//The Wire//2300Z April 13, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: MAJOR ESCALATIONS REPORTED IN MIDDLE EAST AFTER PEACE TALKS FAIL. AMERICAN NAVAL BLOCKADE ANNOUNCED IN THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ. TERRORIST ATTACK REPORTED IN ALGERIA DURING POPE'S VISIT.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Middle East: Over the weekend, negotiations between the United States and Iran failed to produce any sort of agreement. Both parties have returned to their respective countries, and the potential for future negotiations remains unclear. Shortly after negotiations concluded, President Trump announced the implementation of a naval blockade of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. The post specifically stated that the U.S. Navy will blockade "any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz". A few hours later, CENTCOM posted an article on the implementation of this policy, stating that "The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman". Lebanon: The war continues as Israeli forces continue their advance to the Litani River. Clearance operations have been on going in the south, with most villages within a few miles of the traditional border between Lebanon and Israel having been either bombed or bulldozed over the past few years with the goal of establishing a buffer zone. Hungary: Yesterday, the results of the general election resulted in sitting Prime Minister Viktor Orban being replaced by Peter Magyar after holding power for 16 years. Algeria: This morning two IED attacks took place in Blida, which took the form of two assailants wearing explosive belts attempting to target a crowd near the National Police Headquarters. Analyst Comment: These attacks coincided with Pope Leo XIV's visit to Algiers. Consequently, local media is speculating that these attackers were on their way to target the Pope, and got discovered, prompting their detonation. However, considering that the attackers were on foot at the time (and Blida is a long way from Algiers, where the Pope was located), a more likely theory is that this attack was targeting the police station. This theory is supported by the rather graphic video of at least one of the attacks. These types of attacks are extremely common throughout the third-world, as low-level insurgent groups sometimes prefer to conduct attacks during a high-profile visit, so as to amplify the message of their cause. In this case however, nobody survived to convey what group actually conducted the attack, so pending a group claiming credit, the overall motive for this terror attack remains unknown. Eastern Pacific: Overnight strikes on narco-vessels continued throughout the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility, with multiple airstrikes being reported in the general vicinity of the Caribbean. Analyst Comment: While attention has been diverted to the Middle East, Operation Southern Spear has been continuing, with strikes on fastboats being reported regularly this entire time. Most of the more recent strikes have been conducted not in the Caribbean specifically, but in undisclosed regions of the Pacific Ocean (probably off the coast of Ecuador, where joint American operations have been increasing over the past few weeks). -HomeFront- New York: A mass stabbing attack was reported at the Grand Central Terminal subway station on Saturday, after an assailant began attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Police officers on the platform shot and killed the assailant immediately after the attack began. Concerning casualties, 3x elderly victims were wounded during the attack and all are expected to survive. The assailant has been identified as Anthony Griffin, and a family friend stated that Griffin was known to have mental health issues and that he was known to carry a machete. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Blockading ships from only Iranian ports is quite different from the White House's statements of "any and all ships", and as a result, the implementation of the blockade in the Middle East is extremely significant. If the U.S. does intend to halt "all" traffic through the Strait, half of the planet will be in a bind. If the U.S. is only targeting Iranian ships (or ships exporting cargo from Iranian ports), this would make sense except for the U.S. lifting sanctions on the Iranian oil market a few weeks ago. As of today, no one has really addressed this prior lifting of sanctions, and it is not clear as to which policy supersedes the other. At this juncture, there is no word on how this is going to work out, because on the one hand the U.S. has told Iran that they can export oil to the global market, but at the same time they are being told that their ships will be interdicted, and sunk if necessary. Clarifications may come in due time (or they might not), but at the moment the announcement of a naval blockade of any kind probably won't do very much to alleviate concerns among maritime insurance companies. Companies were already concerned about the Iranian blockade, but now merchant shippers have to be concerned about the U.S. Navy interdicting them as well, especially since there are differences in the terms laid out by President Trump and CENTCOM regarding what ships are being allowed through. Bottom line, the war is not over, and the concerns that have been in place since the start of the war, still remain in place. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

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 May 25th through the 31st, 2025. So let's get right to it. Around the world, the summertime kinetic activity appears to be in full swing this week with many conflrations arising and a few going away over the past few days in Mexico and really throughout North America at large. The cartel violence has continued as expected. Nothing really out of the ordinary. It's just that this week a couple of mass graves have been found or couple of body dump sites that have been a little bit more high-profile than normal. Again, the violence down there is not really uh it's hard to say if it's escalating or not. Most of this is really not that much out of the norm. However, again, due to local focus on things like this and a lot of local activism, there's definitely an increased focus on some of these uh very, very brutal attacks down there. Across the pond in Liverpool, the vehicle ramming attack suspect has been identified. This has been a rather contentious topic over the past few days. Ever since the vehicle ramming attack occurred, vehicle ramming attacks throughout Europe at large is is not really out of the ordinary. This is very much a standard thing, especially with the uh summertime weather which allows uh more cultural events, more you know, open street fair kind of things and uh you know, people trying to go out and enjoy the summertime and enjoy the good weather. Well, this means large crowds and large crowds always bring malign actors who uh seek to cause harm. In the case of the Liverpool attack, however, it is a little bit harder to slap that general, you know, terrorist label on this kind of thing. We will do so for now. We'll definitely call this uh and use language to refer to this as a vehicle ramming attack because that's what it was. And generally, that's considered to be terrorism. However, considering that this wasn't really a planned thing, it doesn't seem like it was. At least the street was just uh full of, you know, soccer fans, right? Football fans. So, I don't know if this is more along the lines of just a very aggressive and violent form of hooliganism or if this is a legitimate terror attack that we might see fairly commonly throughout Europe. Either way, British media has had a field day with this as the attacker's identity has been released as Paul Doyle. Depending on which sources you read, this is very contentious uh because a lot of people I I don't know what the truth is. I'll just state right up front. don't know what the truth is, but a lot of people suspect that the guy that they arrested and have identified as the attacker was not the guy. I don't know about that. Uh there have been some discrepancies with age. A lot of people were saying that the guy who committed the attack appeared to be much younger than a 53-year-old man who was arrested. There are also some indications that maybe a few uh uh rowdy fans uh who were trying to, you know, take the fight to the the terrorist, the the the attacker during this vehicle ramming incident. There's some speculation that a lot of those guys have been arrested as well for trying to get at the asalent. I don't know. It's a very very hard thing to assess right now. British media is no help. The authorities are no help. The authorities surprisingly or in this case very unsurprisingly released the guy's name rather early on uh in the investigation whereas of course people are drawing the the comparison that the Southport murderer his identity was withheld for months. Uh we didn't even we didn't even know what he looked like until after the conviction. So yeah, we're just going to have to see if we can get our hands on more media of the attack, more photographs of the attacker, more photographs of who they arrested, which so far I haven't seen any mug shot. uh haven't I've only seen courtroom sketches and those don't really those don't really help you that much. So, I don't know. Either way, I just wanted to point out that this is not your standard vehicle ramming attack. It it's a little bit more complicated than that and it's being made complicated by the follow on details of what's going on. So, when everybody hears a vehicle rams into a crowd, they immediately think jihadi kind of thing. They immediately think Islamic based terrorism. And so whenever that doesn't appear to be the case, it appears to be some uh what we might consider to be terrorism of some other variety, it's really hard to get a beat on sometimes. And I think that's what's going on here. So we'll see. But right now, there's not a whole lot to go off of. Similarly, much uncertainty remains in Iran with regards to the talks that are ongoing. Just like last week, uh in which I said there's been a lot of talk, but not a lot of action or any kind of verification that this talk has any credence. The same things happened this week. There's been a lot of talk that says that Israel is going to go to war with Iran one way or the other in the next few days. We've heard this many, many times before. I don't know how true this is. There's just not anything to go off of. So, but I'm not sure. All that seems relatively certain is that war with Iran is certainly still on the menu and it probably will be for a while. Uh, but in terms of figuring out, are we really going to do this? Is Israel really going to do this? Yeah, it's anybody's guess. Right now, they've got their hands full with Gaza. So, once that wraps up and they they finally achieved their goals there, uh my guess is that they'll have the ability to open up another front wherever they choose, whether it be West Bank, Lebanon, wherever. And that's probably going to continue for a while. In the South Pacific, things are both heating up and cooling down. Earlier this week, there was a brief border clash between Cambodia and Thailand in a very well-known disputed area. This happens occasionally. This is kind of a thing that's been going on for a long time, but for a few days there, it seemed like they were they were really getting ready to go to swinging at each other. This is something that happens quite often in this particular area. It's really just jungle, you know, just south of the Golden Triangle. So, you know, it's anybody's guess as what actually goes on out there in those jungles. But either way, both sides claimed that the other started it, and that's how border clashes usually go in this part of the world. Either way, both countries sent a few thousand troops from what I can tell to the border region before the leaders of both countries stepped in and said, "Hey, you know, cool it kind of thing." So, that's kind of how it remains right now. It's it's cooled off quite a bit, which is good. Uh, I don't know how much Cambodia and Thailand are are going to feel like going to war with each other. I don't think so. I think it's just a brief border spat, but you never know. Stranger things have happened. And it is most certainly the time where every other Tuesday you're just reading about two nations getting ready to go to war with each other. That's just kind of the way it is in the 2020s. So similar situation in China. Uh this week the United States and well China as well have been kind of trading rhetoric back and forth a little bit. The Pentagon the other day uh Pete Hexath the Secretary of Defense has made it clear that the Pacific pivot is definitely a military aspiration. Still, the United States is still very much considering China to be an adversary, especially when it comes to the use of military force in the Pacific theater. Now, I know that sounds like a lot of DC think tank talk, but this is generally true. Uh the United States is most certainly preparing for some kind of military aspiration on China's part. Mostly when we refer to uh this, we're talking about China invading Taiwan and the First Island chain. Not just Taiwan, but the whole first island chain, which includes parts of Japan, Okinawa, and uh the Philippines. So, is an invasion imminent? No, of course not. China's got quite a long time before that becomes uh viable, but they're working on it. China's getting a lot better at a lot of things, and it's going to sneak up on us. At least that's what the the Pentagon is trying to say. I don't know. There's a lot of rhetoric back and forth on that, but generally speaking, that's the kind of status right now. 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 projection, things like that. We're not really getting into the military operation, operational planning phases yet, which is probably a good thing. And speaking of operational planning, uh strategic movement for this week has largely been relatively benign. The Truman Carrier Strike Group uh returned to Norfolk this morning. I saw they pulled into to port earlier uh today a few hours ago. The Carl Vincent remains in the Middle Eastern theater. That's going to be our carrier for there for a while. But now, if you guys will note, we're down to just one aircraft carrier in the Middle East again, which is a good sign. Generally speaking, for those of you who, you know, don't follow this kind of thing. Whenever the United States puts two aircraft carriers in Sentcom in the Middle East somewhere, that tends to suggest that we're either going to war or tensions are pretty high. It's hard to determine which. Maybe there's a intentionality behind that. But still, for the past few weeks, there have been a couple of aircraft carriers in Sentcom's AO conducting operations in Yemen. And now that the Truman's rather unfortunate uh deployment has come to an end, the Carl Vincson remains uh the only flat top in the Middle East theater for now at least. Similar story out in the Pacific. The Nimttz is conducting her final deployment to the Pacific theater. Really just kind of doing the status quo. So we're we're kind of back to a baseline of uh American aircraft carrier strategic movement around the globe, which is a good thing. So it just means that there's not really an increase in tensions to the point to where we feel like a a second aircraft carrier is needed somewhere. Moving to the kinetic activity tracker, there have been a lot of developments, but mostly on the border crisis tracking map. So you can see uh I've got a few riots in Seattle this week. Of course, it's it's Seattle, so that's kind of thing is going to happen. But mostly what I've been focusing on this week have been the events down in Mexico which I'm generally putting on the border crisis map. So it's a different different data set. So there have been two high-profile in incidents this week. Both of which involve the finding of human remains or mass graves. The more high-profile one that's gotten a lot of uh locals upset occurred in the town of Reosa, a border town right on the Texas border there. A local uh band was found murdered. all four members of the band plus their photographer uh that were found in a body dump site just in in a vacant lot there in Reosa because these guys were fairly famous locally. This has sparked local outrage and you know so we're starting to see a little bit more political activism with this kind of thing. This happens occasionally. Again, it's not out of the ordinary, but but because of this focus on a lot of the the cartel problems down there, we're starting to see this a lot more in local media than we have in years past. So, I don't know if this is out of the norm. I don't think it is. I mean, it's fairly violent down there anyway, but there are a lot more of these stories coming to light from within Mexico, such as the finding of a mass grave down in the small town of Iratau, which is in the middle of absolute nowhere. There is nothing there. Uh, I mean, it's it's a fairly, I don't know, moderatesized uh town for central Mexico. But in any case, if you look at the Google Street View of where I was able to geollocate this this uh mass grave to be, it's kind of in the middle of a town. It's right on the edge of a soccer field, right? So, there are houses built up all around there. Normally, when you see a kill site from the cartel, it's going to be in the middle of nowhere. I mean, occasionally it happens in more builtup areas, but my guess is that this whole town is in on it or knows what's going on or full of people who are terrified, but they know exactly what is going on in that town. So, that's a tale as old as time down there. Again, it's not new. In Mexico, you go to the house next door and find 17 bodies one day. That tends to be how it works sometimes. So there are a lot of indicators to help uh identify and start working the cartel problem but I I can just say it's a very big task. There have been a lot of people who have spent 30 40 year careers and they have not put a dent in anything even in their local area. So it's a big problem set. It's bigger than terrorism. It's bigger than journalism. It's it's a very big investigative line of effort. So, uh, please forgive me if if this is going to take me a little while to start getting a better beat on because right now we're we're not even scratching the surface here with the events that are occurring in Mexico. So, we're definitely not seeing the whole picture. We're looking at looking at the issue through a soda straw. But, I do want to focus on some of these more horrific things. Sometimes it's not pleasant, but I think it's important for us to to be mindful of, especially considering how much the cartel's influence uh runs here in the United States. So, moving to the United States specifically, let's talk about the Northeast region for a bit. Moving around the whole country, the general story is that the summertime fund is here once again. A lot of this doesn't really have a whole lot of intel value, but I'll go ahead and skim through it anyway. So, Pennsylvania, there was a mass shooting. It was probably more of a cultural or gang related thing because it involved this large-scale Memorial Day event in the park 10:30 at night. We all know how this goes. Anyway, multiple shooters. Two were killed, nine were wounded in a city park, Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. Not particularly surprising. Locals probably don't bat an eye at this kind of thing, but something to be mindful of being in a city park at night uh in any city of moderate size in the United States. That's a that's a risk these days. Moving over to the southwestern region this week, rather interesting cases of vandalism at various Islamic related sites. So there were two Islamic cultural centers that were vandalized with graffiti and a third site which was a mosque which is uh to the south of of these two sites. I found this to be kind of interesting so I thought I would mention it. Uh but yeah, vandal vandalisms are definitely going to happen a lot more often this summer. This is a very easy assessment to make. Anybody can guess that. But what I thought was quite interesting is when I was putting these uh incidents on the kinetic activity tracker, it looks like we're starting to build a little bit of a pattern here because both of these sites were located pretty close to each other, which is interesting. It kind of makes sense if somebody's foot mobile walking around with a can of spray paint, they're probably going to tag up any site that they can easily walk to. But more interestingly than that, you can see that this is right around the corner or just down the street from a Tesla dealership in which uh which was targeted with an incendiary device. So, we're starting to see, okay, well, now in this small geographic area, we've now got three vandalism incidents. So, again, it's very simple. I'm missing probably a dozen more vandalism incidents that have occurred in this specific area, but I think that now now that this data set is being built and I'm handpicking a lot of these and putting them on the map that it's not just a general crime tracker, we can start to see some of the some how some of these things are uh in the same area as other things. Of course, this doesn't mean that the same guy did all three, but it doesn't mean there's a link at all. I just find it to be kind of interesting that I'm starting to go through the map now and uh put icons on the map and say, "Oh, wait a minute. I already already got something in this area." Which is interesting. So, this is also very interesting to note when we get out to uh out west. So, for instance, in Seattle, the events this week, it's just been one continuous riot basically for the past week or so. Again, this is Seattle. This is the heartland of this kind of thing. It's not really surprising. A lot of the time it's not even worth tracking. Anyway, this week has been a lot more contentious based on the Christian rallies uh that have been held, protest events, prayer vigils, concerts, whatever. There have been a lot of things that have occurred this week. But anyway, Seattle is going to be working through a state of unrest for a while. I would very much urge caution for any of you out there doing research on the mainstream media with this because they're making it out to look like like these Christian groups are the ones who are, you know, beating people and that's that's not true at all. I have not seen media bias as sharp as this uh in a while, honestly, since uh the the Biden presidency. So, I find that to be kind of interesting. Uh it doesn't surprise me, but it's kind of interesting. Right now, for for those of you who are outside of Seattle, it's not really as as bad as 2020, but it could be. Right now, most far-left groups don't really have a lot of the punch that they used to have. a lot of their funding has dried up and a lot of their manpower has not they're they're just not around anymore or they're doing other things. So yeah, Antifa in Seattle doesn't have the mobility that they used to have. Uh they're they're starting to be able to latch on to things and this, you know, provided a convenient target for them. So of course they're going to be able to latch on to that sort of thing. Same thing in places like Cincinnati, Washington DC, New York City. you know, big places like this are uh are definitely anytime a a target is provided, regardless of funding, a lot of these far-left groups or groups that are have very questionable politics, they will seek to cause harm simply because they can. So, that's pretty much all I have for the United States. Uh before we close out today, I want to show you an image from Diego Garcia. That's right, everyone's favorite island that nobody cares about in the middle of the of the Indian Ocean. It's fairly busy. As you can see, we've got a lot of airframes stacked up there at Diego Garcia. This is actually from May 27th. Uh the latest commercial imagery is only partial. So, I don't have a really good uh paid commercial image to be able to identify these, but you can very clearly see that that F-15 squadron that that showed up to Diego Garcia is still there. And the B-52s are still there. So, so yeah, very very busy out there in the middle of the Indian Ocean and uh who knows what we're up to. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Let's roll through the Ghost Net reports for this week. Again, it has been very very good for propagation lately, which is fantastic. I haven't had much time to get on the air this week, unfortunately, uh due to thunderstorms. So, it's always good to get out and test and make sure you're you're uh you're not just a fair weather radio operator guy, but there's also that fine line between you don't want to, you know, get yourself hurt or struck by lightning out there. they're uh trying to operate in in adverse conditions. But but I was able to make the the calm window this week. And we got some good news coming out of Texas. Uh one one person says that the measles outbreak in Texas is subsiding, which is great. Uh so that's uh good to see. Also, somebody pointed out that there's the new CO variant. I guess we're going to have to see what that's all about. And also somebody who just wanted to see their own transmission on an Intel update. So I thought I would oblige and uh show you that I did hear you. coming in hot from Eastern Pennsylvania. So, appreciate all of you for participating in the Ghost Net. It's going to get a lot better very soon. You will see. And it'll be a lot easier for a lot of you to intercept and process and take in a lot of the the news reports that other people can send. I know there's a very high barrier to entry to HF radio, to high frequency or shortwave radio. I know that there's a long list of things you got to do. It's not easy, but uh I will find ways of ingesting this information a lot better and showing that it is a useful tool. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. Again, clickable links everywhere. Um most of the the best ways to get the uh sources for all the information that I put out there is from my Obsidian page. Uh the link is at the end of every single wire report and you click that you'd be surprised as to how little people uh click that and and do research to look at all the sources and raw information that I'm processing to make these uh reports throughout the week. So so check it out if you want. It's there. This is a tool for you to use if you wish. But yeah, uh that's that's all I have for today. Hopefully next week will be a little bit less hectic than this one. And uh maybe we can get into the summertime and not be as uh kinetic as everybody seems to think it will be. So, thank you guys all for your support. Thank you all for watching and we will see you next time.

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.

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.

…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…

…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…

…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…

…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…

…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…

…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…