Intel Update - June 27 - Pulled Back In - Maybe

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for June 21st through the 27th, 2026. Just when we thought the war was over, we get pulled back in, at least to some degree. This is of course no surprise, so let's get right to it. Around the world, it's been a busy week. The main focus this week has been overseas as the earthquakes in Venezuela have caused widespread devastation throughout the most populated cities, including the coastal areas to the north of the capital, as well as the capital itself. Mass casualties have been reported in all of the hardest hit areas and the death toll is expected to be in the thousands. Over in the Middle East, the war has reignited to some degree, though the full-scale targeting campaign has not returned just yet. These targeting efforts have substantially increased the danger to civilian mariners as disputes regarding the administration of the routes has been complicated by the targeting of merchant shipping. Here on the home front, there have been two items of note for this week which I've been tracking. First of all, has been the severe weather and flooding throughout the American South and East. Flooding has continued throughout the hill country of Texas and the following collapse of the weather system has spawned hundreds of storms throughout the eastern half of the country. On average, this is not really out of the ordinary for this time of year, but some areas have been hosted to more severe weather than is normally expected as many storms have swept through the nation. Also in Texas, a different crisis is developing as the spread of new world screwworm has continued to expand significantly. Right now, the total number of cases is still small, a total of 26 confirmed cases so far, but as with all parasites, this can greatly expand without anyone knowing. Considering that the screwworm larva is so small and hard to find on an animal, sometimes this can get out of control really fast, which is why we've gone from one case to 26 in just a couple of weeks. Just south of the border, where much of our beef supply comes from, the USDA has stated that there are over 30,000 confirmed cases in Mexico. This is why things might get a little busy here pretty soon. Concerns are also emerging that highlight some of the more illicit activity that might be going on throughout the region. It's extremely early, so data is limited and this is mostly gut suspicion more than anything else, but it's possible that illicit cattle practices might be contributing to the spread of this disease. For many, many years now, Central American cartels have relied upon diversifying their portfolios by trafficking not just drugs and people, but also beef cattle. Since cartels are not really inclined to follow safe animal handling practices, these cattle tend to be very prone to catching parasites like screwworm. And since they tend to launder cattle through legit businesses for import into the United States, it's impossible to tell if the cheeseburger you're eating came from a wholesome family farm in Oklahoma or a Mexican cartel. This is demonstrated by cases being reported at the same time in different places. The cases in New Mexico popped up at the same time as ground zero in Texas, and these locations are too far away from each other for the fly to have flown that far, which strongly indicates that it's not spreading from the point of detection in Texas, but rather infected cattle are probably coming across the border separately and going to many different places. I suspect that the spread of screwworm is far worse than anyone knows right now because all of the efforts within the United States to combat the disease, while certainly the right thing to do, it's going to not be as effective if it's running rampant throughout Mexico. Having a significant percentage of our food supply originating from the third world is not great for food security, but we're here now, and there's not much that can be done from our end other than monitor and isolate and try to get ahead of it. We will certainly keep an eye on it for sure. It's not worth panicking over, but definitely do not sleep on this crisis, either, since this has the potential to severely impact our beef supply later on this year. Moving now to take a look at the situation in Venezuela, it's not good. I have been trying to use a lot of the helicopter and drone footage to geolocate damaged or destroyed buildings, and it's been rather tough because a lot of these cities are just completely destroyed. All of these points that you see on the map are damaged buildings that are hand-picked by me as best I can and assessed to using the standard building damage assessment guidelines created and used by FEMA. Red are buildings which are totally destroyed, orange is heavy damage, yellow is minor damage, and green is mostly untouched. Most of the damage has arisen from the heavily populated areas along Venezuela's northern coast, which has been legendary and infamous for contracting companies using very poor construction materials to help build government housing projects in this region, which surprise, surprise, turn out to not be very stable. The geography of the terrain also adds to the vulnerabilities as mudslides have been a common observance here over the years with many tragedies taking place here due to this soil substrate not being very conducive to building large structures. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people lived here in the Catia La Mar area because it was cheap housing with ocean views close to Caracas. This turned out to not be a super great idea as nearly all of these high-rise apartment buildings have collapsed and killed thousands of people. Speaking of the casualties, as with all natural disasters, the true number is hard to assess right now, especially since most of the response is centered in heavily urbanized areas where the population density is extremely high. Complicating factors also include landslides and terrain deformation from the earthquakes making roads impossible to transit outside the main cities, so a lot of the more remote towns are now cut off from major transit routes. Additionally, several aftershocks have continued throughout the area over the past 24 hours, which has made many of the barely standing buildings even more unstable, so it is very, very likely that many of the structures that still remain will probably collapse over the next few weeks. Since people are still living in many of these halfway destroyed buildings, the chances of more fatalities occurring is extremely high. A lot of people simply have nowhere else to go, so they live in what remains of their house even though it's very much a death trap. Venezuela was uh obviously not in super great shape before the earthquakes, and extreme levels of poverty and improvised housing efforts were common throughout the epicenter region for decades. The recent unsettling within the nation after the leader of their country was arrested by the United States also will be a complicating factor because on the one hand the national government is basically in shambles, but there also would be zero chance that the US would have been allowed in to help victims if Maduro was in power, so maybe that will balance out. I don't really know, but either way US Southcom is moving assets to help coordinate the response in the hardest hit areas. Just as a brief digression for a moment on the damage assessment efforts, there are a lot of people touting the use of AI for stuff like this, and I agree this would be a good tool for the job if it actually worked. But sadly in this case, it's just not good enough and produces so many false positives that it's not helpful. And just to show that, I will load in an AI-driven geospatial product that was compiled for this purpose. This is something that Google and I think Microsoft put together, and we can use this to compare and contrast what the truth really is. And just looking at the comparison between what the AI has given us and what I have assessed myself using helicopter footage of the damage, we can see that the AI is hallucinating pretty hard on some of this. Some of the buildings that are utterly pancaked are only listed as minor damage, and some of the places that are marked as destroyed are still standing. So in this case, it was a good try, it was a really good effort, but the AI models that are being touted and being used and and kind of circulating on social media for this, they're really only as good as the data that's put into it. And in this case, a satellite data with more precision would be needed. Preferably synthetic aperture radar, which would cut right through the clouds and make this a lot easier, but those images are very expensive, and in the case of extremely urbanized terrain, it's debatable as to if it would help anyway. So again, good try, but nothing beats the Mark I human eyeball. And even though the boom in AI has really kind of tried to motivate people to use some of these tools a little bit more more commonly than they've been used in the past, coherent change detection has actually been around for a very long time, and that's not an AI-driven thing. Some of these more AI-driven models are not actually that helpful. I just wanted to put that out there because as I was working on this last night, I saw a lot of people like trying to push a lot of these AI-driven models, and it just turns out, well, they're not that accurate. So I foresee this becoming a problem for the disaster preparedness and disaster response community over the years. So, hopefully things will either get better or we'll learn to not rely on tools that we cannot verify ourselves. So, this little digression shows us an important lesson. Just because we have data displayed in a way that looks cool, it doesn't actually mean that it's accurate or even helpful. So, for the products I'm making, the the few products that I can make, I'm trying to use evidence from the ground to assess the damage. And right now, the biggest intelligence gap, the biggest unknowns are the status of Caracas itself, as well as some of the more remote, but still heavily populated towns throughout the countryside. I have high-resolution imagery of Caracas after the earthquakes hit, but there has been cloud cover over much of the city for a couple of days, which has made it hard to geolocate anything. For me, my plan is to do what I can to get a good picture of the situation on the ground, so that any volunteer groups or agencies can be as prepared as possible if they start heading down there. Even though the sort of governance situation with Venezuela is kind of weird right now, I'm sure that there will be some groups heading down. I'm just not plugged into any of them just yet. But, for anyone who knows anyone heading down there who might benefit from some of my geospatial products, as always, everything I'm building is publicly available in three different ways. You can review my ArcGIS maps online just by tapping the links below, which will open up these maps on your phone's internet browser. And if you need more offline access, I publish these layers as KMZs for use with A-TAC or CalTopo, whichever platform your agency uses. And for the researchers who already use ArcGIS, you can pull my layers into your project if you want, because these are published They're published feature classes on ArcGIS online. For me, this is not just a worthwhile effort due to the mass devastation in the region, but it's also a good way to get those training reps in and get more experience in managing disaster situations, even if we might not be able to go to the physical area. So, definitely going to be keeping an eye on Venezuela over the next few weeks, because this disaster is probably one of the worst that that America has ever experienced. Jumping around the world to the Middle East for this week, the situation has deteriorated as Iranian forces have demonstrated that they control the Strait of Hormuz, and they are willing to enforce their tactical advantage with explosives. Over the past few days, several merchant ships have been hit with various munitions by Iranian forces as these vessels were taking the unauthorized Omani route to the south of the normal traffic separation scheme. When the MOU was signed and the strait was truly opened up to merchant traffic, many ships just went for it, and an administrative and organizational disaster rapidly emerged, and the experiences of every ship is individual and unique. Some ships were given permits and continued transiting just like they have been doing since the ceasefire went into effect. Some ships took any route that they could to get out of the Gulf. Some ships kept their transponders off and tried to sneak out between other ships, and many other vessels have remained at anchor as their owners have deemed the situation still too dangerous for them to make the crossing. Earlier this week, the International Maritime Organization worked with all parties, they even got the Iranians on board to conduct a rescue operation to get many of the stranded vessels and mariners out of the Gulf. However, continuing tradition, this operation was paused almost immediately due to the increase of Iranian and American targeting throughout the region. Turns out the Iranians did not really like the ships which were acting unilaterally and taking the Omani route instead of getting a permit and taking the Iranian route. And after about a week of this being tolerated and warnings being issued that the strait is closed, the Iranians' patience wore out and they started striking vessels which were doing their own thing on Thursday night. On Friday, yesterday, the United States retaliated by striking essentially an abandoned dock on Siri Island, also called Sirik Island. And even as early as this morning, it looks like another vessel was actually hit in the Strait of Hormuz once again, bringing the total to, I think, three ships hit over the past 24 hours within the strait. So, the escalations are continuing for the time being, but the good news is that this is unlikely to kick-start more serious bombing efforts because the United States has been drawing down resources from the region. This drawdown effort actually started last week, but I wanted to wait for definitive evidence that the US is actually moving resources back to Europe and not just pretending to move resources around. Most of the assets that have been relocated are aircraft as the US Navy still remains on station in the Gulf of Oman, but earlier this week the Air Force moved a bunch of KC-135s back to Al Udeid Airbase, which we can see on the satellite imagery of the base. This is a big indicator that the large-scale shooting is probably over because this base has been a fat juicy target for Iranian missiles and has been hit many times. So, the fact that the US Air Force is moving these airframes back to Al Udeid is a sign that the US does not expect a return to the more widespread targeting, which is good news. Honestly, this is a message that also works both ways. The Iranians clearly see this too and know that the war is pretty much done aside from the occasional strikes against each other's equipment. How this develops from here is going to vary by the day, even by the hour. And the biggest points of debate moving forward will be around the Strait of Hormuz and whether or not an arrangement can be worked out regarding the transit of the strait. But once again, the Strait of Hormuz is only one half of the equation at this point. The other side of the coin is Lebanon. So, aside from the situation in the Persian Gulf, there have also been some developments with the other main conflict of the region, the war in Lebanon. Yesterday, the White House announced the signing of a document between the United States, Israel, and the Lebanese government to establish a security zone in southern Lebanon. Just to cut right to the chase, this document appears to effectively legalize the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and allows the IDF to keep all of the terrain that they have taken so far and even take a new terrain with this amorphous security zone label. Now, if you think this sounds rather surprising and rather unfortunate for the Lebanese, rest assured quite a few Lebanese are also extremely upset about this and mass protests and riots have been ongoing throughout Beirut for the past couple of days. As you are perusing the photos of the signing of this document, the more astute among you might realize that someone is missing from the table, most notably Hezbollah. Yeah, of course Hezbollah did not agree to this. For those who are unaware, unlike in Gaza, the Hezbollah organization is not the actual ruling government of Lebanon, but Hezbollah does effectively control most of the terrain in southern Lebanon. Lebanese politics is always incredibly difficult to describe, but in general, the Lebanese government has always generally at every single step withdrawn to let the IDF invade their country over the past few decades, simply because they're just a small military. They're a small government. Hezbollah doesn't necessarily call all of the shots throughout the entirety of Lebanon. That's That's not true. Hezbollah has certain areas in which they operate and control. They certainly have strongholds, but to say that they control the entire country of Lebanon is is inaccurate. And the Lebanese government is kind of like the third wheel, to be honest, who doesn't get a lot of discussion these days because most people tend to think that Lebanon is simply just a failed state where Hezbollah runs supreme. And that's not true. The Lebanese government actually does wield most of the control in the northern parts of the country, certainly in Beirut. But down in the south, the Lebanese government, the Lebanese army, has mostly withdrawn from a lot of these southern border outposts and checkpoints, simply because they don't want their soldiers getting killed by the IDF, and they know that they're powerless against the Israelis because the Israelis have the American backing, right? So in fact, the signing of this document is the Lebanese government signing along to a deal that they can't enforce on their own. And they're essentially handing over terrain that they don't even control themselves. The people who actually control this terrain, Hezbollah, did not sign on to this deal and have not agreed to stop fighting the Israeli invasion. As a result, this alleged agreement is probably not going to mean much. So Lebanon is still popping off, no matter how much we want to, you know, declare victory and move on. It's still pretty hot. It's still going to be a point of contention. What the Iranians do in response to the signing of this document, how they treat it, and how they sort of feel about the Lebanese government is going to be very interesting to see, but all in all the Middle East is still on fire as always and even though the MOU has been signed, things are not getting back to normal fast enough. This was always on the menu. We have been saying this and expecting this for weeks now. Even during the height of the war, we knew this. But it is helpful to remember that once we transition from crisis to recovery, the process is still going to take a lot of time that the world simply does not have. And honestly, we have not even transitioned into recovery yet. It's still in kind of the amorphous pause between active fighting and recovery. The crisis is still going on and there really hasn't been a super solid solution for it yet. Now granted, this is what this 60-day period of negotiations is for. This is for ironing out the details of a more solid plan, which at the end of that 60 days, then that plan can come into fruition. But for right now, the crisis continues and unless there were 100 ships transiting the strait per day, this the very day that the MOU was signed, we're simply not going to catch up with the demand, so the crisis still continues. Going from 0% of normal traffic to about 10% of normal traffic certainly does not mean that the crisis is over. And since the shooting took place last night on both sides, both the Iranians and the Americans, it's not really clear where we go from here. The MOU is signed and in effect, but things are not returning to normal and only a tiny fraction of normal has been seen so far. And that's where we find ourselves at the end of month four of this conflict, a lukewarm peace with the occasional missile strike, very tepid traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil production remaining stagnant and everybody pretending like the impacts of the war are over. When in reality, we're still more or less in a similar spot as before the MOU was signed. Thankfully, some progress is being made, even though it's slow. But if the Iranians are correct in their assertions, it's unlikely that the global flow of energy will return to the way it was before the war. And now that some limited strikes are taking place once again, it's going to be hard to keep that fraction of global maritime traffic going over the next few weeks. So, wrapping things up today with the Ghost Net reports for this week, I have picked up quite a few transmissions on our little off-grid information exchange system. Lots of people, as usual, transmitting informational reports about their local area, which is fantastic. Summertime is usually the more popular time for radio stuff, and after the past couple of weeks of severe weather around the world, it's good motivation to make sure we are as ready and as prepared as we can be for whatever uncertainties lie ahead, whether it's severe flooding or earthquakes or even ballistic missiles. Maintaining contact with the outside world when an entire region is either devastated or locked down or both is incredibly useful. So, let's get at it and do what we can to have capabilities and options, no matter what happens. So, that's all I have for today. As always, all of my research and geospatial products can be downloaded at the links below. However you wish to visualize the data, there are different options available. Thanks again to all of you on Patreon. I could not do this work without your help, and thanks to all of you for watching. I really do appreciate it. And as always, fight in the shade.