SITREP 9/13/23: Tradewinds of Change

What’s in a name?

We start today with an interesting angle to ongoing global developments. The G20 assembly in India was a ‘quiet’ watershed moment that will go down as another mile-marker on the now inexorable march toward the collapse of Western hegemony.

India for the first time has reverted to using its ancient name of Bharat, with Modi sitting behind a placard with the new name at the summit:

This is a powerful decolonization move that marks an ascendent Eastern and ‘global south’ world which is finally awakening en masse to repudiate the bonds from the West, both physical, psychological, and spiritual, which have shackled them for so long.

In 2014, famed yogi Sadhguru perfectly explained the significance of India needing to adopt its true name over the one forced onto it by colonists:

“When someone conquers you, the first thing they will do is change your name. This is the technology of dominance, the technology of enslavement.”

He states that Bharat is a mantra of power:

There are some detractors, though, who believe the new posture change is a dangerous shift in the Hindu nationalist movement, and may spark repressions against ethnic minorities.

But this encompasses a wider movement of the liberation of people around the globe, finally witnessing the downfall of the West, and no longer afraid to embrace their own histories, taking control of their own agency and destiny.

This of course comes not long after Turkey similarly shed its Westernized veneer and declared itself as Türkiye, officially changing the name of the country.

All of this falls under the shadow of the historic decolonization sweeping through Africa, where Francophone countries in particular are standing up against their erstwhile occupiers once and for all. These shifts mark a major turning point in the global consciousness. The West has never looked more frail, more “out of ideas” for the future leadership of the world. It has never looked more “on the wrong side of history” than today, with its utterly inhuman and ubiquitous economic terrorism, where 1/4 to 1/3 of the world’s countries are currently under sanction by the U.S., not to mention its even more inhuman social engineering, pushing vast unnatural changes on humanity’s social fabric in the most coercive ways possible.

These tectonic shifts have not been lost on some of the world’s most incisive thinkers. Alexander Dugin was amongst the first to notice the seachange. In a new post, he describes the new emergent world ‘eschatology’. I’m no hardcore Duginist, per se, so I can only assume he’s using the term not in a theological but rather Heideggerian way (he was a follower of Heidegger, after all)—which is to say, eschatology as a sort of human manifest destiny, or true being. In short, he’s saying that countries around the world are throwing off their previous imposed facades and false mantles and are going back to their roots by re-embracing their historical essence.

Dugin links it to the final refutation of Francis Fukuyama fallacy—that the “end of history” had come with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that “liberalism” would be the final eschatological fabric for all humanity til the end of time. But the new global shift represent an awakening of the world’s oldest cultures, having finally realized that the pseudo-religious cult of Western ‘liberalism’ is in fact a dead end.

Lastly, to return from the lofty and abstract back to the concrete developments on the ground, we note that the other major ground-shaking demarche occurred when the West, and the U.S. in particular, got a big slap in the face rebuke when the entire G20 refused to declare the Ukrainian conflict as an “aggression” by Russia, wording it as a “war in Ukraine” rather than a “war against/on Ukraine [by Russia]”, a sharp departure from the Bali summit in November of last year, where most countries condemned Russia’s “aggression”.

From BBC:

Desperate to bolster its fading influence, particularly in Africa, the West invited the African Union to the G20 as a permanent member in its entirety, all 55 members of it. But the luster simply wasn’t there, as G20 leaders even refused to take a group photo with each other for the first time, some sources claiming it was due to the “presence of the Russian delegation.”

Just another example how little the West has left beyond desperate ploys and infantile behavior.

Ultimately, this Russian analyst described it best—that despite Putin not even being present, Russia “won G20”:

⚡️⚡️⚡️There is such an opinion.

Sergey Markov:

Russia won the G20 summit in Bharat India. The declaration was adopted. And in it, Russia and the Global South imposed their formula on the Collective West. The West conceded.

The West wanted the phrase “Russia’s war against Ukraine.”. She was thrown out and put the phrase “war in Ukraine”.

The West wanted there to be support for a Grain deal only for grain access from Ukraine. But in the declaration, the formula is “grain from both the Russian Federation and Ukraine.”

The Global South has defeated the Collective West in these formulas, because the Global South and Russia have become stronger and more consolidated.

They expanded the BRICS, and now the West is giving in, leaving, gnawing its tail like a wounded wolf.

In Bali there was a year ago “aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine” and it was then our defeat. And now our formula is “war in Ukraine”. Will there be “SVO” next year? Or the liberation of Ukraine?⚡️⚡️⚡️

All that being said, it’s fair to say that Ukraine won’t be getting an invitation any time soon:

Weapons news

The other section I wanted to cover today revolves specifically around some of the latest weapons development updates. There has been a particularly interesting spate of recent news on this account, so we might as well explore them all in one go.

1. A Russian source has announced that Russia has now tested, for the first time, a Fab-1500 version of the UMPC glidebomb and it’s said to have hit its target accurately. Reportedly, Su-34s can carry upwards of 2 such bombs.

FighterBomber (Russian airforce-linked account) gives the details on why it took longer to develop this variant:

After many months of trial and error, a couple of days ago the first UMPC FAB-1500 M54 accurately found its combat target with a direct hit.

The countdown of hohlofrags has begun!

For certain reasons, the designers were unable to simply increase the UMPCs that were used on the 500 and 250 kg calibers and attach them to the lorry. Therefore, we can say that everything had to start almost from scratch. New airframe, new mechanisms. Everything is solid, but everything is new.

And finally everything worked out.

At the same time, they were able to increase the release range by … times compared to UMPCs of smaller calibers. That is, this is our longest-range UMPKashka that exists.

With a stated accuracy of 5 meters, only the crater from the bomb explosion reaches fifteen meters in diameter, and the affected area is more than two square kilometers. Only the explosives in this bomb are under 700 kg, while the Su-34 carries and can already operate with two such UMPCs, and in the future it will be able to operate with three ammunition, at one or different targets in one pass.

There is still a lot to be completed, a lot to improve, to go through the inevitable process of shrinking and shaking, but successful combat work has begun in one and a half hours.

Let me remind you that crests currently have no protection against UMPC.

Yes, so far the cases of using UMPCs of this type are isolated, there are still few of them, but I think within a month the industry will organize their production at the calculated volumes and they will fly, just as UMPCs of more modest calibers fly today, up to a hundred a day in all directions.

And in light of the fact that recently UMPC have learned to throw not only Su-34 and Su-35 of the latest series, but also Su-34 of the first series, I think this is great news.

Oh yes, and today they will fly by taxi. Perhaps in those very seconds when you are reading this text.

This is a huge deal. Recall that in a recent Forbes article the AFU themselves admitted that the new glidebombs are the single weapon they fear most:

The Fab-1500 is 1500kg compared to the 500kg size of the ones most commonly using the UMPC “Orthodox JDAM” attachments presently. That’s on top of the fact he indicates that the range on this one is actually much larger. A 1500kg bomb is massive in power, with an explosive warhead of I believe somewhere near the 700kg weight.

Most cruise missiles have warheads in the 450-500kg range, as an example. This would be much more powerful than a large cruise missile yet inordinately cheaper to use. It’s like having an “on call” Kalibr cruise missile to use on the frontlines on a daily basis, for close-in air support and other situations, rather than having to conserve them as is currently done with expensive cruise missiles.

If they can truly get it to work in decent numbers, this could turn into the most terrifying weapon of the war.

2. Another big piece of news came with the revelation that Russia has used the Kinzhal missile fired from an Su-34 platform for the first time:

The reason this is bigger news than it sounds is because not only does this open up a huge amount of new platforms that can use the missile, but more importantly it allows Russia to ‘mask’ the use of the missile far more effectively.

You see, one of the chief issues of the Kinzhal’s use thus far is that, operating primarily from the Mig-31 platform, it allowed the U.S. to track potential strikes much more effectively, giving Ukraine advance warning which goes against the entire ethos of what the Kinzhal is supposed to represent: namely, lightning fast decapitation attacks that take away your ability to anticipate or defend against it.

But since Russia has a limited number of Mig-31s which likewise operate from a smaller number of designated airfields, it’s much easier to anticipate an impending Kinzhal attack when you see one of the Mig-31s taking off, which the U.S. can do by watching just the airfields they operate from, whether by some sort of satellite or forward observers on the ground (easy to have an agent renting an “apartment” nearby who can literally watch them take off from his window and immediately report on it). Just read this Rybar report from about a month or so ago:

It’s resulted in a known situation where the mere take-off of a Mig-31 sends the entire country of Ukraine into lockdown, as they expect a Kinzhal strike on some sort of decision-making center (as that’s the only type of target a Kinzhal would normally be used for).

But now, if Su-34s can carry the missile, there’s no real way to track that because they operate out of a much wider array of fields, flying far more sorties in general. That means a Kinzhal attack can happen at any time, completely unexpectedly, which puts all of Ukraine’s most sensitive targets on notice.

3. Speaking of planes and airfields. A curious update on the ‘tire’ saga. Many have laughed after Russia apparently began to place tires on the grounded fuselages of strategic craft like the Tu-95. This culminated in a new photo showing Su-34s have fallen victim to the tire campaign as well:

The photo spawned a frisson of jeering laughter and ridicule around the net:

But it quickly subsided after it was revealed that the tires are not just a desperate ‘cope’ ploy against drone-dropped grenades, but rather they interfere with the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites which scan Russia’s airfields on an hourly basis:

It seems Russia has once again used the cheap “wooden pencil” to foil the West’s billion-dollar efforts.

This comes after a series of naval tricks Russia continues to utilize which throws off Western OSINT detection of their ships, like the ongoing repainting of ship hulls to create optical illusions that mess with accurate identification and tracking of Russia’s vessels:

4. I wrote long ago about how the U.S. announced a sudden impending cancellation of the F-22 program shortly after Russia’s SMO began, clearly reading the tea leaves of modern conflict and realizing how old and obsolete their vaunted ‘stealth fighter’ had become in light of Russia’s air-defense supremacy.

Now, there’s been another such u-turn: this time in the form of an announcement that the U.S. will be cancelling its much anticipated Abrams tank:

The Army announced Sept. 6 that it will no longer upgrade its old Abrams Main Battle Tank and that it will build a new fighting vehicle instead.

The Army will close out the M1A2 System Enhancement Package version 4 effort and develop M1E3 Abrams, “which will focus on making the capability improvements needed to fight and win against future threats on the battlefield of 2040 and beyond,” an Army statement said.

Initial operational capability is anticipated in early the 2030s, the statement said.

Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for Ground Combat Systems, said: “The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protections for soldiers, built from within instead of adding on.”

Add that to the growing list of abandoned U.S. projects from the realization that they can’t compete on the modern battlefield. …