[BB] On Thursday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “American Agenda,” Newsmax National Security Analyst Charles Marino, who served as DHS Senior Law Enforcement Adviser under the Obama administration, discussed a reported thwarted terror plot on the Mall of America and said that one issue is “communities in sanctuary states that have been permitted, just like we saw very early on in London, that have been allowed to isolate themselves, with no plans to assimilate to the U.S. culture in any way.”
Marino said, “Anybody claiming to be surprised that we’re seeing more and more of these types of incidents is living on another planet, because we have been infiltrated, as a country, by dangerous, unvetted people with even more dangerous ideologies. And you’re talking about communities in sanctuary states that have been permitted, just like we saw very early on in London, that have been allowed to isolate themselves, with no plans to assimilate to the U.S. culture in any way.”
He continued, “And so now you have the perfect storm of a collision of these dangerous people coming from special interest locations like Somalia, isolating themselves, and they’re influencing American-born people that also still share a strong cultural alignment with countries like Somalia. And so, people become radicalized.”
[Jpost] Many in Israel declared "mission accomplished" when the hostages came home. Wilf thinks otherwise and lays out a day-after plan for Gaza that no one else in Israeli politics would touch.
With elections bearing down and the whole country consumed by the race, diplomat and writer Einat Wilf sat down with Jacob Laznik to make a case that almost no one else in Israeli politics is making. Running third on the Reservists—New Economic Party list, an unaligned slate polling around four seats and openly determined to blow up the country's paralyzing bloc politics, Wilf argues that the real fight isn't over territory or coalitions at all, but over consciousness.
After doing her military service as an intelligence officer in the IDF’s Unit 8200, Ms Wilf served for a time as a Member of Knesset for the labour socialists. Nonetheless, she wrote a column for years for the center-right Israel Hayom newspaper, worked as a consultant for McKinsey and with a venture capitalist firm, and has been very active in post-10/7 public advocacy for Israel around the world, so her ideas have been refined from both sides.
October 7, in her telling, was the day adversaries "emerged from physical and metaphorical tunnels to launch a global assault on Jewish life," and her central claim is that neither the government nor the opposition grasps the scale of that war of ideas, let alone how to fight it.
For a writer and former politician who has spent two decades on exactly this terrain, the campaign is less about a seat than about forcing a conversation the political class keeps avoiding.
MOVING THE TOPIC TO THE GAZA STRIP
Where the interview gets passionate is Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... . Wilf contends that Israel's leaders have left the single most consequential question of the postwar era: What actually happens the day after, which is almost entirely undiscussed. She then lays out a strikingly concrete alternative: Reinterpreting the Board of Peace's twenty-point framework so that "Gaza will not be a threat" means ideological disarmament rather than a few weapons stashed in a shed, and splitting the Strip into a "Gaza of war" and a "Gaza of peace" where residents must formally renounce refugee status and the right of return before any reconstruction money flows.
It's a vision that ranges from the granular, which includes cutting UNRWA cards, new documents, a new flag, to the sweeping idea of rebuilding not just a place but a people's self-understanding. Around it she threads the themes her readers will recognize: the "bigotry of low expectations," "Westsplaining," the "Zionism Is" project, and the "mass psychosis" she says drives anti-Israel activism from the Oxford Union floor to the street. Laznik, in turn, questions the logistics, the other players at the table like Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... and The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor... , the risk that reopening a signed agreement reads as reneging, and the uncomfortable reality that Hamas ..always the voice of sweet reason... keeps boasting it would do it all again.
Whether you come away thinking Wilf's plan is visionary or unworkable, you'll want to hear how she answers when pressed. Watch the full interview to see where it holds up and where it strains.
[OmbreOlivierSubstack] So how’s it going for you guys in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... ?
That’s not a picture of Gaza, but it should be, because it does pretty much sum up the whole thing.
3 years ago Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... s rapist fighters broke through the barriers around the Gaza Strip and invaded Israel accompanied by other Gazooks who liked the idea of a bit of rape and pillage. Unlike Sept 11, which did not directly affect anyone I know, October 7th did because my company employed 2 Israeli security researchers and one of the two lived on a Kibbutz next to Gaza. As I wrote some time back, she was killed, her children were (fortunately briefly) kidnapped and her body was left boobytrapped for rescuers to find.
I used to assume that it was obvious who to support in the various wars and threatened wars going on. But apparently this is not so because every war now seems to get wrapped around politics in the US and/or Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... and support of one side or the other then depends on whether you support Transgender rights or not (only slightly joking)
A lot of woolly headed sorts in the west think that Israel’s response to having thousands of its citizens murdered and raped has been inappropriate. They may be surprised to learn that I agree, but probably not in a way they consider acceptable.
I think Israel has been inappropriately nice to Hamass and has not killed enough Gazooks. As I finished that section of the previous substack:
[T]hey just can’t face the idea of rubbing the Paleostinians noses in the stick of defeat and keep on giving them an out so that their lying leaders can claim they "won". This time Israel needs to make it abundantly clear to the Gazooks that they have lost and the ideology they supported was a failure.
It is possible that Israel has defanged Hamass enough, but I don’t think so. On the other hand they haven’t stopped. Plus Gaza has been significantly pacified with, IIRC, no attacks from the territory into Israel for the last few months if not year and very few attacks in Gaza on Israeli forces. Moreover the Israelis are gradually locating and executing every Gazook they can identify as involved in the attack which has to be making a lot of terrorist very nervous.
In fact the Hamas attack has convinced Israel as a whole to stop believing in the tooth fairy and instead start taking people at their word when they say they want to see the destruction of Israel. The result of that is that not just Hamass, but also Hez(no)ballah and their sponsors in Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... have had some serious hurt put on them. As of course have sympathetic regimes like Syria and allied terrorist organizations like the Iran's Houthi sock puppets ...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him... s. We aren’t yet at a point where Hez(no)ballah can be counted out, but their malign influence on Leb ...The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else?... has been severely curtailed and their influence on Syria has of course been completely destroyed. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has made Iran’s sponsorship of Hez(no)ballah much harder because there is now no easy way to transport weapons to them.
Mind you it is unclear whether Iran can make weapons to transport in the first place. Between the Israeli strikes and the subsequent US ones Iran’s weapon industry has been gutted. Of course they still have significant stockpiles (albeit nothing like as many as they had a year ago) but they can’t rebuild them using their own factories and they can’t easily import them from abroad either. The US, Israel and Ukraine have all hit targets on the Caspian Sea side so that path is limited. The US blockade of Iranian ports has stopped imports that way and the destruction of a few key bridges has meant that overland import is also problematic. Yes overland transport is possible, but not in bulk.
Iran is also now seeing its finances being serious attacked with countries like Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... , The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...a NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A single organization with differing goals, equipment, language, doctrine, and structure.... member, but not the most reliable... and the UAE closing Iranian institutions that they had formerly permitted. In addition various sources have noted that Iran shipped exactly 0 barrels of oil in September. That doesn’t just hurt the IRGC which used those institutions to transfer money but it also hurts all the shady middlemen that have been smuggling things into Iran and profiting from the spread between the official Rial rate and the black market one.
None of this:- the decapitation strikes on Hez(no)ballah and Iran; the deaths of many of Hamass’ own leadership; the destruction of most of Iran’s economy; or the removal of Assad were things that could have been predicted 3 years and a day ago. On October 6th 2023 Israel thought it could negotiate with the IRGC and the various Iranian proxies threatening it. Sure it might have to assassinate one here and there, and probably occasionally blow up a particularly egregious weapons pile, but over all the feeling was that the situation was manageable.
On October 7th Israel learned that this was not the case: when these enemies said they wanted to see the extermination of the Jews they were deadly serious and not engaging in heated rhetoric. Having learned that they moved from "managing" the threats to removing them wholesale and thus the dramatic declines in fortune of Hamass, Hez(no)ballah, Assad and the IRGC.
GLOBAL EFFECTS
There are some interesting secondary effects as well. Within the Middle East it seems clear that countries have changed from fearing Iran to anger at it and a disinclination to tolerate its meddling. So far we are not seeing new official alliances with Israel, but we are clearly seeing unofficial cooperation on a scale that has never been seen before.
There there are the out of region effects. Ukraine’s willingness to share drone defenses with the Gulf States has incentivized those states to finance Ukraine’s various drone programs. That friendliness with Ukraine hurts two would be hegemons - Russia and West Taiwan. Russia is directly hurt since, thanks to its alliance with Iran, perceived as a hostile competitor to the Gulf. That means that no one in the Gulf is going to care about Russia’s desire to export oil and gas except to see them as competition, whereas in 2023 the Gulf and Russia tended to work together on managing oil prices. West Taiwan is hurt in a couple of ways. First it has lost its arms export markets. Countries that might have considered buying Chinese are now significantly less interested having seen those weapons in action.
Secondly the Iran war in particular has likely contributed to the permanent ending of West Taiwan’s ambitions to invade Taiwan. On October 6th, 2023 plenty of analysts looked at what was happening in Ukraine and thought that, while the PLA would have a fight on its hands, it would likely attempt to cross the Taiwan Strait. Thanks to Venezuela
...a country in Central America that sits on an enormous pool of oil. Formerly the most prospereous country in the region, it became infested with Commies sniffing almost unlimited wealth. It turned out the wealth wasn't unlimited, the economy collapsed under the clownish Hugo Chavez, the murder rate exceeded places like Honduras and El Salvador. A significant proportion of the populace refugeed to Colombia and points south... and Iran, the PLA now knows that its weapons are not up to US levels and that its radars, in particular, only function to detect US stealth warplanes by blowing up when one is nearby. Winnie the Flu told the PLA to be ready by 2027. It is now late 2026 and the top ranks of the PLA have been cleared out by Chairman Winnie for reasons that have not been directly stated but seem to be due to the PLA’s unreadiness to actually invade, both on the weapons capability and on the availability of key logistical requirements such as oil storage. On the latter front there were strong rumors that some of the oil storage that had already been built and allegedly filled with oil turned out to not be filled with oil. It would not surprise me if it turned out that an audit showed other things like missiles also turned out to have been paid for but not actually delivered. Quite a few China commenters have downplayed the corruption parts of the PLA clean out as being "well they are all corrupt so it was just an excuse" but I wonder if in fact those corruption allegations had a factual basis.
Anyway the 2027 deadline looks like it will slip and my guess is that the unofficial official excuse will be President Trump. Thus 2027 becomes 2029 and a hope that the Democrats ...every time you hear the phrase white people, white supremacy,white anything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word (Thomas) Nasty to the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects... can manage to get some puppet elected. If, as I suspect is more likely, President Trump is succeeded by a President Vance or Rubio then things get delayed even more. If the US does elect a Democrat that may not help the invasion as much as hoped for. By 2029 Japan should have both its ASEV missile cruisers1 deployed and one hopes two more years of prodding the US defense contractors means that missiles will be available in sufficient numbers that not only will the missiles expended against Iran be replaces but there will be surpluses available to allied nations such as Japan.
Whew! I was not looking forward to that war ramping up.
Vladimir Orlov on the visions of future robotic warfare.
I spent a long time watching and analyzing the results of the Center-2026 exercises, and from this I developed a small thought-graphic in the form of a short story... A probable near future... Prologue. Zero. Deep in the rear. The night wasn't just dark—it seemed thick, tangible, suffused with ink. On a vast concrete platform, carved out of an ancient granite plateau, bathed in the deathly blue light of hidden LEDs, stood twenty identical 20-foot containers.
During the day, this would have been a typical, dreary scene at any port, but now, in this artificial, unnatural light, they resembled a squadron of alien landing capsules. Each container was already clad in a removable aerodynamic body kit. Their fronts were crowned with sharp, predatory carbon-fiber prows, capable of ripping through the dense layers of the atmosphere. Along the sides, pressed tightly against the steel, lay the long folding wings of the UMPK, and the fins of the tail jutted out from the aft section. Underneath, secured to truss structures, massive blocks of solid-fuel boosters could be discerned.
Inside, in complete darkness, a vacuum of silence, and sterile cold, death slept. Tracked and wheeled platforms, anthropomorphic vehicles, and cassettes containing hundreds of FPV drones were pressed tightly into their cradles with titanium grips. The robots did not move. Their optical units were sealed with diaphragms. The processors ran at a frequency of one hertz. They "slept" in a low-power mode, drawing no more current than a digital clock, and only the inertial navigation units in their bodies slowly, with cosmic precision, counted the planet's rotation. They waited.
The command didn't come by radio—the airwaves above the pad were dead. It traveled along armored fiber-optic cables embedded in the side of each container. The signal: "Execute." First, the boosters ignited. It wasn't the roar of engines. It was a thud. Twenty fiery columns of blinding, eye-searing flame struck the concrete, instantly vaporizing puddles and turning the air into plasma.
Twenty tons of steel, composites, and machinery didn't lift off—they were torn from their place. The near-vertical climb, which would have crushed the bones of any living creature to dust, was just a gentle background hum of vibration for the sleeping machines. The concrete pad was momentarily empty, a scorched black spot remaining. Then, high in the stratosphere, where the sky turns blue-black even during the day, the shooting stars flared and then went out.
The launch pads, their mission over, flew off to the sides, tumbling in the icy vacuum. The cruise engines ignited. Smooth, bluish flares. The containers, transformed into something like ballistic missiles, set course and shot into the stratosphere. 18 kilometers. 20 kilometers.
22 kilometers.
There, in the thin, empty air where human blood boils in seconds, the automation gave a new command.
With a dry, echoing click, unheard by anyone but the sensors, the UMPK's wings fully extended. The long, fifteen-meter-long planes of black carbon fiber caught the first photons of the sun, already touching the eastern horizon. The engines switched to low-power mode. Twenty heavy, angular "boxes" ceased to be rockets. They became gliders.
A long, terrifying flight began.
For hundreds of kilometers, they flew almost silently. Below, beneath the cloud cover, cities, rivers, and dormant forests flashed by, but here, at altitude, absolute peace reigned. They raced at Mach 2, and the only sound was the thin, barely perceptible whistle of the wind cut by the sharp edges.
They adjusted their course without human intervention. The satellite constellation transmitted cold, numeric coordinates, but the real power lay in the inertial brain inside each container. The fiber-optic gyroscopes didn't see the satellites. They sensed gravity, the Earth's rotation, and the slightest course fluctuations. Twenty vehicles moved in perfect formation, like a school of iron fish, exchanging data via laser beams.
At the calculated point, above an invisible front line erased from maps, over enemy territory, the cruise engines shut down. They simply cut off thrust.
The containers entered a pure, silent glide.
Gravity now became their engine. Altitude began to drop rapidly, converting into speed. The air around the hulls grew denser, hotter from friction.
A few minutes before their target, when the heat spot of a large industrial hub loomed on the horizon below, behind which the desired bunker was hidden, the automation began its final phase.
The dry clicks of the squibs were heard again.
The heavy nose cones, protecting the optics and antennas from plasma, ejected and sank. Following them, camouflage panels along the entire hull bounced off and were carried away by the wind.
Internal organs were exposed.
Precision targeting systems activated.
Lenses began to flow from retracted slots. Titanium diaphragms on the "heads" of the anthropomorphic machines mounted within opened. The red dots of laser rangefinders, invisible in daylight but bright in the twilight, began to scan the ground.
Processors emerged from sleep mode. The frequency jumped to gigahertz.
Lights came on inside the containers.
Twenty capsules, shedding their camouflage, hurtled toward the ground, transforming from featureless cargo into a striking fist bristling with sensors and guns. Seconds remained until the harvest began.
Five hundred meters. The main canopies deployed. But these weren't the silk parachutes that gently lower people. These were rigid, cross-shaped parachute-wings that violently tore the multi-ton bulk, reducing residual velocity to subsonic.
One hundred meters.
Inside the containers, secured in their sockets, the anthropomorphic robots applied the first current to their gyroscopes. Their dead optical units flickered, focusing on the inner darkness.
Fifty meters.
The landing solid-propellant rocket motors fired. Jets of hot gas struck the greasy, squelching earth, evaporating puddles and shearing off treetops.
Impact.
But there was no impact. Ten centimeters from the surface, the nozzles howled at the limit of their thrust, creating a cushion of air. The container hovered for a moment, and then slowly, with a dull hiss, sank into the mud.
The titanium grippers holding the robots lost power.
And in that same second, even before the severed fairing panels touched the ground, the end doors of the containers blew out.
Mister Bad Guy.
October 5th was unusually chilly. Low, leaden clouds seemed to settle belly-down on the treetops of the old, gloomy spruce forest, blurring the line between sky and earth. A fine, persistent drizzle, unlike rain or snow, settled on faces like an icy crust, soaked greatcoats, and turned the rich, clayey soil into a continuous, squelching swamp. The chill, dank air smelled of fallen pine needles, rotting leaves, and that special scent of imminent, inevitable disaster that only seasoned soldiers know—the smell of burnt TNT and cooling metal.
Chaos reigned in a large, track-ravaged clearing sandwiched between two marshy gullies, but this chaos was frighteningly mathematical. Here, in the very heart of no man's land, landing had just been completed. Like giant steel seeds dropped from the sky, several 20-foot olive-green containers stood. Their angular uniforms, familiar to the eye of a dockworker, now looked alien and ominous.
The end and side doors had been blown off by explosive charges and swung open, transforming into wide steel ramps sinking into the mud. Some of the hulls were still smoking a bluish, acrid smoke—the cooling of the landing rockets for the soft landing, which had torn the multi-ton bulks from free fall at the very last moment. All around, caught in the sharp, spiky branches of fallen pines and withered heather bushes, lay crumpled, ghost-like parachute canopies, scraps of Kevlar slings, and severed composite panels of aerodynamic fairings. The clearing was strewn with them, like an old battlefield—the bodies of the fallen.
From the dark interiors of the containers, illuminated by the deathly red emergency lights, from this steel womb, into the drizzling rain, one by one, those who had flown inside began to emerge.
The first sound was the low, guttural hum of hydraulics. A heavy tracked platform slowly slid down the metal ramp, pushing it down with its weight. It had no face, no cabin, no triplexes—only a sloping forehead of Kevlar composite, studded with sensors like the dead, compound eyes of an insect. On its broad, flattened back, twin Utes missile launchers and automatic grenade launchers were fixed in ring turrets.
The vehicle landed heavily in the mud. Its wide, half-meter-wide steel tracks, with joints resembling those of a prehistoric beast, spun, searching for traction, and with a guttural squelch, began to bite into the soil. Behind it, its tracks clanking against the steel side of the container, came a second. And a third. The heavy platforms did not fuss. Slowly, with a fatal, irresistible heaviness, they fanned out across the clearing, engulfing it in a perfect steel cauldron.
Following them, throwing up fountains of black ooze, light wheeled vehicles rolled out of other containers. With their six independent suspensions, they seemed almost graceful in their predatory speed. They didn't sink into the mud, but seemed to glide over it, scattering shreds of turf. Abruptly picking up speed, they flanked, instantly disappearing into the gray shroud of rain to occupy the intersections of clearings and approaches to ravines.
And then they appeared.
Between the steel carcasses, ankle-deep in icy ooze, stepped figures that the human mind at first refused to accept as inanimate. Anthropomorphic robots. Their titanium joints were covered with flexible carbon fiber elements resembling musculature. Their hands, ending in four-fingered manipulators, clutched assault rifles.
Their movements were frighteningly fast, yet slightly angular, jerky, lacking human fluidity. Where a human would slide, they took a short, sharp step. Where a human would duck, they crouched on servos, the sound of this movement reminiscent of the click of a giant rifle's bolt being cocked. They moved in dashes from one fallen, moss-covered tree trunk to another, their head-mounted optical units constantly rotating, scanning the damp, fog-filled forest with thermal imagers and lidars.
But the true master of this battlefield was the air.
Above this entire scene, above the steel herd and the black mud, the ether itself was already seething. Hundreds of FPV drones rose into the sky almost simultaneously. They burst from rotor drums hidden in the centers of the containers, like a disturbed swarm of wasps.
Their engines weren't roaring. The chill, damp air was filled only with a thin, maddening, high-pitched itch, like the squeak of a tribe of mosquitoes before a thunderstorm. The drones weren't flying in formation. They swooped chaotically, low to the ground, their propellers nearly cutting down last year's grass. They zigzagged between the black, wet trunks of pine trees, diving toward the concrete caps of pillboxes and the roofs of dugouts on the distant, barely visible edge of the clearing.
Some of them were already working on the embrasures. Short, dry, crimson flashes—shaped charges—exploded on the concrete canopies. Gray dust, sheaves of concrete chips, and pieces of rebar flew in all directions. Thick, greasy black smoke billowed from one embrasure—a drone had found a cable duct.
And only when the air filled with this mechanical throb and explosions did the forest respond.
Mud sprayed out in fountains from beneath the heavy tracks. Somewhere in the center of the formation, beyond the fallen, uprooted dry wood, the first bursts were already firing. The dry, staccato clatter of the PKTs, which almost immediately merged into a continuous, eardrum-crushing, steely roar. It was joined by the deep, ragged bark of the Utes—the sound was so dense it seemed you could touch it; it physically pressed on your chest, forcing you to bend to the very ground.
Smoke from the burning positions at the edge of the forest—the smell of burnt plastic, smoldering rubber, and old TNT—mingled with the sour, pungent odor of gunpowder gases and the gray, stinking exhaust of the robots' diesel generators. The clearing ceased to be just a piece of land. It became a hellish forge, where the cold autumn air was heated by the flashes and trembled with shockwaves.
The forest around the perimeter, until then seemingly dead and numb from the cold, began to "come alive" with return fire. The silence was shattered by the cracking of breaking branches. From behind piles of rotting logs, from beneath the roots of century-old spruce trees, trembling orange lines of tracers stretched toward the containers.
But they were quickly covered by a new wave of drones.
The sky above the clearing turned black. This wasn't a metaphor—hundreds, if not thousands, of aircraft obscured the leaden clouds in a dense, vibrating cloud. The kamikaze drones formed a solid, unbroken wall. They fell upon the flashes like a flock of iron swifts. Where a machine gun had fired a second ago, now only a gray cloud of wood dust rose silently—behind the general roar of battle—and chunks of torn metal flew in all directions.
Meanwhile, the containers continued to "give birth" to vehicles.
From the distant steel boxes, still shrouded in the bluish, acrid smoke from the cooling nozzles, fresh vehicles rolled down the wet ramps. They didn't hesitate for a second. Their tracks touched the mud—and the platform immediately sank into the liquid, squelching muck of the clearings, taking its place in the line.
It seemed as if an entire robotic battalion had suddenly descended upon this godforsaken, frozen section of the front, into this freezing, bottomless autumn mud. A battalion that hadn't even existed a minute ago. It had no headquarters with maps, no field kitchen, no medical company. It had no need for warm dugouts, no dry foot wraps, no hot, lip-scalding tea in aluminum mugs.
They only needed a target.
And they had already found it.
Mister Bad's defenses, the concrete cocoon of his personal fortress, designed to withstand artillery strikes and special forces assaults, turned into paper in the face of this cold, impassive, mathematically calibrated steel. When eight autonomous "Utes" guns, their barrels tireless and their hands trembling, start firing at you, and from above, all this is mercilessly countered by a swarm of five hundred hovering eyes, the day truly becomes a very, very bad one.
The robots knew no fear. They knew no pity. They knew only elevation angles, azimuths, heat signatures, and ballistic tables. And now all this icy, inhuman mathematics was aimed at turning the concrete shelters at the far edge of the clearing into fine, gray rubble...
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
..always the voice of sweet reason...
..a regional Iranian catspaw,....jpg)
BREAKING: Israel says pilot tried to hijack flydubai flight to Tel Aviv that diverted, landed in Saudi Arabia
