It Could Happen Here Weekly 124

could happen here, a podcast about it happening here. The slow crumbling of the institutions that make up our society, and that includes not just the good stuff that's become the bad stuff, like, for example, Google Search, but it includes the stuff that's always been bad and has gotten worse, like life inside the prison industrial complex, which is partly what we will be talking today because our guest is the great Corey, doctor, activist, writer, author of a book

called The Bezel, which is a fiction novel but deals with some very non fictional stuff in relation to how finance schools have changed life for people behind bars. Corey. Welcome to the show.

I wanted to talk about a not so stealth advertisement within the series for a guy that we're both a big fan of, Stephen Bruce. There's an extended digression where Martin is sending books to a friend of his in prison. And you talk a lot about Steven's Taltosh series, which was a huge influence on me as a young person. I could definitely see, I think, an influence on this series as well.

liber fan. And the it's got that wise cracking Robert McGee kind of or Travis McGee rather kind of affect those books, and also the stuff that I love about the best of what you know, disparagingly we could call men's adventure fiction, yeah, which is that it at its best. And Maria Ferrell just wrote something really good about this on crooked timber, and it's best that stuff really geeks

out about a lot of stuff. That The bad version of it is the kind of James Bond version where it's like, yeah, you know, this is what the status watches, and this is what the status martini is, and this is what the status whatever it is, and that you call that the gourmet version right, where it's like, you know what all the best of everything is and you know how to how to signal you know, your ver blend goods to other people had to signal that you

are posh and upper class. But the good version of it is the is the gourmand version, which is like, if you're going to eat cardboard pizza, this is the best cardboard pizza.

There's a lot of like deliberate like, oh, this is how I'm going to live my life so that it's as good as possible, and I enjoy all of the finer things as much as I can. This is the thing that I do when I'm making a burger so that it's a ten percent more delicious every time, you know, yeah kind of thing.

interiority and a reason for being there. That's not just being scenery or cannon fodder.

the pre dot com bubble tech industry. I guess you'd say, and you take us with, you know. He goes with one of them to a place called Catalina Island, which is a real place that was founded by one of like our nation's early plutocrats, who had a bizarre obsession with their not being like fast food available on the island. Yeah, he had a lot.

on Catalina Island was or summered there. Rather was Zane Gray, the great Western writer, and there were a bunch of Zane Gray movies that were made on the island, including one where they brought over thirteen bull bison because they were needed for the movie, and because they didn't know a lot about animal handling, particularly they did not know that male bison do not ever come into contact with one another except to have a violent dominance clash, which

is how the thirteen mail bison all ended up escaping. And then Wrigley, in one of his other obsessions, thought it was Unchristian for these bachelor bison to be on his island, so he brought over thirteen cows and created the bison invasive species. Think. He also didn't know that bison operate in harems, which was another thing that he was just badly wrong. Like it is true that like being a billionaire lowers your IQ by thirty points and being the son of a billionaire lowers your IQ by

forty points. Yeah, and and you know, Wriggly had all kinds of esthetic ideas in the same way that like, you know, when when Ford built Fordlandia in Brazil, a planned community that was an identical copy of Dearborn Michigan, including the south facing windows, because he wouldn't let his architects explain that south of the equator you want north

facing windows. Yeah, you know, he said, oh, well we're you know, like he came up with all kinds of weird rules for rubber planters rubber harvesters in the Brazilian jungle, and Wrigley came up with his own rules for people living on his island.

murder any of his colleagues. While they buy and destroy every promising startup in Silicon Valley using the money from the Royal family of Saudi Arabia that was funneled to them by Masiyoshi Son and Soft Bank, they encounter a Ponzi scheme, and the Ponzi scheme is grounded in what is an actual practice of people bringing fast food to

Catalina Island. Like if you go to the K twelve school and you have an away game, everyone brings back a sack of burgers for their friends because it's forbidden fruit. It's exotic, and this turns into a Ponzi scheme to sell flash frozen burgers brought to the island by various means. And as with every Ponzi scheme, the thing that they're actually selling is the right to sell, the right to sell, the right to sell burgers. Yeah, no one, No one wants the burgers right. They want the down line. And

this is why Ponzi schemes always implode. And what Marty realizes is that this Ponzi scheme is going on, and that it has been cooked up by this guy whose parties they've been going to, this real estate baron, and that he's done it the same way you might carefully tend an ant colony for the sole purpose of burning them with magnifying glasses. You build this enormous sort of Rube Goldberg machine, a self licking ice cream cone, and

then you destroy it, you smash it. He's waiting for this economy to collapse once he's extracted every penny from the island, which will add one percent to his net worth, and so they do a controlled demolition of it. They foil this guy's plan, and this kicks in motion the real action in the novel, which is about the private prison system.

fraught place, this very beautiful place, very weird place. It's one of my favorite places to go. We just booked another trip there, and everything about it is is amazing and also terrible, but also beautiful.

they can be pretty ugly places, but like you have family and they can come and visit you. Right, there's a big room where everybody gets together with their you know, we arrested developments maybe the most before this all changed,

most recent kind of touchstone on this. And also it's a place that has like a library, and not just a library, but like there are what comes with the library is opportunities for people to like better themselves, to learn things, to build skills, to potentially take some more agency of their situation. Right, That idea of like the jailhouse lawyer who comes informed in all that, and that that world has really gone away to a significant extent.

It's not completely gone everywhere, but certainly a lot of those a lot of that has been pruned away. The ability of prisoners to have face to face contact with their loved ones and the ability of prisoners to like use a library is something that is a lot less common now than it used to be. And it's because a lot of these a lot of these kind of attitudes that have characterized finance for so long or increasingly become in common within the companies that run these facilities.

like me. And that is a wonderful term coined by John Kenneth Galbrath to describe the magic interval after the con artist has your money but before you know it's a con and in that moment, everybody feels better off.

And one of the great bezel moments was the moment between the crash of the dot com crash of like two thousand and two thousand and one and the crash of the Great Financial Crisis, the housing crash, and in that period, all the money that people put into so called investments and into the market and that made them feel better off, made them feel like they had a pension, made them feel like they had savings, and so on,

all that money was already gone. So this is one of the things about a scam is it feels like the moment that you lose the money is the moment you realize it's a scam, But you actually lose the money the minute you give it to the con artist. The con artists might let you keep some of it for a little while, but they can take it away from you whenever they want. That was a moment of kind of giddiness where none of us really wanted the

dream to end. We knew that once the dream ended, we would all be poorer, although in reality we're all poorer. Right then, One of the things about that moment is it was the moment when another long con came doe, and that was the long con of the California three

strikes rule. So there had been a couple of quite ghastly murders of young people, a teenager and a child in California that were weaponized by some fairly cruel racists to pass a law in California that says that if you were convicted of three felonies, you would go to prison for the rest of your life with no chance

of parole. And you know, this is California, which is a place that's quite allergic to hire taxes, famously the home Proposition thirteen, where you know, we can't raise our property taxes unless something like seventy percent of us go to the polls and specifically vote for it, which is

why our cities are so cash strapped. And so in this place where you have these anti tax extremist types and you have this increasing tax burden associated with locking up an ever larger fraction of the population for the rest of their lives, you have this unstoppable force and this immovable object on a collision course with one another, because at a certain point, you're just going to have prisons that are so full that you're going to have to do something to relieve them. You're going to have

to build more prisons. You're going to have to reduce the cost of operating those prisons. Something's going to give. In the end, what ended up giving was a Supreme Court case that rule that just being in prison in California violated your Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment. That every California prison basically constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment. And California went through the you know, the five stages of grieving, which I know they don't replicate

that it's not real, we don't. That's not really a neat description of exactly what happens when we grieve. But they certainly went through a period of denial and bargaining, including mooting at one point sending prisoners to like Arizona, so sending California State prisoners to Arizona and paying Arizona

to take them off their hands. And as all of this stuff was going on, some grifters saw great opportunity, and that opportunity was to cut costs in the prisons and facilitate moving prisoners further and further away from their families by replacing all of the services in the prison with a tablet that you would get for free. Yeah, So remember you know, the iPad comes out in two thousand and eight. Steve Jobs is touting it as the future.

per child, but for prisoners. And those tablets will replace the library and in person visits and phone calls and music and TV and continuing education and all of it's going to cost. And it's going to cost a lot more than you would pay outside of the outside of the prison for the same services. So, you know, four bucks a minute for poster stamp sized video instead of free zoom calls, Yeah, music for three bucks instead of one.

And then, of course these companies are very grifty, and so they're constantly restructuring, going bankrupt, being bought, buying one another. And every time that happens, the company changes its name and says, oh, we're no longer the same company. We no longer supply all of those services. We are wiping out all of your data, and you're gonna have to

buy it again. And so, you know, if that's music, it means that the song that you pay three dollars for, that you bought by working in the prison workshop for twenty five cents an hour is gone and you're in prison for remember this is California, the rest of your life. And so you're going to have to go back and earn more money to get.

away too when the prison changes vendors. And it's a kind of perfect parable for the indifferent sadism of capital, like the degree to which the pursuit of profit drives people to be far more cruel than mere ideology.

It's what Douglas Rushkoff calls going meta. You know, the don't drive a cab found Uber, don't found uber invest in Uber, don't invest in Uber, invest in uber derivatives. Don't investor in uber derivatives, invest in uber derivative futures. Right, like go meta, like get further and further away from the useful activities. Yeah, you are insulated from the consequences of whatever it.

you wouldn't have even thought of. And again, but for that kind of person, everything you break is usually an opportunity for financializing something else.

the Nazis weren't cruel and the ideological cruelty of Nazis. So, for example, there were moments where, rather than transporting troops to decisive battles, they were shipping Jews to concentration camps on those same trains and losing battles so they could.

to death. It was half of what it was in Auschwitz. The conditions were so bad at Monowitz that the SS guards who were seconded to it from Auschwitz wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty of Monowitz. At the end of the war, in Nuremberg, twenty four Ig Farben executives were tried for this. Their defense was that they had a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize returns, and nineteen of them were acquitted on that basis.

it's maddening stuff. Yeah, indeed, and it is, like I think one an accurate way to look at the Holocaust from the perspective of those guys is the mining of populations, like mining them to death. That's really how a lot of this like because a huge chunk of especially the early stages of Nazi oppression of like starting with German Jews, but going beyond that as they conquered more land, was the appropriation of businesses and property, right, like that was

it was, it was mining human beings. And that attitude is persistent. Right, It's not just a thing that happens in Nazi Germany. It happens whenever you let people who don't have any sort of human concern take control of every aspect of life.

that's the character. And if the microcosm meshes correctly with the macrocosm, then as the person spins around and around doing their plot stuff, they spin around enough times that the world, the big gear that they're meshed with, makes a full revolution. So you have this microcosm macrocosm thing. And often when a book doesn't work, it's because the microcosmic macrocosmic correspondences aren't sharp enough. There's some way in

which those teeth aren't meshing. One of the things that this book tries to do, and that the Martin Hinch books generally try to do, because they're all about these these finance scams, these high tech finance scams set in different eras from the nineteen eighties through the twenty twenties, is that they try to create a series of these

similar correspondences between small scams and big scams. You know, they use the small scam as a kind of setup or a frame or like a cognitive tool for understanding

the much bigger scam. And so that small scam, that Ponzi scheme, where you have a person who is setting out just for shits and giggles to make some money by destroying a bunch of other people's lives and viewing those people as not as people but as as things, as a means to an end, not as an end unto themselves, ends up creating this sadistic, brutal, pointless, and deliberately unsustainable situation that he knows is going to hurt

all these other people. And the way that he's able to do it is by simply not considering the people who are enmeshed in the scheme as fully people entitled to their own sort of moral consideration. And in the same way that is that's like a microcosm for the kinds of decisions that are made when people go on to found these prison tech companies and these other companies that do these these ghastly things.

it happening to you. You know, I a couple of times in the last decade I have been the victim of various kinds of con and I am also someone who's written a lot about cons So I've been successfully fished once and I had a phone scammer talked me out of my credit card number once. And I always write about it when it happens, and I write about it in part because I want to make sure that people understand that, you know, you're not too smart to be conned, anyone can be conned and so on, and

I think that's an inoculant against getting conned. But I also do it because the reactions are a kind of sociological study.

so you deserved it. And that means, on the one hand, it's never going to happen to me because I don't deserve it. And on the other hand, if I ever do it to someone else, that's fine because if they fall victim to it, then they must deserve it. The old con artist saying that you can't cheat an honest man.

child and says that they need a ransom payment. Right, you're not there's not like dishonesty in your heart because you don't want your kid to be kidnapped. You're just not ready for what tech has been able to do, you know.

it's about a faith scam. It's an early PC company I made up called the Three Wise Men, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi who use, you know, affiliate marketing through congregations to prey

on their own faith groups. And one of the things about these Ponzi schemes, these pyramid schemes, is that they take the only capital that working people have, which is social capital, right the relationships they have among one another, and they convince them that it is entrepreneurial and therefore virtuous to instrumentalize your relationship to the other women in your life who help you look after your kids, or to your coreligionists who you can turn to if things

go really bad at work or with your family or whatever. And that turning that into a transaction that you can milk, you know. Turning those people into a down line who have to recruit other people to make you whole so that you can feed your own upline is just hustling. It's just your shot at the American dream. You know, Spike Lee telling you that investing in shit coins as building black wealth.

it feeds into everything else. It's like it's a I think that's probably why it runs through so much of your work, because this the scam economy, is behind every and it's increasingly becoming everything right, and there's this kind of pernicious effect where by people don't the more people are victimized by this, both the less they trust other people and the more the more they begin to accept that, like, well, this is just how you get by in our society, right,

Why shouldn't we take away prison libraries and replace them with more expensive kindle that we can yank away at any moment. Everyone's always nickel and diming me. I'm always getting more money taken away from me. By these same people. And I'm not even in prison, you know.

person with cash. And then you realize that, like there that none of these are convenience fees. They're just they're just fees.

happens at the end. And you know, there have been successful prisoner uprisings that have been led by working people who are serving long terms, but for the most part those uprisings, we never even hear about them. You know, there was a prison labor strike before lockdown. I believe it was twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen. There's a national prison labor strike, and it barely made a dent in anyone's consciousness. It was, you know, ultimately one of the

largest strikes in modern American history. You know, there're thousands and thousands of workers were on strike, and we didn't even hear about it. Because there's such control over the narrative about prisons and prisoners that's run by the carcerl system.

And so you know, by telling this story about someone who goes into prison already a millionaire and who has a friend on the outside who's kind of a hustler and you know, a pal and who is someone who knows how to finagle the system, I can spin out a yarn that takes you, like back to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the Big Gear driving the Little Gear takes you on a three hundred and sixty degree tour of how fucked up the system is rather than just the ant's i view or the worm's eye view that most

people get because they aren't even able to explore all the avenues and run into their dead ends because they're just stuck where they are.

to subscribe to my mailing list or whatever. Yeah, and the email version of it, you can get it as an email list. The email version also no tracking. I can't tell when you've opened the email or anything. I keep no statistics, and I just it's a letter in a bottle I write and throw into the ocean every morning. And it's great. That's so much fun to write.

actual replacement. It's just it's just another basil. It's a yeah, it's a It's that long moment where you think you've zeroed out your labor force costs, but you haven't realized that you're no longer productive because the chatbot keeps, you know, as in the case of Air Canada, just like telling

people they can get refunds they're not entitled to. And then you know, regulators come along and smack you around and charge you, you know, find you for your chatbot having lied to people about their bereavement, flight discounts and stuff.

by others operations in in crime estate has has been has been quite rapidly spreading across the country and that's definitely went through a kinda state where resumed to target the the the junta in its polotopical objective to be

to be reaching uh uh. That's the situations we are today that the Arcan Army has been in very goods to be dismantling the Hunter's forces in our kind of state, and so far since Operation twenty seven ten twenty seven staled more than half of the township districts in our kind of state has been ceased by the Arkhan Army, including some of those were majority of Ringa lifts. And it's continued to be under in the very literarating situations.

Rohingia's sources in twenty seven and make them flee. So six years later they saying the GPS who committed to the crimes against the Rhinga atrocities that include crimes against humanity and war crimes had to flee to Bangladesh in a quite similar way to refuge. And so it's sort of karma or whatever you put it in a way and the perceptions and reality of course when it's it's kind of confrontations between the two groups Arcan Army and

the military compless sources. The reality that has been defined by most of ours ninianmar and the course that we used to believe that the Burmis malitary is a strong vote by human resource and equipment and then in reality they are very weak and our army has proved by dismantling a various battalion in country battalion and even capturing alive like second ice commanding officer in the whole of the kind of state. And also many senior level officer

has been has has been killed over this. That so the reality perception has been deeper on the NMR malanitary when we look it from from external perspective.

kind people has been very high. Therefore, the resource allocations that he got from human resource to other resources to be rapidly coping with that group growth has high end that put them in a position to be standing in front of Hunta in a very stronger positions and defeat them and very rapidly. And of course the Arkhan Army which we refer here as AE, is not as inclusive as ra kind. Ra kind of state is very diverse

and it has got a multiple ethnic group. The largest ethnic group is Rakin religiously with these people and to which the majority of army's leadership derived from there, and the second largest majority, which are the Rowinga and Toroinga, are still the second largest majority in the rack kind of state. Despite a milion being pushed off to Bangladesh in twenty seventeen and several hundred thousand spread it across the region, and the inclusivity in an Arcan Army is

still still not there. When we talk about Ringa, that's know that there might be some small a small number of Rhingias in different battalions of Arkan Army and the administrative units that they're building at a very crossroot level. However, the the the Rhinga need to be included both by functions and in order to have to describe that relationship and inclusively between the Rhenia people and the Arkan army.

to end the dictatorship in Meanmar. But the the the the primary thing here is the self interminations and self autonomy, like people want to decide to determine what is their present and official look like, how they want to treat with their past. That's the the the the the aspect. But of course the the like to my to the best of my knowledge, these ethnic resistance organizations, both political and and and and the armed groups have never claimed that they want to separate from me and Mar. Yes,

it's coming together in a different way. The holding together would be in a different way.

having these seventy years long civil war. You know, that's came to collective revolutions in twenty twenty one, and history really speaking, people have been fighting in Enmark for equality, justice and to end the cycle of impunity for the last seventeen plus years.

the Rhinga people, I hope. But one thing that's been happening recently which are particularly appalling is the forced recruitment of Bahinga Peoplehinga people by that same military, right, can you explain what's been going on?

several casualties. And apparently the Hunter became the largest military equipment supplier to the to the revolutionary force where we did not get we did not get international support when when young people actress, models and writers points decided to to go to the forest to do to fight against this cunter and there was little to no international support. And we have been struggling to to to equip ourselve

to to fight this center. And and of course the the resilience and the courage that young people had and the tactical and strategy capacity that the ethnic Resistance organization had in combined became a factor. UH to have an strategic sourcing of the military equipment and Hunter like battalion by battalion. You don't need to buy the weapons and

military tang and things like that. You you go and fight one battalion and they run away or they die and then you take over the That's how the the the whole old thing started in in In then when they are losing uh, they reactivated the conscriptions law and started to in the of making mandustry everyone to be serving by force in the military by terms. And of course when it's come to a kind of state or

a kind of state. The six hundred thousand RINGA and T one hundred and fifty to sixty thousand of them has been in concentration camp, consolidated in one place with movement restrictions, no access to education, healthcare and things like that, where they have been living more than a decade in some of those camp and villages where those people who are not in the camp as well has been imposed by additional movement restrictions, so you don't need to really

go and mobilize and people to be forcefully recruiting. And at the beginning the junta went to them and to give them sort of show them incentive of like you will become the citizens and will give that and we'll give that, and you need to fight against the Arcan army and of course the grassroot the leader community leader responded in a way that they need to respond to reject the the the requests from from the from the military, hometown and mality started to of course, I posted by

using the force and as I mentioned earlier, they will need to like when you have consultilated people that amount of young people doing nothing and you just go and catch them and put them on a truck, and some of them don't know where they are going because their whole life has been in this camp. Like when you're six years old and you are now eighteen and you're it's an industry for you to be serving in the military and you don't know what is happening in our

side of your camp. Because yeah, so that's how really the the and then we got these news and of course we have been talking different community leaders and the community has been approaching to us as a government and we make uh. There are several media coverage as well. Then the military started to say that these Bengalis are not referring to the Hinga, are not the cities. Therefore there is no way that we make them served in

the in the military. So those are fakings that. So they use these States propaganda TV channel and the state newspaper which is now under control of SUCK to deny that. And on seventh October, seventh sorry, seven March, the the those who they have conscripted, uh more than five hundred has been brought into into the commanding office of the

Hunter to be training in full uniform. Some of them those inside there has got managed to get internet internet access and then said to me the video footage, what is happening on the inside there, So I posted that on my Twitter and and then it's it's spread it from there and then we called them like their denial initially the lives that they have been putting by denying

that Roo we're not conscripted, all was wrong. And then a few days later they have been sent to the front line to fight against a And then there are hundreds of those rough hingers who were who died in this front line while and the Hunter. The Cake came back a few days later talking to their family saying that Okaye, hundred plus people has died and we don't know who is who and when we bring your dead body,

you will be able to be identified. And the first dead body that they brought and handed over to the clumby and the community leader with one million jets, which is three hundred and fifty dollars plus one hundred kg of rice as an incentive for the life that they have given in the fighting. So that's the situations and we can of course continue.

what they need to do as a powerholder. And of course when the Arcan army is getting greater control over a kind of state and the hunter is losing the the Melochiy hunt and it used all tactics that they have, including the the the UH, the intercommunal tensions, and and so they there are Ruhinga, few Ringia maybe who has businesssess with this hunter, are being used as a proxy to push pressure or pressure on the Ruhinga and to organize.

And so that's why the protest started a few years ago in one of the townships in the China state. We're eighty to ninety percent are Rringa and claiming that we don't want war and we don't want ee. And of course this can be happening artificially organically, and it's so artificial, and anyone who looks into this video footage, I can see that the Ruhingia never had in their life, like those who are protesting never know what is means.

So a freedom of expression means And suddenly in one random morning, one hundred hundred of Rwinga, including minors, children coming on the street and protesting is not something normal. It can happen without the U And of course majority of the of the Rhingia are peace loving people and they want Burma to be an inclusive federal democracy and they want to be part of it and weird. That's why I myself as a Ruhinga taking a leading rule in the government as the first Rhina holding back ministrial

positions in the cabinet since nineteen sixty two. And of course the Ruhingo equally want the to end the dictatorship once and for all because that very junta has been committing trustity scrims, including crimes against humanity and to genocides to Uringa. This is the very same military who devoted a million ringa killed more than twenty four thousands of people in burning children's life in twenty seventeen. So in which way that's the collectively will come and ascend with

this hunt were the whole country. So this is not this is really not something organic, and this is artificial. This is too big and this is so like Hunter made to fit into be fitting into their political propaganda.

Hunter newspapers and some of its comically false. But one thing I did want to talk about is like when I talk to young PDF fighters, and I've spoken to dozens of them now, people who are Koreny, people who are Korenne, people who are a people who are kitchin they a lot of them say to me that, like what happened in twenty seventeen was atrocious and at the time they didn't realize because of this manipulated media environment, they didn't realize that the way the Rahinda were being

treated was so appalling, and that now they're very upset about what happened. And like for them, I guess the litmus test for like a future for Burma is one that can include Rahinja people and so like with that in mind, I guess we've seen this kind of changing of language, right where previously they were referred to as Bangladeshi and then now they're referred to as Muslim or

Hinga people. I guess can you just explain, like what is the n UGPDF kind of like how how do we ensure independence and safety for a Hingo people in Myanmar in a federal, democratic future without a dictatorship.

as others in the nation building process. And of course before twenty seventeen, even before that, there has been a lot of misinformation. Disinformation is propagram that are widespread state sponsored against the Rhinga to that could be misleading and incitement of violence. And the Troum Bengali is a rum that's reefer that you're coming from Bangladesh illegally and you're illegally as you settling. That's how the terms came from. False.

that trap. And even somewhere either silent in this horrific genocideal attack in twenty seventeen or somewhere taking side of a military at that time that that is okay to kill and it's okay to And of course these are being being propelled by all misinformations and disinformation that our

earlier mentioned and twenty twenty one attempted could happened. And that's where a new perspective is being offered to the people of Me and Mar, because the same militory that has been carrying out atrocities clans against the Rhingia and other minorities came to Largerma people doing the same thing. So what has been told to us by the Ruhinga and the religious and ethnic minority in the end Mar for the decade came to be true, and that's how

the acceptance of the Ruhinga has started to grow. Of course, it's not to the level that we would be satisfied with yet, it's a process and there is so much to unlearn because one provoking factor like attempted to should like wouldn't fix a problem, a problem that has been

there for for decades. And a National Unity government declared that we accept the chum Ruhinga, and there has been a policy stating very clearly in twenty twenty one June, and that policy to be implemented of course when the situation is conducive, and there are significant challenges with the territorial control and things like that when it's come. But again, the momentum that I mentioned we got as a result of extreme evolutions need to be maintained in the higher scale.

That's not only the ruhinga and anything that's wrong, that's primarily that's principle and value are strong. I need to be able to see it wrong, regardless of whoever it is and regardless of race and religion. If we are talking about federal, inclusive democracy, we cannot preach to our people or international community saying that support us or asking for support or be a part of this movement where we see a sepri floud fishers and inclusive federal democracy.

We're actual values that we are not practicing by ourselves. So before we preach, we need to we need to act upon those principles by ourselves. And overall, I would say, the all the loss that we had, including life and livelihood, that hundred and hundred of people, thousands of people has been killed, jailed, and hundreds of villagers, township has been destroyed, the good thing that we got is the the these consciousness on the morality.

because they're joined up together. Now the PDFs and and the eros are largely fighting like side by side against is there like the PDF forces present in rakind state as well.

and and this time it's so coordinated across the country that the junta like cannot be able to position themselves or estrategize themselves or put then themselves in the tactical positions they're all tactic did not work in the modern coordinations of the PDF and Ethnic Resistance Organization.

so far we got little to no international support. And on the on the Ruhinga crisis as well, there's one million people in Bangladesh where their Russians are cuts to eight dollars per month per person and which is a cup of coffee in the United States, and there is a greater danger of hunger restorations and malnitary nutrition and UH and so many other social economic problems that would have an impact on the regional security stability and things

like that if the shortfall remains UH funding short call remains for for for for for for for the India. That's on the Humanustrian and and of course Rhingia need to be politically organized in order to be to be fitting into the changing political dynamic of Meanmar. Duringia has been oppressed, they were not able to study organizations, they

were not able to be elevating themselves. So all these societal leadership aspects need to be supported, including having a company like having an organized political platform for for Ringa which will be able to represent Shuringa in the larger political table UH, ensuring their voices are heart and there able to equally take the rights that they deserve and more importantly equal equally able to contribute to a decision

that will have an impact on their life. And the United States has determined the crimes against Ruhinga as genocide two years before. And of course the genocide discrimination does not simply is an announcement. It's come with the moral

and legal responsibility. So we do want to require the United States and it's people to formally extent on the moral and legal obligations that it has in ensuring that the Rhinga are able to live equally peacefully and more importantly, the justice that they deserve on the physical and mental

damage that happened as part of the genocide. And it was picked in twenty seventeen, it's continued to be happening today and even today one hundred and fifty people were arriving in Archie, Indonesia, where the Indonesian people who were showing greater humanity in opening their arms and parts to

be accepting Ruhinga, are denying the rhinga. So for the Ruhinga, there is little to no space to be accommodated, both in regional and international and local setting, and it is very important that we are able to tackle and navigate these issues together with the international community in an innovative, effective,

efficient and sustainable way for the sake of humanity. And there are competing priorities across the world, but the international community is we are so aware of that international community is capable of doing more than one thing at a time. It doesn't have to be either or.

and solidarity as well. Yeah, I hope, yeah, yeah, I mean it does seem like I guess a little more hopeful than it was even a couple of years ago that there will be a democratic mean and.

An international community was not doing more than condemnations for releasing a statement of concern over the last three years. It's time to act and international community again has to answer this question to next generations when there's a questions on the morality we're the internetional community. When the genocide comes against community and work careme has been happening to meally anything send people in the eyes of international community.

There's a sort of memory that functions in inside of like the American military where you know, Algeria's remember it is one of those sort of like examples of failed.

And this is kind of startling, because you know, up until there's probably like there's like a four year span where the Algerian Revolution is the sort of like capital S, capital R social revolution, like it's the big one, is the one people all over the world taking inspiration from, and then it kind of, you know, it flounders out for reasons that we're going to talk about, and also

the culture revolution starts and everyone lashes onto that. But it's sort of fascinating to me that this the second part of the revolution and the part that everyone was really excited about, which is the core of the revolution being worker self management, and that being the sort of great theoretical innovation of Algeria and socialism that has just completely faded for memory. It's just gone, and so today

we're talking about that revolution. Unfortunately, one of the most detailed studies on this I'm can be citing from a lot is in Clegg's Worker Self Management in Algeria. Now, this is a good book. However, Comma Clegg is uh, He's a very specific kind of crimogeny Marxist guy.

and goes nowhere. So many sues, you know, but it is a very very detailed and very useful account of what actually happened after the First Revolution, like after the French are forced to pull out of Algeria, and what happens effectively is well, we need to go back a little tiny bit, so there are you know, there is a staggering slaughter of people who attempt to resist French colonialism. Like a lot of the sort of techniques that are going to be used in Vietnam, they are going to

be used all over the world. And kind of insurgencies are developed in Algeria in this period. I'm going to read a quote from Clagg about what they were doing. The use of air power in napalm to clear cover made movement inside the country almost impossible. The construction of mind and electrified barriers along the border with Tunisian and Morocco kept the better trained and armed elements of the Liberation Nationale from coming to support the gorillas and moving

in supplies. One of the most successful moves encountering goerrilla activity was the policy of regroupment, initiated by General Chalet. This strategy, learned from the British and Malaysia, involved moving the rural population out of areas favorable to the gorillas and resettling them in camps on their military guard, and estimated two million peasants were treated this way, creating vast social and economic problems for the future. So, like they put two million people in concentration camps.

the becomes the new template for like the season that. Yeah, and it's because it works really well, and you know, like the key thing of Maoist like well, I mean there's a couple of things obviously, but like one of the key elements of it is this is this line for Mao is it like the gorilla moves to the

people like a fish moves through the sea. Right, So it's about like it's about building social basis such that you know, gorillas can move in and out of communities and not get turned in and stuff and use them as terrain.

does make Garrida war. If you can remember the population.

like all over the world of completely unrelated ideologies all sort of picked this stuff up. And the British response to this is the British are fighting a communist insurgency in Malaysia and they're like, Okay, we're gonna do concentration

camps for our purposes. So obviously this is a a you know, this is an unfathomable atrocity, but it has enormous effects even after the war ends, because suddenly, you know, okay, like the war ends, the French are gone, but you know, two million people have been taken from their homes and locked in and locked in camps, and this has enormous you know, I mean, this is this is enormous economic effects and the second thing that has really sort of

stunning economic effects are the Sore. There's been a class of people in Algeria called the Colognes who are basically the colonists. They're not actually all French, a lot of them are from other European countries, but they come to be this sort of hardcore French ultranationalist, sort of fascist turbo racists. I guess they're they're they're not quite the Rhodesians, but they're they're only not quite the Rhodesians because they

didn't stay to fight it out. And when when the French lose the war, and when the French pull out, these people just flee, like all of them were talking, hundreds of thousands of people just are gone. I'm going to read another quote from Cleig, because you know, if these people had merely left, I think a lot of what's going to happen in this revolution goes a lot better. But they didn't just leave.

coherent ideological group. It's just the sort of banner that everyone who is fighting kind of attaches themselves to.

these languages I can even sort of speak. But it so it means self management, and it basically it has this context of of sort of like workers democratic self management. Right if you're if you're doing osteone, you're like the workers of a factory have taken over the factory and are running it themselves. The most prominent example and at this point of self management is Yugoslavia. Now this it's very Theoslavian version is very, very weird, but as a

way basically to tell the Soviets to fuck off. Yugoslavia adopts a very different kind of model of socialism than everyone else's. So there are models based on the quote unquote the withering away of the state. So they're you know, you have basically these like reasonably democratic, like workers co ops that are the sort of that are sort of their productive basis of society. And these these co ops

sort of compete against each other on the market. But other hand, there is a like a very large level of workers control that's different from you know, like the US, which is just a pure dictatorship of your boss in the workplace, tells you what to do, and if you don't do what you get fired. Yeah, and so Algeria gets there has their own version of self management. But unlike Algeria which was sort of effectively imposed by the

top down for the Comnist party. In Algeria, what happens is you have this this enormous mass of workers who used to work on these plantations, used to work in factories.

There's these huge colony lagger cultural estates. And what happens is with with the entire ruling class gone and when I say the entire ruling class, we're talking from all the way up from you know, the highest level government officials, through all all of your sort of capitalist bosses, right down to sort of the middle management guys are gone. All those people just have disappeared. So what happens is workers start taking over all of their all of their workplaces,

and they start forming workers councils. Right now, this is this is driven largely by I mean there's there's there's there's a few different drivers. There's we'll get to the ideological aspect. A lot of it is that these people have no money and no one else is going to run it. So they're they're the workers who have now sees all the stuff are like, Okay, well we're gonna we're gonna get the money we need to survive by running by running all the stuff ourselves.

up all this land. And there's a much of really funny stories of these guys buying these estates and showing up and the workers conn they just kicking them out. Yeah, yes,

this is extremely funny. Yeah, there's also issues. So part of what's going on is this is this is the sort of this is the permanent workers taking over the stuff with their people, right, and so a lot of times like they'll they'll kick out seasonal workers because yeah, so it's not it's not perfect, and there's a lot of issues with it, right because this is this is all being formed effectively, spontaneously about a bunch of extremely desperate people.

they do. That like, there were anarchists in all kinds of roles, Like when people talk about their rooty column or whatever like, there were absolutely anarchists, noncommissioned officers from the military who they relied on heavily for advice. And the same is true with the collectivized workplaces, right that there were anarchists in many roles, you know, in shop stewards and things like that, obviously not in like the

higher management roles. I think, yeah, doing that is kind of incompatible with anarchism, but obviously what we're dealing here with is anarchosyndicalism. For the most part, the fire was more of a purest anarchist group, but there you had people who've been working towards this for a long time, who have been planning for it, and who did have people with a variety of experiences in I think oversight might be a better word than the management preps or

like sort of organization. But they were very successful. But that didn't just happen overnight. It often gets presented as if it did as if on like the eighteenth of July, these people were just sort of going to work and by the twentieth they were fully formed the anarchists running their own workplaces. But that's absolutely not the case.

Colonial context is extremely important.

ideological conflict. But they they they all assume that they're going to do some kind of like giant state led industrialization project, right, whether it's a socialist one, whether it's the more Islamist one, and then suddenly they're they're now all, you know, it's like, okay, well your economy is now on the Yugoslavian uh self management model because.

Their plan is to use this against any attempt to set up basically a dictatorship by uh, you know, it's okay. And this is where it gets sort of interesting because very explicitly they are trying to stave off sort of Soviet style socialisticatorship, right they are, And their plan is We're going to use we're going to use the workers councils as the as the basis of of an actual sort of workers democracy against again against the sort of

orthodox like Marcus Leninist stuff. And this is another thing that's going on too, is the army is a lot more orthodox Marcist Leninists than and then either the workers committees with the unions and so a lot in a lot of parts of the countries in the West, the army just sort of rolls through, knocks off the workers committees and seizes the land for itself. And that's a fiasco.

But now now pretty very quickly Ben Bella, who emerges as as the sort of as the leader of Algeria after a set of political maneuvering that we're not going to get into here, is basically forced to and in nineteen sixty three set a bunch of decrees saying that, yeah, these guys are people who run the economy, et cetera,

et cetera. But there's there I want to talk. I want to actually get into something that is really not talked about in ninety nine percent of the accounts of this stuff, which is how do these councils actually work? Because spoiler alert. This whole thing is going to fail and all these people are going to be crushed. And a lot of that has to do with how this thing's set up, which is very badly because it is a system designed by Marxists, and they're very sympathetic Marksist to a broad extent.

power out of the hands of workers directly. Right that that that giant assembly, it can't actually make policy. The only thing they can do is approve plans or disapproved plans set down by the management committee.

bigger issue, which is state control. And this is this is where I think, really this is something that Clegg doesn't get into much because Clegg is a Marxist.

organizations don't have control over their own money. So y're, yeah, you're paid. You're getting paid by the state, right and you so you give the state your money and then they they pay you. And this becomes a real issue because the state goes, oh well, the people in these self managing things are actually like privileged workers, so they have permanent pay freezes. And also you can't reinvest your profits back into the firm, which is a real issue.

just to like put it out there. I think like and archo syndicalism is right there, and it allows for the like unions and syndicate which over overlook a whole industry to coordinate between workers' committees and ensure that, you know, things get done and people get read with dignity, and they also make enough money or have access to the

resources that they need to survive. And when we try and like cut the corners off this or kind of make a little collage between this and barkist leninism or state socialism, like neither thing works, and we to stand up with this kind of terrible hodge podge in which it doesn't it doesn't function, right, But that that doesn't necessarily mean that work is self management itself is invaded as a concept it.

is an output. Is that the city, the state is doing things like I mean sometimes sometimes they they'll have all these oranges. So a lot of the the Algeria and agricultural economy is set up as a cash crop economy. And you're supposed to fight you so okay, and it's it's never really worked very well. But the Algerian state just completely shits the bed. And there's I mean, this is like i mean we're talking like tons of fruit is just sitting there rotting a lot of the time.

What they do is they just dump in onto the French market at for like basically zero cost, and so and you know, and so you you you get these things and you look at the sort of profit lost thing, and you know, the sort of like right wing parts of the state, and this is oh, I guess you like, I guess they are right wing, but the sort of anti self management parts of the statia going oh, well, look at these these firms. They're hemorrhaging all this money.

It's like, well, yeah, they're hemorrhaging money because instead of actually selling the goods, you guys are throwing all of their goods into a dumpster. Like yeah, of course it's not working, right.

the state. And so you know, there's not even to quote Claig again, as the president of a self managed farm said to me in nineteen sixty five, in this situation, how can we persuade the worker that he is no longer working for a capitalist exploiter? And like, well, yeah, he objectively is right, he is, like the state is stealing all of his money and then doing some stupid bullshit with it.

talk to you about. This was that if you look at the way that that the Spanish system is set up, right, it's it's built off of coordination, like basically like sectoral coordination between everyone who's doing a thing, right, It's built on resource sharing. If I'm remembering my stuff, right, I mean they have basically they have a banking union, and people put their profits into the into the banking union, and then people can get money from the banking union to reinvest in other places.

producing stuff that you're producing stuff for need. And then on the other hand, you have the other thing that's supposed to be the advantage of self management, which is that the workers themselves, who are the people who are supposed to understand that production process the best, can make

decisions over how they're going to do things. But then if you look at the Algerian system, because it's because it's set up by Marxists, it's specifically designed such that basically like you're you're instead of you actually managing yourself, you're you're just electing your boss, and then your boss manages, right,

And that's not actually good. This is and it's weird because looking at this, right, this is actually a worst system in terms of self management, I think in a lot of senses than the Chinese, because the Chinese system is not designed for self management. But you can't fire people. So because you can't fire people, you have to listen to what people think and what people sort of do.

Is this system, I don't know. It pisces me off because this is a revolution that very very easily could have worked, but it was you know, there's intentional sabotage by the state because most of the sectors of the state don't want this to work.

an oil economy. Yeah, and dismantling this entire thing. And I don't know, it makes me really angry because the the the like the actual Algerian ruling class had the right idea and then they just got completely fucked by everyone who was supposed to be leading them, or you know, the people who were supposed to be selling the stuff that they made, people who are supposed to be reinvesting, all the people who ended up with the financial control

just completely screwed them. And yeah, I don't know, it's it's it's really it's it's it's really depressing in a lot of ways. But on the other hand, right, like, it doesn't it doesn't. It doesn't have to go like this, Right, you don't have to hand control of your workplace over to some fucking guy in the Department of Agricultural Waste Management or whatever so he can use your origines for fertilizer like you can. You can simply not do this.

And then you have this sort of source of labor which is not inherently tied to the land that like, you know, when when there was a need, like for instance, I'm writing a book right now and writing about the Druti column, and like they would because they had less rifles than they had fighters, they would rotate their fighters off the front line during the harvest time and have people help with the harvest, and then they didn't like

need those people the rest of the year. Right, So they were able to incorporate like temporary surgeries in labor without it being like destructive to their model, because it was the idea was like a collective community as opposed to a collective as opposed to like just the workplace being this island of pseudo collectivisation, like you're saying in Algeria.

Also shout out to the Iron column who I've been writing about recently, who solved their supply side issues by leaving the front line and raiding the cops because they didn't have enough guns either, so they simply took them from the cops. Telling Yeah, incredibly based, Yeah, very bag.

workers cooperatives competing against each other. And those are, like, you're, those are your two models of socialism, and those both suck, and both are set up to fail from the beginning because they're not actually you know, you're you're you're you're you're not actually doing the thing, you're not actually having the entire the entire class as a class, you know,

abolishing itself. And then also managing managing production in such a way that people are cooperating to produce what people need instead of everyone fighting over like either well instead of either the state setting a steel quota and having that be the entire goal of the economy, or like seventeen co ops and the like both producing all producing the exact same kind of coffee trying to figure out who can produce it more cheaply.

resistance can take. We've chatted extensively on this network about Rojava. We've talked a fair amount James Stout and I. James is on the show today, by the way, Hello James, Hi Robert. We've talked a lot about me and mar and the gin Z Revolution, there three D printing of firearms and kind of this war that these people have been waging in the Jungles successfully in order to overthrow the military dictatorship of their country. But we haven't talked

a whole lot about naval warfare. And this is because for most of history, for most of at least our recent history, naval warfare was not really a thing insurgents could engage in, right, you know, you could every now and then if a ship was docked or something, you might be able to get off a bombing, right, like

what happened to us as coal. And I'm not expressing general sympathy for everybody who does a militant insurgent act, but I am talking about like the overall kind of like tactics and strategy that underline how that stuff works.

And one of the things that's really changed in the last couple of years, since twenty twenty two, you could really mark it out, is that irregular non state groups can now to an extent never before possible challenge the sea power of nations like the United States, which has an unquestioned, previously at least unquestioned level of dominance in sort of conventional naval power. And we talked about conventional naval power in the twenty first century. That means aircraft

carrier groups. Right, the US has eleven of them, which, if I'm not mistaken, is more than the of the world. We have a lot of fucking aircraft carriers. And previously that was believed to be you know, a guarantee of book dominance on sea, and if a carrier group or two is in the area, you generally we generally, the United States generally could count on having air supremacy. You

certainly wouldn't expect it to be countered. You know, you could expect, like, for example, if we were to have a conflict over Taiwan, the Chinese navy could or the Chinese army could potentially interdict a carrier group using ground based you know, ground to see anti ship missiles or

something like that. But we're increasingly in an era in which these kind of irregular non state groups have access to similar technology and have access to kind of even more bespoke technology like drone swarms that poses a unique threat to the naval dominance of the United States. And I wanted to start you know, we've got a two part of here. We're going to be talking about the

Huthis and Yemen. We're going to be talking about the Ukrainian navy, which does not really have much in the way of boats, but it is still challenging the Russian Navy. And we're going to be talking about rebels in Myanmar. We're going to start today, we'll be talking about the Huthi and to understand Houthi resistance to the United States and why a militant group has had such success challenging

US naval power. You first have to understand how they got to the point that they're at right now, where they are kind of in a lot of ways a near state actor, you know, not a world power actor, but near state actor. You know, they're probably more capable in some ways than the State of Yemen, which they are at war with. Yeah, yeah, And to get how they got to that point, you have to understand what

happened with their fight against the Saudis. So the Houthi Movement or ansar Allah, which means Supporters of God, is a Zaidi Shia Islamist movement run primarily by members of the Huthi tribe. Zaidi Islam is a bit of an odd duck. You'll hear it described as, yeah, like a Shia segment. It's really probably more accurate to look at it as like it's kind of in between Shia and Sunni of like the Shia kind of denominations. It's kind

of closest to being Sunni. I'm not an expert on any of this, but it comes out of a guy named Zaid iban Ali's rebellion against the Umiyad Caliphate, which did not succeed, but we still have the Zaidi. What matters for our purposes today is that the Huthi as a movement came out of opposition to the Yemen's president Abi Abdullah Salah, who was corrupt as hell. He was seen as corrupt, and he was in fact corrupt as hell, and he was. It was specifically they were they were

accusing him of basically being bribed by the Saudis. That's where like the Houthi started the rebellion in around two thousand and three. So they began as a resistance movement to this corrupt president Salah. They adopted the slogan God is the Greatest, Death to America, death to Israel, and a curse upon the Jews, which is still their slogan.

So they are not what you would call unproblematic. Again, but now that they applied out there, they're they're not hiding it, you know, dig for this stuff.

we're talking about this now. Hoothy armed activities against the Saudis really kicked off and hit a major level after the Yemeni Civil War, which officially started in twenty fourteen. The new president of Yemen, who was not Salah at this point, asked for military support from the international community, which in this case meant the Saudis right. So the Saudis.

It's called a coalition. There's technically some other people involved, but it's the Saudis right, and the president of Yemen calls in the Saudis when his forces are kicked out of the capital of Yemen, Sana, by Hoothy fighters. The way when the Hoothy take Sana is when they get their first cruise missiles, largely just like a bunch of

scuds and stuff, so like old Soviet shit, right. Operation Decisive Storm is the name that Saudi Arabia gives to their intervention in Yemen, and a lot of people will say this is basically Saudi Arabia's Vietnam, not an inappropriate comparison to make. So the Saudis start bombing the shit out of the Houthi and then they send in ground forces, because bombing the shit out of people who are motivated never really works as well as you want it to, right.

exit this conflict. I mean it's not like you wouldn't say completely done, but they exit this conflict with the Saudis a lot stronger, right, a lot more organized, with a lot better weapons, right, and a lot of this you know, so by the way, I should also state that, like now, the Houthis are on the side of former President Sala It's a complicated conflict, right, but at the end of this all they have a shitload of Iranian weapons because Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Saudi Arabia

and they see the Houthis as allies, and so they spend a lot of time this during this conflict shipping in agtms, which are wire guided missiles that are just aces and blasting holes in Saudi Arabia's tanks, which are US supplied. If I'm not mistaken as a general, Yeah, a lot of Saudi Arabia stuff is US and like, yeah, basic most of it, right, much of it? Yeah, Yeah, there are a lot of contractors over there.

But this is kind of when people start to realize, oh, fuck, you know Syria as well, these are This is really going to change a lot about how armor gets used. And this is also where we start to see the first Hothi deployments of ballistic missiles, which were used sort of they initially used them, not dissimilarly to how the Germans used V twos right in World War Two. There are terror weapons and they're used in retaliation for Saudi Arabia's use of a terror weapon, which is US jets

and missiles. Right, So Saudi Arabia is terror bombing Yemen, and Yemen starts firing missiles back at Saudi Arabia because you know that's what you do, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm going to quote here from an article in the National News, quote Huthi militias and Yemen launched and this is from twenty twenty two. Huthi militias and Yemen launched ballistic missiles at Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on

Monday and the latest attack on neighboring states. Two missiles were destroyed in mid flight during the attempted terrorist attack on Abu Dhabi while in Saudi Arabia, one was shot down and another missile wounded two civilians in an industrial area. So this is that gives you an idea of like where they are a couple of years ago. And these are not super advanced cruise missiles, as you can see by that kind of like casualty rate. Right, they're not

doing massive amounts of damage, but they caused terror. Right. It's scary to know that a missile could come out of the sky and kill some of you, and it's you know, from their perspective, how else are they going to strike back? They don't have an air force in the conventional sense, but what we do see here is by being able to carry out these attacks back on Saudi Arabia who's bombing them, despite not having an air

force of their own. You already see how new technology and cruise missiles aren't new technology, but them being available to a non state actor is fairly new. You see how that has already changed the game in terms of like you can't really say the Saudis don't have this

air supremacy. You can still say they have air supremacy because again, the Huthis don't have much in the way of air power at this point, but they can't stop missiles from hitting their cities entirely, which is a different game than when you know that's not really a possibility. The Houthy arsenal today includes a dizzying array of different Iranian, Soviet, Syrian,

and indigenously produced rockets, including the Burkhan three missiles. These are for long range strikes up to twelve hundred kilometers, and the botter P one rockets, which have one hundred and twenty two one hundred and sixty kilometer range. They also have old Soviet Frog sevens, which are useful to about sixty five kilometers. None of these are accurate in cruise missile terms, you know, but they work well enough for the Houthy's purposes. The botter P is indigenously produced.

It's made by the Houthies. It's thought to be based on the Syrian Kaibar rocket. It is unguided, and experts will say it's closer to being functioning as just like dumb artillery than an actual cruise missile. Un inspectors claim quote it is produced locally from steel tubing, very likely sourced from the oil industry. You hear this a lot in a regular conflict in the Middle East. When I was in Mosel covering the fighting with Isis, their mortars were made off out of tubing that was like part

of construction projects. I think that traced back to the oil industry, at least some of it.

They only are believed to have a few dozen of these, although that's an estimate from an earlier report, and these were the ones they would use most regularly on ground targets during the Saudi intervention when they needed a precise strike. And I'm going to quote from an article and an analysis of their missile capability. The Huthis first fired a Tatchka missile in September twenty fifteen, targeting the coalitions that's

the Saudi's software military base in Mareb, Yemen. The strike hit a weapons orige depot and killed sixty coalition soldiers. The Houthis fired another tachka on December fourteenth, twenty fifteen, targeting a coalition base south of Taia's City in Taia's Yemen. The strike reportedly killed over one hundred and twenty coalition soldiers. The most recently recorded tachka fire took place on November nineteenth, twenty sixteen, landing in a desert in eastern Marab Province.

The target was unclear, but was likely the Arab Coalition's all weak military camp. So those are significant casualties. These are very effective weapons that do a lot of damage.

But even without Iranian aid's there's a signe probably a significant degree of time to which they could continue to produce some of these weapons because they are making them themselves.

this is this stuff. If you think back ten fifteen years, the idea of a non state insurgent group having access to a cruise missile library like this, you know, not to say about like the other weapons they have, the drones and stuff they have, it would have been kind of unprecedented. That said, these are not good weapons in

the modern military sense of the word. But I mean they are not very accurate for the most part, and compared to more advanced missiles like the kind of the United States, Russia and China have, they are easy to shoot down with the kind of weapons systems aboard say,

US aircraft carriers. We will discuss that more later. This is largely inconsequential to what's been happening in the Red Sea because the vast majority of naval traffic that passes by Houthi territory does not have access to say FAYLANX, FELANX systems. Yeah, you don't have much in the way of anti missile systems on a normal containers.

anti ship missiles. In an article for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a guy named Fabian hens Rights quote the parades these are Houthy military parades also featured of right of anti ship ballistic missiles ASBMs and guided rockets

employing Iranian infrared or imaging infrared seeker technology. The four hundred and fifty kilometer range CEF appears to be a rebranded ASBM version of Iran's FATA three one three missile, while the Tongue Kill represents a previously unseen anti ship version of the IRGC Iranian Revolutionary GUARDCOREPS developed five hundred kilometer range so higher. The two designs constitute the heaviest, hoothy anti ship missiles, both with warheads of more than

three hundred kilograms and are of Iranian origin. Three smaller ASBMs. The one hundred and forty kilometer range FLEK, the Mayun and the bar al Amar strongly resemble Iranian design philosophy and seeker technology, but do not precisely match known Iranian systems.

They could either be Iranian systems not observed before in smuggle to Yemen, or Huthi produced rockets combined using Iranian guidance skits, not unlike developments made by another Iran proxy, the Lebanese has Belah in its precition guided surface to surface missile program. Finally, the Huthis have presented an S seventy five SA two surface to air missile, likely from pre war ye many army stocks modified for an anti

ship role using an Iranian guidance kit. So that's that's that's a potent and it's probably more some ways more advanced than their general cruise missile stockpile arsenal for taking out ships. Now, the Houthis are still a non state force. When people say online that like the us IS is fighting Yemen, not quite accurate, because the Huthis are fighting Yemen too, right, like the government if you're if you're

saying government, you're talking about the people. Well, people in Yemen are fighting each other, right, yeah, it's it's that is the situation. They are at war with the government of Yemen, right, that is still right case.

dangerous to continue. Their stated goal here is to force damage on Israel and the Western nations who support it by hitting the only thing they care about, commerce, and their actions here have done real damage to international trade, not exclusively Western international trade. I should note the latest several months have seen them capture or sink a couple of merchant vessels. They've sunk one. They've hit at least

sixteen vessels with drones and missiles. I found a Bloomberg report with the telling title houthy missiles do far more damage to trade than to actual ships, which is an interesting way to frame it. Yeah, and they're kind of trying to minimize what's going on here. While sixteen strikes is a large number for the industry to withstand, there

have been even more failed attempts. Since the Hoothies began their attacks, there have been more than sixty incidents of some kind in and around the waterway, including everything from near misses to hijackings and harassment by armed militants and small boats. If you look at the damage that's occurred in most of these incidents, it has not been significant, said Marcus Baker, head of the Marine and cargo at Marsh,

one of the world's top insurance brokers. So far, we haven't seen a total loss caused by a missile strike. That changed in March when the Houthi successfully sank the Ruby Mar despite more than a month of US strikes to degrade their capability. The vessel was initially wounded and drifted unmanned for almost two weeks before sinking. While it listed, A Hoothy representative promised the ship could be salvaged if aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza. Ruby Mar wound up sinking.

carrier named the True Confidence. Now, how you kind of interpret this as a success by the Houthy stated goals, which is right, to inflict enough pain on the West and on Israel economically that it forces an earlier end to what Israel is doing in Gaza, Right, if that's their goal, Well, it hasn't happened yet, right, That's one thing we can say right, it has not yet. There's no evidence that I have seen that it has affected the tempo of Israeli operations substantially.

think it's not unreasonably. There's a thing called the right to protect an international law, which is probably what the heaths are claiming they have of the acting under it, and that's not, like, on the face of it, unreasonable, But yet I think the US has this very like strong incentive to not let it become a thing that keeps happening.

the Red Sea. Right, there's I've heard some argument that the tempo is reduced since the US got there, But it's also one clear to me is like, well, they only have a limited amount of these missiles, right. Has the TiO changed because they need to marshal their ammunition effectively, or has it changed because there's been damage done to their infrastructure. I don't know that we'll ever really get a perfect answer on that, right, I know the US

claims that it has. You know, we claim that our strikes have weakened them, but we always claim that, right, you know.

substantial drop. That is a hit, and it's hurt a lot of people.

look at a map. Right, people who rightly see what's happening in Gaza as a crime against humanity are unlikely to care too much about the Egyptian economy, nor should they necessarily. But the bigger questions here are can the hoo He's actually force an into what Israel's doing? And how long can they keep this up? The answer to the first question, can the Houthi's force it into his reely aggression is not yet. And the answer to the second question is how long can they keep this up?

I don't know, they might be able to eventually bring about international pressure through economic damage, but given the state of the US presidential election, I don't see that as particularly likely a method for changing net and Yahu's behavior. The answer to the second question is, you know, you know, how long can they keep this up? Probably forever? Right, US strikes have been lauded by the US as damaging infrastructure, but we don't know that that's true. Our air strikes

in the region have been launched by the USS. D White D. Eisenhower, the head of the carrier strike Group in the Red Sea at present. And again, when you look at kind of like leftists analyzing this, because they don't often know much about the military, you'll get a mix of like people being like, ah, the houthis are going to kill a carrier because they put out a video of like a carrier in their sites and shit, and like, I don't think so, guys, doesn't seem likely.

These are very well defended ships, and they are very competently led. Look I have looked into the capital of the ship, I've looked into how they have handled the considerable tempo of tax against them. I think that these guys are operationally competent as the US tends to be. Now,

that doesn't mean they're going to win. The US US soldiers tend to be operationally competent most of the time, and we also lose a lot, right because operational competence doesn't matter if the operations you're being asked to undertake have no chance of victory. And that is more or less the situation. I think that these sailors are in right where they're pretty good at sailing around in an

aircraft carrier and not getting killed. But that doesn't mean they're going to defeat the Houthies in a meaningful way right right, And the Hoothies are aware of this. They're in a holding pattern. They understand that the primary thing that is that all of strategy really hinges around stopping

and denying terrain to the enemy. And all the Hoothies have to do to deny a significant amount of terrain to the entire west is keep lobbing missiles, often blindly, in this sea and it will make everything more expensive for everybody, keep them in the news, and that's a win. And it's unlikely, if not basically impossible, that using current methods, the US Navy and US you know, airpower in this area, based in this carrier group is going to be able to do anything but spend a shitload of money.

you know. As impressive as their drone swarms are, for a nonstate actor cannot put together the kind of a swarm that a state actor like China, for example, could. But people are looking at how close some hits have gotten to the carriers and being like, well, shit, if you add a lot more of these things, you could really cost some fucking problems for these boats.

use those on ships that cannot defend against them. They have since some manned boats, which the US has fucking mrked immediately, and they don't seem to be doing that anymore because it's dumb and the Hoothies didn't get where they did by repeatedly doing dumb shit. What they seem to have settled on is sending out drone swarms. Both of these boats, these underwater drones and of aerial drones, and these things can cost just a few thousand dollars each.

Some of the biggest ones are probably more like tens of thousands of dollars. But the navy missiles that we use to interdict this shit and some of these, they also have some dumber cruise missiles that are pretty cheap. The missiles we use to interdict this shit are two point one million dollars is shot.

These have worked really well, especially against drones and tests, but they're only effective from about ten miles or less away. In ballistic missile terms, that's extremely close. You don't want to rely on these for as and it's not even all that far away in drone terms right As a result, the US has expanded research into more efficient anti drone and anti missile weapons, including what amounts to laser, laser and microwave weapons that could be fired indefinitely for the

cost of electricity. Given the nature of these weapons, that's not insignificant either, but it's a lot less than two point one million is shot. As is always the case, the kind of fight the Huthies are waging right now has an expiration eight right now. Any group that can put together a few million dollars to make hundreds and hundreds of explosive drones right which a number of groups are capable of, could at least exact a substantial toll on a US carrier battlegroup, make it, spend a shitload

of money, potentially even do some damage. And again, even if this stuff hits an aircraft carrier, you're like very unlikely to see that thing sink. There's a story that's worth knowing that, Like when we decommissioned one of our aircraft carriers fifteen or twenty years ago. They started. They shot at a bunch like they just to see like how well it would hold up, and like they such a great sink and they couldn't sink the fucker. Like,

you can do that, you could kill sailors. It would be a big deal if they hit a fucking aircraft carrier and killed some sailors, even if the carrier doesn't go down, that's a huge fucking deal. I don't know that they're capable of doing that, but it's unlikely they're going to kill one, right.

the way war works, right. You know, the Hoothies ten to fifteen years ago wouldn't have been able to wage a war like this against the US Navy. They fought the Navy to a stand still. That's the only way to analyze this, right, and again, that doesn't mean either side is achieving their operational goals. Right, The Houthis have not ended the genocide in Gaza, and the US doesn't seem to be capable of ending the Houthis. So they fought each other to a stand still in this matter.

And that wouldn't have been possible twenty years ago. So right, twenty years from now, what's going on will be different. You know, the fact that the US seems to be pretty close to developing more efficient anti drone and anti missile weapons that are a lot cheaper to use doesn't mean that non state actors will not find a way around those. But that is the situation we're in right now with the Houthis, and that is the end of

this episode. We're going to get back to you tomorrow for part two, where're going to talk about irregular naval warfare in Ukraine and Myanmar. James, you got anything else to say, No, I didn't think. So you need to be a bad day to be a boat. I guess bad day to be a boat, bad day to be a drone. They're really suffering in this.

So that's going to be fun. And of course the Navy of mianmar which is a bit of a different class from the US and Russian Navy, but no less interesting.

really having one of their own. But first Ukraine. In twenty fourteen, when the Russian Army invaded eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine lost a significant portion of it's already not that impressive navy. Most of their boats were just taken by Russia, along with a number of sailors who defected. A lot of other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes and cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their country in a war that a decade later is still ongoing.

One of these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to flee his home, possibly forever, in order to continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy, Admiral Nazpapa. He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships, and on paper, it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's legendary Black Sea Fleet. Since the age of the Czars, the Black Sea Fleet has been infamous as

a pillar of Russian military power. However, also since the age of the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it.

that's a remarkable achievement. Sinking a third of the Black Sea Fleet and basically when you reopen a port. That means that you have taken away naval dominance from a country that has a navy and you don't. That's pretty good, pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, Ukraine had damaged, irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't know the difference. They've They've fucked up a lot of boats.

They have destroyed a submarine with seed to ground capability that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser, the capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva. They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of patrol boats and missile boats, and a number of other boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties, especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel we're looking at a year's multiple years lead time to replace.

You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during the big Dub Dub dose, the US did, but nobody really does that anymore, not with the big ones.

The Turks are not allowing that right now. So again, this is a situation that has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea fleet could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like if they keep going at this rates like eighteen months or something before, there's not really

much of a fleet anymore. Now. If Ukraine had accomplished this task with a traditional navy using standard naval tactics, This would have been an impressive victory given the disparity in resources between the two nations. But they have done all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country, aerial drones, and new bespoke

locally produced suicide drone boats. This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one Rand Corporation engineer and analyst, Scott Savatz, described the BLA blaxiafleet as a fleet in being quote, it represents a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check for now. And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article on the topic. It brought a little

more context. Ukraine has effectively turned around ten thousand square miles in the western Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military calls a gray zone, where neither

side can sail without the threat of attack. James Heapey, Britain's Armed Forces Minister, told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat, and contended that the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea was every bit as important as the successful counter offensives on land and Cersona and Kharkiv last year. The classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies

does not work now, Admiral Nese Papas said. Therefore, we have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning and implementing work as much as possible. That articles about a year old or so.

storm shadows to rain death on the crime import of Sebastopol. Recently, seven out of eighteen of the missiles fired made it through Russian air defenses, and these damaged or destroyed four landing ships in a single strike. And these are sizeable naval vessels. This is the most recent attack, although as after I wrote this, there was another attack on the Kirch Bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place

yet that seems to have shut it down again. But that gives you an idea of like what you actually have to do. How much of these missiles you have to put in the air to get some through. And that's not too bad, right, eighteen missiles, seven get through, four ships down. That's a really good rate of return.

defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource. So any time you can even if the ship doesn't get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles, which it doesn't, which the whole country doesn't have very many of, that they're still a win.

the aspects of Ukrainian a regular naval warfare. That are some guys that are hobbyists building shit. Yeah, this is not that part yet. But I think this information is kind of significant and that it shows the tactical use of anti ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an operational environment even when the country using them has minimal conventional naval assets of their own. It is largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has

been able to reopen their black Sea ports. That matters to people seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but I think we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment, at least in terms of how doctrine is changing as a result of this. So maybe I

should update how we're defining this. But for our purposes as people unlikely to have access to cruise missiles but significantly likely to find ourselves waging an unconventional than having cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the Black Sea fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this is where we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones

are a mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about stuff like the Bairaktar, the Turkish drone, which is like kind of like the Predator A right, it's like an actual military product. But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or

at least drones that started out a civilian technology. A lot of these are now built to be military, but they're still based on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling together civilian drones and outside of naval stuff.

Prior to the war, there had been a lot of veterans and hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale, the kind of drone warfare that you can do with these these less expensive drones, and they received a lot of pushback until the war started and these guys just took to the fields, started fucking murking Russian armed units and infantry and killing generals and shit.

And now Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going to follow. Like Ukrainian like battalions have like companies now that are drone assault companies, and like line battalions, and.

weapons systems like samsites deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of, and that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels. Some of this has been kind of funny. I want to read a quote from a Business Insider article here. Russia is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try

and trick Ukraine, which keeps destroying its warships. In an intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the side of ks probably to confuse the uncrude aerial vehicle operators. They showed there's some images of this. They don't seem convincing to me. I don't know if I think this is working.

that this is working well. Their actual like jamming efforts have been much more successful, right, Yeah, they always will be on civilian One of the thing that's really interesting compared to Meanma is that Ukraine tends to rely on modified off the shelf civilian drones, right your dji is that kind of thing in Mianma because of where a lott of the PDFs are. Because but they increasingly do control the borders, but they haven't always. They have been

making their own drones. The group called Federal Wings you can find them on telegram who who make their own drones, and I think those seem to be less the Jammas that the sac that the Tamado has are Chinese made Jamma rifles. You see them all the time in captured weapon cashes, but they don't seem to be having as

much impact on these homemade drones, which is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, and it's you know, I've mentioned a couple of times we're doing this in part because the odds that people listening might be involved in an irregular conflict are not zero.

You know what I think about when I say that is not that there's high odds for any individual person fighting themselves in that situation, but there is, given the number of people who listened to this podcast, probably someone who is not currently involved in a conflict that will

find themselves that way in the future. And I base that in part on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar who are currently fighting a war were a couple of years ago delivery drivers and you know, playing pubg online and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.

Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing Ukraine to do severe damage to that massive Russian armored column heading towards the city and providing intel that led to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I found in CNN by some Bashtian Shukla, Alex Marcott and

Daria Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the title of this article. Yeah, I'll try to thriller in the show notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea. Haven't really seen the word fight backies that way, but there you go. So I'm going to read a quote

from that article. A government linked Ukrainian fundraising organization called United twenty four has sourced money from companies and individuals all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a variety of developers and initiatives, from defense to soccer matches. The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who seen and met with declined to give their full names or even

their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants to go by shark in front of him is a long, black, hard show briefcase. He unveils a bespoke multi screened mission control, essentially an elaborate gaming center combined, complete with levers, joysticks, a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches that

shouldn't accidentally be knocked. With labels like Blast. The developer of the drone, who act to remain anonymous sid their work on sea drones only began once the war started. It was very important because we did not have many forces to resist the maritime state Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design I mean, this guy's not really a hobbyist anymore, but that's how

he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the military recognized the value of what he was doing. And the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little over two thousand pounds with an explosive six hundred and sixty one pound payload, a five hundred mile range and a max speed of fifty miles per hour. That is a

significant weapons system. Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets in the Black Sea, and drones were involved in a successful attack that severely damaged the Kirch Bridge last July, rendering it impassable since until September. So these have had a real battlefield effect and they probably will continue to do so. The developer of these drones told CNN these drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn and tested here. It's our own production

of holes, electronics and software. More than fifty percent of the production of equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as a result of fucking around in Congress, and so it is a necessity for them to be able to develop weapon systems like this that can interdict and counteract more advanced and expensive weapon systems and can

be produced indigenously. You know, I don't think we have seen a mass suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what happens when we do, like with more significant numbers than we've seen deployed. I kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've come across at least a couple of stories of these boats likely destroyed on approach. So they certainly don't

always work even a majority of the time. But given the cost of these things they don't have to get through the majority of the time, very much worth it. Right now, In you Know that interview with the New York Times, Admiral Najpapa caution that a Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea. Even though the Russians no

longer have supremacy, they still have air superiority. They are still able to launch from the sea long range missiles at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets, So this is not again a situation that should be portrayed as them having

their own way. Their ability to kind of interdict the sea has been the primary effects of it have been number one, the reopening of trade in the Black Sea and earlier in the war, by locking down the ability of these landing ships to put more troops on ground, and by doing damage to the Kurch Bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements in Russian materiel from entering the war zone in order to this aided in some

of the advances, particularly in areas like Carson. At this moment, the situation has changed because again, the Russians aren't just kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over again, or at least not always, and we don't tend to talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things,

but that is an important part of the story. And one of the things the Russians have done is kind of igledge that the Black Sea Fleet may not be a fleet in being forever and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle. And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern

Russia to Mariopol and occupied southern Ukraine. This has allowed them to get high volume shipments into the area and supply troops to the area along Ukraine's southern front without relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings.

to fix a damage sunk of railroad. Fixing a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat is a lot harder.

them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them terrain that they can act in without being countered, and you have also denied them from stopping you from acting in that same terrain, even if you don't have total safety in that area. That opens up the operational possibilities substantially. And this is something that I kind of don't think

is going to get put back in the bag. Even if some of these Star Wars ass weapons systems do come out in the near future. You know, maybe that'll have an impact in the immediate term on people like the houthies, but I don't think that it really will on you know, for example, what Ukraine's doing right Yes, yeah.

on a twenty. It's about the first of March. It was in the river, in the river in Yangon, right, and it was carrying allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now, if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese Freedom movement, they will one of their demands for a long time has been to stop supplying the Hunter with jet fuel, which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians, PDF formations, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed

at some point in the last couple of years. And they haven't been exactly right. They haven't been able to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the Hunter. So they've taken it into their own hands. And what they did on the first of March was that they snuck onto a boat. So two, this is the story from the Burmese National Unity Governments Ministry Defense. Anyway, combat divers snuck onto this boat planted a kilogram of TNT

or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of TNT. Robert and I've both spoken to people who make explosives in mema, so we do. We definitely know the PDF has access to a range of explosives. They set it on a five hour fuse and it blew up in the middle of the night, and there's definitely footage of the ship

on fire having blown up. Now, this is pretty remarkable for never real Like this is like why the United States has units like the Navy Seals, right, like the higher speed guys, because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor, climb onto a ship, send an explosive charge without being detected, and then leave that ship and have the charge go off and sink the ship without you being compromised, without the charge itself being like compromised,

and the ship being saved. Right, this is some like this is some classic like this is why they are special unit within the US Minute Now, the PDF very obviously did not have combat divers. Two years ago, I was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon. The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very low, So the people who you find diving in that area are not so much like hobby scuba divers or free divers, but there's salvage divers and there's a whole little industry

of people. And these people are diving in equipment that I would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and diving down and trying to find there's a large deposit of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship that's sunk. There was a course copper, which everyone all around the world, including the Vigcong in Santia, are stealing copper.

There's iron, right, So these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever minimal amount they can. Right, It's an extremely dangerous an extremely low income. It's one of the sort of really high risk, low reward jobs that you get in economies where people are really struggling to make ends meet, right, So those are the only divers I can find evidence of in Yangon.

I don't think it was them who did this, because you have to have a boat above you with a pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth, right, So it seems like somebody in within the They said it was a Yangon PDF, that's what they attribute it to,

So that would be one of these. It would likely be an underground group within the PDF, right, some people living in the city who were able to sneak onto this boat, set a charge and blow it up, And they would also had to have intelligence at the boat where it was, what it was carrying, et cetera. It's a pretty pretty daring mission that this is the first one like this we've seen, and we haven't seen anything since. But it's of course possible that this is a story

that we're being told. In fact, they had like someone undercover on the ship, right, or like they had some other means of getting this charge onto the ship. But one way or another they managed to blow up this ship carrying fuel, which is a significant debt trim. Yeah, right, and that's how they get most of their shit, it's not over land, especially with more the.

then they will make that more expensive for them. And they're not exactly a wealthy like hunter, even though I guess Lung just made himself an air force one recently. I was just looking at it today.

like necessarily an ethnic one. The Rakin would be the ethnic group. So what the AA have done is sunk I think at least four Hunter ships now, and most of these ships are kind of they're like the they look like big Higgins boats. They're like landing craft or like car ferries, like flat bottom with a bow that goes down.

to transport them up river. They also use them a lot in Rakhine State to shell AA positions and any townships that they've decided they want to wipe off the map and kill all the people in.

years plus underwater mines have existed. It seems the way that like, the reason they're able to get away with using what is their relatively dated technology is because the hunter doesn't expect to encounter anything, right, and so has not equiped its ships as such, Like they do have

stuff like submarines, but that's not what's getting sunk. What's getting sun of these big kind of landing craft riverboats, And it seems that they're using mines and then once they disabled the ship, they're then attacking it with small boats, small arms like indirect fire mortars and stuff. I saw one post that suggested they'd use which is pretty cool if they did. The Burmese military has these like tank destroyers.

It's a tank, it's what it is, and they've captured the AA has captured a number of these, and I've seen suggestions that they're using some of these on like they just set up an ambush along the banks of the river, right and as a ship comes in they can they can maybe disable it with a mine and

then attack it with those. But there are videos online you can find them of the AA sinking these ships and then they've done some amazing drone photography of like they obviously they then like staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the drone and they had the Arakan Army flags and they're actually really cool photos of them

taking these. But again, like I think this might be the first sinking of a Bermese naval ship since since independence from Britain, Like I can't think that they were. They really haven't played much of a role at all in its comics with the Eros aside as from like basically kind of just shelling places when they want to do that. But there's never really been any significant opposition to them, and that's changed now they have to obviously,

just like everywhere else, watch out for drones. R drones have been used to a massive extent in Myanmar, and like the AA doesn't have as many like associated PDFs, I haven't seen them doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs. The pdf tend to be like the more urban folks, right, the younger folks and the gen Z folks that we've spoken about before, and a lot of them have been very savvy with their use

of drones. Like I said, you can look up Federal wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones and all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks. So they like, but that what it wasn't even drone to you, it's pretty simple. It was just mine. So things they do love mines and meat of mines all over that country. But in this case, these I guess

massive what mines in the rivers. Given that the Hunter is the only only entity sending big boats up and down, you could set them at a certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them, and eventually one of the Hunter boats is going to hit them, I guess. And so it's pretty basic technology, but it's still a massive step forward in terms of like a place where the state had complete impunity, it now doesn't.

took those out. I think the hunters. Like tried to spin this as like the AA is attacking civilians, but I think a Burmese Navy ship with a Burmese Navy flag, when those ships have just been shelling you, seems like a legitimate target to me. And I think it's very hard. It's you know, it's a hunter, but children on one of their naval ships rather than the AA who attacked the ship because it had children. You can hear in

one of the things. You can hear the AA are like attacking the ship in small boats and they're shouting like there are children on board, and you can hear them acknowledging it. And there are videos of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard, rescuing them from the river, and then like, I guess they've just held us. POW's cool. Yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously, not many of us have access to underwater mines, but you know, maybe in a fictional future we might.

That'll kill everybody on board on Those things are traps. Just pray for those.