We are seeing a lot of posts and articles on X about Ukraine's OWA drone strategic bombing campaign against Russian refineries .
People, including Jake Sullivan over at the Biden Adm. NSC think this is about AFU cutting off Russian oil.
They're wrong. It's about explosives. 1/
The Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries are less about POL than reduction of nitrogen,ammonia and methanol feed stocks for Russian explosives and propellants for it's artillery and missile production.
Ukrainian OWA drones are engaged in strategic counter battery fire against the Russian artillery supply chain providing the explosive fillings & propellent for shells, rockets and missiles.
[This also has knock on effects for Russian fertilizer production.]
3/
Nitrogen, ammonia and methanol are the bell book and candle of chemical feedstocks that Russian refineries supply to it's war machine.
Fixing nitrogen is especially key in making high explosives.
4/
When the US EPA talks about crude oil refining, it mentions nitrogen thusly:
"Undesirable elements such as sulfur, nitrogen, and oxygen are removed by hydrodesulfurization, hydrotreating, chemical sweetening, and acid gas removal."
When you look at modern explosives and artillery shell/rocket propellent on Wikipedia, a lot falls out that shows what Ukraine is up to with it's campaign against Russian refineries.
1. RDX and HMX are made from Formaldehyde that is made from Methanol and ammonia (both of
8/
1. Con't ...which are oil refinery products) via Hexamethylenetetramine.
2. TNT is made from Toluene, which is a refinery by product of gasoline.
3. Nitroglycerine is a made from Nitrogen, is a biodiesel by product, and is used to make #2 TNT.
9/
4. Ammonium perchlorate for rocket fuel comes from ammonia, for which see #1.
So, we have a lot of evidence here that Ukraine's anti-refinery campaign is more about removing oil refinery made chemical feedstocks for Russia's artillery supply chain than cutting off oil money
10/
...or fuel to the Russian Army. Yet, before I posted this, no one seems to have noticed any of that.
And everyone, especially the Jake Sullivan lead Biden Adm. National Security Council is screaming oil.
First, Illia Ponomarenko (@IAPonomarenko) is exactly right as to how Russian Reflexive Control Information Warfare has captured Jake Sullivan's crowd at the Biden Administration National Security Council.
...and mirror imaging pallets & forklifts on the Soviets without ever giving any collection priority to the problem or actually looking at chemical feedstocks.
The 80 year feedstock & forklift miss points to the intelligence validation step as a threat to career promotion
14/
...inside intelligence agencies.
It won't let senior intelligence analysts feed to senior politicians what they want to hear.
Their poor 1980's Iran-Iraq War intelligence product reflected this careertist patron-client defect.
When the Lockheed Martin WARSIM software development team went to US Army TMs/FMs, the OPFOR World Equipment Guide and AMSAA for Russian log-data, it was INA (Item not Available) because "mirror imaging was good enough."
What we are seeing with the combination of 80(+) years of intelligence dysfunction & the JD degree spin doctor run NSC is the ultimate American Government expression of the Dunning - Kruger Effect.
We have people running the US Russo-Ukrainian War security policy at the NSC that have absolute confidence in bad intelligence product, while knowing absolutely nothing.
And who are too lazy to do a flipping internet search on Russian refineries chemical feedstocks.
18/18 End
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This means the world has changed so radically that any US Army officer higher than Captain is negative value added on a drone battlefield because their professional military education is as obsolete 1930's US Horse cavalrymen Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures were in 1944.
The problem for an independent EU nuclear deterrence force is sheer numbers, the EU lack of them.
What the Putinists have proven is that Western deterrence assumptions about "acceptable losses" were naive mirrored thinking, attributing Western values to Russia.
The assumption of credible "deterrent effect" has to be shifted into the loss band of annihilation of threat forces - anything less than that, as the Ukraine war proves, is an acceptable loss for the Putinists.
We are at over a million Russian casualties to date.
That means a 200 kiloton nuke in either St. Petersburg or Moscow, or dozens of tactical nukes into airfields & missile fields across Western Russia as an EU nuclear response to a Russian first strike are acceptable at a minimum.
It looks like my 4th Gen nukes posts here on X shook out data from US three letter agencies. Who belatedly realized that classifying physics was both self-defeating & stupid.
The bad news is the FYEO web site is now reporting a _NINTH_ 4th Gen. nuclear tech approach by China with metal nitrogen/nitrogen anion salt.
Specifically, this new Chinese approach to 4th generation nukes that create fusion device without a HEU/PU fission trigger can be packaged as small as 100 to 200 grams and can fit into a group two size class drone.
My worst-case 4th Generation nuclear scenario was based on explosively pumped flux compression generator fusion primaries with U-238 jackets in something sized to fit into an ATACMS warhead.
The statistical comparison in the FBI data from pre-1961 is invalid as the underlying medical systems have so changed as to utterly pollute the "murders per 100,000" data.
Violent crime data pre-1961 and post 1961 are apples to oranges comparisons.
2/
-Trauma care centers (1961),
-Standardized trauma procedures (1978),
-Adoption of military Korea/Vietnam medical emergency treatment & air transport procedures,
-Improved triage (1986)
-And (since 2011) widespread adoption and use of blood clotting bandages...
3/
Chairman Xi suffers from the traditional dictator's trap of believing his own sh*t because he has made it too dangerous for his cronies and underlings to tell him the truth.
Thanks to that, Chairman Xi's Regime has pretty much no resilience in adversity because it's so kleptocratic and it's all about what the guy in charge can do for his next set of corrupt cronies today.
2/
This 1970's comment about the Shah of Iran is so historically on point in 2026 because it shows how Xi's regime is failing "The dictator on the wall test."