The comments section to today's "Wall Street Journal" article about the ceasefire agreement confirm that denial has moved well west of Egypt. (Riffing on an old joke. I'm old.)
Our media is supported by advertising and wonder of wonders the military industrial complex can afford full page adds. So bad design decisions and low inventory do not get the publicity necessary.
The anvil of uncomfortable truths will drop soon. There will be much discomfort to put it lightly.
'The Iran crisis is the moment the lights come on, and we can see things clearly at last. We have become “enlightened,” and like mystics, we have seen things “as they really are.” Accordingly, nothing has particularly “changed” recently: much of what we can see before us in the harsh light has existed for some time, but we didn’t want to acknowledge it. Now we can’t avoid it. But that’s how it is.'
Just so - and isn't this great for the rest of the world.
True that. But of course the same can be said for the US, if only the US was in a truly defense-only posture. Turns out, being the global hegemon ain't all it's cracked up to be, especially when your strategy is all stick and no carrot.
What is bad new for the 'golden billion' could be rather good news for the 7bn of the world's population. 'Could be' because usually things get cocked up, and there are some really powerful nutters around in the golden lot who may decide that 'if I can't have it, no-one can'.
With all respect, can we cold-bloodedly ignore the role of racist ideology in the wars against Russia in Ukraine and against Iran in West Asia? Would the Russians have invaded Ukraine in 2022 but for the U.S. and NATO pushing the Ukrainians to ethnically-cleanse Donbass and Crimea? Would the Americans have impotently thrown away their illusion of deterrence but for the Israelis launching a decapitation strike against Iran that was inevitably going to result in retaliation against U.S. assets in the Gulf?
Has a “Sampson Option” level of Mutually Assured Destruction at the top of the escalation ladder been reached between Israel and Iran this past week? Just as Maréchal Foch recognized that the 1919 armistice between exhausted armies hadn’t changed “facts on the ground” vis-à-vis France and Germany, we must recognize that the impotence of Western arms as demonstrated in April of 2026 has not changed the dark hearts of the racial ideologues who summoned them.
Racial-supremicist fascist legacy ideologies such as Banderism and Jabotinskyism/Kahanism play as strong a role in the “civilized” West as do ideologies such as Salafist Islam or Hidutva in other supposedly “backward/tribal” regions of the world. As we reach the physical carrying capacity of the planet racist ideology is going to play an ever greater role in political decision-making about who gets to be a “have” and who will be relegated to “have-not” status, not simply the capability of arms as discussed in this essay.
Thank you , thats a superb explanation of how the West has become a confused quagmire of political nothingness.
I find it amazing how many people in the West particularly USA and UK actually believe their tv and radio and newspaper reports and accept without queztion that they are honest appraisals , its clear to me and has been for a long time that politicians tell lies , often , its also been clear to me that the tv radio and newspapers report in such a way that they have clearly colluded with each other and with government and then written and agreed the content of their story before announcement , in the UK its especially noticeable because we have radio stations that pronounce their news word for word exactly the same and yet so many people just accept it as truth.
BBC question time has been found out , it handpicks the audience to ensure that the answers to political questions are expected and accepted as aligning with the current government in play.
Politicians do practically nothing for their constituents many of these politicians do not live anywhere near their constituents and will not see any of them for months on end , thats not representation , its lining their own pockets doing nothing much more than travelling from place to place and sitting listening to proceedings in their parliament without ever making any comment or contribution.
The whole of politics needs cleaned out , replaced by a direct decision making process by the public , the internet enables this as is seen in some countries already , war should never be started until a large majority of voters have voted for it , at least 75% i would say and abstentions or people not voting should count as not in favour.
Yes, absolutely (especially about the BBC). Good addition to the article. - But as Chomsky observed, if these supportive media types had different opinions, they would not have the job.
I have little to add to such an erudite group, except possibly a ‘war story’ that seems relevant. In 1997, I was assigned to the US Naval War College to get an MA in Strategy (etc). The NWC was fixated on a predicted revolution in military affairs (RMA). This would be brought about by linking reconnaissance and targeting data with precision strike weapons, usually (but not always) coming from an aircraft. Desert Storm was our experience and we had hit everything we aimed at, so the RMA seemed possible. I was a USAF fighter guy with experience flying with the Navy in Desert Storm. My follow on assignment post War College was to command a drone test unit that became a squadron after 9/11. So here’s the thing: the RMA happened in the US military. We got all the sensor to shooter stuff working and that progress showed up in 2003 and has since gotten better. But, the RMA turned out not to be just about us. As the Iran war loomed, it seemed to me from my long-retired (I’m 67 now) seat that Iran had what the Russians call a ‘precision strike complex’. Also, I didn’t see how we could stop it. The revolution in cheap tech had pushed precision strike out of expensive platforms and into users who were smart enough to know how to use it. There was a hint of how low-tech could decimate high-tech when the Iraqis got handy with IEDs after 2003. But Iran is on a whole other level. I see that the US could be stuck with expensive weapons that are not useful in future wars and are, in any case, too expensive. I wonder how many in power realize that the RMA went away from us? I don’t think we’re industrially and mentally equipped to get it back. OTOH, for most of my life, Americans have been usefully pragmatic. Maybe we still are.
Your military is having its “Kodak moment” — not the kind when you get your picture taken, but the kind when your formerly dominant and indispensable technology stack is discovered to have become obsolete.
"I see that the US could be stuck with expensive weapons that are not useful in future wars and are, in any case, too expensive"
And you could add: "don't actually work" see conversations around the shortcomings of: F-22, F-35, Littoral Combat Ships, Ford class carrier(s), Zumwalt destroyers, B-21 and B2 bombers etc. etc.
With this (predictably brilliant, at this point) essay of yours, and particularly with your analytical centre of gravity on Epiphany (which I find more to my aesthetic liking then price discovery), I was finally able to understand what is it, about your style of writing, that makes me look forward to reading each Wednesday's new issue. And curiously enough, the answer is embedded in an expression I heard for the first time from an Iranian: nostalgia for the future. That is what the Epiphany is about: despite the future not looking chirpy at all, especially for us Europeans, it is somehow preferable to the current unhinged Parkinsonian present, which keeps trembling without going anywhere. Thank you for that, I guess there's also some humour in releasing this around Easter.
Aureilen offers a sobering realist assessment: modern conflict increasingly favors cheap, attritable systems like drones and missiles over expensive Western platforms. Recent events in Ukraine and the Iran crisis have delivered a brutal “price discovery,” exposing thin munitions stocks, aging equipment, vulnerable bases, and doctrinal rigidity. Western forces, optimized for short high-tech neo-colonial expeditions with air supremacy, now face prohibitive costs in projecting power against determined regional defenders. Globalization and just-in-time logistics have left defense industries unable to surge production effectively when supply chains (especially of the rare earth metals) are contested. Soft power, training programs, and normative influence will erode as hard-power credibility visibly declines. Inertia will delay the shift, but reputation damage from oversold hegemony is already significant. Continental powers like Russia, China, and Iran appear better postured for regional denial and control in the emerging environment. For the US and Europe, adjusting to limits on expeditionary warfare and strategic reach will prove politically and culturally painful. Ultimately, more regional powers will slowly emerge exploiting the new paradigm, and hence challenge the existing rules based order.
Has not fortunate geography also been true for the US having the Atlantic to the East and the Pacific to the West? If we focus on defense, as does Iran, then invading us is one tough prospect.
Aurelien is not the first to point out serious deficiencies in the US weapons both in performance and maintenance. Brian Berletic has talked quit a bit about the reliance on stand-off munitions and the low US stocks of these. Our systems were great in the eighties but now is now. (And much of our vaunted success was due to bribing the opposing high commands.)
Nukes, which unfortunately for our planet, the US and Israel possess have the ability to make moot this article. But the utilization of those is an abomination.
I think the word "fortunate" is redundant here. I agree that Iran is resisting in large part due to geography, but that geography was not drawn in the lottery last Thursday, and otherwise it was completely different before that.
Um, OK — but that’s WHY they have been there for over 4000 years now. It’s not like it ought to have been “news” to the western imperial meddlers — but the arrogance of the latter blinds them to the simplest realities. They still think they’re living in Thomas Friedman’s imaginary as depicted in “The World Is Flat.”
Sorry, Tommy boy — turns out that the world is very much mountainous in rather poorly distributed ways …
Maybe read the article again FF, with close attention. If you follow the logic therein, you may see there is much more involved than just geography, and to say this is to ignore the whole thrust of the article.
If I was going to start a new civilization somewhere in the world, my first two choices would be the Himalayan and Andes plateaux. The problem is I would first need a few-thousand-year breeding program for cardiovascular resilience. (The Tibetans have traces of Denisovan heart-lung DNA!) My third choice would be the Persian heartland: an outlet to the Black Sea ringed by mountains. The high desert is big enough and has enough water to do agriculture. It's awesome.
It is interesting to compare the descriptions of world affairs offered by Aurelien, and by another insightful analyst, ESCapekey: https://escapekey.substack.com/
ESC writes about the underlying threads and systems of conspiracy that shape most of policy, practically all of the policy in the West; the invisible elephant in the room, as it were. Aurelien stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the elephant, writes as if that layer of reality did not exist, and things simply occurred by happenstance, by ebb and flow of conflicting tendencies, which he masterfully elucidates. Both views are deficient, in that they willfully ignore the other reality; I found that I get the best understanding of events by weighing both factors, and these two authors /together/ offer just about the best explanation of what is really going on, and what to expect.
So, I tried your link to 'escapekey'. The site I was taken to turned out to be a crock of Neo-liberal bullshit. But if that's the sort of excrement that you like to wallow in, well . . . don't forget to wear your waterproof trousers.
the foundation of American hegemonic power was its economic surplus — the result of multiplying abundant natural gifts by the country’s early arrival in the 20th century and rapid advance thru the 2nd Industrial Revolution. The U.S. was willing to give it away — not as a free gift, but nevertheless as a benefit of cooperation in an American-branded neoliberal order. The U.S. ran a trade deficit that financed industrial development in Western Europe and the Far East.
That surplus has been exhausted — gone now for twenty years past at least — and the forms of that hegemony are still standing like a theatrical stage set, but empty, hollow. And, a political class in the U.S. and Europe is still expecting to cosplay in the empty theatrical set like nothing has changed.
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
"The Europeans have relied on money and the imposition of normative frameworks to secure their own place in the world. But even if the European economy survives intact, and even if soft power money continues to be spent at something like the current level, it will be increasingly irrelevant. Programmes to establish gender training in municipal police forces aren’t much use when starvation and even famine start to hit some of the world’s poorest countries. And these days the Europeans increasingly lack the practical skills and the organisation that would be helpful, always assuming they could spare effort from their own problems. Meanwhile, whilst we won’t necessarily see actors like China and Russia moving in straight away, the fact that they have retained capabilities that the Europeans have squandered away will become increasingly obvious to all.
The problem with norms is that you can’t eat them. The European media is currently consumed with the threat from the “extreme Right” in various countries, which in practice just means lecturing citizens on who they should vote against, and it mentions Iran only incidentally. No European government seems to have a genuinely thought-out programme for tackling even the existing economic and social problems of their countries: the only priority is that the Other Team shouldn’t win. "
This is hilarious, BTW. We sometimes hear europeans talk about developing an independent hard power, something other than hiding behind the Americans' legs and making faces at The Bad Guy du Jour.
Not going to happen. Even if the money were there, europeans are not only metrosexual limpwrists who cannot fight schoolgirls - europeans also are *old*, some of the oldest societies on earth. There is thought to be a reason that military recruiters don't try to convince pensioners that they should consider a rewarding second career as airborne assault troops, or perhaps grandpa is more suited for armored cavalry?
LOL! As a Brit septuagenerian I am probably fitter now than a substantial minority of modern ‘youth’. And I’m pretty good with a longbow too - so watch out!
The comments section to today's "Wall Street Journal" article about the ceasefire agreement confirm that denial has moved well west of Egypt. (Riffing on an old joke. I'm old.)
Our media is supported by advertising and wonder of wonders the military industrial complex can afford full page adds. So bad design decisions and low inventory do not get the publicity necessary.
The anvil of uncomfortable truths will drop soon. There will be much discomfort to put it lightly.
'The Iran crisis is the moment the lights come on, and we can see things clearly at last. We have become “enlightened,” and like mystics, we have seen things “as they really are.” Accordingly, nothing has particularly “changed” recently: much of what we can see before us in the harsh light has existed for some time, but we didn’t want to acknowledge it. Now we can’t avoid it. But that’s how it is.'
Just so - and isn't this great for the rest of the world.
True that. But of course the same can be said for the US, if only the US was in a truly defense-only posture. Turns out, being the global hegemon ain't all it's cracked up to be, especially when your strategy is all stick and no carrot.
Not arguing that part.
'rotten' stick!
That was to FF.
A very well argued and written article.
What is bad new for the 'golden billion' could be rather good news for the 7bn of the world's population. 'Could be' because usually things get cocked up, and there are some really powerful nutters around in the golden lot who may decide that 'if I can't have it, no-one can'.
With all respect, can we cold-bloodedly ignore the role of racist ideology in the wars against Russia in Ukraine and against Iran in West Asia? Would the Russians have invaded Ukraine in 2022 but for the U.S. and NATO pushing the Ukrainians to ethnically-cleanse Donbass and Crimea? Would the Americans have impotently thrown away their illusion of deterrence but for the Israelis launching a decapitation strike against Iran that was inevitably going to result in retaliation against U.S. assets in the Gulf?
Has a “Sampson Option” level of Mutually Assured Destruction at the top of the escalation ladder been reached between Israel and Iran this past week? Just as Maréchal Foch recognized that the 1919 armistice between exhausted armies hadn’t changed “facts on the ground” vis-à-vis France and Germany, we must recognize that the impotence of Western arms as demonstrated in April of 2026 has not changed the dark hearts of the racial ideologues who summoned them.
Racial-supremicist fascist legacy ideologies such as Banderism and Jabotinskyism/Kahanism play as strong a role in the “civilized” West as do ideologies such as Salafist Islam or Hidutva in other supposedly “backward/tribal” regions of the world. As we reach the physical carrying capacity of the planet racist ideology is going to play an ever greater role in political decision-making about who gets to be a “have” and who will be relegated to “have-not” status, not simply the capability of arms as discussed in this essay.
Thank you , thats a superb explanation of how the West has become a confused quagmire of political nothingness.
I find it amazing how many people in the West particularly USA and UK actually believe their tv and radio and newspaper reports and accept without queztion that they are honest appraisals , its clear to me and has been for a long time that politicians tell lies , often , its also been clear to me that the tv radio and newspapers report in such a way that they have clearly colluded with each other and with government and then written and agreed the content of their story before announcement , in the UK its especially noticeable because we have radio stations that pronounce their news word for word exactly the same and yet so many people just accept it as truth.
BBC question time has been found out , it handpicks the audience to ensure that the answers to political questions are expected and accepted as aligning with the current government in play.
Politicians do practically nothing for their constituents many of these politicians do not live anywhere near their constituents and will not see any of them for months on end , thats not representation , its lining their own pockets doing nothing much more than travelling from place to place and sitting listening to proceedings in their parliament without ever making any comment or contribution.
The whole of politics needs cleaned out , replaced by a direct decision making process by the public , the internet enables this as is seen in some countries already , war should never be started until a large majority of voters have voted for it , at least 75% i would say and abstentions or people not voting should count as not in favour.
Yes, absolutely (especially about the BBC). Good addition to the article. - But as Chomsky observed, if these supportive media types had different opinions, they would not have the job.
They have all sold their souls to Bernays. The reckoning will be unpleasant.
You might say... we're Foch-ed
I'll see myself out
Don't forget the coat! 😳
If only intelligent and compassionate lessons could be learned, but I fear the pathocracy is incapable of such.
I have little to add to such an erudite group, except possibly a ‘war story’ that seems relevant. In 1997, I was assigned to the US Naval War College to get an MA in Strategy (etc). The NWC was fixated on a predicted revolution in military affairs (RMA). This would be brought about by linking reconnaissance and targeting data with precision strike weapons, usually (but not always) coming from an aircraft. Desert Storm was our experience and we had hit everything we aimed at, so the RMA seemed possible. I was a USAF fighter guy with experience flying with the Navy in Desert Storm. My follow on assignment post War College was to command a drone test unit that became a squadron after 9/11. So here’s the thing: the RMA happened in the US military. We got all the sensor to shooter stuff working and that progress showed up in 2003 and has since gotten better. But, the RMA turned out not to be just about us. As the Iran war loomed, it seemed to me from my long-retired (I’m 67 now) seat that Iran had what the Russians call a ‘precision strike complex’. Also, I didn’t see how we could stop it. The revolution in cheap tech had pushed precision strike out of expensive platforms and into users who were smart enough to know how to use it. There was a hint of how low-tech could decimate high-tech when the Iraqis got handy with IEDs after 2003. But Iran is on a whole other level. I see that the US could be stuck with expensive weapons that are not useful in future wars and are, in any case, too expensive. I wonder how many in power realize that the RMA went away from us? I don’t think we’re industrially and mentally equipped to get it back. OTOH, for most of my life, Americans have been usefully pragmatic. Maybe we still are.
Your military is having its “Kodak moment” — not the kind when you get your picture taken, but the kind when your formerly dominant and indispensable technology stack is discovered to have become obsolete.
First hubris, then nemesis …
"I see that the US could be stuck with expensive weapons that are not useful in future wars and are, in any case, too expensive"
And you could add: "don't actually work" see conversations around the shortcomings of: F-22, F-35, Littoral Combat Ships, Ford class carrier(s), Zumwalt destroyers, B-21 and B2 bombers etc. etc.
With this (predictably brilliant, at this point) essay of yours, and particularly with your analytical centre of gravity on Epiphany (which I find more to my aesthetic liking then price discovery), I was finally able to understand what is it, about your style of writing, that makes me look forward to reading each Wednesday's new issue. And curiously enough, the answer is embedded in an expression I heard for the first time from an Iranian: nostalgia for the future. That is what the Epiphany is about: despite the future not looking chirpy at all, especially for us Europeans, it is somehow preferable to the current unhinged Parkinsonian present, which keeps trembling without going anywhere. Thank you for that, I guess there's also some humour in releasing this around Easter.
Aureilen offers a sobering realist assessment: modern conflict increasingly favors cheap, attritable systems like drones and missiles over expensive Western platforms. Recent events in Ukraine and the Iran crisis have delivered a brutal “price discovery,” exposing thin munitions stocks, aging equipment, vulnerable bases, and doctrinal rigidity. Western forces, optimized for short high-tech neo-colonial expeditions with air supremacy, now face prohibitive costs in projecting power against determined regional defenders. Globalization and just-in-time logistics have left defense industries unable to surge production effectively when supply chains (especially of the rare earth metals) are contested. Soft power, training programs, and normative influence will erode as hard-power credibility visibly declines. Inertia will delay the shift, but reputation damage from oversold hegemony is already significant. Continental powers like Russia, China, and Iran appear better postured for regional denial and control in the emerging environment. For the US and Europe, adjusting to limits on expeditionary warfare and strategic reach will prove politically and culturally painful. Ultimately, more regional powers will slowly emerge exploiting the new paradigm, and hence challenge the existing rules based order.
Much as I'd like to be able to agree, much of Iran's advantage was the result of fortunate geography.
Has not fortunate geography also been true for the US having the Atlantic to the East and the Pacific to the West? If we focus on defense, as does Iran, then invading us is one tough prospect.
Aurelien is not the first to point out serious deficiencies in the US weapons both in performance and maintenance. Brian Berletic has talked quit a bit about the reliance on stand-off munitions and the low US stocks of these. Our systems were great in the eighties but now is now. (And much of our vaunted success was due to bribing the opposing high commands.)
Nukes, which unfortunately for our planet, the US and Israel possess have the ability to make moot this article. But the utilization of those is an abomination.
"Has not fortunate geography also been true for the US having the Atlantic to the East and the Pacific to the West?"
I never said otherwise.
Sorry. I should have worded the opening sentence a bit differently or moved it to the top level.
I read your comments with interest on many sites!
No worries, and thank you for the kind words.
I think the word "fortunate" is redundant here. I agree that Iran is resisting in large part due to geography, but that geography was not drawn in the lottery last Thursday, and otherwise it was completely different before that.
Um, OK — but that’s WHY they have been there for over 4000 years now. It’s not like it ought to have been “news” to the western imperial meddlers — but the arrogance of the latter blinds them to the simplest realities. They still think they’re living in Thomas Friedman’s imaginary as depicted in “The World Is Flat.”
Sorry, Tommy boy — turns out that the world is very much mountainous in rather poorly distributed ways …
Maybe read the article again FF, with close attention. If you follow the logic therein, you may see there is much more involved than just geography, and to say this is to ignore the whole thrust of the article.
Right, and as always, LOL!
No joke.
If I was going to start a new civilization somewhere in the world, my first two choices would be the Himalayan and Andes plateaux. The problem is I would first need a few-thousand-year breeding program for cardiovascular resilience. (The Tibetans have traces of Denisovan heart-lung DNA!) My third choice would be the Persian heartland: an outlet to the Black Sea ringed by mountains. The high desert is big enough and has enough water to do agriculture. It's awesome.
It is interesting to compare the descriptions of world affairs offered by Aurelien, and by another insightful analyst, ESCapekey: https://escapekey.substack.com/
ESC writes about the underlying threads and systems of conspiracy that shape most of policy, practically all of the policy in the West; the invisible elephant in the room, as it were. Aurelien stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the elephant, writes as if that layer of reality did not exist, and things simply occurred by happenstance, by ebb and flow of conflicting tendencies, which he masterfully elucidates. Both views are deficient, in that they willfully ignore the other reality; I found that I get the best understanding of events by weighing both factors, and these two authors /together/ offer just about the best explanation of what is really going on, and what to expect.
Thank you for this exceptional link.
So, I tried your link to 'escapekey'. The site I was taken to turned out to be a crock of Neo-liberal bullshit. But if that's the sort of excrement that you like to wallow in, well . . . don't forget to wear your waterproof trousers.
The “revolution in military affairs” is ruthlessly exposing illusions everywhere.
As Aurelien has noted before, expect epic sulking … 😈
the foundation of American hegemonic power was its economic surplus — the result of multiplying abundant natural gifts by the country’s early arrival in the 20th century and rapid advance thru the 2nd Industrial Revolution. The U.S. was willing to give it away — not as a free gift, but nevertheless as a benefit of cooperation in an American-branded neoliberal order. The U.S. ran a trade deficit that financed industrial development in Western Europe and the Far East.
That surplus has been exhausted — gone now for twenty years past at least — and the forms of that hegemony are still standing like a theatrical stage set, but empty, hollow. And, a political class in the U.S. and Europe is still expecting to cosplay in the empty theatrical set like nothing has changed.
Like Frank Zappa said:
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
― Frank Zappa
"The Europeans have relied on money and the imposition of normative frameworks to secure their own place in the world. But even if the European economy survives intact, and even if soft power money continues to be spent at something like the current level, it will be increasingly irrelevant. Programmes to establish gender training in municipal police forces aren’t much use when starvation and even famine start to hit some of the world’s poorest countries. And these days the Europeans increasingly lack the practical skills and the organisation that would be helpful, always assuming they could spare effort from their own problems. Meanwhile, whilst we won’t necessarily see actors like China and Russia moving in straight away, the fact that they have retained capabilities that the Europeans have squandered away will become increasingly obvious to all.
The problem with norms is that you can’t eat them. The European media is currently consumed with the threat from the “extreme Right” in various countries, which in practice just means lecturing citizens on who they should vote against, and it mentions Iran only incidentally. No European government seems to have a genuinely thought-out programme for tackling even the existing economic and social problems of their countries: the only priority is that the Other Team shouldn’t win. "
This is hilarious, BTW. We sometimes hear europeans talk about developing an independent hard power, something other than hiding behind the Americans' legs and making faces at The Bad Guy du Jour.
Not going to happen. Even if the money were there, europeans are not only metrosexual limpwrists who cannot fight schoolgirls - europeans also are *old*, some of the oldest societies on earth. There is thought to be a reason that military recruiters don't try to convince pensioners that they should consider a rewarding second career as airborne assault troops, or perhaps grandpa is more suited for armored cavalry?
LOL! As a Brit septuagenerian I am probably fitter now than a substantial minority of modern ‘youth’. And I’m pretty good with a longbow too - so watch out!
The way the weather's going your probably better off with a crossbow.