Raw Intel

What a great weekend for a good old fashioned Midrats Podcast Maritime Melee! Petty domestic political posturing has decided to broach a whole series of our favorite subjects for the last 17 years: carrier shortages, neglect of our auxiliaries in our Combat Logistics Force, leadership at sea, ships adrift…enough for a whole series of shows, but Mark and I promise to keep today’s show to an hour. Join us LIVE from 5--6 PM this Sunday at this link. Jump in the live show chat and share your observations or direct a question to us. DON’T MISS IT! If you’re reading this after the show, check back on the Substack page late Sunday or right before your Monday commute, and we’ll h…

Somewhere in a Russian drone factory, an engineer looked at a satellite-jamming crisis that has cost the Kremlin countless drones and countless rubles, and solved it with the same tool Boy Scouts use to find their way out of the woods. A Ukrainian radio technology specialist says Russia has started bolting a basic magnetic compass […]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

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

The U.S. Marine Corps has awarded Accrete a contract to deliver an artificial intelligence platform designed to track and analyze narratives across social media, broadcast outlets, and messaging platforms in near real time. The contract covers Argus for Cognitive Advantage, a system built on Accrete’s Knowledge Engine platform. Accrete describes Knowledge Engines as tools that […]View the full article

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces recruited 11,177 personnel in Fiscal Year 2025, surpassing 10,000 for the first time in three years and marking a 1,453-person increase over the previous year. The turnaround reversed three consecutive years of declining recruitment that had culminated in fiscal 2023, when the SDF hit a record-low recruitment rate of just 51 percent […]View the full article

Poland may be preparing to buy around a dozen Airbus A400M Atlas heavy transport aircraft through the European Union’s SAFE defense financing mechanism, according to Polish defense analyst Jarosław Wolski, who cited unnamed sources in an August 25 post on X. Wolski wrote that the numbers he has heard range from 8 to 15 aircraft, […]View the full article

The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency awarded Rockwell Collins ESA Vision Systems, a Fort Worth, Texas company, an estimated $333 million contract to supply spare parts and repair services for the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System, a fighter pilot’s helmet that doubles as a targeting computer. The system, known in defense circles by its acronym JHMCS, […]View the full article

Finnish defense manufacturer Patria remotely operated an AMV armored vehicle located in Finland from a control desk in Tokyo, a distance of more than 7,800 kilometers (4,847 miles), the company said this week. The demonstration took place August 25-26, hosted by the Embassy of Finland in Japan. The Patria AMV was positioned at the Parola […]View the full article

At some point in the post-WWII era, someone looked over at that quiet, unassuming man and thought, “He’s just a banker.” Really? Picture in your mind a British officer from WWII. This man, John Cruickshank, is almost right from central casting Just a junior officer flying a slow seaplane out of the Shetland Islands, taking his crew north. Just another patrol. Flying Officer Cruickshank was twenty-four years old when he piloted a Consolidated Catalina anti-submarine flying boat from Sullom Voe on 17 July 1944 on a patrol north into the Norwegian Sea. The objective was to protect the British Home Fleet as it returned from the unsuccessful Operation Mascot raid on the German…

The U.S. Navy is running open-ended combat deployments in the Middle East without access to most of its regional supply bases, forcing ships to resupply at sea roughly every five to six days rather than pulling into port, The New York Times reported. Iran struck the Navy’s logistics hub in Bahrain on February 28, the […]View the full article

JP Aerospace, a volunteer-run organization that has spent decades pursuing an unconventional path to orbit using airships instead of rockets, has released still images from an upcoming concept video showing a vehicle it calls Hazel being launched from a high-altitude airship called SuperTandem. The images, shared by JP Aerospace president John Powell, show an animated […]View the full article

A team of engineers have proved that a helicopter design older than most of their grandparents can still out-fly the strangest, most futuristic drone shapes engineers could dream up. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s advanced research arm known for funding technologies that eventually reshape entire industries, announced that its Lift Challenge had […]View the full article

The Swedish Armed Forces will receive 45 heavy recovery and technical rescue vehicles built entirely in Poland, a deal that marks one of the few instances in which Sweden has turned to a manufacturer outside its own borders for this kind of specialized military hardware. Szczęśniak Pojazdy Specjalne, a family-owned vehicle manufacturer based in Bielsko-Biała […]View the full article

The U.S. Army’s search for a replacement to one of its most iconic armored vehicles is entering a make-or-break phase, and a nationwide network of American factories is racing to prove its design deserves the job. American Rheinmetall announced that its Lynx XM30 infantry fighting vehicle prototype is approaching delivery to the Army, a milestone […]View the full article

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) says its Alfa special operations unit is running what the agency calls a unique operation to isolate an entire stretch of front-line territory, using a category of strike drones it calls “middle-strike” to cut Russian supply routes. Over the past month, SBU special operations fighters destroyed or damaged nearly 2,400 Russian […]View the full article

As most regulars here know, on the 13th, President Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM), which was known in previous administrations as a National Security Memorandum. Most are aware of it because almost immediately there was much gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes, and general knee-bent running about concerning the future USS Doris Miller (CVN 81) having its EMALS replaced with steam and returning to hydraulics over a lot of the problematic electrical motors used in various elevators, etc. We’ll return to that in a bit—and it is but a small fraction of the story—but let’s make sure everyone understands what an NSPM is. It operates with the …

It is easy to forget how long the China Doves and the China Lobby—wait, I repeat myself—held absolute control of power and influence over the full spectrum of the American political nomenklatura. Bush-41 and Bush-43 were both supporters of a rising China. The Clinton Administration was LITERALLY the Coffee Klatch Era. Obama “welcomed China’s rise” … and everyone this century has been too distracted to slow the creeping influence and control of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the South China Sea to the Southwest Pacific. Only in the last decade has there been a real shift where the China Doves have lost the dominant position in most of the national security nom…

Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur military airbase in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province early Tuesday with eight airstrikes, an attack U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack said carried real risk of triggering direct military confrontation between Israel, Türkiye and Syria. “The Turkish forces did not know that Israeli aircraft were making their way to this specific […]View the full article

Lockheed Martin unveiled a new, cheaper version of its Patriot air defense interceptor at the Farnborough International Airshow, announcing that the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector, known as PAC-3 ACE, will cost less than half as much per unit as the missile it’s designed to complement, the PAC-3 MSE, which runs roughly $4 million per round […]View the full article