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Ukraine’s Navy said one of its Sargan-3000 uncrewed surface vessels destroyed a Russian drone boat in the Black Sea, describing the engagement as the first battle in history between two uncrewed naval vessels. The Navy said its Defense Intelligence partners spotted the Russian craft before the Sargan-3000 closed in and destroyed it using a remote-controlled […]View the full article

Russia’s state-owned tank manufacturer Uralvagonzavod has delivered another batch of T-90M “Proryv” and T-72B3M tanks to the Russian Army, the company said, timed to coincide with Russia’s Tank Crew Day. As with previous shipments, Uralvagonzavod did not disclose how many tanks were included in the batch or where they are headed. The company said the […]View the full article

The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration has awarded a $161 million Strategic Breakthrough contract to Antares, a California nuclear startup, to advance a reactor design meant to power spacecraft. The company describes it as the largest Department of War award to date focused specifically on […]View the full article

ELVO, Greece’s main military vehicle manufacturer, has shown off the first Mercedes G-Class “jeeps” modernized under a new refit program built to extend the life of the Greek Army’s aging vehicle fleet rather than replace it outright. The vehicles being upgraded are roughly 30 years old. ELVO is fitting a new engine and automatic transmission, […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has selected Fort Benning, Georgia, as one of five military bases that will host nuclear microreactors under a new Pentagon energy resilience initiative called the Janus Program, Army officials announced August 26, 2026. Fort Benning will pair with California-based Radiant Industries to install three of the company’s one-megawatt Kaleidos microreactors, adding a […]View the full article

Russia’s war against Ukraine has turned unmanned aircraft from a supporting capability into one of the central elements of modern battlefield operations. It has also forced drone manufacturers to confront a problem that peacetime testing cannot fully reproduce: how to keep an aircraft useful when tactics, electronic warfare threats and operational requirements can change within […]View the full article

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited a group of Ukrainian military pilots training in Canada on September 12, 2026, ahead of their eventual transition to Western fighter jets including the F-16 and Sweden’s Gripen. Four L-39 training jets flown by Ukrainian cadets performed a flyover to greet him at the airfield. The visit took place at […]View the full article

An autonomous machine gun system engaged drone targets in the Arizona desert, according to official photos from a U.S. military exercise. The system, called Bullfrog and built by Texas startup Allen Control Systems, pairs a standard M240 machine gun with a robotic turret, in this case bolted into the bed of a pickup truck. The […]View the full article

A fire and a series of explosions tore through an ammunition storage site in central Bulgaria overnight into Saturday, September 12, 2026, roughly five weeks after fire and explosions destroyed a separate EMCO storage building near Belitsa, Bulgaria, on August 10. No injuries were reported in either incident. The blaze broke out near the village […]View the full article

The world’s nine nuclear-armed states expanded their arsenals in 2025, according to a new assessment from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Researchers Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda found that most countries deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons during the year, even as the overall number of warheads in the world continued to decline. […]View the full article

For a very long time on the anniversary of 9/11/2001, I have simply posted the Fox News recording of that morning that I had on in the background as I went through my daily routine in Bahrain, and generally left it at that. Last weekend, my 25-year-old daughter and a few of her friends decided to stay with me over the weekend as I did some preseason prep work on our hunting property. Just me and a hunt camp full of young, happy, professional, and accomplished women having dinner, drinks, even making S’mores over the fire-pit—it was a joy. It had me thinking of her, just a few months old when 9/11 took place. This reality is all that she has known: it just is. She is a grown woman with concerns and perspectives very different than mine. She is not haunted by 9/11 any more than … well, that is when it hit me. It is time that we move on and stop treating 9/11 as a secular holy day of some sort. That morning of 9/11 as I was going through SIPR email taskers, was just a year further away from the Fall of Saigon than we are today to the attacks of 9/11. It was 24 years from the attack of Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam, popularized by Hal Moore’s book and Mel Gibson’s movie, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. We should not forget 9/11, but it should be put is a place like the Fall of Saigon was in 2001, and the attacks on Pearl Harbor were in 1965. I think it is time. We also still need to have a reckoning with the conflict that—if you correctly start it in the build-up in 1990 prior to Desert Storm in 1991—I spent 19 of my 21 years of my career mostly focused on. GWOT. Global War on Terror. We didn’t win it—and it is still being fought, at least by the terrorists. Attackers at 9/11 were 15 Saudis, 2 from the UAE, and one each from Lebanon and Egypt—organized by a Saudi based out of Afghanistan. We invaded and occupied Afghanistan for two decades. We were defeated on the battlefield by the same people who had defeated the Soviets before. The Soviets actually did a better job in less time in building civil society and a military than we did. At least their Afghanistan government survived for years after they left. Ours fell before we could even get our people out. Trillions of dollars expended, thousands killed, tens of thousands wounded—complete strategic failure and national humiliation. We talked ourselves and others into invading Iraq two years later, mostly it seems because we felt we didn’t finish things in 1991. Who knowns—the people who started that war still cannot explain it. Islamic radicalism is still on the march from Africa’s Atlantic coast to the mayor’s office in New York City. This is also the 5th anniversary of my description of What a Whole of Government Epistemic Failure Looks Like. Read the post as linked. I stand by every word. …we were just telling each other another of those little white lies that we do now and then. Lies. Unaccountability. Blood. Treasure…and in the intervening years, The Smartest People in the Room™ and the institutions we trusted to steward us through this century’s first great challenge, failed the moment, themselves, their nation, and Western civilization. Instead of clear action in the face of evil, they invited to settle here those who hated us and then enabled enough of those who shared the world view of those who attacked us a quarter century ago so well that we find ourselves in 2026 with terrorist apologists literally holding the mayoralty of Ground Zero and holding such significant influence over one of our nation’s two major political parties that they have nominated their comrades to run for seats at the national level up to the Senate. We thought we were going “over there so we don’t have to fight them here” to change terrorist supporting nations to be more Western. Instead, while we invaded the world, we invited and enabled terrorist supporters to come here to change Western nations. We are past the point of making sure we remember the lessons learned from 9/11. Our political class refused to, and as a result, with a quarter century passing us by, it is time to put 9/11 on a respected shelf with Pearl Harbor and the Fall of Saigon. 9/11 should be noted and remembered, but not considered a reference point or touchtone to events we need as a primary reference to be ready for in the second quarter of the 21st Century. That moment has passed. I am much more interested in studying and learning from our failure to meet the moment so we don’t make it worse. Just 11 years after the end of WWI—a much more civilizationally important event than GWOT—Robert Graves published, Good-bye to All That. Yeah, that’s a good title. Now that I’m through with that self-indulgence, we should remember that war can come to us in a whole variety of ways, and in line with thousands of years of human history, the worst of our species finds nothing more exciting than to visit death and violence to innocent and harmless civilians wanting nothing more that to have a good day. One bright, bluebird day a quarter century ago, that specter visited the homeland. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Share Leave a comment View the full article

Life comes at you fast; you better be ready for it. We are coming up on three years from the final wakeup call after October 7th, 2023, that conventionally armed ballistic missiles are the premier threat to critical capabilities ashore and at sea. In the U.S. at least, though production was minimal and inventories allowed to be too small, we at least had the technology to meet the threat from Medium, Intermediate, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. At sea, which will be our focus today, we just made it across the finish line in time with the RIM-161 SM-3, which built off the success of the iterative development of the SM-2 for decades. This work has paid off via the exceptional performance of our Arleigh Burke Class destroyers off Israel, and in defending our fleet from the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea against Iran and her proxies. With each engagement, our software gets better…the next update to our missiles gets better, and, more importantly, it has yanked the Lotus off the dinner plate of our defense establishment to expand production and inventories. Bravo Zulu to those people who fought, mostly nameless and unseen, for decades to ensure we did not take our eye off the need to be able to meet the threat from ballistic missiles. Here’s the issue. We’re alone here, and our European allies just don’t seem to get it. Their historical passivity in this area is why a decade and a half ago the U.S.A. deployed inside the NATO framework Aegis Ashore installations—one in Deveselu, Romania and one in Redzikowo, Poland—and the American Arleigh Burke DDG based out of Rota, Spain. Classic NATO: “The Americans will do it. Let increase aid for foreign NGOs instead.” Some minds are turning in the right direction, as there are some moves from The Netherlands and perhaps Germany and Denmark, who are pondering the possibility of getting SM-3 at some point in the future. That is a lot of appreciating the problem, fitting-for-but-not-equipped-with kind of thinking, but the fact remains that at this moment and at any time in the near future, no European NATO navy has a capability even approaching the SM-3. Range and reach. The SM-3’s range is well past 1,000km and more importantly, it can intercept missiles outside the atmosphere—exo-atmospheric. Nothing else at sea in the West can do this. The closest the Europeans have is the French Aster 30 B1NT, which we can expect the French Navy, Italian Navy, Royal Navy, and Swedish Navy to equip their ships with. On paper, it is an exceptional capability, but it is much closer in capability to the SM-6. Both of these can do anti-ballistic missile (ABM) work, but only endo-atmospheric. Here’s a quick comparison of the three I threw together. I think I have things correct here. If not, let me know otherwise in the comments. As wretchardthecat pointed out on X, I believe, correctly, Consider the French Charles de Gaulle. A normal CdG group includes at least one Horizon-class air-defence frigate. It has no SM-3 equivalent. It has no dedicated exo-atmospheric interceptor. British Queen Elizabeth carriers are organically defenseless against an Iranian antiship attack. Everything depends on Type 45 escort which has the same capability as the French Horizons. Either ship might withstand a light attack but probably lack the capability to survive against the volume of fire the USN took. He then, rightfully, points out that there is a navy out there besides the U.S. Navy that does have the capability that the SM-3 has—the Japanese Navy—and they have been at it for almost a decade. The yet-to-be-named cruisers they are building now will be superb ABM platforms. They just need to expand the run past two ships. South Korea plans to get 20 to 30 SM-3s for its next Aegis destroyers, and I would bet that buy will expand as well. So, the U.S. does have allies that are getting ready for today’s and tomorrow’s threat from ballistic missiles…but European NATO? A little thin, and relying on Uncle Sam, who—should he find himself in a fight with the PRC west of the International Date Line—will have higher and better uses for his ABM capabilities than parking them in Europe. Speaking of thin, effectively large portions of the world’s oceans are now off limits for the few aircraft carriers the Europeans have. There is always risk, as you will have leakers in any determined attack—but unless those European strike groups have an SM-3 equipped ships with them, the risk is simply too great. They are already late and behind. Someone needs to light a flame under their sterns. 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

Yemen’s Houthi movement seized the Red Sea port city of Mocha on Thursday, forcing government-aligned forces to withdraw and pulling the Iran-backed group closer to full control of the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Four Yemeni government military sources told Reuters that Houthi fighters took the city after hours of fighting, while a separate military official told […]View the full article

Polish defense manufacturer WB Group has unveiled Gladius 2, a new loitering munition built for a reduced radar and heat signature and powered by a turbojet engine for a fast run into the target area. The company also refers to the weapon as Warmate 30, tying it to WB Group’s existing Warmate family of strike […]View the full article

Four defense-tech companies integrated an AI-enabled sensor, an unmanned helicopter, Ukrainian-made interceptor drones and tactical radios into a single counter-drone system, then tested it at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, during a Pentagon exercise called Falcon Peak 26.2. DataShapes AI, Evolved Aerospace, General Cherry and Persistent Systems built the combined system in about three […]View the full article

Two Bangladesh Army soldiers were killed and an officer was seriously injured on September 9, 2026, when a tank exploded during a live-fire exercise at the Hathazari Field Firing Range in Chattogram. The Bangladesh Army’s Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate, known as ISPR, confirmed the accident. ISPR said the blast happened while the crew was firing […]View the full article

Ukraine’s Defense Forces struck Russia’s naval base at Novorossiysk overnight on September 8-9, hitting the Kalibr-missile frigate Admiral Essen and starting a fire on its deck superstructure, according to Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence agency, known as HUR. HUR said operators from its Active Operations Department carried out the strike as part of a joint deep-strike operation […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has awarded Global Military Products a $12.9 million contract to integrate its Scorpion Light 81mm mobile mortar system onto the Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle-Utility platforms. The company announced the award on September 3, 2026, under the Department of Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium’s Other Transaction Authority framework. The deal covers pairing the Tampa-based […]View the full article

V2X confirmed on September 8, 2026, that it has been awarded a $19 million contract by the U.S. Marine Corps to deliver Tempest counter-drone vehicles, along with the maintenance, software and training needed to keep them running. The announcement puts a public face on a deal the Pentagon had already disclosed. A contract notice dated […]View the full article

Australia’s Army has declared Final Operational Capability for its National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System, confirming the ground-based air defense system is ready to support Australian Defence Force operations. Defence announced the milestone on September 9, 2026. NASAMS is built to detect, track and destroy cruise missiles, aircraft, helicopters and drones. The system was […]View the full article

Russian aircraft dropped 8,766 glide bombs on Ukrainian front-line positions in August 2026, the highest monthly total recorded since the invasion began, according to Ukrainian General Staff figures compiled by the OSINT monitoring group Oko Gora. The total works out to an average of 283 bombs a day over the 31-day month. Oko Gora put […]View the full article

Two Royal Australian Air Force F-35A Lightning II stealth fighters landed at Ohakea in New Zealand on September 8, the first time the jets have visited the country, the New Zealand Defence Force said. The aircraft, from the RAAF’s No. 3 Squadron, flew training missions through September 10 alongside New Zealand forces, including mock bombing […]View the full article

American Rheinmetall has won a $7.28 million contract to deliver 12 Mission Master SP autonomous ground vehicles and five amphibious kits to the U.S. Marine Corps, the company announced. The Defense Logistics Agency is managing the procurement, with ADS Inc. serving as prime contractor supporting the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. The vehicles will be used […]View the full article

The Netherlands and Sweden signed a letter of intent for the Dutch government to buy a Saab GlobalEye surveillance aircraft, the Dutch Ministry of Defence announced September 10. The Netherlands does not currently operate an aircraft capable of this kind of long-range surveillance and instead relies partly on NATO’s aging AWACS fleet. The Dutch aircraft […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has added $38.2 million to a BAE Systems contract to overhaul two Mk 45 Mod 4 naval guns, the main deck gun mounted on the Navy’s destroyers and cruisers. Naval Sea Systems Command issued the cost-plus-incentive-fee modification to an existing contract, funded through fiscal 2024 shipbuilding money that will remain available beyond […]View the full article