Fiona James (@Rossa59)

Simplicius and Larry Johnson point out a number of issues facing the US Navy in the ME that would be a crucial disadvantage in a direct confrontation with any of the regional participants in a war and their response to the use of tactical nukes as Tom has detailed. Seems to me the Hegemonic Empire is sailing blind into a bear trap. Via Simplicius: The US navy no longer has any warship resupply tenders and each warship’s air defense missiles must be restocked only in calm waters and in port, which makes resupply very time consuming and means that shooting down a bunch of cheap drones and rockets is not sustainable. Larry Johnson noted: “...The problem facing the U.S. warships is that they have a finite supply of missiles for air defense. If the Houthis fire a drone, that may have cost $5,000 to produce, it will be shot down by an Aegis missile that costs almost $500,000 dollars. This could turn into an expensive proposition for the U.S. Navy. Moreover, as has been revealed by the war in Ukraine, the U.S. does not have an ample inventory of such missiles and there is no immediate hope of producing more to replace what have been fired...” Also a major lack of manpower in the US Armed Forces is now apparent. This week Ashish Vazirani, the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness, told the House Armed Services Committee that the individual services missed their recruitment goals in 2023 by a combined 41,000 personnel. That means, after its recent Putin-announced boost, Russia now has slightly more total active duty troops than the US. This is mindblowing, as up until recently, US active duty numbers dwarfed that of Russia with nearly 1.4M active versus ~800k. Now it’s 1.2M and change for the US and over 1.3M for Russia, with a soon-to-be reached goal of 1.5M. What a shocking reversal. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/more-afu-downers-from-the-press-mill https://sonar21.com/even-some-israelis-admit-the-iof-has-gone-too-far/ @Runner6789 @paulf @_G9_ @DC_Cesspool @blackrow @AncientofSouls @lotsofprisoners @American50