that i would consider using and these are the the bogota i think nano i think that's what they're called we have a few the minis the micros or whatever they're called and we have all different sizes of these bogotas they're expensive they're very expensive uh tools but they are titanium they're low they're they're not made of a ferrous metal which means they're harder harder to detect with a metal detector once again um and so yeah that's why they go in our kit because these are the smallest ones that we can use um physically right there are smaller ones out there smaller lock picks but they are made of steel which is you know quite magnetic and very easily detectable via a metal detector and they also don't quite have the capabilities these have so um you know this is about as small as we go with with the lock picks and they fit easily on the survival type capsule and then up next is something that not very many people talk about because it's kind of expensive is an escape saw now this particular escape saw i think we got from shomer tech but there's now a couple of different brands out there um and they we put the price here on the screen as 20 bucks because that's i think what the msrp is but we got this one for eight dollars um i can't remember from where i think it was shimmer tech but i'm not entirely certain and we got a few of these and this saw is like you you would you don't quite understand how sharp it is until you get it and i've never seen a saw like this before not even like a small like jeweler's little saw this kind of saw is amazing it will cut through everything so this saw is worth way more than its weight in gold and i would highly recommend getting one of these little escape saws like this and also it functions as a handcuff shim it's the right size to work as that and it's long so it will work on a lot of those uh handcuffs that like we showed before those rigid cuffs where it has a re you need a really long shim to get in there and bypass those locking poles this one will work it will work quite well in fact and the saw blade doesn't get in the way when it's used as a handcuff shim so this is one of those tools where it's like you're hesitant to buy it because it's like ah that's kind of expensive for such you know tiny little saw there's better saw blades out there right um but we pulled the trigger on it we bought it and we bought a few of these and they have been amazing i would not hesitate to buy uh quite a few more of these so that's the so you and this saw blade goes by a few different names [Music] but you can generally just google escape saw and you'll find it it's a very small little saw blade like that then up next are a couple of more you know more like containment escape tools like for padlocks so we've got a quick stick and an easy decoder once again they're bent to sort of fit the round container you can leave these in or you can take them out i personally don't rely on these i take them out because they're um they're steel spring steel and it i'm trying to get i personally my personal one is trying to be as as as have as little magnetic signature as possible and these really don't grant me a whole a whole heck of a lot of capability considering i have a saw blade i have you know lock picks themselves things like that i can get i can fashion a way to get through a padlock um without using this type of tool so put them in if you want i think a few guys have them in theirs here but yeah that's something to consider these are fairly common component in a lot of search kits and then up next is barter slash trade items now this is one where we kind of want to explain what we're talking about here because a lot of people get bent out of shape when it comes to talking barter goods now i will admit that bartering in a stereotype scenario is probably not a good idea it's not a super great thing um it usually most seer doctrine like anybody who's been through a normal seer course will tell you yeah bartering is it that went out of the window you know back in the 50s right we don't barter anymore we avoid civilians as much as possible and because usually a civilian population means we're going to get turned in you know the united states military learned that very well from vietnam and subsequent conflicts uh throughout the middle east is that basically yeah you're not going to have a population that is on your side this isn't world war ii anymore the world has changed quite significantly now that being said we also have to remember though that in the civilian sector we might have that option you know we are not you know like downed aviators you know where most seer courses are you know um meant to sort of portray we're civilians right we're in our own communities so bartering might be an option if nothing else we're talking about like bribing guards and things like that and that might be a better option and gold is very very small it's very lightweight if you keep a gram or two on you um and it it's relatively cheap for what you can get out of it see these little one gram bars are very very small you can see how they fit there but two of them fit on a quarter and you can fit these very easily pretty much anywhere and they have a lot of value so you can use them to easily trade you know the the uses for these are quite literally endless in a civilian sphere type scenario not so much useful in a conventional military sense but we do have to remember the origins right these did exist in the military sort of history right there were such things as barter kits as you can see here on the slide you know aviators throughout the pacific and in some parts of the european theaters mostly the pacific theaters as far as we know but comment below if you know where these were used more often these barter kits are sort of a lesser known part of history where they are a kit of of valuable things that could be used with a native population to help get a downed aviator to back to american friendly lines right so this one on the right here contains a very nice mechanical watch with a little watch band you know watches aren't typically that hugely valuable to you know westernized society but to you know a sort of pacific islander culture back in the 40s they you know a very you know um very tribal like culture a timepiece might have a lot more value than a gold coin would um you know likewise a lot of these you know small shiny baubles and things like that going back to the you know quasi-offensive you know era of of um you know colonists you know trading with you know native americans and things like that they weren't trading things that had particular value um to the to the you know the westerners but to the natives they had great value so things like that you know a little copper or uh you know so you know very low carrot uh gold um very ill-fitting uh pressed you know rings things like that might have great value and that's where sort of where we're coming from now in a modern day society we of course are going to use these little gram pieces little gram bars of gold because they're easier to carry and you know things like that but you know just keep in mind is it bartering while it has come out of the the doctrine for most of um you know american societies it might be willing to put in it might be worth putting in your circuit um just on your you know out of your own considerations so um to think about that is something to think about you don't have to do any of the stuff we're saying of course but it's you know a lot of people um put down bartering or a lot of people of course overestimate the power of borrowing like they're going to be able to walk up to a guard and say i'd like to be led out of jail please here's one one gram of gold like no it's not going to work like that but in a situation where you might have the opportunity to barter you want to have something to barter with so that's why we include gold now another barter tool that we use is uh diamonds now diamonds historically have been quite bad for currency they have very little resale value they they cannot be divided easily like gold can and they are very very uh different every single diamond is different which means that it basically checks all them uh you know checks all the boxes for not becoming a currency so diamonds are not a great shtf's currency it would not be a good idea just stockpile diamonds or anything like that now that being said we do include one diamond one little .23 carat diamond in these kits because as you see look how small it is it is so small and it cost us around 250 bucks to buy it from a certified american vendor now if you've ever been to a foreign country like afghanistan and you try to buy some of the jewelry that's you know on base or um you know come this stuff that comes through the kyber pass and stuff like that you can get non-certified almost certainly illegal diamonds for a lot cheaper and um that would probably be you know an option for some people if you're not too concerned about you know u.s laws you know if obviously if you're in the u.s you have to obey us laws and those kinds of diamonds are illegal but if you're in afghanistan if you're in a country that doesn't necessarily care about the diamond trade that might be an option for you and you can get it for a lot cheaper you buy a two carat diamond for like what 50 bucks or something like that you know off some kid in a foreign country and it'll be a perfectly fine you know perfectly fine diamond of course it's you know morally questionable but you know that's just how the diamond trade works in other countries but we might have a future video talking about that kind of stuff but yeah sorry we're going to leave it kind of vague for now but the point is is that diamonds can serve as a last currency and that's because a lot of like i mentioned a lot of terror groups use diamonds to finance their terrorism to this day even though they're not a good currency they don't necessarily have a whole lot of resale value they're very hard to tell what value they have um you'd need a very special you'd have to know what you're looking at to tell how valuable a diamond is and even then it you know it might mean something to some you could have two you know diamond uh you know you could have two jewelers look at the same diamond and give you a different price for it so that's not admit that's you know basically rules it out as a currency unless you're dealing with like a terror group or something so if you're held you know if you're held captive by a terror group or if you've you know you've gotta uh you know pay your way through you know a dirty guard or some kind of border checkpoint in a foreign nation which we may or may not have had to do many times in the past um diamonds work that ones work quite well so keeping one around you see how small it is it doesn't hurt anything it takes up no space in your kit and if you can do that you know it would not be a bad thing to do and then moving on to a more conventional barter thing you can just keep cash on you like um we have this uh um dollar bill here which is a 50 bill a 50 american dollar bill and then we also have a 50 euro note that we can cram up and uh shove in um our kit so that works out quite well um you can use you know spend money no matter where so euros obviously europe you're not going to find any place in the united states it takes euros but that's so that's why we have the american dollar bill and the american dollar bill functions in a lot of it works in most countries on earth i haven't i don't think i've ever been to a country that did not accept american dollars at some place now a lot of places of course within europe don't accept american dollars in the countries but you can always find some place that does i haven't been to anywhere where you have to use america you have to use the local currency with the exception of places like war zones where um the local population does not want to get caught with american currency because um that mean that they might get labeled as a collaborator with americans right so like in a lot of places in you know iraq and syria you're not going to find you're going to find that the locals don't want to take american cash they want to take their local currency or something else in trade because they don't want to get caught with the american dollar bills at least that's the way it was a you know a few years ago but yeah keeping cash on you in your little survival cat capsule is very very important then up next is sort of the sort of survival components and the first one up is this little thumbtack compass compasses like this are quite amazing i think the very first uh first time that we heard about this was a little nato 40 millimeter compass a little dry cell compass that i think they're still made nowadays but they work quite well these are i think thumbtack they're labeled as thumbtack compasses from county comm it's the only place i've been able to find them but they are very very small as you can see by how small it is compared to that quarter and they fit very well inside the lid of the survival capsules or uh if you don't want to glue them to the inside of the lid uh you can just stick them in there they also fit very well in little you know pico containers as we'll talk about in a minute um but yeah these these compasses work quite well i will note though that somehow or another we've got like i don't know 15 or 20 of these laying around and so at some point in time uh they become demagnetized now some of this only happens with a with a couple of the ones we have like they they no longer point north and i don't know how or why but it's just kind of a reminder that if you're dealing with something this small and it's a dry cell you might want to might want to keep checking it every now and then to make sure that it actually does in fact point north and you haven't de-magnetized it in some way because the needle is so small um and you know so yeah that's something to keep in mind and then up next this is something that we know we don't really see a whole lot of people talking about but water treatment tablets in a survival capsule um and this is something that you like our personal experience sort of came out and i'll show you an image and this image was from nepal when we were there a while ago and this image is taken from about 300 kilometers from the nearest town so this road is the only part of the road that goes through this part of the country it's down um a little bit further south than uh kathmandu uh the main the capital there and it's in the middle of nowhere um quite literally there is nothing uh except for this road um there's no humans there's no villages there's there's nothing in this particular part of the country for you know a couple hundred kilometers around and there's garbage everywhere there is trash everywhere you would be surprised um at how much garbage is in places around the world that like where no humans should be or go like i remember going to um going to indonesia and just going to the beaches there and just walking the beaches and you cannot take a single step without stepping on some plastic garbage so suffice it to say the world today in is polluted it's polluted as heck and it is not a um place that i want to drink water from you know this is not the kind of thing where you can go back and um look at you know survival guides and survival manuals from like 50 years ago and say like oh you know you can drink water that's clean coming out of a mountain or things like that you know that's really it's really going to be hard to find a spot of water on planet earth that has not been contaminated by human beings even in some of the most remote areas on the planet so that's why we want to carry water treatment because water treatment tablets can prevent you from getting very very sick and if you're on the run and you get some kind of thing like giardia or you know crypto or something like that uh you could quite literally be dead within a couple of days um if nothing else you're gonna be sapped of all energy uh within within 24 hours and that's not good and if you're in some kind of you know escape and evasion scenario right so that's why we talk about water treatment tablets and we keep them on us no matter what now these are the um uh potable aqua tablets no they're the mic they cated in micro pure tablets there are some other ones called from israel card called uh tahar mayem i think is how you say it you'll notice the packaging has you know hebrew lettering all over it when you google like water purification tablets they are a lot smaller and they might fit in these survival caps a little bit more but these were micro pure tablets that we had um and we just you know shoved them in there because it took up a little bit extra space and prevented the the kit from rattling so much so that that's why we have those in our kit all right and up next is something that i don't i haven't seen anybody talk about at all and this is a micro sd card now this is one of those things where we're gonna have to be kind of cryptic again about why we have it um but we we always all of us here um separately and independently carry a micro sd card and you know sometimes multiple ones um and on that micro sd card we have three partitions so the first partition is unencrypted it is just a normal you plug it into a usb adapter plug it into a computer you can read it normally and that thing in that that partition has our identity documents you know scans of passports drivers licenses things like that visas you know entry paperwork um [Music] if you're traveling in a country that requires it a lot of times you know vaccine paperwork things like that medical records if you know if we get injured and you know we're unconscious somebody finds this you know capsule on our person they plug in this micro sd card they can get our medical records and things like that if they need them um we also have on their sort of information arc you know like we've mentioned before um sort of like a you know like a noah's ark of information you know information that's likely to be banned so a couple hundred survival manuals you know all kinds of things that are likely to not be available in a lot of places so we keep that you know on the unencrypted part because so it's easier to get to so on part two i'm afraid we're gonna have to be you know even more cryptic about that um part two is gonna also be encrypted and it is going to have a negotiating tool a small bit of information that we can give people the password to we could tell them the password to allow them to install the encryption software and decrypt partition 2 and that can serve to verify our identity if we needed to we don't want that unencrypted because we want people to have to interact with us at some point in time so so we get picked up for something and we need to verify our authenticity but we can't we don't want to have it on an unencrypted drive we could physically tell our captors slash interrogators right okay open partition 2 on the hard drive here's the password for it that should verify our identity or it could be used to barter so we could say hey this is the information we have if you want to talk about negotiating for our freedom we can do that too and then partition three is essentially our insurance policy it is um another partition where we can have a whole host of information that might be valuable to any government agency on earth and um if you know part two partition two can serve to verify the authenticity and verify who we are verify that we do have the access to the information that we do have and part three is the um is the full on sort of information that can be used to ensure our freedom or if nothing else it can be used to um ensure our our authenticity right so uh that's that's sort of what we keep on the micro sd cards hopefully people out there who are in the know who might need this sort of setup will recognize what we're talking about because every analyst out there has an insurance policy once you've seen enough stuff out there to make sure that you you know a lot of times intel analysts and people not necessarily analysts this is more of an ops thing but people who get involved in special programs or things like that oftentimes realize that in order to make it home in one piece they need some kind of insurance policy to make sure that their government comes and gets them and doesn't just leave you know drop them like third period french right so you know incidents have happened over time and um you know i'm just going to leave it at that so microsd cards uh are very um very very important especially when it comes to information and then sort of along those lines is a more thing that we can talk a little bit more freely about is is a blood now this is something that is more of a governance and government thing only but you can make your own and essentially a bloodshed you can read about it on your own it's fascinating to read the history of these but essentially what it is is a document it's a document that has one statement on it or a series of statements and it is written in most languages on earth most common languages certainly the language is in a specific area so if you're operating in say like southeast asia every language spoken in southeast asia will be on this bloodshed and essentially it's a document that says hey i'm an american i'm in trouble uh if you help me if you help me my government will pay you a certain dollar amount and um yeah hell you know help me get back here take this take you know rip off a corner of the document that's your receipt essentially that you helped me and you can go to the embassy and claim your reward right um these were very popular in world war ii they came out they arose actually out of the very first bloodshed i believe was uh from a balloonist in france from like the 17th century or 18th century or something like that don't quote me on that but this go this concept of a bloodshed goes back hundreds of years quite a long way really to the very first time you know the very first air travel with balloons is how far back they go and they're still used today although nowadays they look more like this this is what bloodsheds look like in today's modern military they're mostly the same piece of paper you know durable tyvek paper um but they are uh put in belts um so they call they're called blood belts nowadays now of course we can't show what one like looks like for real because you know there aren't any pictures of that on the internet and they are heavily serialized um so you you sign these out these are controlled items you sign these out just in the military when you're issued one you sign these out just like you signed up for night vision goggles or weapon uh catalog because it has currency value each corner of that document is worth ten thousand dollars i think is the going rate um so if that gets into the wrong hands you could potentially be paying terrorists up to forty thousand dollars of hard american dollars no questions asked so that's why these are kind of a sort of a not really a taboo item to talk about it's just nobody really knows about them so if you wanted to make your own um you can i would advise doing this actually it'd be quite good quite good to have you know put it on some type of paper print it out on some really durable you know paper right in the ring pipe or something like that and you just keep it around um because that's a really good part of a survival kit you know so it's a sort of bloodshed now obviously you can't really make one that is you know valuable you know uh has value to it like you know tear this corner off and it's worth ten thousand dollars that would be kind of not really doable but you can write on a piece of paper in a bunch of different languages as you know a phrase like please help me get back to the nearest you know american embassy or something like that and that would be good you know that's what we do a lot of times um so yeah bloodsheds are very very useful and then so the next concept is switching gears quite quite radically here um this is the next concept that we wanted to talk about because it has more of a pop culture reference than anything and uh so this is also by the way the part where you know we're going to be talking about some kind of adult topics so if you've got you know kids around listening to this you might want to hit pause for a second or skip past it um not to say you know we're you know going to get particularly vulgar it's just you know this type of stuff is not quite pleasant or for mixed company and this is the idea of the plan d evasion plan of you know evasion or plan simply and this comes from a movie because people remember movies more than they remember us classified documents right this comes from a movie called papillon steve mcqueen movie from you know way back in the day oh really good movie they did a remake of it here recently but the original is of course always always better but there's one particular scene right at the beginning of the movie where steve mcqueen's character is he's got this little capsule in his hand and for those of you who don't know you know without spoiling the content of the movie the movie is about a guy who is sent to um devil's island um and he is basically the worst prison in the world and for a crime he didn't commit of course right and it's it's about documenting his journey to escape and things like that so that's the plot of the movie if you haven't seen it before but suffice it to say very harsh conditions right and the only possessions he has in his possession are in this little capsule and the movie sort of explains it to try to explain to a civilian uh audience what is exactly going on because it's a key part of the movie and um steve mcqueen his character is kind of an expositional moment within the movie he's being observed by a fellow inmate and a hammock on board the the transport ship and he's observed um putting money in this little survival capsule right and he and he remarks you know as he's putting the money into the capsule um he makes our mark of you know oh you know the things we have to do you know for survival you know i'm shoving things up one's uh rear end right so it's a sort of rectal capsule um that he keeps money in and as most people know this is very much a thing in u.s prisons today so um skipping out of the fantasy land because we don't want to ever do anything survival related you know based on a movie right this actually is a real thing in fact this is an example a 3d model of a of the oss the office of strategic services developed this what they quite literally called a rectal tool kit and it is a metal capsule that has all bunch of these little tools and stuff in it for escaping and evading and a little handle for all these tools as well and uh it's quite big if you look at the look at how big the capsule is it's quite significantly quite quite large in fact much larger than i think anyone would would want to put it delicately but it's also press fit together there's no threads in it at all it's press fit together and it's meant to you know go right up inside a person and uh for retrieval later so that you could pass a strip search and so that if you're in captivity you could still have access to some tools now the uh the the british our friends from across the pond are not to be outdone they have their own version as well this is a more more modern version from our friends over at mi6 they created one as well and this is the only photo we could find of one and it is we don't know how big it is um but as you can see the knurled surface there has got to be sort of painful um you know going in and coming out from its hiding place um but yeah so this is a this is a real thing this is not something that that's just you know in movies or whatnot and then we also have to remember the prison example everyone knows about the you know the old um to put it crudely the prison pocket right that everybody uh knows about so this is the modern day version this is a very mysterious product that appeared on schumer tech's website a few years ago and it's um it has a quite obvious usage now as you can see one is quite tapered there's no hard surfaces anywhere on it there's no you know jagged surfaces and it looks like it has one very specific use now the shimmer tech capsule is very very interesting because it sort of unscrews in the middle right there it has an o-ring on it so it's waterproof um so the contents inside don't get soiled and sometimes you'll find these being sold with a packet of lubricating jelly right there so there's really only one one possible usage for this capsule and the capsule itself is interesting because it's made out of magnesium some additive normal metal it's made out of magnesium so that if you had a ceramic razor blade on the inside of that capsule you could shave the capsule itself is a fire starting tool which is interesting um it's a great concept there are a few you know a few cons to it though um but yeah the shimmer tech capsule is quite interesting now one thing that we we must talk about is uh this is the you know like i mentioned the the very crude term the you know prison pocket right um this is something that modern day corrections is very much prepared for people have been shoving things you know up the rear end for quite literally forever as long as prisons have been around so they've gotten quite good at detecting that sort of stuff now this is where you know sort of non-magnetic stuff comes into this is the boss too this is what most county what pretty much every christmas department in the world or at least in the united states in europe they have these and these are designed to detect all kinds of metal inside a person ri

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the Intel update for the 20th of December 2022 and as always it is being recorded on the day prior so let's get right to it uh first up I wanted to address some of the updates that we've had following the Moore County North Carolina critical infrastructure attack uh the attack on the electrical substations down there so so as many of you know this incident uh has had many different challenging aspects to it for one there has been the actual attack itself the circumstances surrounding the attack the details of what exactly was attack and how attacks were carried out and then the other side of things are the responses to it so there are two major groups of concerns there so let's first talk about the actual electrical substation attack itself uh really not much more is known uh it has been kind of an information black hole since our last briefing on this incident the only really thing that we have to update are the responses to the situation right so speaking of the actual attack itself we really don't know much more there haven't been any arrests there have been several warrants issued at least according to the local sheriff down there but those warrants are sealed so we don't know what they pertained to so there have been multiple uh Financial incentives being offered uh totaling as last I checked up to 75 000 which in that part of North Carolina to be you know kind of indelicate is is a pretty pretty big sum so uh the fact that no one has come forward yet even with this uh pretty substantial reward being offered for any information pertaining to the attacks that kind of tells me that there's the authorities are kind of struggling on this one to kind of figure out what happened just my gut feeling is that since this is such a remote part of the country I mean Southern Pines itself is not really that remote I mean it's a city right uh but you know where these attacks occurred it's it's rural North Carolina and there's really not a whole lot of State you know either state or federal government surveillance down in that area I am absolutely certain that you know as with every electrical substation in the world or at least in the United States there's probably surveillance footage of who conducted these attacks however it's probably so inconclusive that no one can really get any information from it cell phone data is almost certainly being surveilled down there as well and I can guarantee you that everyone in Moore County probably has had their cell phone data pulled by the FBI at this point again that's just a hunch but I mean hey look at the kind of surveillance that we're living under nationally you know every day the fact that there still hasn't been an arrest and there still hasn't been anything it's kind of like um the whole situation with a missing person right if someone goes missing and there isn't and they're not recovered within you know 48 Hours the chances of them being recovered are pretty substantially low the same kind of thing applies to attacks like this is that as time goes on if we don't get an immediate arrest uh you're probably going to be very hard-pressed to find someone now even though I'm sure a lot of people don't really want to hear this I must talk about the potential for who could have done this attack and really it could have been anyone uh however I do want to address the main concern that I've seen kind of floating around out there and it's just kind of the the elephant in the room at this point when we see infrastructure attacks and that elephant is people thinking that this could have been the government doing this as a way of either sending a message or trying to knock off critical infrastructure in areas where they know there is going to be significant resistance to their actions these General sentiments are are real right there this is not something that we're just you know seeing you know being made up this is a real sentiment tensions are very high and these sentiments these feelings these atmospherics right the situation on the ground gets made a lot worse by the County's reaction to this electrical substation attack so let me just cut right to the chase with that and explain what I mean so here's what we had we had a critical infrastructure attack two electrical substations were attacked specifically with the intent to cause damage and bring the power offline for whatever reason we don't know the full end goal I suppose but we do know that somebody somewhere wanted the power out in Moore County North Carolina and they knew exactly how to do it following this incident which is bad enough as is the local government went and did a lot of weird stuff and what they did was the the first thing they did as soon as the power goes out curfew there we go right the the attack occurred uh on around seven ish seven to eight ish I think on the third of December by that by the next morning the fourth of December curfew was in effect and it stayed in effect for several days while the crisis was you know kind of working its way through the problem with this is that that's not all that's not all of what they did the local government the local County officials shut down tattoo parlors because literally the county officials stated the reason why they didn't want tattoo parlors open is because it's a good idea it's not a good idea to give people tattoos in the dark like what in the Sam Hill is going on down there the other thing that was also concerning is the local Health Department uh also shut down every single restaurant or establishment that lost power during the crisis they shut down those restaurants and they only let them reopen if they could prove beyond all doubt to the health inspector that they their food was safe that they didn't uh you know like lose Refrigeration or something like that and uh the food spoil while you know sitting in a hot refrigerator so a lot of weird stuff happened this is not typical like power goes out all the flipping time all around this country all around the world and there is very rarely like I can't remember any situation where a health inspector literally says you cannot serve customers until we come in and reinspect and make sure that your food did not spoil during the power outage like that's just utterly ridiculous uh to me so we had a lot of weird stuff happen down there it's almost like as soon as the power went out every single authority figure even at the smallest most unimportant level uh immediately became tyrannical and they wanted to wield their power as much as they possibly could like when was the last time anybody body who regulates tattoo parlors was any had any kind of relevance in the world whatsoever I mean I hate to phrase it like that but that's the truth so yeah a lot of weird stuff happened a lot of what we might consider to be tyrannical stuff uh instantly occurred as far as the local government uh you know was concerned at the lowest possible levels and like I mentioned these thought processes get Amplified because what is the first thing that happened right there have been power outages all over this country and and uh electrical substations attacked all over this country right we had an IED a vehicle-borne IED detonate in downtown Nashville a couple of years ago no information since then but no curfew was announced when there was an actual no kidding IED attack in the United States of America and really nothing happened because of that they cleaned up the debris and everyone went about their day like it never happened right here in North Carolina the power goes out in five minutes later the sheriff's declaring a curfew everyone stay in their homes right that's a huge deal right you have to look get things like that and you know I'm I'm really sorry for the people who can't see the writing on the wall for what this means because sure you want to catch the bad guys you want to catch the guys that did this but at the same time you've also got to think why am I getting why am I getting punished for this when there's why the why the extreme overreach here we've got so many law enforcement like all of these electrical sites had the entire County's law enforcement at them right also infuriating to see are is the local response to it I mean there were so many people um that that thought oh the curfew is perfectly fine the sheriff's doing a wonderful job this is great yeah nobody needs to make tattoos in the dark despite the fact that most tattoo artists actually use headlamps routinely during their job but despite that fact there were a lot of people that thought that the local authorities were doing a good job and that these tyrannical measures were not tyrannical at all they're just you know trying to keep our community safe only other hand you've got a lot of people down there that are smart enough to see the riding on the wall and say hmm yeah curfews not a good thing the damage has already been done you've already got you know your entire police force uh stationed outside of every other electrical substation in the county you know why the curfew here what's the big deal so there are a lot of people I just want for for people who aren't aware of this because this brief goes out to you know a lot of people people who aren't in the area might not understand that people in the area people in Moore County a substantial number of them cannot see the writing on the wall as to why this was a bad thing right they look at the power going out and they think that's the biggest issue that's not the biggest issue the biggest issue is your local authorities trying to tyrannize you during a crisis so now you're not just fighting the crisis but you're up against you know authorities who you know have guns and that's not a huge it's not a good uh thing so a lot of people don't realize that they're really up against three major groups of adversaries when it comes to things like this now you know it used to be man when I was growing up when the power went out you know the local authorities were were you know helpful they they do what they can they may not be the best well-equipped but nowadays man what is what has been the response the response is the authorities you know pointing guns at the citizens who didn't do anything wrong you know that's kind of the the attitude that that comes out of this that a lot of people especially in you know places where these kinds of things happen don't realize they don't realize the adversarial nature of the relationship and because they don't understand the adversarial nature of the relationship they're going to get you know kind of you know bad things happen to them and they're they're going to realize it far far too late so the next time this thing happens right because let's face it as we get further into this brief you're going to realize that electrical infrastructure attacks are on the rise like you would not believe now every time there's a substation attack throughout the country you have to be prepared no matter where you're at in the country you have to be prepared for your local police officers to keep you in your home that's the precedent that's been set you have to be prepared for a curfew at any given time and so few of us remembered that over the past couple of years of curfews if you know what I mean but also your next door neighbors could quite literally be your adversary because you dared to oppose the creation of a curfew so I think I've talked this one to death we'll move on now to uh the actual Regional updates uh but I really just wanted to make sure that we kind of ironed things out and talked to this one out a little bit more with regards to what this attack means this is a very severe incident that requires a significant amount of reading between the lines to understand the impacts of so let's move on to the Northeast region so far I haven't found anything for the Northeast there have been a lot of things that have occurred right I don't want to again I want to remind everyone that just because it's not on the slide doesn't mean that it hasn't happened it's just I haven't gotten to it yet and I haven't run it to ground with a bunch of different sources right these things take time so uh I haven't really focused on the northeast just yet so we'll go ahead and move on to the Southeast region so moving to the Southeast region we can kind of see why I think this is worth talking about a little bit more because even in North Carolina the latest attack back on the third slash 4th of December in Southern Pines that attack was not the only one uh there have been several others uh there was one uh back on the 11th of November in Maysville North Carolina this one really didn't get any news because it didn't really affect any customers the power was able to be rerouted successfully and even though the substation was offline for gosh a considerable amount of time I think a couple of days at least while the repairs are being conducted the customers didn't really feel the impact of it so again this is rural North Carolina and there's just not a whole lot of information in some some of these places right I think the interesting thing so far is that North Carolina is a very uh heavily militarily Centric State and I find it very interesting that two electrical grid attacks have occurred immediately outside or in the general vicinity of we have the Duke Energy attack in Southern Pines North Carolina taking place just outside of Fort Bragg or really rather Camp McCall the special side of uh things and we also have this attack in Maysville which is is sort of in the general vicinity of Camp Lejeune and also Cherry Points not too far away technically I guess so there's also a few Coast Guard bases down there but I'm not sure if you'd Factor those into the to the thing but I do think it's very interesting that these attacks are occurring outside of or in close proximity to military bases I don't know that's just kind of my gut observation here I don't know if there's any kind of you know link there investigatively you'd think that investigators have to be thinking about that but I guess we'll see as time goes on moving down to Florida a very interesting series of attacks occurred in the sort of Tampa Bay area and I say area because six at least six as of now electrical substations have been taken offline or affected in some way by vandals and or people seeking to attack the facility now again I have to be super vague about this because not a lot of the details are public and we just don't know the details of what these attacks looked like we do know that Duke Energy has disclosed that there were multiple quote unquote intrusions to their facilities throughout the area now it being Tampa Bay you know the Tampa area being Florida we have to kind of remind ourselves that a lot of electrical sites are tampered with broken into um affected in some way by copper theft right with the economic situation in the country being super you know not great at the moment we had we were realizing that things like catalytic converter theft copper theft purchase metal theft is at an all-time high you know it's not helped by the markets I guess either way but we have to think about that um I think that's a possibility so I wanted to mention it right up front but I also think that it's probably not very likely you don't have six different electrical substations attacked or vandalized you know within a very short time frame I don't really know what to think about this it's just one of those things I wanted to bring up in the context of our you know National infrastructure electrical infrastructure being under attack like in unprecedented numbers so I I thought that since it occurred after the North Carolina attacks uh and those North Carolina attacks were so high profile I thought maybe it was copycats and that that could also be a theory as well but really we don't know hardly any details about these attacks in Florida so I guess we're just gonna have to wait and see moving to the East Central midwestern region uh kind of an interesting one this is uh this got kind of viral news because it was yet another food production facility that caught fire slash exploded uh this was at the Star of the West Milling Company in Kinto Ohio just outside of Cleveland uh this one is a little complicated uh to to kind of talk about because I'm not entirely sure if the facility actually is functional because when you when you try to Deep dive on these things you can read the headline you know Star of the West Milling Company catches fire right but when you actually start looking into this facility you start finding news articles from you know months and years ago stating how operations have ceased at this facility so I don't know if this facility was actually active at the time we do know that it was vacant and there were no workers at the time of the fire sound familiar to literally all the other briefs that we've you know talked about these facilities are always vacant at the time of the fire interestingly enough but also it was labeled as a historic site because it's a very old historic building you know in Kent Ohio so I'm not entirely certain if this facility actually produces food I saw several news agencies claiming that you know several hundred thousand pounds of flour you know this is what this produced but I I don't know if that's what it currently produces whether or not the building was actually occupied and producing food at the time of the incident is really important and it matters a lot because if the building was you know vacant and it had it wasn't producing any food and there was just kind of an abandoned building well if you know a building that catches fire that's abandoned we can just kind of chalk that up to a normal arson kind of event however if it was a functioning facility we really start after thinking in terms of all right this might be a more deliberate attack on critical infrastructure so again we'll keep an eye on this I'm sure someone out there who goes by the facility and knows maybe it's both maybe it is a historical site and maybe it did do some kind of limited production of flour or or grain processing of some kind uh but yeah I just wanted to kind of talk about this one because even the local media doesn't seem to know what this facility was actually doing at the time of the fire other than you know being vacant with no workers at it so kind of interesting and we'll again have to wait and see what the details are on this one moving over to the West Central midwestern region two incidents of no um two of which are quite interesting so let's start with Kansas back on the 7th of December uh TC energy which is a company that maintains uh the flow of of product through the Keystone Pipeline the original Keystone Pipeline I detected a leak of roughly 14 000 barrels which spilled interestingly enough into a local Creek in extremely remote Washington County Kansas the pipeline was offline for a significant amount of time about a week or so as far as I can tell while repairs were being made but right now really no one has disclosed the company hasn't disclosed nor have government agencies disclosed what the cause of this leak was was this a deliberate attack or was this some kind of you know maintenance error again when we're looking at critical infrastructure attacks I know I've said it multiple times but let me reiterate that it doesn't necessarily have to be nefarious a lot of times these critical infrastructure incidents are purely maintenance right and we'll get to that here uh when we're when we talk about Iowa in just a second but we don't necessarily have to look at things from a from a purely nefarious Viewpoint right these could be legitimate incidents that are really just maintenance issues now that doesn't mean that they're that they're all you know hunky-dory and everything's fine no we have seen over the past couple of years a sharp increase in maintenance issues because of supply chain issues causing parts to wear out more quickly and they're not being replaced things are being used past their life cycle and we've got a whole just a mess of a you know chain of causation of really bad incidents right so the potential for really bad stuff to happen is very very high right now and it's not just because we're all thinking that there are you know deliberate attacks on our critical infrastructure which there most certainly are but a lot of these are are just purely mistakes now I wanted to say that uh with regards to this one because when we swing over to Iowa we can talk about the C60 Factory slash recycling facility uh incident now this was a very high profile sort of I guess we should call it an incident rather than an accident uh which was a large explosion at that facility now this facility is a recycling facility they primarily focus on recycling shingles back into oil or petroleum products of some kind now this incident I'm sure will make every Osho uh official just absolutely cringe because it's almost like they went down the list of everything you should not do at a facility and they did all of those things for instance at this facility at the time of the fire slash explosion the sprinklers were not functional at all throughout you know the whole facility also the facility had a long history of fires in fact there had been several Fires at this facility involving diesel fuel uh the day in the days prior to this uh explosion and local and the actual employees of the facility were putting out these diesel fires with uh hand fire extinguishers so you know that tells you something right there also employees had not actually been paid there were few employees who noted that they had not been paid for oh they had a backlog of about a month's worth of pay they were missing from this facility again another huge red flag uh and there were other complaints too stuff like employees complaining that the facility management refused to provide them with literally the absolute Baseline of Osha mandated stuff like hard hats and reflective vests so you start to get kind of a bigger picture here um of a more negligence kind of incident right as if things were not bad enough the facility is now a Hazmat Zone because the chemicals that they use or something at this facility is now leaking into both a local River sort of tributary thing and also into the ground so that's not good for the local environment so the reason that I wanted to bring this one up is because again we have to keep in mind that right now is really really risky for a lot of Industry right if we're not trying to take out Bad actors or monitor deliberate attacks on our infrastructure we're doing it to ourselves right so just gross negligence is a huge problem right now and we have to keep in mind just like what I said uh you know a couple of briefs ago I think we really really really have to be vigilant so if you are a factory worker or if you work at an industrial site please please please be careful because here's the bottom line we all know how vulnerable our system is right now our entire Global infrastructure is just cripplingly dependent on everything going right at all times it is so so easy to completely disrupt and destroy a lot of our critical infrastructure and no one has really paid attention to any of this stuff until stuff starts happening unfortunately so we have to make be vigilant and understand that government agencies don't even really care until after the fact right and a lot of times they don't even really care even if an incident does occur so it's really down to you the average everyday worker to make sure or at least be aware if something's going on now I I understand a lot of people work in places where you know OSHA violations are a huge thing and there's really not anything they can do about it because you know do your job or you're fired kind of thing I get that but you don't want to be that guy who works at a facility and it gets you know impacted in some way under mysterious circumstances and you knew you could have done something right you knew that the thing that got attacked was the thing that you knew was vulnerable the whole time you don't want to have that happen and uh I think that these two incidents here both the pipeline incident and the the recycling facility incident really highlight and drive home these really really important issues that there's really no one here coming to save us right we know this but we also need to start thinking about that in terms of Industry as well so let's move on to the Southwest now this is a rather empty slide because I am still trying to figure out how to talk about this issue and this is the Border crisis down on the southern border between the United States and Mexico mostly the border between between Texas and Mexico because Texas is really one of the the only States down there that's actually burying kind of the brunt of uh the the immigration crisis down there I'm not really sure like I mentioned how to start talking about this because I could do a whole two-hour brief on just this issue alone but for those of you who are not aware of what's going on down at the border the situation is pretty bad I understand that immigration is more of a political issue than it is an everyday daily life issue for most of America like I get it so I really think what's needed for Americans to understand what this issue is is a a rephrasing and a more eloquent description of what's going on down there at the border and why it matters for someone living in a state not even close to the border right people who hear immigration they they don't they think of it in terms of a national gross you know large political issue right something that gets talked about during political debates and not really something that affects them on a day-to-day basis and I really really want to stress that the immigration issue is not just a political issue this is a huge huge problem and it is affecting the daily lives of millions of people right we're not just talking about from a welfare standpoint or a taxes standpoint or a job standpoint the crime that is coming along with this and other socioeconomic factors are a very very big problem and I'm not doing a super great job at expressing why it's a it's a big problem so rest assured I'm going to get a little bit more deliberate when I talk about this later on so again I just really wanted to draw attention to the southern border and remind everyone that I am not ignoring this deliberately I just don't know how to summarize and break down this very very large issue uh I can say generally that we have seen a huge influx of people and you you know you see these numbers on TV right you see the numbers either on social media or on some you know website or something and you just you just can't put into your mind how many people that actually is uh you you think you just see a number and you can't understand that you know ten thousand people coming across a border in a day that's a that's so much more than you could possibly imagine right these are a lot of people and they're going to go somewhere uh one of the facilities that they're going is actually the Fort Bliss Don Yana facility uh I think that's just over the Border in New Mexico actually uh but it's still I think technically Fort Bliss I'm sure somebody knows out there when I went through Fort Bliss a couple of years ago the doniana facility was still just kind of like a vacant facility nobody was really at it um but since the Afghan crisis occurred they actually stood that facility up and that's where all of the Afghan refugees or most of the Afghan refugees have been since that incident uh before they you know quietly were shelf to other parts of the country right so I know people forget about you know hey the Afghanistan crisis was a huge thing but there's a reason that we covered that incident with such you know such detail it's not just because of you know my own personal connection to Afghanistan but because these facilities were stood up and now shocker look these facilities are now being used to house illegal immigrants coming across the border so the village as it's colloquially called is now being used to house immigrants that have come over in these recent waves of new and new people coming over so uh as far as how they're going to stay there or how this is going to work nobody really knows again we try to think of this a lot of people at least try to think of this in terms of a large political issue but since it's a political issue there are differing opinions on what should be done with you know these tens of thousands of people coming across the border uh if not you know millions of people over the past few years and because of that nobody is really getting down to the nitty gritty details of how the everyday management of this crisis is happening for instance we've kind of briefly mentioned this a while back when we were covering you know the actual the the Inception of operation Lone Star uh but the the operation uh including I think six different units or six different commands uh command structures to Halt the uh immigrant waves coming across the border from from Texas's side of things uh that's really been a mission that is highly highly controversial a lot of people particularly troops on the ground have expressed that this is a garbage mission that they're being mistreated very strongly by the state they're either when this mission was first stood up they weren't getting paid they're being taken away from their families and activated you know for a mission that is you know what they feel is kind of pointless with regards to how they're employed in the mission so there's a lot of discontent there conditions for troops are have gotten better uh but they're still I mean it's it's the southern border it's really hard to describe there's nothing there a lot of these places are just not super great places to be I mean you know no offense to anybody living in El Paso but you know I've been to El Paso several times and it's not exactly a fantastic fantastic place so so yeah you've got it's just a whole nothing about this is good right you've got you know your liberal National leadership that is kind of turning a blind eye to this and pushing the buck off to everybody else but you also have your conservative State leadership perfectly fine with mistreating troops for political gain which at least it's not my words these words from the guys down there and a lot of these a lot of these cases so you see how this is a no-win situation for anyone and a lot of people are down there trying to make the best of this situation and try to do some good but unfortunately it doesn't really look like there's a whole lot of good to be had with this whole mission so so again I know I'm kind of rambly today but I really wanted to to talk about the southwest region particularly the Border crisis and I want to talk about it in much more detail as we go along this is kind of like the heads-up notice of hey even if you're not affected by the border crisis you you really you really are uh so even if you don't live near the areas where the Border crisis is occurring uh trust me it's it's rapidly becoming your problem problem as a lot of these people are filtering to other parts of the country so start getting spun up on this area start reading and start understanding what's going on why is this such an issue and why do why is it worth talking about so much and you'll start understanding the socioeconomic factors and the the cultural factors that make this a very significant problem that affects the country as a whole right so again we'll talk about this more in depth and I'll be a little bit more eloquent next time but for now I just wanted to remind everyone hey border crisis is getting worse and um you might want to start paying attention to it and finally moving out west we can wrap things up for the United States again with more electrical grid attacks so many of you know that I personally lived in the Pacific Northwest for a few years there uh some some years ago so I tend to you know this is my own personal bias I'm trying to kind of overcome but it's really hard to to describe the Pacific Northwest to someone who has not lived there it is real it might as well be a different country um you know I was born and raised on the East Coast to you know down in the southeastern United States and I moved out there and talk about culture shock I got less of a culture shock going to the Middle East than I did going to the Pacific Northwest um so I say all of that to say look electrical grid attacks in these areas are pretty standard uh particularly in Portland OR Seattle every single day there is somebody doing something to some critical infrastructure in those cities either it's deliberate or or an accident or something these cities might as well be Gotham City at this point because these places are just absolutely horrible places uh so when you know I hear of an electrical substation attack in Portland OR Seattle I basically ignore it I don't even include it in the briefs you know I probably should but it's like okay what else is new this is a very common thing so why am I talking about it now well because there are uncommon electrical grid attacks being undertaken in the Pacific Northwest so there have been six different attacks over the past two to three weeks in Oregon on the Oregon side of the border and I think there were a couple in Washington as well I need to double check that but these attacks have not been inside the city limits of Portland or Seattle or or even Olympia or Vancouver or anything uh these attacks have been at really seriously remote places like in the middle of nowhere like drive four hours and you get to these sites and interestingly enough these attacks bear a striking resemblance to the attacks that occurred in both Florida and in North Carolina recently in which case there were there was limited breaching occurring uh you know Gates were forced to open or like chain link fences were cut or or something to that effect again we don't really know exactly how the attacks occurred because the authority is not going to release that data but the attack style was very very similar to what we've already seen somebody breaching a perimeter you know a fence around a substation and conducting Small Arms attacks on specific equipment now this is a pretty pretty big deal because a lot of these places again like I mentioned are remote and that may not sound like much but that's really the whole kind of thing if I'm not mistaken one of these attacks actually occurred at the Bonneville Dam complex I don't know if it was uh the substation that serves the dam or whatnot but uh the Bonneville complex is a huge huge hydroelectric uh Dam facility that provides a lot of electricity to the state of Oregon and really the West Coast in general so anytime anybody comes close to one of these big facilities we gotta stop and look at this right and there have been six of these different attacks throughout the region really really close together so these I don't I mean again with with things being the way they are these could be copycats these could be deliberate attacks I literally don't know and no one else knows either we can only assess right and like I've mentioned a few times before you know it sounds kind of callous to say and you know you know kind of nonsensical to mention but the the honest truth here is that a lot of people are not really going to Care uh who conducts the attacks whether it's antifa or the FBI or the CIA or some you know bubble with a rifle or something nobody really cares at the end of the day they just flick the light switch on the wall no power now they're gonna you know be affected in some way because of that right of course we here try to be at least a little bit more analytical than that uh when it comes to these kinds of attacks which is why you know we're talking about it but the sad truth is is that we really just are not going to get the information all we're going to have is some news report from some local news media station that barely gets National coverage saying oh this electrical substation was offline for a couple of days due to an unknown incident or or my personal favorite weather concerns because weather is like the number one thing that takes out electricity across the country and uh just my just my hunch is that a lot of the a lot of the weather that we're seeing isn't really weather but again that's just me theorizing uh with no evidence whatsoever to back it up but you have to start thinking about these things uh in terms of being a little bit more deliberate especially if you start thinking about well you know who do electrical outages you know impact they impact the general population because everyone that has Authority in this country is going to have a generator from your local Police Department to the hospitals to you know the White House they're all going to have generators so you're not really harming anybody by taking power offline but yourself so you really have to wonder who's behind these attacks um even though each individual attack is its own case study so so now that I'm completely all over the place today let's go ahead and close things up with the United States and move to Europe and really today I want to talk mostly about Western Europe so uh sorry Eastern Europe we're going to talk about you another time because Eastern Europe is getting kind of spicy right now uh down uh down in the Balkans um but I need to get a little bit more data on that before I start talking about that potential conflict so let's start with the United Kingdom our friends across the pond there you guys have had quite a bit of problems with uh two main concerns which again are not new we've been talking about these for weeks and months and years now uh but the two biggest concerns have been food and energy prices mostly uh the price of these two things are becoming a huge problem for citizens though The credibility of most statistics on the planet is very questionable right now uh many British mainstream media sources have cited recent studies claiming that one-third of single parents are skipping meals uh regularly perhaps most disturbingly there is limited unconfirmed reporting out of Wales that people are being reduced to consuming pet food in Cardiff again we all know how the media loves a sensational story so there's no telling how true these reports are but many citizens throughout Europe are posting about their own food insecurities on social media so that does lend some credibility to these reports you know I hate to drop kind of a bomb like that and then just kind of walk away and say well maybe not maybe maybe it doesn't matter but that's how it is you know with mainstream media these days you see something really shocking and then you kind of have to balance it out with a lot of reason and unfortunately with regards to the food energy crisis throughout Europe we're not going to find a whole lot of Reason these days to balance out the bad news unfortunately so so food and energy have been a huge problem for residents of Great Britain and a lot of Western Europe as well jumping to Mainland Europe there in the Netherlands the world economic Forum continues to wreak havoc on the Dutch food supply with Farmers being forced to only use a fraction of the fertilizer that they need in order for the wef controlled government to meet their climate goals look I'm just going to be honest with you today the the Straight Dope is that throughout Europe there is a concerted effort to reduce the global food supply and the Dutch government is among the top offenders in the humanitarian crisis that is currently underway the Dutch government has cut livestock production by 30 percent across the board and has shut more than 3 000 Farms down and confiscated the land because those Farms are quote Peak polluters right look we we all know what's going on and we all know what we need to do get really good at farming and living without electricity while at the same time your government is hunting you I I can't really mince words on that one because it's the truth at this point we have been given the advantage of Prior notice and it doesn't take a genius to predict how severe these things will likely become and I understand that European viewers like watching an American cover European news it much it must be a bloodbath to be honest but at the end of the day I think that maybe an outsider's perspective is probably a little bit more helpful than you might think because we're dealing with a lot of the same issues here and let's be honest a lot of the problems in Europe are being created by or heavily influenced by or encouraged by you know very powerful Americans so so when I say that the culture in Europe is much different than the culture in America like trust me I understand that that's the understatement of the century and I also understand that the culture of literally every single European nation is extremely different from every other European nation I understand that I know but when I say really strong things like you know what I just said about the Dutch government it's it's not meant to be you know unnecessarily Americanized you know dramatic right these are some serious issues here and we've got to stop mincing words at some point so when we're talking about these issues in Europe people understand that they're serious and we see the same thing happening here in the United States so I just wanted to put that out there for uh the average person out there who might be thinking you know well this is just an American's opinion on things well yeah it is but I also think that you know hey it's pretty clear as to what's going on the good news with all of this is that we've got a lot of time to get creative with Solutions especially throughout Europe where electricity has become temporary and food has become a luxury the same kind of seriousness for lack of a better term applies to the energy sector as well while most nations are grappling with both shortages of and high costs of food the other main issue for Europeans uh is energy both the extreme High Cost of energy and the lack of availability in many areas this is already a huge problem for a good chunk of Europe right can handles for instance are sold out throughout most of Germany Finland has told citizens to not plug in their electric cars on cold mornings and uh Britain's National Grid operator has indicated that blackouts will be a major possibility and once again average citizens are left holding the bag with all of this uh German political leadership has fortunately scrapped the plans to shut down Germany's last three nuclear power plants and several coal-powered plants have been brought online out of mothballs to meet Germany's power needs will this be enough to prevent blackouts I highly doubt it I mean I'm no energy expert but it doesn't take a genius to see that Germany's actions much like the actions of most other European nations are far too little far too late however we shall see what the creativity of the citizenry will bring about now is the time for Europeans to start taking interest in their own Survival and reduce the Stranglehold their governments have over them even if their governments do not desire that outcome seeing as how Germany has been an example of companies involuntarily turning down thermostats for climate reasons now would be a pretty good time for everyone to perhaps remove their smart thermostats electric wheel companies not letting you charge your electric car well maybe now it's time to rethink that purchase or at least take measures to fully own your technology and be able to charge your vehicle off of solar panels or other means that governments cannot control these things may seem simple in retrospect but right now this is what average citizens are being faced with around the world including here in the United States so we shall continue the tradition by ending on that foreboating note and we'll have to talk about some more stuff next time I know that there there has been so much news and so many incidents that have occurred over the past well since the last briefing that there's just way too many for me to talk about and I've just kind of got to take a step back and and reassess what's going on here so for those of you who think oh there's nothing going on now trust me there's there's stuff going on uh it's just it's just overwhelming uh to cover all of this stuff so try trying to kind of pick the stuff that I've already kind of thought about quite a bit and um and we'll go from there as a side note uh I'm really trying to avoid these briefings becoming a sort of I told you so because we've been talking about a lot of this stuff for a very very long time and it's from I know it's it's it's probably annoying for you but it's definitely annoying for me when I basically talk about the same thing over and over and over again because the same exact things are happening over and over and over again you know there's there's nothing I can do about that but I'm trying to find ways of making these briefings a lot more efficient and a lot more useful rather than you know me just reading you the news but as you all know these briefings have been kind of a Meandering experience over the past few years so I guess we'll keep Meandering a little bit further thank you again to everyone out there for watching us and supporting us over the years and more than that thank you for supporting yourselves as we all know you know chances are if you ended up watching this video then you know you know how things are going we don't really need to to preach or tell you what's going on in the world you can plainly see it for yourself and I really do appreciate the amount of innovation the amount of dedication uh and the amount of hard work that we have seen people you know undertaking uh in these tough times and you know to prepare for the Times uh that are about to get tougher you know right now we're just at the beginning of this Global goat Rodeo so here's your motivation to keep getting better keep getting fitter and keep learning and take all of the hardship that you've experienced so far and put it to good use turn your disadvantages into advantages even if for right now we have to fight in the shade

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for April 6th through the 12th, 2025. It's been a very busy week, like I say all the time nowadays, but in this case, I'm afraid that this week has been a swing and a mess on my part, at least from a research perspective, which we'll get to in a moment. Sometimes Intel work is like that. A lot of times you have to do an awful lot of work to come up with a giant pile of nothing or just get stuck at some step along the way. So, I'm afraid I've been a little bit preoccupied with uh some research that hasn't really panned out. So, I haven't had much time to dig much uh into what has happened around the world this week, but let's go ahead and talk about the global strategic concerns right up front. And in the United States this week, the trade war has continued. So, lots of ups and downs, not a whole lot to sink our teeth into. We're just going to have to wait and see. When things are chaotic, it's probably a good idea to let things pan out and see how it works. As far as the tariffs go, it looks like most of the tariffs uh on on the rest of the planet from the United States have either been paused for 90 days or they have been reduced to 10% uh for 90 days while negotiations are ongoing. At the moment, the big tariff conflict appears to be between the United States and China, both of which are digging in. So, as things stand right now, the United States has a 145% tariff on Chinese imports and China has a 125% tariff on American imports. This has obviously amounted to what is essentially a trade embargo between the two nations. Uh, this is very obviously not something that is economically sustainable in the long run. So, I would expect by this week to have some more information on Chinese American trade negotiations. More specifically around the United States, aviation concerns have continued to grow over the past month or so. Since the election, there have been a lot of shakeups at the FAA and various uh airports around the country regarding personnel and things like that. But the past few weeks have been rather kinetic. For instance, there was a fist fight between air traffic controllers earlier this month in the tower during flight operations in Washington DC. Uh this is coupled with a couple of days ago a couple of aircraft clipped wings in Washington DC. There have also been a few highle retirements. For instance, uh the chief of all air traffic control doctrine and management retired announced his retirement earlier this week. So, it's a fairly kinetic time. Of course, the media is going to focus on things like the the plane crashes and problems with general aviation that are more typical and not really out of the norm. But when it comes to other things like fist fights at airports becoming a huge problem now, even apparently amongst staff it seems, and other things that are adjacent to the aviation community, these concerns are beginning to mount and uh there's been increased scrutiny on the way that air traffic control is handled throughout the country. Moving over to Eastern Europe, the situation with regards to the Ukrainian war continues really without much change. However, this week the United States and Russia have begun more direct negotiations with regards to how this conflict is going to shake out. This is not really new. The United States and Russia have been working on this for a few weeks now. However, the talks are beginning to become a little bit more high level and a little bit more publicly high level. So, this is probably a positive tone for the the how the Ukrainian war is hopefully going to come to an end, but no real public progress has been made. Sometimes that's uh that's the way that it is. And uh sometimes in the world of diplomacy, no news is good news. So uh nothing bad has happened so far between the United States and Russia. So that's that's probably a positive thing for now. Moving down to the Middle East, the strategic buildup continues as before. I know we're tired of hearing about it, but it still continues and it's still continuing to get more and more substantial. The grand questions are starting to be asked on the on the national stage of is this buildup for Yemen or is this build up for Iran or is this build up for somewhere else? Uh who knows? It's really hard to say at this moment, but the the buildup does continue. The United States, more specifically, has continued bombing nearly daily in Yemen, and we'll talk about which assets are conducting that bombing here in a moment. But over in Diego Garcia, where we're going to be spending most of our time today again, there have been a lot of indications and warnings of uh increased logistical efforts. So, we'll talk about that in just a moment. Though, moving to the strategic movement tracker, our fleet tracker for this week, things have remained very much the same as before. The Nimus has arrived in the Pacific theater and is cutting some circles out there in the North Pacific Ocean at the moment. The USS Euima has been in and out of Port Norfolk for a few days now. I think she's conducting some sort of exercise, probably some follow-on training regarding the exercise a couple of weeks ago. No real indications and warnings of a major deployment, but both the Euima and the Wasp have been seen moving in and out of Norfolk a little bit more often than is normal. So, we'll see how that works out. But either way, they are not a factor. Neither of these flat tops are a factor for what's going on in the Middle East. That is squarely on the Truman and the Carl Vincent. The Truman is in the Red Sea and the Carl Vincson was observed off the coast of Oman a few hours ago. We don't have an exact location for either of these carrier strike groups obviously because you know operational security. However, aircraft uh who have been conducting logistics flights to these carrier strike groups have been observed on ADSB. So, we can kind of get a general gist of where they're located. And the Carl Vincson was definitely off the coast of Oman at least a few hours ago. Both of these carriers, their mission is somewhat ambiguous, but it's very very likely that both of these carriers are conducting strikes in Yemen. We've seen a very sharp increase and at least the Houthi is reporting things blowing up. So the SNCOM has announced various bombing campaigns. The White House has been talking about it quite a lot. It's hard to pin the tail on the donkey as to which carrier is doing which bombings, but that's the kind of situation as it stands for now. Moving down to Diego Garcia. I don't want to hyperfixate on this location too much in the grand scheme, the big picture of things, but I do have a lot of satellite images to cover. I've already bought them, so I might as well talk about them. Uh, this image is from the sixth is probably the best image I have this week of the South Parking Apron. As we can see, six B2s are still there. Six tankers are still there. Hangers still may or may not have bombers in them. Probably empty, but you never know. One of the more interesting images this week came from April 8th. Again, this is a commercial imagery, so please forgive the Looney Tunesque distortions on this image. I can't really help it that much, but this image shows that three of the B2s were missing. So, three B2s and three KC135 Stratakers were missing. Now, again, most people might say, "All right, fine. They're aircraft. They were off bombing something in Yemen or doing something." However, a little analytical rule of thumb is that when you're looking at satellite imagery from an intelligence perspective and you're trying to figure out what's going on, sometimes the time of day that the image was taken is more valuable than what's in the image. In this case, we have three missing bombers and three missing tankers. Now, you may say one of two things happened. Either one, those bombers are secretly in those hangers uh hiding and they're doing some kind of something on the bombers that they don't want satellites to see. Very good theory. But a more likely theory is that the three bombers took off and they took each a tanker with them wherever they went. Now again, time of day matters. This image was taken at 0443 Zulu time, which works out to be around about4 to 11 local time. So middle of the day, more or less, around lunchtime. So this image was taken during the daytime. So what? Well, for one, one of the main theories as to why these B2s are here is because of the story, the narrative that's being pushed either by a lot of so-called oent pages on Twitter or by the White House or the Pentagon themselves or everyone is basically saying these B2s are for Yemen and they're conducting bombings in Yemen. And that may be true. That may be true. However, the Houthis have not reported a single daytime bombing at all. uh certainly not with large bombs that are going to be delivered by a B2. Now, there have been hellfire strikes here and there from drones. Uh there have been a few sporadic bombings during the daytime. We have footage of this, so we know these this has occurred, but the Houthis have mostly reported these very large scale bombings. The the large targeting, the large deliberate targeting, not the dynamic stuff, the deliberate stuff, which is what B2s are going to be doing. That kind of targeting has taken place during the nighttime, which makes sense. So, if the B2s are missing during the day and they're not bombing in Yemen, where are they? Where did they go? That I cannot speculate on. I do not know. You can make the argument that it's it was a training flight. These that three B2s took off uh with their tankers and they flew somewhere for training. I don't know why you're going to break multiple world records to land at this place and and conduct a forward deployment like you've never done before just to do some localized training. That's not something that B2s normally do. I don't know. I'm sure there's plenty of theories out there, but I thought it was interesting that it does not make any sense for these bombers to be gone during the daytime if they're conducting bombings in Yemen when no bombings have been reported in Yemen. So, that was kind of an interesting tidbit from the April 8th. Also kind of interesting as we can see there are two C5 galaxies sitting on the runway. And just to show my homework a little bit, you can 1,00% say that these are in fact C5s and not C17s as many people have claimed. These are C5s because I can load this satellite imagery into ArcGIS and do what's called point mineration. Basically, I can measure things with a very very good accuracy. the end. If I were to use my measuring tool here to measure the wingspan of whatever aircraft is on the runway, I can compare that to what the US Air Force says is the wingspan of a C5 Galaxy. And in this case, I'm off by a couple of meters. So, with a resolution, uh, image resolution of 1 meter, I'm off by two pixels. So, sorry about that. But either way, uh, pretty close. So, we can say with a pretty good certainty that these are two C5s sitting here delivering cargo to Diego Garcia. So, pretty interesting stuff. Other images I already got this week are from April 9th. Again, the analyst nightmare of clouds over the target. This has been the bane of existence for most military analysts who look at imagery since uh World War II, and it's still the same today. I can't afford a synthetic aperture radar image to punch through these clouds. And and a lot of the satellite images uh that we can buy images from commercially, they don't have infrared either, so it doesn't help us out too much. But we can still see a handful of B2s peeking through the clouds. And the next day, we also have a free satellite shot. Sentinel 2 imagery from April 10th confirms that all six bombers are back at base along with their respective strat tankers. And we do have one C5 parked on the runway as well. And one of the interesting notes from this image is that one of the B2s appears to be maneuvering. So either she's just taxiing around, testing something, maintenance checks, whatever, or she's returning or departing. Either way, kind of an interesting image, even if it is a low quality rendering. Now, one of the things that we have to be mindful of when it comes to looking at runways and blurry images of aircraft is hyperfixation. A lot of people are looking at this island, and a lot of people are looking at this parking apron here. And the US government knows, the Pentagon, and whoever federal agencies are watching this video right now certainly know that people like me are watching this to get a feel for basically if we're going to go to war or not. And because the national intelligence agencies are watching this, they may be inclined and the forces at this island may be inclined to pull a little bit of a sneaky. So, while we're looking down here at the South Apron, it's easy to forget that this isn't the only parking area on this airfield. There is a North Apron. So, I did get a shot of the North Apron just to confirm. I already had a hunch, but I did get an image to confirm that no, there is nothing going on at the north parking apron. is uh an unused portion of the base normally, but I would have expected maybe a C5 or C17 to park here if the south south apron gets a little bit full. Uh so if we start to see more strategic assets start to stage here, we'll have to keep on an eye on the North Apron, too. But for now, the situation here is Nister or nothing significant to report. A giant fat nothing. And even though nothing is occurring at this part of the air base, this is a good reminder to avoid slipping into the analytical trap of failing to zoom out. And to zoom out this week, I did. If we were to go back to our Sentinel imagery and zoom out quite a bit, there have not just been aviation concerns this week, but also maritime concerns. So, even though you guys have not seen this work, I have been tracking the ships as they have been coming and going from Diego Garcia simply because I'm interested to see if this location is starting to be used more as a jumping off point for very uh long-term military operations. And unfortunately, my research has been rather inconclusive this week. I did find two unidentified vessels that seem to be rather new to me over the past few weeks or so. And I will share with you some of my homework in trying to identify these vessels. So, one of the reasons we may want to be mindful of this is again taking a more holistic approach. Just tracking B2s, as cool as it is, and looking at these very, very expensive aircraft on satellite imagery is is interesting. If we're trying to get a much more bigger picture of things, you're not going to be able to fly in enough bombs on a C5 or C17 to sustain a long-term bombing campaign, right? You're going to need ships. And in this case, these two ships caught my eye. Now, before we jump into what these two vessels are and their true identities, I had to jump back in here after I have recorded this brief. I have edited it. I have even uploaded it. It's all good to go. And in classic fashion, the very minute that I finished the upload for this briefing today here on Sunday, April 12th, I have identified this vessel. So, in short, all of what I'm about to talk about, highlighting my thought processes and all the images and all of the analysis work on my end, all of this is kind of irrelevant now. So, if you want to skip past it, please feel free to do so. But I wanted to leave it in to show you some of the things that I think about and the things I was working toward. And if you want to, you can actually see some of the analytical mistakes that I made going through this. some key assumptions right up front that actually are very very inaccurate. Now, I did start off with this sort of okay, but it really did kind of bug me that some of the data points that I identified never really sat quite right. Anyway, I'll start to go through my process now and kind of jump back and show you what I was thinking and then I'll cut back in at the end and tell you exactly what this vessel is because it's not a supply vessel. Well, technically it is, but not really. Anyway, we'll we'll get to that in a moment. But for now, here's what I started with. Now, the first one, uh, which we'll call composite tanker number one. This was very obviously a a tanker of some kind. Completely normal, not nothing out of the ordinary. It doesn't seem to have visited this location very often, at least based on my um limited research, but it's still going to be delivering fuel probably for the aircraft at this base. Maybe oil, too. Who knows? Probably a variety of petroleum products, to be honest. Either way, we've got a pretty good jumping off point for what vessel that is. The other vessel is a rather unique one. Uh this is very obviously a supply vessel, an auxiliary. And to me personally, uh it looks like a Louiswis and Clark class dry goods auxiliary. Uh that's generally what they're called. Um now I scrolled back through all of the Sentinel imagery and found out when she arrived at this location. That's a pretty good place to start from. When did she get there? That maybe help us figure out which one which vessel it is. And it appears to have arrived between March 11th and March 18th. Some people claimed that she is the USNS Guadalupe on social media. We'll get to that in a moment. But overall, uh, my appointments for this time for this vessel is that she's approximately 213 to 215 m, at least from my rather garbage imagery. So, I'll show you that. Now, one of the reasons I don't think she's the Guadalupe, even though that's what's being claimed right now, is that her whole configuration looks different. Guadalupe has got a pointy bow, and this one has a rather blunted beak, so to speak. It just doesn't look the same. Uh there the folks on the Guadalupe is rather large as well. Doesn't really match. However, if we look at a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary, it looks very similar to that. It looks like the small folks there in the squared off portion of the bow looks a little bit more accurate. And we can even go a little bit further. Go to Norfolk Naval Station, our favorite naval base for getting top- down imagery of US Navy auxiliary ships. And we look at a Henry J. Kaiser class replenishment oiler and our our satellite image of our vessel that's uh in the harbor at Dega Garcia. And you can see it doesn't really match. It's not the same vessel. However, it does look a lot more like uh a Louiswis and Clark class dry cargo or ammunition ship, right? So, you know, this is generally the kind of back pocket research that most of you will never see, but it's being done in the background. Anyway, I just thought I would share this time around. So again, I got multiple images of these vessels throughout the week, and I was really kind of interested to find out what is the name of this auxiliary ship here, and I got way down into the weeds by creating a table of every single Louis Clark class auxiliary ship with a goal of finding out uh through process of elimination which this which vessel this could be. Again, there are easier ways of doing this, but I I wanted to do the hard work this time around. This is some kind of like junior level intel guy stuff. So, I wanted to do this work uh just to build familiarity with where these vessels are located normally. And through my own work, I was able to basically narrow down uh which vessel this could be. If it is a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary, it's got to be one of these three because all the ones in red here, uh it obviously can't be those ships. So, I thought, well, you know, none of these were really good fits either. So, I thought, well, maybe it's not. Maybe it's not a Louiswis and Clark. But I measured multiple times from multiple images and the measurements I was getting are not the best. I mean, it could be a lot of different things. I think probably the image from April 5th is the best image I could get of this particular vessel, but again, not really conclusive. Uh it it does look like a Louiswis and Clark class, but it may not be. Um the tanker, it seems a little bit more clear in this image from April 5th. So, uh, the claims that this is the tanker Stenna imperative that that does kind of match the Stenna line of oilers or tankers, excuse me. Uh, those are very impossible to tell apart on satellite imagery. The only way to tell these apart is again by AIS and uh by really good imagery, much better imagery than we can get from a satellite. So, I did work through, just to show my work, I did work through uh one of the classic ways that we track and uh categorize ships since World War II. So, believe it or not, the US Navy uh specifically the Office of Naval Intelligence still does do this by hand. Uh the they classify the whole configuration and what we call the upright sequence. This is done by hand still to this day. So, I pulled the upright sequence for the STA imperative. I found a side shot of the Stenna imperative and I did the upright sequence myself. Now again, this is really nerdy stuff. It doesn't really help you that much, but this is kind of an interesting little bit of Navy lore. This goes back again to the days of World War II uh when imagine you're a submarine captain in the North Atlantic. You're you're hunting merchants and uh you need to know which merchant you sink, right? How do you for instance on all those History Channel documentaries, how do we know the gross tonnage of vessels that were sunk? Well, I'll tell you how we know. The submarine captain looked through his periscope and conducted an analysis of the upright sequence of whichever ship he was getting ready to shoot a torpedo at. And from that upright sequence, we could then determine what ship it was, especially if it's in the dark. Uh all you see is a silhouette and you see masts and funnels and cranes. And you can uh categorize the hole shape and superructure. Well, if you've got a big database or in many cases just a a book, you know, on board the ship of which vessel it is, you know, you can generally kind of put two and two together as to which submarine sank which ship. And that that research combined with the losses, for instance, during the Battle of the Atlantic, the losses on the Allied side, you know, which ship was sunk, you know, at which location and uh on what day, you can narrow down and figure out which ship it is. But this doctrine carries forward to today. So determining the upright sequence for commercial ships is very very important when it comes to trying to identify commercial merchant vessels. And in this case uh it's a little bit subjective. Uh but I did the upright sequence as mast mast crane funnel crane just identifying the features you can see. Again we're looking for big features on board the ship. There is a little bit of room for debate. Modern ships are not like World War II ships. So for instance, in this in this particular image, you could the analyst could make the argument that that second mass there is a king post. But in any case, this is generally what we're going with. And if we also do the same thing with the hole configuration, in this case, it is a raised one uh hole configuration. Some might argue it's a flushed hole. Either way, it's just more data in our pocket. it doesn't really matter because the the upright sequence and the whole configuration for our ship that we see here in the imagery matches pretty good. Uh so we're going to say with a fairly high confidence this is probably the Stenna Imperative as claimed. Again, World War II, we've made a lot of development since then and we have uh really overly watermarked drone shots of some of these uh vessels as well. And we can compare that to the open- source Sentinel imagery. And we can compare it to the image uh the paid commercial image and it seems to match pretty pretty dang close. So as far as the tanker goes, yeah, it's just an imperative most likely. We can also uh check the AIS data. Again, some of you may say, well, why didn't you check the AIS tracking data? I did. Almost all vessels shut off their transponder before they get within a thousand miles of this island. Again, it's a very decently secret place. And uh there is an AIS transponder or receiver here. And none of the vessels who go to this island turn their transponder on. So it's very much a kind of a blacked out place, which is understandable considering it's, you know, largely military use. So that's kind of where I'm stuck at here. One of the reasons why I can't identify this vessel is uh there are a few theories here, uh which you can read on your own. It could be that I'm just stupid and am missing something completely. This could be a standard thing that maybe this isn't a buildup of resources at Diego Garcia. I went through and I looked through the past four years of Sentinel images. Every single time an image was taken, I looked at it and from my own eye, I can't really I mean, there are routine logistics shipments to this island, but I can't say I can't determine right now. I don't have enough data to determine if what I'm seeing in this image, for instance, is anything abnormal. I maybe it's not abnormal. I don't know. Another thing to remember is maybe I'm just misidentifying this vessel. Maybe it could be something else. Maybe it's uh maybe it's a foreign vessel. Who knows? I measured it. I did all this uh point mineration on it and it matches as best I can to a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary. Another theory is that well maybe the Sentinel imagery is misleading. Maybe they're trying to pull a sneaky on us. Again, coming back to the military deception possibility. Here are uh the past few images where I think this vessel arrived uh at this location and anchored in this spot. And as you can see based on the kind of yellow orange circles, it's been there since at least March 18th. Now, there was a gap of time between March 11 and March 18 where there was no satellite coverage. So, she arrived somewhere between 11 and 18. But maybe she didn't. Maybe that's a different vessel. Uh, it's pretty cloudy. So, maybe she really arrived on the 31st. There's no telling. I mean, maybe they're maybe they're trying to play a shell game here and telling different commercial ships to to anchor in the same spot to make it look like it's been one single ship this entire time when in actuality it's been multiple ships. That's a possibility, too. I say that because if we go back to my chart here of who it could possibly be, uh, based on the images, well, we've got the our three contenders. You can see the dates here. The dates are not matching up. So, something is wrong along here. It's far more likely that I'm just wrong and that I have done something incorrectly up until this stage than than it is for a sort of ghost ship to exist. Ships don't just, you know, appear, right? So, all right. Just to save everyone some time, uh, in the comment section down below, I can confirm 100% that I was wrong. This is not a Louiswis and Clark class dry cargo ship. The entire internet is wrong as well. Twitter is wrong. All of the multi-million dollar think tanks and probably CIA funded naval warfare publications are also incorrect. I have figured out what this ship is. This vessel is the USS Emory S Land AS39. And some of you out there may say, "What in the Sam Hill kind of vessel is that?" Well, my friends, this is a submarine tender. I would like to state for the record that I'm not entirely at fault here, okay? Uh because this ship is not supposed to be here. So, the Emory S Land is one of two ships left of her type in the entire US Navy fleet. There is the USS Emory S Land and the USS Frank Cable. Like I mentioned earlier, it didn't really make a whole lot of sense. There was something a little bit nagging to me about this vessel being called something that it wasn't right to start with. And then the uh actual like AIS data indicated that well, it doesn't it can't really be a Louiswis and Clark vessel either. It doesn't I mean the imagery is kind of bad, but I mean it's almost the same dimensions as a Louiswis and Clark vessel. However, what I was measuring is the helellipad off the rear end. And if you'll see at the very very top image, the the satellite image that I bought here shows a cutout in the uh helipad. So, it's like an offset helipad. And that was the thing that kind of got me going to think maybe this is maybe this is not a Louiswis and Clark class vessel because they they have a helellipad that's obviously uh contained within the hole and it it it just looks different. So anyway, I kind of had an epiphany. It came to me that this is actually a submarine tender, the USS Emory S land, and that's definitely what it is. If you look at all the images you can Google on your own, it's definitely what it is. Now, for those of you who feel a little bit charitable with wasting your time for the past few minutes, this is still very important. So, I was originally concerned about this ship coming to this area to deliver bombs. Well, we know that's not the case now. This ship is here to take care of submarines. This is a submarine tender. So, what does that tell us? So it tells us that the US Navy is going to be running attack subs out of Diego Garcia. Now, now the more astute of you, if you research the USS Emiry Sand and the submarine tender class of ships, you may find that, "Wow, wait a minute. She's been here before." And you would be correct. The USS Emory S Land was stationed in Diego Garcia almost 15 years ago. That's a long time. Right now, here's the kicker with this. There's only two of these vessels left. The Emiries Land and the Frank Cable. Now, the Frank Cable is supposed to be stationed in Guam and the MRA land is supposed to be stationed here in Diego Garcia. Now, here's the kicker. I've got a lot of documentations that state that this ship, the Emory Land, was actually transferred to Guam and the Frank Cable was sent to the west coast of America, back to Seattle, right? So, quite the twist of fate, isn't it? It's not exactly what we were talking about, but in unraveling this mystery of what this ship is, we've actually uncovered something rather new. That's why I couldn't find this ship going back a little ways in the imagery because well, she wasn't there. She was in Guam. And now, at least as of a few months ago, maybe even a couple of years, she's been stationed here in Diego Garcia a little bit more permanently. So, how long has she been at Diego Garcia? I don't know because my sentinel imagery is not that great. During the wintertime, there are sometimes many, many months where I can't get a good image of anything because of cloud cover. So again, I've gone through years and years and years of uh this this area worth of imagery, and I can't find the this this ship here passed a few months ago. So when she got here, she got here in the probably in the middle of March, like I had originally theorized, between March 11th and March 18th. So I don't know. You guys tell me. What do you think? I mean, this is kind of interesting. No, it's not the ship we were expecting it to be, but it is very, very interesting in a completely different manner. So, once again, not particularly new. This is rather old information to be honest, but I think it's kind of interesting and and it does highlight that we're looking at militarizing Diego Garcia a little bit more often because otherwise, why would she be here, right? Again, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is very helpful for running submarines uh out of uh the Middle East, so that you know, the submarines that are accompanying the carrier strike groups don't have to wait so long without going uh with mail and uh things like that. So, it's kind of interesting. I don't know if this is a smoking gun that points to, holy cow, we're going to be having more submarine operations out of Diego Garcia. I don't know, this may be the same baseline. So, it doesn't really help us make any more decisions about the seriousness of what's going on at Diego Garcia, but it is very, very interesting. and I I found it to be uh quite the thrilling hunt to fi find out what this vessel is. So either way, this is kind of the research that I have done this week. These are the the facts that we can sink our teeth into. And unfortunately, you know, this this does highlight the difference between journalism and intelligence. If we were to just talk about just the raw facts, hey, there's two ships in the harbor, right? Uh and we don't go into the analysis of what that means or we don't do any of the research to determine what vessel it could be. we we're not going to highlight any of these discrepancies. So the world of intelligence is of course different from the world of journalism. Uh journalism is supposed to tell you just the facts whereas intelligence is supposed to help you make decisions based on incomplete information. And in this case there's a lot of incomplete information. Sometimes that's that happens but either way it is a very good uh week for learning lessons and kind of getting back to the basics of good intel habits to have. Don't hyperfixate on one thing. I know I've hyperfixated on these ships this week, but don't focus on just the aircraft. Don't focus on just this island. This island doesn't really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. It's all little breadcrumbs. All little breadcrumbs of information we're trying to put together. It's like uh it's like a paint by numbers thing. We're trying to paint a picture here, but we've only got like two colors and we can only fill in 30% of the of the spots on the on the painting. So, not going to be a very pretty picture. And you may have to still look at that picture and make a decision. That's kind of what this is all about. showing my homework to uh detail some of the more in-depth things that that we talk about and work through and some of the conclusions we have to come to uh based on very very incomplete and oftentimes conflicting information. So, I know not very interesting, very very boring, but that's what I have for this week. That's pretty much all I've been able to focus on and and work through with regards to what's going on around the Middle East. Now, I do have a couple of things I'm not going to talk about just yet. I do have a couple of other locations. I have not, as you might be led to believe by what I've talked about so far, I have not been focusing only on Diego Garcia. There are a few other places to watch. And watching them, I have been. So, I will hope to have a little bit more information. We have to start developing these things out. We've got to start somewhere, right? So, I'll hope to hopefully have a little bit more information on that over the next month. It's going to take a while for my my work to come to fruition on this to kind of figure out are we going to war with Iran or not or are we doing something else. But either way, wrapping up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. It's been a pretty light week this week, which is kind of understandable this time of year. It's always pretty light. Everybody wants to be outdoors and uh not playing with radio stuff. But that's the eternal battle, isn't it? It's always a uh challenge to keep from being complacent. And uh we most certainly have to remember to not get complacent. Make sure you know how to use your stuff. Make sure you have a plan for communicating with people you need to communicate with if and when communications goes down. We still have to remember submarine cables are still being cut. China is uh still tapping or trying to manipulate or cut or anchor drag over cables all of the time. It's become a very common thing to do. So again, don't be complacent. Realize that the internet may go out for certain parts of the world and it may be hard to figure out what's going on. So, as we all know, you cannot really easily create a communications plan after a disaster. You kind of have to plan on what you're going to do beforehand. And the ghost net is at least a stop gap measure in that regard. So, that's all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. And thank you guys all for sticking with me today. I know it's been kind of a whole lot of nothing this week. Uh even though there have been definitely a lot of things going on, it's just not a whole lot of conclusive uh activities that we can kind of really get any sort of closure on, I guess. But either way, I'm going to continue keeping a very broad view on things and we'll see what uh see what next week brings. Hopefully, we'll have some more information there. But until then, thank you for all of your support. It really helps when uh when I've got to go through a lot of satellite images and it really helps a lot, too. And uh keeping the mapping project I've got going. So, that that definitely does help quite a bit. So, thank you all for that and I will see you next time.

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the intel update for the 25th of june 2022 and as always it is being recorded the day prior on the 24th so let's get right to it all right up first are a new series of slides i don't know how long i'm going to continue this for but i thought it prudent to start talking about a lot of the interesting infrastructural events that have occurred over the past few weeks and months so we're going to talk about this from a regional perspective because i tried putting this all on one slide and it there's just too many so i know a lot of people are very concerned about infrastructure these days rightfully so and i know that there's a lot of either misinformation or propaganda from from all sides regarding who's causing some of these issues or if there is a cause at all so what i thought i would do is break this down by state and by incident really and see if we can kind of pinpoint some of the more innocent events and some of the more uh nefarious things that are just really sketchy all the way around so first up is the northeast region and we'll start off by talking about pennsylvania uh so if you live in the area you've obviously seen this in the news over the past few weeks and that is uh avian flu i of course am no duck farmer right but it looks like there are a lot of farms being impacted in southeastern pennsylvania with regards to either ducks or turkeys i think i don't know if it's spread to chickens just yet it seems like it's really just a couple of duck farms obviously the state is not going to point out where most of these avian flu outbreaks are going to be you know located they're obviously for privacy reads it's not going to be pointing the fingers at a specific farmer but if you can look at this image you can see kind of where the the government has put this heat map out to show where most of the avian flu outbreaks are kind of uh contained i just wanted to start with the avian flu kind of stuff because we have to remember that some of the things that we're talking about today when it comes to infrastructural concerns are really routine things avian flu is almost a yearly thing i'm pretty sure it's a yearly thing in a lot of areas around the country so i understand people's concerns with regards to a lot of the things going on in our food supply and i understand the the hyper hyper awareness that we place on our meat supply in particular these days especially considering all of the things that the oligarchs and the extreme you know leftists and tyrants of the world have been putting out regarding our meat supply uh but i also want to kind of pump the brakes on things that yeah and avoid um events that are basically routine from getting out of control it would be very easy for someone to create a headline that says oh my god all the ducks in pennsylvania are being killed at an astonishing astonishing rate you know 30 000 ducks at two different sites have been massacred right it's easy to it's easy to write those headlines and get a lot of clicks and views but what they don't tell you is that this is pretty much completely normal nowadays now you can of course do the research on your own and figure out what the avian flu actually is and the causes of it and things like that but i'm not exactly going to be peeking around duck farms and houses looking for george soros sprinkling some stuff in their food i'm not exactly going to be doing that so i just wanted to kind of start off with that one a little bit and move on to new hampshire so way back on the 13th of april if you guys can remember that far back east conway beef and pork in conway new hampshire east conway new hampshire was burned to the ground and this is going to be a common theme a very common line throughout this entire brief today that the cause of the fire is unknown and the investigation is underway now again with when it comes to arson investigation it's really really hard to tell a seasoned arson investigator will be very very much able to pick out the more obvious cases and i'll mention these as we go along but for a lot of these you know you can't really you can't really tell what the deal is did somebody is this an accident and we just can't figure it out or is this arson and if it is arson d what's the motivation here is it insurance fraud like i know you know growing up in you know where i grew up and i guess this is kind of a common thing throughout the uh the country is man people would burn their stuff down for the insurance money so you know is that something that is that the case or is this a deliberate attack on our infrastructure i don't know and in most cases throughout this brief today i'm not going to know and no one else is going to know either but i thought that the information would be valuable to share so so moving on to new jersey on the 23rd of march the pepsico bottling facility uh had a very large fire uh there again causes unknown investigation is underway and just keep in mind that when it comes to these investigations you're really not going to hear very much because remember local news sources local medias where we're going to be notified of these events and local media has zero incentive to revisit an article and say hey you remember three months ago that pepsi facility that burned down yeah it turns out it was an accident you're never going to see those news stories right so just keep that in mind as we go along uh massachusetts had an interesting one though both of them kind of well you know basically within a month of each other and both of them involving eversource energy so one was in newton massachusetts and the other one was in plympton massachusetts uh both of them were fires at electrical substations so the first one or actually the most recent one in june on the 20th of june was it looks like a worker might have been involved with that one so it may be accidental i don't know pure speculation the other one though back on the 30th of may was allegedly due to malfunctioning equipment and again local sources really provide no information on that whatsoever so hard to say what's going on but i did think it was interesting uh that there were two of those incidents very close to to one another in kind of the same general area right on the right on the outskirts of boston so very interesting and i guess we'll have to do some more research and figure out what's going on with some of that moving down southeast we'll start off with virginia back on april 30th purdue farms in the norfolk area had a major major fire at one of their processing plants so uh this one was it's really hard to tell exactly what went on it may have been some kind of overheated you know electrical part or motor or something like on a conveyor belt hard to say but the local news sources state that it was uh due to malfunctioning equipment i don't know but the local chesapeake fire department specifically went out of their way to say that it was accidental and not suspicious quote so again you can believe what you want i don't know what to think i just thought i'd share it and move along so in georgia there was a another more interesting one this is a smaller company red ridge llc in calhoun georgia i can't really i didn't really find very much on the company itself but they're they're apparently it looks like they're a very small local supplier of rubber or flooring or things like that their facility burned to the ground and again the cause is uh unknown of that fire moving on down to florida this is a more interesting one back in on the 19th of may there was a train deer element in martin county florida the train that derailed was carrying limestone and it looks like only five or six cars were involved in that derailment again the cause of the derailment is unknown which is not uncommon when it comes to railway things so as one might expect trains and the the rail logistics of this country are very much national security issues so uh when you see incidents involving trains i tend to be more hyper aware of it because uh i lived in the pacific northwest for a few years against my will and it uh it was very apparent to me that a lot of trains were being derailed due to uh eco terrorists up in the pacific northwest uh that was quite clear it was very common uh just a few years ago and probably still is to this day uh but it's very very uh you'll very rarely see that cause being attributed to something so uh when there's a train derailment or something to do with rail it's kind of you know a little sketchy i tend to be hyper aware of it and i'm not saying that's the case down down in florida you know trains are mechanical devices right and it's not easy to move things by rail around the country so you know it could just be something innocent it could be something nefarious i don't know i'll leave it up for you to decide moving on to the midwest or specifically the eastern central midwestern region if that makes any sense basically the five states of wisconsin michigan illinois indiana and ohio i had to break it out that small because i didn't have enough room on the slide so starting off with michigan probably the one that everyone has heard about the most which was abbott laboratories back on the 16th of june abbott laboratories uh suffered they were put on the plant was put offline due to a severe flooding incident that affected the really whole plant complex now abbott laboratories if you recall has been kind of in the news a lot lately due to them being the largest supplier of infant formula in the united states so again i really hesitate to point the finger at something like an act of god like rain uh being an intentional act i don't i mean that's it's gonna be kinda hard to make that you know assessment however when you have such a large factory that has already been in the news you know with regards to being shut down due to um bacterial contaminations and causing this infant formula shortage that we're still going through uh you tend to take notice uh you know one would think that they might have thought to put out a few sandbags here and there i don't know i don't want to you know judge what's going on there because i just i'm just not i just don't know what the situation is but i do find it to be interesting so i thought i'd mention it also in michigan uh there was a very large fire at the rider integrated logistics facility in delta township michigan so rider integrated logistics is a massive supplier of automotive parts they actually are a huge supplier for general motors so gm parts really come from rider integrated logistics they sort parts and things like that and source them as well so the the fire uh damage as far as we know is kind of unknown nobody really knows how bad it is it does not it did not appear to be too bad but it's uh hard to say because we just we just don't have pictures we just don't know right and again like clockwork the cause is unknown again fires at factories are not particularly rare there are hundreds of thousands of fires that occur all over this country you know every year so it's really hard to say what's going on but since this one is such a an important part of our automotive parts logistics you know chain i thought i'd mention it uh moving over to wisconsin uh back on the 13th of june a company called festive foods out of belmont had a very large fire that damaged most if not all of the building they are a major food production facility for some of the more pre-packaged food items that you see in grocery stores right again cause is unknown and it's under investigation really hard to say what any of this really means moving to illinois on back on the 23rd of may so a little bit a little bit further out a company called bio urja if i'm saying that right or bio urja if they're trying to go for urea i don't know uh it's an ethanol plant in peoria uh they are a major ethanol production facility and they had a fairly large fire that destroyed five grain silos so for the guys out in the midwest uh you you already know how big of a deal a grain silo fire is and for anyone else who doesn't know grain dust is one of the most explosive components known to man so whenever you see a grain silo fire that's going to be that's going to be a hot one but in any case this ethanol plant was shut down i don't know how much ethanol they produce but they do produce three grades they produce alcohol like human drinking alcohol grade they produce hand sanitizer grade and they produce vehicle ethanol grades so it's going to be hard to tell if that plant is online now or if they're going to be offline for a while really really hard to say and again the cause is unknown but it's also under investigation so again fires at grain silos are not particularly rare but since it's happened in an ethanol facility i wanted to mention it moving over just a little bit to the west central midwestern region i will start with minnesota which back on the 29th of may there was a fire at foreman farms in stockholm minnesota they are of course a major food production facility they make a lot of pre-packaged freezer goods as well they had a major fire that killed a few tens of thousands of chickens and again the cause is unknown and is under investigation well with this one we don't know if the fire affected just the chicken houses or if it affected the production facility can't really tell but also minnesota again really throughout the whole month of may they had a whole avian flu outbreak at multiple sites around the state in minnesota it looked like it was mostly affecting the turkey supply with many news sources if you want to believe them quoting three million birds affected so far so this is again been kind of a a quasi-normal thing i hate to use that word normal when we're talking about any kind of you know malady but uh the avian flu is certainly something that it just happens every now and then and it's been happening since may in minnesota moving down to missouri on the 2nd of june the paris brothers incorporated company they're from the missouri side of kansas city they're a major cheese production facility they had a listeria contamination so a major recall of a lot of different cheeses you can go to their website you can go to the fda's website and figure out if you have that cheese just so you know it wasn't really highly publicized at least you know not that i saw but again they probably would only you know run ads or notices that there was a listeria contamination in areas where the food probably went but i don't know in any case you know it's worth a check right moving over a little bit to nebraska on the 31st of may a company called knox crete incorporated out of omaha they are a company that manufactures cleaning chemicals for concrete if i have that correct this one was it was a relatively small fire or actually sorry the fire was relatively small the risk was great because as you could probably imagine the chemicals used to treat and uh clean concrete are very noxious and very hazardous so there was a shelter-in-place order for omaha uh for probably tens of thousands of people uh for quite a while while that fire kind of just burned itself out the firefighters went to defensive mode with this one and just kind of let it this kind of kept it from spreading because they couldn't really get too close to it uh the interesting part about this one was that again according to local news media sources which are known for making stuff up uh i the interesting line from a few different local media sources is that there were no employees on the site uh at the time of this fire again i don't know if that means nefarious or not i just think that i just thought it was kind of interesting so and you know the investigation is of course underway and the cause is unknown just like most of these other ones also in nebraska just outside of omaha city they're going to kind of share the same puck because they were kind of in the same area uh there was a cold train derailment and that was back on the 20th of june so um this one went kind of viral with a lot of people saying oh my god our infrastructure's under attack right uh this is again one of those high profile events that have kind of got you know pundits and other people making observations and um yeah this was an interesting one a coal train derailed it it uh chewed up quite a bit of track uh so it looked to me like maybe a quarter mile of track was pretty much um had to be have to you know be replaced due to this derailment um but yeah i was a trained carrying a you know full dozens of cars worth of coal and uh yeah derailed so again no cause to the derailment and it's under investigation uh again like i mentioned with rail things you're gonna have uh you're not gonna get a cause right they're not gonna let people know uh what caused this train to derail lest people get some ideas from the internet right moving up to south dakota back on the 14th of april there was a pretty big fire at a cabinet manufacturing business park i don't really have a specific name for the business there were a few of them there it's really hard to tell exactly what business even the local news media couldn't figure it out they just said cabinet manufacturer cabinet factory uh in blackhawks south dakota again very large fire totally destroyed the building that it was in cause was unknown under investigation then jumping back down to kansas back on the 17th of june um this is an event that has gotten a lot of press and i don't really know what to think about it this was one of those things where it's it's not it's not the event that makes me suspicious it's the reaction to it and this was the mass death of a few hundred head of cattle uh down in southwest kansas so this is something i i read about it i saw it uh i saw it pop up on the internet and i thought you know what you know par for the course i'm not a cattle farmer i've you know never raised uh any kind of cattle and i even i know that heat waves particularly in south kansas you know you get high humidity at night you know decently high temperatures during the day it kind of makes a lot of sense right it just happens sometimes especially you know amongst new farmers who aren't quite so aware of the threat maybe i don't know so when i saw this event i thought you know what not particularly interesting unfortunate for sure especially when it comes to our beef supply you know a couple hundred head of cattle are probably not gonna make a big difference but still it's like you know it's still unfortunate to see however when i started noticing the intense we're talking like military grade media blitz here to cover up this incident and just make it disappear from the internet my interest got peaked a little bit and you know any time i see you know fact checking on something these days i'm very highly suspicious so i wasn't suspicious about this incident before but you know again maybe it's my own bias maybe it's just my own experiences right how often how often we equate bias with experience right in any case my own experiences make me think when someone's trying to cover up something this hard maybe there's something worth covering up maybe i don't know clearly a lot of the more leftist media groups see this incident and they think that there's something to it even when there there might not be you you read any agricultural journal and they're like yeah man that was unfortunate but you know stuff happens right but the leftists clearly don't think that they think that this was they maybe the leftists think that there was something more to this so that's why they're trying to cover it up i don't know either way i just thought it was very interesting that out of all of the events that i've been able to find and put on these slides this is the one that had absolutely hands down the most fact-checking there have been so many articles written and we're not just talking like a little banner on a tweet right we're not talking about a little call-out box on an instagram post no no we're talking about five or six pages of a website talking about how oh this is fake news this is uh oh you know this this this and this and it's like interesting very interesting to see that so i thought i would mention it i personally you know i think it's going to be pretty hard pressed to find there was anything nefarious to do with this specific cattle death but i'm very interested over the amount of fact checking activation uh over this particular incident so we'll move on down to the southwest down southwest we have uh texas and again this is one that to me is not particularly you know nefarious on the face of it except for considering all of the other stuff that has happened and especially the targeting we've seen in our energy infrastructure so in texas back on the 8th of june freeport lng out of freeport texas had a very large explosion and a fire at their facility and the facility will not be online to full capacity at least until september that's kind of the quote that freeport lng has has given out to everyone again the cause is unknown and the investigation is underway from what i can sort of guess from a lot of the local news media sources is that it might have had something to do with venting emergency venting or something like that of uh you know vapors and things like that incidents like this fires explosions at refineries and production facilities pol production facilities are not particularly rare they happen kind of a lot so it's not surprising however but when you see something happen at such an important place you kind of look twice right especially you know five years ago we would have said oh man there's a fire you know freeport lng you know that's that's too bad but nowadays we immediately want to point the finger at something nefarious because of how important it is freeport lng produces or really rather processes uh 20 of the lng that we export from the united states and we're already seeing countries that we export liquid natural gas to they've already said hey we're going to immediately have to go to the saudi markets uh to to fill this demand because your your facility's offline so other countries kind of got the shaft with regards to that you know freeport lng that it's not a small complex it's a huge complex and they do you know thousands of different things there so i don't know how much of the lng that is produced or processed or shipped in or shipped out of the freeport facility where there was the fire i don't know how much that's going to affect american prices for energy i just i don't know i i just think that it's i think it's probably going to affect the export market more but again it's really hard to say moving out west uh let's start with oregon so we've got to go back uh kind of you know to the end of my sort of very loose criteria for reporting back to the 19th of april where there was a massive fire at the shearers foods food production facility in hermiston oregon so from what it looks like that facility burned to the ground and was basically a total loss again cause unknown investigation underway but yeah also just to just the very next day on the 20th of april azure standard in due for oregon they that facility burned to the ground as well now i don't know if that fire burned the hq building it looks like it took out their office building rather than the actual food production facility but again azure standard is a pretty big producer of the you know green bio you know ecologically sound you know organic foods around the country so they make a lot of that there so i thought it was kind of interesting you have two major major food production facilities up in the cascades uh of oregon along the border there and uh they both burned down very very close together again some people would you know say oh it's just it's message misattribution right causation versus you know correlation i don't know i'm telling you i don't know what the correlation is here if there is one i'm just saying that it's a very interesting case where you've got a lot of this stuff happening uh kind of in the same area around the same time you know again could be completely innocent i don't know either way we don't know no one knows because the investigation is not concluded on either one of those so moving down to california another very very large food processing facility taylor farms out of salinas california this was back on the 14th of april and this one actually did get a fair amount of press coverage uh because taylor farms produces a lot of uh prepackaged uh salad goods so if you were to go to your average grocery store pretty much anywhere in the country and you were to look at the like the pre-chopped pre-mixed like salad mixes they have kind of in the river in the produce section chances are you'll find a taylor farms product and that factory uh it looks based on the images it looks like it burned completely to the ground i don't know if it was a total loss or not they will probably have to rebuild a significant portion of that facility if they choose to rebuild it and again the cause is unknown investigation underway i think this one there were a few reports of maybe an equipment failure i i don't know maybe maybe some uh mechanical problem that ignited some ammonia fumes i've seen that on a couple of local news sources that kind of talked about it we'll keep our ear to the ground on that moving up to montana uh on the 27th of march so going back to really kind of like the the very end of the of my uh of when i started looking for these kinds of things there was a very large fire at the exxon mobil pol or petroleum oil lubricant refinery in billings montana so that facility up there in billings billings is well known uh for hosting that v it's a very low it's like several hundred you know acres maybe several hundred square miles if i remember correctly of a combination of refining transporting pipeline some pipeline stuff there are a few well heads out there if i'm not mistaken i don't really know much about the facility but i know that it's a pretty big facility in the area and again causes unknown investigation underway it's really i couldn't even find any pictures of what the damage was i guess we'll have to find out what that is if we find out what it is again just like rail logistics anything regarding a fire or some kind of even if it's like something intentional especially if it's intentional at a pol facility you're really not going to hear about that right so moving to idaho uh back on the 14th of april again so a few months ago jim state processing which is again a major food processing facility they process i'll be willing to bet probably potatoes potato chips out of haber and idaho they had actually a plane crash at their facility uh the facility wasn't really damaged too much but a small small civilian aircraft crashed into the roof of one of their facilities there now this one again the cause is listed as unknown but i just did a quick look at this on google earth anytime i hear of a plane crash at a factory i pull up google maps or some kind of other mapping services better uh and you can clearly see that this facility was directly on the approach path for the local airports runway so i don't know if it's a case of somebody getting their approach all messed up and they just flew into the ground or some kind of other emergency you know we all know that you know most airline disasters occur within what five minutes after takeoff and 10 minutes before landing something like that uh so it would make perfect sense if this was kind of a more accidental thing but again this particular one uh got a lot of press from some of the other you know some of the more conservative news sites you know pointing fingers ah you know they're flying planes into food production facilities i don't know my just my hunch is this was probably more more accidental than intentional so that kind of wraps up uh the talking about the different regions and some of the more the back history i guess if you can call it that of the past 90-ish days of interesting infrastructural events and incidents i kind of wanted to set the stage get the template up there and kind of get everybody used to seeing this kind of thing because i really wanted to do just one slide on this and then i started doing a lot more research and it became two slides and then three slides and now we're you know we're here at multiple slides we might end up having to break this down by state uh someday but again these are not all of the incidents i want to stress that very much this these are not all of the incidents that have occurred uh in the past 90 days these are just the ones that i had the energy to research uh because i had to cut this research off at some point in time or else this brief would just take months to get made this is what i've got for now we will be adding to this unfortunately i'd be willing to bet we're going to be adding to this quite a lot but i'll see what i can do to find more and and see what else we've got so again this is just what i think these are just the incidents that caught my eye and again i had to cut the had to cut the research off at some point so i will continue making this out i'll see if the rest of the team here has has any to add on some of these areas i'm sure if we were if we went looking for nefarious things i'm sure we could find them that's one of the the dangers of research is that if you're if you're on a topic you tend to research what you tend to find with your research right you tend to find what you're looking for even if that's not the most accurate way of doing things if that makes sense again that's why i took a more journalistic approach i'm just telling you about these incidents you can think what you want and i've given my opinion on a few of these as we've gone along and i'll continue to do that in the future but i don't want to put too much emphasis on on some of these incidents because i just do not know i think that at the end of the day doesn't really matter you know man if we found out that freaking bill gates himself snuck into the exxon mobil facility in billings and set fire to the sucker would that make any difference whatsoever to you if that occurred or if it was a total complete and total accident the result for you is the same right your impact your pol market is is impacted you know same thing with the food shortage right if it's a legitimate you know listeria contamination or a legitimate fire that was just legitimate accident or if it was something intentional does it matter are you going to stop the intentional acts from happening no you know i you know our nation's silent services right the the national counterterrorism groups and federal law enforcement agencies that are supposed to be kind of on top of this stuff and have kind of you know this is kind of their wheelhouse and has been since their creation i think it's you know they've made their they've made their intentions very obvious over the past few months and years i guess so i i don't really know that if if we can expect any kind of investigation into any of this stuff i'm talking about so again i just kind of wanted to temper expectations slash pump the brakes on a lot of this stuff that it seems to be circulating around a lot of internet circles and a lot of people are talking about it again rightfully so it's rightful to be kind of concerned about this stuff but i just also wanted to point out you know something somewhat cynical which is you know what are you going to do about it you know is anybody going to go out there and be able to have the intelligence collection capability to know when these facilities are going to be attacked if there is to be an attack right you know that's what that's what my kind of opinion is we can look at the news and say oh well that makes perfect sense all that facility has got a contamination now all that facility caught fire mysteriously in the night you know we can look at this and we can react to it but at the end of the day if we're not going to if we're not going to have the resources we're not going to have the intelligence collection capability as a citizenry to kind of stop these things i guess the best we can do is be vigilant make sure that we are you know watching out for ourselves and our communities and you know others who kind of are more vulnerable in situations like this and so if you're a worker if you are an employee or if you are somehow associated with a part of our critical infrastructure for this country be vigilant you know because you you you might be the first line of defense for for some something nefarious but you also might be the last line of defense right so that's something to keep in mind is that you you might not have a federal agency come to your aid or or stop an attack it might be just you so i just kind of wanted to leave it there i know i've talked a lot about this already but i kind of want to leave it there and just kind of let that marinate for a bit and we'll move on to something equally inflammatory which is church fires so this is one again that i did not really want to make but i did the research and i found myself finding more and more and more and lo and behold i have enough for a slide uh when it comes to specifically fire or any kind of fire event uh saul phrase any kind of fire event that occurs at a religious institution in this country uh is going to be categorized on this slide now i'm trying to rule out the fires that were obviously accidental some some of these fires you can look at and say all right that was that was obviously an accident uh so the fires that i have listed on this slide are really the ones that kind of caught my eye uh and of course we're not going back very far we're going back to maybe march april this is not uh kind of incorporate the you know january february time frame in which there were a lot and even over the winter time there were kind of a lot but i just wanted to kind of cut this off and stick with maybe a march or april timeframe last you know 90 120 days ish so again just to kind of pump the brakes on everybody freaking out a little bit i wanted to remind everybody to remember that churches by their very nature are very big targets for arsonists uh or even just the average mentally ill individual which a couple of these were definitely mentally ill individuals so you know churches are usually very large structures they're imposing on their terrain they're usually on the street corner or in some area where they have got you know got a big parking lot things like that and they're usually unoccupied for long you know periods of time and in many cases a lot of church buildings are of an older construction right so they're not made with the most fire resistant modern materials right a lot of churches around the country are just they've been made you know either in the 50s or even before that uh so they're not really made with the with materials that they're hesitant to burn right so we have to keep this in mind you know and we have to remember that not every church fire is caused by bill gates himself you know and you know i myself do not know the statistics of how many churches catch fire every year i just i don't know i know that hundreds of thousands of fires occur every year and it's really hard to kind of make make patterns and you know determine patterns with this kind of thing all i know is that incidents like this certainly seem to be on the rise or at least we are more aware of the increase due to everything that's kind of going on in the world so maybe it's not an increase maybe it's just us noticing it now and as you as you can see we've got 17 on this slide and that's just the ones that i stopped looking now interestingly enough in my research i hit a lot of barriers which you would expect these days uh of course using google you're not going to find these you literally have to go and search for each state's like local four letter you know affiliate like mainstream news site and then you have to search on those sites so as you can imagine this took me many many hours to find and a lot of these you're not even gonna you're not gonna find if you search for it and newsflash duckduckgo 100 sensors censors its search results um so you can't even really go to like a source like duckduckgo to find some of these you really have to be very you have to like search for the specific church name and then you'll find an article for it which i thought was very interesting uh and as you can see a lot of these are straight up arson uh they either somebody was arrested or they literally have a person of interest that they're trying to arrest or they were caught on film arresting uh you know setting the fire like for number eight there on the 11th of march there were actually two churches well a uh a lutheran church and a synagogue was uh set on fire by a crazy lady somewhere so um that was kind of you know it's a little bit more clear-cut but i didn't want to put it on there because it was such a brazen attack on two different religions which i thought was kind of interesting uh usually if you're going to see something like this it's going to be some kind of fanaticism or somebody's crazy so yeah it's it's very interesting to kind of once you put these on the map you're like whoa there were kind of a lot again i don't know if this is normal i don't i don't think it is um i've lived in america for kind of a long time i've lived on both coasts for a decent amount of time and you know i've spent a lot of time traveling around and i can't say that i think this is a normal kind of thing so again just my opinion but of course we'll keep an eye on these uh as we move along but yeah really all i can do is stick you know pins on a map really and uh just kind of tell you that i don't know what i don't know what to think about some of these things but it certainly does look to be a very palpable increase in this kind of thing at least just based on my own very small sample size so i guess we'll have to keep it keep an eye on this as we move through the summertime up next i wanted to specifically talk about lake mead and the water shortage that's been going on out west so for many of you who live on the east coast like we do and uh water shortages are not really uh they're not really so much of a cultural thing as they are out west uh i wanted to mention how serious this problem has become if you've been listening to me ramble on on these briefs for a while now you will have remembered that i talked about this quite a few months ago about the shortages that are that were going to happen and now that we're here i thought i'd kind of circle back around and and talk a bit about how serious this has become so uh out west uh the colorado river basin and the uh lake mead specifically uh have been experiencing a very very severe drought now this is not a drought that has just kind of sprung up it has been going on for a very very long time some people even say it goes back 23 years but recently the drought has become deadly serious unfortunately i don't really have a whole lot to say on the drought itself other than the fact that it exists and it's going to cause a lot of problems so i'll just briefly kind of recap what some of those problems might be moving forward first of all a lot of mainstream media sources are now kind of getting spun up over this again because of reports that the water level in lake mead is less than 150 feet away from deadpool status now deadpool's status for a body of water is when the water level gets so low that the the water cannot flow downstream from the dam so in this case it's the hoover dam right the massive hydroelectric project that is the source of lake mead right so water levels have gotten so low that they're in danger of not even being able to flow at all out of the lake which means that the colorado river after the hoover dam would cease to exist so this would be a very very serious and very deadly problem for the uh townships and cities and really the entire population that relies on the colorado river for a water source so we're talking about places like lake mojave lake havasu again this sounds really bad and it is really bad uh however we don't really know and when i say we i mean the engineers who actually are working on this problem that no one really knows if lake mead will get that low we've this may still be a few years away it might be a few months away nobody really knows it seems to be a problem that might be a few years out from what i've been reading but in any case what is very true is that the water situation out west is very very dire especially for people who get their water source from the colorado river now again just like i mentioned when this whole thing kind of came to our attention and we started talking about it in earnest many months ago the problem with this kind of thing the problem with a drought is that it's not just a drought it's never just the drought right so when you have water shortages it's not just the water that you have a shortage of it's electricity because the colorado river provides a lot of electricity via hydroelectric projects to the surrounding areas so you basically have all of these bad things compound at once so you're out of water and your power's out right so it's not just one or the other it's going to be both at the same time or you're going to be fa you know around the same time right again for those of us who do not live in the areas that are affected by this it's easy for us to get kind of very complacent and kind of say well okay that's a problem for out west when in actuality it really highlights a universal problem and that is how issues tend to compound at the worst possible times right murphy's law right that's definitely a thing that happens especially when it comes to emergencies involving critical infrastructure so even though for those people who who don't live in the area i wanted to kind of bring this up and keep this in people's minds because chances are you've probably got something similar going on in your area too as far as when the situation out west will be alleviated no one really knows a lot a lot of engineers are saying that this you know we might get some water back this winter time there might be some spring thaw next year it really is hard to tell no one really can give can give a straight answer on when this water crisis out west will alleviate itself yeah it's very unfortunate um i don't really know what to say on it like i mentioned uh but i would say that if you're living out west i would very seriously start looking into where your water comes from and if you can add to your water sources with ground water now easier said than done of course but i just think that you know my little two cent advice if you want to call it that is that the water crisis out west is illustrating two very big infrastructural problems the water supply and electricity you could even say transportation as well if the water gets too low to allow boats and things to transit but it really highlights these problems and you know it's one of those things where you almost don't even want to talk about the problem because there's no solution for it on the very individual level but you know we've got to bring this stuff up and we've got to get people thinking because you never know ingenuity might come out and we might find some way out of this but yeah i just wanted to briefly talk about it even though i don't really have a whole lot to say about it i've gotten a few people emailing us and dming us about it so i thought hey now would be a good time to reassess this now that we're kind of here and the water crisis is most certainly very severe and moving on to significant governmental actions i kind of burned myself out this week doing a lot of research for a lot of other stuff so i don't have a whole lot uh to go off of today for this kind of stuff all right so up first is the supreme court and uh they have given us two things to talk about uh this time around and uh both of them are very interesting so first up is the second amendment uh news which is the supreme court striking down new york's policy of of trying to attribute a reason to get a gun permit so new york had a law or a series of laws that basically meant that you had to provide justification to law enforcement in order to get a certain kind of permit uh to own a certain kind of gun so the supreme court struck that down and um so yeah it's really really good news uh really big news for the 2a community um you know me being me i uh i want to thank all right what's the angle here uh so so i don't want to get sucked into kind of the mentality of being pessimistic and um negative all the time right this is really good news but i also don't want to get super excited uh and i don't want to get sucked into the alternative which is thinking that a court can decide what a a god-given right is so it's interesting to me and i'm glad that the supreme court uh ruled this one of the very few things they have done that i think is actually good over the past few years but i'm also going to leave that caution bulb lit and see what comes out in the future uh and speaking of i had to re-record this segment because uh the roe vs wade ruling was overturned just a few minutes ago as i'm recording this so so yeah that's another very big one a lot of states i think um i have to count again but by my very quick count in just the past few minutes uh over a well over 20 states have trigger laws that are effectively banning abortions in those states i don't have the list together i'm sure that by the time this video comes out the list will be out already i'm actually kind of surprised the supreme court made that decision i surely thought it was going to go the other way but i guess that's you know watching court proceedings for you um i don't really have a whole lot invested anymore in uh trying to cover each little action within our justice system it's just too it's just too much for me to handle at this point but i think that really my own thoughts on it and really any other thoughts on it are kind of irrelevant because what's going to happen is mass pandemonium so as my guess is this will be the catalyst for a lot of violence in pretty much every city in the in the country for the next few weeks what i would also fully expect to see is uh something that we i guess often don't really think about too much and that is the the whiplash effect with regards to the leftist states which are going to uh endorse abortion even more than they already do so we can again we could have predicted this is going to happen uh but i just wanted to remind everyone out there that there's going to be a lot of nasty stuff out on the tv and on the internet and on social media and in real life too so so if you have children that are in uh public school just be advised that right now is is going to be the perfect uh justification for the wailing and gnashing of teeth that is going to come from the left so just keep that in mind uh if you're trying to you know shield your little ones from the the evils of the world so to speak it's uh it's not going to be an easy time so again just remember that um this is struck a nerve with a lot of the leftists out there with pretty much every leftist and it's uh it's going to get nasty and if you don't want your children to be a part of that as we have illustrated that children nowadays are most certainly a huge target for the left uh on an ideological level so just just keep that in mind i'm trying to to to be as as family friendly as possible when describing it but we we all know the nasty things that the left has been putting out on tv and you know things that i would never have expected to find any human being capable of doing is not just done normally but it's that kind of behavior is conducted on live tv uh for all the world to see uh so if you don't want your little ones to see that just just remember um that it's gonna be kind of a rough time over the next few weeks with regards to that kind of stuff so i'm already seeing the the grotesque actions being planned in my local area and i know that it's not going to be pleasant to see for um some of the more vulnerable populations right so just keep that in mind uh and as you know as always get ready for the riots because that's going to happen yeah there's really not much more to say on that so i'll move on so back in 2020 uh the state electoral college electors uh they signed the people physically who were the you know electoral college right signed a symbolic document um that they believed that their votes should go to trump due to fraudulent balance i think that's what happened i'm not entirely certain a lot of and again this is one of those things where i wasn't really too interested or surprised until i started researching it and oh my gosh i've found so much opposition propaganda it's ridiculous the leftist media sources which apparently there are tens of thousands of these websites are calling these people fake electors and they're just really going all in on the story of these people who are trying to like impersonate electoral college members i i really don't know i think that the truth is impossible to determine right now it's just it's like a oil fire it's just too hot to get close to right now uh so i don't know what's going on with this i just wanted to kind of bring this to your attention hey fbi targeting 2020 nevada electors and you can kind of figure out what's going on down the line i'll rev i'll revisit this if there's anything that

…Yesterday the Pentagon announced the shelling of another narco-submarine, which was sunk in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. One individual was reported killed during the strike, though a full Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) has not been…

…The United States is involved in the war in Ukraine, the Gulf War, and of course the war on narcotics trafficking in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The US is also somewhat involved in a loose collection…

…Closer to home, kinetic strikes continue on fast boats in the Eastern Pacific as the United States begins to accelerate the counter narcotics mission down south. But there are very few details on this. So there…

…For one, Operation Southern Spear continues as before with daily strikes on narco vessels being carried out mostly in undisclosed regions of the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Sorry, I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly where…

…Other drone and missile attacks were reported along the Eastern Front as well. Ukraine has also continued drone strikes as before, with strikes being reported at Engels Airbase overnight. -HomeFront- Washington: The fugitive search for Travis…

…s mostly because most of those are in the pacific theater anyway we couldn't even allocate one to hunt for hamza bin laden in eastern afghanistan but here we are burning race tracks in the…

…This morning the Pentagon announced two more kinetic strikes on narco-vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean. 6x people were KIA as a result of the strike. India: This morning at least one (possibly more) Vehicle…

…Eastern Pacific:

…Overnight, the War Department announced several more airstrikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Three kinetic strikes were carried out on a total of four vessels (one strike targeted two boats that were tied together to exchange…

…Similarly, in the same area, but kind of a different conflict, are the narco strikes, which continue to take place in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. I suspect, again, I don't know, but I suspect off…

…The dragon in the Pacific is definitely stirring, though uh things are not completely out of control just yet. It's still within the realm of diplomacy. It's still within the realm of posturing, power…