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Northrop Grumman has demonstrated a secure testing environment for radiation-exposed microelectronics under DARPA’s ASSERT program, the company announced on January 13, 2026. According to Northrop Grumman, the achievement is part of DARPA’s Advanced Sources for Single-event Effects Radiation Testing (ASSERT) effort, which aims to create compact laboratory alternatives to heavy-ion test facilities. The company said […]View the full article

The United States Missile Defense Agency has awarded Iridium Communications a contract on January 15, 2026, for work under the Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense, or SHIELD, program. The company said the award carries a ceiling of $151 billion and covers a wide set of work areas intended to field new capabilities for U.S. […]View the full article

Over at WSJ, recent Midrats Podcast guest and former Congressman Mike Gallagher, along with Kevin Wallsten remind us where we were just a year ago in their article, How DEI Caused a Military Recruitment Crisis. So much progress has been made over the last year in a move away from sanctioned sectarianism and institutional racial discrimination that it is easy to forget how bad things were. We should not forget. Much of the progress is based on executive action, not legislation or significant new action in the courts. With the courts, quite a few firewalls have been put in, but not enough. Without proper legislation, we are just one election away from returning to this. Under President Biden, senior officers worked to make our military less white, precipitating a recruitment crisis. During the first Trump administration, lethality was the military’s overriding focus. That changed in 2021. Mr. Biden issued an executive order embedding “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” across “all parts of the Federal workforce.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took the unprecedented step of ordering a “stand-down” to combat “extremism” in the armed forces. By the time an independent report commissioned by the Pentagon found these concerns to be baseless, they had already formed the ideological permission structure for a DEI crusade. This was endemic and promoted at the highest levels. In 2022, Gen. C.Q. Brown (later promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) issued a memorandum that set numerical quotas for everyone from white males to Pacific Islander females among commissioned officer applicants to the Air Force. Racial discrimination likewise distorted admissions to the U.S. Naval Academy. Black applicants scoring in the fourth decile had an admission rate higher than that of whites in the eighth decile. The authors refer back to the article from Jacob Savage that we covered in December. It is here they make the tie-in to recruiting, and it is spot on. …the military isn’t the media. It requires young people to sign up for unglamorous and sometimes dangerous jobs far from home. By signaling that white men were less welcome, DEI initiatives pushed thousands of them away from military service. Between 2013 and 2023, annual male enlistments in the Army fell 35%, from 58,000 to 37,700. From 2018 to 2023 the number of white Army recruits dropped from 44,042 to 25,070. No other groups saw such steep declines. Meanwhile the share of white high school boys who in Monitoring the Future surveys said the military is doing a “good” or “very good” job declined from 76% in 2014 to 57% in 2024. While all that was going on, in comments here, readers reported in first person how this overt discrimination was impacting multi-generational military families. Don’t forget, this was policy. The focus on DEI also fueled a “recommendation recession.” The percentage of white male veterans who said in a 2019 Pew study that they would advise a young family member to join the military was 81%. Only 63% said so in the 2024 Survey of Military Veterans, which also asked why. Far more white male respondents pointed to the military’s “DEI and other social policies” (66%) than to the “possibility of physical injury or death” (38%) or the “possibility of psychological problems” (35%). These recommendations matter: According to a 2023 article in the Journal, 80% of recruits have relatives who served. Good news, there has been nice progress in correcting the recruitment problem, and as part of a larger shift in the vibe at The Pentagon, it isn’t just among white men. Initial evidence suggests the reset is working, with the Pentagon announcing its “best recruiting numbers in 15 years.” All active-duty services met their fiscal 2025 recruiting goals, and 2026 recruiting numbers suggest “a strong and promising start.” The Pentagon hasn’t released data on white male enlistments, but the postelection 2024 Reagan National Defense Survey found a 12-point increase in the willingness of white people under 30 to serve compared with a year before. In the 2025 survey, the share of adults who would encourage a young person to join the military increased 8 points among whites and 14 points among veterans from two years earlier. DEI advocates often framed their initiatives as necessary to attract female and nonwhite recruits. Today’s evidence contradicts that self-serving view. Female recruitment is up from 16,725 in 2024 to 23,985 in 2025. Encouragement to enlist increased among blacks (9 points), Hispanics (14 points), and women under 55 (15 points) since 2023 in the Reagan National Defense Survey. As we have often pointed out here, perhaps it is because the nation has moved past 1973, and spot welding on an outdated and counterproductive Cultural Marxist theory on a free people is just a bad idea. We are not even close to fixing the larger problem, however. This note towards the end wraps it up nicely. If the U.S. wants to sustain its all-volunteer force, we must rebuild trust in the military as a uniquely egalitarian institution in which standards are uniformly high, excellence is rewarded, and no one receives special treatment. And we must maintain this commitment across administrations. Again, Congress must act. This progress cannot be sustained on Executive Orders, personality, or the whim of who is going to court or not. The present administration needs to use this as an opportunity to dig in the records and put out in public the red in tooth and claw discrimination we all saw on active duty. If they won’t do that, or perhaps in parallel with that effort, I think the trial bar might have some additional work to do. For those of us who have been writing about this topic and our readers, summary in the article is not news. This was not done on the down-low behind closed doors. We saw it on active duty. Heck, some of us were ordered to “make the metrics work” and participated in it. <guilty> We wrote about it at the time. I’ve been writing about such action since the Bush43 administration. Gen. Brown et al above is not the story, but the final form of the story. There are worse stories. Admissions and promotion are a zero-sum game. People were harmed. A class of people who should take action. A class action. All the records are there; all they need is proper discovery. I’d prefer present Pentagon leadership take a proactive approach in line with the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission” concept, but if not, let slip the lawyers of wrath. 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

The Finnish shipbuilder Rauma Marine Constructions (RMC) began production of the fourth Pohjanmaa-class multi-purpose corvette and laid the keel for the third vessel at its Rauma shipyard on January 14, confirming that all four ships in the Squadron 2020 program are now under construction. According to RMC, the steel-cutting ceremony officially launched production of the […]View the full article

The French Army has begun testing the next-generation Hermione unmanned ground vehicle at the Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan Military Academy, the service confirmed this week. The trials are being conducted under the Army’s Pendragon program, which focuses on integrating artificial intelligence-enabled combat systems into future military operations. According to the French Army, the objective of the first […]View the full article

Shield AI announced on Wednesday that it has begun wind tunnel testing of its X-Bat unmanned combat aircraft, marking the first major evaluation phase for the company’s next-generation autonomous strike platform. The company said the tests are intended to accelerate design refinement and reduce developmental risk as the aircraft moves toward flight demonstrations. According to […]View the full article

The United States State Department has approved a possible $800 million Foreign Military Sale to Kuwait covering sustainment and follow-on technical support for the country’s Patriot air-and-missile defense program, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said on January 14. The agency confirmed that it has delivered the required certification notifying Congress of the proposed transaction. According […]View the full article

Israel has deployed additional air-defense systems across several cities as of January 14 in response to growing concerns about a possible strike from Iran, according to multiple local reports. Residents in Haifa, Jerusalem, Netanya and Caesarea observed the movement and emplacement of new batteries that form part of Israel’s nationwide protection network against rocket and […]View the full article

When it comes to the United Nations’ various bodies, other International Organizations (IO), and the grifty universe of Non Governmental Organizations (NGO)—especially those involving “the environment”—no matter how cynical you are, you are not cynical enough. The whole scene has moved beyond farce, watching the activists across the West, from the Just Stop Oil neo-Luddite types, to the operationalized self-loathing deindustrialization and decarbonization actions throughout Europe whose advocates continue to ignore the world’s greatest polluter of the air and water—the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The reasons are multi-causal, from useful-idiot cluelessness on one end to red in tooth can claw Comintern-admirer dead-enders on the other. In the middle is the intersectionalist West haters and their strange bedfellows—mercantilists who don’t care what China does as long as it helps create fractional-cent increase in profits. Not content with wholesale poisoning of the land and water—they are on a drive to denude the world’s oceans of life. The PRC fishing fleets have been a global terror for a while, strip mining the seas and destroying ecosystems. In the last year, however, it has gotten even worse and no one is trying to do anything about it. It is a parade of horror at sea, and has come to the Western Hemisphere with even greater aggression. Via Isabella Anderson: China now accounted for over 80 percent of fishing in the waters off Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. China is ranked as the world’s worst nation in a IUU fishing index. Its fleet, by far the largest in the world, is regularly implicated in overfishing, targeting of endangered shark species, illegal intrusion of jurisdiction, false licensing and catch documentation, and forced labour. I received a brief earlier this month about what is going on off the Galápagos recently. …and yet, who is raising the alarm? The same pattern is visible on the other side of the continent. Their fishing fleets are so large, you can see them in space. The same people who bemoan an international world order built by Europeans and North Americans over the last two centuries, are they aware that the only other option is one led by the PRC? Where are the IOs and NGOs on this? The same place the WHO and other global health organizations are—under the influence of the PRC and her useful idiots. There is no a military solution to this, but there is a law enforcement and international relations solution to this—or at least a way to mitigate it. We should, with responsible allies and friends, support nations who want help with intelligence and planning—and resources. If the many nations just invested 5% of the money they are throwing in the mouth of Vaal for their climate cult into mitigate this irresponsibility on the world stage—the planet’s ecosystem will be helped to the benefit of everyone. Even more so, the local people who make a living by the sea will have their livelihoods and community stability given a chance to survive. 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

The Embassy of Japan in Ukraine announced that the final shipment of Japan Self-Defense Force vehicles designated for Ukraine arrived in Poland on January 12, completing Tokyo’s latest transfer of support equipment to the Ukrainian government. The delivery included 14 vehicles—1/2-ton trucks and High Mobility Vehicles—as part of an additional package approved in October 2024. […]View the full article

Epirus released video on January 13 showing its Leonidas VehicleKit high-power microwave system disabling a fiber-optic guided unmanned aerial system during a December 2025 live-fire demonstration at a U.S. government testing site. The company said the demonstration represents the first documented instance of weaponized electromagnetic interference defeating a fiber-optic controlled drone. According to Epirus, the […]View the full article

A United States Air Force MH-139 Grey Wolf executed its first operational mission on January 8 at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, flying alongside convoys from the 341st Missile Security Operations Squadron. The Air Force said the event marks the new aircraft’s initial integration into day-to-day nuclear security operations supporting the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missile […]View the full article

United States Air Force personnel released a photo of an MQ-9 Reaper assigned to the 431st Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron on January 13, showing the aircraft positioned inside a shelter at Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea. The Air Force said the squadron’s presence reinforces U.S. commitment to security on the Korean Peninsula and provides a […]View the full article

United States Army soldiers conducted HIMARS training with the Lithuanian Armed Forces on January 13 at the General Silvestras Zukauskas Training Area in Pabrade, Lithuania, as part of ongoing efforts to strengthen NATO’s long-range precision-fire capabilities along the eastern flank. The exercise involved crews from Task Force Pergale, Bravo Battery, 1st Battalion, 14th Field Artillery […]View the full article

The United States Navy awarded Sikorsky Aircraft, a Lockheed Martin company, a not-to-exceed $21.6 million order on January 13 to support transient engine torque test and certification work for the VH-92A Patriot fleet. The undefinitized order, issued under an existing basic ordering agreement, funds engineering and test efforts required for modifications to the aircraft now […]View the full article

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev opened the reconstructed Tartar Electromechanical Plant on January 13, during a visit in which newly developed directed-energy counter-drone systems were shown for the first time. The plant has been modernized as part of Azerbaijan’s expanding defense-industrial program overseen by the Ministry of Defense Industry. According to information provided during the […]View the full article

Destinus, a European aerospace and defense company, announced the updated versions of its modular precision-strike weapons and interceptor systems, releasing new details on the Ruta Block2 cruise missile, the Vector Vista Block2 navigation system and the Hornet Block2 quick-response interceptor. The company published technical descriptions of the upgraded systems on its website. According to Destinus, […]View the full article

United States Army soldiers from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division conducted Bradley Fighting Vehicle gunnery on Jan. 11-12 at the General Silvestras Zukauskas Training Area in Pabrade, Lithuania. The training involved live-fire exercises designed to validate crew performance and maintain readiness along NATO’s eastern flank. According to the U.S. Army, the […]View the full article

China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense confirmed on Jan. 12 that the export-oriented J-10CE fighter jet achieved its first combat victory last May, stating that the aircraft downed several adversary aircraft in an aerial engagement without suffering losses. The agency described the operation as the J-10CE’s first confirmed combat result. […]View the full article

Northrop Grumman delivered its 1,500th center fuselage for the F-35 Lightning II on Jan. 12, completing the milestone at its Integrated Assembly Line in Palmdale, California. The delivery reflects the current production pace of one center fuselage every 30 hours. According to Northrop Grumman, the Palmdale facility uses advanced manufacturing processes to build center fuselages […]View the full article

United States Central Command and regional partners opened a new coordination cell for integrated air and missile defense at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on Jan. 12. The Middle Eastern Air Defense – Combined Defense Operations Cell, or MEAD-CDOC, is housed inside the Qatar-based Combined Air Operations Center. According to CENTCOM, the cell brings […]View the full article

The Ukrainian Air Force’s Central Air Command confirmed on January 13 that Ukraine has fielded newly delivered U.S.-made Tempest missile-armed buggies produced by V2X, marking the first verified deployment of the mobile air-defense platform in active operations. According to a statement from Central Air Command, the Tempest system was introduced to address “modern challenges and […]View the full article

As you may have noticed, I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the latest unrest in Iran for a whole host of reasons/excuses, but part of it is simply not wanting to get too far ahead of my skis desiring something that would truly be a world-changing event. It would be a change that would alter the landscape so dramatically that I’ve become so used to, that it is hard to view the “what’s next?”. I was barely a teenager when the world and our nation were subjected to another monumental error by the Carter Administration and the West (mostly the French) — the betrayal of the Shah and the people of Iran. Of course, the Iranian people had agency here. As was the habit of fuzzy-headed leftists for most of the 20th Century, in another rash externalization of their own self-loathing, the Iranian left got into a popular front with communists and whoever hated the subject of their daddy issues and wound up being led by religious absolutists who wanted to create Year Zero—in this case the fundamentalist Shia leadership. The usual pattern through the 20th century was the communists, being the more ruthless of the various factions in popular fronts, would make short work of tearing down, compromising, and eventually lining up against the wall everyone else in their popular front until they had all the power. The smart money for those who did not appreciate the moment would have been for the communists eventually to grab power the same way in post-Shah Iran, but no…they were not against your garden-variety popular front. Oops. In this case, they overplayed their preferred dialectic and as such, failed to properly understand the ruthlessness of fundamental Islam (Shia flavor), and so we got the Islamic Republic of Iran. Instead of a flawed but functioning constitutional monarchy with the Shah trying to pull its people into the modern age aligned with the West, the world was handed this foul creation that would spend the next goin-on-five-decades exporting death, terror, horror, instability, and a soul-crushing view of the future under the oppression of a retrograde religion whose driving force was to subjugate and control. I already had friends whose parents, or at least one of them, who were from Iran when it all came apart. After the fall of the Shah, even more came over. I heard their stories growing up and going to school with their kids. Combined with the heavy Cuban influence in the Free State of Florida and the occasional grandparents of my friends who still had the tattoos on their arms from the Nazis in the 1940s, you can see how my worldview was shaped. Like all Americans of my generation, I grew up with a hostility to the Islamic Republic. I remember well in the silence prior to the national anthem at the 1979 Gator Bowl, some hero shouted, “The Ayatollah is an assahollah!” heard through much of the stadium that my dad thought was hilarious. I can still see his smiling face. There wasn’t, at least where I live, hostility to the Iranian people. They were our neighbors and friends. Good neighbors and friends. Heck, even today, my next door neighbor is from Iran and lives with his sons and grandson. He served our nation in Afghanistan on three tours. A great American who has a greater dislike of the Islamic Republic than I do. He puts out a great spread for Nowruz, BTW. During my time on active duty (1988-2009), like everyone else in my cohort in the Navy, I spent a lot of time worrying and working around the Iranians. Most of us are one degree of separation from knowing someone killed or maimed by Iranian supplied weapons in the last quarter century. You can fill a library with the stories of the malignant stain on the world emanating from the Islamic Republic. No need to catalogue it all here again. I’ve wanted to see the Islamic Republic fall since I was a teenager, and every few years there is a false hope. Will this time be any different? Maybe. The last significant uprising was the “Green Revolution” during the Obama Administration. Some think it could have come to something with the right support, but I’m not so sure. The Obama team were focused on working with the Islamic Republic based on their theory of the case. They weren’t interested in supporting the opposition. Things are different now, which should give us a bit more optimism. What’s different? Iran’s proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Hamas, and Yemen are the weakest they have ever been. Iran has thrown everything it had at Israel and the USA in the last year to little effect. The USA and Israel proved that they can attack Iran at will should they desire, knocking back the Iranian nuclear weapons program perhaps a decade or more. They just lost their New World foothold and money maker, Venezuela. The have lost their legitimacy in the eyes of their people, though they still hold power. The Crown Prince is actively involved and isn’t asking for a single American boot on the ground. Smart move, for if there were, any post Islamic Republic government would be tainted. The stage is set, but let’s return to a phrase I used at the opening of this: the Iranian people have agency here. Iran is a large nation in both size (2.5x the size of Texas) and population (90+ million souls). It has a culture going back thousands of years. The USA is past the era of invading nations and trying to make them…something we think they want to be. The people of Iran, if they want a future, must earn it. They will have to earn it as people often have to—with blood. How much blood? That depends on how much the Iranian people want a different future and how much the Islamic Republic wants to remain in power. Are we looking at a Soviet Union-like collapse, a Syria-like civil war, or a fizzle and fade to the status quo ante? I think the best bet is to watch the interaction between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regular Iranian Army, Navy, and Air Force—especially the Army. If the IRGC sees that they have no future in a post-Islamic State Iran/Persia, and they have few safe havens who will take them, will they fight or stack arms in a deal for amnesty? Will the regular army decide to not take a chance and just “eliminate” them in a massacre like we have seen in such conflicts in this part of the world from the dawn of time? We will have to wait and see. That is exactly what I intend to do. Watch for signs. I’m going to be careful, and I advise you to as well. Check your sources. Know their biases. Also, you will hear a lot from people who, mostly but not exclusively in the Democratic and European Union foreign policy nomenklatura, who at best have been accommodationalist to at worst outright supporters of the Islamic Republic. From promoting the JCPOA to sending pallets of cash…those people simply need to sit down and apologize. I want to end with this one note: the Islamic Republic’s government has shut off the internet, so that has cut off most usable information. However, Elon Musk has turned on Starlink for free in all of Iran. The best thing any nation could do—and something I hope the USA is doing—is to get as many Starlink terminals into Iran as possible. That is how you help the Iranian people leverage their agency if they desire a better future for themselves. For all the hate the left throws at Elon Musk, from opening the free speech gates on X, to giving Ukraine a comparative advantage over the Russians (Starlink again), to this act—freedom has no great advocate today. Heck, not just advocate, creator. 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

Pegasus Arms has released detailed operational results for its Pegasus Arms 25 heavy strike drone, confirming that Ukrainian forces used the platform in more than a thousand engagements throughout 2025, including over 560 sorties by a single airframe. The company disclosed the figures in an official summary of wartime performance. According to the report, more […]View the full article

The Royal Thai Army has signed a follow-on contract with China North Industries Group Corporation (NORINCO) for additional VN1 8×8 wheeled armored vehicles during a delegation visit to Beijing on January 11, according to official information released by the Royal Thai Embassy. The signing took place at NORINCO headquarters in Beijing and was attended by […]View the full article