Intel Update — July 19 — Thucydides Traps

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for July 6th through the 19th of 2025. It's been a busy couple of weeks, so let's get right to it. Starting off with the general overview around the United States, there have been several items of strategic note over the past few weeks. Today I'll be focusing mostly on the wartime preparations that the Pentagon continues to undertake as well as some of the biocurity concerns, which is the best way I can think to phrase it, regarding the potential threats to the American food supply. Over in the Middle East, things have been very kinetic as usual with two ships being sunk in the Red Sea region, civil war flaring up once again in Syria and the conflict in Gaza continuing to escalate. As far as strategic movement, I'm sorry I have not had time to update the slides for this week to track down all of the uh platforms that have been moving around. Just a cursory glance this morning, I haven't seen a whole lot of uh very concerning major deployments from the United States. However, there are several major uh military exercises being undertaken around the world that have that are either underway right now or have already occurred and have concluded. Many nations around the world are continuing to break their own records and undertake very large military exercises around the world. And in the American homeland, things are developing much the same. So, starting off with the Southeast region today, let's briefly touch on what's been going on in Washington over the past few weeks. As everyone knows, it has been very, very busy both in Congress and the White House. things have been changing by the minute. So, it's not really been very prudent to comment on things until things have kind of ironed out a little bit. But just very roughly touching on some of the things that may matter a little bit more than you might think. The 50% tariff on imported copper into the United States is scheduled to start in August, which is going to impact things in two main ways. For one, uh the most obvious impact is going to be copper prices uh skyrocketing, which is to be expected. Anytime you're going to tariff something that is a heavily imported good, you're going to have the price of that good go up quite a bit. However, when it comes to things like raw minerals such as copper, this is going to drive up a lot of copper theft. I'll touch on the reasoning behind this tariff uh in just a moment because I think this will make a little bit more sense when viewed in the context of a national security issue or at least I hope that's the decision-making process behind this and not just some other uh political pork trading kind of thing. But when it comes to the average American, look, it's summertime. The weather's pretty hot. We all know that it is both riot and theft season. The theft of catalytic converters, for example, always increases when there is a sharp uh sharp spike in the price of things like palladium, for instance. So, if you all remember uh from a couple of years ago, there was a a pretty good spike in in precious metals and catalytic converters were being stolen left and right. It was a pretty pretty big crime spree. Well, the same sort of thing may happen with copper. Copper is a lot easier to steal in many cases and copper theft is becoming a very big problem in places like South Africa. That's kind of their crime of choice uh in many cases. So going out on a little bit of a limb, this could become a pretty serious problem once these tariffs go into effect. And if they stay for any period of time, stealing a catalytic converter out of someone's car sitting in the driveway is a lot different than stealing several thousand pounds of copper from electrical switching stations or electrical substation, for instance. So the past few years have also very much highlighted how vulnerable a lot of our critical infrastructure is to malign action either targeting to you know by some extremist group or some kind of uh terroristic kind of threat. But when it comes to the average thief a lot of times the average thief is a lot smarter than a terrorist is. So bottom line just be aware of the impacts that copper theft can have uh on your local area mostly when it comes to things like power generation and stuff like that. So it's going to be a pretty rough time in some areas. I think some areas won't be affected so much, but a lot of areas pretty much everything that you know isn't bolted down is stolen on a regular Tuesday and increasing copper prices are going to make people come back with bolt cutters to get whatever is nailed down. So, just something to be mindful of as we move forward. Also, in Washington DC, the FDA has granted approval for the spike vaccine for six-month-old uh children to children 11 years old. So, there's that. And also in Washington, the Epstein scandal continues. I'm sure a lot of you have already been inundated with a lot of this, but the latest information that we have so far is that President Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to release the grand jury uh files regarding Epstein's earlier trials. I'm not sure if it's all of his uh trial data or if it's just the grand jury uh files. I'm not honestly there's really no telling as to exactly what's going to be released. If we recall, after President Trump was elected, uh this was a huge part of the uh initial few weeks of his presidency just a couple of months ago and the White House made a very big deal about President Trump signing orders to mandate the DOJ to release all these files, right? It was this big press conference. There were uh this is all that was talked about by the White House for several weeks, right? Um but we all know how things go. So, I guess we're just going to have to see if anything comes from this. My personal guess is that we're not getting the files. I don't think anyone is actually uh expecting a physical document to be released. Really, the general sentiment here is is more abstract than wanting a specific paper copy of something. Most people just want to know who was involved in Epstein's network. That's the general gist of what's requested here. There's been a lot of manipulation with regards to uh what people are what the American people actually want to see. But just to be absolutely clear, the sentiment right now is that the American people would really prefer to know who Epstein was trafficking uh people to and who was involved in this grand network. And pushing beyond that, they would really appreciate it if there was some kind of prosecutorial effort taken against the people who were uh clients of Epstein. Right? So I just wanted to mention that just for posterity just so that everyone is clear that as of you know the late July 2025 this is the expectation. Uh this is what uh is kind of on the table right now. And I I wanted to state that right up front because I think that over the next few weeks we're going to see a lot more manipulation than we've seen so far. even though we have talked about it for many many years and this has become kind of the rally cry for a lot of the uh corruption and very horrific things going on at the upper echelons of American society. Even though a lot of this has been talked about for a long time, I have I have a very sneaking suspicion. I've just got this gut feeling that this is about to become a very very dangerous topic. And I think that this scandal, if it hasn't done so already, is about to highlight why it would be very wise to tread carefully. A lot of people have gotten really, really comfortable with the Trump administration and the things that they are allowed to say and discuss. And I uh I think that caution is probably a wise move. I hate to be all mysterious like that, but I think that there's more to this issue than meets the eye, which is very obvious to be honest. But there are now many, many indicators that suggest that that this story isn't exactly over yet. And I don't think that this operation has reached a conclusion just yet. So despite what the White House wants us to do, we will continue to focus on not just Jeffrey Epstein, but also all of the other operations that are currently ongoing. This is not just about Jeffrey Epste. This is just the one sort of rally cry that people have uh to sink their teeth into really with regards to some of these types of operations. But yeah, we're just going to have to keep an eye on it, let it develop, take notes, and don't forget what happened. And speaking of national security concerns, the Department of Defense has also been moving and shaking a lot the past few weeks. A few days ago, SOCOM issued a duty to warn in the state of Florida regarding the uh potential targeting of former service members for their uh efforts in Iraq and Syria. I saw this notice floating around on social media a couple of days ago and uh just to kind of quell concerns just a little bit. These duty to warn notifications are a lot more common than you might think they are. Uh it's just that this one's a little interesting because it's kind of a blanket statement, meaning that they probably have a word of some kind of threat against uh retired service members in Florida or people who are kind of out of the game. They probably picked up some chatter on social media, but they don't have any specific threat uh in mind. So, and they and no specific person was named. So, they probably just sent out a general blanket notice just to make everyone aware that uh uh things are pretty hot. And of course, Florida being a very heavily militarized state. A lot of uh a lot of retirees down there. A lot of service members end up retiring down there. The Sentcom headquarters is located in Florida. You know, it's a pretty big uh military state, right? Uh people may not think of it that way, but but it is. So, yes, this is concerning. It's something to be aware of, but uh really there's not a whole lot more to it than that. My guess is if there are any specific threats, uh they're going to handle that probably in-house and uh inform people individually, which is where most duty to war notifications go. They're usually letters uh sent to individual people. Sometimes you, you know, may get a even a knock at the door, right, if if you're being targeted by a terrorist group, for instance. It's it's fairly common throughout the SoCom community, unfortunately. But yeah, just something to be aware of. Keeping with the theme of the Department of Defense, let's move out west and discuss the activities there before moving on to Texas. And in California, the Department of Defense has become the majority shareholder of a company called MP Materials, which is an industrial rare earth mineral uh company which mostly makes magnets for industry and uh commercial purposes. This kind of slid under the radar a couple of weeks ago when it first was announced, and I couldn't find a good way to talk about it until now. But this is a very interesting case uh because we have to note that this is not just a contract. Yes, the Department of Defense did sign a contract with this company and uh wants to increase their production of magnets in the United States for defense purposes over the next uh 10 years, I think. However, this is not just a contract. This is the Department of Defense purchasing shares in a public company so that they are the main shareholder. That's interesting. Essentially, they're buying the company, right? More or less, they're they're now the majority shareholder of this this public uh company, which is very very interesting. And that's kind of a a new development from the Department of Defense. They've done this before. Uh I'm fairly certain, but it does go to show what the DoD is focusing on now, which is uh disconcerting a little bit. By and large, the bottom line up front, so to speak, with regards to what the DoD is doing is the the Pentagon is now starting to very seriously invest in domestic production of things. This goes back to what I mentioned about the copper, right? Why would you want to put a tariff on imported copper? Copper is used to make munitions, bullets, right? And if you're going to go to war with a country, you don't want to have your bullets made with materials from that country, right? So, the Department of Defense has really kicked into high gear efforts to increase domestic production of things like steel, precious metals, rare earth minerals, right? We've heard President Trump talk about the rare earths all the time, right? Well, this is one of the reasons for that, or at least I think and hope that it is. Of course, there's always a potential for these uh financial decisions to be something like corruption or just helping out buddies or securing, you know, postgovernment jobs and things like that. But for me, my lens of the world is through national defense, right? So when I see things like this, my brain goes into national security mode and says, "Ah, okay, they're trying to secure a lot of mineral wealth for the United States. So that if we go to war with someone, when we go to war with someone, we'll be able to produce a lot of this stuff here at home and not have to rely on overseas production with a country that we probably will be at war with." So from my wheelhouse, this is kind of the way that I'm thinking about things. And generally speaking, in a more abstract sense, this is both for me, going back to what I said a few months ago, I think last year, this is both concerning and a good idea. Right? Anytime you see the defense industry making good decisions to engage in things like national defense and do things that would actually be good to help defend the American homeland, uh you both for me at least I have both kind of a a twinge of hey that's a good idea and also a slight bit of concern mostly because of two words thusidities trap. That is a little bit of homework for you if you have not heard of that term before. But the general idea for those of you who don't want to Google it is that when it comes to nation states and warfare, wishing will make it so. And also more specifically, as the spheres of influence for two nations grow larger and start to overlap, it is not a situation of if they will go to war, but when. This is for many reasons, but we see this going all the way back to Greek antiquity, to World War I, and now uh one might say our modern times with the United States and China. One nation starts arming for their national defense and their neighbor says, "Hey, those guys are arming, so maybe we should arm, too." And then a third nation says, "Hey, why are you guys starting to make a lot of tanks? Maybe I should make some tanks, too." And then the first nation says, "Hey, everybody else is copying us. Maybe we should do more." And then it's an arms race between a lot of nations. And there we go. Uh, that's kind of the short version of how World War I got started, to be honest. But when it comes to the United States and China, when you look at things that are being done in the United States and in China, it's not just the United States doing this. China is doing this as well. Obviously, we have better eyes on the United States. So, it's easier for us to make comments on what the United States is doing on our half of uh this sort of trap. But every time you see a story in the news or see something in the wire report of, hey, the the Pentagon has gotten this new contract for this new cool thing or this new radio or this new uh SOCOM is doing this new aircraft design or something like that, you you think and you see the Pentagon making good decisions, right? For once, if you see them making good investments for national national security, well, maybe if we're arming and militarizing so much, we're just going to make it so. To be perfectly honest, when we say forever wars, we just really mean moving from one Thusidity's trap to another. That's really all that means uh in a more abstract sense. And I think that's generally what people are kind of concerned with, or at least that's what I'm concerned with. So, there's both a good job pat on the back, but also a twinge of maybe this means we're going to war at some point. And that's more or less how I personally view the US defense industry at this point. So, uh enough on that. I know that it's a big topic, but uh we'll move on here to something uh also quite concerning, which is uh the biocurity concerns down in the American Southwest. Really Texas is kind of at the center of this, Oklahoma as well. But again, this is more of a national issue than just uh Texas and Oklahoma. So, there have been over the past few weeks, months, years, uh, growing concerns with regards to biocurity, which I guess is I don't know if that's the right term or not, but it's the best way I can think to describe the threat of things like blight, pestilence, parasites, any kind of bad things that may affect our national food supply. Thankfully, the USDA has reversed their horrifically bad decision to open up the ports of entry for Mexican cattle due to the new world screworm concerns. Uh, everyone said this was a very bad idea at the time, but you know, big cattle is a is a big is a big problem and that's another rabbit hole in and of itself. But anyway, uh the new world screworm concerns are continuing to mount. Of course, halting the spread of cattle into the United States and focusing more on domestic uh cattle production is probably one of the better ways to to monitor and make sure that this uh this parasite doesn't spread. But again, the agricultural community has been getting hit uh left and right over the past few years when it comes to pests and parasites. So, another one that's kind of popped up is the Asian longhorned tick. Now, I mentioned this in the wire yesterday. Uh, again, it's not really something that is uh a new thing. It's certainly not new, but I did want to mention it anyway because it's it's I hesitate to say it because I don't have the data just doesn't exist yet. But this uh this tick may be entering into the exponential growth phase where we're starting to see it rise quite exponentially. So, again, this tick was first discovered in 2017 and spreads a bunch of diseases, but mostly ones that kill a lot of cattle. A few universities have been monitoring it and uh trying to kind of get a hold on it and trying to see how bad it is uh over the past few uh years. But over the past couple of months and couple of weeks really a couple of universities have have really been raising the alarm bells because they're uh trying to conduct a lot of surveys and the very initial unscientific initial results are that it's pretty bad. So, as we can see, these ticks are spreading like wildfire uh everywhere from Texas to Ohio and Pennsylvania. This is most certainly not something that is in my wheelhouse at all, but I did want to mention it because of the national security concerns, which kind of is is what I do. So, like I said in the wire yesterday about this, it it is really really easy to when any kind of biological threat or potential biological threat comes up, it is incredibly easy to stoke fear and panic. But I did want to mention it because this is kind of an important thing to to keep an eye on. Of course, always being aware of the context that these kinds of threats pop up all the time, right? Whether it's some kind of blight that was smuggled into the United States by a Chinese student or some kind of tick that is swarming cattle herds around the country or some kind of curillion death ray. In the world of biological threat concerns, there is always some kind of doom and gloom impending worldending disaster. So, I don't want to make it out to seem like this is some kind of new, oh my gosh, freak out right now kind of thing. But, it is a concern to be aware of because there's just not a whole lot of focus. You would think that after the CO years that there would be this massive push in the CBR&E community to focus on the bee, right, the biological threats, and to kind of really examine what went wrong. What if CO was way worse than it was? Well, from from what I've seen, there really hasn't been that level of frank discussion. And there's been a lot of people talk about, okay, well, the, you know, the social freakouts that that happened, right? There's been a lot of that, but nobody's really sat down and said, you know, what if this was a legitimate bioteterrorism thing, at least not in the open world. There hasn't really been a whole lot of frank discussions on that. But, I don't know, maybe maybe people just want to kind of forget the co years and move on. But either way, this is kind of in the same vein of uh people not really wanting to pay attention to this sort of thing, even though it is kind of a pretty big concern. So, the alarm bells are being raised by various universities on the subject. So, I thought I would uh touch on it at least and hopefully mitigation efforts will be undertaken and we can kind of uh tamp this one down once again. But again, this is just another way of highlighting the larger issue, which is that when it comes to biological threats and things like that, uh I don't think we've really learned our lesson over the past few years. And um maybe maybe we should focus a little bit more on that than we have. So that's pretty much it for the United States. Let's briefly touch on the events of the Middle East. Uh and starting with the Red Sea Horn of Africa region. Two vessels were sunk uh last week, both of which were targeted in complex attacks by uh the Houthi militants in Yemen. I know everyone thought that we were kind of done with the Red Sea for a while, but nope. Uh the Houthies are still there and they're still sinking ships. Uh at least one of these vessels was bound for Israel, which is why it was struck. I don't know about the other one. I've seen a lot of conflicting reports on both of these vessels. So, uh please take all of this information with a grain of salt, but these two targeting efforts really highlight the fact that the issues in the Red Sea are certainly not over just yet. And if we take just a slightly closer look at at least one of these instances, uh such as the merchant vessel the Eternity Sea. Now again for the casualty count, the math is not mathing here. So u the numbers are very wrong. Uh but we have to go off of something. And there were several crew members that were killed by the initial blast uh from the cruise missile and the drones that struck the vessel. But what I found interesting is that a lot of the crew members uh who were rescued from this vessel were actually recovered from the water. And I mean from the water. They were not on a life raft. They were in the water for over 24 hours before they were rescued. So talk about a miracle rescue right there. Uh that's pretty impressive. Now I found that to be very interesting because in the past the Houthis would very obviously target a ship uh in a way that would cause minimal casualties among the crew. Now there were casualties especially when they were targeting things like engine rooms. Uh so engineers down below deck would often get killed uh by strikes uh on commercial vessels. But as as much as people may not want to think about it, the Houthies when this first when this thing first started, they did take some efforts to not uh anger the world too much, right? Uh by just going after the ship itself, but I think with the Eternity Sea, this may not entirely be accurate anymore. Uh things have gotten a little bit more serious. Again, we have to look at things through a lens of public relations. And the Houthis are absolutely, or at least they were in the beginning, absolutely going for a PR victory, right? So they would over dramatize uh how they were gracious towards the crew. They would let the crew get into life lifeboats before finishing off a vessel. Uh they would uh just try to disable the vessel with causing minimal harm to the crew, right? Because killing a lot of crew members, the Houthis don't really care either way, right? But if you kill the crew of a vessel, you're going to uh bring a lot of international condemnation than that you would not otherwise get if you were trying to play the play the role of a gracious insurgent group kind of thing. Well, that seems to kind of gone out the window uh because they did not let the crew get into lifeboats this time. Everybody just kind of jumped overboard and fled for their life as best they could. There were also some reports that the crew were taken captive of at least one of these vessels. Again, I don't I don't know if that's true or not. I haven't been able to verify that independently just yet, but yeah, it looks like uh the Houthis are starting to not be so PR minded anymore and they're just striking vessels uh especially ones bound for Israel that are a lot more brutal, I guess, than efforts they took in the past. So again, we may not want to think about details like this, but again, the world of international shipping, this is a big money industry, right? I know it may not seem like it, but you've got private intelligence firms, you know, producing quarter of a million dollar intelligence reports on this crisis, right? And there's a lot of money, very big money in shipping, and they are taking note, right? The fact that crew members were in the water in their life jackets for over 24 hours before being rescued. From a survivability uh perspective, that's going to be a very, very big risk now. Uh, and I think that that's probably going to uh cause a pretty big wave throughout the uh maritime survivability search and rescue community because that's very that's a very interesting statistic and data point. It probably won't matter to most people honestly, but these these little details that kind of that kind of stand out to me with regards to these sinkings. So, we shall see if uh any sort of shipping increases throughout the Red Sea. I highly doubt it. I think these two were probably trying to sneak through thinking that a change of American policy was worth the uh financial risk of kind of running the gauntlet here and it didn't really work out for them. So yeah, things are going to continue to stay expensive. Ships are going to continue to go around Africa as they have been. Uh which is kind of an interesting note. Not a whole lot of ships resumed their traffic through the Red Sea uh when President Trump became uh president. And I think that's a very interesting thing to note. So anyway, moving up north to the Middle East proper. The war in Gaza continues as before amid a high-profile targeting instance of a Christian church in Gaza City. This has gotten a lot of uh press because of uh how serious it is. If I am not mistaken, there is only one uh Roman Catholic church left in Gaza City and the Israelis just hit it with a tank shell the other day. So uh Israel has claimed credit for it, but they claim it was a mistake and we all know how that goes. But it's increased tensions throughout the region and it just kind of brings focus back to Gaza and the fact that the war still continues there and we may it may be out of the news. It may be financially damaging for most people to talk about even to this day, but it's still there. It's still a problem. It is still a conflict and the war there has no end in sight. Likewise in Syria, things are kicking off uh into high gear once again. I think it would very much be safe to say that a civil war is is underway in Syria. Again, over the past few weeks, the Drews militias south of Damascus has have really consolidated gains throughout mostly the district of Sueda, but also Dar. And there are some very grizzly content on social media regarding all of these forces that are involved in this sort of thing. So again, it's very, very brutal. It's not it's not really the same flavor of civil war as the civil war that the United States was involved in. You got to remember during the initial Syrian civil war, which was uh depending on how you define it, about 15 years long, that conflict wasn't necessarily what I would personally call a true civil war. It was more of a proxy war than anything else. I'm again it's semantics the way you define it but this time there appears to be and I may be completely wrong on this but there appears to be less international uh interest in being involved in Syria. It's really just a few people mostly Israel uh who is invading Syria to the south and trying to expand tour gains but also Turkey in the north trying to do the same. Of course the United States is involved too. Uh we've still got a military presence in Syria and of course we helped topple Assad u a while ago, right? But over the past couple of months, this is really what I would consider to be more of a a true civil war kind of thing. Of course, there are proxies, right? The a lot of Drews tribes are proxies of Israel, right? This is very very plain to see, right? When Israel is striking the Ministry of Defense in Damascus to help out the Drews militias uh down south in Sua, that's kind of clear at that point, but not all of them, right? So Syria is again a very complicated place. It is a very very uh hard conflict to describe. But this time around you're going to see continued brutality from either the Arab Bedawins who are going to be targeting the Drew militias, the Drew militias who are targeting the Arab Bedawins, the Syrian government, Galani's forces which whichever forces he's been able to, you know, gather around himself and his administration to kind of basically just hold Damascus. That's a a tenuous task as well. And basically the Syrian situation is more or less just a wash at this point. Both Israel and Turkey will without question uh take advantage of this fray to basically just let a lot of militia groups kill each other to the point to where they can just come in and mop up forces and take more terrain. Uh Israel in the south and Turkey in the north. It's a lot more complicated than that, but in terms of an American audience, this is pretty much the only thing that anyone would probably care to notice. As far as what this means to the rest of the world, I don't really know what the impact is going to be too much. It's just that anytime there's a a war or a pretty big power vacuum forming in Syria, it inevitably ends up impacting Europe and the United States in some way. Uh either directly or indirectly. So, it's something to keep an eye on. Uh Syria kicking up again, but once again, direct impacts are are going to be pretty hard to determine at the moment. So, bottom line, the Middle East is on fire again. No real uh end in sight for any of the wars that are currently going on there. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Let's go ahead and roll things up with the intercepted ghost net reports. I'm sorry. I've uh been a little bit absent from the ghost net over the past couple of weeks. I've been having really severe weather here uh at my location over the past couple of weeks. So, I've had to rely more on web SDRs to kind of see what everybody's kind of talking about because I didn't want to uh string up my antenna during a very severe thunderstorm. But either way, the the network continues on, which is fantastic to see. There has been an update to JSA call. I have not tried it out yet, but a lot of good things coming for from JSA call, which is always good to see uh anytime there are good developments in the the world of HF radio. So, it's growing. It's continuing on. It's fulfilling its mission. I have been working on some other products to kind of flesh out the the the overall communications plan a little bit more and make things a little bit more clear to understand. But, it's going to take me a while before I have anything ready on that front. But, things are continuing on as before. And uh I really thank you all for making this network a great thing. So that's all I have for today everyone. Here are the sources as usual. For those who don't know, all of these uh sources can be found on my Obsidian page uh sorted by the day. Uh this goes for my wire reports as well. Most of the platforms that I publish the wire uh reports on heavily penalize uh links. So that's why I have just one URL at the end of the wire report so you can go and check out uh the sources for that day. It's kind of a logistics thing. I wish I could just, you know, post all the links in in the report itself, but you guys know how it goes. Most platforms nowadays don't like external links linking off of their website. So, it makes it hard for the reports to kind of get out there. But either way, that's how I kind of handle the research for the moment. But yeah, uh that's pretty much all I have for today. Thank you guys all for sticking with me. Uh thank you for all of your support over the past couple of weeks. Just trying to keep moving forward and uh taking things one day at a time. And I guess that's pretty much uh the best we can do these days. So, thank you guys again for all of your support and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.