Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn't been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal's adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
From the videos I've seen of tank combat I'm starting to wonder if tanks are even that relevant now. If all the tanks can all blow each other to pieces in one shot it comes down to how quickly one tank can shoot another. Speed, mobility, targeting and stealth seem like the most valuable things over armour. The armour just needs to be good enough to render small arms useless.
Weight in particular seems like a limiting factor for your logistics because it vastly increases fuel use.
pretty much, this is what french tank designers went with during the cold war. Tiny shitboxes with paper thin armor and huge guns and engines and sometimes missiles. The french MBT also follows this trope as its the fastest mbt in service and hold multiple tankathlon shooting records
not a huge tank nerd but my impression is that the Leclerc is probably the best MBT platform in use by NATO militaries, the challenger and abrams are both overweight lemons and i don't think the leopard is that much better in that respect.
I think something important to note with regards to the question of tanks' continued relevancy is: relevancy in what role? As the main battle tank, by definition, fulfills a bunch of different roles, its relevancy could be different depending on the role we're talking about. In the mechanized offensive role, indeed tanks face a lot of issues and are highly vulnerable - the reason why Western tanks are so heavy is precisely because they've realized how vulnerable tanks are, but are essentially stuck in the bargaining stage, continuously strapping on more and more armor and other upgrades, and kind of skipping over the question of "yeah, but how many of these fancy tanks can you actually field, given how much they'll cost with all these features?".
For the infantry support role, however, tanks are still relevant - during assaults, you'll always want to have some kind of cannon so you can fight harder targets, like bunkers and the like, and because indirect fire support is slow, difficult to coordinate and not necessarily the most accurate, you'll want the cannon to be on a vehicle so it can actually get close enough to the target for direct fire, and if you're going to be approaching the enemy, you'll want armor - and thus you've just reinvented the tank. The only thing that could truly make them obsolete in this role would be massive advances in the capabilities of indirect fire support - and admittedly, advances are happening, artillery has improved massively in range and accuracy, missile technology has allowed the development of a new form of artillery which can be even more precise (but admittedly, also a lot more expensive), and the profileration of drones now allows artillerymen to directly observe their targets, instead of having to rely on a guy kilometers away calling them on the radio, holding a crumpled map and trying to figure out which coordinates the enemy is at. So one might envision a future scenario where a high degree of digital integration and automation allows soldiers to actually do the Call of Duty thing of pulling out a little tablet, pointing at a target on it and having ordnance immediatelly delivered from cannons kilometers away, but sci-fi stuff like that is probably still a long way off, if even possible.
This predicament, however, entirely vindicates Soviet rather than Western tank design - making a tank that doesn't have all the fanciest capabilities, but is good enough, cheap, simple, reliable, something you can make a whole lot of, so that you have enough to attach a few to every infantry brigade and give them organic fire support capabilities. Westerners love to mock the Russians for pulling out various older tanks - except that for supporting infantry, those older tanks, with a few upgrades, are quite alright, and the key thing is that the Russians actually have equipment to pull out of reserve. Western militaries other than the US have absolutely fuck-all - most of their tank fleets are like 200-300 at most, and as this war is showing, you will suffer losses, it doesn't matter how fancy your wunderwaffe tank is, it's still going to get blown up. And if you have barely 300, your military industry has been thoroughly neoliberalized and can barely even make a dozen tanks a year, and those tanks are dependant on highly complex and fragile supply chains which will inevitably be disrupted in the event of a global conflict (and how much would these tanks really be worth without all their electronics and optics?), then... you have basically no means to actually fight a protracted war, your equipment will dry up in a month and then you'll just have nothing. Perhaps the Western obsession with fighting lighting-fast "shock and awe" wars is because they, deep inside, realize that they have no capability to actually fight a serious peer conflict for more than like a few weeks.