Intel Update - Nov. 7 - Dark Nights

Hello again everyone, and welcome back to The Underground. This is the intel update for November 1st through the 7th, 2026. In the wake of the midterm election fiasco, the war remains in the balance, and everyone is wondering where we go from here. So let's dig in and try to get some answers. Within the homeland this week, the biggest news is the election bloodbath for the Republicans, the fallout of which is likely to result in more resignations and/or firings as fractures within the White House become more apparent. Some of this talk of resignations and firings directly impacts how the United States intends to prosecute the war and where the war in Iran goes from here. Over in Europe, the chaos continues with protests remaining constant in France and the coup situation in Poland causing instability in the systems of governance as the pro-EU factions attempt to consolidate their power throughout the continent. Ukraine and Russia have engaged in serious fighting this week, with both sides intensifying their efforts to hit each other's energy infrastructure, and significant strikes have taken place at petroleum facilities in the region. On the civil unrest front, protests and riots remain daily occurrences throughout most of Western Europe, and France remains the epicenter of long-term civil unrest. Closer to our own hemisphere, the happenings in South and Central America have continued with a banking collapse taking place in Paraguay this week, and the Salvadorans expanding their war on gangs in Haiti. Moving to strategic movement for this week, there have been some developments to be aware of. The USS George Washington and the USS George H.W. Bush remain in the Arabian Sea as before, and the USS Boxer remains in the Indian Ocean, far from the combat zone. The biggest development this week is that the USS Theodore Roosevelt is currently sitting pier side in Singapore today, having made another port call instead of heading directly for the CENTCOM area of responsibility. Instead of heading through the Strait of Malacca, she's hanging out in Singapore for a while, which is an indicator that she is not expected to take part in combat operations this weekend. Other than maritime movements, military cargo flights have continued pouring into the region, and simultaneously, evacuations of civilian and non-essential diplomatic personnel from various nations have continued as well. A lot of nations, including the United States, are still pulling their people out of the Middle East and maintaining as small of a footprint as possible. More broadly, a lot of people are still asking the eternal question, are we going back to war or not? At the more strategic level, certainly a lot of nations think so, as demonstrated by their movements this week, and even though nobody is really sure, many nation states are certain enough that this is going to kick off, that they are making preparations for a continuation of the war. Moving over to Europe, around the continent, civil unrest and cyber attacks remain the main themes this week, as the trends we have been watching for several weeks now have continued to get worse. In France, the protests and riots have become more organized and various movements, such as the Yellow Vests, are starting to more formally demonstrate under a banner of more solidified causes instead of just random groups getting together. There are still a lot of random groups causing chaos, and as has been noted before, the migration-centric element to this cannot be dismissed as a lot of the more kinetic arson attacks are still being carried out by the large migrant diaspora in certain areas. However, in other parts of the continent, the usual suspects are hard at work as well, with arson and sabotage attacks being carried out by more far-left organizations, such as some of the more traditional eco-terrorist groups. In addition to the mess of civil unrest, cyber attacks and data breaches are also a constant this week as the impacts of Black October get worse by the day. As with anything in the cyber realm, it is nearly impossible to attribute all of these incidents to one source as thousands of different malign actors are all causing chaos for their own reasons. The daily bomb threats targeting aircraft throughout Europe are probably being caused by a different malign actor than is hacking refrigerators at blood banks, for example. However, the end result is the same. Outages and frustrations among the populace who are most heavily impacted by many different problems all at once, which are continuing to escalate. As I am producing this report this morning, I'm also seeing indications that a terror attack has been conducted in Poland with a mass shooter targeting a crowd of people in Kraków. This is a developing situation, but it's not looking good at the moment and there are multiple casualties, so we'll have to see what official statements come out later this afternoon. As one can see, it's a busy weekend for our friends over in Europe and here in the homeland, similar problems have also begun to stack up. Here within the United States, we have our own series of issues as the impacts of the midterms are felt all around. Most people knew that this result was probably an inevitable outcome due to the war, even though the domestic impact of the election is going to result in a return to more political violence within the homeland. The gloves are already coming off among far-left groups, and as next spring, we may see a large burst of funding by NGOs, which seek to increase operations in the lead up to twenty twenty-eight. As always, once a midterm election has passed, we have a lame duck period where the outgoing administration is not really gonna be able to do a whole lot, and once January rolls around, it could be on like Donkey Kong, as they say. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, though, perhaps the somewhat silver lining to the midterms lies in the realm of foreign policy. The devastating losses by the Republicans has briefly pumped the brakes on the war in Iran, mostly just due to the political infighting within the White House this week, which has given the American people a peek behind the curtain as to how serious the war is. For example, there's a lot of speculation that Secretary of War Hegseth might be being considered for a replacement. As Susie Wiles, his chief opponent in the White House, was fired yesterday, this potential is reduced, and it seems like Hegseth's faction won the day in the inner circle. However, his job is still on the line due to the new Congress that is expected to take over in January, and this is going to affect the timing of the war. The Democrats have made it clear that he is their primary target, and there are more than enough Republicans that would support his impeachment at this point. If President Trump does not replace him and waits until the new Congress takes over, Hegseth faces an almost certainly successful impeachment effort, and when that happens, his replacement, whomever that is, will not be confirmed by the new Congress unless they're going to tone down the war. Remember, whoever's in that job is confirmed by the Senate, and I don't think they're going to want a Hegseth two point O. Starting another major military escalation while also debating whether or not to fire the Secretary of War is not a super solid strategy regardless. And while these power struggles continue within the upper echelons of government, a lot of military assets are on station and awaiting orders right now in the Middle East. AsAs many of us await the potential escalations of the war, and as we try to figure out how this will they, won't they decision will be made, let's take a closer look at the situation on the ground. In short, a lot of people with a lot more money and intelligence capability than us seem to think that the war is going to start up once again, and the grumblings within the White House have really caused a lot of the Gulf states to start panicking just because of how close we have been to the brink for a while now. More tactically, options are on the table for several different courses of action, which we have discussed before. As always, we do not know for sure, but it's an open secret at this point that the main course of action that's being considered is a series of airstrikes similar to that which launched the war back in February. That is the main plan as it stands right now, or at least that's what we think it is. This afternoon, CENTCOM announced a new phase of the war, which they're calling Operation Iron Gate. We don't really have any information on what this is just yet, as the press release was just posted online, but it sounds like a whole lot of nothing because it's only involving 20 people back in the United States, so it's not exactly a kinetic military operation. It's more of a staffing effort. They're running a media blitz with this Operation Iron Gate at the moment, so we'll have to see if there's more of an in-theater operation that's kind of coinciding with this. But for right now, it seems like it's not a whole lot of anything. On the other side, within Iran itself, preparations continue on the ground to prepare the battle space for a wider array of operations than is being considered by the US. Iranian state media has begun urging their population to prepare for war, and looking at what's going on within Iran itself, they themselves are fairly well convinced that the war is going to begin. Overnight, there were some indications and warnings that Iranian officials have started distributing potassium iodide tablets, which is a medication that is mostly used to protect the thyroid from exposure to radiation. So there is some speculation that the Iranians are preparing for either the use of some sort of nuclear weapon on their territory, or more likely, the targeting of their nuclear reactors or their nuclear facilities, which may cause a radiological release. Now, I must say that the Iranian telegram channels that are affiliated with the Iranian government, they are denying these reports. So the Iranians are saying that, "No, we're not distributing potassium iodide tablets. We're not really considering this sort of thing." I don't know. I'll leave that up for you to decide. It's not exactly something that would be out of the realm of possibility. The Iranians are well known to prepare for a lot of things like this, and they distributed gas masks and, uh, chemical weapons decontamination kits, uh, several months ago. So they're preparing for any eventuality. I don't know how much the Iranians are preparing for more serious stuff, but that's worthy of note. On the diplomatic side, things are not looking good either. On Thursday, the Qatari-led mediations broke down, and that round of negotiations were canceled. There is some speculation that the reason that the negotiations collapsed is because the Qataris got word that the US was going to attack Iran that night, and once the Iranians found out through their own channels, either at the same time or from the Qataris directly, the diplomatic sessions were called off so that preparations could be made. Again, that's just the rumor that's leaking through the Qataris, but that's what they're trying to say. As we know, the big one did not occur that night, but yesterday the US did strike a couple of unknown targets on Qeshm Island, which were largely ignored by Iran, so nothing really major. So on the mainland, we've got some really tense situations. A lot of random targeting back and forth, a lot of diplomats preparing, diplomatic talks still continuing, but efforts within the Iranian homeland continuing to prepare for any eventuality. In the Strait of Hormuz, both the movement of ships and the targeting of those ships has remained constant over the past few weeks. Ships are moving every single night, and every single night Iran has struck and/or sunk at least several of those ships in those convoys. This is no longer a sporadic thing. The Iranians are hitting every single convoy that tries to go through. As it stands, the net result is unclear. I myself no longer trust Kepler's data, and the cloud cover and minimal imagery over the region throughout the past month has really put a damper on figuring out exactly what is going on in the Strait. All we can say is that some ships are getting hit with such regularity that at some point we're going to start having problems with the sheer availability of ships. The world is not gonna run out of oil tankers anytime soon because a handful are getting hit every night. But if there's a specialty ship that has some unique capability and is harder to repair or replace if lost, those vessels are not going to risk the crossing. That's something to think about for later on. Just wanted to put a pin in it now because ship availability is probably going to be an issue in a few months if this carries on. Drilling down even further, this weekend weather conditions are going to be mixed to unfavorable, depending on the chosen course of action. Using the Bandar Abbas International Airport as a baseline, the forecast is not super great for the next few days. Cloud ceilings are expected to be rather low throughout the region for the next few days, so intelligence collection is going to have less time to conduct an ISR SOCC of potential targets. Lunar illumination is going to be red for the entire weekend, and combined with the expected cloud cover, it's going to be super dark at night throughout the region. Now, as a brief digression about this illumination data, which has suddenly become a focus among mainstream media and pundits alike, there are some competing schools of thought about whether or not green or red is good or bad. So let me briefly explain the differences in mentality because this matters for how you approach the potential courses of action for how the war will develop. This week, a lot of pundits and talking heads on podcasts have stated that since the moon is dark right now throughout the region, this makes it more likely for the US to conduct targeting efforts so that military forces can take advantage of the darkness. Unfortunately, this idea is only half of the equation, and depending on your perspective, the exact opposite could be true. The doctrinal standards for green and red illum were developed by and for conventional forces who might prefer some moonlight to get the job done. It is certainly true that the United States has great night vision devices and can function under even the darkest night. However, for some jobs, like Army aviation, for instance, the risk factors change. An Army helicopter pilot is going to assume more risk coming to a hover over a compound where there is red illum than during a period of green illum because depth perception, shadow length, and the moon angle itself is going to make that task harder and more prone to mishap. This is why you are probably seeing some discrepancy among various media personalities because they only know what they know from their communities. For ground-based squads and special operations soldiers, green illume is bad. They want total darkness for maximum concealment. But for an army unit who has to conduct a very large helicopter assault force or half raid using dozens of helicopters to move a battalion of soldiers during the night, in that situation, they're going to assume a lot of risk doing that under total red illume conditions. You could say that if you're using my TAC plugin here, the mixed category is going to be generally that sweet spot between dark enough for decent concealment, but also light enough that you can move a lot of aircraft very fast and very low to the ground without driving up the risk too much. But even that is not a rule of thumb because we start splitting hairs at a certain point with moon angle and shadow length, which although we have doctrine and standards for, not many people really care about. After all, the war itself began on the first day of a green illume cycle. The start date for Project Freedom, the attempt to sneak ships through the Strait of Hormuz, began on the back end of a green cycle when ships would have been more easily visible with the naked eye. The infamous operation to rescue the downed pilot in Isfahan took place during a green cycle as well. Granted, that was a special case that was more time-sensitive, but all three of these operations illustrate that illume is a factor, but it is not the deciding factor. Unfortunately, a lot of us, myself included sometimes, are having to make decisions based off of factors that may be deciding factors under perfect conditions, but during the actual conditions, they're not really considered. Things like weather in combination with illume, tide charts, soil composition, and moisture, all of this is more important when considered together and also when the operation itself allows it. Of course, none of this matters whatsoever if the plan is to drop a lot of GPS-guided bombs from 60,000 feet from stealth bombers. At that point, hyper-fixating on things that should be pretty good indicators of a war kicking off, none of that stuff really matters anymore. Neither weather nor illumination matters that much at all, really. Illumination, weather, visibility, all of this stuff is really going to be a factor for a more wide campaign that involves multi-domain operations. If we're just gonna go in and bomb stuff, none of this matters. But if we're doing something else, if we're going to make use of the large wealth of assets that are in the region, keeping an eye on the moon and the weather is going to be important. As a rather infamous figure once said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army that you want." Somewhat ironically, he was right. At the strategic level, the United States does not have that many options left. Most of the military options, such as trying to implement a land blockade, whatever that means, are going to be ineffective at achieving the end goals, which have so far not yet been achieved. You can argue about the moon and the weather all you want, but really it's not gonna change a whole lot. And this is the point at which diplomacy and finding a non-military solution to this conflict is the course of action that is most viable for ending this mess. Unfortunately, the craziness of midterms and the subsequent infighting amongst White House insiders is causing some unsettling among the war planners for the time being. From a planning perspective moving forward, the next milestone worth monitoring will be the movement of aviation assets and aircraft carriers. If the Teddy Roosevelt departs Singapore and stays in CENTCOM with the other two carriers, that will be an important indicator that has been discussed before. Likewise, if we notice any aircraft being moved back to their main bases, that will be an indicator that a course change has been decided on. Right now, there are thousands of pilots and airmen stationed around the Middle East sleeping beside their aircraft, targets already selected, just waiting for the go order. That order may never arrive, but if it does, as we think it might, the situation is going to get out of control once again. And even though waiting is the hardest part, we'll just have to keep waiting for a change in policy on the home front and hoping for a de-escalation overseas. And on that note, let's wrap things up today with the Ghost Net reports for this week. I was a little late to the party on Thursday myself, but I managed to pick up a few reports as transmitted by some of you. For those who are not familiar, the Ghost Net is a weekly radio network on HF radio that is intended to bring more real-world use to the world of HF radio, keeping skills sharp, and hopefully serving as a valuable asset in the event that communications infrastructure goes down for any reason. In short, if all else fails, we can transition off of the internet to this radio network and still have a lot of capabilities in knowing what's going on around us. Speaking of capabilities, I've also published three new apps this week, three more plugins for ATAK, which I needed for myself, but wanted to offer to everyone who needs them. The first plugin is TFR TAC, which is a simple plugin that pulls in the FAA's airspace closures and draws a 3D shape of the temporary flight restrictions on the map. It's pretty simple, but pretty handy. This data is public, and most of the time people would have to get a ForeFlight subscription or something like that to view this data in a handy 3D manner, or they would have to export the files themselves. So this is a seamless way to get airspace closures in real time for free. The next plugin is called HAZ TAC and is for all things hazmat. This is essentially a digitization of the Emergency Response Guidebook, or ERG, and having that data in TAC allows us to calculate and plot evacuation zones for various hazmat incidents. So if you are responding or live near an industrial accident, this plugin will allow you to plug in what you know and automatically generate the evacuation and downwind zones based on the official doctrine in the book. If you have a toxic industrial chemical in the air, seconds do count, so having a plugin that automatically computes a lot of this data for you based on the official doctrine is probably going to be decently helpful just in case. And finally, the last app is the Blast plugin, which is again, more of a crisis response sort of plugin to help determine safe standoff distances from potentially explosive devices. There are three modes within the plugin, a suspicious device mode for just regular general threats, more of a counterterrorism sort of thing. There's also an unexploded ordnance mode, or UXO mode, for more of a military sort of use kind of thing. And there's also a nuclear blast standoff calculator and fallout heat map creation tool, which I hope that we will never need, but it was easy to put in the app. If you want to calculate what it would look like to drop a nuke on Pickaxe Mountain, you can easily project that just to get an understanding of what scale we're dealing with when we talk about how serious these considerations really are. Once again, I will be doing a deep dive on all of these plugins at some point, but I have a few more to finish up first, which may result in some of these plugins changing a bit, and I would also like to get more field use out of them just in case some radical design changes are needed. I also have a lot more interesting and seriously helpful software solutions coming down the pipeline, which will come together more coherently later on. Right now, the six apps I've released so far are pretty good, I think, but it's going to be a lot more helpful later on when I tie a lot of this together. Who knows what the future will bring, but I've been putting in a lot of overtime to work on these apps to have them just in case, and in combination with more hardened communications plans, I think we'll be all right. So we shall see how the war goes from here once the fallout in the White House settles down a little bit and decisions are made pertaining to where we go from here. So that's all I have for today. As always, all of my research can be found at my Obsidian page, and all of these plugins that I've mentioned today and all the plugins that I show sporadically throughout The Wire reports during the week, you can download all of these for free from my GitHub page. They should load right into ATAK if you're, uh, familiar with that application, and I will be constantly making updates, smoothing things out, making it a little bit better, and really hardening these projects as best I can. So thanks again for watching. Thanks for all of your support that has made all of this possible, and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.