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AM General, the South Bend, Indiana manufacturer that has built the Humvee since the 1980s, was awarded a $98.7 million contract modification, according to a Department of War contract announcement, adding to an existing agreement for various models of the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, commonly known as the Humvee. The modification pushes the total […]View the full article

TCOM LP, based in Columbia, Maryland, was awarded a $447 million contract by U.S. Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to handle production, fielding, sustainment and lifecycle support for the Persistent Surveillance Systems-Tethered family of systems, an aerostat-based surveillance program the Army has relied on for more than a decade. The contract itself […]View the full article

The Pentagon’s Space Systems Command awarded Rocket Lab USA a $266 million contract for suborbital launch services, according to a Department of War contract announcement, covering 12 confirmed launches with an option for six more, all to be conducted from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska, through the end of 2028. The contract […]View the full article

NODA AI announced Wednesday it has secured a $10 million contract from the Department of War, the current name for the Department of Defense, to develop software that lets American military drones and autonomous vehicles keep executing a commander’s orders even after enemy jamming or cyberattacks cut off their communications links. The contract funds an […]View the full article

Footage of Stryker armored vehicles rolling off a cargo ship at a Thai port has been circulating on TikTok this week, and an open-source account tracking the videos says it points to a fresh shipment of American military hardware arriving in Thailand. The account, run by a user posting as Hem on X under the […]View the full article

I remember sending this off into the ether with a shrug 22 years ago as if it were yesterday. 22nd anniversaries are not that big of a deal, and I know many of you, like my friend Sid, have been with us from the start. I did a good origin story on the 20th anniversary post, so if you’re new, give it a read. At the 20th anniversary, my friend Claude Berube was kind enough to interview me on the inarguable UNCLAS Read Board Podcast that is outside the paywall. I think it ages well. I think for the rest of the 22nd I wanted to take note of a few things. First of all, in the last year, we saw the passing of a CDR Salamander Plankowner, Byron Audler, in April. A good man I had the pleasure of breaking bread with a few times. We also saw last fall the aforementioned Claude Berube—after two decades at the front of the maritime national security debate—decided to decouple from all that, delete almost everything online, and concentrate on things locally. As he told everyone for years, as his 60th year approached, another friend, Bryan McGrath, decided to back away from everything but musings on his Substack. Like with Claude, I respect their decision, but I will not take their path…at least not anytime inside the horizon I see. I know I’ve used the word “friend” a lot in this post. It isn’t by accident. There are “online friends” that may or may not be a friend IRL if they lived nearby. There are DC friends that really aren’t but are nice to be around as long as you understand the nature of that town and the reality that the friendship will exist only as long as they find you useful. That’s OK. It just is. There are also allies, some in the open and some you work with on issues in the background. Those are solid as well. There are also many of you—some who I have had the pleasure of meeting IRL—who I do consider in that perfect circle of acquaintances and friends that I enjoy seeing in comments and when fate allows us to gossip in person between panel discussions, share an adult beverage and/or cigar. Some, like Sid, Byron, Claude, and Bryan, I’ve know for a decade or two, some just in the last few months, but one way or another, allow me to say, “thank you.” Thank you for taking time out of your day to pay a visit here, leave a comment, drop a DM or email, or otherwise just entertain my imperfect observations of the things I see along the waterfront. Here’s to another year—and again, thank you for being part of the CDR Salamander community. Oh, and as a side note, as has become a tradition in the couple of years since I put out the tip jar, if you’ve been pondering becoming part of the paid subscriber community of CDR Salamander underwriters, we have an anniversary sale discount of 22% on yearly or monthly subscriptions which, in addition to my unwavering gratitude, gives you access to the paid-subscriber-only UNCLAS Read Board Podcast. If you are so inclined, follow the link and claim your discount before it expires at midnight Eastern. 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

Raytheon, the RTX-owned defense manufacturer based in Andover, Massachusetts, announced that the U.S. Navy awarded it a $1.8 billion contract extension for hardware production and sustainment of the SPY-6 family of radars, building on an initial contract the company received in March 2022. The extension carries options that, if the Navy exercises all of them, […]View the full article

The British defense giant unveiled BlackThorn, a new family of modular warheads built specifically for the current wave of cheap, mass-produced weapons reshaping modern warfare, from autonomous drones and one-way attack munitions to counter-drone interceptors, missiles and unmanned ground vehicles. BAE Systems designed the warhead family to be modular, meaning the same core technology can […]View the full article

BAE Systems, Boeing and Saab announced they have signed a formal teaming agreement to jointly pursue the UK’s next generation pilot training program, built around Boeing’s T-7 trainer jet, and the deal commits the companies to building a brand new final assembly and integration facility inside Britain. Advanced fast jet training currently runs through the […]View the full article

BAE Systems announced at the Farnborough International Airshow that it has signed a licensing agreement with an unnamed strategic defense partner to support local manufacture of the Light Gun artillery system inside Ukraine, giving Kyiv’s defense industry direct access to the technical know-how behind a weapon British and Commonwealth forces have relied on for half […]View the full article

Somewhere in a Chinese factory right now, a machine is stamping out a rare earth magnet that could end up inside a U.S. missile, and until this week, the Pentagon had no reliable way to force American weapons makers to stop that from happening. President Trump signed an executive order on July 20, 2026 aimed […]View the full article

As regulars here know, there are two defining cultures that shaped who I am. First, both sides of my family are Old Line Southern families who have been in the South for four centuries. Second, I grew up in Florida with the children of Cuban and Iranian refugees. The former, especially, shaped my view of the greatest cancer on this planet in the last two centuries—Communism. As a fellow Floridian of the same age, I just nodded and smiled when Secretary of State Marco Rubio's State Department published, Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism. It pulls it all together. It is a document that serves as a marker, a Ref. A, and a testament. I encourage you to put it on your read-list, but indulge me as I pick just a few things from it to share. For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history. … the most successful and enduring sphere of Cuba’s campaign against America has taken place on the ideological battlefront. Since the 1960s, the regime has served as the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism, forged around an overriding resentment and fundamental hatred of the United States and the broader West. The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa. Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States. Literally my entire life. In 1966, Castro convened the Tricontinental Conference. Among the organizations represented in the audience were the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Viet Cong, Puerto Rico’s leftist Pro-Independence Movement, South Africa’s African National Congress, and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, whose guerillas – including cadres trained in Cuba – would join forces with ANC militants to carry the African revolution into Rhodesia the following year. The Tricontinental magazine that was born from the conference became a major global influence in its own right, publishing quarterly issues brimming with radical essays, poetry and art, which circulated to tens of thousands of readers across nearly 90 countries. For decades, Tricontinental was the most influential vehicle for the global iconography of “anti-imperialism”: its fold-out posters of Che, Ho, Lumumba and other Third World revolutionaries and its colorful “Yankee Out!” flyers passed through every New Left publisher, student group, bookstore, and organizing committee in the West. Three years later, the Venceremos Brigade was born. Over the next half-century, the Brigade would transport thousands of American radicals to the island to network with regime officials and receive “political education” in the principles of the Cuban Revolution. U.S. officials would soon learn that the program was dominated by Cuban spies, designed and run as a vehicle for Havana’s operatives to infiltrate and shape the American radical milieu. All the usual suspects. In 1966, Castro convened the Tricontinental Conference. Among the organizations represented in the audience were the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Viet Cong, Puerto Rico’s leftist Pro-Independence Movement, South Africa’s African National Congress, and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, whose guerillas – including cadres trained in Cuba – would join forces with ANC militants to carry the African revolution into Rhodesia the following year. The Tricontinental magazine that was born from the conference became a major global influence in its own right, publishing quarterly issues brimming with radical essays, poetry and art, which circulated to tens of thousands of readers across nearly 90 countries. For decades, Tricontinental was the most influential vehicle for the global iconography of “anti-imperialism”: its fold-out posters of Che, Ho, Lumumba and other Third World revolutionaries and its colorful “Yankee Out!” flyers passed through every New Left publisher, student group, bookstore, and organizing committee in the West. Three years later, the Venceremos Brigade was born. Over the next half-century, the Brigade would transport thousands of American radicals to the island to network with regime officials and receive “political education” in the principles of the Cuban Revolution. U.S. officials would soon learn that the program was dominated by Cuban spies, designed and run as a vehicle for Havana’s operatives to infiltrate and shape the American radical milieu. I’ve mentioned a few times why in the late 1970s my family left the Presbyterian Church—a church we have been members of for centuries back to before we were kicked out of Scotland—because every Sunday became a Nicaraguan communist rally. My dad was right about two things: 1) Leave the church. 2) Don’t buy the coffee plantation and move the family to Costa Rica. That movement also benefited from its integration into Cuba’s broader proxy network. That network spanned the hemisphere, working through third countries, sympathetic governments, guerilla cells, clandestine networks, and transnational leftist organizations that could move soldiers, weapons, money, and messages across Latin America. (And beyond – via the Cubans, the Sandinistas were introduced to militants from the PLO, and reportedly traveled to the Middle East to receive training in PLO camps there).6 In the final phase of the Nicaraguan struggle, the Sandinistas were not simply a local insurgency. They were the beneficiary of a hemispheric revolutionary supply chain, drawing on an expansive cast of Latin American allies, militants, and fellow travelers, all operating inside the political and logistical space that Havana had spent two decades building. By 1979, Cuba was reportedly sending trained guerrillas back into Nicaragua, supplying heavy weapons, and possibly even inserting its own Cuban specialists, as well as organizing, arming, and transporting an “internationalist brigade” of militants from several Central and South American extremist groups to fight alongside the FSLN. Anyone who deployed/were stationed/took liberty to Puerto Rico in the 1980s and 90s knew the brief. Puerto Rican revolutionaries were a source of particular interest for Castro’s regime. So much so, in fact, that large shares of the entire movement were effectively built by Cuban intelligence services – “created,” as one 1999 Los Angeles Times report put it, “in consultation with Cuban intelligence agents.” ... The guerilla group proved to be the most active and deadly domestic terrorist organization of its day, carrying out as many as 130 bombings between 1974 22 and 1983. ... In 1979, a cell of AK-47-wielding Macheteros militants staged an armed ambush of a U.S. Navy bus, killing two sailors and wounding nine others. Less than three years later, a Macheteros ambush on four sailors from the U.S.S. Pensacola claimed another American life. …When the Macheteros fired an anti-tank rocket at the building housing the FBI San Juan headquarters in 1983, they used U.S. military hardware that had been captured in Vietnam and subsequently shipped to Cuba. The same Havana-supplied weaponry was used two years later in the Macheteros rocket attack on a U.S. courthouse in San Juan that housed the U.S. Marshals Service and other federal agencies. In another instance, the Macheteros militant Víctor Manuel Gerena – who holds the record for the longest-ever stint on the FBI’s Top Ten Wanted Fugitives list – led the armed robbery of more than $7 million from a Wells Fargo depot in 1983, hog-tying and drugging a bank worker by jabbing a needle in his neck. It is so good that all of this has been put together in one document to make official what most of us in Florida knew to be true, if only because of our proximity. By the mid-1980s, Latin America was the site of more acts of international terrorism against U.S. targets than any other region in the world, largely driven by at least two dozen Cuban-backed Marxist groups. Late-1980s estimates reported that Cuba had “worked quietly to train, build up, and unify” some 27 leftist guerilla groups across the region, totaling about “25,000 armed and trained members” in total. In 1986, Latin America accounted for about 55 percent of all incidents of terrorism involving U.S. targets. By 1989, it accounted for an estimated 64 percent. Cuba’s revolutionary ambitions were not confined to the Western Hemisphere. Starting in the early 1960s, the regime set up a network of training facilities around Havana that taught tens of thousands of militants from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and eventually North America how to handle weapons, prepare explosives, and carry out urban guerrilla tactics. In the first three decades of the Castro regime, at least 20,000 guerillas from “virtually every Latin American nation” had attended terrorist training camps in Cuba. From the mid-1970s to the mid1980s, another 20,000 people from around the world traveled to the island to undergo revolutionary “education” at Cuba’s Isle of Youth complex. The Cubans were not just concerned with the 3rd World. What was Venceremos? The Venceremos Brigade – described in one Senate report as among “the most extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States” – has brought some 10,000 American activists to Cuba since its first contingent in 1969. Its participants have included well-known elected officials, labor leaders, academics, activists, and a long list of other influential U.S. progressives. Since its creation, the Brigade has served as a tool for the Cuban regime to sponsor a wide range of subversive activities against the United States – ranging from influence campaigns to espionage and guerilla violence. It has been linked to the formation of some of the most infamous far-left terrorist movements in U.S. history. The first Venceremos Brigade – born out of a 1969 meeting between Cuban officials and radical American students – came at a moment when America’s emerging New Left was undergoing a shift away from campus activism and toward revolutionary violence. Many members of the first 216-person contingent that traveled to Cuba that year hailed from the faction of America’s radical left that would lead that transition. Several of the young American organizers of the first Brigade were also in the midst of forming what would come to be known as the Weather Underground. The revolutionary leftist group was born in 1969 – the same year as the Brigade – when the radical “Weatherman” faction split off from the collapsing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the national SDS convention. From the outset, they maintained a close relationship with the Cubans. FBI reporting relayed that the Weather Underground had “initiated, planned and organized the Venceremos Brigade (VB) trips” with the direct “encouragement and instructions of the Cuban government.” The next year, the Weathermen issued a “Declaration of War” against the U.S. government, and launched an unprecedented campaign of terrorist attacks across the United States, bombing targets such as the U.S. Senate, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Some of the organization’s members would carry that revolutionary war into the 1980s, allying with militant communist and black extremist groups to bomb U.S. military bases, execute prison breaks, and assassinate police officers. This is not ancient history. Fomenting a revolution within the United States has always been an explicit ambition of Cuban programs like the Venceremos Brigade. … In 1995, Barack Obama launched his first-ever run for political office in the living room of Dohrn and her husband, Bill Ayers – another co-founder of the Weather Underground who would go on to become Professor of Education at University of Illinois at Chicago. Dohrn was hardly the only former Venceremos radical to transition into mainstream power. Susan Rosenberg is a Brigade alumna who later joined the May 19th Communist Organization, a particularly violent terrorist offshoot of the Weather Underground that was responsible for the murder of two police officers and a security guard in 1981. She later became the vice-chair of the board of Thousand Currents, a powerful progressive nonprofit that served as fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. The Brigade’s alumni rolls also include not one but two mayors of Los Angeles. The first, Antonio Villaraigosa, served as mayor from 2005 to 2013; prior to that, he had served as Speaker of the California Assembly. The second, Karen Bass, is the current Los Angeles mayor. Bass was a leading Venceremos organizer in southern California and visited Cuba as frequently as every six months, according to an interview she gave in 1996. She would go on to serve in Congress, where she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus, and was widely considered to be one of the finalists for then-candidate Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick in the 2020 election. Bass’ friendliness towards the communist regime has not dissipated with age. In 2016, she traveled to Cuba with President Obama as part of a congressional delegation seeking to normalize relations with Havana; when Castro died that same year, she released a statement 46 mourning “the passing of the Comandante en Jefe” as “a great loss to the people of Cuba,” and extending her “condolences to the Cuban people.” That is enough pull quotes for today, I think. Again, I cannot recommend enough that you take the time to read this. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you pay attention to the apologists for communism around us. Do not let their connection go unmentioned. They, and their death cult, are still with us. …and pray for the eventual liberation of the people of Cuba. 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

An unmanned robot the size of a small truck just proved it can drag an artillery piece across a battlefield while hauling more than a ton of extra cargo at the same time, a feat that could let front-line units cut the number of vehicles and soldiers needed for a single resupply run. ABRIS DG […]View the full article

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, won a contract worth $199 million to provide research and development engineering support for the Sentinel program, the effort to replace the nation’s aging fleet of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, with work continuing through July 2029. Sentinel, formally designated the LGM-35A, represents the Air Force’s […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force has handed a Georgia drone maker a contract worth up to $90 million to build small, expendable aircraft designed to deny enemies the ability to fly. Tandem Defense, based in Richmond Hill, Georgia, won a new contract, meaning the U.S. Air Force can order any quantity of equipment up to the […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force wants to install a network of microphones at one of its most secretive bases in England, built specifically to hear enemy drones coming before anyone ever sees them. A newly published Air Force solicitation reveals that the 352nd Special Operations Wing at RAF Mildenhall is seeking a passive acoustic drone detection […]View the full article

Teledyne FLIR Defense announced it will begin assembling its Star SAFIRE line of thermal imaging camera systems at its facility in West Malling, Kent, after more than two years of planning and formal approval to produce the advanced surveillance systems locally for the UK Ministry of Defence. Star SAFIRE is a family of gimbal-mounted camera […]View the full article

The U.S. Marine Corps’ Program Manager Light Armored Vehicles held what the service calls a Marine Touchpoint event last month for the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle, letting Light Armored Reconnaissance Marines get hands-on time with the new vehicle, including a test drive, months before the program reaches its next major design review. The Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle, […]View the full article

A robotic gun mount built by a Texas firm just landed a spot on one of the Marine Corps’ most important counter-drone vehicles, giving Marines a way to turn an ordinary machine gun into an autonomous, AI-guided weapon. Allen Control Systems announced that the Marine Corps selected its Bullfrog autonomous weapon station for the service’s […]View the full article

A helicopter maker and an electric aircraft startup just proved they can bolt cutting-edge autonomy software onto a brand-new aircraft in under two weeks, a pace that would have sounded absurd for military aviation programs just a few years ago. Sikorsky, the helicopter manufacturer owned by Lockheed Martin, announced at the Farnborough International Airshow that […]View the full article

Lockheed Martin unveiled MORFIUS X-Rotor at the Farnborough International Airshow, an airborne counter-drone system built around a high-power microwave weapon that the company says can neutralize an entire swarm of hostile drones in a single mission, then land, get recovered, and fly again. A high-power microwave weapon, commonly shortened to HPM, works by blasting a […]View the full article

Ukraine has turned its signature long-range kamikaze drone into something considerably more dangerous: a standoff strike platform. The outlet Oboronka reported that its correspondent, present at the Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom, saw an An-196 Liutyi drone displayed on a Ukrainian stand carrying four missiles mounted beneath its airframe, a configuration that would […]View the full article

China stole a march on us. In any multiplayer game, you cannot get scope-locked. While you may focus on one enemy or one particular part of the game, others are not standing by idly, politely waiting their turn to move. No, they will encourage your distraction. They will let you indulge yourself in other problems. Meanwhile, they move through the unguarded gates into fertile fields. We live on a large, round ball—but we think right and left because that is what our maps look like on our wall, across our screens. North-up, head-down, obsessing about the grind off some hot, dry, legacy concern or wet tropical island no one has heard of. Where are moves taking place we are not watching? This week, the U.S. Coast Guard monitored the Chinese research ship Xue Long, which transited north through the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and over the U.S. extended continental shelf in the Bering Sea with a declared destination of the Arctic and the Xue Long 2, another China-flagged research vessel transiting to the Arctic. For the first time this year, Chinese vessels were tracked transiting through the U.S. EEZ and over the U.S. extended continental shelf (i.e., continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles of shore) in the Bering Sea. In response, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Munro (WMSL 755) executed Operation Frontier Sentinel to actively monitor the vessels during their northbound transit. This operation is designed to protect American sovereign rights, ensure consistency with international law, and position the Coast Guard to rapidly respond to any detected malign activity. China is not a maritime power. She is not a polar power. Indeed, she has no interests there, and yet she invests, probes, learns. Why? Because her primary challenger is a polar power, yet pretends it isn’t. Deludes itself into thinking it is entitled to its north, unchallenged. In the Arctic, one of her most critical assets sits there, relatively unprotected, especially from the sea. Is it? Our National Security Strategy, amazingly, does not mention “Arctic”, “polar” or “Alaska” once. The U.S. does not have a proper military presence at sea protecting our Arctic treasure. We do not have ice hardened warships. Adak, Kodiak, Nome and other forgotten, unrealized, or underutilized bases just sit there, unappreciated, ignored, neglected. I can only imagine the perspective from China looking at the blessing that Alaska is to the U.S. and how entitled the Americans act towards it—and the assumptions she keeps about its security and access. For China, the Arctic is a strategic embarrassment of riches. China’s neighbor to the north—sick, fading, distracted and holding some of her traditional lands from the Century of Humiliation—is also an Arctic power. That challenge also awaits its time. After long neglect and procrastination, there are positive moves. At last we have icebreakers on the way. Unarmed, but on the way. It should be seen as only a start. Put the Russians to the side. The Chinese move to the north is longstanding and accelerating. As she is doing in many places, where traditional power have grown complacent and entitled, she is moving in—regardless of what on paper it may look like. As mentioned earlier, China has no significant Arctic concerns, but she is a north Pacific power. She’s on the north side of the equator. What about the other pole? She was not part of the age of exploration when the powers of the time made their rules for the Antarctic. While we struggle to do the bare minimum to defend and reinforce our interests around our own Arctic territories in our hemisphere, we will be hard pressed to make more than a token show around Antartica. Let’s go, as we do, to the chartroom. What do you see? Two of our closest allies are right there. Natural Antarctic powers if there ever were some. Over as ASPI, our friend Elizabeth Buchanan is, as usual, on the hunt. In Antarctica, both Russia and China are redeveloping old stations and building new ones, at a remarkable pace. Advanced technologies enable polar research activities to blur the line between research and military application. These so-called dual-use capabilities (including satellite support infrastructure, drones and sensors) support collaborative research endeavours. But they clearly have military and intelligence value, in the future, if not now, and all without violating the Antarctic Treaty’s explicit demilitarisation terms. India joins Russia and China as a leading power in the polar regions. All three work to sustain permanent infrastructure, invest in operational experience on the ice and fund new capabilities there. Strategic competition seems to play out at the poles under the cover of benign science. States stretch and test norms via scientific research framing while accumulating strategic advantages in influence across governance forums and future resource leverage through early physical positioning. … Overnight, the polar regions have become strategic frontiers. Russia, China and India are three nations that appear to recognise this. What can Australia do? Australia’s complacent, reactive posture towards the polar regions is no longer tenable. Canberra cannot continue treating the poles as peripheral scientific domains best managed through diplomacy. Strategic competition in the polar regions should be viewed as a single broader power contest. Sharpened geopolitical rivalries at the ends of the Earth are helping to shape the contours of our emerging international order. My new ASPI report, Polar security: Strategic competition at the ends of the Earth, explores these issues. The polar contest that’s now well underway has three key drivers. The first is resource insecurity. The Arctic and Antarctica hold immense hydrocarbon and critical mineral wealth. In the Arctic, most discovered resources fall within the well delimited areas of Arctic littoral states. … An Australian polar strategy should prioritise friend-shoring to pool scarce assets, from icebreakers to domain awareness technologies, for collective advantage. Membership in the US-led Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact, must be treated as an immediate priority. This trilateral pact between the US, Canada and Finland is focused on designing and building polar icebreakers by pooling resources and industrial capacity to surge capabilities. The assumption that the Arctic and Antarctica remain insulated zones of Cold War-era cooperation is being overtaken by the converging trinity of resource insecurity, renewed strategic competition and environmental change. Neither Australia’s historical polar legacy nor its scientific leadership, trusted goodwill and continued quiet diplomacy will be enough to absorb the shocks of generational changes underway in the international system. Canberra must get moving. It is good to have friends. Friendships need to be valued and nurtured. You can amplify the value of those friendships when you find areas of mutual interest. In the north, the U.S. should do what it can to enhance its relationships with Canada, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and even Sweden and Finland. To the south, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile—with a nod to Argentina as she regains her economic footing—should be the power players.. We don’t have to be everywhere if our friends can help carry the load. Look at the bases already there. There is no reason to let China bully her way in the southern ocean as she has in the South China Sea. We have friends, many and deep. She has few, narrow and shallow. Leverage that…if we can. 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

Israel Aerospace Industries introduced ELLYON, a multi-mission aircraft that combines electronic attack capabilities with advanced intelligence-gathering sensors into what the company calls a single, all-in-one airborne platform, built to operate from hundreds of kilometers away while keeping the aircraft and its crew out of an enemy’s direct line of fire. Electronic attack refers to the […]View the full article

Anduril just unveiled a helicopter-killer’s replacement: a pilotless attack aircraft built specifically because attack helicopters have become too dangerous to fly. The defense technology company announced Thunder, an autonomous attack rotorcraft designed to fly alongside crewed helicopters like the Apache, absorbing the risk that increasingly cheap drones, loitering munitions, and persistent surveillance systems have turned […]View the full article