All Activity

Dutch soldiers are training with anti-drone tunnels, the netted covered routes first developed by Ukrainian forces to shield vehicles from kamikaze drone strikes, after the Netherlands became one of the first NATO armies to integrate Ukrainian battlefield lessons directly into its largest military exercise in twenty years, Eindhovens Dagblad reported from the field in northern […]View the full article

If I am ever invited into someone’s personal study, office, or library—especially someone who puts themselves forward as a national security type—one of the things I not-so-subtly look for is maps, charts, or better yet, a globe. Yes, I will judge you. It matters. I have seen exceptionally credentialed and powerful uniformed and civilian leadership here and in Europe have an almost comical ignorance of the world in which they hold access to levers of almost unimaginable power. From a complete disinterest bordering on criminal unawareness of the bottom topography of the Baltic and Taiwan Strait, to not knowing where the Cape of Good Hope is, or even what a Great Circle Route is. That kind of ignorance gets people killed. They got their positions of power and influence for a whole host of reasons, but an understanding of geography and the ability to read a map was probably not one of them. This all goes back to not just an incomplete education—but an incuriosity of the fundamentals that makes me question completely anything these individuals have to say on any subject outside of the Coke v. Pepsi rivalry. Our regulars are probably tired of seeing me write, “Let’s go to the chartroom…”. It is more than a tagline. I mean it. You have to ground everything you do relative to the stage on which it is being presented. In the national security arena for a global power—it is the planet. But what representation are you using? What projection of that three dimensional object is informing your decisions? If someone says, “When you look at a map of the world…”, more likely than not, what will pop into your mind will be what is at the top of the post, the Mercator Projection. That may be one of the contributing factors to inadequate strategic thinking in the modern age. Of course, any attempt to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional format is going to create some problems. You need multiple perspectives, and often the one that best serves in helping you understand the challenge of the moment. As we continue to argue the point here, we don’t need a new force design, or national strategy, we need a national understanding. We need to understand the fact we are a maritime and aerospace power, and those are the two domains where the majority of fighting in any war against the People’s Republic of China is going to take place. It has a unique set of challenges that have nothing to do with politics, people, culture or anything from man; it has to do with the interface of land, water, time, and distance. As we learned and then forgot from WWII, any war in the far reaches of the Pacific requires range, scale, and the logistics system that appreciates both and can sustain the fight forward. Stop throwing spreadsheets and hundred-page think tank products at a leadership class that are more verbal and personable personality types than they are numbers and engineering thinkers. On top of that, they are busy. You need to catch their attention at the start and keep it long enough to give them the highlights of the Executive Summary. They like pictures…but you need the right pictures to make your point. I give you the Spilhaus Projection: In 1942 (Athelstan Frederick) Spilhaus tackled the problem of displaying the world's oceans in an unbroken view. He achieved this by carefully selecting antipodal points as the centers for two hemispheric projections.[12] However it wasn't until 1979 that he published maps using continental shorelines as "natural boundaries", including one that has become the typical example of Spilhaus's technique. It uses locations near Hankou in China and Córdoba in Argentina as poles with a cut joining them across the Bering Strait.[13] In 1991, Spilhaus published Atlas of the World illustrated with a large selection of maps having "geophysical boundaries", typically coastlines, in various orientations and for various purposes. He published several other papers and articles on the topic.[14] More recently, the Spilhaus Projection has been used to map multiple seafloor characteristics such as tectonic plate boundaries, hydrothermal vents, and drilling hole sites.[15] You can get a more full background here, but let’s discuss why this should be the map we should be pondering the most now. What are the top-5 even the novice should get? AUKUS is a must-succeed. Don’t balk. Don’t stutter. Don’t be difficult. Make it work. It reinforces our left flank. Australia and the Philippines are our shield and redoubt. Taiwan is the stopper that keeps the PRC relatively contained. If you lose that, Guam is your new front line. A strong Japan and South Korea must be made stronger and closer. They are our right flank. What does the PRC want? Once you accept that they want everything from the line drawn from Alaska to New Zealand to their coast under their uncontested control, but are more than happy to let us have everything on the other side, then you understand what they have been doing for decades in the small island nations in the Southwest Pacific. People grow up with maps that emphasize Europe and the North Atlantic. This projection breaks that mental fixation, putting Europe and the North Atlantic in a minor corner of the map, almost an afterthought that barely catches the eye. A slightly more recognizable version is below. Do you know that if you turn this into square tiles, they can all fit together in a repeating pattern? You can cover floors with it. It looks like this. When does the Secretary of War’s bathroom need to be retiled? h/t Simon KuenstenmacherLeave 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

Ukraine is turning to the global labor market to fill its infantry ranks, with Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announcing, that the government will license private recruitment companies to sign up foreign nationals for the Ukrainian Defense Forces, paying those firms approximately $7,400 per recruit they bring in while offering the soldiers themselves monthly salaries of […]View the full article

Cheap, mass-produced Ukrainian long-range one-way attack drones are breaking through one of the most expensive air defense networks ever assembled, with a 20 to 30 percent penetration rate that is proving sufficient to systematically dismantle Russia’s oil refining industry and degrade its military logistics, a Ukrainian officer with direct command experience in the deep-strike drone […]View the full article

A simply outstanding summary of the state of play in the re-vitalization of—and in parts re-imagining of—defense production capabilities can be found in an article in the June 5, 2026 Investors Business Daily, above the fold on page 1, by Harrison Miller and Paolo Confino. The White House is seeking expanded manufacturing commitments from defense contractors, is pressing automakers to convert spare production capacity to defense, and is urging NATO partners to supplement weapons production. The Trump administration aims not simply to rebuild stockpiles depleted by the war against Iran. It wants to revamp large segments of the traditional military industrial complex. Unlike previous buildups, this won’t just be the usual players we see in the defense arena (RTX (RTX), Lockheed Martin (LMT), Northrop Grumman (NOC), Boeing (BA) and General Dynamics (GD)). This expands the number of players we will use to expand our ability to project power. To meet the requirements of the war that more and more people are starting to appreciate, we can’t rely on the excellent few; we need mass. We have a need to scale. We need more, sooner, and are running out of time. We need more players with new ideas in the mix. …a raft of generally younger, innovative and efficient players — Palantir Technologies (PLTR), AeroVironment (AVAV), privately owned Anduril and others — are jockeying aggressively to seize opportunities. "The model of procurement is changing," said Dr. Jerry McGinn at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. "They (the White House) are doing these big deals to buy a bunch of munitions. But it's really more about how they're buying future systems, and the planning for future systems is different." Here’s the driving factor. Since the hangover from the “peace dividend” era and the turn of the century, more and more people have been warning about the self-delusion our natsec nomenklatura. They were happy to build their reputation and their retirement fund with interesting concepts, well-edited reports, and careful alignment with domestic socio-political priorities, all the while finding reasons not to be concerned with our criminally shallow magazines. Perhaps they’ve finally found religion. The expenditures this spring against Iran are just a whisper of what will be required in any Great Pacific War against the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I have little patience with people—especially the retired senior GOFO and political appointees—who have retreated to the fainting couch about what was used this spring against Iran…something we have been planning for since I was in middle school. Bells were ringing about inadequate magazines after every OPLAN revision and related exercises in the mid-late 1990s. After Desert Fox. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Constantly discussed in COCOM planning cells. We knew this. We were warned. Fine. We’re here—so let’s do something about it. Without action, we risk early culmination in any conflict west of the International Date line against the PRC, or being forced to let it simply devolve into an exchange of low-tech/high death (for us) secondary weapons options…or what you see in Ukraine right now—a slow slog. Those in the last two decades who sold “72-hour Wars” and exquisite “war winning technology” as opposed to doing the hard work of sustaining a realistic warfighting capability bear this blame, but we cannot do anything about the past. What are we doing now? Something better than we’ve seen in years. The aggressive start to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran depleted U.S. missile stockpiles. In the first 39 days of the Iran war, the U.S. expended more than half its prewar inventory for four critical munitions: the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), SM-3, THAAD and Patriot, according to an April report from CSIS. Mark Cancian, retired Marine Corps colonel and senior advisor for the defense and security department at CSIS, says the usage rate for precision munitions has been “very high,” but the rate for other munitions is comparable to operations like Desert Storm and the Iraq invasion. “It’s a high rate of usage, but I wouldn’t say it’s unprecedented,” Cancian said. These “exquisite class” munitions — highly advanced, high-precision weapons — are also very expensive, often priced at more than $1 million per unit. Rebuilding these inventories could take one to four years, depending on the missile pipeline, according to CSIS. The center noted these missiles would be critical for any conflict in the Western Pacific or with China. This must be a bi-partisan effort. It must outlast the Trump administration. I know that is a position that is hard for some to run with in an election years, but this is more important than petty political posturing. “The industry’s greatest concern is ensuring there’s a long-term commitment from the DOD to use the expanded capacity,” Cancian said. Dr. McGinn, director of the Center for the Industrial Base at CSIS, said defense contractors have a “difficult history” planning production timelines, due to volatile demand from the DOD. “If you’re a government program manager managing the Patriot program or if you’re a contractor building those systems and your order book is 70 then it suddenly changes to 50, that’s a big deal,” he said. New Missiles And Munitions ProgramsWhile the military has a bad reputation for cost management, the current budget effort looks to shore up some of its most sophisticated weapons systems with cheaper substitutes that can be built more quickly. “There’s a whole variety of systems that are just coming online, coming out of what I call the developmental primordial soup,” Cancian said. He noted these systems have been in development for “many years.” But the Ukraine war accelerated those efforts. “So there’s a variety of (counter-unmanned aircraft system) technologies that are coming online,” he said. None of these systems are one-to-one replacements for exquisite systems. But they do offer reliable complements and alternatives, which can help stockpiles last longer, according to Cancian. Last year the Air Force launched the Family of Affordable Mass Munitions (FAMM) program, which plans to procure 28,000 low-cost munitions by 2031. These include variations for fighter jets, palletized launches via cargo aircraft, and long-range cruise missiles. Some recent additions to the U.S. missile arsenal, including a range of FAMM designs, cost as little as $250,000. The Air Force lists Anduril, CoAspire and Zone 5 as vendors on budget documents for the FAMM program. Other firms have revealed cheaper cruise missile models such as Lockheed’s CMMT cruise missile, a modified Boeing-made Joint Direct Attack Munition, and Leidos Holdings‘ (LDOS) Small Cruise Missile, according to reports. The U.S. has even taken to copying some of its scrappier adversaries, developing its own version of Iran’s notoriously cheap and effective Shahed drones for just $50,000 apiece. These Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) drones are developed by privately owned SpektreWorks. Price ranges from $20,000 to $50,000. Scale. That is how we get scale. Without scale we will not be able to properly attack the PRC target set. It makes the operations in Iran look like what it is, a dress rehearsal. Wars are won with the application of mass, not by having the most exquisite wunderwaffe. In 2025, RTX, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin’s international sales grew faster than those to the U.S. government, according to company filings. RTX, the largest of the three, did $12.5 billion in 2025 sales to foreign governments, up 14% from the year before. Northrop Grumman’s overseas sales grew 20% to $5.99 billion, well ahead of the 3% increase for the overall company. At Lockheed Martin, international sales rose 15%, more than double its 6% overall revenue growth. Sales to foreign governments represent a comparatively small — but not insignificant — share of their total business. Lockheed Martin is the least reliant on the U.S. government, with 28% of its sales coming from foreign countries, compared with 14% for Northrop Grumman and RTX. NATO Arms Up; Will U.S. Defense Stocks Benefit?U.S. defense stocks are seeing added demand as European allies hike their defense spending. Nothing has driven high-dollar sales of U.S. weapons to Europe like Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and rising concerns that it won’t end there. Germany’s 2026 defense budget of $127 billion is more than double the roughly $62 billion it spent in 2021, according to data from NATO and the German government. In April, the French government proposed to add $39 billion to its defense budget through 2030. Britain is moving up plans to increase defense spending from 2.5% to 3% of GDP in five years. In April, RTX’s defense arm, Raytheon, agreed to two contracts with Ukraine and Netherlands for Patriot missiles, valued at $3.7 billion and $627 million, respectively. In March, Lockheed Martin signed a comprehensive agreement to provide the Czech Republic with F-35 fighter jets. Anything we can do to encourage the internationalization of the rebuilding of defense capacity should be roundly supported. Both we and the Europeans must fully understand that if a war erupts in the Pacific, all but a token American presence in European NATO will be available—and those will be second-tier forces. Everything will be heading to the Pacific. Europe will not be on its own, but they need to prepare to act as such. The House version of the Pentagon’s budget request now faces Senate scrutiny, which means political debate — especially in a midterm elections year. But despite the record-setting overall number, CSIS estimates the actual outlays — the amount that the Treasury actually pays out in a given year — will peak in fiscal 2028 at just under $1.3 trillion (in fiscal 2027 dollars). That could put outlays as a percentage of U.S. GDP at around 3.7% at the 2028 peak. That level is well below the Afghanistan War’s 4.7% ratio in 2010 and the Reagan-era peak of 6% in 1986. Defense outlay ratios were much higher during the Vietnam War and World War II. That helps explain how the current military budget could be a rare point of common ground in Congress, according to Gabelli Funds’ aerospace and defense analyst Tony Bancroft. “There’s always going to be (political) machinations and brinkmanship, but ultimately they’ll reach a deal,” he said. “Both sides recognize they want to get this done.” Investors and the contractors will almost certainly feel the same. “The primes are going to enter a major capex cycle if this bill passes,” Bancroft said. “The spending is real. It’s happening.” So, we wait—mostly—on the Senate. They have not even scheduled a floor vote yet. As a side note, the referenced article in IBD is a deep dive. I did not even cover the portion about the Golden Dome missile defense effort. Give it a read. 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

From australian abc news service https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-22/australia-canada-sign-billion-dollar-over-horizon-radar-deal/106827724?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

Ukraine appears to have struck one of the more obscure but consequential nodes in Russia’s weapons manufacturing chain, hitting the Sborka plant in Voronezh, a facility that Ukrainian military intelligence identifies as a supplier of specialized semiconductor components to three of Russia’s most operationally significant weapons programs: the Kh-101 cruise missile, the Iskander-K ballistic missile […]View the full article

Australia has sold its most closely guarded surveillance secret to Canada in a $2.5 billion deal signed on June 22, 2026, that marks the first international export of the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar technology and the largest single defense export in Australian history, giving Canada a system capable of detecting aircraft and ships approaching from thousands […]View the full article

A South Korean defense company that was barely known outside Asia a decade ago has received the kind of financial endorsement that opens doors in the international capital markets, after S&P Global Ratings assigned Hanwha Aerospace an ‘A-‘ long-term issuer credit rating with a stable outlook on June 22, 2026, placing the maker of the […]View the full article

Training photographs circulating from a Ukrainian Special Operations Forces unit show what appears to be a large-format acoustic hailing device mounted on top of a tactical vehicle, a system that analysts assessing the images tentatively identify as consistent with the LRAD 1950XL-RT manufactured by California-based defense technology company Genasys. The images represent the first observed […]View the full article

A photograph making the rounds among Russian military analysts shows the Russian Navy’s latest answer to Ukraine’s growing drone threat at sea: a thin green mesh net, the kind more commonly found on garden trellises or insect screens, draped over the superstructure of a 40-year-old landing ship tasked with escorting a cargo vessel through the […]View the full article

Ukraine’s drone interceptor crews cannot reliably chase down Russia’s new jet-powered attack drones because their aircraft simply are not fast enough to catch them before their batteries run out, a frontline Ukrainian air defense commander has revealed in an interview to Militarnyi. The commander, who goes by the call sign “Ramzes” and leads the anti-drone […]View the full article

An Indian-made artillery gun is now in the running to equip the U.S. Army, after AM General, the Michigan-based military vehicle maker best known for building the Humvee, signed a strategic partnership with India’s Kalyani Strategic Systems Limited at the Eurosatory defense exposition in Paris on June 18, 2026, and immediately submitted a joint proposal […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy is overhauling how it moves research from laboratory to warship, with its top science official announcing a new strategy that strips bureaucracy from the development pipeline and demands that the service’s $3 billion annual research budget stop competing with the private sector for work that commercial investors will fund on their own, […]View the full article

A surveillance drone that needs no runway, no catapult, and no dedicated launch infrastructure lifted off from the deck of a U.S. Navy warship in the South China Sea on June 17, 2026, and in doing so illustrated exactly the kind of warfare that keeps Chinese military planners up at night. Marines and Department of […]View the full article

King Fahd Air Base in Taif, Saudi Arabia, has marked a significant milestone in the Royal Saudi Air Force’s drive toward defense self-sufficiency, completing the first scheduled heavy maintenance overhaul of an RSAF Eurofighter Typhoon following the aircraft’s accumulation of 2,500 flight hours. The operation was conducted entirely on Saudi soil over a period of […]View the full article

A robotic combat vehicle carrying an autonomous laser weapon system designed to shoot down drones rolled onto the floor of a Detroit manufacturing conference this week, placing one of the most futuristic weapons concepts in modern defense squarely in the middle of America’s industrial heartland. Aurelius Systems, a defense technology company developing autonomous directed energy […]View the full article

A small British aerospace company has successfully flight-tested a long-range strike weapon under a UK Ministry of Defence program, validating a development model that bypassed the traditional procurement bureaucracy and delivered a working one-way attack system at a fraction of the cost and time that established defense primes typically require. Rotron Aerospace, a UK-based advanced […]View the full article

Europe’s largest missile manufacturer has successfully fired its newest ground-launched deep strike weapon twice in the span of three months, completing a development cycle so compressed that the weapon went from drawing board to live firing in under a year, a timeline that would have been considered impossible by conventional defense industry standards a decade […]View the full article

A known design flaw in the U.S. Air Force’s newest and most expensive aerial refueling tanker has now contributed to four separate midair accidents since 2022, including two incidents where the aircraft’s refueling boom, a 15-meter (50-foot) telescoping arm worth millions of dollars, was torn completely off the plane and fell into the ocean, Task […]View the full article

Britain’s military is exploring a radical new concept for its naval missile defenses, one where warships and robotic vessels can sit armed and ready to fire for a month at a time with nobody on board to maintain them, and the UK Ministry of Defence is now asking the defense industry to help figure out […]View the full article

Russia laid the keel of a new nuclear-powered attack submarine on June 17, 2026, the first vessel of its class to enter construction in six years and a signal that Moscow is pressing ahead with its most capable undersea weapons program despite the enormous financial and industrial strain of the war in Ukraine. The ceremony […]View the full article

Turkey has begun construction of a second naval replenishment and logistics support ship for the Portuguese Navy, marking a significant expansion of Ankara’s defense export portfolio into NATO’s maritime domain, Ulusavunma reported. STM, Savunma Teknolojileri Mühendislik, the Ankara-based state-affiliated Turkish defense technology company that serves as the prime contractor for the program, started construction of […]View the full article

A mystery military aircraft draped entirely in white fabric was spotted at Japan’s Gifu Air Base on June 18, 2026, triggering immediate speculation across defense-focused social media about what the shrouded airframe might be and why it was being kept hidden in plain sight on an active flight line. The sighting was first posted by […]View the full article

Russia appears to have modified its most advanced attack helicopter with new electronic warfare equipment, and the changes visible in recently released Russian military footage suggest the Mi-28NM is being adapted to counter the drone threat that has fundamentally reshaped the battlefield over Ukraine. Israeli defense analyst Guy Plopsky, who closely tracks Russian military aviation […]View the full article