Intel Update - August 15 - Guns of August

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for August 9th through the 15th of 2026. As usual, it's been a rather packed week as the crazy times have continued and I'm going to be all over the place today because we've got a lot of really random stuff to cover. So, let's get right to it. As usual, the wars in the Middle East continue as before with no real indication it's going to end anytime soon. The Iranians have continued to strike vessels nearly daily in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Houthis have continued hitting Saudi refineries down south in the Red Sea region. Over in Europe, the war in Ukraine has continued to drag on with Russia and Ukraine targeting each other's infrastructure in increasingly serious ways. Though, Ukraine has started to slow down their attacks on Russian tanker vessels in the Black Sea because Russia has started hitting their critical infrastructure a little bit more substantially over the past week or so. Within the homeland, fuel prices are on the rise once again with diesel being the main focus that will keep rising in price while the market remains heavily impacted by the wars in the Middle East and in Europe combined. As this month has demonstrated so far, all of the shooting all around the world has resulted in those pesky second and third order effects from the Iran war, the Houthi conflict, and the war in Ukraine continuing to manifest here on the home front. for the Iran war side of things. Now that that conflict has been dragging on for about half a year now, we have a slightly better picture of the impact that this conflict is going to have on the domestic homeland over the next few weeks. But before we get into the homeland of this week, let's start with a recap of some of the more pressing issues which have popped up around the world. Starting with Europe. Throughout the continent of Europe, there have been a number of random and mostly unrelated items I wanted to cover. Starting with the drone attack incident at the airport in Leipig last week. So far, there is no real solid proof in the public eye regarding which nation might have been behind the drone attack at the German airport, which was allegedly targeting Ukrainian cargo aircraft that were parked on the tarmac. Of course, like I noted last week, the knee-jerk reaction has been to blame Russia, which is fair enough, and most of the mainstream media outlets have loosely gone with this theory in the absence of anything better. However, the Germans have been rather telling with their silence. Most German sources have not officially determined who the culprits are for this attack, which is probably a pretty big clue. Of course, the investigation continues on, so more details may or may not come out eventually, but it's pretty interesting that once this incident hit the media last week, there haven't really been too many reports on it since then. Either way, there are motives to lie about this from both sides, and there's really no telling what actually happened here. If Ukraine is behind it, the German government is motivated to lie to protect their ally. But if Russia is behind it, Germany might also be motivated to lie because it's an embarrassing incident that draws attention to how defenseless their homeland is. On the other hand, Germany can spin this in their favor as well by using this as a way of drumming up more support for the war. So, I don't know. For now, I'm calling it a wash because there's not enough info to determine what the truth really is at the moment. This time, the attack did not actually succeed. Or maybe it did succeed if it was a scup. I don't know. But when we're dealing with plastic explosives and aircraft, I get a little bit nervous. So regardless of whether or not this was a false flag attack or if it was a genuine attack when we're dealing with Simex and passenger aircraft, that's not really a good combo. So hopefully this will not escalate, but we all know that it certainly will. Aside from the war itself, wildfires have continued to spread around the continent, most of which have been confirmed to have been arson. As of last night, roughly 70% of the fires are suspected of being deliberate arson incidents. France appears to be the hardest hit by the arson attacks this wildfire season. Or at least their authorities are more forthcoming with stating that these incidents are arson because over 500 people have been arrested this year for deliberately setting wildfires in France. I do not have any information on the people who have been arrested because France protects criminals much like Germany does. So I don't know if these are regular French citizens or if they are new French citizens, if you know what I mean. I doubt that we will get more fidelity on these arson events, but it's a good reminder to stay vigilant and be aware that wildfires are now a mainstream weapon used by malign actors both overseas and here at home. So, speaking of the homeland, moving to the United States for this week, right now the biggest immediate problem is fuel. During the very brief ceasefire in the Middle East last month, the situation was looking to start recovering at first, but then the US scrapped theou deal and the situation has gone right back to being problematic once again. During that ceasefire period, the amount of crude oil that exited the Gulf was merely a drop in the bucket as confirmed by the International Energy Agency, who issued their latest monthly report a couple of days ago. This report confirms that the entire planet is still not able to make up for the loss of oil out of the Middle East, and the problem is one of basic addition and subtraction. The Gulf provided about 20 million barrels per day before the war. And even with all mitigating factors such as the Saudi East West pipeline, shipments running the gauntlet through the minefield and so on, we are still short by over 8 million barrels per day. So the whole world, not just the US, but the entire world, is having to make up that 8 million barrels per day every day that this war goes on. And most are doing what the US is doing, draining their strategic reserves. Let us not forget the war in Europe is also impacting the oil markets heavily now as Ukraine has continued to strike both Russian oil refineries deep inside Russia as well as oil tankers in the Black Sea. In short, the Ukrainian targeting of Russian refineries has taken an already very stressed oil market and fractured it even more. Again, the Ukraine issue is a very hot button topic, but that's just the facts of the case. The Ukrainian targeting of Russian tankers in the Black Sea over the past month or so, combined with the Russian refineries being taken offline or heavily damaged in some way. Well, that means production is cut from Russia and now the people who are buying the Russian oil, which is surprise surprise, most of the planet, now they have to get that oil from somewhere else. And oil is a zero sum game. If Malaysia buys a barrel of oil for their national infrastructure, then that's a barrel of oil that we can't buy eventually from wherever it's going to come from. So again, markets are complicated, but as both situations have been going on for such a long period of time, cracks are appearing at the various levels of the entire globe's energy production ecosystem, and basically everything is affected. Most immediate concerns lie with diesel fuel uh within Europe this week. Diesel actually became more expensive than jet fuel uh due to the widening global diesel shortage. Rising diesel prices usually directly and immediately translate to higher food prices because nearly all commercial goods around the world are transported on diesel trucks and trains. And whenever it becomes more expensive to move cargo, those costs are passed on to the consumer. It takes a while for these costs to make their way down to the consumer, but eventually they're going to make it there. So fertilizer shortages are another major concern, and these have already been baked in for months now. So we are possibly starting to see those second order effects come about right now, which once again compound food prices. Also, my friend Marina OnX reminded me of this report this morning, which came out a couple of days ago and details the closure of several Tyson Foods meat packing plants out west. Tyson Foods has deliberately stated that the reason for the closure of these two facilities is due to the national beef shortage. I do not know if Tyson's claim is truthful or not. They could be using this as an excuse for something else, but they are most certainly laying off hundreds of people in Utah and Nebraska. And it is very true that there is a national beef shortage and it's getting worse. As a reminder, we actually talked about this a few weeks ago after the July cattle inventory report was published. And back then, we reached the milestone of American cattle herds being at their lowest level in decades. Now, the reasons for this decline in the national cattle herd is debatable and due to many different factors, but the two biggest factors are drought, which has reduced available grazing lands, but also the price of cattle feed. The drought doesn't really have much to do with the war, but the feed supply does because the war and inflation are driving up feed prices and reducing the total number of cattle that smaller ranchers can raise in this year's cycle. Once again, compounding factors make things worse and getting hit with high feed prices at a time when drought has reduced grazing land is not super great. So, the concerns that are coming online right now are elevated diesel and fertilizer prices, a beef shortage that has now progressed to the point that meat packers are shutting down facilities, and there's no real clear end to the crisis for the time being because the war is going to continue on just like it has for months now. So, speaking of that war, moving to the Middle East for this week, the war marches on with no real solution or settlement being likely at this time. This week, the White House has taken the position that the war will not end anytime soon and that they are quote unquote low-keying diplomatic efforts. President Trump himself, when questions by journalists about the issues on board the Lincoln carrier strike group, stated that the already record-breaking deployment has not gone on long enough, which is a pretty clear indication of the long-term nature of the conflict. Many pundits are continuing to theorize that the White House is looking for an off-ramp to the war, but as of this week, that no longer appears to be the case. The tactical situation on the ground does not indicate a return to the full-blown stage of the war just yet, but right now the situation looks like it's going to continue stagnating for a while. This is most clearly indicated by the various strategic and logistical movements this week. Again, centering around that Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. A few days ago, the Pentagon announced that the USS George Washington would be replacing the Abraham Lincoln, taking up station in the Arabian Sea. For those who have not been glued to CNN this week, there has been growing controversy on board that Lincoln carrier strike group. Now, most of this is really hard to verify, but claims have been made that morale on board the Lincoln is not good. Complaints from sailors on board have been growing for months because this carrier strike group has been at sea for the longest any aircraft carrier has been without a port call. We don't know the exact number of days at sea because the departure date from Guam took place between satellite images, at least from what I can see, but it's well over 260 days a float without a single port call in between. Now, I know that a lot of guys will say that this is nothing. And I've seen a lot of brovets clowning on the Navy regarding this deployment because they somehow think that acknowledging hardship for someone else negates their own hardships. And that's certainly not the case. Every deployment is different and even on the same ship, experiences can vary quite a lot. This seems like it wouldn't matter, but it really, really does. Even at the strategic level of national defense, some of the guys down in engineering don't see the sky for months sometimes, and the psychological effect of this simply cannot be felt unless you experience it yourself. I add in this context to hopefully explain that on board ship, morale is a real delicate balance sometimes. And when that balance gets thrown off, people snap and very, very bad things happen. Yes, it is true that this can and does happen in pretty much every military unit, but we have to remember that when it comes to an aircraft carrier, the stakes are pretty high. Earlier this week, reports started circulating about a rash of sailors attempting to jump overboard. Now, once again, I'm trying to be as delicate as possible here because this is a very touchy subject, and I'm not able to encapsulate this uh super well. Normally, every carrier strike group has at least one per deployment. With a ship the size of a small city and a population of about 5,000, not counting the resupply and escort ships, there's always one or two people who take their own lives on deployment, unfortunately. However, a bit of inside baseball knowledge is that when they occur in clusters, there's a bigger issue and more broad investigation is usually quietly undertaken. Same thing happens with non-fatal mishaps, which usually take place on the flight deck or hanger bay or someplace that's really dangerous like that. When one guy loses a finger, it's a bad day. But when a dozen guys all have mission impacting injuries all within a short time frame, look closer because it's usually a leadership problem. As with all naval deployments in the modern era, you can't really know what's going on on those ships unless you are physically there. It's the strangest phenomenon ever and probably why real life incidents are immortalized in novels like Mutiny on the Bounty. You just have to be there to understand how the atmosphere on board ships plays out. Some ships, it's not really perceivable. They function as a unit just like any other military organization. But on some ships, you set foot on the quarter deck and just feel that something is not quite right. I don't know what's going on on board the Lincoln, but I also will extend a lot of leeway to the people who are there and say that it's not going well. And this will matter here in a minute when we discuss what comes next. Just for some historical context, the last time that US Navy aircraft carriers were running this many combat operations while being engaged themselves was World War II. Not even during Vietnam were US Navy aircraft carriers hit this hard with as many missiles and as many targeting engagements as these carrier strike groups have been uh undergoing over the past few months. So for the Navy, this is the most fighting they have had since that time. And during World War II, aircraft carriers were rarely in a hot shooting combat zone for more than say a month at a time. Obviously things have changed quite a bit since then, but the Lincoln has been at sea with no port call for almost 9 months. And those port calls are not just for vacation time either. We don't focus on them for morale first, even though that is generally what how sailors remember them. The main reason for port calls being so important is to unload stores and supplies more quickly and substantially than can be flown in on small cargo aircraft. And the logistical element is the more important part to all of this. So let's just put a pin in that discussion and come back to that idea later on. Just just remember that for later. On the more hot shooting side of the war, the two hottest regions right now in the Middle East are the Straight of Hormuz, where ships have been getting hit pretty much every single day, and also down south with the war between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, which has started flaring back up every few days or so. As to why ships keep trying to sneak out through the straight of Hormuz when they know there is a very high chance that they will get struck, I don't know why they're doing this. Maybe they are listening to the mainstream media and the White House telling them to go for it. But the truth of the matter is that every ship that I found attempting to sneak through the southern Omani route this week has been struck by Iranian cruise missiles and drones. There may have been some sneak through. If that's the case, congratulations. But so far, it looks like a pretty high failure rate for ships who don't want to take the Iranian route. Down south, the net result of the Houthi targeting has been to reduce the Saudis overall oil production capacity, which once again is compounding an already bad problem. As a reminder, the Saudi East West pipeline is being used to bypass the Straight of Hormuz entirely to the tune of roughly 6 to 7 million barrels per day, allegedly. It's probably less than that, but that's the number we have for now. Well, this week, the Houthies have been hitting these Saudi pumping stations and Ramco refineries in southern Saudi Arabia, which have put strain on this pipeline system, which is farther to the north. Additionally, the Houthis being able to strike Saudi oil tankers unloading oil at Yanboo has proven that the Saudi pipeline is not relevant if the oil can't be loaded onto ships for fear of strikes. Once again, none of this is particularly new. It's been that way for months now. It just warrants constant reminder because this war continues to expand and has become a major mess all around. The Houthi Saudi war does not really get a lot of press because the Western media has really tried to avoid admitting that the Houthis are actually a pretty significant fighting force. But the Saudis are really stepping up their efforts to escalate their decadel long war against the Houthis. And the Saudis are doing so in ways that try to keep the fight below the level of outright warfare, but still get their their digs in when they can. And the Houthis are wise to their efforts, such as a strike on the small cargo vessel/container ship, the Tyama earlier this week. This was a cargo vessel that was allegedly carrying arms and munitions from Saudi Arabia to the official Yemeni government, which has been ousted from power by the Houthis, but they're again propped up by Saudi Arabia. Well, Houthie intelligence networks found out what was on board this ship and then they struck it with either a drone or a cruise missile. And then they hit the Aramco refinery in Yamu again just for good measure. Similarly, various strikes have been ongoing in the more remote parts of Yemen as the Houthis are playing whack-a-ole on the various tribal groups and staging areas that the Saudis are using to wage war within Yemen. The Houthies have hit the port facility of Mocha several times this week, targeting all the Saudi efforts to stage forces there. This city is still controlled, well, it's it's contested. It's contested, but it's still controlled by the Yemeni government, and it's a foothold for Saudi Arabia to get cargo into Yemen to help the government. Well, the Houthies have been slamming ballistic missiles into that port all week long. Basically, I know this is not the easiest thing to understand. This is a super complicated conflict and ordinarily this would really not be worthy of mention if the war in the Persian Gulf was not a factor. Nobody's going to care what goes on in Yemen. Nobody has cared what happened in Yemen for 10 years now. Nobody even really cared when the US was bombing Yemen last year. But since the Persian Gulf is offline now, Yemen's important because the Saudi back door is essentially threatened by the Houthis. Last year, the US waged war against the Houthis for several months before basically abandoning that mission quietly after they realized that continuing to do what the Saudis did, i.e. bomb random stuff from the air for a decade, doesn't actually work against this particular adversary. The effect of that at the time was pretty substantial, and it took almost 6 months for international shipping lanes to adapt to just going around Africa and avoiding the Red Sea region altogether. But again, now that the Gulf is compromised by the war in Iran, the Houthi targeting has a much higher impact because the Red Sea is an even more important lifeline for oil exports. And this maritime artery being choked off to some degree on both sides in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. This is going to be more of a problem than it otherwise would be. As far as where we go from here, we are probably going nowhere fast since the US has continued to drain the SPR at record pace. It's hard to say when our strategic reserves will hit rock bottom, but we might be looking at around the November time frame. Obviously, this timeline for when things start getting really serious will shift depending on how both wars go, both the war in Iran and the war in Ukraine. If both sides remain kind of stagnant like it is right now, obviously, we will have more time for logistics to stabilize and maybe hopefully find a solution. I don't see how we're going to do that, but again, it's it's not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is if the war picks back up, which is going to eliminate what little mitigating efforts we've taken so far. And this is also where the Lincoln carrier strike group comes back in. Zooming back out to a more strategic level, the problems on board the Lincoln have been made worse because of the logistical problems they have been having. Morale has been quite poor because the food supply has reportedly been quite bad. Sailors and marines are reportedly not getting enough to eat or the quality of the food is not good or it's rotten or just generally inedible. Once again, many of you may be surprised to find out that this is actually quite a common thing on board Navy ships and has been so for quite a while. The longer the deployment goes on, the worse the food gets. That is just something that happens. However, since the deployment has gone on for so long, logistics are even more strained. What adds in more tension to the system is the fact that the US Navy has had to shift most of their logistical resupply operations to Diego Garcia since the normal logistics hubs in Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE have either been hit by the Iranians already or they are about to be. This is probably why the situation on the Lincoln is not so great. The carrier has had to stay out to sea far from land for many months now simply to avoid getting hit by Iranian missiles. The only place that is decently safe to bring the carrier into port is Diego Garcia, which is too far away from the operational area for the carrier to make just a quick port call. It would probably take a full week for the Lincoln to get to Diego Garcia. And even when they get there, there's really nothing for the crew to do because it's basically just a secret logistics hub in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The other side of that coin is that if the US Navy is increasing their already significant logistics hub at Diego Garcia, that might be a clue that this war is planned to escalate. Right now, nothing is happening in the UAE. Nothing is happening in Dubai. And even though Bahrain has been hit pretty hard and a lot of warehouses have been destroyed in Kuwait, they can certainly still run logistics out of those places if the situation stays the same. But the US Navy is taking measures to fortify their logistical chains to the point that they are willing to risk crew morale turning sour. So sour that they're having to replace this carrier with another one just so that they can run logistics out of bases that won't be within Iranian drone range. In short, the Lincoln's morale problem seems kind of frivolous until you realize that it is the canary in the coal mine for the underlying logistical problems and how strained the US Navy is right now. I think the military seal lift command has been moving most of their efforts to Diego Garcia. This is of course no big secret. They began this process months ago, but the problems on board the Lincoln have really shed some light on how dire the situation is and the links that the Navy has gone to to bring Diego Garcia online as a major hub for operations. So, cutting through the chaff, we end the week with mixed news. The war continues on as it has for weeks, and the fuel crisis is getting worse every day. But the biggest concerns lie with the US Navy making preparations for this war in the Middle East to continue much longer than anyone seems to think it will last right now. Once again, the like 30th week in a row of not super great news. But at least we now have some kind of general understanding of what the US government is planning for. And they are planning for a much longer war. And on that foreoding note, that's all I've got for today. So let's wrap things up with some of the more interesting Ghostnet reports for this week. As most of you already know, this weekly radio network is our continuing effort to bring more practical information to the world of shortwave radio. Every week, uh, people from all around the world transmit textbased news and information that they think might be helpful. And during the summertime, most people take the time to improve their radio setups, test everything out, and make sure everything's good to go just in case it's needed. We are most certainly still in the era of everything from major cyber attacks to censorship and media manipulations. So, it's really good to have an alternative economy of information exchange, if you will, which can function even under the worst conditions completely offline. So, that's all I've got for today. Thanks for sticking with me through this very complicated week. The longer these wars drag on, the harder it is to figure out what disaster is going to pop up next. But even though we rarely have good news, I think we're still doing pretty good. And staying as prepared and as vigilant as we can be is definitely quite helpful. So, thanks again to everyone on Patreon for keeping the project going. I could not do it without all of you. And once again, all of my research for the week, including clickable links and sources, is on my Obsidian page, organized by the day, where you can get each wire report. I'm starting to improve my situation for publishing these wire reports to my NomadNet page on the Reticulum network. So, for those of you who are kind of into that stuff already, that's already uh going and I'm trying to make it a little bit better. But suffice it to say, there's a lot of different ways to get a lot of different information. So, thank you to everyone for watching and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.