this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Bulletins and News Discussion from July 28th to August 3rd, 2025 - The Brief(?) Thailand-Cambodia Border War - COTW: Cambodia
(hexbear.net)
Image is of the Preah Vihear Temple on the Cambodian border. Image sourced from the UNESCO World Heritage website.
Over the last few days, Thailand and Cambodia entered into a heightened stage of conflict due to a long-running border dispute. Like many problems on this planet, Europeans are ultimately to blame - specifically France. Certain sections of the border drawn up by France about a century ago were not fully agreed upon by both sides, with the ownership of some Khmer temples being the most visible points of disagreement.
Despite interventions in favor of Cambodia in the 1960s and later 2010s by the ICJ - one of the mainly mostly useless global institutions that liberals periodically disown - the border conflict has simmered at a generally low level. Of the two countries, Thailand is significantly more militarily and economically powerful.
Last Wednesday, a Thai soldier lost his leg by stepping on a landmine, prompting a rapid escalation between Cambodia and Thailand that has since resulted in dozens of deaths and tens of thousands displaced. Cambodia was willing to come to the negotiating table fairly quickly, but Thailand was more hesitant. International pressure on the two countries by Malaysia, China, and the United States eventually forced Thailand to the table, and they have recently agreed to an immediate ceasefire courtesy of ASEAN.
Notably, Trump refused to hold trade talks with either country until they agreed to peace, which suggests that he really wants a Nobel Peace Prize - which he seems a shoe-in for given that he's met the two most important requirements that several Nobel Peace Prize recipients have needed to meet in the past, which are: 1) start at least one war, and 2) accelerate the genocide of millions of people as billions more people watch on. His policies vis-a-vis ICE creating a domestic terror regime only further increase his chances of winning the prize.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
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https://www.twz.com/land/minigun-equipped-m1-abrams-tank-being-tested-by-army
They are experimenting with miniguns on tanks. Probably for anti drone capabilities. It is hard to miss with up to 100 bullets per second. I always thought about something like that but I thought there will be other reasons not to implement it. You can probably slap a very short range radar on tank for precise aiming. This will make it open to be spotted with enemy passive radars but I think tanks are hard to hide at that range anyway . Or 2 passive radars on tank to get 3d location of drone if it illuminates with radiation. Maybe get a tankette and replace the gun with 12.7 gatling gun for better anti drone capabilities and use it to support allied tanks
I think the main problem here is ammunition - miniguns are really cool in Call of Duty, where mounted machine guns have infinite ammo for gameplay reasons, but realistically it's actually pretty difficult to sustain the ammunition expenditure, which is why they're mostly seen in emplaced positions or on aircraft. Dedicated SPAAGs like the Shilka (which use autocannons with rates of fire nowhere near the level of a minigun - that's why they pair several cannons together, to essentially multiply the rate of fire) need to have a substantial amount of their internal volume occupied by ammo:
On an already-built tank, you don't exactly have a bunch of empty space waiting to be filled, so without a substantial redesign of the turret (which would presumably involve sacrificing some of your regular cannon ammo, thus making the tank worse at its actual original role), the minigun would only be good for a couple bursts before you run out - so your opponent would simply need to send a handful of cheap drones to waste your ammo, and then finish you off when you're dry.
The Russians actually did design a so-called "tank support" vehicle - the BMPT, although its intention is more-so to fight sneaky infantry trying to hit the tank with ATGMs than provide air defense. But still, the concept could be adapted to that, but I don't think we've seen any such developments in Ukraine for now.
However, that's based on a proper tank chassis, rather than being a tankette - here again we get into the ammo problem, a small and light vehicle wouldn't be able to actually carry that much minigun ammo (and would be very vulnerable to being taken out by drones itself - while it fires on one target, it could be attacked from another angle), so you'd really need something a lot bigger and heavier to make this viable.
7.62 doesn't seem to occupy too much space. Regular crows hmg holds 400 bullets. 100 hmg takes as much space as 500 762. 2000 bullet is quite enough I think
The M134 has a rate-of-fire varying between 2000 & 6000 rounds-per-minute, although that upper end is rarely used, it's usually set somewhere between 3000 & 4000. So, with 2000 rounds, that's 20 to 30 seconds worth of shooting, and presumably each drone would take a few seconds of shooting to actually take down, so you do end up with, let's say, 10 to 15 bursts (some of which might not hit at all).
With automatic targeting where the drones can just be sniped out of the sky with a very short burst it'd work out a lot better, but I'm not sure if bolting a whole CIWS system (although a decent bit smaller since it'd be in 7.62x51mm instead of 20mm) to each tank would really be viable.
Accuracy and ammunition expenditure will be much better if you're shooting the drones from really close, which we see in Ukraine, but at that point you can use regular small arms, I'm not sure a minigun really makes sense. And it's obviously a risky approach.
Vulcan from tanki online in real life
Alas, poor MetalStorm, you were ahead of your time.
As a non-gun-knower, surely small drones are not gonna need a full on 7.62mm to shoot down? Even a 9mm (or .22?) seems like enough, and would massively reduce the footprint of the weapon and ammo while increasing its agility.
...now I wanna get silly and suggest rocket-propelled net guns.
Pistol bullet's fly slower than rifle bullets (380 vs 780+ m/s). And there is no guarantee drone will come in one size. Maybe you can consider 5.56
Next step will be automating their aim so it is just air drone vs ground drone
It feels like we are about to hit the spell of radiative speciation in drones that makes murderswarms a reality.
An effective design would likely look something like this, 6 massive shotgun CANNONS slapped onto a chassis
The challenges of course are targeting software (tracking tech that's faster and more vigilant than a human) and ammo storage
If I'm remembering right, there was a report a few months ago about China working on an anti-drone platform and the description fit this design, except with even more guns