Oil hits $100 a barrel despite deal to release record amount of reserves

No. 80% of the British wanted to avoid war with Germany, for different reasons, and 15% even voted for someone whose main campaign idea was an alliance with them. The bombing campaign radicalised the vast majority of British voters, even those in less affected areas.

(Btw, the only recent documented instance of machine gun mowing down people is Saudi police mowing down Somali workers).

60% of the Iranian population polled were against the bombing during the 12 day war, bombing that, unlike this one, didn't break too much civilian infrastructure (targeting desalination plants is something I thought even Russia wouldn't do, but well, I shouldn't hold US army and Tsahal to the same standards). And that's with most observers saying that only 20-25% of the population support the regime in 'normal' time.

You had thousands dead, 50k people in prison waiting for the death penalty, a leader on his deathbed, and rather than waiting for the internal tensions between army branches to break the regime, the US chose to martyr the almost dead, suffering leader, consolidating his successor power, and eliminating and opposition in the more laical army. Nice fucking job. Now the army and the clerical police are aligned.

Even when you organize and plan correctly a regime change, a few unlucky breaks and you create a Lybia. Going there gung-ho was truly a spectacular choice, and managed to put Komenei son in place without any power struggles that could have been instrumentalized.

> You're making very specific and bold claims related to the fungibility of oil, oil infrastructure, transpiration, etc and they simply don't line up with my experience.

I'm not arguing that they're always and instantaneously fungible, my point is that the aren't any less fungible than they are when the thing you're transporting isn't oil, so it doesn't make much sense to make a special carve out for the cases where the load is also the fuel.

> You won't replace oil pipelines or sea-based transportation by importing tanker trucks, its completely inpheasible on any reasonable timescale.

An oil tanker ship holds around 55 million gallons. An oil tanker truck holds around 10,000. Truckloads per ship is therefore around 5500. If the round trip is around two hours, and assuming that pumping is a relatively small proportion of the time (you have high capacity pumps at both ends or bring a few percent more trucks so drivers can switch trucks instead of waiting or both), you'd need around 500 trucks and, assuming 8 hour shifts, 1500 drivers per oil tanker ship per day. In normal times something like 60 oil tanker ships go through the Straight per day, so if you had to do all of them it would be on the order of 30,000 trucks and 90,000 drivers.

That's not a small number, but at the scale of global trade, it doesn't seem like an impossible number. And you wouldn't actually be doing all of them this way, you would be diverting as many as you can to other paths and only doing this where it's the least bad alternative. 10 ships a day would be ~5000 trucks. Is it infeasible to find 5000 tanker trucks in the world?

> Similarly, you will never replace petroleum-based transportation at scale in any near term future with electric or other non-petroleum sources.

You're not trying to replace all of it instantaneously, you're trying to substitute at the margins. Does it make sense to try to use electric trucks if you were doing the above, trying to run the trucks continuously in a place that presumably doesn't have adequate charging infrastructure? Almost certainly not.

Does it make sense to convert fleets of millions of delivery trucks to electric or plug-in hybrids, when they're doing continuous stop and go that benefits from regenerative braking? Absolutely it does. Does it make sense to add a battery car to already-hybrid diesel electric freight trains so they can do regenerative braking on down grades, and add a pantograph and some overhead lines to the up grades so they can run electric there instead of burning diesel? Also yes.

> The power to weight ratio of oil, ease of transport of liquid oil, and scale of petroleum a powered vehicles is simply unmatched. Go ahead and do the math on what it takes to replace a diesel oil tanker at sea to cross from Iran to China or the US to Europe, and don't forget to consider all the materials required to make battery storage equipment for such a trip.

This seems like a pretty attractive option for large ships if you're worried about power to weight ratio:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/hd-hyundai-abs-pla...

Wow, proximity fused 30mm. Never heard of that, but I've been out for a while and technology has really accelerated in the last 3-4 years.

Thanks for sharing.

And yes, find and fix with a strategic radar platform. It's tough to set up DCA (defensive counter-air) lanes with helicopters; they're slow and most need to refuel on the ground (an argument could be made for using H-60's. Some variants can refuel in the air).

Depending on the threat picture, it could be feasible to set helos up to defend naval assets or use them like Israel has been to defend land-based high-value assets.

Israel is a pretty small country as I'm sure you know. The northern border is about 60km wide. As I understand it the big problem with drones coming from the north is that they are programmed to fly through valleys and the topography is mountainous which makes them hard to detect. Drones from Iran or Yemen have large stretches of open flat desert and have to cross very large distances. Another purely speculative thought is that the F-35s act as an airborne radar to help with detection.

Israelis get advanced warning for (most) drone attacks and have to go into shelters/safe rooms just like with missiles. There is a specific/different kind of warning.

AFAIK in the big attack last year these Shaed drones were shot down by jets with air-to-air missiles.

I served in the IAF on that northern border (not a pilot or anything like that but a somewhat relevant role) so at least I'm familiar with the topography and distances.

The other thing coming into play in Israel these days is the laser system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam I think it already shot down at least one drone.

Also- Thanks for your service and for the "insider" perspective.

> Something the Palestinians and the Arab countries have been unwilling to accept.

Seems to be a common trait amongst Palestinians: fighting losing wars and blowing up shit in the process because they are unable to accept reality.

The entire Middle East should just be glassed. Encase the holy lands in concrete and sink them into the Mediterranean.