Christmas Eve Massacre in Gaza Refugee Camp
The Grayzone goes to the scene of one of the most heinous crimes Israel committed in the besieged Gaza Strip: the Christmas Eve massacre in Maghazi Refugee Camp, which left over 70 dead in a single airstrike. We speak to survivors of the attack and expose the scale of damage with exclusive drone footage.
US….Arsenal of Genocide in Gaza
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 27 Dec 23
During 80 days of mass destruction and human slaughter in Gaza, the US has done its part. President Biden has shipped 10,000 tons of US weapons to help Israel utterly destroy Gaza. Took 244 cargo planes and 20 ships to deliver all those weapons of mass civilian destruction with endless more on the way.
In WWII the US was the Arsenal of Democracy in defeating fascism. In the current Israeli war on the entirety of Gaza, the US has morphed into the Arsenal of Genocide in destroying the Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel receives 230 planes, 20 ships loaded with US arms amid Gaza war
US military assistance includes artillery shells, armored vehicles, basic combat tools for soldiers, lsraeli daily says
Ahmed Asmar 26.12.2023, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-receives-230-planes-20-ships-loaded-with-us-arms-amid-gaza-war/3092301
ANKARA
The United States has sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships loaded with weapons and military equipment to Israel since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict on Oct. 7, according to Israeli media on Monday.
The US military assistance includes artillery shells, armored vehicles and basic combat tools for soldiers, Yediot Ahronoth newspaper reported.
Israel’s Defense Ministry estimates the cost of the current war on the Gaza Strip at around 65 billion shekels ($17 billion).
The newspaper, citing a Defense Ministry official, said the army had used most of the ammunition in its warehouses at the beginning of the war.
“But Israel managed to re-fill its warehouses in preparation for a possible large-scale war with the Lebanese Hezbollah group,” it added.
At least 489 Israeli soldiers have been killed in clashes with Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, according to Israeli military figures.
Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7, killing at least 20,674 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 54,536 others, according to local health authorities.
Around 1,200 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the Hamas attack.
The Israeli onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with half of the coastal territory’s housing damaged or destroyed and nearly 2 million people displaced within the densely populated enclave amid shortages of food and clean water.
Ukraine confirms retreat from key Donbass town
https://www.rt.com/news/589722-ukraine-confirms-maryinka-retreat/ 27 Dec 23
Kiev’s top general has acknowledged Russia’s capture of Maryinka, saying his forces pulled back to the outskirts
Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny has confirmed the retreat of his troops to the outskirts of Maryinka, a key Donbass town, where Russian forces claimed victory on Monday after months of fierce fighting for the stronghold.
Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday, Zaluzhny acknowledged the pullback of Ukrainian troops from Maryinka, located to the west of Donetsk. He likened the heavy fighting for the town in recent months to Ukraine’s loss earlier this year of Artyomovsk (known as Bakhmut in Ukrainian).
“This is exactly the same as it was in Bakhmut – street by street, block by block, and our soldiers were being targeted – and the result is what it is,” Zaluzhny said. “This is a war, so the fact that we have now retreated to the outskirts of Maryinka and set up positions behind Maryinka in some areas is nothing that can cause any public outcry. Sadly, this is what war is like.”
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced on Monday that Moscow’s forces had fully liberated Maryinka. Ukrainian troops had dug in for nearly a decade, using the town as a key hub in their battles with Donbass separatists and later the Russian Army. President Vladimir Putin said the victory pushed Ukrainian units further away from Donetsk and would provide Russian troops wider operational freedom in future maneuvers.
Ukrainian officials have denied Russia’s claim of capturing Maryinka, saying that fighting for the town continued. However, Zaluzhny said Kiev’s troops remained only on the northern outskirts of the town. He added that although every inch of territory is important to Ukraine, “the lives of our soldiers are even more important to us.”
Kiev’s top general has clashed increasingly in recent months with President Vladimir Zelensky, whose office rebuked Zaluzhny in November for telling a Western media outlet that the conflict with Russia had reached a “stalemate.” Zelensky repeatedly hyped a long-awaited summer counteroffensive that cost Ukraine around 160,000 casualties and failed to make any significant battlefield gains.Russian forces achieved their main 2023 goal by thwarting the counteroffensive, Shoigu said on Tuesday. He added that the Russian military was steadily making strides toward overall victory in the conflict, “constantly taking more advantageous positions and expanding territories under its control in all directions.”
Russian forces achieved their main 2023 goal by thwarting the counteroffensive, Shoigu said on Tuesday. He added that the Russian military was steadily making strides toward overall victory in the conflict, “constantly taking more advantageous positions and expanding territories under its control in all directions.”
Year of the drone — how the hi-tech weapon has transformed warfare
The Times, Michael Clarke, 23 Dec 23
“Sixth-generation airpower involves the integration of many systems of information, tactics, weapons and decisions. It’s about AI, robotics and the autonomy we will grant to the robots. The aircraft that flies in the midst of all this is no longer the key component. Instead the massive Tempest IT system will come first; the physical fighter plane will be designed around its needs.”
Sixth Generation Warfare…New ways to kill that militaries are salivating over…brought to all living beings by tech and AI. Drones, autonomous weapons, AI facilitated/controlled swarms.
Excerpts:
“Combat aircraft still vie for superiority as they operate and fight at 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000ft. But down at 5,000ft, the airspace now belongs to the drones. It has become the new spatial domain of modern warfare.”
“Drones can attack, they can look and listen, they can report back, they can stick around. Or they can just intimidate troops on the ground by creating the dreaded buzzing overhead.
And this is where the 5,000ft air domain is about to become really revolutionary. The thousands of drones now operating are mainly controlled individually. But they are on the cusp of becoming part of an artificial intelligence world where their diverse functions can be integrated, and their prodigious numbers, plus the immediacy of their operations, makes them prime candidates as autonomous weapons systems — making their own combat decisions as they see the battlefield developing rapidly below them.”
“In this way, drones are all part of the AI revolution that is happening at the top of the airpower domain — up at the 30,000 and 40,000ft levels. ‘Sixth-generation’ airpower, due to be with us by the 2030s, will use advanced robotics and AI to produce aircraft that can either be piloted or left to fly and fight for themselves.”
“A single piloted aircraft in this sixth-generation conception could become an organic air wing of its own. But it will only work with advanced AI to integrate the massive information flows it will all require. And it implies a lot of system autonomy for the robotic units. A pilot will still be legally and morally responsible for what all of his or her aircraft get up to, but robotic Tempests and their accompanying drone swarms will be making a lot of their own immediate battle decisions. And the same will be true in sixth-generation maritime warfare — lots of vessels, only some of them crewed and fought like normal warships.”
“Sixth-generation airpower involves the integration of many systems of information, tactics, weapons and decisions. It’s about AI, robotics and the autonomy we will grant to the robots. The aircraft that flies in the midst of all this is no longer the key component. Instead the massive Tempest IT system will come first; the physical fighter plane will be designed around its needs.”
Russia To Retire World’s Only Nuclear-Powered, Largest Battle-Cruiser Pyotr Veliky
The Russian Navy will not modernize the massive Pyotr Veliky battle-cruiser, the world’s only nuclear-powered surface vessel, and the largest non-aircraft carrier naval warship.
The one-of-kind warship that packs phenomenal firepower was supposed to be refitted and modernized after another ship in its class, Admiral Nakhimov, concluded her modernization. Pyotr Veliky will head for decommissioning following that.
According to reports, the anticipated refurbishment has been canceled owing to concerns over the massive costs and technical challenges involved in the vessels’ operations and maintenance.
Moreover, the ships are also not in harmony with newer concepts being considered in the Russian Navy, which favor mid-sized, heavily armed missile boats, corvettes, and frigates, which have a mix of land-attack, surface-ship strike, anti-air, and submarine hunting capabilities. …………………………………………………………………………… https://www.eurasiantimes.com/russia-to-retire-worlds-only-nuclear-powered-largest-battle-cruiser-pyotr-veliky-sister-ship-to-serve-in-arctic/
Ukraine losing 800 troops a day – ex-NATO officer
https://www.rt.com/news/589421-ukraine-losses-attrition-morale/ 22 Dec 23
Kiev’s manpower is “significantly worn out” as Russia’s “strategy of attrition” is taking effect, a former German Air Force Colonel has said.
Around 800 Ukrainian troops are being killed and wounded daily amid the conflict with Russia, retired German Air Force Colonel and prominent military analyst Ralph D. Thiele has claimed.
In an opinion piece for Focus magazine on Wednesday, Thiele, who used to serve in the personal staff of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, claimed that Kiev needs to recruit more than 20,000 soldiers every month in order to replace its dead and injured. He did not reveal his sources or basis for his calculations, however.
Ukraine also requires additional personnel to be able to rotate its troops on the frontline, so that “exhausted soldiers” may recover and units may replenish their material supplies, he wrote.
According to Thiele, who now heads the Political-Military Society, EuroDefense (Germany) and StratByrd Consulting think tanks, “the highly motivated defense” and subsequent counteroffensive, which he described as “a thing of the past,” came at a “high price” for Ukraine.
Kiev’s manpower and hardware are “significantly worn out,” he said. “Western weapons systems are not miracle weapons and are wearing out,” the analyst added.
The worsening battlefield situation and decreasing Western support for Kiev are “eating away at the morale” of the Ukrainian troops, who “will have to save ammunition in a war of attrition and endure slaughter at the front without rest and without a greater sense of achievement,” Thiele stressed.
Russia has also lost “a large number of soldiers and huge amounts of material” during the conflict, but “it has much more of both than Ukraine,” he argued.
“Step by step, Russia’s superiority in the conflict with Ukraine is becoming more visible,” the analyst acknowledged. Moscow’s “strategy of attrition” is “taking effect” in terms of personnel, material, ammunition and morale, he said.
Thiele’s number of 800 Ukrainian soldiers being lost per day appears to be higher than the one announced by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu at the expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry’s Board on Tuesday. According to Shoigu, some 400,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed or wounded since the start of the fighting in late February 2022. This means that, according to Russian figures, Kiev’s daily losses stand at around 600 servicemen.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who chaired the meeting, stressed that “we can say with confidence that our troops have the initiative” on the frontline with Ukraine. “In essence, we are doing what we consider necessary, what we want. Wherever… commanders decide active defense is best, it takes place. And where it is needed, we improve our positions,” Putin explained.
Surrender or die – Netanyahu
Thu, 21 Dec 2023 https://www.sott.net/article/487123-Surrender-or-die-Netanyahu
Israel intends to fight until total victory, its prime minister has announced…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war against Hamas until the Palestinian group is eliminated entirely and Gaza poses no threat.
His comments come after Hamas reportedly rejected West Jerusalem’s offer for another week-long “humanitarian pause” in exchange for freeing 40 Israeli captives.
In a video message posted on X (formerly Twitter) by his spokesman Ofir Gendelman on Thursday, Netanyahu said:
“We are fighting until victory. We will not stop the war until we achieve all of its goals: Completing the elimination of Hamas and releasing all of our hostages.
“The choice I propose to Hamas is very simple: Surrender or die. All Hamas terrorists, from the first to the last, are dead men walking.”
He added that after eliminating Hamas, Israel will ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat and that “whoever thinks we will stop is detached from reality.”
The message, in Hebrew with English subtitles, appears to have been recorded on Wednesday evening after the talks on a possible ceasefire reportedly collapsed. Citing anonymous sources, the Wall Street Journal said that Israel had offered to halt its military operations for a week in exchange for the release of hostages and allow more humanitarian aid into the Palestinian enclave.
Hamas, however, rejected the offer and insisted that any talks would require halting the offensive against Gaza first, according to the Journal.
The Palestinian group seized an estimated 240 Israeli captives during its October 7 incursion into the country, which claimed the lives of an estimated 1,200 people. Several of the hostages have since been killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during their offensive against the enclave. Around 120 are estimated to still be in Hamas captivity after some were exchanged during a week-long truce at the end of November.
Israeli forces have so far taken the northern part of Gaza and thoroughly devastated the enclave’s infrastructure. Local health authorities have estimated that more than 19,500 Palestinians have been killed over the course of the fighting.
The US has called on Netanyahu to limit civilian casualties but continued to provide Israel with military and other support. West Jerusalem has faced backlash from abroad, with the Houthis of Yemen openly siding with the Palestinians and attacking Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea.
Meet the Companies Profiting From Israel’s War on Gaza
“The scale of destruction and war crimes in Gaza would not be possible without massive weapon transfers from the U.S.,” . “As global resistance to war and apartheid grows, it is important that the public know exactly who is making this violence possible”
“As global resistance to war and apartheid grows, it is important that the public know exactly who is making this violence possible.”
SCHEERPOST, By Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams December 21, 2023
As of Wednesday, a U.S.-based Quaker group’s online database listed over two dozen companies profiting from the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have spent the last 10 weeks waging what experts call a “genocidal” war that sent defense stocks soaring.
Backed by $3.8 billion in annual military aid from the United States, Israel declared war on October 7 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack that killed over 1,100 people. Since then, Israeli forces have killed over 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza—sparking massive protests demanding a cease-fire around the world, including many led by Jewish people.
“War and attacks on civilians will never bring safety or peace to Israelis or Palestinians.”
The growing death toll, displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and difficulties in delivering humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave have also increased scrutiny of a $14.3 billion package for the war that the Biden administration requested from Congress as well as criticism of the U.S. weapon-makers and billionaire donors who are arming and enabling the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“The scale of destruction and war crimes in Gaza would not be possible without massive weapon transfers from the U.S.,” said Noam Perry of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the group behind the tool, in a statement Wednesday. “As global resistance to war and apartheid grows, it is important that the public know exactly who is making this violence possible.”
As the AFSC webpage details:
Shortly after October 7, the U.S. government started transferring to Israel massive amounts of weapons. Among these weapons, Israel received more than 15,000 bombs and 50,000 artillery shells within just the first month-and-a-half. These transfers have been deliberately shrouded in secrecy to avoid public scrutiny and prevent Congress from exercising any meaningful oversight.
Some of these weapons were purchased using U.S. taxpayers’ money through the Foreign Military Sales program; some were direct commercial sales purchased through Israel’s own budget; and some were replenished U.S. military stockpiles in Israel, which the Israeli military may also use. A list of known U.S. arms transfers is maintained by the Forum on the Arms Trade.
The webpage notes that the list is based on reporting, social media, and other open sources, and “focuses on weapons used by Israel because all Palestinian militant groups are already sanctioned and receive no support from Western governments or corporations.”
For example, Boeing, the world’s fifth-largest weapon manufacturer, makes F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used by the Israeli forces, as well as “multiple types of unguided small diameter bombs (SDBs) and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits” that have been used “extensively” during the war, including in a bombing of Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp…………………………………………………………………………..
Other companies on the list include weapons giants such as General Dynamics, General Electric, L3Harris Technologies, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX—formerly Raytheon—as well as vehicle companies AM General, Ford, Oshkosh, Toyota, and drone manufacturers AeroVironment, Skydio, and XTEND…………………………………………………..
The other foreign firms on the list are ThyssenKrupp, the German company that built four warships for Israel, and Nordic Ammunition Company, which makes the M141 Bunker Defeat Munition, a shoulder-fired “bunker-buster” rocket……………………………………..
more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/21/meet-the-companies-profiting-from-israels-war-on-gaza/—
What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War? The Narrative Turns. Now What?
Patrick Lawrence ScheerPost, December 20, 2023.
“Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe’s foundations are trembling.”
This was the headline atop a Dec.9 commentary in The Telegraph, the farthest right of the major London dailies. The subhead elaborated the theme in yet graver terms: “Kyiv’s counteroffensive has ended in failure. This could be NATO’s Suez moment.” The piece that followed included all sorts of goodies in this line.
It is not official, not yet, that Ukraine’s grand counteroffensive, the great Russophobic hope of the Zelensky and Biden regimes earlier this year, has proven a bust and that defeat is in the offing. The closest we have to such an admission came from Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this month, when the Ukrainian president declared that the counteroffensive “did not achieve the desired results.” I loved that moment, to be honest. It reminded me of Emperor Hirohito’s famous declaration on August 15, 1945, when he announced the surrender on Japanese radio. “The war,” he told his desperate subjects, “has not necessarily progressed to our advantage.”
O.K., let’s leave Zelensky to Zelensky, Joe Biden to Joe Biden, and Antony Blinken to Antony Blinken. We can count news of failure unofficially official when mainstream media start dropping such news on their readers and viewers. The Telegraph, so far as I know, was the first big daily on either side of the Atlantic to make such blunt admissions. Others have already followed, if in gentler, more oblique language—in Zelensky-speak, this is to say.
A significant moment may be upon us. What will follow once it is acknowledged that the Nazi-infested crooks in Kyiv have failed? President Biden, as is his consistently unwise wont, radically overinvested in the proxy war he chose to start with the Russian Federation as soon as he took office three years ago next month. Having defined the Ukraine conflict as a war in the name of democracy and freedom —“values” rather than interests, this is to say—he has left the U.S. and its European clients no room for compromise and nearly none even for negotiation. What is the next move when defeat is too obvious any longer to deny?
If we are about to enter uncharted territory, will it prove dangerous ground? It may, but this is not yet clear. It will be uncertain and probably unstable: This we know. Of the many things I do not like about this circumstance, I will mention a few straightaway. Biden may be the stupidest president of the postwar era on the foreign policy side: He exhibits no capacity whatsoever for nimble or imaginative thought. He is a warmonger of long standing, an election year is upon us, and he is by now in obvious danger of being impeached. His mental incompetence, atop all this, is plain for all to see. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………
‘“People Snatchers:’ Ukraine’s Recruiters Use Harsh Tactics to Fill Ranks,” appeared Dec. 15. In it, Thomas Gibbons–Neff describes how plainclothes goons have taken to kidnapping draft-age Ukrainian men, some with mental or physical disabilities, and forcing them into the military induction process. This is sometimes done at gunpoint. People are taken off the streets, at factory gates, from inside shop:
Recruiters have confiscated passports, taken people from their jobs and, in at least one case, tried to send a mentally disabled person to military training, according to lawyers, activists and Ukrainian men who have been subject to coercive tactics. Videos of soldiers shoving people into cars and holding men against their will in recruiting centers are surfacing with increasing frequency on social media and in local news reports.
The harsh tactics are being aimed not just at draft dodgers but at men who would ordinarily be exempt from service — a sign of the steep challenges Ukraine’s military faces maintaining troop levels in a war with high casualties, and against a much larger enemy.
Lawyers and activists say the aggressive methods go well beyond the scope of recruiters’ authority and in some cases are illegal. They point out that recruiters, unlike law enforcement officers, are not empowered to detain civilians, let alone force them into conscription. Men who receive draft notices are supposed to report to recruitment offices.
We are reading here about a desperate regime that has sent too many of its able-bodied to their deaths and is now running out of bodies.
A day later, Carlotta Gall, with several colleagues sharing the byline, published “Ukrainian Marines on ‘Suicide Mission’ in Crossing Dnipro River.” Here we read about incensed grunts at the front condemning the Kyiv regime’s incessant propaganda as to the military’s progress against Russian forces. Again this is very effective reporting:
Soldiers and marines who have taken part in the river crossings described the offensive as brutalizing and futile, as waves of Ukrainian troops have been struck down on the river banks or in the water, even before they reach the other side …
In the case of the Dnipro, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other officials have suggested recently that the marines have gained a foothold on the eastern bank. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a statement last month claiming they had established several strongholds.
But marines and soldiers who have been there say these accounts overstate the case.
“There are no positions. There is no such thing as an observation post or position,” said Oleksiy, who withheld his last name. “It is impossible to gain a foothold there. It’s impossible to move equipment there.”
“It’s not even a fight for survival,” he added. “It’s a suicide mission.”
…… The Times is not yet prepared to state plainly that Kyiv is not far from defeat. But, in that way, The Times thinks American readers must be gently prepared for bad news, as if we are a nation of kindergartners—well, let’s not “go there”—we are being so prepared.
…………………………………………………………..In plain English, the kind you and I speak: The Biden regime has no idea what to do in the face of failure, but, as failure cannot be admitted, it must be dressed up as a new strategy.
………………………………………………………………The significance of the moment is in large part in the collapse of the propaganda. ………………………………..more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/20/patrick-lawrence-what-ukraine-is-not-winning-the-war/
Spiralling nuclear costs make UK’s Ministry Of Defence’s equipment plan unsustainable.
While there are shortfalls in every ‘Top Level Budget’ (TLB) in the plan, huge increases in the forecast cost of the MOD’s nuclear weapon upgrades is the most significant driver of these deficits.
While there are shortfalls in every ‘Top Level Budget’ (TLB) in the plan, huge increases in the forecast cost of the MOD’s nuclear weapon upgrades is the most significant driver of these deficits.
Nuclear Information Service 20.12.2023, DAVID CULLEN
The Ministry of Defence’s plan for equipment acquisition over the next decade has once again been branded unaffordable, with overspending on its nuclear programme now clearly responsible for the overall insolvency of the plan. After two years where the plan was predicting a modest surplus, due to the greatest increase in UK military spending since the Korean war, the apparently inexorable rising costs of the government’s nuclear weapon upgrades have created the largest deficit since the government started publishing these plans in 2012.
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) plans its equipment spending around a 10-year budget set by the Treasury. This is longer than most departments, due to the substantial costs and lead-in times involved. The plan covers spending on all equipment used by the armed forces, from submarines to small arms ammunition. The plan is updated annually to cover the next 10 financial years, and is intended to show Parliament that the MOD is able to properly finance its ambitions in military equipment spending.Once the plan is published the National Audit Office (NAO) carries out an analysis of the affordability, which is published separately. The MOD decided not to publish its 2023 Equipment Plan, telling the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee that it needed more time to “work through the consequences” of the 2023 Integrated Review Refresh (IRR) and its accompanying Defence Command Paper. However, all of the financial analysis for the plan has been undertaken and the NAO has published a report based on that analysis.
The MOD’s assessment
The MOD’s own figures show that there is a £16.9bn shortfall in the plan, compared to the £2.6bn surplus in the previous year’s plan. While there are shortfalls in every ‘Top Level Budget’ (TLB) in the plan, huge increases in the forecast cost of the MOD’s nuclear weapon upgrades is the most significant driver of these deficits.
The Defence Nuclear Organisation (DNO), the TLB which oversees the majority of the MOD’s spending on its programme, has seen its spending on the equipment plan increase 62% since last year to £99.5bn. The DNO appear to have been given approval to spend whatever is deemed necessary to avoid delays in the production of the Dreadnought submarine class, as the NAO says it has prioritised delivery to schedule “over immediate cost constraints”. This approach is apparently supported by the Treasury, and although it is hard to dispute their claim that fewer delays will in general lead to lower overall costs, it is a questionable approach to financial management………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
………………………………………….. Over the full life of the Dreadnought programme, CAAS estimates that costs will be £4bn higher, a substantial increase from their estimate last year of costs being £1.2bn above current forecasts.
……………………… The NAO also highlights the propensity of project delays leading to increased costs, both in the projects themselves and in related programmes, such as maintaining equipment that had previously been scheduled for retirement. This has frequently been the case within the MOD’s nuclear programme, and again raises questions about the substantial ‘adjustments for realism’ in the DNO’s current calculations.
A lack of plans
The gulf in the MOD’s equipment plan finances in general, and nuclear project finances in particular, is emerging despite substantial increases in funding from the Treasury. In the 2023 Spring Budget £3bn of additional funding was announced alongside the IRR, and current budgets allow for annual increases of £2bn, both specifically for nuclear projects. £2bn of the Dreadnought programmes nominal £10bn contingency fund had already been spent by March 2023, and the current forecast cost for the project appears to anticipate another £1bn being spent. The Treasury have apparently ‘set out the arrangements’ for further contingency spending, although it is still to be agreed on a case-by-case basis. In practice, the contingency does not exist as a separate fund, and this ‘contingency’ is just a mechanism for the Treasury to approve overspend.
While the stated commitment of the MOD and Treasury to funding the Dreadnought programme above any other considerations is clearly intended to dispel any doubts about the viability of that project, it is hard to see any resolution to the current state of the equipment plan that does not involve spending on conventional equipment projects being cut. The NAO warns about this prospect and highlights the reliance of nuclear-armed submarine patrols on conventional forces that are not currently protected by the ring-fencing of the MOD’s nuclear spending.
………………………….. The MOD’s refusal to take difficult decisions now merely increases the number of tough choices that will await an incoming government after the next election. The most likely outcome of those choices is that once again conventional military spending will be cut to fund the government’s nuclear ambitions. https://www.nuclearinfo.org/comment/2023/12/spiralling-nuclear-costs-make-the-mods-equipment-plan-unsustainable/
Israel’s military bombs Gaza into unprecedented levels of hunger
December 22, 2023, by: The AIM Network https://theaimn.com/israels-military-bombs-gaza-into-unprecedented-levels-of-hunger/
Oxfam reaction to the IPC food security figures for Gaza
In reaction to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report published today on Gaza warning of a risk of famine if intense hostilities and restricted humanitarian access persist or worsen, Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Director, said:
“Gaza’s shocking descent into starvation was so predictable as to be premeditated; an ongoing war crime by the Government of Israel.
“This is irrefutable proof that Israel’s attacks have decimated Gaza’s already fragile food system so catastrophically that most people are no longer able to feed themselves and their families. People are being starved in Gaza. Unless there is an immediate ceasefire and a massive scale-up of humanitarian aid, Gaza risks being pushed into a famine.
“It is abhorrent and barely conceivable in 2023, that women, children and babies, the elderly and sick, the most vulnerable people have had their food weaponised against them. The horror felt by a mother unable to feed her child is the horror of Gaza today.
“While over 90 per cent of people in Gaza cannot find their next meal, some UN Security Council member states are still toying with words rather than voting for a ceasefire.
“Those within the international community who have refused to rein in Israel’s military machine and its collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza today stand shamed and complicit – this scandal is on your watch. You must no longer patronise this Israeli aggression that is killing so many civilians, even as it fails in its own terms by sowing the seeds of future insecurity for both Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
Chris Hedges: The Death of Israel
Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception. https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/chris-hedges-the-death-of-israel/
Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.
Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.
When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.
All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.
“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.
Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.
Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”
Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.
The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”
The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.
Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.
The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.
As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Old World plagues brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.
The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.
Biden has the power to rein in the nuclear presidency. He should use it.
By Jon Wolfsthal, December 18, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/18/trump-nuclear-weapons-control-president-biden/
Jon Wolfsthal is director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists as well as a former National Security Council senior director under President Barack Obama.
In less than a year, America will elect a president. Whoever is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2025, will immediately be vested with the sole legal authority to order the use of the United States’ nuclear weapons. If a sitting president decides to exercise that authority — for almost any reason — no one can legally stop them. That must change.
This is not a new problem. Two of the 14 presidents in the nuclear age have behaved dangerously enough that their own officials have tried, in legally questionable ways, to insert themselves into the nuclear chain of command.
In President Richard M. Nixon’s final days, then-Defense Secretary James Schlesinger declared that any nuclear order had to be checked with him first. The fact that Donald Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination injects additional concern given his behavior as president. In the last few days of Trump’s term, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley tried to mitigate these risks by telling officers at the National Military Command Center (NMCC) that if they received a nuclear launch order from Trump, they must loop him in. “I’m part of the procedure,” Milley reportedly told subordinates.
We might want to thank both Milley and Schlesinger for did what they did, but they might have broken the law in doing so. Though the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the country’s senior military officer, he is not part of the nuclear-launch process. Nor is the defense secretary, secretary of state or even the commander of U.S. Strategic Command.
To initiate a nuclear strike, the president can issue an order bypassing senior military leaders and advisers. Every president carries with him a sealed card known as the “biscuit.” The president can call the NMCC at any time and use the code from the biscuit to verify his identity — and the weapons get launched. As commander in chief, a president can even order the watch officer not to tell superiors that an order has been given. So even if a concerned chairman of the Joint Chiefs instructs his soldiers to inform him of any such command, the president can simply override that “safeguard” at his discretion.
The chain of command, however, is different for almost every other decision to use military force. For non-nuclear decisions — including conventional military strikes or sending soldiers into combat — the president must give an order to the defense secretary, who then issues written instructions to the relevant combatant commander. It’s a transparent system that encourages accountability.
Why are nuclear weapons procedures different from conventional ones? Because, during the Cold War, speed was seen as essential for deterrence. If a Soviet nuclear bolt from the blue could kill a sitting president before he had time to order a counterattack, adversaries were thought to have an incentive to initiate a first strike. By being able to respond quickly, without having to work through layers of officials, deterrence was thought to be more robust.
But there is no reason today to rely on speedy decision-making during situations in which the United States might launch first. Even as relations with Moscow are at historic lows, we are worlds removed from the Cold War’s dominant knife’s-edge logic. This means checks and balances on a president’s decision to start a nuclear war can be adopted without sacrificing America’s security or the protection of our allies. It’s time our institutions caught up with this strategic reality.
Numerous ideas have been put forward to close this dangerous loophole. None is perfect. The idea of requiring another elected or Senate-confirmed officer such as a vice president, secretary of state or defense secretary to agree to a nuclear launch order has been considered impractical. For one, if senior officials are killed, or are appointed without Senate approval, the United States could be rendered unable to retaliate against a nuclear attack. At the very least, any such change would require a legal remedy and congressional approval by both houses of Congress — something unlikely even in ideal circumstances.
What is left is not a permanent solution but an improvement over the current process nonetheless: President Biden has the authority as commander in chief to change the military chain of command. He can make launching nuclear weapons absent a confirmed nuclear attack on the United States conform to the same procedures required for the use of conventional forces. Adopting such a process would not impact the country’s security, or that of its allies. But it would ensure that no president can act without other senior officials being directly involved in a decision to use America’s most powerful weapons.
Could a future president try to reverse these safeguards? Yes, but doing so would take time and require the work of other senior officials. The formal chain of command is established by law but can be changed through executive order. Requiring White House lawyers to develop a new directive to revert to the older, less-constrained systems would be a time-consuming process. And putting even surmountable speed bumps in place is worth the effort.
There is no perfect system for preventing nuclear use as long as nuclear weapons exist. Yet nuclear procedures have been adjusted many times over the decades, and it is time for yet another change. The Biden administration should be praised for spending a lot of time crafting norms for responsible nuclear behavior — from repeatedly declaring that a nuclear war cannot be won and thus must never be fought, to ensuring that unsupervised artificial intelligence is kept far from decision on the use of nuclear weapons. It should continue this admirable track record by insulating the United States’ nuclear weapons from an unstable future president by adding senior officials into the process.
John Mearsheimer: Israel is Choosing ‘Apartheid’ or ‘Ethnic Cleansing’
https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/john-mearsheimer-israel-is-choosing-apartheid-or-ethnic-cleansing/
Israel has gone far beyond “going after Hamas” in the first 10 weeks of its war on Gaza, according to one of the United States’ leading political scientists, John Mearsheimer.
He tells host Steve Clemons that murdering hundreds of civilians daily and starving the rest is a “punishment campaign” and “should be unacceptable to decent people all over the world.”
In this episode, Mearsheimer, who teaches international relations at the University of Chicago, looks into Israel’s long-term strategies and explains why the elites in the US, Europe and the Arab world are not taking concrete steps to stop Israel’s bombing campaign.
1 This Month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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