All Activity

Russia’s Uralvagonzavod concern publicly unveiled for the first time a prototype of the DT-3PM light articulated tracked all-terrain vehicle at the Gas. Oil. Technologies exhibition in Ufa, presenting a dual-use platform that its developers describe as equally suited for Arctic military operations and civilian industrial work in some of the world’s most remote and hostile […]View the full article

The top American general in South Korea described the Korean Peninsula as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s perspective, and China’s embassy in Seoul responded by publicly telling him he had crossed the line, injecting a pointed diplomatic confrontation into a week already complicated by the broader state of U.S.-China relations. General […]View the full article

Russian Su-57 stealth fighters have resumed high-tempo cruise missile operations along nearly the entire length of the Ukrainian front, with Ukrainian air raid monitoring services recording more than ten confirmed launch events during May alone, a pace of operations that had been significantly curtailed following a Ukrainian drone strike deep inside Russia earlier this spring. […]View the full article

I’m not sure another nation has the same underlying concern for prisoners of war (POWs) that Americans do. I don’t think anyone else has a POW/MIA flag flying all over the place, even if we don’t have any POWs. As everyone was reminded this spring, we will go to incredible ends to stop our people from being taken prisoner if we have to. We will try to rescue them if we can. Perhaps it is the legacy of the British prison ships of the Revolutionary War, the nightmares of the American Civil War camps, or the memory of how our POWs were treated in Vietnam and Korea. In WWII’s European Theater, conditions were rough, but they were not so bad that we couldn’t make a comedy series out of it—but there was nothing that could be made light of American POWs in the Pacific Theater. Unimaginable horror—though we tried. While we all like to focus on the big naval battles and island hopping in the last year in the Pacific theater, we were also grinding our way through The Philippines. On the islands, thousands of Americans languished in Japanese prison camps. Many were survivors of the Bataan death march at the start of the war. Starved, tortured, executed for sport—used for slave labor. As the American armies advanced, word spread that the Japanese were executing POWs who were no longer useful, or simply to prevent them from being liberated. The 6th Ranger Battalion and Alamo Scouts had been itching to get into the fight. The Filipino guerrillas have been at it for years. They decided to make a plan. They did. That is how we got the Great Raid on Cabanatuan. …nearly 150 Americans were executed by their Japanese captors on December 14, 1944 at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp on the island of Palawan. An air raid warning was sounded so that the inmates would enter slit-trench and log-and-earth covered air-raid shelters, and there doused with gasoline and burned alive.[64] One of the survivors, PFC Eugene Nielsen, recounted his tale to U.S. Army Intelligence on January 7, 1945.[65] Two days later, MacArthur’s forces landed on Luzon and began a rapid advance towards the capital, Manila.[66] Major Robert Lapham, the American USAFFE senior guerrilla chief, and another guerrilla leader, Captain Juan Pajota, had considered freeing the prisoners within the camp,[67] but feared logistical issues with hiding and caring for the prisoners.[68] An earlier plan had been proposed by Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Anderson, leader of the guerrillas near the camp. He suggested that the guerrillas would secure the prisoners, escort them 50 miles (80 km) to Dibut Bay, and transport them using 30 submarines. The plan was denied approval as MacArthur feared the Japanese would catch up with the fleeing prisoners and kill them all.[14] In addition, the Navy did not have the required submarines, especially with MacArthur’s upcoming invasion of Luzon.[67] On January 26, 1945, Lapham traveled from his location near the prison camp to Sixth Army headquarters, 30 miles (48 km) away.[69] He proposed to Lieutenant General Walter Krueger‘s intelligence chief Colonel Horton White that a rescue attempt be made to liberate the estimated 500 POWs at the Cabanatuan prison camp before the Japanese possibly killed them all.[69] Lapham estimated Japanese forces to include 100–300 soldiers within the camp, 1,000 across the Cabu River northeast of the camp, and possibly around 5,000 within Cabanatuan.[69] Pictures of the camp were also available, as planes had taken surveillance images as recently as January 19.[70] White estimated that the I Corps would not reach Cabanatuan until January 31 or February 1, and that if any rescue attempt were to be made, it would have to be on January 29.[71] White reported the details to Krueger, who gave the order for the rescue attempt. Warfare History Network has a great summary of the operation that is worth the read, but if you can, take the time to watch The Operations Room video below. Amazing that this is not more well known. There is a great memorial where the camp used to be. Very well done. UPDATE: We have the best comment section in the business! It was pointed out that, yes, in 2021 there was a movie made out of it called, The Great Raid. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

More than a dozen countries are now waiting in line to buy the rocket artillery system that rewrote the rules of the war in Ukraine, and the U.S. Army just signed a contract to make sure all of them can keep it running. A $180 million award announced May 28 will put Lockheed Martin in […]View the full article

The U.S. Marine Corps has begun fielding its most heavily armed amphibious vehicle, a tracked fighting machine that can swim from a ship in open ocean, roll onto a hostile beach under fire, and engage enemy targets with a 30mm automatic cannon at ranges that far exceed anything the Corps’ previous amphibious platforms could match. […]View the full article

Canada unveiled a new self-propelled artillery system at its premier defense exhibition this week that can fire a 155mm shell while moving at speed, reload automatically without a gunner exposed outside the vehicle, and hit targets up to 70 km (43 miles) away, all operated by a crew of three from inside an armored hull […]View the full article

A Canadian armored vehicle manufacturer unveiled an image of a new mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle at CANSEC 2026 in Ottawa, revealing the full technical specifications of the Admiral MRAP, a jointly developed platform built in partnership with South African defense firm Panzer following Roshel’s acquisition of the KF411 MRAP design in 2024. The Admiral represents […]View the full article

A Canadian armored vehicle manufacturer and a Singaporean defense engineering giant unveiled a joint concept at Canada’s premier defense exhibition that could fundamentally change how infantry units deliver indirect fire: a light pickup truck carrying a fully automated mortar system that two soldiers can deploy in 15 seconds and stow just as fast before driving […]View the full article

A coalition of European and Ukrainian defense companies launched Dronetex at Odense Airport in Denmark, presenting a set of integrated air defense and counter-drone technologies that its members describe not as future concepts but as systems already operating in real-world conditions, including on active frontlines in Ukraine. The event, organized in partnership with Rasmussen Global, […]View the full article

The U.S. Army is pumping $20 million into expanding AeroVironment’s Huntsville, Alabama facility to accelerate production of Freedom Eagle-1, a new low-cost interceptor missile designed to shoot down drones and aircraft at a price point that makes defending against mass aerial attacks economically viable for the first time. The $20.2 million government investment, announced May […]View the full article

As opposed to taking this moment to celebrate, once again, the success of Italian-Americans in the face of widespread discrimination, it appears the signal went out to dirty up General Christopher LaNeve, USA, acting Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and by all appearances should be nominated to take that position, pending Senate confirmation. This isn’t something done by some rando anon typing away on X or Substack, but in the pages of The Wall Street Journal by a serious journalist we’ve known for a long time, Lara Seligman and her co-author who, no offense, I don’t know from Adam’s off-ox, Dan Lyon. If you are not familiar with the good General, Lara & Dan’s article can give you the details, but that is not what I find interesting. What I want to find out is what the miasma soaked opposition has to throw at him. Let’s focus on that. You have to start with the title. Right away, this won’t be a bunch of hagiography. This, literally, had me laughing to the point Mrs. Salamander demanded to know what I found so funny. She did not agree, but I digress. The use of “Hardline” is interesting. Generally speaking in American English, the opposite of “Hardline” would be “Moderate, Flexible, or Accommodating“. If you let your googlefu guide you, this the type of result you find: Moderate Four-Star General: Colin Powell, USA. Flexible Four-Star General: Nothing. All I get is reference to the Zwilling Four Star Flexible Boning Knife. Seriously, that was the top return. Accommodating Four-Star General: Nothing. It does not exist. It was stupid to ask, but for my readers, anything. It is also funny how, “…close to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth…” is a resistance twofer: Not self-described Secretary of War, but the passive aggressive “Congress has to change…” stylebook requirement of Secretary of Defense. The use of “Pete Hegseth” in order to set the reader’s mind right as they proceed to the fainting couch that the mere mentioning of his name gives All the Right People™ the vapors. Now for the charge sheet in the main body. Two years before Gen. Christopher LaNeve found himself in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s inner circle, he was a division commander known for strictly enforcing the rules, banning cellphones during physical training and insisting that troops use only military-issued gear. It was the kind of hard-line approach that didn’t endear LaNeve to the rank-and-file at the 82nd Airborne Division, many of whom booed when he appeared at the All-American Week events during his last year as commander, according to current and former members of the unit. Ummm…I think “…strictly enforcing rules…” is pretty much an officer’s job, especially in garrison. Why the other two items are even up for debate is silly. To describe either as, “hard-line” is more of an indictment of the rest of the Army more than it is of LaNeve. We’ll return to the All-American Week incident in a bit. I think we know which (R) Senators these are. Some Republicans have signaled privately that they aren’t sure he’s the right fit for the job, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations. They are going to have to make their case in public. I don’t think they can make the sale. Yes, there are some Senators leaving office this year by choice, or after being defeated in primaries by Trump-backed challengers, but these are not the types who would use an appointment to Chief of Staff of the Army as a way to strike back at the President. Wait…some may be. We’ll see. When reading the following, all I could think of is Generals Pershing, Marshall, Patton, and Eisenhower laughing: LaNeve is less experienced than most of his predecessors: He has been a four-star general for only three months, since Feb. 6 when he was confirmed as vice chief of the Army. Most chiefs serve at least 18 months in a four-star role before assuming the top position. NB: yes, I know, the rank issues, but AI can’t generate five-stars properly President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Marshall as Army Chief of Staff over thirty-three more senior generals. That was not a one-off. The big Louisiana Maneuvers, staged in August and September 1941, served as a proving ground for Marshall’s officers. Only 11 of the 42 generals who commanded a division, a corps, or an army in the maneuvers would go on to command in combat. Just one of the prewar army’s senior generals, Walter Krueger, would be given a top command in World War II. His “plucking board” was legendary. One of the best, if not the best, Chief of Naval Operations (the Navy version of the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army) was Admiral Arleigh Burke. Then President Eisenhower picked up on his habits from WWII in selecting Burke: When President Dwight D. Eisenhower selected Arleigh Burke as Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) in 1955, Burke was a two-star Rear Admiral. In a highly unusual move, he was promoted directly to four-star Admiral, bypassing 92 active-duty flag officers who were senior to him on the Navy Register. This is also a silly critique. Unlike many in the Army’s top ranks, LaNeve didn’t attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Instead, he received his commission as an infantry officer through the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at the University of Arizona in 1990. …and the point is? The present Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle, USN, is the graduate of a public university, North Carolina State University, and wasn’t even in NROTC. He is a graduate of Officer Candidate School. The critique that might get the most attention—generally because it involves the bi-partisan triggering of, But LaNeve’s rise wasn’t without controversy. In 2021, he was serving as a one-star general on the Army staff when a group of pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol. As the Army’s director of operations, readiness and mobilization, LaNeve was the liaison between the Army and the National Guard, according to current and former officials. The Defense Department’s inspector general found no wrongdoing by department or Army officials. The watchdog found the actions taken by the Defense Department in response to the Jan. 6 riots were “reasonable in light of the circumstances that existed on that day.” But less than a month later, a 36-page memo by a lawyer for the District of Columbia National Guard at the time alleged that top officials, including LaNeve, covered up an hourslong delay in the Army’s riot response. The memo, by Col. Earl Matthews, who is now the Pentagon’s general counsel under Hegseth, insisted that LaNeve and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of the Army staff, lied. “Piatt and LaNeve literally changed facts and recollections overnight. The end product, a revisionist tract worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist, was close hold,” Matthews wrote. The connections here are exceptionally complicated and will be covered in detail by others. If you want to know how complicated it is, note the connection to Matthews mentioned above, where he is now, and then just do a name search to read the appropriate passages in that 36-page memo. If it were that bad, then LaNeve would not have been promoted from a one-star to a two-star and then a three-star under President Biden. That’s my take. Back to what makes a “hardline” general. Later, as commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, LaNeve developed a reputation as a stickler for rules that many of his own troops deemed old-fashioned, including gear restrictions and the cellphone ban during morning physical training, according to Army officials and current and former members of the unit who served under LaNeve. So, a modern general is happy with you playing Candy Crush during PT and wearing that worn out t-shirt you wife keeps trying to throw away? OK. Run with that critique, if you wish. What about the booing at All-American Week? During the unit’s annual All-American Week festivities, LaNeve also banned the longstanding tradition of veterans tossing cans of beer at the soldiers running in formation, and ordered military police units along the route to patrol for alcohol, the people said. LaNeve saw the practice as a safety issue, according to the Army officials. Again, this is more of an indictment of other Army generals than it is of LaNeve. Next slide. Now that the bold-faced items to trigger the left are complete, we have an attempt to get the right in a huff. At the same time, LaNeve was perceived by some of his subordinates to be pushing Biden-era policies that Trump and Hegseth have decried as “woke,” such as allowing preferred pronouns and training on transgender identity and diversity initiatives, although much of that rhetoric was disregarded at lower levels of command. In June 2023, he signed a memo commemorating “pride month,” according to the letter. “We appreciate the contributions of the LGBTQ+ Paratroopers and understand that inequity and discrimination undermine diversity’s strategic advantage and our core mission,” according to the letter, a copy of which was reviewed by WSJ. U.S. and Army officials defended LaNeve’s decision to sign the memo, explaining that the previous administration demanded he do so. You don’t even want to know all the paperwork I had to do in support of every diversity-related item you can think of in the course of my active duty career. I am sure I have printed out my body weight of paper alone submitting nominations for all the sectarian affinity group awards. You know, the “Outstanding Watchstander of the Year” award by the Left-Handed Lisping Lithuanian Navigators Association, etc. They are lawful orders. You execute them. Some with more enthusiasm than others, but you do them. Sticklers for rules do that, dontchaknow. Who would find this problematic and unattractive in a General? LaNeve later endeared himself to Hegseth with his work ethic, direct approach to problems and his ability to provide an experienced military perspective, officials said. OK, I did find one real bad thing. Last year, LaNeve was a strong supporter of the Pentagon chief’s controversial September move to end shaving waivers for almost all troops, according to one of the officials. I support the return to allowing beards, so I non-concur on this point. Worth torpedoing a Senate confirmation? Probably not. Since he became Pentagon chief last year, Hegseth has fired or sidelined at least eight senior Army generals, including George. LaNeve became the main beneficiary of these changes, as some of those pushed out cleared a path for his rise. Again, this is a bad thing? I like the guy already, you don’t have to keep trying to make me like him more. A lot of us think the decimal point should be moved over one here, and the same in the other services. At the end of the day, a Commander in Chief is allowed to pick his most senior officers. “Gen. LaNeve is precisely the kind of leader the U.S. Army needs right now. He’s decisive, focused on strengthening our Army, and not interested in playing politics in Washington. He is a back-to-basics, no politics, no-nonsense General—exactly what President Trump expects,” Hegseth said. There is not enough “there-there” to get in the way of confirmation, but the Senate in an election year is its own creature. As a side-note: LaNeve has a son and a daughter who are both serving in the Army. He has skin in the game. That means something when it comes to when we decide to send our men and women into harm’s way. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

Sweden announced on May 28 that it will donate 16 Gripen C/D fighter jets to Ukraine and enable the purchase of up to 20 newer Gripen E/F aircraft funded through a 2.5 billion euro ($2.90 billion) EU loan, with long-term ambitions to deliver between 100 and 150 Gripen aircraft to Kyiv and training of Ukrainian […]View the full article

Ukrainian investigators have published their findings from the wreckage of a nuclear-capable Russian ballistic missile that struck an industrial zone near Bila Tserkva on the night of May 23-24, and what they found inside the debris tells a story that undercuts several of the claims Moscow has built around its most heavily promoted weapon. Russia […]View the full article

Armenia publicly displayed Iranian-made air defense systems at its Republic Day parade in Yerevan on May 28, confirming that Tehran has made its first known weapons export of the Majid AD-08 short-range missile system to a foreign military. Around four Majid AD-08 systems were spotted by open-source analysts during parade rehearsals in Yerevan’s Republic Square […]View the full article

Social media video published this week shows a Russian Mi-26 heavy transport helicopter lowering a Pantsir-SMD-E short-range air defense system onto the rooftop of a building in Moscow, a deployment that captures in a single image how profoundly Ukraine’s drone campaign has changed the security calculus inside Russia’s own capital. The Mi-26, the world’s largest […]View the full article

Lithuania will purchase 936 Patria 6×6 armored vehicles from Finland in a landmark procurement approved by the State Defence Council on Wednesday, with President Gitanas Nausėda confirming that 300 of the vehicles are expected to arrive by 2030 and that part of the production process will take place inside Lithuania itself. The decision makes Lithuania […]View the full article

Germany ordered more than 2,000 military transport trucks from Rheinmetall in a contract worth approximately $1.18 billion, the largest single logistics vehicle call-off under a framework agreement the Bundeswehr signed in 2024 to procure up to 6,500 vehicles from Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles. Deliveries will begin in the first half of 2026, with the vast […]View the full article

Germany’s Bundeswehr has placed a second major order for Rheinmetall’s LLM-VarioRay Laser-Light-Module, committing to a six-figure quantity of the weapon-mounted targeting devices for delivery between 2026 and 2032, with the contract value running into several hundred million euros. The call-off, approved by the German parliament’s Budget Committee in December 2025 and formalized under a framework […]View the full article

Elbit Systems announced a $350 million contract on May 28 to modernize main battle tanks for an undisclosed international customer, delivering an upgrade package that replaces the vehicles’ fire control systems, gun and turret drives, communications, and situational awareness systems over four years. The customer’s identity remains confidential, continuing a pattern in Elbit’s recent contract […]View the full article

Rheinmetall UK has introduced Shadow Wolf, a new tactical vehicle competing for the British Army’s Land Mobility Programme, positioning it as a next-generation replacement for the aging light vehicle fleet that British ground forces currently operate across demanding operational environments. The announcement describes a platform built on the same proven architecture as the Caracal tactical […]View the full article

The U.S. Army awarded BAE Systems a program of record contract to equip ground combat vehicles with an electronic warfare system that jams and confuses incoming missiles and drones before they can reach their targets, the company announced May 27. The Soft Kill Active Protection System program centers on BAE Systems’ ROOK system, a soft-kill […]View the full article

In spite of the rough lessons on the importance of mass in the Korean and Vietnam Wars in the second half of the 20th Century—and even the cold bucket of sand thrown in our face about what is required for even heavy imperial policing like we had in Iraq and Afghanistan at the end of the first decade of this century—a large segment of the national security nomenklatura was content with boutique-levels of warstocks in our relatively shallow magazines. We’ve discussed this here and at the OG Blog for a long time, as have others, but until recently the need to purchase and stockpile the weapons we know we will need in the big fight—heck, like we’ve seen in Iran recently, even for extended punitive expeditions—simply has not been getting the support it needs. It is nice to at last see a shift, but let’s not celebrate it until we understand how we got here. If we don’t have a good understanding why we forgot the need for the magazine depth that is inefficient in peacetime but essential in war, then we are condemned to repeat it when the immediacy of the crisis starts to fade and the accountants, backed by hucksters selling sketchy theories, start clawing back supremacy in the argument. Generations have grown to positions of power in our defense establishment riding on their success of selling the shallowness of our magazines as a reflection of modern natsec theory. It started before the guns from WWII were even cold. Most famous was the nuclear club that convinced everyone, because they were the Smartest People in the Room™, that ‘war was new’ and that they knew that the future was nuclear. No need for large navies, armies, or tactical air forces taking up space with ‘old think’. No. Nuclear war will either be the new normal, or would prevent wars from happening at all. Oops. We don’t really need to cover the Jesus Jones Era and the peace dividend that didn’t even last a decade. After Desert Fox and the Balkans conflicts, at least to me, it became clear that the few hundred TLAM expended were a shockingly large dent in our precision stockpile. Once I got a peek at the numbers, it had me nosing around everything from Light Weight Torpedo inventory to small arms ammo. Then at the end of the century I got a peek at some of our OPLAN requirement…and even then, there was no there there. JOs would ask questions like: “What happens when we run out of XXX and YYY. There is only enough for about two weeks at the rate we will expend them.” The answer from those trusted to be ready to fight, “That is not our job here.” It never got better because the issue never had the top cover it needed. No accountability then or now. Then 9/11 happened. It has been a quarter century since then, and we still have the problem of numbers. The vanity of our ‘Deterrence by Denial’ vs. ‘Deterrence by Punishment’ debate was, as Bryan pointed out in the link, largely an argument by those trying to wrap their desire to under-resource the military in a pseudo-intellectual wrapper—roughly from the same school that thought a ‘light footprint strategy’ was a smart strategy in GWOT. Cheaper for the accountants, disastrously expensive for strategists. The worst school of thought was being sold by highly credentialed and self-referential natsec luminaries to gullible people lusting for a sage to give them an easy fix to a hard problem: the concept of a ‘72-hour War’. Anyone who thinks there is an easy and cheap solution to hard national security challenges is at best not a very good student of history, or at worst a fool, most likely thinks the people who buy their Theory™ are fools. Someone briefed Putin the 72-hour CONOPS in February of 2022, and we all know where that led to. The Russians clearly had an industrial scale problem with optimism filters in the buildup to their 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but they are not the only ones with that problem. Effective militaries are not cheap. The desire to save money on a military you might needs is only encouraged for the very real need you have to sate the appetites of your political allies who want that money for something else now. If some bright guys with solid reputations from All the Right People™ can tell you this is also the ‘smart power’ and ‘modern thinking’ approach to war at the same time, then all the better. For those who do not have the spine to take the pressure and the wisdom to listen for hard truths, people offering comfortable vignettes that help justify smaller investments will allow you to work backward from ‘less’ to justify the smaller purchases justified by the assumption that the war might never come. Well, not ‘you,’ since someone else will be holding the bill when it comes due. What is the opposite of stewardship? Neglect? Exploitation? Pick one of those or another more fitting. This is very much a ‘feeling and believing’-centered worldview encouraged by a willingness to be an agent of neglect, that won the argument for a long time against a ‘reason and knowing’ world view attempting to execute responsible stewardship. The kindest view, and probably describes some or not all of our situation, is that good people in hard jobs did the best they could do, and tried to keep as much as possible on life support until opinions—and funding—change directions. That’s the past. Can’t change it, but what do we do now? Time to look at our elders’ bar tab. Over at The Dispatch earlier this month, our friend Mackenzie Eaglen lays some sobering numbers on the table using clear and direct language. Art. A beautiful music to my ears. Credible institutions and war colleges all come to the same war-gamed conclusions: The U.S. military consistently runs out of critical long-range weapons within the first weeks of a major war. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Hal Brands has warned, without immediate investment, America can “get ready for ‘missile famine’ if there is a great-power war.” Operation Epic Fury offers a real-world preview of exactly that scenario. The American military reportedly fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles over a few weeks, even though this weapon is built at a rate of just 90 to 100 units per year. Absent acceleration, replenishing this key armament from one short but intense operation would take roughly 10 years. And the offensive munitions shelf is only half of the problem. Stocks of defensive weapons protecting our troops or territory, such as the Patriot interceptors or THAAD missile defense system, are running either very low or nearly empty. Since 2021, we have produced around three dozen or fewer THAAD interceptors per year, but fired off 150 during last summer’s 12-Day War against Iran. On the current schedule it would take three-and-a-half years to replace what was fired in just under two weeks. As for the critical Patriot interceptor, relied on by militaries around the world, the Pentagon used more than 1,200 against Iran in Epic Fury. While the Army hopes to order 2,798 PAC-3 missiles with the pending budget request, those funded in the annual base budget won’t begin delivery until May 2029. This shortfall is all over the warfighting spectrum. This generational habit created some incredible weapons, but they are designed for a world where no war lasts more than a portion of a deployment. I’m sorry, that is not the world we live in. The popular precision strike missile (or PrSM), also heavily used against Iran, has a construction timeline of 36 months. The Tomahawk’s build time averages 26 months. In all these cases, the long build cycles offset plans to order munitions in large quantities. That leaves the U.S. military to supplement what it does not have with what it does—a plethora of old, cheap, non-precision weapons that would fail to accomplish strategic goals in an environment such as the South China Sea, where long-range precision strike capabilities are critical. There is no training timeout in war. You keep going until one side loses the will or capacity to continue. Precision weapons are, more than anything else, life savers. They save the life of your people. When you run out of precision weapons, you can’t ‘touch base’ and stop the game, it keeps going. In order to bring the fight to the enemy—unless you want to quit—then you will have to use other, less precise weapons—weapons that will force you to close the enemy and lose a lot more of your people in the process: a much deadlier battlefield for you, and maybe or maybe not for your enemy. It does not have to be that way, but we have to make changes and find the funding to ensure it doesn’t happen. Change is not easy when so many people have their jobs, paychecks, and egos wrapped around … well … how things have always been done. Thankfully, this is a solvable problem—but not in the traditional Washington way. A wartime production surge to rebuild the industrial base and boost manufacturing capacity is part of the answer. But it’s just as important to rethink what America builds and how we build it—pursuing production with intention, putting more key assets underground, and modifying what we already possess. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to think about making what we already have better—and make new things with a different mindset. America’s military needs weapons it can print by the thousands and lose by the hundreds without breaking the budget. The Pentagon must ramp up its build-to-print model for munitions. America’s government research labs have tremendous innovative ideas primed for production. Outsourcing the key fabrication of parts while keeping design control in-house will help yield tangible results sooner. The military can also repurpose older weapons and reimagine uses for legacy systems with modest modifications. The Hellfire missile, originally designed in the 1970s, had by the 2010s become a victim of its own success: effective enough to keep ordering but too expensive to keep in surplus. By redesigning the Hellfire’s warhead and guidance section into a modular configuration, Lockheed Martin transformed the existing Hellfire airframes into a substantially more effective asset for its replacement system. Weapons that had been warehoused as second-tier munitions came back into inventory as first-tier ones. Scale. We need not just industrial scale, but intellectual scale. We need a growing mass of people with access to—or better yet control of—levers of power to force change. If we rely on the same people, institutions, and processes that got us here to force that change, we will fail. Towards the end of her article, Mackenzie coins a phrase—really a warning—that captures our legacy problem well. We have leaned back on our grandfather’s pride of our nation being the mid-20th century’s Arsenal of Democracy far past the point it was still valid. We’ve morphed into something else. Emphasis is mine. Until our arsenal is rebuilt and restocked, a commercial mindset to acquire technology rapidly and purchase off-the-shelf components must reign supreme in government. A majority of the munitions mentioned above are housed within the mandatory portion of the 2027 defense budget request. This side of the ledger is key to making one-time injections at scale into the munitions, shipbuilding, and drone industrial bases, accounting for surge capacity. If reconciliation does not become reality, the low quantities requested in discretionary funds for 2027 will ensure America remains the artisan of democracy and not the arsenal. Exquisite designed, Tiffany-jawed, and craft-built may look good at trade shows, but they don’t win wars that last more than 72-hours. The Artisan of Democracy is an invitation to disaster. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

The United States just used its most powerful conventional bombs against the deepest underground nuclear facility in the world. Those bombs worked — and they also revealed exactly where current physics ends and the next weapons problem begins. DARPA is now looking for solutions to that problem. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s […]View the full article

Three years after a Chinese balloon drifted across the continental United States and was shot down off the South Carolina coast, the U.S. Army is now buying the same technology for itself, and the shopping list it published tells a story about how American commanders plan to watch the Pacific in any future conflict. The […]View the full article