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OP: Geoaegis, UNFILED, VerRep: 2025.25 I did a fresh install from the comprehensive patch to make sure any of my tinkering on the database does not cause a/the problem. There are some differences in unit loadouts, so I will repeat the issue I am seeing with the current loadouts. There is a Kongo class destroyer (BMD option) stationed northwest of Iwakuni, Japan. I included an E-3C at Iwakuni in case the Kongo radar did not pick up the incoming missiles. There is a RED unit located at the southeast tip of South Korea. The unit includes two TELs: Hwasong-5 and Hwasong-6. The current database has Hwa-5/6 traveling at Very High altitude. The Kongo has onboard both SM-2MR Block IIIB and SM-3 Block IA. Since the HWA-5/6 are not traveling at suborbital, I would not expect the SM-3 to be used to engage. With air and surface search radars on, the Kongo picks up the incoming at about 51 nm. The Kongo shoots a series of SM-2s. However, as the HWA-5 and 6 are traveling at 3999 knots, after the second volley from the Kongo, the SM-2s cannot catch up to the HWA-5 and 6. The Kongo though keeps shooting the SM-2s. The SM-2s then appear to self-destruct and then another volley from the Kongo. This cycle repeats until the Hwa-5/6 hit Iwakuni. I would expect the Kongo to stop shooting once the HWA-5/6 could not be run down since the ship is then just wasting its onboard loadout. Test scenario and saved game attached. Out of curiosity, I went into the database and swapped out the SM-2MR BIIIB's in the 29 cell VLS on the Kongo BMD with SM-6 ERAMs, changed the speed of the SM-6 to 4500 knots, then repeated the test. Considering the velocity of the revised SM-6 could overtake the HWA-5/6, I would think the AI would choose the SM-6 at some point. However, the AI just continued shooting the SM-2s. Missile Test.BKq Missile Test.scq Missile Test.scq.xml missile test.hpq

F-22 Raptors from Alaska and Virginia have arrived at Kadena Air Base in Japan, the latest rotation of America’s premier air superiority fighter through the island base that sits at the geographic center of U.S. air power in the Western Pacific. The aircraft come from two squadrons: the 90th Fighter Squadron at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, […]View the full article

U.S. Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum have begun training with the Bumblebee V1, a first-person-view counter-drone system that its users are already discovering does considerably more than shoot down enemy unmanned aircraft. The training brought together soldiers from different units across the division to operate a system that Joint Interagency Task […]View the full article

The U.S. Army is buying a Draganfly commercial, heavy lift drone system for Fort Drum, New York, with the Mission Installation Contracting Command posting a combined synopsis and solicitation on May 6, 2026, for a complete unmanned aerial system package that includes communications hardware, a ground control station, delivery box, batteries, and a sensor gimbal. […]View the full article

General Dynamics Mission Systems has won a contract worth up to $69.7 million to produce the KIV-78A cryptographic device, a piece of hardware that sits at the heart of how allied military aircraft identify each other in contested airspace, with the contract covering Foreign Military Sales to 18 countries across NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and the […]View the full article

Boeing has received an additional $125 million for the VC-25B program, the next-generation Air Force One replacement, pushing the total contract value to $4.445 billion. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, awarded the modification to Boeing’s Tukwila, Washington, according to the Department of War’s contracts announcement. The […]View the full article

A U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer that had been sitting in the Arizona desert since 2021 flew back into active service on April 22 after nearly two years of intensive depot maintenance at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, returning to Dyess Air Force Base as a fully mission-capable bomber. The aircraft came from Type […]View the full article

Ukrainian drones struck a Russian Defense Ministry military logistics complex near Moscow overnight on May 7, hitting the Nara production and logistics facility in Narofominsk in the Moscow region. The Nara complex is a large-scale military facility covering more than 180 to 200 hectares, located in Narofominsk on the grounds of Military Town No. 3. […]View the full article

Two foreign drones crossed from Russia into Latvian airspace overnight and crashed in the Latgale region in the early hours of May 7, with one striking an oil storage facility in Rezekne and igniting a fire that emergency services extinguished before dawn. Latvia’s State Police confirmed that operational services at the oil storage facility on […]View the full article

SummaryA shorter than usual UNCLAS Read Board Podcast, with look around current naval developments, military actions in the Strait of Hormuz, the state of the Royal Navy, and Japan’s growing ties with its Western Pacific neighbors. Chapters00:00: Introduction and Overview of Current Naval Issues 03:24: The State of the Royal Navy 06:04: Japan’s Military D… Read more View the full article

The F-35 Joint Program Office is preparing to modify the fighter’s In-Line File Encryption Device software to support government-mandated quantum-resistant algorithms, according to a presolicitation notice published on May 6, 2026. The notice, issued through Naval Air Systems Command, signals that the F-35 program is beginning the process of hardening one of the aircraft’s core […]View the full article

Ukraine has doubled its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and is keeping up that pace into May, targeting refineries, export terminals, Baltic Sea ports, and sanctioned tankers in what analysts at ACLED now describe as a sustained campaign rather than a temporary escalation — one calculated to drain the revenue Russia is drawing from a […]View the full article

DARPA flew a hybrid-electric unmanned experimental aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base in April 2026, marking the first flight milestone for a propulsion architecture the agency believes could fundamentally change how military aircraft are designed and what they can do. The aircraft, designated XRQ-73, was developed through DARPA’s Series Hybrid Electric Propulsion AiRcraft Demonstration program, […]View the full article

Otto Aerospace has completed a flight-test campaign for an unmanned aircraft built around laminar-flow aerodynamics, validating in actual flight the drag-reduction performance the company has been modeling for years and generating data with direct implications for long-endurance drone design. The tests were conducted at Spaceport America in New Mexico, within White Sands Missile Range airspace, […]View the full article

One of the great things about writing for so long on the maritime beat—2004 in my case—is that I’ve had the chance to travel along this path with other people who have been in the game as long or longer than I have. In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, Robert D. Kaplan published an essay, America's Elegant Decline. I first mentioned it ten months after its publication while I was in Afghanistan, and then only briefly. It was more or less taken aboard as background info. Fifteen years after its publication, I revisited its points and covered some of it in detail. It says something for Kaplan that a decade and a half later, it still popped into my nogg’n for consideration. You can read that if you wish. No reason to rehash my points on it again. There are plenty of things that I disagree with Robert Kaplan about, but he always gives me a reason to ponder a thing or two, and he has a good eye and I think makes a better than honest effort to see where things are with a long-time-constant. On May 1st, he wrote an article, this time for NYT, titled “The Tragic Decline of the American Navy” that, in a way, is a companion piece to the almost 19 year old, America’s Elegant Decline article. An interesting side note: when it first came out, if you linked to it on X, the title came out, “America No Longer Rules the Waves.” I guess they decided to downshift it a bit...because as we’ve seen the last few years around the Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Mediterranean—in spite of all our challenges—in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I won’t do a full fisking, but enough people over the weekend asked for my thoughts that it would be rude if I didn’t pull out a few pull quotes for discussion. As Mahan wrote, “a peaceful, gain-loving nation” like the United States “is not farsighted, and farsightedness is needed for adequate military preparation.” You can rarely go wrong quoting Mahan, and this essence of the American mind remains in place…but I would argue that relatively speaking, this no longer holds. Yes, as we discuss often here, this issue remains, but it is but a shadow compared to the rapid decline of farsightedness we have seen among our European allies in their domestic, foreign, and defense policies over the last few decades. While they mostly dither and decay, there is vibrancy and forward thinking budding in, of all places, the Arabian Peninsula and more reliably, the ring of western Pacific nations. One of the cornerstones of my elevator speech regulars here have heard over and over (as only when you are sick of saying something will people finally start to listen), is that the U.S. is a maritime and aerospace power. That is also our comparative advantage…a fact that the events of the last few years have only underlined. That said, there are centers of power in our nation who not only refuse to see and act on that, they seem determined to weaken and dilute this foundational characteristic of our nation’s military power. The U.S. Navy is in decline relative to its own history and to the growth of the Chinese Navy, and has surrendered the control of the world’s vital choke points that it had at the beginning of the 21st century. The South China Sea, through which up to 40 percent of global maritime trade passes, in addition to oil and natural gas, is now dominated by China. The Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the crucial transit point out of the Red Sea, is harassed by the Yemen-based Shiite Houthis. Now we can add the Strait of Hormuz to the list. Just 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest, the strait offers oil tankers and other large vessels only a limited path through. Iran’s Islamic revolutionary regime, aided by a coastline of mountains and coves, has managed to effectively shut down the waterway with drones, speedboats and mines. American warships may be able to enforce a blockade, but the Navy still can’t open the Strait. And even then, this concentration of U.S. ships in the region is robbing the Navy of assets it should be using to patrol and project power in the Pacific. Whereas in the past the United States could cover all its bases or choke points, now in an age of gradual decline it has to make choices. Two points need to be made here: There is no military force, or combination of military forces, that can counter the threats to the free flow of goods at market prices through international straits other than the U.S. and her Navy. This was proved again. Both Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb are threatened by the aggressive stance of the Islamic Republic of Iran and her proxies in her drive against the entire globe. Both parties are in a much degraded state than they were three years ago, when they were waxing in their power—and Iran’s march to nuclear weapons was unimpeded. That has changed drastically, and they are weakened only through the power of the U.S. and Israel. China is concerned with the Western Pacific. The South China Sea is not being ignored, but is being dealt with in a low-risk manner as possible—as everyone waits for a super-typhoon to fix the problem. In any event, the time to nip that problem in the bud was during the second Obama administration when the U.S. was leading from behind and appreciating the problem when not monitoring the situation. Benchmarking a few centuries of best practices, China saw the weakness, took advantage of it, and simply changed the facts on the ground, or sea as it were. If I were in a PRC planning cell, I’d advise doing the same exact thing. Once it was done once unchallenged effectively, I’d advise doing so on an industrial scale. That isn’t 3D chess thinking, that is checkers. Talk to the Obama natsec team. The global elite at watering holes like Davos and Bilderberg could never have prospered without the U.S. Navy, even if members of this elite are unaware of the fact. Though we live in the jet age, as much as 80 percent to 90 percent of global trade by tonnage is transported by water. That means the seas have to be relatively safe, especially around places such as Hormuz. The recent struggles of Dubai, an icon of globalization, demonstrates just how fragile our world is and always has been. Nice swipe of the Davos crowd. Never before have so many been so wrong about things so important—intentionally. Moreover, as I learned as a teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it was the navies of China and India that had become avid followers of Mahan. His ideas languished somewhat at Annapolis, despite there being a building named after him. While the role of the U.S. Navy was, by then, already publicly diminished, Beijing and New Delhi were concentrating on naval expansion and warfighting. To compensate for its stagnating number of warships, the U.S. Navy was intent on partnering with allied navies as a means to mask its own relative decline. As we have chronicled here, this is no surprise. I would encourage everyone to review—and you can get the documents if you ask for them—the hiring practices and selection criteria of historians hired at USNA, NHHC, and NWC in the decade from 2014 to 2024…but especially the worst years 2018-2022. People are policy. You get what you hire. What is retained, blooms again. We’ll touch on that a bit more tomorrow, but let’s get back to Kaplan. In November 2007, in The Atlantic magazine, I warned of the Navy’s “elegant decline.” I emphasized that the number of hulls in the water would eventually be more important than the number of boots on the ground. But naval power was the furthest thing from people’s minds amid all the fevered discussions about counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to reverse the downward trajectory of our fortunes in the chaotic deserts of the greater Middle East. Yes, but that critique is incomplete. What was needed at that time was a CNO who was willing to argue the long-term requirements in the face of short-term contingencies. If you want to see patient-zero, look at Admiral Mike Mullen, USN (Ret.), CNO from 2004-2007 and picked an admiralty in his own image that haunted the Navy for the next decade. I mean, Mullen pushed the “1,000 Ship Navy” cope, and his hand-selected successor Admiral Roughead extended the concept to include—no you can’t make this stuff up—NGOs. The most damaging CNO of this century to our Navy…and we’re naming a DDG after him. Amazing. Keep in mind that as a fleet stagnates, quantity increasingly equals quality, since a warship cannot be in two places at once. The U.S. buildup near the Strait of Hormuz hurts our deterrence against China in the South China Sea and near Taiwan. And this is to say nothing about our current long deployments that have led to maintenance problems and put undue stress on crews and their families. The Gerald R. Ford, an aircraft carrier deployed in the Middle East with a crew of over 4,500, has been at sea for 10 months now, a post-Cold War record. Correct. We do not have a large enough Navy…or enough carriers. We are an almost11-CVN navy in a 15-CVN world. Mahan was born in 1840 at West Point, the son of a professor at the United States Military Academy. His middle name, Thayer, honors the “father of the military academy,” Sylvanus Thayer, who brought the institution up to modern standards. His great, burgeoning Navy may sound like a warmonger’s dream. But Mahan was a realist. He wanted a great fleet for a purpose, because he believed in America’s spiritual mission. What kind of world do we want to live in? A world united by democracies that uphold a certain standard of human rights is incompatible with a weak Navy. That’s because a stable, humane world requires economic prosperity. That, in turn, requires relatively unimpeded intercontinental trade and commerce. And that requires secure waterways. That last paragraph is superb. Outstanding. In some way, we should all try to fold that into our conversations with people who don’t have a grasp of this simple, but powerful, concept. 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

ThinKom Solutions has won the U.S. Space Force’s “Fight Tonight” competition for 2026, beating out competing entries with a containerized satellite ground station designed to replace the kind of fixed dish antenna infrastructure that makes military communications vulnerable to detection and attack. Space Systems Command announced ThinKom as the overall winner on May 6, 2026, […]View the full article

Raytheon has landed its largest single order to date for the SharpSight surveillance radar, a 120-unit contract awarded by Blue Raven that the company says signals strong global demand for a system it is now ramping up to produce in bulk. The contract, announced by Raytheon (an RTX business), pairs the radar manufacturer with Blue […]View the full article

RENK Group AG recorded its highest-ever order intake for an opening quarter in company history, the German propulsion manufacturer announced on May 6, 2026, with approximately $657 million in new orders and a total backlog that has climbed to an all-time high of approximately $7.8 billion. The Augsburg-based company posted first quarter 2026 revenue of […]View the full article

EagleNXT has sold three eBee VISION unmanned aerial system kits to the U.S. Army’s 7th Army Training Command, the company announced on May 5, 2026, adding to a growing Army-wide adoption of the fixed-wing ISR platform that now totals 34 systems across six distinct organizations. The sale was facilitated by Dronivo, a German UAS integrator […]View the full article

Leonardo DRS opened 2026 with its strongest quarterly earnings performance in recent memory, reporting first quarter revenue of $846 million and net earnings of $62 million while raising its full-year guidance across every key financial metric, the Arlington, Virginia-based defense electronics company announced on May 5. Revenue grew 6% over the same period last year. […]View the full article

ARX Robotics is expanding its deployed fleet in Ukraine to five times its initial size, the European unmanned ground vehicle maker announced in May 2026, securing a new contract to supply several hundred additional GEREON uncrewed ground vehicles to Ukraine’s Defense Forces and cementing its position as the largest supplier of Western UGVs to Ukraine. […]View the full article

Russia announced missile tests at the Kura test range in Kamchatka scheduled from May 6 to 10, a window that brackets its Victory Day parade in Moscow and which analysts at Militarny are reading as a deliberate nuclear signaling move timed to deter any Ukrainian strike on Red Square. The announcement came from the Emergency […]View the full article

A Virginia-based counter-UAS training company has launched a program focused on the phase of a drone incident that most training programs ignore entirely: what to do after the drone is already on the ground. 38 Sierra announced Drone Incident Response Training, known as DIRT, on May 5, 2026, from Barboursville, Virginia, positioning it as a […]View the full article

Russia ignored Ukraine’s ceasefire initiative and launched a sustained overnight attack with drones and glide bombs within minutes of a silence regime taking effect, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha declared on May 6, calling Moscow’s parallel proposal for a May 9 ceasefire a political performance with no connection to genuine diplomacy. Sybiha posted the statement […]View the full article

Dawned on me as I was about to send the scenario that I was running on my modified database, which has a number of updates that include the units and weapons involved. I'm in the middle of updating several countries (Japan, DPRK, ROK) in my database to represent post ~2000 and omit previous years. Will shift gears later this week and remodel the scenario with the current game version database. If I have the same problem, will advise and send. 👍