NATO has more water than ships… And it’s a bit of a problem.

With thousands of miles of coastline, crowded shipping routes, undersea internet cables, pipelines, offshore energy infrastructure, and naval approaches to monitor, Russia only needs to find the sections that aren’t being watched at the moment it decides to act.

For a Russian naval commander, that task is exceedingly easy at the moment. But a Danish company is trying to change that.

Now, I’m not a Navy Puke, but I have it on good authority that crewed ships remain pretty important.

A manned frigate can identify a contact, launch a helicopter, board a vessel, escort shipping, and defend itself. But it can also cost hundreds of millions of dollars, require human crew that need pesky things like food and rest, and many ships may spend substantial portions of their service life training, maintaining equipment, or refueling.

There simply aren’t enough of them to park one beside every internet cable, wind farm, harbor approach, and shadow-fleet route from the Baltic to the North Atlantic.

Sure, aircraft cover distance quickly, though they eventually run out of fuel. Most satellites revisit rather than stare. Coastal radar can leave huge gaps beyond the horizon or behind terrain. A manned patrol ship can remain on station, though assigning a high-end combatant to watch one patch of water for weeks is an expensive use of a scarce hull.

That’s the gap uncrewed surface vessels are beginning to fill.

And why not? Uncrewed military ground vehicles in Ukraine get a lot of press, loyal wingmen autonomous fighters are the bleeding edge in air war, and Ukraine’s kamikaze USVs have put tens of thousands of tons of Russian junk on the bottom of the Black Sea.

But what about thousands of uncrewed floating sensor nodes spread across vast stretches of ocean? Sounds to me like a great idea.

Stormborn’s X-Wave 01 is a persistent sensor node: small enough to tow by road, cheap enough to deploy in numbers, and designed to remain offshore far longer than a crewed patrol vessel can without rotation.

Its job is to sit there like flotsam (or jetsam) and watch.

When X-Wave sees something interesting, it passes the problem to people and platforms better equipped to respond.

On June 25, this model received its first public Russian inspection.

It sounds like the start of a joke: A Russian corvette carrying roughly 100 sailors approached a Danish vessel carrying none. The Russians were scratching their heads in confusion while the Danes were enjoying a kaffepause in the control room.

The Danish vessel recorded the Russian warship, the sailors moving across its deck, the helicopter parked aft, and the small quadcopter the Russians launched to inspect X-Wave.

The Russians, meanwhile, received an unobstructed look at the radar mast, cameras, antennas, hull, and communications equipment aboard one of Europe’s newest autonomous maritime surveillance platforms.

Then the two vessels went their separate ways.

If you think about it, the Russians showed an amazing amount of restraint; their navy is typically reckless to a fault. I’m surprised they didn’t make up some BS excuse to board and inspect the Danish vessel.

This encounter may have been one of the more revealing naval events in the Baltic this summer.

Here’s exactly what happened:

On June 25, the Danish-built X-Wave 01 was operating approximately 30 kilometers southeast of Bornholm. Its owner, the maritime technology company Stormborn, had placed the uncrewed boat in an area where Denmark’s existing coastal surveillance coverage was limited.

The vessel sat at anchor with its Automatic Identification System, or AIS, transmitting normally. Its sensors were running. Its operators watched from a control room ashore.

Then the Russian Baltic Fleet corvette Soobrazitelny, hull number 531, approached without broadcasting its own AIS position. The Project 20380 warship passed within roughly 200 meters and launched a small quadcopter that examined the Danish vessel at close range.

Stormborn says its system detected the corvette with radar, identified it with electro-optical and infrared cameras, detected the Russian drone through radio-frequency sensors, and forwarded the collected information to the Royal Danish Navy.

Read more

I remember the first time I saw a Hellfire strike in person. It was the early 2000s at Fort Campbell and the unit was gearing up for its first Iraq rotation.

I was recovering from surgery, but I still somehow talked the commander into letting me tag along to the field with a video camera during a live fire exercise.

(I was the videography nerd in the unit and would often film our infantry company at the range or in close-quarters combat, and make VHS tapes dubbed to Metallica. These were the 8mm camcorder days, and I still have all these tapes somewhere. To my knowledge, none of them ever made it to the internet.)

Anyway, this was a few years before the invention of the Joint Fires Observer (JFO), who would normally communicate with the Apache pilot from the ground. Back in 2003, our commander’s radio operator would use an early version of the 5-line brief over basic FM radios to talk directly to the Apache pilots.

Because attack helicopters were classified as a commander’s “organic” maneuvering assets, we didn’t need a dedicated Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) or Forward Air Controller (FAC).

This obviously led to problems in those days. Grunty grunts sometimes struggled to talk to pilots using all that college-educated aviation talk… Hence, the invention of the JFO.

For a young company commander, having three Apaches as company assets must have felt like having the power of Zeus.

That day, I saw the twinkle in his eye.

“O’Donnell! Get the camera ready.”

“Yes sir!” I said with a growing smile.

A few minutes later, an Apache roared by. I didn’t even hear it coming over the gunfire on the ground. First platoon was executing Battle Drill 5: Knock out a Bunker located about 200 meters away. We marked our position with smoke and a few minutes later, I saw the hellfire; literally.

Members of the platoon fired their own AT4 rockets into the bunker at the same time it was getting hit by the Hellfires. With concrete powder still hanging heavy in the air, the assault element advanced.

I’m going to make it a point to find these tapes and digitize them, minus the Metallica for obvious copyright reasons. James Hetfield is quite litigious.

Now, thanks to the prolific Dylan Malyasov at Defense Blog, we have evidence of Ukraine using Hellfires as air defense missiles Franken-strapped onto a Dutch truck.

Wait, Hellfires for air defense?

Indeed. But this isn’t new. I actually made a video in January about Ukraine’s new Tempest buggy with armed with Hellfires.

During the Red Sands exercise in Saudi Arabia in September 2024, an AH-64D Longbow Apache tracked a hostile drone with its Longbow radar and killed it with [what officials strongly implied] was an AGM-114L Hellfire.

Israel had already been doing something similar with Apaches for years, including a shootdown of a Hezbollah drone near the Syrian border.

General Atomics later confirmed its own MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone had used the identical missile, guided by its onboard radar, to kill another small UAS in live-fire testing at Dugway Proving Ground.

So, when Ukraine’s 302nd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade formally unveiled a system called STASH this week, pairing Longbow Hellfires with a compact Israeli radar on a Dutch-built DAF YA 4442 military truck, it’s technically not a new use for the missile.

But Ukraine did find the fastest, cheapest, most practical way to turn the missile into routine wartime air defense.

Today, let’s look at how a missile, the AGM-114L designed for ground attack can be repurposed for air defense.

“AGM” stands for air-to-ground missile, and a lot of folks don’t realize that HELLFIRE itself is an acronym for HELiborne Laser, FIRE [and-forget missile].

Obviously, the air-to-ground designation is just a label.

From a physics standpoint, the missile itself only cares about five things: a sensor that can find or receive information about a target, guidance smart enough to steer toward a point in the sky where that target is going to be, enough speed and maneuverability to get there, a warhead capable of doing damage on arrival, and a launcher that can physically point it into a valid shot.

Hellfire already had four of those five nailed down.

The US Navy’s own public fact sheet says that Hellfire can function as an air-to-air weapon against helicopters and slow-moving fixed-wing aircraft.

The Longbow variant is the whole story

Most Hellfires guide themselves with a laser.

Someone paints the target with a designator, and the missile chases the reflected light home. That works beautifully against a tank. It gets considerably harder against a moving aircraft in darkness or smoke, because someone has to keep that narrow laser beam locked on a moving object for the entire flight.

The AGM-114L, the Longbow variant, throws that requirement out entirely.

It carries its own active millimeter-wave radar in the nose. So, the missile launches with a rough target picture already loaded in, flies the first leg on inertial guidance alone, then switches on its own radar seeker to find, lock, and finish the intercept without anyone holding a beam on anything.

That’s the decisive difference. A laser-guided Hellfire needs a human staring at the drone the entire time. A Longbow Hellfire carries the last, hardest part of the job inside its own braincase.

The millimeter-wave seeker was originally built to punch through battlefield smoke and darkness to find armored vehicles hiding underneath. It turns out those same all-weather qualities are exactly what you want when the target is a Shahed instead of a T-72.

Then there’s the Israeli radar…

I spent years working around radar systems, and the lesson that never stopped mattering was the hole between a radar noticing something and a radar being confident enough in what it noticed to shoot at it.

A search-quality return tells the crew something might be out there.

A fire-control-quality track tells the weapon precisely where that object is going to be after the missile has already left the rail.

STASH’s ground radar, widely identified as belonging to the Israeli-designed RADA family (though not officially confirmed component by component), has to build the second kind of picture, not the first, before anything gets fired.

The likely sequence probably runs something like this.

The ground radar picks up the drone and starts building a track, folding in position, altitude, heading, and speed over several seconds.

A fire-control system checks whether that track falls inside the Hellfire’s actual launch envelope.

Target data passes to the missile.

The launcher fires.

The missile flies its first leg on inertial guidance toward a calculated intercept point, then wakes up its own millimeter-wave seeker to search the expected volume of sky, find the drone, and correct itself home.

Nobody has published Ukraine’s exact wiring diagram for how the ground radar hands that track to the missile, so treat this as educated speculation.

In Ukraine’s case, the missile likely doesn’t fly toward where a drone currently is, because by the time it arrives, the drone has moved. The fire-control system must calculate an intercept point using the target’s speed, heading, and altitude alongside the missile’s own acceleration, flight time, and launch angle, then send the missile toward that future meeting point in the sky rather than the current one.

Like throwing a football to a receiver: You throw it at the spot where he and the ball are both going to arrive at the same moment, and the difference here is that the football has its own radar and remains religiously committed to correcting your throw on the way there.

Against a Shahed, this is actually a piece of cake.

The drone is slow, flies a comparatively stable route, and can’t maneuver aggressively even if its operators wanted it to, which compensates for the fact that Hellfire was never built as an AIM-9 Sidewinder chasing a fighter jet through hard turns.

The reason this is happening right now

So, STASH exists because of a very specific, very recent Russian adaptation.

A standard piston-engine Geran-2 flies around 180 to 185 kilometers an hour, slow enough that Ukraine’s fleet of cheap interceptor drones can catch and kill it. Russia has started fielding jet-powered versions of the same airframe that can push past 500 kilometers an hour, and a jet-powered Geran simply outruns anything Ukraine can chase with another propeller-driven drone.

That leak in the dam is exactly the hole STASH was built to plug, and Ukraine’s 208th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade has already used an earlier Ford F-350-mounted version of the system to intercept exactly this threat: jet-powered Shahed and Geran variants Ukraine’s slower interceptors physically cannot run down.

Tempest crews, running a closely related American-built missile-and-radar architecture from V2X, also uses Hellfires and had destroyed at least 21 Shahed-type drones by January of this year.

Here’s my Tempest video:

STASH looks like Ukraine taking that same basic package and distributing it across cheaper, more available vehicles.

No evidence of fragmentation

But there are a couple of complications here nobody’s talking about.

The AGM-114L carries a tandem shaped-charge warhead, purpose-built to punch through a tank’s reactive armor and then keep going through the hull underneath.

A traditional surface-to-air missile usually carries a fragmentation warhead paired with a proximity fuse, so it doesn’t need to physically strike the target at all. It just detonates nearby and fills the surrounding airspace with a bunch of angry steel bees.

Nothing in the publicly available material on the standard AGM-114L describes it carrying that kind of air-defense proximity fuse, which means Ukraine’s system, unless it’s running some undisclosed modified configuration, is likely leaning heavily on a direct hit or an extremely close terminal pass rather than a forgiving fragmentation blast.

That makes guidance accuracy the whole shebang.

A shaped-charge warhead that misses a Shahed by several meters accomplishes far less than one that arrives through the airframe.

So, let’s say the honest target list for STASH runs through Shahed and Geran-series attack drones, Gerbera decoys, larger reconnaissance UAVs, slow fixed-wing drones, and helicopters, with maybe some low-flying conventional aircraft under favorable conditions.

Cruise missiles are the interesting edge case. Defense Blog claimed that Hellfire simply cannot catch cruise missiles because they’re too fast.

Objection, your honor!

Ballistic missiles are definitely too fast. But a Hellfire can reach roughly Mach 1.3, and plenty of Russian land-attack cruise missiles fly subsonic. So, a crossing intercept geometry could theoretically produce a real shot at one under the right conditions.

So, you’re telling me there’s a chance?

If anyone could do it, I would expect Ukraine to be the first to hit a Russian cruise missile with a Hellfire.

The harder cruise missile-related problems technically aren’t raw speed at all. They’re detection range, how quickly the seeker can lock on, how much maneuvering energy the missile has left by the time it needs it, and the fact that it’s carrying an anti-armor warhead instead of a purpose-built air-defense fragmentation charge.

The RADA’s detection range depends on the target type, reaching up to 100 km for heavy aircraft, 45 km for medium drones, and 5 to 10 km for small mortars or rockets. For cruise missiles, DRS RADA Technologies claims it can detect cruise missiles at about 15 km.

Although, I should note that speed really isn’t the determining factor in radar detection. After all, the radar wave is moving at (carry the one) oh, the speed of light… I mean, it’s more like 99.97% the speed of light because of atmospherics. But still…

The real issue in detection is actually altitude and radar cross section.

So, Defense Blog is correct that STASH probably shouldn’t get marketed as “cruise-missile defense” without real combat evidence from Ukraine behind that claim. But the reason for that caution is just a set of engineering questions; and the Ukrainians are engineering savants.

Why the truck keeps changing

Also, STASH has now shown up on a trailer, a Ford F-350, and a Dutch military cargo truck.

This appears to be a case of Ukraine testing which chassis fits which mission.

A trailer works well parked next to a fixed asset like a power station or an airfield.

A pickup favors speed, dispersal, and quick relocation after firing.

A proper military cargo truck brings better off-road capability, more onboard electrical power, room for reloads, and easier integration into an existing air-defense unit’s logistics.

What matters here isn’t the vehicle at all. It’s that the missile-and-radar package is increasingly vehicle-agnostic, something Ukraine can bolt onto whatever chassis happens to be available and durable enough for the mission in front of it.

One last thing: The Hellfire isn’t exactly cheap.

Historical US procurement figures put a Hellfire’s fully loaded cost well into six figures once support and integration are factored in, against a Shahed that might run Russia tens of thousands of dollars.

That math looks different the moment the drone in question is descending on a transformer station or a radar site. Air defense was never really a comparison between the missile’s price tag and the drone’s price tag. It’s a comparison between the missile and whatever the drone is about to destroy if nothing stops it.

And older AGM-114L stock already sitting in Western inventories carries a kind of value that a fresh line-item purchase doesn’t. That money is already spent, friendo.

Ukraine’s live question tonight isn’t what the missile originally cost. It’s which interceptor actually exists right now to fire.

But just keep in mind that a Hellfire for a Shahed is not a winning math problem on paper.

Okay, so the Hellfire family has now flown off helicopters, drones, ships, and ground vehicles, against tanks, boats, buildings, and aircraft, which, methinks, points at something bigger than one Ukrainian truck.

The Army’s intended successor, the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile, blends radar and laser guidance in one weapon, and Lockheed Martin demonstrated JAGM firing from a vertical ground launcher against a drone earlier this year, which suggests the next generation is drifting even further away from any rigid air-to-ground label.

The strategic direction here is that future missiles are increasingly becoming common effectors wired into whatever sensor happens to find the target first.

A radar spots the drone. A command system assigns whichever weapon is closest and compatible. The nearest launcher fires. The missile’s original service branch and launch platform become irrelevant details rather than defining ones.

I keep thinking about that twinkle in my commander’s eye. He felt pure joy from blowing things up.

Back at Fort Campbell in 2003, I saw the Hellfire do exactly what it was built to do.

Twenty-three years later, I’m writing about the same missile family doing something nobody in that field at Fort Campbell would have guessed: Reaching up into the sky over a Ukrainian tree line and finding an Iranian-designed drone built in a shitty Russian factory, guided there by a radar bolted to the back of a Dutch cargo truck.

Actually, the weapon hasn’t changed nearly as much as the job has.

It still carries the same rocket motor, the same fins, the same logic. Somebody just pointed the whole package in a different direction and discovered it had been capable of that the entire time.

I’ll look for that 8mm tape, by the way. When I find it, digitized and Metallica-free, you’ll be the first to know.

Stay frosty.

Слава Україні!

Think of this as your weekly strategic weather report exclusively for paid subscribers. Five Six things to watch and what could break next in war, defense tech, and geopolitics. Just the pressure points most likely to shape the next seven days.

I try to keep this a no-nonsense, high-level brief to start your week… But snark occasionally seeps in.

If you want to understand how I build my OSINT dashboard, I wrote about my workflow here:

Source links in the text. Let’s jump in:

BLUF:

Trump canceled the biggest attack since World War II and Iran said there are no talks.

Russia floated a hypersonic submarine while burning through its hypersonic missiles in Ukraine.

Ebola set a weekly record for cases and deaths simultaneously.

Hungary lost 40% of its electricity in a heat wave.

Sudan killed 35 people in Darfur with a drone strike that barely made a ripple in the news.

Plus, Russian planes dropped eight glide bombs in a span of 90 minutes on residential districts of Zaporizhzhia. Stay sharp.

1. Trump Called Off “The Biggest Attack Since World War II.” Iran Says There Are No Talks

Trump said Sunday he decided not to carry out major strikes against Iran at the urging of Gulf allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, saying a plan was in place for US forces to carry out “the biggest attack since World War II,” but that he decided to give diplomacy more time after hearing from key Gulf leaders, as well as at the request of unnamed Iranian officials.

“Now what we’re doing is we’re talking to them in the form of a negotiation. It begins tomorrow afternoon,” he said, without providing further details or saying who would be involved.

Read more

I had high hopes for Substack…

In the early days, I would do the math in my head: If 500 people subscribed at $8 a month, that’s a cool $4K (before taxes and Substack’s cut)!

I have 172,000 subscribers on YouTube, so how hard could it be?

It was the promise of a lifetime! The dream job. Paid to write.

So, I put an insane amount of work into it. I write twice a week for free subscribers and three times a week for paid subscribers. But after two years of this, Substack is moving in the wrong direction.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my paying subscribers. I’ve gotten to know many of them, the frequent commenters, and they ask very good questions. My audience is hella smart.

But it turns out, the subscription model itself is fundamentally broken. We now live in an era where people, me included, are reducing monthly subscriptions, not adding more.

Jesus, have you seen grocery prices in the United States?

What’s worse, Substack appears to be going through an inexplicable influx of trolls. I’m basically venting here, but someone just commented on a video I reposted to Substack (from YouTube) claiming I was AI because of too many jump cuts.

If people knew the sheer amount of work it takes to make one of those videos, between writing, filming (on 3 different sets I built myself in my Michigan basement), editing (which I loathe, hence the bad jump cuts) color grading the Sony footage, scheduling, and community moderation, they would realize how much of an insult it is to say a video of me is AI.

(Just to be safe, I just asked my wife if I am AI and she said no, but she does tend to lie a lot, so who knows.)

And the coup de gras, if you will, is Substack’s new AI detector

So, here’s the thing: I wrote every word of my last article.

I researched the aircraft, checked the technical specifications against multiple sources, studied photographs of its antenna arrangement until my nose bled, worked through the electronic-warfare implications, and revised the bastard until it sounded like something I’d be willing to charge subscribers to read.

Then Substack’s new AI detector examined the finished piece and decided I was responsible for about 85 percent of it.

I wish you could see my face right now, but just imagine a 40-something white dude looking particularly dour.

The other 15 percent had apparently been written by a machine. A machine, mind you, that was not in the room, did not do the reading, and would not know a phased-array radar from a phased-out relationship.

I’ve been writing professionally for just shy of twenty years. My work tends to run structured, because I write about radar systems, military aircraft, Ukraine, electronic warfare, law, and global security… Oh, and I have a law degree. And guess what? Those subjects and that particular education REQUIRE structure.

Organization isn’t a “stylistic flourish” in this line of work. It’s the difference between a reader understanding how a jammer defeats satellite navigation and a reader quietly closing the tab and opening up Pornhub.

Apparently, organization itself is now suspicious.

Starting on July 21, Substack lets readers scan eligible posts, Notes, comments, and replies. The scan runs on a detector built by a company called Pangram, which then assigns a percentage estimating how much of the text was written by a human versus written with AI assistance.

Writers get some tools around it. You can scan your own drafts before publishing (not sure why anyone would do this if you genuinely wrote it), report a result you think is wrong, attach a “How I make this” note describing your process, or switch detection off for a given post.

Turn it off, though, and readers don’t see nothing. They see a message telling them “AI detection is unavailable” for this one.

Substack says the point is transparency, and CEO Chris Best has made the case with honest-to-God conviction. He’s argued that readers deserve to know whether they’re spending their attention on work that involved actual human thought. He coined the term “Claudefishing” for passing off machine text as your own and warned that a platform rewarding fakery could kick off a race to the bottom.

I absolutely agree with the diagnosis, and I want to be clear about that before I dismantle the proposed cure. Readers shouldn’t pay eight quid a month for someone to press a button, paste the output into an editor, and pretend they spent three days on it.

That’s a very real problem, it’s corrosive, and Best is right to worry about it.

I’m worried about it too.

This problem is especially acute on YouTube and Meta’s platforms, where AI slop seems to be proliferating faster than lice in the barracks at Fort Benning.

My disagreement starts with what Substack decided to do about it.

An “estimate” wearing the costume of a “measurement”

Substack calls the score an estimate.

Fine. The trouble is that the interface renders that estimate as a crisp number, and a number does not read like an estimate to a human being scrolling past it.

Listen friends: “Fifteen percent AI” sounds concrete… It sounds like a lab result, a plagiarism score, a blood-alcohol reading, a fucking vote count.

Almost nobody encountering that figure is going to mentally translate it into what it actually means, which is something closer to “this classifier detected stylistic patterns that fall somewhat near a region it associates with AI-generated text, which may or may not indicate anything at all about how the author actually worked.”

That’s not what “15 percent” communicates. “15 percent” communicates that a machine measured something and found it.

Here’s the thing the software can’t do: It doesn’t know who wrote the article. It wasn’t present for the research, the drafting, the revision, or the part at 11 p.m. where I deleted an entire section because it had bored even me, the guy being paid to care about it.

It has no access to my notes, my browser history, my document versions, or the voice memo I recorded in the car because I had an idea at a stoplight. It reads the final prose and classifies what that prose resembles.

Resemblance isn’t provenance. That’s my whole argument, and everything else is just me showing my work.

To be fair to Pangram, the company is upfront that it’s a neural-network classifier mapping text against learned stylistic patterns, and that it weighs many signals rather than leaning on obvious tells like em dashes or a few overused phrases. That may well make it a better classifier than the junk that came before it. But it does not make the classifier a witness to anything.

Don’t get me started on em dashes. I will forever be furious at large language models for stealing this from me. I’ve had to replace my em dashes with ellipses.

ELLIPSES! The fucking RC Cola of thoughtful pauses!

Why good human technical writing looks like AI writing

Large language models learned to write by ingesting an ocean of human writing, then getting tuned by human reviewers who rewarded outputs that were clear, orderly, explanatory, and easy to follow.

Pangram itself acknowledges that assistant models develop durable preferences for that helpful, legible style.

So where did those preferences come from?

Not the Goddamned MCU multiverse. They came from us.

From human writing that reviewers judged to be good, and from human trainers steering the models toward coherence and structure.

Now let’s look at what a competent explanatory writer, who writes about high technology, does on purpose:

He opens with a clear question.

Defines the unfamiliar terms.

Breaks a complicated system into parts.

Weighs competing explanations against each other.

Separates confirmed fact from analysis.

Uses transitions so the reader doesn’t get lost.

And ends a section on a point that actually lands.

None of that is machine authorship. It’s just what explanatory writing looks like when someone has done it long enough to be good at it.

ChatGPT and Claude were trained to imitate that kind of writing. The detector now encounters that kind of writing and treats it as evidence that the writer imitated the machine. The arrow is pointing backward. Pangram is not catching me sounding like an AI. It’s catching an AI that was built to sound like the exact category of explanatory writer I’ve spent two decades becoming.

I can’t prove that’s the mechanism from where I sit. But it fits the evidence better than the alternative, which requires believing that fifteen percent of an article I demonstrably researched and wrote was somehow authored by a tool I never opened.

I have been writing this way since before ChatGPT existed

The tell that this is a resemblance problem and not an authorship problem is that my prose looked like this years before generative AI was something a normal person could use.

I learned to define jargon because most readers genuinely don’t know what an active electronically scanned array does.

I learned to lean on analogies because explaining radar polarization with equations would send half my audience into a sudden medical emergency.

I learned to organize an argument because military technology already contains enough acronyms to give the CEO of Lockheed a hard on.

None of that arrived with a chatbot. It arrived the slow way, over years of watching exactly where readers got confused and rewriting the explanation until they stopped.

The industry used to have a word for the structure people now associate with AI. The word was editing.

And here’s the race to the bottom that Best warned about, coming in through the door he left wide open.

Once writers know their work gets a public score, some of them will start writing for the classifier instead of the reader.

Let that sink in for a second…

Maybe I toss in profanity because it reads as less assistant-like.

Maybe I insert autobiographical detours that have nothing to do with the subject.

Maybe I break clean paragraph structure on purpose.

Maybe I strip out the transitions that were helping.

Maybe I even leave a tyypo in as proof of life or reach for the obscure word over the clear one, or refuse to finish a thought cleanly, because a tidy landing looks suspicious now.

I can apparently prove I’m human by becoming a worse writer.

My subscribers get a weaker article. The classifier feels reassured. Everyone loses except the machine, who, by the way, was never the customer.

None of those moves make writing more human in any way that matters. They make it better at performing humanity for software.

The three bad doors

So, a falsely flagged writer gets three options, and every one of them is a trap.

First, leave the 85 percent human result up and trust readers to shrug off the other 15. Except the score exists specifically to shape reader judgment, and plenty of subscribers will read any nonzero AI percentage as a quiet confession.

Second, degrade my writing until the detector is satisfied. Now my editorial goal has quietly shifted away from accuracy, clarity, and rhythm and toward pleasing Pangram. I’d be serving the classifier and billing the subscriber.

Third, disable detection. Substack permits it, but readers then get “AI detection unavailable,” and in a system built entirely around suspicion, unavailable reads like the author has something to hide. (For the record, I’m leaning toward this option for all future articles; ya know, just refuse to play the game at all.)

Pangram says its false-positive rate is roughly one in 10,000 documents, and that it deliberately trains against hard human examples to keep that rate low.

Okay, I take that seriously. But it raises the question that actually matters here, which is: what counts as a false positive?

If a completely human article gets labeled 85 percent human and 15 percent AI, an ordinary reader would call that a false positive without hesitation. The company’s headline statistic may be measuring something narrower, like whether a document’s final categorical label tips all the way over into “AI-generated.”

Those are very different things. A detector can maintain a pristine document-level false-positive rate while still sprinkling small, wrong AI percentages across a huge number of genuinely human pieces.

I’m not accusing anyone of cooking the numbers. I’m asking a specific, answerable question: does a 15 percent AI score on fully human prose count against that one-in-10,000 figure, or not?

Until that’s clear, nobody can tell whether the reassuring statistic actually describes the product Substack has placed in front of readers, or a different one.

What could Substack do instead

I honestly don’t know how much longer I’ll be on the platform. My energy may be better spent focusing on higher-quality content for Medium, writing a tech-thriller novel I’ve always wanted to write, or give that time saved to my YouTube channel, which is growing exponentially. That dickhead saying my video, (of ME talking on camera), was AI, really got under my skin.

But if I were to stay on Substack, here are some ideas for Chris:

Drop the reader-facing percentage, because it implies a precision the tool doesn’t have in any individual case.

Rename the output to describe what the classifier can actually see, something like “stylistic similarity to AI-generated text,” which is honest, rather than “15% AI-assisted,” which is a claim about my process the software absolutely can’t support.

Set a genuinely high confidence bar before anything shows publicly.

Give writers a real appeal with a visible public correction when the tool gets it wrong.

Make opting out neutral instead of ominous.

And put the weight on the “How I make this” disclosure, where I can actually describe my research, my drafting, my editing, and any tools I used in context, because that’s a human account of provenance instead of a machine’s guess at resemblance. Right now that section is limited to 200 words which is not enough to explain my process.

Because the truth is, I do use AI.

I use generative AI as part of my research and planning process, mainly to help manage the volume of information surrounding defense, technology, and the war in Ukraine.

I have AI agents scan numerous (346) open sources for my OSINT dashboard, SITDECK, while VidIQ helps me track YouTube trends and see which subjects other defense creators are covering.

These tools surface leads and patterns. I still read the underlying sources, verify the reporting, compare conflicting claims, and decide what the evidence actually supports.

I also use Grammarly inside Microsoft Word for routine copyediting, mostly spelling, grammar, and the occasional passive sentence that needs to be rewritten more directly.

So, I wrote my last article. Pangram didn’t watch me do it, and Substack didn’t ask.

The detector looked at my finished prose, noticed that some of my choices resembled patterns it associates with AI assistants, and turned that resemblance into a number readers could mistake for a verdict about how I work.

Now I get to choose… Accept a permanent asterisk on work I wrote myself. Switch the tool off and let “AI detection unavailable” hang over the piece like a raised eyebrow. Or start making my writing rougher, stranger, more profane, and less useful until the software finally recognizes me as a person.

I’m not doing the third one. After twenty years, I know how I write, and my readers know how I write. The machine knows only what my sentences resemble, which is a different thing entirely, and a far smaller one.

If Substack wants to protect human writing, a good place to start would be to stop making human writers audition for a machine.

Wes O’Donnell is a real human, veteran of two branches of the US military (Army and Air Force), Juris Doctor, YouTuber, and very much dislikes dictators — especially American ones. This article is an outlier; I normally write about military technology and global security, with a heavy emphasis on pro-Ukraine topics. Subscribe if that’s your jam.

The most important sound in the footage is the one you never hear.

No countermunition fires.

No interceptor detonates.

No fragmentation blast tears the drone apart before it reaches the hull.

A Ukrainian FPV drone gets within range of the Russian T-72B3A in the village of Maiak, Donetsk Oblast, and the most advanced tank dome that Russia developed for three decades (and at a cost of enormous sums of rubles) has absolutely nothing to say.

The drone hits. Two others follow.

On July 24, the National Guard of Ukraine published the video below. This T-72 was in a column of ten T-72s, which supposedly lost at least nine crew members in the same engagement. The T-72 was also equipped with an Arena-M, which completed its acceptance and testing in 2024, and only began arriving at the front-line units in the summer, and was even designed and upgraded to counter the same threat that destroyed it.

Can we get a slow clap for Russian engineers squandering their Soviet tech legacy?

This appears to be the first publicly documented combat encounter between an Arena-M-equipped tank and an FPV drone, and on the evidence available, it’s also the system’s first documented failure.

Admittedly, one video can’t tell us whether the system was switched off, damaged, out of countermunitions from an earlier engagement in the same assault, or simply looking the wrong direction when the drone arrived.

What it can do, however, is put a face on a warning Russian analysts had already raised months earlier… that Arena’s radar might be running headfirst into a problem it was never built to solve.

That’s right… This is a radar story disguised as Russian failure. Let’s jump in!

What Arena-M is actually supposed to do

Picture a miniature air-defense system bolted directly onto a tank turret, because that’s essentially what Arena is.

Radar sensors watch the space around the vehicle.

A processor figures out whether an incoming object is a threat. Then, the system fires an explosive countermunition that throws a directed group of fragments into the object’s path, all without a human approving the individual shot.

The crew can switch Arena on or off. Once it’s live, the engagement happens on its own.

Russian descriptions put Arena’s interception zone at roughly 20 to 50 meters from the tank.

Compare that to a normal air-defense engagement, where an interceptor might get several kilometers of warning and several seconds to classify friend from foe. Arena gets a few dozen meters and, depending on the target’s speed, a window that can shrink to fractions of a second.

A radar picking up a reflection off some object in the sky is not the same thing as that radar identifying a drone.

And identifying a drone isn’t the same as building a stable track on it.

A stable track doesn’t automatically mean the system has determined the object is on a collision course with the vehicle.

And even a confirmed collision track might sit outside whatever narrow arc the countermunition launchers can actually cover.

There’s a real difference between a search-quality return, which tells a system that something might be out there, and a fire-control-quality track, which tells it precisely where that object will be a fraction of a second from now, precisely enough to trust with an explosive.

Arena needs the second kind. When Russian sources talk about the radar struggling to “see” FPV drones, the more accurate version of that sentence is probably that the radar can’t reliably turn a weak, ambiguous return into a track clean enough to fire on without also endangering the tank’s own crew or nearby infantry. After all, you don’t want Areana firing every time a bird flies by.

A radar trained on the wrong kind of threat

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That’s not confirmed. But if even part of it holds up, Ukraine attacked the trust between a radar and the crew reading it. That’s huge.

There’s been some chatter that Putin is considering a mass mobilization of half-a-million conscripts this fall. This info comes from Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation.

Just to be clear, I haven’t seen a published Russian decree, regional call-up order, or independent intelligence assessment confirming the 500,000 figure, (and I have AI agents listening to Russia 24/7).

But it’s definitely possible… Ukrainian intel is often right nine times out of ten, they have better resources than I do, and Putin hasn’t exactly been making good decisions lately.

So, how would a fresh injection of 500,000 poorly trained “soldiers” affect the front lines?

First of all, these would probably be mobilized reservists, not ordinary conscripts; the kind serving their standard period of national service. Russia could pressure regular conscripts into signing contracts, as it already does, but a half-million-man expansion would require another involuntary reserve call-up or some new legal mechanism.

As of right now, Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service estimates that Russia recruited approximately 195,000 contract soldiers during the first half of 2026, or about 1,070 to 1,090 per day.

That’s actually below Moscow’s annual target of 409,000.

Ukrainian estimates place Russian casualties during roughly the same period close to recruitment totals, which suggests Russia’s voluntary system is simply replacing current losses rather than “expanding the force.”

If Russia called up another 500k over six months, it would add about 83k new recruits per month before accounting for medical rejections, evasion, desertion, training accidents, support assignments, and ongoing battlefield casualties.

Even after those deductions, Moscow could potentially create a net force increase measured in the low hundreds of thousands by spring 2027.

This is just my estimate; not really a prediction. Russia may very well conscript men quicker than it can provide the necessary training and equipment. In fact, that’s almost guaranteed.

We saw the same thing in 2022 complete with soldiers outfitted with old, rusty rifles, no personal body armor, and family members shopping for medical supplies to send to the front lines.

The defensive effect would be much greater than the offensive effect

Ukraine’s current drone overmatch makes troop and vehicle concentrations more hazardous for Russia, but they don’t render infantry obsolete.

Infantry are still needed to occupy trenches, observe and guard against enemy tree lines, maintain patrols, and prevent Ukrainian infantry from crossing and occupying ungarrisoned positions.

In theory, mobilized Russian personnel can be used to reinforce and fill existing, thinned out defensive positions, construct additional defensive lines, establish defensive position reserves, rotate existing defensive position personnel, protect and defend logistics routes, command and control nodes, airfields, and munitions storage, and establish defensive positions in lower priority areas.

All of these would serve to improve and strengthen Russian defensive operations against future Ukrainian counter offensives.

And the impact would be compounded by the fact that Ukraine’s own defensive operations are also suffering from a lack of personnel. Even an unskilled Russian infantry soldier in a defensive position can create a problem for a Ukrainian offensive if that unit does not have the personnel to clear and occupy the position.

But I think the bigger danger is what mobilized troops free up…

Russia could assign these new soldiers to rear area positions and static locations. They could then send experienced contractors, drone operators, engineers, scouts and the remaining assault specialists to be organized into focused units.

Russia’s more experienced soldiers would be able to stop covering the less active sections of the line of contact.

Imagine Russia adds 300,000 usable troops after training and administrative losses. Perhaps only a minority ever conduct offensive operations. The rest could still free up tens of thousands of experienced personnel for attacks around Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka, Kupiansk, Sumy, or whatever sector Moscow chooses.

Russia could also afford to send small teams forward continuously, probe more locations, replace losses quickly, and force Ukraine to expend drones, artillery, mines, and operator attention on a greater volume of targets.

But I do think Ukraine’s drone overmatch limits some of the offensive payoff. Ukraine has built a deep zone of drone surveillance and interdiction extending from the front into Russia’s operational rear. And large troop formations are just begging for a SCALP or Flamingo cruise missile strike.

Huge groupings of troops require a few things that can be planned for, like transport trucks, fuel, food and water, and staging areas… All of these would have a big fat Ukrainian target on them because each one creates a detectible signature.

I think it’s more likely that Russia disperse the new mobiks into small groups and feeds them into existing formations rather than create one massive, visible army.

Current Russian attacks use small infantry groups that infiltrate through tree lines, ruined buildings, drainage ditches, and gaps in Ukrainian surveillance.

There are two reasons for this: These small-group assaults require less sophisticated command and control, which the Russian military is just plain bad at. As an added benefit for Russia, these small groups expose fewer troops to Ukrainian drones at any one time.

A fresh batch of conscripts would allow Russia to repeat those small attacks much more frequently across the front. This would burn through Ukrainian drones, artillery ammo, and probably patience.

Still, the training issue may be the true bottleneck for Russia.

They already have massive administrative and training problems at their current recruitment rate. Any future large, involuntary call-up would create massive pressure on already-existing shortages of instructors, facilities, and officers.

In theory, training 300k to 500k Russians to wear a uniform and fire a rifle is possible, but these so-called soldiers would have no knowledge of infantry battle drills, secure communications, artillery coordination, how to operate in an electronic warfare environment, combat medicine, vehicle maintenance, or any type of basic discipline whatsoever.

Two weeks simply isn’t enough time to make a new private off the street into a combat-effective soldier.

The last big Russian mobilization, World War II, gives us a glimpse into how Russia could do it, although Stalin never really solved the training issue.

It’s not a perfect comparison; before Germany invaded, the Soviet system combined universal military service, pre-military instruction, reserve obligations, and organizations that taught marksmanship, aviation, physical fitness, and other military skills.

A contemporary American assessment estimated roughly five million trained Soviet reservists and another six million with partial training before the war even started.

But for training, Stalin created a sort of national training conveyor belt: In September 1941, the State Defense Committee ordered compulsory military instruction for male citizens between 16 and 50. The basic program totaled 110 hours and emphasized drill, rifles, machine guns, grenades, and chemical-defense skills.

It was intended to provide at least rudimentary preparation before men entered the Red Army.

But it didn’t really work…

A 1942 Soviet inspection found poor discipline, desertion, inadequate weapons instruction, weak marksmanship, poor camouflage training, insufficient practice in combining fire and movement, and commanders who didn’t understand the weapons they were supposed to teach.

Putin’s wartime bargain, and what mobilization would break

The Kremlin’s deal with Russians has been clear: as long as you “support” the war (aka shout about your support for the war), and ignore it privately, the State will ensure that this war doesn’t disrupt your everyday life, your job, or your son.

So far, Moscow has kept this promise (barely) by using contract incentives, prisoners, migrants, debtors, and recruits from the poorer regions.

A call-up of 500,000 men puts the kibosh on that arrangement.

If you count the parents, spouses, children, and siblings of the half a million conscripts, the politically affected population would be in the millions.

The September 2022 partial mobilization was the greatest domestic impact of the war’s early years. Polling showed 47% reported anxiety, fear, or horror, while 23% reported shock.

Two-thirds of the surveyed population believed a wider mobilization was inevitable.

Protests occurred in cities with historically low levels of protesting. Draft offices were also attacked.

Putin was able to survive the call-up because of the limited scope.

Protests largely remained localized and borders were kept open just long enough for the most likely dissenters to leave. The burden for the war was then focused onto the poorer regions and ethnic minorities.

A second one would land on much worse ground

According to Levada’s June 2026 data, Putin’s approval rating dropped from 79 to 74 percent, disapproval rating increased from 15 to 21 percent, and the percent of Russians who think the country is on the right track decreased from 61 to 52 percent.

Compared to some Western countries, these numbers seem trivial. But in Russia, the numbers reflect a monumental shift.

The second call-up would follow multiple years of losses, increased inflation, loss of workers, Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil, and a long series of broken promises that victory was “just beyond the horizon.”

Mobilizing an additional 500,000 men would admit that the first mobilization didn’t touch the manpower problem.

Russian state media could call it the final push. But, Russian families have heard the phrase “final push” enough to do the math on what a second one implies..

The real danger for Putin sits with the elites, not the streets

Putin’s type of dictatorship is most vulnerable when a restless public meets a divided “establishment,” or the people who actually run the country, like higher-ups in the security services, governors, military leaders, aides to the president, and business leaders.

Currently, Russia’s elite seems stuck and unable to make a move against Putin, who, as it stands, still controls their finances. After two decades of dominating Russian politics, Putin’s regime has made the elite submissive.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains that the elite of Putin’s Russia have become managerial and bureaucratic in nature. Personalist dictatorship regimes can also rely for an extended period on repression, wealth, and a sense of mutual fear until the elite start to believe that the regime can no longer protect them.

This type of war demands ‘passive’ patriotism from the public. And if this intelligence is true, Russian citizens are about to drink from the patriotism firehose.

So, regardless of what happens to Putin’s prestige, here’s what I see in three stages in Ukraine:

In the first stage, maybe the first two months, there would likely be chaos within the Russian system: Overflowing training centers, under-equipped and unprepared recruits arriving at the front. The immediate benefit here would be filling depleted units.

During the next stage, after three to six months, there may be an improvement of defensive depth, with more frequent rotations of Russian troops, more personnel in the rear, and more attacks with concentrated experienced personnel. This would result in more pressure on Ukraine with weaker defended areas.

In the last stage, say six to twelve months, (and only if Russia is able to prepare, equip and organize the mobiks), then Russia may be able to create a meaningful operational reserve and may be able to launch attacks from the north.

I still don’t think this would be enough to break Ukraine’s defenses.

And I guess that’s my big takeaway…

Putin can pour more Russian souls into the meat grinder, may take some additional land in small amounts, but still wouldn’t be able to make meaningful gains in central or Western Ukraine.

It would, however, make any future Ukrainian counter-offensive more difficult by allowing Putin to “flood the zone” he’s captured already with enough Russian meat to make any Ukrainian attack a slog.

The best we can hope for is that any future mobilization hits an already weakened Putin regime and hastens his downfall.

Слава Україні!

I’m traveling today so I wanted to get out a lighter piece that’s meaningful to me. Back in the office tomorrow.

I’m a watch guy…

Wait, don’t leave!

I’m not the pretentious kind who buys shiny wrist candy for status.

Usually when I say, “I’m a watch guy,” I get some eye rolls. But my watch collection began with John Travolta trying to steal two nuclear weapons.

In the late 90s, my wife and I watched Broken Arrow, John Woo’s gloriously overcooked 1996 action movie where Travolta plays a rogue Air Force pilot wearing a two-tone Breitling Aerospace.

(This was before my Air Force days; I was still in the Army at the time).

The watch gets its own full-screen moment during a countdown to an explosion, which is the kind of excess a John Woo film considers restraint.

My wife noticed that I noticed the watch.

On our first anniversary, she bought me a very close facsimile to the Breitling: A Citizen watch that, at the time, was still quite expensive for a lower-enlisted servicemember, (but nowhere near the Breitling’s price tag).

That watch became the start of a collection, though “collection” gives the whole enterprise a bit more financial discipline than it deserves.

I don’t chase the fanciest movement or the best resale number. I don’t buy expensive watches for status. I really don’t like the color gold at all. I own watches because they mean something to me, and every one I keep has to earn its spot in the box.

The anniversary watch represents my wife, and the beginning of all of this. It’s the one that taught me a watch could be a bookmark stuck into a specific moment of your life; something utilitarian that you could also glance down at years later and teleport back in the room where you got it.

The second one came out of uniform. Nothing fancy; a plain G-Shock field watch that spent its formative years being introduced to carcinogenic environments no sane person would choose.

It got rained on, sweated on, and banged on metal like it was just another piece of government issue equipment. Through all of that nonsense, it kept on running. Because of that, I feel a type of loyalty to the brand.

The third marks a professional milestone I still don’t fully believe happened; the kind of thing younger me would have assumed was a clerical error if you’d told him it was coming.

None of the three showed up because an OMEGA forum promised a twelve percent annual return and the chance to be an insufferable prick at a dinner party.

They showed up because a person, a place, or a moment demanded to be worn.

The Ukrainian watch that kept finding me

Enter the Ukrainian Kleynod watch…

Kleynod kept turning up at the edges of my Ukraine reporting long before I ever went looking for it.

Hmmm, that’s a cool watch in that presidential photograph…

Wait, does that watch face have the Ukrainian Tryzub symbol?

A collection built around Antonov aircraft, the same aircraft I’d already spent years writing about in an entirely different context?

Eventually I stopped scrolling past it.

The Kyiv Watch Factory started in 1997, after Ukraine got its independence in 1991. It’s the first and only factory in Ukraine created to make watches on a large scale.

KWF made its first watch to commemorate Leonid Kadeniuk’s flight on the space shuttle Columbia for mission STS-87. This mission was the first crewed space mission for a fully independent Ukraine.

In 2002, five years after it was founded, the factory started the Kleynod trademark.

Kleynod assembles its watches in Kyiv, using some movements from Swiss companies (Ronda and Sellita). The outer case is made out of 316L stainless steel and the watches also go through a four-stage quality check, plus come with a 36-month warranty. I’m not sponsored by Kleynod despite this sounding like I’m trying to sell you one.

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Think of this as your weekly intel brief exclusively for paid subscribers. Five things to watch and what could break next in war, defense tech, and geopolitics. Just the pressure points most likely to shape the next seven days.

If you want to understand how I build my OSINT dashboard, I wrote about my workflow here:

Source links in the text. Let’s jump in:

BLUF:

The ceasefire pause is holding but Iran won’t call it a ceasefire. A man with a prior terrorism conviction just killed someone at Berlin Pride with a van and a machete. The Iran war burned through enough Patriot missiles to open a window of vulnerability over Taiwan. The Houthis are threatening to close the second major energy chokepoint. And Iran just threatened Kyiv. Adjust accordingly.

1. The Pause Is Holding. The Question Is Whether It’s an Off-Ramp or a Reload

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The smoke was easy to see.

On July 18, a fire at a Wildberries logistics warehouse in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, burned for four straight days and threw up a column likely visible from the orbit of Neptune.

That week, I included this strike in my weekly Monday intelligence brief for paid subscribers at Substack and one of my readers commented that the column of smoke looked quite apocalyptic for an Amazon-style warehouse.

And apocalyptic it was. It was obvious something bad had happened there.

While many of my OSINT colleagues across Medium and Substack wrote in detail about how this strike happened, nobody covered how Ukraine got the intelligence to suggest that something fishy was going on at Wildberries in the first place.

At the time, Zelensky said the facility, (along with a sister warehouse in Kotovsk), had been used to supply sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment to Russia’s military operating in Ukraine.

Obviously, he didn’t say how Ukraine knew that and he didn’t name the components, the sellers, or the shipments.

But I think we can make some educated inferences.

Somehow, between pulling out burnt up parts of a Russian drone in Ukraine, and maybe 360,000 square meters of a distribution center outside of Moscow, Ukraine’s intelligence was able to find a connection between two things that have no business being connected.

One sells a service that provides fiber optic cables to fund and fully equip an army, and the other sells Adidas to teens in Krasnodar.

The overnight bombings on July 18 left a total of 8 people dead, 7 nighttime employees of the Kotovsk distribution center in Tambov Oblast, and 1 in Elektrostal. A ninth died in the hospital days later.

Hundreds of people were injured, including 61 of the Moscow region’s employees according to their governor.

Then, the bombings continued. 8 Wildberries Logistics hubs were hit after the first night. This comes out to about 10% of the company’s storage capabilities. PBS confirmed bombings in Koledino, Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, near St. Petersburg, and even a storage hub in occupied Crimea.

Somebody in Ukraine went after Wildberries with a vengeance.

The company Russia’s volunteers turned into a supply depot

Russia still relies on their defense industry for big projects. But, much of the smaller, urgent materials and tools for day-to-day operations of drone units come through a different method. This involves private manufacturers, volunteer fundraisers, and regular online marketplaces coupled with Telegram.

Since Defense Ministry contracts take time, defense units can rely on fundraisers set up by private citizens to buy things such as flight controllers and motors. These fundraisers operate much like online marketplaces, from which goods are shipped to defense units.

Wildberries became a great online marketplace for these fundraisers.

Even Ukraine relies on these methods of citizen fundraisers. In fact, my subscribers and I have used Car4Ukraine to fund two vehicles which were then up-armored and sent directly to front line drone units in Ukraine. No government bureaucracy required.

But Ukraine is a small country.

This type of fundraising has been normal-ops for the bootstrapping nation since 2022. By contrast, Russia was ranked as one of the world’s most powerful militaries before the invasion… Implying, at least in theory, that Russia wouldn’t need the same level of civilian-level fundraising.

This points to some level of logistical dysfunction or grift within the Ministry of offense, but I don’t think this is a big surprise to most of my readers.

While researching this piece, I assigned my OSINT AI agent to monitor the company’s own public catalog and found 178 listings for fiber-optic drone spools and 444 for drone-drop equipment, some explicitly advertised as compatible with VOG-17 and VOG-25 grenade rounds, alongside flight controllers, motors, electronic speed controllers, thermal sights, body armor, and anti-drone gear.

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Ukraine shot down a Russian Su-35 on July 8th using a three-aircraft F-16 ambush and a repositioned Patriot battery, exploiting a Russian intercept habit that had worked every time; until Ukraine built the entire trap around it. Russian military bloggers, including Fighterbomber, confirmed the loss and described it themselves: three aircraft plus a Patriot against one of theirs.

Ukraine didn’t out-gun the Su-35. It out-thought the pilot flying it.

From orbit, the damage looks slightly awkward; like looking at a broken arm that’s definitely not supposed to bend that way.

Two Tu-95MS bombers sit parked beside each other o…

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A Russian propaganda blogger posted some photographs to his Telegram channel last week and accidently revealed a new Russian tactic aimed at slowing down Ukrainian deep strikes.

Best case, he likely got a visit from the FSB (or soon will). Worst case, he might have an unfortunate tumble out of a high-rise building in the near future.

The pictures show an Mi-8, the Soviet-era transport helicopter that’s been hauling troops and cargo since the Bay of Pigs, wearing a set of flat panel antennas along its fuselage that nobody outside Russia had documented before now.

Ukrainian OSINT analysts at Militarnyi studied the images and said the helicopter looks like a flying jammer built to blind the satellite navigation aboard Ukraine’s long-range strike drones.

That’s my reading also. Russia can now fly a dedicated GPS dead zone wherever it thinks the next wave is coming.

Actually, Ukraine got to the same idea first, using a Czech-Slovak carbon-fiber ultralight that weighs about as much as a mid-life crisis Triumph motorcycle.

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Hey friends.

Somewhere in a training cycle a long time ago, an infantry instructor drilled a simple rule of thumb into my head about spotting a hidden enemy: …

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Think of this as your weekly strategic weather report exclusively for paid subscribers.

Five quick things to watch and what could break next in war, defense tech, and geopolitics. Just the pressure points most likely to shape the next seven days.

If you want to understand how I build my OSINT dashboard, I wrote about my workflow here:

Source links in the text. Let’s jump in:

BLUF:

Nine consecutive nights of strikes and Iran still has 80% of its mine-layers. Ukraine hit Russia’s version of Amazon. China fired a nuclear missile over the Philippines while everyone watched the Middle East. Ebola added 560 confirmed cases in a week. And US servicemember deaths rise to seventeen since February. Stay sharp.

1. Nine Consecutive Nights of Strikes. Iran Still Has 80% of Its Mine-Layers

CENTCOM confirmed it completed the ninth consecutive evening of strikes against Iran Sunday, targeting Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and communications networks; all aimed at degrading Iran’s ability to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

Just to clarify here… Nine nights is a campaign, not a response.

The operational logic CENTCOM is executing is systematic degradation of the infrastructure Iran needs to threaten the strait, coastal radars, SAM sites, small boat pens, and missile storage. The problem with that logic is the inventory math. Even after having more than 50 Iranian naval vessels destroyed, Tehran still has over 80% of its small boats and mine-layers available to seed the strait with traps.

While the exact size of Iran’s mine stockpile is unknown, previous estimates suggested the Islamic Republic has access to roughly 2,000 to 6,000 sea mines on hand.

Before the war, approximately 20% of the world’s oil was transported through the strait. Six vessels transited the critical waterway in the past 24 hours, according to MarineTraffic data, showing the increasing strain ships are under at one of the world’s busiest maritime passages. Six vessels per day versus a pre-war baseline of roughly 138. That’s not a functioning international waterway.

What I’m watching: Whether Secretary Rubio’s statement Sunday: “The United States always remains open to a diplomatic solution. We’ve tried multiple times with Iran, and we’ll continue to try,” is the beginning of a genuine de-escalation overture or diplomatic BS designed for the ASEAN audience he was addressing in Manila.

Also watching CVN-72 Abraham Lincoln’s positioning; any movement out of the Arabian Sea changes the strike math immediately.

2. Ukraine Just Burned Russia’s Drone Supply Chain. The Target Was Chosen Carefully

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UPDATE: as evidence of how fast the story is currently moving, as of Sunday morning, Fedorov is expected to move to the National Security and Defense Council, where he would chair a newly established Defense MilTech and Strategic Planning Coordination Council.

If confirmed, the position would place him in direct service to President Volodymyr Zelensky and give him broad authority over Ukraine’s defense technology portfolio, including the Brave1 innovation initiative, long-range drone development, and the country’s missile programs. The new council would reportedly allow Fedorov to coordinate these efforts with fewer bureaucratic layers than exist within the Defense Ministry or General Staff. His portfolio is also expected to include continued oversight of anti-corruption efforts in military procurement, expanding digital transparency across defense logistics and auditing contracts after an initial review identified roughly UAH 300 billion (about $6.6 billion) in potential savings through procurement reforms.

Beyond domestic reforms, Fedorov is expected to remain one of Kyiv’s chief envoys to Western governments and investors, helping attract foreign investment into Ukraine’s defense technology sector while continuing to expand the successful “Danish model” of joint defense production with European partners.

Hey friends, happy Sunday.

Let me say one thing before we start. I’m an American sitting comfortably outside a war Ukraine has been fighting for its life for over four years. I don’t get a vote on how Volodymyr Zelensky manages his own defense ministry during that fight. Zelensky made this call for reasons that aren’t fully public yet, and Ukrainians are the ones who’ll live with whatever comes next, not me.

With that said, what just happened deserves a close, honest look, because it’s a genuinely fascinating test of something I care a great deal about. Whether a wartime reform outlives the reformer.

On July 15, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s 35-year-old defense minister, announced he’d been removed from the post after six months.

In that short stretch, he became the political face of Ukraine’s effort to make its military move at the speed of the technology reshaping the battlefield around it, and now everyone gets to find out whether that speed was ever actually institutionalized, or whether it was just one guy running very, very fast.

What happened, and what’s still murky

Fedorov’s removal landed inside a much larger cabinet shakeup, triggered when Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko resigned and Zelensky brought in Naftogaz’s CEO, Serhii Koretskyi, to replace her.

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For forty-four years, NATO has watched the sky with an American aircraft. The E-3 Sentry AWACS. Boeing 707 airframe, rotating radar dome on top, sixteen crew, flying since 1982, the nervous system of every major NATO air operation since the Cold War.

Last week, at the NATO Summit in Ankara, the alliance announced its replacement.

It’s Swedish. The radar is made by Saab. The airframe is a Canadian Bombardier business jet. And the US, which walked away from the E-7A Wedgetail replacement program last year and told Europe to figure it out, was conspicuously absent from the contract.

Eleven NATO nations signed up for up to ten GlobalEye aircraft, worth roughly four and a half billion dollars, on the same week Washington was publicly insisting that Europe buy American defense equipment.

Here’s the part that makes this more than a procurement announcement. Ukraine has been flying the smaller version of that Swedish radar since March 2026. And one of those aircraft reportedly helped Ukraine’s F-16s shoot down a Russian Su-35 in June 2025. NATO didn’t just pick a good aircraft. It picked the aircraft that’s already been tested against the adversary NATO is buying it to face.

I have a personal interest in this story. I spent years on the aircraft NATO just decided to replace.

Hey friends, Wes here. Defense journalist, Army and Air Force veteran, law grad, international relations degree, and former E-3 Sentry AWACS radar tech. Today we’re covering NATO’s selection of the Saab GlobalEye as its next airborne early warning and control aircraft. Why Saab beat Boeing, why Ukraine’s connection to this story matters, why Canada is now building both the airframe and buying the aircraft, and why this is one of the more consequential defense industrial decisions NATO has made since the Cold War ended.

I wonder what Boeing is thinking at this very moment?

[BOEING joke in video]

Here’s the contrast worth understanding before we get into the hardware.

For four decades, the foundational assumption of NATO’s airborne surveillance was American. The E-3 Sentry was American. The Boeing 707 airframe was American. The JTIDS data links were American. The whole architecture was built around US industrial capacity and US technological leadership in the domain.

That assumption died quietly in November 2025 when the US Air Force cancelled its own E-7A Wedgetail procurement in favor of space-based sensors, triggering a chain reaction that left NATO’s planned replacement program without its strategic and financial foundation. The US walked. Eleven NATO nations were left holding a capability gap and a 2035 deadline.

They solved it by hiring Sweden.

That’s not a knock on anyone. It’s a signal about where the defense industrial center of gravity in NATO is moving, and who has been building the relevant technology while everyone else was watching.

Let me explain what GlobalEye is and why it’s different from what it’s replacing.

The Saab GlobalEye pairs the Erieye Extended Range radar with a Bombardier Global 6500 business jet airframe. The Erieye ER is an Active Electronically Scanned Array radar mounted in a fixed “balance beam” fairing on top of the fuselage, scanning 60 degrees either side of the aircraft’s track. Unlike the E-3’s rotating rotodome — which sweeps in a full circle every ten seconds — the Erieye ER uses electronic beam steering to cover its sector without mechanical rotation. It can detect and track air, surface, and ground targets simultaneously, which is something the E-3, designed as a pure air surveillance platform, cannot do in the same integrated way.

The GlobalEye also incorporates a Leonardo Seaspray maritime surveillance radar, a FLIR electro-optical and infrared sensor, Electronic Support Measures, IFF systems, and an Automatic Identification System receiver, making it a multi-domain platform rather than a single-domain one. You get the air picture, the maritime picture, and significant ground surveillance capability in one aircraft.

Saab’s CEO put deliveries from 2030, conditional on a quick contract, with a formal in-service target of 2031, at around $400 to $450 million per aircraft. For context, a new E-3 AWACS cost roughly $270 million in early 2000s dollars. The GlobalEye is more expensive, more capable, and built on a commercial airframe that’s cheaper to maintain and operate than a 1960s-era Boeing 707 derivative.

No contract has yet been signed. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced the alliance will begin formal negotiations with Saab, which is different from an order. The path from announcement to signed contract to delivered aircraft still involves considerable bureaucratic distance, but the direction is confirmed.

The short version of this story involves one decision in Washington that nobody in Brussels saw coming.

NATO had originally selected the Boeing E-7A Wedgetail in 2023 as the initial element of its future airborne surveillance capability. That plan came apart after the US Air Force moved to cancel its own E-7 procurement in favor of space-based surveillance. When the US walked away from its own program, it pulled the financial and strategic foundation out from under NATO’s version. The Dutch Ministry of Defense, speaking on behalf of the other partner nations, announced in November 2025 that the Wedgetail acquisition had lost its strategic and financial basis.

Since Saab’s GlobalEye was the only alternative available in the European market, it became the obvious candidate. But obvious candidate and confirmed winner are different things, and GlobalEye had been building its order book for exactly this moment.

The UAE already operates the type. France ordered two in December 2025 with options for two more. Sweden ordered three as its own replacement for the aircraft it donated to Ukraine. Canada selected six. Germany’s draft 2027 budget carries about 3.4 billion euros toward the program, set aside, in the budget’s own reasoning, because the United States is no longer willing to finance airborne early warning in Europe.

Wait, what? Germany put a line item in its defense budget explicitly justified by the United States no longer being reliable. That is a real sentence in a real government document. File it next to every conversation you’ve had about NATO cohesion and European strategic autonomy, because it’s one of the most honest government budget justifications I’ve seen in years.

After years of watching its Gripen-E/F fighter lose export battles to the F-35, Saab finally found its redemption when NATO chose the GlobalEye as a replacement for its aging AWACS fleet. The F-35 took Saab’s fighter market. The Wedgetail collapse handed Saab the surveillance market instead. It’s a strange path to winning, but winning is winning.

The E-3 AWACS is the air picture. When NATO or coalition forces conduct any major air operation, somebody up there at 29,000 feet is building the real-time picture of who’s in the sky, where they are, where they’re going, and what they’re likely to do. That crew of seventeen-ish people, mixing pilots, navigators, and mission specialists, is the difference between an air operation that sees the battlefield and one that’s guessing.

The thing that makes this job genuinely hard is the volume. On a busy night, you’re not tracking five contacts. You’re tracking hundreds, mixed military and civilian, some squawking transponders and some not, some at altitude and some floor-hugging in ways designed specifically to stay off ground radar. You build that picture continuously, in real time, under the pressure of knowing that what you miss gets people killed.

What the GlobalEye’s Erieye ER radar adds to that picture, the multi-domain capability, the ability to simultaneously track low-flying drones and cruise missiles alongside aircraft, is the capability the mission has been missing for thirty years. The E-3 was built for the Cold War air battle. Massed Soviet aircraft, clear altitude bands, relatively predictable threat signatures.

The current threat environment includes Shahed drones at 200 meters altitude, hypersonic glide vehicles, cruise missiles terrain-following at 50 meters, and fighter aircraft mixing in commercial air corridors to complicate the picture. The E-3 can see most of that. The GlobalEye is built to sort it.

Here’s where this story gets personal in a different way.

Sweden donated both of its Saab 340 AEW&C aircraft to Ukraine in May 2024, as part of its biggest military aid package to Ukraine at the time, worth approximately $1.25 billion. These aircraft carry the earlier generation Erieye radar, not the extended-range version in GlobalEye, but the same fundamental technology family. They give Ukraine what it never had before: a domestic airborne early warning capability independent of NATO aircraft flying missions from Polish and Romanian airspace.

The Erieye radar system aboard the Saab 340 can detect low-flying cruise missiles such as the Kh-59MK2 at distances of around 160 kilometers, helping cover gaps in Ukraine’s ground-based radar network.

And then, in June 2025, one of Ukraine’s Saab 340 AEW&C aircraft reportedly participated in the first ever shootdown of a Russian Su-35 by an F-16. The Erieye radar built the picture. The F-16 executed the intercept. The kill chain worked.

Sweden ordered three GlobalEye aircraft as its own replacement for the Saab 340s it donated to Ukraine. Sweden gave Ukraine the old aircraft and bought the upgrade. NATO then bought the upgrade. The lineage goes: Ukraine gets the Erieye family, proves it works against Russia, Sweden upgrades to GlobalEye, NATO follows.

That’s technology demonstrated in combat against the adversary everyone else is buying it to deter.

Here’s the honest state of play on what this announcement actually is.

Saab has not signed a contract or received an order from NATO for GlobalEye. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced the alliance will begin formal negotiations. Formal negotiations is bureaucratic for “we’ve agreed on a direction and now begins the process of agreeing on a price, a timeline, workshare arrangements, sustainment contracts, basing agreements, and the forty other things that have to be resolved before metal moves.”

The 2031 in-service target is Saab’s stated goal conditional on a quick contract. NATO procurement history suggests “quick contract” and “large multinational aircraft program” have a complicated relationship. The E-3 AWACS will retire around 2035. That’s the hard deadline. Whether GlobalEyes are operational before the gap opens is the question procurement officials in eleven capitals are now working to answer.

The US withdrawal from the program also creates a structural asymmetry worth naming. The original E-3 AWACS fleet was a shared NATO asset, partly underwritten by American participation and operating under American technical standards. GlobalEye will be a European-led program without US participation. That means European nations carry the full bill, European industry gets the contracts, and European operational doctrine has to evolve without the historical US backstop. Whether that’s a problem or a feature depends on who you ask in Brussels in 2026.

Here’s what this decision actually represents beyond the aircraft.

At a summit whose organizing demand was that Europe buy more and buy American, the alliance’s flagship surveillance program went to a Swedish sensor suite on a Canadian jet.

That’s the sentence that contains the whole story. NATO spent a year being lectured about buying American. Then it hired Sweden for the most important surveillance contract in the alliance’s history, because Sweden had the technology, the track record, and the demonstrated capability against the relevant adversary, and Boeing didn’t.

The alliance isn’t walking away from the US. It’s doing what competent military organizations do: buy what works for the mission. The GlobalEye works. Ukraine proved it against Russia. France, Sweden, and Canada confirmed it with procurement decisions. Eleven NATO nations signed up. Germany put it in the budget and cited American unreliability as the justification.

The E-3 Sentry was America’s gift to the alliance’s surveillance architecture for four decades. Its replacement is a reminder that capability earns its place regardless of flag.

Saab spent a decade losing fighter contracts to Lockheed Martin. It just won the one that matters.

Washington cancelled its own replacement program, walked away from the NATO version, and told Europe to manage its own surveillance architecture.

Europe hired Sweden.

Sweden, which gave Ukraine the smaller version of the same radar to use against Russia, which Ukraine then used to help shoot down a Russian Su-35, which proved the technology works against the adversary everyone else is about to buy it to deter.

Saab spent a decade losing Gripen orders to the F-35 across every European air force that evaluated both aircraft. It just won the contract that matters most. The eyes of NATO’s sky, for the next generation, will be Swedish.

My old aircraft is getting replaced. I’ve seen the replacement fly. The picture it builds is better. The threat it’s watching is the same one Ukraine’s been training the system against for a year.

Russia should find that combination deeply unfunny.

That’s it for today, my friends. If this was useful, hit the thumbs up to like and consider subscribing if I’ve earned your trust. I cover NATO, Ukraine, and modern military technology four times a week. And by the way, you are looking amazing today, I hope somebody has told you that. Maybe it’s your hair? I don’t know but you’re just glowing.

And as always, Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, Crimea is Ukraine.

Well, I was going to write a…

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Hey friends.

Some readers may see this as another criticism of the American defense establishment.

It is.

But that criticism comes from loyalty, not cynicism.

I want the United States to succeed. I want American troops to enter the next war with equipment that works, stockpiles that exist outside a requirements doc, and factories that can replace losses before the enemy can exploit them.

Sometimes supporting the institution means telling it, truthfully, that it’s on the wrong path.

The United States still has enormous advantages in engineering, capital, research, and military experience. But those advantages aren’t self-executing. They can be squandered through complacency, bad contracting, fragile supply chains, and acquisition timelines built for a slower century.

Call it tough love if you like.

I’d rather criticize these weaknesses now than explain them after American service members come back in a flag-draped box.

Let’s get into it:

The United States Army spent $469 million building a state-of-the-art artillery factory in Mesquite, Texas; about ten miles from where I grew up. Nearly two years later, that factory has produced exactly zero artillery shells that meet contract specifications.

Zero.

Not “fewer than expected.” Zero, on a product the Army has manufactured continuously since before your great grandfather was drafted.

Keep that number in the back of your head because we’re about to talk about a much harder problem. Washington now wants American industry to build roughly 340,000 small attack drones inside two years.

If the country just proved it can’t reliably forge a steel shell whose design, metallurgy, and purpose have been settled science since the Wilson administration, what exactly makes anyone confident it can mass-produce a flying computer that has to out-think an enemy who’s rewriting the rules of the fight every few weeks?

The shell America still can’t build

Let’s start with what actually went wrong at Mesquite.

The Army’s target was 100,000 rounds of the 155mm M795 shell per month by October 2025, the standard artillery round fired from howitzers across the entire NATO alliance. As of this past March, total national output sat at 36,000 rounds a month, less than half the goal, and a new Pentagon Inspector General report just laid out exactly why.

The Mesquite facility, operated by General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, was supposed to contribute 30,000 of those rounds every month using “high levels of automation” and “digital data capture.”

Instead, the Army let the contractor try to adapt old machinery built for the M107, a shell that dates back to 1958, to instead crank out the newer M795, which flies about six kilometers farther and packs a heavier charge.

Army officials called it a “high-risk, high-reward opportunity” and accepted that risk anyway. The reward never showed up. The equipment never produced a single projectile body that passed inspection, and the Army finally ordered the plant to stop spending money entirely in August 2025.

Here’s how it normally works: Steel gets forged and machined into a projectile body, that body gets inspected, then it moves to a separate facility to be packed with explosives and assembled into a finished round.

Fail at step one and nothing downstream matters, no matter how much explosive-packing capacity you’ve built. The Army had actually planned for plenty of that downstream capacity. It just couldn’t feed enough steel bodies into it.

Real manufacturing capacity exists the day a production line starts reliably spitting out parts that pass inspection, and not one day before.

Mesquite failed at that test using a shell whose specs, metallurgy, and purpose have been settled and unchanging for decades.

Small attack drones remove none of that difficulty. They add software, batteries, radio-frequency engineering, foreign-sourced electronics, and an enemy who studies every video of your product and adjusts within the week.

To be fair to Washington, and I want to be fair here, the drone plan isn’t reckless. It’s a genuine attempt to learn from Ukraine, and in several places it shows real thought.

The program is called Drone Dominance, roughly $1.1 billion aimed at building a demand signal strong enough to convince American manufacturers to invest in real tooling and suppliers instead of pitching prototypes to nobody. I’ve just made a video for the New York Post that is currently in the review stage that covers the drone dominance program.

It runs in phases the Pentagon calls Gauntlets, competitive live-fire evaluations where actual military operators fly the drones through realistic mission profiles.

The first Gauntlet, held at Fort Benning in February and March, put 25 companies through strike scenarios across open terrain and simulated cities, and eleven winners walked away with a combined $150 million to build 30,000 drones, at a price the Pentagon is trying to push down from roughly $5,000 per unit toward $2,300 by the later phases.

A new Gauntlet is scheduled roughly every six months, the vendor pool narrows with each round from 25 companies down to as few as three or five by the final phase, and the total target across all four phases sits at approximately 340,000 aircraft by 2027.

Give credit where it’s due. Operators, not contracting officers, do the testing.

Plus, losing a competition in one phase doesn’t disqualify a company from the next.

The drones are meant to actually get flown, crashed, and expended in training rather than sealed in a warehouse. That’s a real improvement over how the Pentagon has historically bought things, and it shows leadership genuinely absorbed part of the Ukraine lesson.

What it hasn’t fully absorbed yet is the harder part.

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