Intel Update - July 11 - Shadow War Goes Hot

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for July 5th through the 11th, 2026. It's been a busy week as usual, so let's get right to it. Around the world this week, the two main wars that we've been watching for a couple of years now have flared back up with several very serious developments taking place in Europe and the Middle East this week. In Africa, the Russians are involved in intense fighting against the FLA militants in Mali, which have taken control of most of the north and eastern parts of the country. And even though wars in the Sahel region are quite common, this conflict has really served as a window for showing us how the third world has adapted to the modern battlefield when it comes to the use of drones and warfare. Here a bit closer to the home front, similar concerns are emerging as the summer fighting season this year south of the border has been hosted to a rise in drone attacks between rival cartel factions in Mexico. The more desolate and far-flung regions of the earth are starting to use drones in their mostly tribal conflicts. And as the Russians are finding out in Mali and the cartels are finding out in Mexico, drone warfare is most certainly a major concern that is very, very hard to counter. Within the homeland, important events this week have largely been within the political realm as several security improvement efforts are underway in Washington DC. This has not gotten a lot of press, but it's still interesting to note as this gives us an indication of where a lot of concerns are starting to mount. So, let's go ahead and start right there because the security improvements that have been observed this week are rather interesting in Washington. In short, the White House has demonstrated a growing concern regarding the safety of President Trump over the past few weeks. This came to light most publicly during President Trump's visit to Turkey for the NATO summit a few days ago when the Secret Service had to switch back to the old Air Force One due to an undisclosed security concern. This was kind of a big deal at the time because this was supposed to be the inaugural flight for the new Air Force One platform. Initially, President Trump claims that switching back to the old airframe was due to sending the new Air Force One ahead to show it off at various bases around Europe. But eventually, they let slip that this was actually due to security recommendations by the Secret Service. And despite the assurances from the Secret Service that this was just done for no reason and not tied to any specific threat, the Secret Service never does anything for no reason. And the logistical nightmare involved in switching planes during an international trip is such a hassle that it's more likely than not that the Secret Service got spooked about something and they needed to pull a fast one and play the shell game again. Who knows what it was? Maybe they found a pager on board or maybe it wasn't anything specific and they just got a bad feeling. I don't know about this one. It's kind of interesting, but that's not all we have to work with this week. In Washington DC, there have been major security renovations at the White House ongoing for the past couple of months at least. For one, we have the major ballroom construction project, which has gotten a lot of attention from everybody for a variety of reasons. But if we skip past the assorted screeching to realize that the new ballroom is mostly just a cover for the massive compound that's being built underground, this is very obviously a project to build a massive compound for C2 or command and control purposes. It's not exactly a big secret. You can look at this and see this is very clearly what's going on. And this is also something that's not unique to Trump. This has been in the works for a while. So, the ballroom itself is honestly not that interesting. What is more interesting is the new fencing that's been put up and the various perimeter expansions that have been requested to be made over the past couple of weeks. They've been testing out a bunch of different arrangements, but the general gist of the plans is to expand the White House perimeter a bit more so as to improve the security situation. They're still working on it. Nothing is finalized yet, but the general plan would involve closing a lot of public access spaces. So, that's going to be a delicate thing to balance in terms of allowing tourists to still get selfies while preventing small arms attacks. In addition to the fencing, the White House is also conducting security upgrades on the North Portico, which began yesterday. Once again, sources differ on why this construction project is going on. Some sources claim it's restoration work. Others claimed that this was a security breach or something to do with the Secret Service requesting a change to the building in some way. I don't know. There's very little information on this. Of course, the Secret Service is not going to comment on anything like this. And there are a lot of renovations being undertaken all over the White House now. So, it's hard to determine which ones are standard restoration work kind of projects and which construction projects are actually security upgrades. Once again, this is kind of early on in the process and there's not a whole lot to sink our teeth into. I've just been noting this over the past couple of weeks and I haven't really had a lot of time to talk about it. A lot of those can of course get dismissed very easily by saying of course the Secret Service is concerned with the threats to the president because he's lived through at least four different assassination attempts depending on how we're counting them. But at least three of those attacks were actually really close calls. The Butler shooting, the Trump International Golf Club shooting, and the Hinckley Hilton attack just a couple months ago were all too close for comfort. So, it would make sense for the Secret Service to try to be more on the ball than they have been in the past, especially in the context of recent comments by President Trump himself, indicating that he has taken personal contingency plans to conduct strategic strikes on Iran in the event of his assassination. He posted this uh message on Truth Social last night. And well, suffice it to say that the concerns are real uh that a very serious event might take place. Of course, we can't really quantify gut feelings on things most of the time, and that's okay, but it also makes it hard to add weight to decisions that are made. But I did want to mention it because again, it's something that I and many others have noticed over the past uh couple of months, but mostly the past couple of weeks, and the shorter daily reports are not exactly conducive to conveying wild hunches or theories, but I guess I also do that far too often anyway. So anyway, it is interesting though that all of these security upgrades and concerns are coming about at the alleged end of a war when the risk of an Iranian attack would be fairly low, but the risk of somebody else being upset is rather high. Just thinking in terms of the old Columbbo style means, mode of an opportunity right now, who in the whole world would have the means, mode of an opportunity to carry out an attack on the White House or some other important figure and the Iranians get blamed for it? Who could that possibly be? Well, chances are if you're watching this, you're probably uh not going to be fooled by it. But rest assured, most people probably would immediately suspect the Iranians, if anything, happened to President Trump. So either way, no matter what happens, it's interesting to make note of these things. Quiet security upgrades, quiet security practices being enacted. This is most certainly something to be aware of moving forward. And speaking of the war this week, let's transition to the Middle East where things are moving rather quickly once again as contradictory actions are taking place all around the region. Simply put, the United States is both escalating the war, but also deescalating quietly. So, let me explain a bit. As we all know, the war reignited somewhat earlier this week with dozens of strikes taking place throughout Iran. I'm still consolidating all of the geoloccation efforts from the past few days, but it looks like most of the targets were along the coastline in the vicinity of Bucher and Chabahar naval bases at the northwestern and southeastern ends of the coastline of Iran, respectively. Keshum Island was also hit several times over the past couple of days along with the scattering of fast boat bases on the eastern side on the eastern coast of the straight of Hormuz. Continuing the trend, a lot of the rhetoric has been contradictory and confusing. So, we just kind of have to let that sit for this week. But what is a lot more clear and a lot more easily verifiable are the strategic moves that have been made. Namely, that the United States is drawing down forces in the Middle East, at least when it comes to aircraft. The B-52s, which were stationed in England, or at least most of them that were stationed in England, have already come back home. And by my account, a couple of flights of F-15s have also departed. And the F-22s that the US had stationed at Ovda Air Base in Israel, they also departed yesterday. So, a lot of aviation is heading back home to the US or back to their normal bases in Europe. What is not changing is the US Navy's posture. The Bush and Lincoln carrier strike groups are still on station in the Middle East and the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group or ARG has moved back on station after having uh to divert back to port for some repairs a couple of weeks ago. But in terms of potential ground troops, these guys have already been on the station since the war started really now. All of that being said, what has surged into the region that is new is mostly a lot of bombs and missiles. When the ceasefire was announced, then that time frame between the ceasefire being announced and theou being signed, the United States surged a lot of cargo flights into the region. C7s, C5s, standard military cargo flights. Of course, we can't confirm or figure out what's on these military cargo flights. It's not like they're going to publish their cargo on the internet for us to see, but we can guess that this was probably a huge resupply effort to restock and rearm while they could be relatively sure that they would not get targeted on the tarmac. Though another clue that things are very interesting on the strategic front is that the US has begun to stage a lot of tankers at Aludit Air Base in Qatar. As you guys probably remember, if you've been following this war for 5 months of your life now, you will remember that this air base was evacuated early on because the Iranians started hitting it right during the early stages of the war. The United States figured out that it was probably not a super great idea to have a bunch of very expensive refueling tankers on the ground within very close range of the Iranian missile systems. So, the United States emptied this base out over a period of a couple of weeks. This also happened during Operation Midnight Hammer last year. This is how we were able to be decently sure that those strikes were going to go ahead because by the time the last plane left Aluded, well, guess what? The bombs were just a couple of days after that. So, this base is a good a good indicator. I'm sure the DoD knows what they're doing. They know that they can be seen and they're moving a lot of these tankers back into Alud air base. Lot of very very valuable targets on the ground within range of the Iranian missile systems. Now, I don't know if they're doing this because they're stupid and they're just gambling that the Iranians won't hit it. I mean, it's not like they haven't done that before already. That's why we lost an Awax uh during the height of the war. We parked it at an air base. We didn't think the Iranians would have the guts to hit. And surprise, surprise, they actually did. So, I don't know what's going on with this, but generally speaking, if you're seeing a lot of aircraft being staged at IUD, that just means that's where they're normally stationed. And it's a pretty good indicator that the Pentagon doesn't think they're going to get hit there. And if they think they're not going to get hit there, that probably means the Pentagon is not planning any major offensive. At least so the logic goes, if that makes any sense at all. So again, to recap, we have a very strong discrepancy between the rhetoric and the targeting and what's being moved around. The US is moving and has already moved a lot of aircraft out of the Middle East entirely. And the aircraft that remain in the region are now back at the bases where they were struck at during the height of the war. And yet the targeting flared up earlier this week. So, I don't know what's going on. Um, in terms of how this affects us here at home, the energy crisis really mostly just continues. It's like nothing has changed because the straight of Hormuz has only seen very tepid traffic since theou was signed. And now that the ceasefire is officially over, this is President Trump's own words. The ceasefire is over. We're basically back to where things were before the ceasefire was originally announced. So, back to technically a state of war. And as we end the 19th week of the war, we're on week 19 now. Peace does not appear to be a viable option for the time being. So, not a whole lot of closure. It's very much a state of limbo and I think we're going to probably be there for a while. Continuing the trend of wars flaring back up again. The war in Ukraine has begun to spill outside the main conflict zone. So, let's go over to Europe and discuss that conflict. There has not been much media focus on Europe this week. However, the war in Ukraine is beginning to be quite concerning at this point. On the Russian side, the Russians have been consolidating gains in the vicinity of Costantinovka with most reports agreeing at this point that Russia has taken the city for the most part. This was a major objective for Russia to capture and also for Ukraine to defend as it's a comparatively large city in the Donbass, which has been a milestone for a while. Similarly, uh gains are being made up in Sunumi on the northern border. The Russians also continue to slam as many drones and missiles into Odessa as they possibly can with large waves of drone attacks taking place pretty much every night for the past couple of weeks. The Ukrainians are doing the same thing from their side. So, you know, it's kind of a tit fortat sort of thing. And aside from the gains that are being made by the Russians on the Eastern front, the Ukrainian targeting of petroleum sites around Russia within Russia has been the most important factor for stability in Europe. This week, uh, the Ukrainians and the American advisers working with them have continued to strike Russian petroleum infrastructure at many different sites around Russia. Oil refineries and export terminals have been the main target, and many of these places are in extremely remote terrain, which is why it's so hard to geollocate. The Luga oil terminals near St. Petersburg have been hit a few times over the past couple of months, especially over the past couple of weeks. And a few days ago, hit a refinery in Omsk, which is a long way from the front lines. That's an old old school Soviet city and it's a very long way from the fightings. Other than those uh two main attacks, there have also been hundreds of attacks on refineries and fuel storage depots in Moscow. And this week, Ukraine has escalated drone attacks on Russian merchant ships transporting petroleum in the Sea of Az. Once again, the map is misleading. Sorry about that. I'm still trying to catch up. But there have actually been a few dozen attacks on merchant vessels in this general location in the Sea of Azov. The Ukrainians are claiming to have struck 73 vessels in the Sea of Azov over the past week. That's their number and I can't verify it independently but again that's their claim. Regardless of the exact numbers uh this is having an effect in Russia as their supply chain has been disrupted significantly. Fuel shortages have continued throughout the country but how serious this is. It's anybody's guess. It is true that Russians themselves admit there are gasoline and diesel shortages due to the attacks. But the severity of this is up for debate. The Ukrainians of course claim that Russia is on their last legs and it's like Mad Max over there trying to get gas. and the Russians of course claim that this is merely a minor setback that is being addressed. The truth as always is probably somewhere in between. Hitting one refinery is going to disrupt supply somewhere. Uh so you're going to see, you know, footage of long gas lines in various places, but because Russia is so big, it might take a couple of days for another refinery to start shipping oil to those uh more far-flung regions. So again, how bad is this? I don't really know. Either way, regardless of how bad it is, time will tell. I guess the next events to look out for are what Russia is going to do in response. So far, we haven't seen uh an arresting missile slam into the ground in downtown Kiev, but if uh Ukraine keeps this up, I think that's probably going to happen. So, you know, not trying to take sides here, but I think that's probably what's coming down the pipeline. Either way, we shall see how this war develops over the next few weeks. But things are not looking super great in terms of stability throughout Europe. So the Ukrainians and Russians are starting to target each other more significantly and the potential for slowly sleepwalking into a wider conflict remains pretty high. So not super great. It's not the end of the world as always, but something to be aware of even here in the homeland as the United States is substantially invested in the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran. So we've got two major wars that we are either fighting directly or spending a substantial amount of resources on uh kind of keeping going. So, even though it doesn't seem like either of these conflicts affects us, things uh things have a way of catching up to us pretty quickly as the shadow wars around the world keep marching on. And on that note, that's all I have for today. So, let's go ahead and roll things up with the ghost net reports for this week. Again, a fantastic ghost net. It was thunderstorming rather severely uh this week when I was trying to send and receive messages, but that's okay. Still was able to get a lot of uh messages exchanged back and forth, and that's pretty good. On a bit of an administrative note, some of you may have noticed this week I am now hosting my wire reports uh throughout the week on the Nomad Net. And I know I've not explained this just yet or provided a tutorial showing exactly what this is. Uh fear not, it's coming down the pipeline. I'm still getting things organized for the moment, but I'm going to be diving into this a lot more later this year. This project revolves around a communication system that works over the Reticulum network, which is a project that is right up my alley and something I think will be very useful to integrate into the Ghostnet at some point. I'm pretty sure most of you have probably heard of Reticulum before by now, maybe just parenthetically, but just in case you haven't, this is an open- source communications uh ecosystem which allows users to link up in whatever means that they have. If you want to give it a try right now and just kind of copy what I'm doing, you can use any client you want, but right now I'm using Mesh Chat X, which is a client. It's an app you can install on your phone or uh you can download it to your computer and it allows you to access the infrastructure which is Reticulum. It's still a little bit developmental, but I think it works pretty good. And in the spirit of the ghost net, this will be a very good tool for communicating using a variety of different means. You can use Laura devices like meshtastic devices that you buy and flash with mesh meshtastic firmware. You can use ham radios. Uh you can even use a server running on the internet, which is uh kind of what I'm using right now. And it's all going to sync everything up together and allow information to flow across this entire ecosystem. It's not exactly a perfect analogy, but think of this as an app that you have on your phone, which essentially lets us reinvent the internet. Maybe not totally, but the general utility of it. All of it peer-to-peer completely anonymously. And if the entire internet goes down, this will still work via radio. Specifically regarding my work, the wire reports. One thing you can do with Reticulum is host very primitive web pages, kind of like uh the good old days of dialup. But the difference is this can all work over radio. So the same hardware that runs your meshtastic devices. You can do a lot of other cool stuff with it too. You can send files, full-size images, and you can even send voice notes and voice messages through the system. I'm right now using a Halo node that I have set up with this phone out here in the middle of the woods. And it's a pretty cool way of ensuring uh different kinds of communication can be obtained even if you're completely off-rid. I think that's pretty cool. It's like Meshtastic on steroids, but it's a completely different ecosystem and a whole a whole lot heavier than just Meshtastic. So, right now I have my own Nomad Net page up and running connected to the internet. But the general idea is that if one day the internet goes out, the system itself will switch over to radio and we'll still have the same capabilities even during a total apocalyptic scenario. Again, I'm making a whole tutorial on this. So, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, fear not. This is really just for those of you who are interested in the more nerdy kind of radio stuff. All will be made clear in due time. Just like with the ATAC series I'm currently working on, we are rapidly developing a lot of capabilities that help in many different ways, not just in terms of censorship prevention, but also resiliency during natural or man-made disasters. I know it's not exactly an exciting prospect sometimes and the radio stuff is pretty hard to understand and kind of boring, but just think about how you would know what happened if you lost connection to the outside world. Information that goes nowhere is useless. And I myself have been constantly relearning that over the past couple of months. You may not have noticed this, but over the past uh couple of weeks or so, I've been able to research, write, produce, and publish several wire reports while my power was out due to severe storm damage. Hopefully the experience was as seamless as possible, but that's the end goal. Resiliency even during a disaster situation when everything is going wrong. You have a million other things to do and you still need to maintain a link with the outside world so that you can be aware of threats before they get within your area. In my case, I think Reticulum is a pretty good candidate for allowing me to always always always be able to work and provide a wire report or some other kind of report no matter what. I know the end user doesn't really care. uh they just want the information and that's perfectly fine. But I'm getting closer to being able to provide a decently professional product in extremely adverse conditions if need be. If the power goes out, I can still get information to write my report and I can then make sure that that report gets disseminated to other people who might also be in adverse conditions as easily and as seamlessly as possible. And once I get more experience with this sort of thing, once I iron out the details, I can teach you guys how I did it and what I'm doing so that you can replicate everything that I'm doing if you want on your end. Now, maybe we can see the utility of the ghost net. If you have an HF radio and you can send and receive messages on JS8 call, you're about 95% of the way there. There's not really much more to learn. Instead of sending short text messages over JSA call, imagine if you could send photos, short videos and files. You could even maybe potentially even have voice calls. All of this is technically possible to do right now over the ghost net. It's just that the FCC's rules kind of get in the way right now. So, we'll have to work around that somehow and overcome the uh cultural problems within amateur radio. But the general idea is that we are working toward having some serious capabilities very very soon. The ghost net itself is going to stay the same for a long time. I'm not going to make any changes anytime soon, so don't worry about any imminent changes. But this just goes to show what is actually possible. It used to be that if doomsday arrives, in the worst possible case fantasy scenario you can conjure up, doomsday arrives and you go out in your yard and fire up your radio, you'd be able to talk to a few hundred or a few thousand of us who would also do the same and fire up the ghost net and we can exchange information around the world in a textbased format. Well, now at least theoretically, we can send images, send files, even host our own off-grid web pages, which I think is pretty cool. So, with all of that in the pipeline for later on, uh that's all I have for today. Hey, thanks to all of you on Patreon for the support to keep going and sticking with me as I've been trying to figure all this stuff out. I could not have done this without you guys, so I really do appreciate it. And thanks to all of you for watching, and I hope to improve a lot of this resiliency over the next few weeks. So, thanks again, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.