All Activity

In 1QFY2026, there cannot be anyone in Europe or North America—much less anyone in a NATO nation—who still thinks that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a good-faith business partner unless they are compromised or thick as a brick. Let’s speak as adults. Yes, there is a large percentage of mercantilists on both sides of the Atlantic who will happily sell the rope used to hang them. There are equally significant numbers of people who refuse to accept any of the lessons of history and are as happy to sell off their national industrial capital to the PRC and buy all their hydrocarbons from Russia. They neither care nor are curious to know why others do care. All they are interested in is collecting their quarterly dividends and being invited to all the fun meetings. Yes, there is a lot of money floating around people are willing to grasp to pay-and-play. No, you don’t hold those people in enough contempt, but yes, you have to accept that they exist and, frankly, still control most of the levers of power. NATO is notorious for arguing over how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, why everyone deserves a contribution trophy, and why every cardinal heading around Brussels is a flank. This is an opportunity for the alliance to do something serious and impactful. As an alliance, we need to drive a stake in the ground and say, “No more.” Enough ground has already been lost by the worst leaders for the worst reasons. No reason to give up more ground. If you don’t get angry reading James S. Robbins’s article over at Real Clear Defense, Beijing’s Trojan Yacht, please consult your doctor. If you don’t understand the concern raised by the following, please leave the national security space and invest your time in something like funny dog videos. BEHOLD!Western military technology has run not only through espionage but also through economic leverage. China buys companies of strategic importance, learn what they know, and move the knowledge home. This approach worked in semiconductors, telecommunications and critical minerals. It is now being applied to one of the West’s most sophisticated builders of high-performance naval craft. Ferretti Group, the Italian builder of luxury yachts, is also a defense contractor. Since 2016 it has supplied patrol and fast-attack craft to the Italian Navy, Coast Guard and Carabinieri, and Rome designates it a strategic asset. Its “dual-use” technology can be used for both military and non-military purposes. The hull that lets a Pershing sports yacht exceed 45 knots, the composites that trim radar signatures, the propulsion that quiets the acoustic profile and the integration of sensors and weapons stations are engineered the same for both civilian customers and maritime security services. … Ferretti's controlling shareholder is Weichai, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate founded after World War II to manufacture arms for Mao’s People's Liberation Army. Today, Weichai builds diesel engines that power everything from trucks to mobile rocket launchers for the Chinese military. One customer, Norinco, answers to the Chinese Communist Party's state-asset system. … Weichai owns 39.5 percent of Ferretti but was able to capture eight of nine board seats at the company’s May board meeting. The vote passed with the support of a bloc of major Chinese shareholders, each holding under the 3 percent threshold that would have triggered additional disclosures. The second-largest shareholder is now in a Bologna court arguing that Weichai never made the national security filing Italian law requires. Anyone who has observed how Beijing operates in Western markets will recognize that this is all part of a pattern. Weichai’s longtime chairman said in 2023 that a priority was to transfer Ferretti’s production technology to a marine hub in Qingdao, already home to a large Chinese naval base. Read the whole thing. It only gets worse. 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

Photos have emerged of Russia’s newest version of the Geran-5 light cruise missile, known as the Geran-5 K5-K and often described in the media as a jet-powered drone, lying in a field somewhere in Ukraine’s Odesa region after it came down during an attack, with the serial number ANS-3031 visible on the airframe. It is […]View the full article

KNDS Deutschland is promoting its Boxer RCT30 wheeled infantry fighting vehicle as a weapon against drones, saying the 8×8 combat vehicle, which Germany and the Netherlands are buying in large numbers under the name Schakal, combines mobility, protection and firepower in a design suited to countering the latest airborne threats. In a post this week, […]View the full article

Saronic Technologies’ Corsair drone boats, the same type the U.S. military used to strike an Iranian naval base in July, have operated alongside forces from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia at Maritime Big Play Pacific, the AUKUS partners’ largest demonstration of uncrewed and autonomous technology, held in San Diego this October. The […]View the full article

Israeli company SMARTSHOOTER has fitted its SMASH computerized fire control sight to a Benelli shotgun, taking a system best known for helping soldiers shoot down small drones with rifles and putting it on a weapon that fires spreads of pellets at close range. The company announced the integration this week, saying it shows the flexibility […]View the full article

An armed, reusable drone that fires 40 mm grenades and 12-gauge shotgun rounds and then flies back to be reloaded has been cleared for purchase and use across the U.S. military, after Skyborne Technologies’ Cerberus MI was added to the U.S. Department of War’s Blue UAS Cleared List, the company announced on Oct. 26, 2026. […]View the full article

Auterion, the drone software company best known for the autonomy systems inside thousands of Ukrainian strike drones, has shown its Talon interceptor on a test range with Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, saying the system is built to take on both single drones and swarms. Footage released by the company this week shows several German […]View the full article

Aeon Industrial, a Texas company that already makes low-cost drone fuzes in volume, has unveiled the Armory, a planned 140,000-square-foot (13,000-square-meter) factory for missile systems, interceptors, high-voltage fuzes, seekers and other critical components, saying it wants to add production capacity where the U.S. munitions supply chain depends on too few suppliers. The company said the […]View the full article

Finnish drone electronics maker Arctic RAVN has secured €2.5 million (about $2.8 million) in convertible loan commitments in five days, passing its €2 million (about $2.2 million) target before it has officially launched a single product, and it plans to use the money to scale up production of the circuit boards that power and steer […]View the full article

Spanish drone maker ARMMO Defense Technologies and General Dynamics European Land Systems’ Spanish unit, Santa Bárbara Sistemas, launched and flew ARMMO’s Bandit-X interceptor drone from an ASCOD Heavy Mission Carrier tracked armored vehicle during the ATLAS 26 counter-drone exercise in Huelva, Spain, turning the heavy vehicle into a mobile launcher for drones that hunt down […]View the full article

NATO commanders spent 10 days in October rehearsing how they would fight a war against an enemy army of one million soldiers, running the alliance’s Avenger Triad 26 computer-assisted exercise from a command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, where about 150 officers from several countries tracked a simulated attack on alliance territory around the clock on […]View the full article

From Australian ABC news service: The way Australia buys weapons and defence gear is getting a major overhaul, with former Rio Tinto chief Kellie Parker hired to run the country's new Defence Delivery Agency. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy will announce today that Parker will become the new National Armaments Director — effectively making her Australia's chief weapons buyer. For decades, defence procurement has been bogged down by massive budget blowouts and severe delays. To fix this, the Albanese government is transforming its purchasing division into an independent agency — known as the Defence Delivery Agency — starting July 2027. By hiring a veteran mining executive accustomed to delivering complex, multi-billion-dollar infrastructure under strict commercial pressures, the government is hoping to inject real-world business discipline into the ADF. Parker takes on the role in November 2026 before the agency goes fully live in July 2027.

Hypersonic missile startup Castelion has received a contract modification from the Air Force Research Laboratory to begin integrating its Blackbeard hypersonic weapon onto the F-16 fighter jet, the company announced on Oct. 26, bringing the missile one step closer to the U.S. Air Force after earlier work for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army. Castelion […]View the full article

The Netherlands will buy more CV90 infantry fighting vehicles, additional bridge-laying tanks, a replacement for its unreliable Kodiak combat engineer vehicle, and new tracked support and heavy recovery vehicles from Germany’s FFG, Dutch State Secretary for Defense Derk Boswijk told parliament in a letter on Oct. 26, the Dutch Ministry of Defense said. The ministry […]View the full article

French underwater drone maker SEABER has launched RAVEN, a compact autonomous underwater vehicle for hunting naval mines and surveying the seabed that weighs 13 kg (29 pounds) and can be launched by a single operator, and the company says it will offer performance comparable to high-end conventional mine-hunting drones at about one-third of their price, […]View the full article

BLADE, the Ohio-based defense contractor formerly known as HDT Global, has won a contract to continue developing the large version of the Critical Equipment Decontamination System, a transportable system that cleans chemical and biological warfare agents off sensitive equipment used by U.S. special operations forces so the gear can be put back into service instead […]View the full article

Two Democratic senators with military and national security backgrounds, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mark Kelly of Arizona, have asked the Department of War and the National Guard Bureau to explain who commands the National Guard’s new “quick reaction forces,” under what legal authority they would deploy inside the United States, and whether they have […]View the full article

We ported the Scenario Editor (SE) from 16 to 32-bit in 2014-2015 so for more than a decade we've been running both GE and SE on current computers (64-bit Windows and Linux [w/WINE] operating systems). The most polished accessory program in development is a replacement for the MS Access-based platform editor to remove the MS Access dependency. It has some nifty additional features as well such as ability to share platform files (remember TPF files from back in the day with Harpoon 2/3?). You can read about it at Stratsims HC Platform Editor and hopefully download it by Christmas.

Hi Tony, thanks for the response! The only benefit to the 64 bit would be that we could use modern computers to run both the scenario editor and to run the game itself. I'll definitely check out the accessory programs!

Do we have that rare intersection of unmet-need, essential requirement, and unexpected answer? Maybe. We’re not the first, but we kind of wandered into it on yesterday’s Midrats Podcast. I’d like to set the table first. A saying I first heard in my 30s, and that with each passing year appears to be more and more a fact of life in the opinion arena, is that once you are tired of saying something is when people are finally starting to listen. Both here in writing and the UNCLAS Read Board Podcast, along with the Midrats Podcast, one requirement that needs to be addressed as we prepare for a Great Pacific War, and that continues to rise to the top of my list, is to Arm the Auxiliaries. The accountants won the battle decades ago, I know. We’ve assumed too much about our supremacy at sea for too long, I know. We’ve been exceptionally lucky, I know. We have long been told that there are not enough destroyers to escort auxiliaries, support, and supply vessels on the high seas, I know. We do not have frigates designed to perform escort duties across the threat spectrum, nor shall we have them in sufficient numbers in the foreseeable future, I know. I understand USNS compared to USS. I don’t care. I can’t change the past, I can only work on the now and plan to make the future better. Many of our auxiliaries are, in some strange self-delusional cope, “configured for, but not fitted with”—built with the structural reinforcement, utility connections, and physical space required to receive military weapons, sensors, or specialized defensive systems later, but without having those systems permanently installed. Indeed, the systems are not even in a warehouse somewhere, nor are there any personnel assigned to run and maintain them should they be needed. Other critically important auxiliaries don’t even have that cope. They only have hope. This state of affairs is inviting tragedy and disaster. We all know this, yet we continue on, just taunting fate. There is not yet a legal mandate to address this. I’d like to see someone in authority clearly state that there is an ethical issue here, but I’ve yet to see it. In the next layer down, I am just speaking for myself. Morality refers to personal or cultural beliefs about right and wrong, and I’m OK with that. On Sunday’s Midrats, I had the urge to put a marker down, and so I did at about the 32 minute mark. “I think it’s immoral to send a ship in harm’s way where the Sailors on that ship aren’t even given a rudimentary capability to defend themselves.” - CDR Salamander on the 25OCT2026 #Midrats Podcast. OK. Stated and noted. “No ability to defend yourself” is the ‘what’. “It is immoral” is the ‘so what’. What is a realistic ‘now what’ to close the reflection model? Last month we heard this, Today, the U.S. Navy announced its plans to procure 30 Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels following the completion of Phase I at-sea testing marking a key milestone for the program and demonstrating the Department’s commitment to deliver asymmetric capability to Fleet warfighters to counter evolving threats. We’ve been waiting for this for a while. What does this offer? Let’s look at Saronic’s 180’ Marauder. As described by Saronic, Marauder is a 180' Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV) designed to host and deliver significant capabilities across complex maritime environments. Capable of carrying up to 150MT in four 40' ISO containers, eight 20' ISO containers, or other modular payload configurations, Marauder is Saronic's premier platform for logistics and at-sea payload deployment. You can do a lot with that kind of square footage. We have already figured out six-ways-to-Sunday how to militarize ISO containers. If the aviation side of the house can have Loyal Wingman, then we surely can have our Loyal Escort. Why not? What other options will be available sooner? Yes, the long pole in the tent that I would like to have briefed first are: Sensors Communication Control Where is the man-in-the-loop CIC? (Don’t say remote; it must be aboard the escorted ship or ships) Sustainment Those are workable. Again, as we covered in the podcast, this is not an area defense solution. Just a basic self-defense to give an auxiliary a fighting chance like the Neosho had. It cannot cover every threat, but it can address some of them. The first iteration will be inadequate, but by taking and working with inadequate sooner, we have the better faster. Even the better won’t be the ideal solution, but we are not going to see an ideal solution. We have to contend with available solutions, and that is fine. Make no mistake, the need for sealift to head west of the International Date Line in the event of war will be greater than our ability to properly escort them, and this simple fact will be true for the foreseeable future. We can take action to mitigate the risk. Until better solutions can be found, I can see this as an acceptable one. 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 U.S. Air Force has put the Paladin, a heavy counter-drone multirotor built by California-based Zone 5 Technologies, through training with Joint Interagency Task Force 401 at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida on Oct. 8, with the drone carrying a Gen12 counter-drone launcher that fires net rounds to entangle and bring down hostile drones, […]View the full article

German defense AI company Helsing on Oct. 26 unveiled Contra, an autonomous, AI-controlled air defense system designed to protect countries against large-scale drone and missile attacks, along with two new interceptor missiles, the jet-powered AD-1 Inferno and the rocket-powered AD-2 Ambush, the company announced. Helsing said Contra fuses data from sensors and weapons into a […]View the full article

Britain’s Royal Navy could be left with just one frigate available for operations at any given time next year, as two more of its five remaining Type 23 frigates are expected to be declared unseaworthy within months, leaving three ships in service in 2027 with one at sea, one in training and one in maintenance, […]View the full article

Japan Ground Self-Defense Force troops deployed the new Type 25 surface-to-ship missile system to the Ōnohara training area in Nagasaki Prefecture and rehearsed anti-ship strikes using targeting information from U.S. forces and higher headquarters during Keen Sword 27, Japan’s largest joint field exercise with the United States, the GSDF’s Western Army said. The Western Army […]View the full article

A Chinese H-6KG bomber has been seen carrying what appears to be a new large electronic jamming pod that closely resembles the pods carried by the J-16D, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s dedicated electronic warfare jet, military aviation analyst Andreas Rupprecht reported on Oct. 25. Rupprecht, who closely tracks Chinese military aircraft, said the […]View the full article