As far as nuclear weapons go, I’m a bit of an odd duck. I’m definitely on the record as being against proliferation; having written multiple articles on the topic before the Ukraine War.

But at the same time, I’m not opposed to my tax dollars strengthening and modernizing America’s (and our allies’) nuclear deterrent.

Because even before Trump, the United States had a long list of enemies who would love to “take us down a peg.” It’s like a carbon monoxide detector in your house: It’s nice to have around, but hopefully you never have to use it.

So, I guess the best way to sum up my stance would be, “Nukes for me, but none for thee.”

Still, one can appreciate the deterrent effect while simultaneously finding them distasteful, as most military folks do. We were trained in precision and took great care to minimize civilian casualties. So, nuclear weapons in general are indiscriminately offensive to most of us.

Now, in the past 48 hours, two different figures have made essentially the same extraordinary claim.

Former Trump ally and full-time circus clown Tucker Carlson says Trump could be days away from deciding whether to use a nuclear weapon against Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain complex.

Then former CIA officer John Kiriakou told Piers Morgan that contacts inside the White House had also told him Trump was considering a tactical nuclear strike against the facility.

Neither allegation has been independently verified; which would be a tall order in any case.

For its part, the White House says Carlson has no insight into current military planning.

On October 16, while discussing Pickaxe Mountain specifically, Trump said, “I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to.” He also answered “no” on November 2 when reporters asked whether he was preparing another attack immediately after the midterms.

But let’s briefly look at the person who would be making that decision.

Trump has a nuke-y personality - Just saying…

One of the largest meta-analyses on the subject examined more than 400 studies involving over 123,000 people and found that narcissism was associated with aggression, particularly when the person experienced provocation.

Other research has found that people high in narcissistic traits can become especially reactive to humiliation, criticism, and threats to status.

Research into narcissism and war suggests that leaders with stronger grandiose narcissistic traits may have unusual difficulty accepting military outcomes that make them appear to have lost.

Rather than updating their objectives as battlefield information changes, they can become increasingly invested in finding some outcome that can still be presented as “victory.”

Now imagine a leader who has publicly promised that an enemy will submit. Months of conventional bombing follow. The enemy doesn’t submit. The government survives, the deeply buried facility remains difficult to destroy, and every additional conventional strike produces diminishing returns. Hmm. Sounds familiar…

Backing down can look like losing.

Negotiating can look like losing.

Accepting that the original objective was unrealistic can look like piss-poor planning.

Then some White House intern hired only for his Aryan traits puts another option on the table: Why not nuke the fuckers?

The attraction here wouldn’t necessarily be purely military; nuclear weapons carry an almost unparalleled symbolic message of dominance. Like catnip to narcissists.

For a president increasingly frustrated that conventional force hasn’t produced the submission he expected, crossing the nuclear threshold might begin to look like the only thing dramatic enough to, let’s say, restore control of the story.

I’m not trying to scare you here. Remember, personality is only one variable among military advice, alliance politics, intelligence, law, Trump’s personal legacy, and the aftereffects of breaking the nuclear taboo.

All I’m saying is enough people with connections in Washington are now discussing the possibility… and that, my friends, is batshit crazy.

Because from a targeting perspective, the premise itself is flawed.

Would a nuke even work against a buried target?

Pickaxe Mountain, known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, sits about two kilometers south of the Natanz nuclear complex in central Iran. Satellite imagery shows a large tunnel system buried beneath a granite mountain, with multiple portals, hardened access points, and a layout designed specifically to make aerial attack difficult.

Ahem, granite. Remember that detail for later.

Analysis places portions of the facility somewhere around 80 to 100 meters underground. Some estimates run deeper. But nobody outside the people who built it can tell us the exact layout.

Satellite imagery can estimate how much rock Iran removed during excavation, but it can’t tell us whether a tunnel then went straight ahead, curved downward, branched into multiple chambers, or climbed upward inside the mountain.

Iran has also shaped some tunnel entrances with bends rather than straight corridors.

They appear to have learned from what happened at Fordow, where ventilation shafts and other structural weaknesses gave American planners useful ways to transmit destructive effects into a deeply buried facility.

Pickaxe is a targeting problem wrapped inside an intelligence problem.

Before deciding what weapon destroys a tunnel complex, you need to know where the tunnels actually are.

I know… That sounds obvious.

But it becomes a bit more important when the weapon under discussion contains a nuclear warhead.

Speaking of the intelligence problem, CSIS’s September satellite analysis found significant construction activity during 2026, but its analysts said the available imagery could neither confirm nor disprove Israeli claims that centrifuges had been moved inside.

They also saw reasons to doubt that the complex was already capable of uranium enrichment.

Then, in October, the Institute for Science and International Security reported that visible activity at Pickaxe had gone dormant. Tunnel entrances had been blocked with earth, and analysts assessed that the facility was not currently operating or undergoing major construction, (although admittedly, valuable equipment or material could still be stored inside).

That’s a pretty big intelligence gap if someone is contemplating the first wartime nuclear strike since 1945.

The Reddit argument goes something like this: Pickaxe is under hundreds of feet of granite. Conventional bunker busters can’t reach it. So, nuclear weapons become the remaining option.

But a nuclear earth-penetrating weapon does not punch down through 100 meters of granite. It penetrates a somewhat small distance into the ground and detonates. How deep? A couple of meters.

When a nuclear explosion happens beneath the surface, much more of its energy couples into the surrounding earth. The resulting shock travels through rock and soil, and that ground shock is what damages underground structures below the point where the weapon actually stopped.

The Pentagon’s own Nuclear Matters Handbook describes this coupling effect as the main mechanism for attacking deeply buried targets.

The United States does indeed possess a nuclear weapon specifically associated with earth penetration, the B61-11.

It’s an unguided earth-penetrating gravity bomb with a fixed nuclear yield of roughly 400 kilotons. By comparison, the weapon used at Hiroshima was around 15 kilotons.

By the way… While being guilty of it myself, I hate the Hiroshima comparison for every nuclear conversation. But why it’s less relevant is an article for another time.

The B61-11 was built to penetrate a few meters into earth before exploding, (not burrow hundreds of feet toward its target).

The newer B61-12 is much more accurate and has selectable lower yields, but it isn’t the dedicated earth penetrator people tend to imagine for this mission.

The B61-13 was designed to give the president additional options against harder and large-area military targets, and US nuclear modernization work continues to focus on hard and deeply buried facilities.

So, here’s the question of the hour: could a nuclear weapon destroy Pickaxe Mountain?

Eh… Maybe.

A National Academies study of nuclear earth penetrators found that nuclear ground shock can hold deeply buried targets at risk at substantial depths, depending on weapon yield, geology, target hardness and distance from the detonation. The same study also found that even nuclear earth penetrators can’t dig deeply enough to contain the explosion underground.

Hans Kristensen, one of the world’s best-known analysts of nuclear arsenals, told The War Zone that a B61-11 could probably make Pickaxe Mountain unusable.

He didn’t say we could confidently vaporize every chamber, every centrifuge, and every kilogram of material hidden beneath the mountain.

And if highly enriched uranium were stored inside, nobody can say whether all of it would remain entombed, be scattered internally, or be carried into the environment by the explosion.

You may end up with the strangest possible nuclear-war outcome:

The US uses a nuclear weapon to eliminate uncertainty about an Iranian nuclear facility then immediately creates a new uncertainty about where the Iranian nuclear material went.

Good luck writing that battle-damage assessment, boy-o.

People also hear “earth penetrating” and imagine a nuclear explosion neatly contained underground. It won’t be.

The National Academies studied this question years ago and reached a nasty conclusion: earth-penetrating nuclear weapons can’t penetrate deeply enough for the explosion and radioactive debris to remain contained underground.

The explosion could excavate an enormous amount of irradiated material and throw some of it into the atmosphere. Honestly, Trump would get better results just sending in lots of US Army Rangers, or a few US Navy SEALS.

I’m actually somewhat surprised that we’ve gone from February to November with no “boots on the ground.” Instead, we’ve gone strait to nukin’ talk.

“How about a nice game of chess?”

What do you think happens to the United States if it were to use a nuke against Iran?

Here’s my guess:

Let’s assume the bomb works.

The B61-11 burrows into Pickaxe Mountain and the Pentagon reports catastrophic damage to the tunnels and halls inside. The president goes on television to announce that the Iranian nuclear threat has been eliminated, and for maybe six hours, Washington owns the story.

Trump calls up “W” and asks to borrow his “Mission Accomplished” banner from 2003.

Then the shit hits the fan.

The UN General Assembly convenes an emergency session. China and Russia condemn the strike, so does much of the Global South, and so, I suspect, do most of America’s allies.

The Security Council can’t do much about it, because the United States holds a permanent seat and a veto, and unless Washington inexplicably decides to sit on its hands, there will be no UN sanctions regime against America.

But that doesn’t mean there are no consequences.

Governments can sanction each other without asking the Security Council’s permission. The EU can impose restrictive measures if every member government agrees, although Brussels usually aims at officials, institutions, or specific sectors rather than entire countries.

So, Trump himself could be sanctioned.

Canada, Japan, Australia, and individual European capitals would suspend defense relationships, restrict exports, and slap travel bans on the people who planned and approved the strike.

Foreign ministers fly home early, ambassadors get recalled for “consultations,” joint exercises disappear from the calendar, and somebody in a European defense ministry starts reviewing pending weapons transfers.

Meanwhile, parliaments across the alliance start asking “why exactly are we hosting American troops, and in a few cases American nuclear weapons, on our soil?”

Nobody in Warsaw or Vilnius is going to decide Vladimir Putin got less dangerous because Washington did something stupid and reckless in Iran.

So, I think the alliance survives (for now). Confidence in American judgment doesn’t.

Under NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements, American B61 bombs sit at bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, ready to be carried by allied aircraft in a war nobody wants to fight.

Now imagine being the German chancellor on the morning after.

You have to stand in front of the Bundestag and explain why American nuclear weapons should stay on German soil when the country that controls them has just shown it considers nuclear first use an acceptable fix for a war of choice.

Belgian and Dutch leaders have the same miserable conversation with their parliaments, and so do the Italians.

We may see an end to nuclear sharing, nations might restrict American access to European bases, end overflight rights, and require Washington to ask permission before launching anything from European territory.

Then, the proliferation cascade begins.

The lesson here is that countries with nuclear weapons don’t get attacked.

Iran didn’t have one, and Iran got nuked. Ukraine gave its arsenal away in 1994 in exchange for security assurances and got invaded twice. You don’t need a political science degree to connect those dots.

Parliamentary commissions start studying options, physicists get invited into secure rooms, fuel-cycle policies get a second look, and some people start calculating exactly how long it would take to build a weapon if national leadership ever gave the order.

But I don’t think the dollar collapses.

According to the IMF, the dollar made up 56.7 percent of the world’s disclosed foreign-exchange reserves in the second quarter of this year. That share has been slowly eroding for decades, but nothing else offers the same depth and liquidity.

The euro still has structural problems, China restricts capital flows and doesn’t let the renminbi trade freely, and gold, for all its charms, doesn’t run a global payment system.

What an American nuclear first use changes is the incentive to keep looking for alternatives. Central banks will buy more gold, some reserves drift toward euros, and more countries start trading with each other in local currencies through payment systems built specifically to avoid touching the American financial system.

Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that heavily sanctioned countries already reroute transactions toward alternative networks, especially the yuan, although outside that group the shift away from the dollar remains small.

A nuclear strike would expand the club of governments that want those alternatives.

Twenty countries decide they’d rather hold 5 percent less in dollars, then another twenty make the same call, and then sovereign wealth funds start pricing in American political risk.

Ten years later, somebody looks up and notices that the 57 percent figure has fallen a long way.

Anyone hoping for a symmetrical response, like Europe slapping Russia-style sanctions on Washington, is going to be disappointed. American banks, technology, capital markets, and the dollar are woven so deeply into global commerce that comprehensive sanctions on the United States would mostly punish the countries imposing them.

I could see targeted measures instead: travel bans on specific officials, suspended military exports, restrictions on technology tied to nuclear delivery systems, and allies canceling F-35 orders in favor of European aircraft.

Those would hurt, but the bigger loss would be America’s ability to organize sanctions against anyone else. Picture Washington, under a future democrat president, trying to rally a global coalition to punish Russia for threatening nuclear use in Ukraine.

Putin’s ambassador simply sets a satellite photo of Pickaxe Mountain on the table.

American moral authority has never been spotless, but after this, its ability to police the nuclear taboo becomes impossible.

Then comes the Constitutional crisis at home…

Remember, congress never passed a specific authorization for the Iran war. In June, both the House and Senate approved a war powers resolution directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities, but it was a nonbinding measure that never went to the president’s desk.

Under the American nuclear command system, meanwhile, the president alone has the authority to order nuclear use.

The Congressional Research Service notes that he doesn’t need the concurrence of Congress or his military advisers, although any order is still bound by the law of armed conflict, and military lawyers and commanders would weigh its legality.

Anyone who served in the Air Force knows how close to religious the service is about nuclear surety, and those officers would be in an unbearable position.

Put those two facts together, and you get a president waging a war Congress never authorized who then crosses the nuclear threshold on his own.

Congress would implode.

I’d expect emergency hearings, subpoenas for the strike planning documents, and classified transcripts, War Powers lawsuits, bills to prohibit nuclear first use, attempts to cut off funding, and quite possibly impeachment proceedings, depending on who holds the House and Senate when the dust settles.

Senior officials would resign rather than defend the decision, and generals could find themselves under oath being asked exactly what advice they gave and when.

The president’s sole authority over nuclear weapons would become one of the biggest political issues in the country overnight.

The military result would become almost irrelevant to the political fight. Congress would be arguing about whether one person has the constitutional right, without asking anyone, to make a decision that rewrites the strategic environment for eight billion people.

Most Americans would see it as the most reckless presidential act of their lifetimes.

You’d get massive demonstrations, veterans shouting at other veterans on cable news, retired generals denouncing Trump, churches mobilizing, and scientists signing open letters by the thousands.

Then the casualty reports from Iran would start arriving.

Whatever abstract support existed for “a tactical nuclear weapon against an underground facility” would have to survive contact with actual photographs. Words like “tactical” tend to lose their soothing quality once somebody points a camera at villages of Iranians miles downwind with radiation sickness.

America would probably survive economically, NATO would probably survive institutionally, and the dollar would probably survive financially, at least for a while.

Countries would simply accelerate their insurance against us. That means more European weapons, more independent intelligence services, more gold in central bank vaults, more payment systems that route around New York, and, most dangerously, more nuclear weapons.

That’s the scenario that worries me most.

The US uses one nuclear weapon to stop one country from getting one, and ten years later, five more countries have decided that staying non-nuclear isn’t worth the risk anymore.

If that happens, a nuclear strike on Pickaxe Mountain would go down as one of the worst strategic defeats in American history.

“A strange game… The only winning move is not to play.”

Слава Україні!

Think of this as your weekly strategic weather report for paid subscribers. Five pressure points around the world that could become a bit more important over the next seven days.

Source links are included throughout. Let’s roll!

BLUF:

Israel has no government and the Arab parties hold the balance. Ukraine’s nuclear warning app was hacked and they hacked Russia’s back. A cyclone is hitting India’s coast tonight. The US midterms are tomorrow and they’ll determine how much latitude Trump has on Iran. And both sides of the Gulf conflict are making diplomatic sounds while the guns keep firing. Stay sharp.

1. Israel’s election produced no government. The Arab parties are now the kingmakers

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Hey friends, some interesting news from Norway and Germany for our paid subscriber piece today. Let’s start in World War II:

On January 16, 1942, the German battleship Tirpitz slipped into Fættenfjorden, a narrow arm of the Trondheimsfjord on the border between Stjørdal and Levanger in central Norway.

For the next 21 months, the most feared warship in the Kriegsmarine sat in that little fjord under camouflage netting and anti-aircraft guns, while the Royal Air Force kept trying to sink her.

The RAF attacked four times, lost 17 aircraft and 64 airmen, and barely scratched the paint.

Two years before that, on April 21, 1940, German troops came ashore at Verdal, the next town up the fjord from Levanger, to outflank the British and Norwegian forces trying to hold the line north of Trondheim.

That stretch of shoreline spent the next five years under German occupation.

Now, on October 15 of this year, German tank maker KNDS and its Norwegian partner Ritek began building Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks in Levanger.

I’ll admit that when this headline first crossed my desk, I almost skipped it.

“Foreign defense contractor opens assembly line in customer country” is about as exciting as watching grass grow. Plus, offset deals like this happen constantly, because countries like to keep some of the jobs when they spend billions on foreign hardware.

But the more I read, the more I realized I was looking at a single brick in bigger wall:

Germany and Norway are binding their militaries together at a speed that would have been hard to imagine five years ago, from tank factories in Trøndelag, to submarine maintenance yards near Bergen, to sub-hunting aircraft patrolling the gap between Greenland and Scotland.

And the country doing the binding is the same one that showed up uninvited on this coastline 86 years ago.

A tank factory with a diving pool

Let’s start with the tanks, because Norway’s road to this factory was actually surprisingly bumpy.

In February 2023, Norway announced it would buy 54 Leopard 2A8s for about 19.7 billion kroner, roughly $1.9 billion at the time, to replace its aging Leopard 2A4 fleet.

(Fun fact: Occasionally I’ll get a “Super Thanks” on a YouTube video from the same guy in Norway. It’s essentially a one-time tip for people who want to send money without becoming full members. Anyways, I’ve become very good at mentally converting kroner or NOK to US dollars in my head.)

The Leopard beat out South Korea’s K2 Black Panther after head-to-head trials. The decision came after a pretty public fight inside the Norwegian military. The chief of defense, Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, had openly argued that the money would be better spent on helicopters and long-range precision fires, and that tanks might not survive a battlefield full of drones and anti-tank missiles.

Other senior officers pushed back hard, and the old school tank camp won.

That debate hasn’t gone away, by the way.

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Somewhere this afternoon, a Boeing 737-900ER will land at O’Hare in a 20-knot crosswind. The tires will chirp, the thrust reversers will roar, and before the aircraft has reached the gate, one guy will be standing in the aisle yanking his roller bag out of the overhead bin while a flight attendant asks him, for the third time, to PLEASE SIT THE FUCK DOWN.

Nobody on that airplane will think about the FAA inspector who signed off on the engine maintenance.

Few will engage a single neuron considering the controller who sequenced them around a thunderstorm over Joliet.

And I guarantee you that no one will spare a thought for the engineer who wrote the rule requiring the airline to replace a cracked fitting after no more than 200 flight hours.

If those people did their jobs well, the passengers will never know their names.

Historian Sarah Paine, who teaches at the Naval War College, has a useful way of thinking about this:

Some objectives are positive… You build something, attack something, launch something, or create something, and when you’re finished, you can snap a photo of the result and post it to Truth Social.

Other objectives are negative. Not negative in the “bad” sense, mind you. But negative in that they prevent something from happening: like the bridge doesn’t collapse, the bank doesn’t fail, the airplane doesn’t crash, or the enemy doesn’t invade.

Success in the realm of negative objectives leaves you with almost nothing to show for it. And this is kind of a big problem for some Americans who can’t (or won’t) think about the bad things that don’t happen.

The trouble with nothing

A government can prove it spent $5 billion because they keep all the receipts. But a government has a harder time trying to prove that spending the $5 billion stopped something worse from happening.

The price we had to pay exists in our timeline. The catastrophe exists in a timeline that never happened.

Of course, some negative objectives are more quantifiable than others: visit any factory floor in Michigan and notice the sign that says, “281 days without a workplace accident!” Great! Whatever you did to achieve that outcome is called a negative objective.

Remember Y2K?

Governments and corporations spent obscene amounts of cash during the late 1990s fixing software before computer clocks rolled from 1999 to 2000. Then January arrived, nothing happened, and a HUGE number of pundits concluded that Y2K had been overblown.

Overblown? Really?

My point is that the repairs worked so well that the success itself became evidence that the repairs had never been necessary in the first place.

This thinking would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic, and impacted so many of us around the world.

Back when I was studying for a UN security certification during my coursework for my international relations bachelors, I encountered a name for this: the preparedness paradox.

You spend heavily to prevent a disaster.

The disaster doesn’t happen.

People then point to the absence of disaster as proof that you wasted the money.

Most of us experience government through forms, fees, taxes, inspections, and waiting rooms, all of which are visible and annoying.

What those systems are designed to prevent usually isn’t visible at all: Food inspectors, bank examiners, bridge inspectors, weather forecasters, air traffic controllers, nuclear security specialists, epidemiologists, and intelligence analysts all work in the business of nothing happening.

When they do their jobs, citizens don’t experience “government success.” They experience just another average day in a democracy.

That makes preventive institutions, the so-called “deep state,” easy targets to cut. The budget sheet shows their mid-range government salaries, but it doesn’t show the disaster that never happened.

Eighty years of shit that didn’t happen

The people who built the postwar order understood this instinctively because they had lived the version of the world where everything went to hell in a handbasket.

They watched a global depression feed protectionism and trade wars, and those feed populist leaders and extremism.

They watched democracies appease aggressors one annexation at a time, watched collective security fall apart, and watched America try to sit the whole thing out.

Then they spent four years burying tens of millions of people across Europe and Asia in a war that industrialized death on a scale we had never seen up to that point. Those people came out of that experience convinced that stability must be engineered.

So, they built a system made almost entirely of negative objectives:

Bretton Woods was there to prevent monetary chaos and economic collapse, and GATT, the forerunner of the World Trade Organization, was meant to stop the tariff jerkoffs that had wrecked the 1930s.

The Marshall Plan kept a starving Western Europe from falling to radicals.

NATO was formed to prevent another war in Europe, and forward-deployed American troops meant no aggressor could take a country before America finished mobilizing.

The US Navy kept the sea lanes open, nuclear deterrence kept the bombs in their silos, and the United Nations, for all its flaws, gave disputes somewhere to go other than the battlefield.

If we look at what that system actually produced, we’ll see a whole lot of nothing.

There was no third world war. The Soviets never rolled into Western Europe, France and Germany never went to war again, Imperial Japan never reemerged, no hostile power ever dominated all of industrial Europe, and no nuclear weapon has been used in anger since 1945.

“Nothing happened” is the greatest achievement in modern history…

The generation that built the system knew what “the failure” looked like because they’d lived in it. But their MAGA grandchildren inherited the benefits without ever seeing the alternative…

They can see the NATO budget, the overseas bases, the foreign aid line items, and the underpaid diplomats. They can’t see the war NATO prevented or the state collapse that the aid prevented.

By the mid-2010s, the postwar order became vulnerable exactly because it worked so well.

Now we have the current US administration.

Traditional conservatives always understood negative objectives… at least in national security.

Reagan-era Republicans could explain nuclear deterrence in their sleep. The whole point of a Minuteman III missile is that it never launches.

The populist movement that now controls Washington is something different.

It’s built around a theory of government that only values what it can see, film, and take credit for. A border wall can be photographed… So can a military parade, a tariff announcement, a stack of executive orders signed in front of cameras, or a chainsaw waved on stage to celebrate gutting federal agencies.

But a wildfire that never spread, a midair collision that never happened, or a war that never expanded can’t be photographed, so in Trump’s America, it doesn’t exist.

The government jobs whose success looks like nothing

The Trump administration came into office promising to dismantle large parts of what it called the “deep state,” reduce the federal workforce, eliminate redundant programs, and restore political accountability over career government employees.

The trouble comes when you try to identify waste inside organizations whose primary product is prevention.

According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly 378,000 employees left 22 major federal agencies during 2025 while about 127,000 were hired. The net reduction was nearly 256,000 people, more than 11 percent of the civilian workforce across those agencies.

Not all of them were fired. Some retired, resigned, accepted buyouts, or left because of hiring freezes and reorganizations.

Imagine the scale…

Thousands of years of accumulated institutional knowledge disappeared from the federal government in a remarkably short period.

Let’s look at the National Weather Service.

Roughly 600 positions disappeared from a workforce of around 4,200 during the initial reductions. Staffing shortages became serious enough that NOAA later received permission to hire hundreds of people back. But veteran meteorologists warned that institutional knowledge couldn’t simply be regenerated by posting a vacancy announcement.

The National Weather Service has an almost comically bad public-relations problem because success looks like nothing.

A forecaster detects hook echo that could signify a tornado’s rotation.

A warning goes out.

Families move to basements.

The storm passes.

Nobody dies.

The next morning, nobody writes a Fox News story about the federal employee whose forecast saved six people in Moore, Oklahoma.

Then there’s FEMA.

More than 4,300 employees separated from the agency during fiscal year 2025, according to GAO, roughly 17 percent of its workforce. Additional employees left during 2026 while hiring remained constrained. GAO warned that FEMA risked lacking sufficient personnel to manage large or simultaneous disasters.

Again, FEMA doesn’t prevent hurricanes.

It prevents hurricanes from becoming larger human disasters than they already are.

If everything works, FEMA’s contribution disappears into the background: Water arrives. Shelters open. Search teams deploy. Resources move. Power gets restored more quickly.

The hurricane is still shitty, only less shitty than it might have been without FEMA.

The same pattern appeared in food and drug safety.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced sweeping reductions in 2025 that included thousands of positions at the FDA and CDC.

One particularly revealing episode involved an FDA proficiency-testing program used to verify that roughly 170 laboratories could accurately identify dangerous pathogens and contaminants in food. Staffing reductions suspended the program.

What does that program actually produce? Nothing.

No contaminated spinach.

No undetected salmonella outbreak.

No children in intensive care.

The public sees laboratory techs, federal salaries, equipment, inspections, paperwork, and regulations.

Cybersecurity is even harder to see.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency lost or sidelined a substantial share of its workforce through departures, reductions, and reorganizations beginning in 2025. Programs dealing with election security and cyber threat hunting were reduced as the administration argued that CISA had become too political and too broad in its mission.

But look at what CISA exists to prevent.

Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and criminal hackers look for vulnerabilities in electrical grids, telecommunications networks, water systems, government servers, pipelines, hospitals, and election infrastructure.

Then there’s aviation safety.

On January 29, 2025, an American Eagle jet and an Army Black Hawk collided over the Potomac and killed 67 people. Barely two weeks later, the administration fired hundreds of probationary FAA employees, people who maintain the communications, radar, and computer systems that air traffic controllers depend on, at a moment when the agency was thousands of controllers short.

The CIA has offered voluntary early retirements to any staff who want it. The CIA doesn’t publish its workforce numbers publicly, but rumblings from inside the agency should alarm every American. They say: WE ARE LESS SAFE.

There are many more examples.

I could do this all day… but we need to get to Ukraine

The Trump administration’s genius, if you can call it that, is re-labeling.

Once a weather forecaster, a nuclear engineer, a career diplomat, or a food inspector gets flattened into the category of “deep state bureaucrat,” the preventive function disappears from the conversation.

The question stops being what catastrophe a job was designed to prevent and becomes why taxpayers are paying this person at all.

This is incredibly reckless… and they’re applying the same logic to Ukraine.

On October 20, standing in the Oval Office, the president said this about American support for Ukraine: “We’ve gotten absolutely nothing back except grief, death, tremendous monetary loss.”

Trump thinks this because the main thing America has bought is something that hasn’t happened. A government that can’t value an absence will eventually pay to cancel its own insurance policy, and that’s what scares me.

Why are we spending our tax dollars on Ukraine?

The invisible answer, that MAGA appears incapable of thinking about, is American support helps keep Ukraine from collapsing and keeps Russia from absorbing Ukraine’s population, industry, farmland, and strategic depth.

It prevents Moscow from learning that conquest pays and from turning next toward Moldova or the Baltics.

It heads off a much bigger NATO buildup later and a direct war between NATO and Russia.

Critics usually compare Ukraine aid to zero, but that’s the wrong comparison. The real choice is between supporting Ukraine today and paying for the plausible world where Ukraine loses.

In that dark world, there’s a victorious Russian army sitting on a much longer border with NATO, permanent American brigades stationed in Poland and the Baltics, new bases, bigger European and American defense budgets, millions more refugees, an economic shock across Europe, and a much higher chance of American soldiers dying by the tens of thousands.

The alternative to spending money now usually isn’t spending nothing later. It’s spending vastly more later, in worse conditions, with American lives instead of American hardware.

The fucked up part of this is that MAGA already understands this in their own lives.

They pay homeowner’s insurance every year and hope they never use it, and when their house doesn’t burn down, nobody calls the premiums wasted. Better still, think about your local fire code, the smoke detectors, the hydrants, and the building inspections. You’ll never know which of those prevented the fire that would’ve taken your neighborhood, and that doesn’t make any of them wasteful.

The absence of catastrophe isn’t evidence that prevention was unnecessary.

This is also why Ukraine’s battlefield map misleads Trumpers.

If the only metric is liberated territory, a front line that barely moves looks like failure. Add the negative territory, that is the Ukrainian territory Russia has failed to take, and the whole picture changes. Russia has thrown hundreds of thousands of soldiers at Ukrainian lines for over four years, and Ukrainian manpower and ingenuity, Western weapons, intelligence, fortifications, and air defense have kept 80 percent of the country out of Moscow’s hands.

A stalemate against a much larger enemy is a negative objective being achieved in real time. The front holding is the proof.

Somewhere in America there’s a 19-year-old private first class who will never fight a war in Poland, and a family who will never get a knock on the door from a casualty notification officer.

There’s a Pentagon budget that will never triple because NATO had to mobilize against a triumphant Russia.

There will never be a line in the federal budget that reads “Russo-American war avoided: several trillion dollars saved, zero Americans killed. 281 days without a workplace accident!”

Deterrence has always looked wasteful until it fails.

So wasteful, in fact, that this was the entire plot of the movie “Spies Like Us” with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. The villainous character General Sline (played by Steve Forrest) justifies launching a Russian ICBM at his own country (the USA) with the line, “A weapon unused… is a useless weapon.”

The aircraft carriers that never fight a peer fleet, the Canadian NORAD fighters that never intercept a real attack over the arctic, and the troops in South Korea who have never had to stop an invasion - all look like money for nothing, and chicks for free.

And the most important return on Ukraine aid may simply be a war that never gets bigger.

None of this means every program deserves to live forever. Some regulations are damned idiotic, some agencies are massively bloated, lots of aid gets wasted and misused, and some military commitments far outlive their purpose.

I understand that “prevention” can’t become a blank check, or the argument collapses into a defense of every odious bureaucrat everywhere.

But a competent government asks four questions before it cuts something: what does it cost, what specific failure this institution exists to prevent, how likely that failure is, and what it would cost if the prevention disappeared?

The Trump administration only asks the first one: “What does it cost?”

Applied to Ukraine, along with asking how much we’ve spent, we should ask what we’re preventing.

Along with asking how much territory Ukraine has liberated, we should ask how much Russia has failed to take.

And along with asking what we get for our money, we should ask what failure would cost.

By the way, that airplane at O’Hare is at the gate by now.

The passengers are filing out, still annoyed about the asshole who stood up and started getting his carry-on before the captain turned off the fasten seatbelt sign…

Not one of them is thinking about the mechanic who made the landing routine. That’s what success looks like when the objective is negative.

Trump supporters can protest every Patriot missile, every artillery shell, every dollar sent to Ukraine. But for some reason, they have the mental inability to count the wars that never started, and the folded flag that was never handed to a young son at Arlington.

The most expensive lesson of World War II was that preventing catastrophe is far cheaper than defeating it after it arrives.

Please vote.

Слава Україні!

Hey friends, just pure aviation history today for our paid subscriber piece.

Britain once built an experimental aircraft to study what happens to an airplane that stays above Mach 2 long enough to get dangerously hot, and then discovered the airplane couldn’t stay above Mach 2 long enough to get hot…

Yup, it never actually reached Mach 2.

Its best speed, on its 47th flight in November 1963, was Mach 1.88 at 36,000 feet.

The airplane was called the Bristol 188.

When I first saw photos of this thing as a kid, a gleaming stainless-steel dart nicknamed the “Flaming Pencil,” I assumed I was looking at a hot rod out of a George Lucas-American Graffiti fever dream.

The reality is more British and a lot more Douglas Adams-esque. The Bristol 188 failed because it was a research aircraft built to support a bomber that had already been canceled, it flew on engines salvaged from another canceled aircraft, and those engines drank fuel so fast that pilots got about two minutes at high speed before they had to turn for home.

The Royal Air Force Museum, which owns the surviving airframe, calls the aircraft “a failure” that “never achieved its target.”

Personally, I think the word “failure” is a bit harsh. I mean look at this beast!

A Mach 3 Dream in a Steel Tube

Let’s go back to the early 1950s, when the Royal Air Force, well-funded and still euphoric from winning the Battle of Britain in the skies, was dreaming very big.

I’m serious about being “well-funded.” The RAF was feasting on approximately 10% of the UK’s GDP at the time. This was the development era that birthed the V-bomber nuclear deterrent force (Valiants, Vulcans, and Victors) and early jet fleets.

Under Operational Requirement 330, the RAF wanted a reconnaissance bomber that could cruise at around Mach 3, dash across Soviet airspace, and outrun anything the Russians could send up. Avro answered with the Avro 730… a long, needle-nosed machine that looked like something out of a Dan Dare comic. If it had flown, it would have been one of the most ambitious aircraft of the era.

The engineers had a problem, though, and it was that air is an asshole.

At high supersonic speeds, the air slamming into an airplane’s skin gets compressed and rubs along the surface, and that energy turns into heat. Engineers call it kinetic heating.

At normal jet speeds it’s barely worth mentioning, but past Mach 2 it becomes a structural problem. Aluminum, the metal nearly every airplane was built from, starts losing strength once it gets hot enough, and an airplane cruising for long periods at Mach 2.5 or 3 gets toasty.

Nobody in Britain had real data on what sustained heat did to a full-sized airframe over time.

How would the joints behave?

What about the fuel, the hydraulics, the seals, the canopy and the pilot sitting in a metal tube that was slowly turning into a pizza oven?

So, in February 1953, the Air Ministry gave Bristol a contract to build a flying laboratory. The requirement called for flight at Mach 2.75 for long periods, specifically so engineers could measure “the effect of kinetic heating.”

In an early twist of irony, Bristol beat out a rival proposal from English Electric based on the design that later became the Lightning.

Hang on to that, because it comes back to haunt everyone.

Bristol decided aluminum wouldn’t cut it and built the aircraft mostly out of stainless steel. According to the RAF Museum, the company chose F.V.520 hardened stainless steel; good for roughly 500°C (932°F, John).

But fabricating an airplane out of steel is a miserable job.

It’s heavy, it’s stubborn, and riveting it was considered too difficult, so Bristol developed a technique called puddle welding; that is, joining the panels with an electric arc shielded by inert argon gas to keep the welds clean.

Armstrong Whitworth, a British heavy engineering and manufacturing company, helped build major sections of the airframe.

The cockpit got a fused-quartz windscreen and canopy, plus a refrigeration system to keep the pilot from turning into a Wal-Mart rotisserie chicken.

The aircraft that emerged was gorgeous in a deeply absurd and impractical way: It was nearly 78 feet long, with a wingspan of only 35 feet.

The fuselage was a long, thin cylinder whose diameter was set by the size of the ejection seat (I find that detail delightful, because it means the entire airplane was essentially a big Virginia Slim cigarette you could eject from).

Two big engine nacelles sat on the wings, and the whole thing was finished in bare, polished steel.

Britain had built a stainless-steel Naboo Royal Starship and put a man inside it.

Read more

By now you’re likely aware that Elon Musk, a private citizen and CEO of a corporate defense contractor, unilaterally crippled a US ally’s battlefield communications. Presumably, he felt he had the support of the presidential administration. So I have to ask… what happens when there’s an administration in charge that doesn’t align with his far-right sensibilities?

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

Military communications fail all the time: Radios break, antennas get shot to hell, satellites leave line of sight, the enemy jams something… I spent enough time around military communications to know that when you absolutely need a radio to work, that’s usually when it fucks off to radio heaven.

This was different. Musk changed a permission.

An ally’s battlefield capability disappeared in mid-flight because Musk possessed the administrative authority to change what the network allowed a drone to do.

That, my friends, is an extraordinary amount of military power for somebody outside the military chain of command to possess. Someone with no accountability to taxpayers, mind you.

When Ukraine first reported the Starlink restrictions, Elon Musk pointed directly at Washington.

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government,” he wrote, adding that limits on speed or usage were decided by “the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

Hold up… Why shift the blame unless you knew you were doing something wrong?

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 20 that Musk personally ordered the slowdown of the military-grade SpaceX service Ukraine was using. The Journal cited US officials and people familiar with the matter, some of whom believe Musk acted unilaterally.

Others said he and President Trump discussed the situation. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says Washington never withdrew Ukraine’s access and has suggested the disagreement involved SpaceX’s terms of service.

Right. Those dastardly ToS that nobody ever reads.

Connectivity for Ukrainian forces moving at speed was partially restored on October 15. Nobody has publicly explained whether all the previous limits are gone.

A bipartisan group of senators has now asked the Pentagon Inspector General to determine what actually happened. Republicans Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John Cornyn joined Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and others in asking whether SpaceX independently imposed the restrictions and whether doing so complied with its federal contracts.

Good. That’s exactly the investigation that should happen.

Still, I can’t shake this feeling of unease. I wanted to know whether America had ever encountered anything remotely similar in its many previous wars.

That sent me down a historical rabbit hole.

Lincoln’s internet problem

When the Civil War began in 1861, the United States government didn’t own the country’s telegraph network. Private companies did.

Before the war, if a federal official in Washington wanted to send a telegram, he walked down to a commercial telegraph office and paid like everybody else.

Then the armies got enormous and the distances got absurd, and the telegraph went from a business tool to the nervous system of the Union war effort. For the first time in history, a president could read reports from his generals hundreds of miles away within hours, and sometimes minutes, of the events they described.

Lincoln famously haunted the War Department’s telegraph office during major battles, leaning over the operators’ shoulders waiting for the next dispatch.

It was the 1860s version of watching a drone feed.

Washington’s answer to depending on privately owned wires was to hire them. Anson Stager, a Western Union executive, developed the cipher system the War Department used and became superintendent of the US Military Telegraph.

The operators who ran it were mostly civilians. The expertise stayed private.

The authority didn’t.

On February 25, 1862, Lincoln issued an order through the War Department stating that the president “takes military possession of all the telegraph lines in the United States.”

Messages about military operations were banned unless the War Department or commanding generals approved them. The order said that it wasn’t meant to interfere with the companies’ ordinary business. Congress backed it up that winter with legislation authorizing the president to take possession of railroad and telegraph lines when military necessity required it.

The government used that power, too.

On May 1, 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered Major General John Wool in New York to take “immediate military possession” of the Independent Telegraph Company’s lines between Philadelphia and Boston.

The company had been passing along information about the Army of the Potomac’s movements. The deal on offer was simple: If the company agreed to send no military information without War Department approval, it would be left alone to run its business. If it didn’t, the people responsible would be arrested and locked up at Fort Delaware.

But private citizens holding battlefield power wasn’t limited to wires. The Civil War is full of civilians who controlled capabilities the Army came to depend on, and the best example floated in the sky.

Thaddeus Lowe was a self-taught scientist and balloonist who talked his way into the war in 1861.

In June of that year, he went up about 500 feet in a tethered balloon in Washington and telegraphed a message straight down the tether to the White House.

In September, he used flag signals from a balloon to walk Union artillery onto targets the gunners couldn’t see, years before anyone had a term for a “forward observer.”

At the Battle of Seven Pines, also called Fair Oaks, in 1862, his observations of Confederate movements helped McClellan rush reinforcements across a flooded river to a corps that was being cut off.

Lowe was a civilian. He was never commissioned in the military, and he and his men worked under a contract. He’d turned down $30 a day and asked for $10 in gold, roughly a colonel’s pay, so he could build better balloons.

In 1863, the Army put the Balloon Corps under tighter control, and a captain named Cyrus Comstock, who resented a civilian making more money than he did, cut Lowe’s pay to $6 a day in paper currency, worth about $3 in gold.

Lowe protested, nobody backed him, and he walked away that spring.

The corps limped along under less capable leadership, and by August 1863 the Union Army had stopped using balloons altogether. The National Museum of the US Air Force says the end of Army ballooning deprived the Union of “a useful military tool.”

Just to clarify here, Lowe isn’t Musk.

Lowe didn’t ground the balloons because he disagreed with Lincoln’s war aims, and he wasn’t running a trillion-dollar empire with a federal service contract. The structure is eerily familiar, though.

A private specialist builds a capability, the military comes to depend on it without ever owning it, a dispute breaks out, the specialist makes a personal decision, and the capability disappears.

The Civil War also shows that power running the other way.

John W. Garrett was president of the privately owned Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, whose employees were scattered all over Maryland and Virginia, watching everything. In the summer of 1864, B&O workers spotted Jubal Early’s Confederate army moving toward Washington, and Garrett passed that intelligence straight to Union commanders.

It helped Major General Lew Wallace grasp what was coming, and his badly outnumbered force lost the Battle of Monocacy but delayed Early long enough for reinforcements to save the capital.

Garrett owned a private railroad and a private telegraph, and employed private people who generated private intelligence, and his decision to share it changed the course of a campaign.

Then there’s Allan Pinkerton, a private detective who became George McClellan’s intelligence chief without ever holding military rank; operating under the alias “Major E.J. Allen.”

His wildly inflated estimates of Confederate strength fed McClellan’s existing gift for imagining a Rebel soldier behind every shrub. Historians still argue over how much blame Pinkerton deserves for McClellan’s caution, but nobody disputes that a private intelligence operation was shaping decisions by the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Garrett used his power to help the government, Pinkerton used his badly, and Lowe walked away. None of them, as far as I can find, did what Musk did, which is change a capability a military ally was actively using, against the Pentagon’s wishes, while the shooting was underway.

Wilson, the Railroads, and a Gateway in Hawaii

By World War I, the wires had become national infrastructure, and Washington had stopped beating around the bush.

In July 1918, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the president to take control of any telegraph, telephone, marine cable, or radio system when he considered it necessary for national security.

Wilson signed a proclamation on July 22, and federal control took effect at midnight on July 31. Postmaster General Albert Burleson ran the systems through their existing managers and employees. The companies kept their names, kept paying dividends, and got compensated, and the lines went back to their owners in 1919.

During the congressional debate, cabinet officials argued that even a few hours of communications interruption could seriously damage the war effort.

That’s practically the Starshield argument, written 108 years early.

The government did the same thing with the railroads.

In December 1917, Washington took control of nearly the entire private rail network because a patchwork of competing companies couldn’t move wartime traffic efficiently. The US Railroad Administration ran the system as one network until it returned the railroads to their owners in 1920.

The pattern across all of this is consistent: Private ownership of critical wartime infrastructure was normal. Private veto power over it was not.

Fast forward to the satellite era.

When Iridium’s commercial satellite phone constellation went bankrupt around 2000, the Pentagon became one of its most important customers, and Iridium phones went on to become everyday tools in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The interesting bit is how the military structured it.

The Defense Department routes its traffic through its own dedicated gateway in Hawaii, which the government owns and operates. The Defense Information Systems Agency described the arrangement as commercial satellite infrastructure running through a gateway under US government control.

The Pentagon didn’t really need to own Iridium. But it did insist on holding the keys to the sensitive part.

When I worked on the E-3 AWACS, every data link and radio net we used ran on government-controlled crypto, loaded by government custodians who signed for every key. I can’t imagine anyone in my crew assuming a contractor back in the States could reach in and change how those links behaved mid-mission.

That’s not how any of this works! (Cue this mid-2000s commercial from Esurance):

Then there’s my favorite precedent, from October 2001.

As the United States started bombing Afghanistan, the Pentagon got nervous about Space Imaging’s privately owned IKONOS satellite, which could photograph Afghanistan at roughly one-meter resolution and sell the pictures to anyone.

Washington had a legal power to order “shutter control” over commercial satellites in wartime.

It didn’t use it.

It bought exclusive rights to the imagery instead, spending millions to make sure nobody else got it, an approach that analysts later nicknamed “checkbook shutter control.”

Washington looked at a private space capability with battlefield consequences and effectively said, we’re paying you, and for the duration of this operation, we decide.

The Starshield situation is the mirror image of that.

Who Owns the Switch?

What makes this story strange isn’t necessarily that SpaceX is a private defense contractor. Lockheed Martin is private, and so are RTX and Boeing. Microsoft runs software across the Pentagon.

Private industry has built nearly every weapon the American military has ever carried.

The strange part is a contractor apparently keeping operational discretion after its product becomes part of a live kill chain.

A Lockheed executive can’t decide an F-16 may no longer fly faster than 400 knots because he dislikes the mission. Raytheon’s CEO can’t switch off a Patriot battery because he disagrees with the mayor of the city being protected. Once those weapons are delivered, they belong to the people using them.

Software-defined services completely break that model.

Starshield is delivered and paid for continuously, month after month, and SpaceX controls the satellites, the software, the network management, and much of the infrastructure carrying the signal.

Current government procurement notices buy Starshield throughput, peering and support services from SpaceX. The manufacturer never really leaves the capability. That’s convenient when you need a software patch at three in the morning, and fucking terrifying when the CEO has opinions about the war.

Does that mean the Pentagon should nationalize SpaceX?

I don’t think so. Lincoln didn’t nationalize Western Union, Wilson handed the phone lines back, and the Pentagon never bought Iridium.

What all of them insisted on was the switch.

A modern version might look like a government-controlled management layer for Starshield, government-held authorization keys, contract language that flatly bans unilateral service changes during military operations, (even for allies), guaranteed continuity, independent audit rights, and enough redundancy, from European and other providers, that no single company becomes a single point of failure.

Iridium gives us a partial model, the Civil War telegraph gives us the philosophy, and Wilson’s wire seizure gives us the emergency option nobody wants to use.

None of those historic examples require Washington to own SpaceX.

All of them require the Pentagon to know exactly who owns the godforsaken switch.

Right now, Musk’s politics happen to overlap with much of the current administration’s worldview.

What happens when they don’t? What happens when a future president decides to support an ally, conduct an operation, or enforce a policy that SpaceX’s CEO personally considers dangerous or immoral?

Will US soldiers die because Musk doesn’t like the deployment?

If one private citizen can push a button and get the soldiers of a US ally killed, all because he agrees with Washington today, the same authority still exists when he disagrees with Washington tomorrow.

But the problem isn’t Elon Musk’s bullshit ideology. The problem is that his bullshit ideology can matter at all.

We need to fix this.

Слава Україні!

Think of this as your weekly strategic weather report. Five pressure points around the world that could get bigger over the next seven days.

Lots of election news this week, but then again, ‘tis the season. Source links are included throughout. Let’s jump in:

BLUF:

Lula came from behind to win Brazil and halt the Latin American right-wing wave.

Students ended Putin-backed Vucic’s 14-year grip on Serbia in a landslide. But can they govern?

Israel votes tomorrow in its most consequential election in nearly 50 years.

María Corina Machado walked back into Venezuela.

And the USS Theodore Roosevelt is heading to Iran.

Stay sharp.

1. Lula Just Won an Unprecedented Fourth Term. He Did It From Behind

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential runoff Sunday night, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro after entering the second round as the underdog.

Lula had finished nearly two points behind Bolsonaro in the October 4 first round, then reversed the deficit in the runoff. No incumbent Brazilian president had ever finished second in round one and come back to win round two.

Lula, now 80, has been elected president four times.

Latin America had been moving noticeably rightward, with governments in Argentina, El Salvador, and Ecuador helping build a political current broadly friendly to Trump’s Washington. Lula’s victory shows that there are limits to it.

Flávio Bolsonaro, meanwhile, gave a speech rejecting the result and said that he may seek annulment.

How Brazilian institutions respond this time will tell us quite a bit about how much strength the Bolsonaro movement still has after the January 8 attack on government buildings in Brasília.

What I’m watching: Whether Bolsonaro actually files a formal annulment challenge with Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal, and what evidence he claims supports it. I’m also watching Trump. He publicly backed Flávio.

2. Students Ended Vucic’s 14-Year Rule in Serbia. By a Landslide

This one is remarkable.

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Hey friends, I outlined three different article ideas over the weekend that would only work on Substack. My Medium audience, the vast majority, are laser focused on Ukraine War news. If I drift too far from that admittedly important topic, I’m “punished” with low views, and thus low money.

But on Substack, I’ve exposed my readers to a variety of military technology, geopolitical, and cultural topics, so there’s less pushback when I go “off script.” Plus, Substack doesn’t use the view model. Writers are paid only by premium memberships (and apparently Substack will soon start letting writers put “sponsored ads” in their writings… That sounds like hell, to be honest.)

So, what were the three ideas, and which one did I choose today?

The first idea is a deep dive into the Bristol 188 jet, which was supposed to support development of the Mach 3 Avro 730. Nicknamed the “Flaming Pencil,” its only job was to get very fast, stay very fast, and let engineers measure what prolonged aerodynamic heating did to an aircraft structure.

The second article examines an obscure US Navy recruiting ad from 2006 that challenged people to find the hidden Navy Seals in the image. In 2006, America’s special operations forces were stretched thin by the Global War on Terror (GWOT). This ad is iconic and gives us a great window into alliance warfare, clever marketing, and a special forces organization that had not yet become famous.

The third article is the one I chose for today; the one that you’re about to read…

Some of these will be free on Substack, some of them will necessarily fall on paid days (Wednesdays and Sundays), so if you’re reading today’s paid subscriber article as part of your free preview, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber to support independent journalism. I’m quite bad at promoting the paid side of Eyes Only as I almost never do any “marketing.”

Hmm, it just occurred to me that all three of these ideas are historical in nature.

Perhaps I was in the military history mood when I came up with these? Anyways, I’ll write the first two of the next couple of days, but for today, let’s talk about the Ukrainians who fought alongside US soldiers in the GWOT.

In early April 2004, a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier sat on the bank of the Tigris River in Kut, a dusty city of a few hundred thousand people about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army had risen up across southern Iraq, and Kut was burning.

Inside that APC was Ruslan Androshchuk, a soldier in the reconnaissance company of Ukraine’s 6th Mechanized Brigade, from a village in the Zhytomyr region. According to his comrades, he spotted a militant on the far bank lining up a rocket-propelled grenade. He put his machine gun sights on the man and asked for permission to fire.

The answer came back: ні. (No)

The rocket hit the side of the APC a moment later, and the shaped charge killed him.

“Only after Ruslan was killed were we finally allowed to open fire,” one of his fellow soldiers later recalled.

Androshchuk died in an American-led war, in a country his own government had no quarrel with, as part of a coalition his nation had joined at Washington’s request. Ukraine wasn’t a NATO member, and it had no treaty obligation to be there. Nine out of ten Ukrainians told pollsters back home they opposed the war, and he went anyway.

On Tuesday, standing in the Oval Office, the President of the United States said this about Ukraine: “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. We’ve gotten absolutely nothing back except grief, death, tremendous monetary loss.”

Grief and death, he said. I can think of 18 Ukrainian families who know a little something about grief and death in America’s wars.

A Non-Member Who Showed Up Anyway

Let’s set the scene, because a lot of Americans either never knew this or forgot it somewhere between the Bush surge and the launch of the first iPhone.

When the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, most of the countries Washington considered its closest friends stayed home. France and Germany said no loudly, and many others said no quietly. The Bush administration cobbled together what it called the “coalition of the willing,” and one of the more surprising names on the list was a former Soviet republic barely a decade into independence.

On March 18, 2003, two days before the invasion began, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma signed a decree sending Ukraine’s 19th Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) Protection Battalion to Kuwait.

The US military expected Saddam Hussein to use chemical weapons, (as he had done before against the Kurds) and Ukraine sent specialists trained to deal with exactly that, people whose country had learned more than it ever wanted to about contamination after Chernobyl. US Marines later described the Ukrainian NBC soldiers working alongside an American-led task force as bona-fide experts.

In June 2003, Ukraine’s parliament voted 273 to 450 to send a full brigade. By September, the Ukrainian 5th Mechanized Brigade was in Iraq, based in Wasit province with its headquarters at Kut, operating as part of the Polish-led Multinational Division Central-South.

At its peak, Ukraine kept about 1,650 troops in Iraq, depending on whose count you trust.

That made it the third- or fourth-largest contingent in the entire coalition. The US Army ranked it third. More than 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers rotated through Iraq and Kuwait before the last of them came home in December 2008.

They patrolled, guarded convoys, cleared explosives, protected infrastructure and trained Iraqi army and police units.

They also bled.

Read more

Ukraine just signed an agreement with Finland to explore something that sounded fairly boring a month ago, and suddenly got extremely important:

Satellite communications that Ukraine actually controls.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo oversaw the signing of seven agreements in Kyiv yesterday (October 22) covering defense production, drones, transportation, construction, and space. The agreements have a combined estimated value of around €300 million.

The document that caught my attention was signed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, Nokia Defense, and ICEYE.

According to Zelenskyy, the three parties signed a letter of intent aimed specifically at developing Ukraine’s satellite communications capabilities. Zelenskyy said Kyiv had agreed to make “greater use of Finland’s satellite capabilities” for both defense and national resilience.

I think that wording undersells what Nokia and ICEYE are proposing.

They’re really talking about helping Ukraine develop sovereign satellite communications.

The wake-up call came when Musk throttled Ukraine’s Starshield service, and as of October 23, 2026, Ukraine says the restrictions remain in place.

(Even though Musk says service has been restored.)

I’ve spent a lot of ink this past week writing about who possessed the contractual authority to change those settings, but the larger lesson keeps bothering me more.

Ukraine built an enormous portion of its battlefield communications architecture around a satellite network it didn’t control; because it trusted the supplier.

And Starlink has been extraordinary technology for Ukraine. It survived Russian electronic warfare, attacks against terrestrial infrastructure and the general abuse of operating in the world’s nastiest electromagnetic environment. Ukrainian soldiers have wired the system into command posts, vehicles, boats and increasingly drones.

Then, infuriatingly, Musk changed a software permission.

That is the vulnerability Nokia and ICEYE say their new system is intended to remove.

And interestingly, they started building it before the Starlink mess.

In an incredible bit of foresight, Nokia and ICEYE announced their sovereign satellite communications partnership on October 1, nearly two weeks before Ukraine began experiencing the SpaceX restrictions.

Their proposal is a broadband low-Earth-orbit communications system intended specifically for governments, defense organizations, border agencies, and emergency services.

The first communications satellites are expected to launch in 2028.

So, Ukraine hasn’t suddenly panic-ordered a Finnish replacement for Starlink. The project was already moving. The Starlink episode just demonstrated the requirement in the most spectacular way possible.

ICEYE says the goal is to provide Ukraine with secure satellite communications “that it controls.” Nokia says the same basic thing from the networking side: governments need communications that remain available under pressure while national authorities retain control over the connectivity their military depends on.

That gets us to the technical question of today’s piece...

What does sovereign satellite communications actually mean? Well, your country has to own the important bits.

Ukraine already knows ICEYE extremely well.

In August 2022, the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation purchased access to ICEYE’s synthetic aperture radar constellation and transferred the capability to the Ukrainian government. The deal gave Ukraine full use of one ICEYE satellite already in orbit along with access to imagery from the broader constellation.

That satellite became known in Ukraine as the “People’s Satellite.” Kind of like The Rock Dwayne Johnson used to be the “People’s Champion” in wrestling before he became a movie star.

Ukraine’s military intelligence said within months of getting access, ICEYE imagery had helped identify thousands of pieces of Russian military equipment, including tanks, artillery, helicopters, air-defense systems, and Iskander positions.

Then the relationship kept growing.

In January 2026, ICEYE announced another agreement expanding Ukrainian access to high-resolution SAR imagery for tactical military decision-making. So Ukraine already understands what it means to integrate Finnish commercial space technology into military operations.

But the new project changes the mission. ICEYE has historically looked down.

Now, with Nokia, it wants to help governments talk through space too.

Nokia brings the nervous system

If ICEYE provides the spacecraft and space experience, Nokia brings much of the communications architecture connecting everything together.

That means secure networking, network orchestration, ground infrastructure, and terminals; the whole shebang.

The two companies say their planned system will integrate satellites, ground stations, and ruggedized end-user terminals into one sovereign architecture.

ICEYE says its approach gives governments ownership and operational control over the satellites, ground segment, and terminals. Its own description of the service goes even further: customer data can remain entirely inside approved national or allied infrastructure, without dependence on a foreign commercial operator’s terms of service.

That’s a nice little middle finger to Elon.

So, I think there are three ways Ukraine could do this…

One is a dedicated national constellation.

Ukraine owns the satellite system and operates it for Ukraine. That’s the purest form of sovereignty and probably the most expensive.

A second option is a coalition constellation shared among allied countries. That possibility gets really interesting. Imagine Ukraine, Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, and perhaps several other European countries collectively operating a low-Earth-orbit military communications constellation.

Each contributes funding and infrastructure and the network provides overlapping coverage. Control remains within the coalition rather than residing with a foreign commercial provider.

The third option is what ICEYE calls a “hosted sovereign service.”

That would presumably allow a government to gain protected capacity more quickly without immediately funding an entire constellation from scratch, while still preserving much tighter national control over data and service than a conventional commercial subscription.

We don’t yet know which model Ukraine is considering, the October 22 document is just a letter of intent.

Plus, the first Nokia-ICEYE communications satellites aren’t expected to launch until 2028 and Ukraine still needs Starlink today.

I have to admit that I didn’t fully appreciate the vision when I first learned about Starlink. But remember, back then, Ukrainian-style drone war hadn’t been invented yet. My biggest concern was the sky pollution hampering astronomers’ observations.

But now the benefit is obvious… Starlink’s enormous advantage is scale.

SpaceX operates more than 11,000 satellites across Starlink’s constellation, giving it coverage and capacity that no competitor can immediately reproduce.

Ukraine has thousands upon thousands of terminals already distributed across its military and civil infrastructure.

Its soldiers know how to use them.

Its units have built tactics around them.

Replacement terminals exist.

Commanders know roughly what the network will tolerate.

A new Finnish satellite system isn’t going to magically replace all of that in 2027, nor are Nokia and ICEYE claiming it will. Their own literature says the sovereign constellation is intended to complement commercial and governmental networks rather than replace every other system.

That’s probably how Ukraine should approach it…

Military communications shouldn’t have one backbone, but several.

Starlink can be one. ICEYE-Nokia can become another. Europe’s IRIS² and GOVSATCOM infrastructure can eventually add additional paths. Terrestrial fiber and microwave links remain important. Military radio still works in a pinch, when Ivan’s not jamming shit.

Different systems overlap so that losing one doesn’t suddenly blind an entire battle group.

That’s just redundancy, (like we had on the AWACS):

There were two complete radar chains starting with two different high power amplifiers (Klystron Power Amplifiers or KPAs) all the way up to the antenna element in the rotodome. It was up to the on-board radar tech which chain, A or B, you’d be flying that day; but if one went down, you could switch to the other chain with no mission interruption. (When both chains went down on the same flight, the mission fails… but you get to go home early.)

Plus, there’s a second story happening underneath all of this.

Finland and Ukraine are developing a strange defense relationship, and I mean that in the best possible way.

In the same package of agreements, Ukrainian and Finnish companies agreed to explore joint production of unmanned military systems inside Finland. Patria is involved. Ukrainian drone companies are involved. Zelenskyy says measures worth around €200 million are already underway under the broader Ukraine-Finland Drone Deal.

Then there are the locomotives.

Finland agreed to give Ukraine ten Dv12 diesel locomotives and spare parts free of charge, becoming the first country to donate locomotives directly to Ukrzaliznytsia.

Ukraine says Russia has damaged or destroyed nearly 600 locomotives since the full-scale invasion, including more than 300 diesel units.

I’m deliberately not going down that rabbit hole here because I think Finnish locomotives quietly joining Ukraine’s war deserve their own video. I’ll be filming this for next week’s YouTube slate.

Anyways, taken together, these agreements show Finland doing something increasingly common among Ukraine’s northern European partners: integrating Ukrainian wartime experience into Finnish industry while giving Ukraine access to capabilities Finland happens to be very good at building.

Remember, Finland spent decades designing a society around the assumption that Russia might eventually become everybody’s problem again.

Turns out, there was some wisdom in that.

Слава Україні!

Well, that was quick. When I published my Starshield whodunit a few days ago, I had a wonderful little lineup of suspects.

Elon Musk said the US government controlled Starshield and that restrictions on speed or usage were decided by the military and, ultimately, the president.

Donald Trump said he didn’t do it.

Reuters had sources pointing toward the White House.

Ukraine was still dealing with the speed restriction.

Space Force had hundreds of millions of dollars in Starshield contracts with SpaceX and somewhere inside that tangled nonsense was the person who changed the setting.

We may now know who.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Elon Musk personally ordered the slowdown of the military-grade SpaceX satellite service used by Ukraine. According to US officials and people familiar with the decision, Musk authorized the restriction that capped the speed at which Ukrainian hardware could remain connected, disrupting strike drones and interceptor drones defending Ukrainian cities from Russian attacks.

CBS News then independently reported that a decision by Musk led to the restrictions.

CBS says Musk held multiple conversations with administration officials before the order because he wanted to understand President Trump’s position. Some Trump administration officials were reportedly surprised by the resulting slowdown, and CBS says neither Trump nor the Pentagon specifically ordered SpaceX to cripple Ukraine’s drone operations.

So our whodunit just changed genres: We have moved from Agatha Christie to contract law. God help us all. I’m having flashbacks: Offer, acceptance, and consideration.

Identifying who ordered the slowdown raises a much more serious question:

Did Elon Musk actually have the authority to do it?

Remember what Musk said when this story first broke:

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government,” he wrote, adding that limits on speed or usage were decided by the US military and ultimately the president.

Musk was describing an operational chain of authority in which the government, rather than SpaceX, controlled the relevant restrictions.

Now The Wall Street Journal and CBS are reporting that Musk himself ordered the slowdown.

Those two things can’t both be completely true in the way they were originally presented.

Either Musk possessed authority that his public statement made sound like it belonged to the federal government, somebody in Washington authorized his decision, the affected service was contractually different from the Starshield service Musk was describing, or the reporting is wrong.

As of Wednesday morning, the administration appears to be moving toward the first explanation.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that decisions about Ukraine’s Starlink access belong to SpaceX and Musk rather than the White House. Rubio said he wasn’t aware that the administration knew of the decision beforehand and described the restrictions as governed by a private commercial contract determining how SpaceX equipment can be used and at what speeds.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has offered a similar explanation.

“We haven’t made any directives or anything like that,” Hegseth said Tuesday, while arguing that SpaceX’s terms of service give the company discretion to make certain decisions about access.

That’s a major shift from where we started.

A week ago, Musk told us Washington controlled the speed restrictions.

Now two of the highest-ranking officials in Washington are essentially saying: “Nope. Elon.”

Starlink or Starshield? Somebody please pick one

Before we get into breach, default, performance obligations, and all the other subjects that make first-year law students reconsider a career in plumbing, there is an annoying threshold problem.

Nobody seems able to agree on what Ukraine was actually using.

Starlink is SpaceX’s commercial satellite internet service.

Starshield is the military and intelligence product built using much of the same underlying satellite infrastructure, with different terminals, security features, management and government arrangements.

Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have repeatedly described disruptions affecting Starshield.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee says the same thing.

In an October 19 letter to SpaceX, four US senators wrote that Ukraine “more recently has received access to Starshield services procured by the US Government to support Ukrainian military operations.” They specifically described the October 14 restriction on devices traveling faster than 100 mph as a Starshield restriction.

But Rubio suggested over the weekend that Ukraine never had Starshield access in the first place.

Umm, that distinction isn’t pedantic anymore. It may determine which contract governs the incident.

If Musk throttled ordinary commercial Starlink operating under SpaceX’s standard service terms, Hegseth’s argument about private terms of service becomes more plausible. If he independently degraded Starshield service that the Pentagon specifically purchased for Ukrainian military operations, we are in a completely different contractual neighborhood.

And the public procurement records tell us that the Pentagon buys a great deal of Starshield.

Follow the money again

Space Systems Command’s current SpaceX contracting vehicle is FA254125DB021, an indefinite-delivery contract that began in July 2025.

Federal spending records currently show about $476 million obligated under six orders, with roughly $1.15 billion in potential value attached to those orders.

Several are explicitly Starshield-related.

Task order FA254126FB008 is described simply as “STARSHIELD SERVICE SUPPORT” and carries $135 million in obligations.

Task order FA254126FB019 covers commercial satellite communications services and hardware. The government says it includes SpaceX terminals, ancillary equipment and service plans for Starshield-based military requirements across the Defense Department and other federal agencies.

Then there’s FA254126FB015, which remains my favorite breadcrumb in this entire story.

The government describes it as:

“SECURE GLOBAL SATCOM VIA POOLED STARSHIELD SERVICE. ENHANCED FEATURES, SECURITY, AND CENTRAL MANAGEMENT FOR ALL MISSIONS.”

That task order carries nearly $132 million in current obligations.

Read more

I know some Americans who heard some variation of this on the news: “Conservative Alberta is sick and tired of doing all the hard work while the liberals in Ottawa reap the financial reward! So, Alberta is holding a vote to leave Canada!”

WHOA, easy there. Let’s not give Texas any ideas; those muppets will look for any excuse to become a republic again.

Through the American lens, the Alberta vote can come across as somewhat confusing to the average Chicago commuter.

So, allow me to break it down for my fellow Yanks.

Wait, Wes! Why are you, of all people, qualified to discuss Canadian politics?

I’m glad you asked… I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Oh, and somewhere along the way I picked up a bachelor’s degree in international relations. Plus, I can practically see Canada from my house…

Actually, when I was a nineteen-year-old private first class in the US Army, my new wife and I drove to Niagara Falls, from her parent’s house in Michigan, through Canada, to the Canadian side of the falls.

I remember standing in this gift shop where I was about to purchase a book about the geology of the Niagara Escarpment.

I still have the book. One sec…

Anyways, the young high school girl at the checkout, not much younger than me at the time, was studying American history after 1865. I recognized the book. And I said “Oh, American history? That’s a super interesting time period: reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Gilded Age.”

She looked up from her book with a studious gaze: “Americans I take it?”

“Yep.”

Then she said something that caught me by surprise. “Do you study Canadian history in the US?”

And today, years later, I still feel bad about what happened next.

I laughed. Involuntarily…

It wasn’t a laugh of superiority.

It wasn’t some laugh-in-her-face-like-a-maniacal-psychopath situation.

It was just an uncontrollable chuckle because my infantry brain couldn’t comprehend the absurdity of it. American high school is already filled with enough asinine bullshit to fill the plunge pool at Niagara; we certainly didn’t need any more.

(Actually, those of us who attended school in Texas were exposed to TWO FULL YEARS of Texas history, which is itself intertwined with Mexican history, so we Texians actually know far more about our southern neighbor…)

Years go by and this episode, (and my immature reaction), haunted me. I made it a point to learn Canadian history and politics in honor of this woman. I hope she’s living her best life somewhere warm.

Fast forward to this year, and the moment I started reading about Alberta’s independence movement, my American brain began building a frozen remake of Fort Sumter…

It went something like this:

Alberta votes to leave, Ottawa says “the fuck you are…” somebody rolls a Leopard 2 onto Highway 2, and Calgary declares itself the capital of a new republic. Before long, a CBC correspondent is doing a live shot in front of a roadblock while everyone involved apologizes for the inconvenience.

Albertans spared me the trouble.

On Monday, roughly three-quarters of voters chose to stay in Canada, according to unofficial results, with official numbers due October 29. Premier Danielle Smith, whose government put the question on the ballot in the first place, voted to remain too.

That’s a bit like a girl organizing a bar fight and then spending the whole night holding everybody’s jackets.

But here’s the thing… The vote also wasn’t really about leaving. Question 10 asked Albertans whether to remain a province of Canada or to have their government start the legal process toward a future, binding referendum on separation.

Elections Alberta designated it “nonbinding.” Nobody was going to wake up Tuesday morning in the Republic of Alberta, standing in line for new license plates.

The 24 percent who voted the other way haven’t gone anywhere, though, and the question underneath the ballot is too interesting to drop. Suppose that someday Alberta holds the real thing, with a simple question: “Should Alberta cease to be part of Canada and become an independent country?”

Let’s say 60 percent say yes.

What happens next?

Surprisingly, Canada already has an answer, and it involves far fewer Leopard 2 tanks and far more lawyers than my Texas-raised imagination wanted.

Canada Already Wrote the Instruction Manual

Canada already has a history with secession.

On October 30, 1995, Quebec voted on sovereignty and came within 54,288 votes of leaving Canada. The final count was 50.58 percent against and 49.42 percent in favor, with a staggering 93.52 percent turnout. I’ve been to college football games with more people in the stands than the margin that kept Canada in one piece.

Canada looked at how close it had come to breaking apart and decided, very sensibly, that maybe somebody should write the instructions down before anyone tried that shit again.

In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down the Quebec Secession Reference, and the ruling is a masterpiece of not giving either side what it wanted.

A province has no constitutional right to simply announce it’s leaving. At the same time, Ottawa can’t shrug off a clear democratic vote for independence as if nothing happened. If a clear majority votes for secession on a clear question, the rest of Canada takes on a constitutional obligation to negotiate “in good faith.”

So an independence vote wouldn’t really work like a light switch. It would function more like somebody dumping an enormous box of constitutional Legos on the living room floor and telling every government in the country to start sorting.

Parliament then made it more interesting still.

The Clarity Act of 2000 deliberately refuses to say that 50 percent plus one equals independence. Before a referendum, the House of Commons decides whether the question itself is clear.

After the vote, it decides whether the result amounts to a “clear majority,” weighing the margin, the turnout and anything else it considers relevant. Squeaking out 50.1 percent on a question written like a cell phone contract probably wouldn’t get Alberta very far. Sixty percent on “Should Alberta become an independent country?” would be a lot harder for Ottawa to wave away.

If both the question and the majority pass the clarity test, negotiations begin.

That’s when this gets wonderfully, almost lovingly Canadian…

Everyone Gets a Lawyer

Okay, we’ve established that a successful referendum wouldn’t make Alberta independent. It would give Alberta a mandate to negotiate independence, and those negotiations would end in a constitutional amendment involving the federal government and, under the Clarity Act, every provincial government too.

Picture the nightmarish agenda… Somebody has to divide the national debt, then the federal assets. Then come pensions, citizenship, currency, banking, customs, borders, federal employees, airports, pipelines, and military bases.

Eventually, around day 417, somebody in Ottawa realizes nobody has decided who owns a particular weather radar outside Medicine Hat, and the whole room fucks off for lunch.

I say this as a guy with both a DD-214 and a law degree: you don’t want to know how long it takes a roomful of lawyers to agree on who owns a weather radar.

The Clarity Act also says the negotiations must address the division of assets and liabilities, minority rights, the rights and territorial claims of Indigenous peoples, and possible changes to provincial borders.

That last one stopped me cold, because it means Alberta’s outline on the map isn’t guaranteed to survive an independence deal intact.

Alberta is home to 48 First Nations covered by Treaties 6, 7 and 8, plus eight Métis Settlements. Those treaties were signed with the Crown, not with Edmonton, and Section 35 of Canada’s Constitution recognizes and affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. Edmonton couldn’t simply declare that everything inside today’s provincial boundary now belongs to a new country and tell everybody to update Apple Maps.

We don’t even need a hypothetical here.

In May, Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench struck down a separatist petition because its organizers hadn’t properly consulted Indigenous peoples, treating that consultation as a constitutional requirement because separation would affect treaty rights.

Treaty 8 First Nations publicly backed legal action against separation, and First Nations leaders across Alberta and Saskatchewan vowed to oppose it.

So, some of the questions in that negotiating room wouldn’t have tidy answers.

Some First Nations could insist that their treaty relationship with the Crown keeps their lands in Canada. Ottawa might support that argument. In the strangest version, an independent Alberta could emerge with pockets of Canadian territory inside it.

Nobody can answer those confidently, because Canada has never actually done this. The law does tell us nobody could just ignore them.

The negotiation could decide what Alberta actually is when it walks out the door, and I find that endlessly fascinating.

Then there’s the oil, because every Alberta independence conversation reaches petroleum within about 6.2 seconds. Alberta sits on enormous energy reserves, and that oil is the foundation of its economic and political clout.

Owning oil underground isn’t the same as owning a road to the ocean, though.

An independent Alberta would be landlocked. Every barrel bound for a Canadian coast would cross a foreign country, the pipelines that are domestic infrastructure today would become international infrastructure overnight, and a refinery shipping gasoline into British Columbia would suddenly be an exporter dealing with customs, transit fees, and potential tariffs.

None of that makes independence impossible, because countries negotiate these arrangements all the time. But it does mean “we have the oil” answers only half the question. Somebody still has to move the stuff, and that somebody would be living in a different country.

Who Gets the Keys to Cold Lake?

This is the part that first sent me down the rabbit hole, because there’s a lot of Canadian military in Alberta.

The province hosts 3rd Canadian Division Support Base Edmonton, the Army’s big training area at CFB Wainwright, CFB Suffield (home to military testing and British Army training on the prairie) and 4 Wing Cold Lake, one of Canada’s two main fighter bases.

Somewhere north of 10,000 Canadian service members live and work in the province.

None of it belongs to Alberta.

Section 91 of the Constitution Act gives Parliament exclusive authority over “Militia, Military and Naval Service, and Defence.” (It took a great deal of intestinal fortitude to force myself to spell “defence” like you freakazoids. You’re welcome…)

If Alberta voted for independence, the troops at Edmonton wouldn’t wake up as the Alberta Defense (I refuse to do it a second time) Force. They’d still be Canadian soldiers in a Canadian chain of command, and the CF-18s at Cold Lake would stay Canadian jets until Canada agreed otherwise.

Any infantryman who’s ever signed for a piece of equipment knows how this goes.

Government property changes hands when the right person signs the right form, and if you’ve ever tried to clear out-processing with one missing canteen cup, you know the federal government will find you wherever you go.

The Air Force was actually more gracious with letting airmen keep their stuff on separation. If the Army wanted every single paperclip back before you left, the Air Force let me walk out the door with a $700 Gore-Tex field jacket that I still use today in Michigan’s abysmal lake-effect winters.

In a negotiated separation in Canada, the bases would get sorted like any other asset. Canada might pull out completely, Alberta might buy some facilities, or Ottawa might lease a few for a transition period.

Equipment would move or be sold, and personnel would face choices about postings, residency, and eventually citizenship.

It’s boring in the best possible way. The dangerous version starts when somebody skips the negotiation.

The Midnight Declaration Scenario

But let’s take this to the extreme… Like an early 2000s Slim Jim commercial.

Imagine Alberta holds the real referendum and 60 percent vote yes. Ottawa accepts that it now has to negotiate, and talks begin.

Then they bog down: The debt split turns nasty, Indigenous territorial claims harden, pipeline access becomes a hostage, and the two sides start fighting over military property.

Months become years.

Eventually an Alberta government runs out of patience, and at midnight on some future July 1 (Canada Day, just for maximum pettiness), Edmonton announces that negotiations have failed and Alberta is now an independent state.

Under Canadian law, that declaration wouldn’t do a thing. The Supreme Court and the Clarity Act both make clear that unilateral secession isn’t allowed and a constitutional amendment is required. From Ottawa’s point of view, Alberta would still be Canada, and that changes everything that follows.

Federal authorities still operating in Alberta wouldn’t see themselves as invading a foreign country. They’d see themselves as continuing to govern Canada.

Federal taxes would still be owed, Canadian passports would still be valid, federal employees would still answer to Ottawa, and the Canada Border Services Agency would still consider the 49th parallel its border.

The Bank of Canada wouldn’t mail Edmonton a box containing its share of the monetary system with a nice card wishing everyone luck.

At first, almost all of the fighting would happen in courtrooms, ministries, and police headquarters. Ottawa would ask the courts to strike down the declaration and refuse diplomatic recognition, while Alberta tried to exercise powers Ottawa still considered federal.

Sooner or later, somebody would have to decide who holds the keys to Cold Lake.

That’s where the temperature starts to climb. If Alberta authorities tried to occupy a base or seize Canadian aircraft, they’d be taking federal military property.

If provincial officers set up their own checkpoints at the US border, two governments would be claiming the same international frontier.

If the RCMP kept enforcing federal law while Edmonton told provincial police to stop them, you’d have officers standing on the same stretch of highway taking orders from two different sovereigns.

None of that guarantees gunfire. It does put armed officers with conflicting orders on the same roads, which is how constitutional theory starts becoming a security problem.

So, when would the Canadian Armed Forces actually get involved?

I don’t see Mark Carney sending armored columns toward Calgary because 55 percent of Albertans voted for independence. Canada built its secession framework specifically so that democratic separatism wouldn’t be treated as rebellion.

The military really enters the picture only once somebody starts trying to enforce competing sovereignty with force.

Canada’s Emergencies Act defines a national emergency to include threats to the federal government’s ability to preserve Canada’s “sovereignty, security and territorial integrity,” but it comes with legal thresholds and parliamentary oversight attached. The National Defense Act lets the military assist civil authorities when riots or disturbances exceed what police can handle.

The normal trigger, though, is a request from the provincial attorney general, which gets awkward fast when the provincial government is the one in open confrontation with Ottawa.

Ottawa would have every incentive to keep soldiers out of it as long as humanly possible.

Courts, police, injunctions, and locked gates at federal property are all cleaner tools, and nobody in Ottawa wants a photograph of Canadian soldiers facing down Albertans over a constitutional argument.

The real nightmare is a slow slide into confusion about who’s in charge.

Picture Edmonton deciding its mandate to negotiate already makes it sovereign, while some First Nations refuse to be included. Federal agencies keep operating, Alberta stands up its own border service, Ottawa refuses to pull the RCMP, and Canadian personnel at Edmonton, Cold Lake, Suffield and Wainwright keep taking orders from Ottawa. Provincial police get told one thing, federal officers get told another, and two governments claim to legitimately rule the same ground.

History is full of places where that sentence ended in a shit show.

That doesn’t mean Canada would ever get there. Everything about its post-Quebec legal architecture is designed to stop it.

What I find remarkable, as an American, is how deliberately Canadians built an off-ramp.

My country settled its secession question in the 1860s at a cost of somewhere between 620,000 and 750,000 lives. Canada came within 54,288 votes of its own existential crisis and responded with legislation and an instruction manual.

It also guarantees that the people whose rights predate the province itself get a say in what happens to their land.

There’s something in that worth envying, especially right now, watching my own country barrel uncontrollably toward Civil War II – the Empire Strikes Back.

The Canadian answer to “what if we break up?” turned out to be “then we’ll argue about it, in order, under rules we agreed to ahead of time.”

So, if Alberta ever does vote clearly for independence, don’t watch for Canadian tanks first. Watch the lawyers. They’ll get there long before the Army does, and they’ll bill by the hour the whole way.

The True North strong and free.

-Wes

Think of this as your weekly strategic weather report. Five pressure points around the world that could become more important over the next seven days.

I try to keep the Preflight relatively light on snark because several of these stories involve people having a terrible week. We’ll see how successful I am.

Source links are included throughout.

BLUF:

A Russian military satellite has spent weeks maneuvering alongside one of Ukraine’s most important intelligence satellites, and today brings the closest predicted encounter yet.

Ebola has reached Nairobi while the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues accelerating.

Four Canadian soldiers are dead after a grass fire tore through a live-fire exercise, with 19 more critically injured.

China appears to be building a second vessel capable of supporting large underwater drones.

And Brazil votes Sunday in an extraordinarily close presidential runoff.

1. A Russian military satellite pulled alongside Ukraine’s Finnish intelligence satellite. Today is the closest pass

Something unusual has been happening in orbit above us, and Russia appears to have spent a fair amount of precious satellite fuel making it happen.

On October 16, Russia’s Cosmos 2612 maneuvered to within roughly five kilometers of ICEYE-X36, the Finnish-built synthetic aperture radar satellite used extensively by Ukrainian military intelligence. Rather than continuing past it, Cosmos 2612 began stationkeeping, essentially matching the other spacecraft closely enough to remain alongside it.

Orbital tracker Jonathan McDowell described the event on X as potentially “the first LEO rendezvous of two active satellites where the owner of one of the sats did not give approval.”

Current orbital modeling projects the two spacecraft making a close pass on October 19 with a miss distance of approximately 150 meters.

Ukraine’s military knows ICEYE-X36 as the “People’s Satellite.” By May 2026, Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence had received more than 5,900 radar images from the spacecraft and used them to locate and monitor Russian military equipment.

Russia knows exactly what ICEYE-X36 does.

Beginning September 30, the Russian spacecraft spent roughly two weeks adjusting its altitude and waiting for its orbital plane to align with ICEYE-X36. On October 12, it performed another maneuver, spending approximately 27.9 meters per second of delta-v to become coplanar with the Ukrainian intelligence satellite. Four days later, it had closed the distance enough to begin stationkeeping.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has noted that a spacecraft operating at this proximity could potentially take action that threatens another satellite. That doesn’t establish hostile intent, and Cosmos 2612’s precise mission hasn’t been publicly confirmed. Close approaches can support inspection, intelligence collection, characterization of another spacecraft, electronic surveillance, or potentially something considerably less friendly.

What I’m watching: The predicted 150-meter pass and, especially, whether ICEYE-X36 experiences any unusual communications or imaging behavior around the encounter.

2. Ebola is in Nairobi, and the outbreak in the DRC is getting worse

Kenya confirmed its eighth Ebola case Monday morning.

The newest patient is a 49-year-old man who worked as a patient attendant and cleaned utensils and linens used by Kenya’s first confirmed patient, a 40-year-old Kenyan man who traveled from the Democratic Republic of Congo through Uganda. He arrived in Nairobi on October 3 and died at Nairobi Hospital two days later.

Read more

At roughly 100 miles per hour, Ukraine’s internet died.

Murdered, more precisely, by an unknow assailant.

Likely somebody within the Trump administration, or one of its cronies; a group so far up their own asses that they didn’t realize they could have asked Canada for faster, cheaper diesel rather than make a deal with Poo-tihn.

“Poo-tihn” is the actual, official US government phonetic pronunciation given to American airmen when Putin visited Alaska (as if we had never heard his name before, smh). Regardless, this is how I think we should all spell his name moving forward.

During the night of October 13 into October 14, Ukrainian military units discovered that Starshield terminals mounted aboard moving platforms were suddenly losing connectivity once they crossed a certain speed.

Ukrainian troops hadn’t been warned: Missions failed. Drones lost their links. Air-defense interceptors that increasingly rely on satellite communications to chase Russian attack drones suddenly found themselves operating under a new restriction that hadn’t existed the day before.

Ukraine’s military reported connection losses at different speeds depending on the unit and equipment, in some cases beginning around 63 mph.

SpaceX acknowledged a 100-mph restriction on Ukraine’s service.

As of today, Sunday morning, October 18, 2026, Ukraine says the service has still not been restored while the US State Department claims it has. Tests conducted inside the European Union don’t show the same restriction.

Oy vey.

Someone changed something.

The victim is Ukraine’s ability to use one of the most important communications systems on the modern battlefield at the speeds required by its increasingly fast unmanned aircraft.

The murder weapon is probably boring as hell: a network configuration, service restriction, account permission, or technical directive.

And our suspects include the richest man-child in the world, a platinum-diamond member of the Spray Tan of the Month Club in the White House, an inebriated Pentagon boss, the fine folks at the US Space Force, and a contracting officer who someday will be explaining this to Congress while under oath.

The first suspect was obvious thanks to the Musk-y smell

When Ukrainian forces first reported the restriction, public suspicion immediately fell on Elon Musk.

That wasn’t irrational.

SpaceX owns Starlink, operates the enormous satellite constellation underneath both Starlink and Starshield, manufactures the terminals, and controls much of the technical infrastructure involved.

Ukraine has also been here before.

Musk famously declined to extend Starlink coverage around Russian-occupied Crimea during an earlier Ukrainian operation because he feared nuclear war. That episode helped convince the Pentagon under then-president Biden that relying on a commercial service whose founder could personally influence battlefield availability was, ahem, less than ideal.

Washington subsequently moved military users toward Starshield, SpaceX’s defense-focused service.

Starshield uses basically the same physical satellites as Starlink, but it’s designed for government and military customers. It uses different terminals, stronger security, prioritized service, and other “encrypted capabilities” intended for national-security users.

But as the online fury grew, Musk quickly deflected blame, claiming Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. According to Musk, decisions governing their use, including speed and other restrictions, belong to the US military “and ultimately the president.”

That is an unusually specific defense and only partially true… Even if the US government wants to change a Starshield setting, they still have to go through SpaceX.

This is very different from the good old days when the US Air Force, and now Space Force, would manage satellite ops directly: The 4th Space Operations Squadron at Schriever controls the satellite buses, the 53rd Space Operations Squadron manages the communications payloads, and the SATCOM Office conducts planning and user support.

Those are the literal military satellite operators.

Space Delta 6 separately runs much of the Air Force Satellite Control Network, which provides telemetry, tracking, and command connectivity for more than 190 US, allied, and civilian spacecraft.

But not Starshield…

SpaceX controls that.

So, when Musk threw up his hands and said, “I didn’t do it!” He’s being a little bit disingenuous. No matter who ordered it, the actual on/off switch lives inside his corporation.

Still, Musk pointed to the President. Let’s interrogate him next:

The White House has a problem with its timeline

Journalists reported on October 15 that two US officials and one Western official briefed on the matter said the order to limit Starshield came from inside the White House.

According to those officials, Pentagon leadership received a message that Starshield service supporting the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed.

The officials couldn’t identify who inside the White House made the decision, nor who ultimately implemented the technical change.

President Donald Trump says it wasn’t him.

Speaking to reporters the following day, Trump denied that he or Musk was responsible and denied that the United States had imposed the restriction. A senior US official separately told reporters that no request to curb Starshield service came directly from Trump.

According to the X account OSINTDefender, Elon Musk proposed slowing down Starlink for Ukraine to President Trump, (according to four sources familiar with the discussions who spoke to The Telegraph). One said Trump “agreed.” A European official and two Ukrainian sources confirmed that version to the paper.

Those statements leave us with a fairly large unexplained hole.

Musk says the US government controls Starshield operating restrictions.

Trump says he didn’t order it.

SpaceX is technically the only corporation that could have made the restriction.

Ukraine says the restriction happened anyway.

And, as of October 18, the speed cap remained.

But what about motive?

The restriction arrived during an increasingly ugly dispute between Washington and Kyiv over Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure.

Trump had been pressuring Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries, arguing that the attacks were contributing to higher energy prices. The Starshield direction followed those demands and came amid discussions involving Trump’s aides and Ukrainian officials over refinery strikes and a controversial US-Russia diesel arrangement.

Timing is evidence; damning evidence. But still not proof.

A good whodunit doesn’t arrest the butler in chapter three because he looked nervous near the attractive maid.

And what’s odd here is Trump is not normally someone to do something like this in secret, even if he knows what he is about to do will piss a lot of people off. (Like the Russia-diesel deal.)

So why do it in secret this time? I don’t have an answer for this, yet.

The contract trail starts in 2023

Starshield’s relationship with the Pentagon has been growing for years.

SpaceX received its first publicly known Space Force Starshield contract in September 2023. That agreement had a ceiling of $70 million and covered “end-to-end service” using the Starlink constellation, including terminals, network management and related services for dozens of military mission partners.

That early contract shows the Pentagon was effectively building a firewall between ordinary commercial Starlink and military requirements.

The arrangement has since become much larger.

The current public procurement trail leads to Space Systems Command contract FA254125DB021.

This is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract awarded to SpaceX under the military’s proliferated low-Earth-orbit satellite services program.

It began July 15, 2025 and currently runs through July 2028.

USAspending records show six orders under the contract with about $476 million already obligated and roughly $1.15 billion in potential value.

Now the murder mystery has paperwork.

One task order, FA254126FB019, covers Starshield terminals, ancillary equipment, and service plans for Starshield-based military requirements across the Defense Department and other federal agencies.

The contracting office is Space Systems Command’s Commercial Services Office in El Segundo, California. The award is a firm-fixed-price commercial task order to SpaceX.

Another task order is even more interesting.

FA254126FB015 began in June 2026 and provides what federal spending records describe as:

“SECURE GLOBAL SATCOM VIA POOLED STARSHIELD SERVICE. ENHANCED FEATURES, SECURITY, AND CENTRAL MANAGEMENT FOR ALL MISSIONS.”

SpaceX received roughly $132 million in obligations under that order.

“Central management” gets my attention when we’re investigating who can change operating parameters.

The SAM.gov notice for that contract adds another detail.

Space Systems Command says the order was issued under a program called “Warrior Plans,” established in September 2025 to acquire commercial low-Earth-orbit satellite services for the Joint Force. The program itself was created pursuant to a FY25 presidential decision document and a Pentagon-approved plan.

Space Force describes this particular SpaceX award as the first Warrior Plan task order, specifically providing Starshield service to satisfy Joint Force operational requirements.

So, the current Starshield service exists inside a formal Pentagon acquisition structure with presidential-level policy above it, Space Systems Command administration below that, and SpaceX providing the service under military contracts.

The broader Pentagon PLEO procurement includes requirements for satellite transport, terminals, service management and defined performance standards. The underlying solicitation covers mobile, maritime, and aviation use alongside ordinary fixed satellite communications.

Somebody OWNS the authority to change those parameters.

The public documents simply don’t tell us who possesses that authority for the exact terminals Ukraine was using on October 14.

And that’s the document I want. A FOIA request might be helpful here… I’ll submit one but it might take a while.

Read more

Russia just threatened nuclear war if NATO tries to blockade Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea that’s smaller than Connecticut and cut off from the rest of Russia.

I break down why Kaliningrad looks like a fortress bristling with Iskander missiles and S-400s, but why a growing number of analysts think it’s actually Russia’s biggest vulnerability: a garrison with almost no ground troops, surrounded by NATO, and dependent on a single supply line nobody can guarantee.

The loudest threats, it turns out, often come from the weakest position.

Rough video transcript (transcribed using an automated system)

[VIDEO START]

Why is Kaliningrad so important to Russia that they would threaten to nuke NATO over it?

Russia just threatened nuclear war over a piece of land that analysts expect would be among the first Russian territory overwhelmed in a real fight with NATO.

Most people picture Kaliningrad as a fortress, a Russian dagger pointed at the heart of Europe. But, a growing number of analysts see the opposite. They see Russia’s most exposed hostage, a heavily armed island with no land connection to the motherland, wedged between two NATO countries, and short on the ground troops it would need to survive a siege. That’s why the threat came out as a nuclear one. When you can’t win the conventional argument, you change the subject to the one weapon nobody wants to argue about.

Hey friends, Wes O’Donnell here. Defense journalist, Army and Air Force veteran.

Today we’re going to find out why a patch of land slightly bigger than Connecticut can make the Kremlin talk about nuclear war. What’s in it, why Russia treasures it, why NATO planners lose sleep over it, and why I think the loudest threats come from the place Russia is least able to protect.

This isn’t a hypothetical.

On September 30, Russia sent a diplomatic note to NATO member states, which Reuters saw, saying Moscow would be ready to use “the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons” if NATO tried to isolate Kaliningrad. The note claimed Russia has information that NATO is preparing an air and naval blockade of the exclave.

A day or two later, Putin said it himself. Speaking at the Valdai Forum, he said that if Russia were directly attacked, the question of deploying all the weapons at the country’s disposal would arise “inevitably and immediately.”

NATO’s answer was blunt. Secretary General Mark Rutte called NATO a defensive alliance, told Russia to stop the nuclear threats, and added that Putin knows he can never win a direct clash with NATO. By the end of this video you’ll understand why Moscow reached for the biggest weapon on the shelf over a place it can barely reinforce.

Wait, how did Russia get Kaliningrad in the first place?

Start with the history, because it explains the emotion.

Before it was Kaliningrad, it was Königsberg, a city founded by the Teutonic Knights that served as the capital of the Prussian monarchy for centuries. In 1945, the Soviet Union took the northern half of East Prussia as a trophy of victory over Nazi Germany.

Moscow renamed the city after Mikhail Kalinin, a Bolshevik leader, and filled the region with a new population after the German inhabitants were expelled.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and Lithuania and the other Baltic states became independent. Kaliningrad became an exclave, a piece of Russia cut off from the rest of Russia by other countries. Today it borders Poland and Lithuania, both NATO members, and sits on the Baltic Sea with no land connection to the Russian mainland.

Consider what that means for a Kremlin that treats territory as sacred. Kaliningrad is Russian soil, plain and simple. Nuclear doctrine updated in 2024 makes clear Russia reserves the right to answer certain conventional attacks on its territory with nuclear weapons, and Kaliningrad is formally covered. Giving it up, or even looking like you might, is a political catastrophe for any Russian leader.

Sooooo, WHAT’S IN THE BOX? [CLIP FROM SE7EN WITH BRAD PITT]

Now the military reason, which is the one NATO planners care about.

Baltiysk, on the Kaliningrad coast, hosts the main base of the Russian Baltic Fleet. The port stays open year-round. St. Petersburg, Russia’s other Baltic gateway, can be hampered by ice in winter, so Kaliningrad is the one place Russia can reliably put warships into the Baltic.

The exclave is also packed with long-range weapons. Russia has deployed Iskander tactical ballistic missiles there, nuclear-capable, with a range of roughly 500 kilometers. Draw that circle on a map and it covers almost all of Poland and a big slice of the Baltic Sea. In May 2022, Russian forces in Kaliningrad simulated nuclear-capable Iskander strikes against mock targets including airfields and command posts. The region has also hosted S-400 air defense systems, Bastion coastal defense missiles, and Baltic Fleet corvettes that can fire Kalibr cruise missiles with ranges in the thousands of kilometers. Defense planners call this an anti-access, area-denial bubble.

Think of a castle that doesn’t have to attack anyone to be dangerous.

Its air defenses make it harder for NATO aircraft to operate nearby, its coastal missiles threaten ships, and its ballistic missiles put NATO airfields and ports at risk. In a crisis, every reinforcement convoy heading toward the Baltic states has to think about what’s sitting in Kaliningrad.

That’s the fortress picture, but it’s only half the story.

Look at Kaliningrad on a map and the weakness jumps out.

To its east sits Lithuania.

To its south sits Poland.

Between them runs a strip of land along the Polish-Lithuanian border, roughly 65 to 70 kilometers wide, that separates Kaliningrad from Belarus, home of Mr. Whipple impersonator Lukashenko, and Russia’s closest ally.

That’s the Suwałki Gap. It’s the only land link between the Baltic states and the rest of NATO, and it’s also the only potential land corridor connecting Kaliningrad to Belarus and onward to Russia.

In a major war, the Suwałki Gap becomes a tightrope. NATO needs to hold it to reinforce Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russia would want to seize it to connect Kaliningrad with Belarus and cut the Baltic states off. Whoever controls that strip controls the whole region’s logistics.

Now think about resupply from Kaliningrad’s point of view.

Land transit through Lithuania has been a political flashpoint since 2022, when the EU sanctions regime collided with special transit arrangements for Russian cargo and citizens that trace back to Lithuania’s 2004 EU accession deal.

Analysts disagree about how blockable the route is, but the sea route is vulnerable too.

Finland and Sweden are now NATO members, which turned the Baltic into something much closer to a NATO lake, and a Russian ship hauling supplies to Kaliningrad has to pass through waters NATO navies know very well.

Stefan Hedlund, writing for GIS Reports in 2022, put the strategic problem plainly. The exclave’s value depends on the outcome of the war in Ukraine and on whether the regime in Belarus survives.

If Russia is decisively beaten and Belarus turns, Kaliningrad’s garrison would be surrounded and degraded. If Russia prevails, Kaliningrad becomes a launchpad for nuclear signaling against Poland and the Baltics.

I learned something in the infantry that never goes away.

The unit with the best position isn’t the one with the most firepower. It’s the one you can resupply. Ammo, water, batteries, medical evacuation. A position you can’t feed is a countdown clock, no matter how many weapons are sitting inside it.

That’s how I look at Kaliningrad. The missiles are real and the radar coverage is real. But a garrison that depends entirely on a supply line somebody else can cut is a garrison with an expiration date, and everybody involved, including the people writing diplomatic notes in Moscow, knows exactly how long they could hold.

So why did the Kremlin put nuclear weapons in writing this week?

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Edward Lucas, writing in EUobserver on October 5, argues Kaliningrad is Russia’s greatest strategic vulnerability, not a fortress threatening its neighbors. He points out that Russia has almost no ground forces left there, because they’ve gone to Ukraine, and that Russia’s air force in the exclave lacks the airfields and hangars needed for a real war. He argues NATO, now including Sweden and Finland, is overwhelmingly dominant on land, at sea and in the air in the region.

Putin said something similar, in his own way, at Valdai. He warned that Russia would face “an enemy twice our size” and would have to “make use of our competitive advantages.”

Sooooo, the Russian president is publicly acknowledging that in a head-on fight with NATO, the numbers favor the other side. And the competitive advantage he has in mind is the one that doesn’t depend on numbers.

Add the pressure on the edges.

Poland recently raised its air defense posture after alleged airspace incursions. Danish authorities said a Russian warship fired two flares near a Danish military helicopter over the Baltic Sea about two weeks before the note went out. Russian embassies in at least three European countries issued statements in the past few days accusing NATO of escalating tensions through exercises and planning scenarios involving Kaliningrad. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called those messages “diplomatic reminders” to “hotheads in Europe.”

A diplomatic reminder is what you send when you want the other side to remember something, and what Moscow wants Europe to remember is that Kaliningrad is covered by the one umbrella that doesn’t need a garrison.

Putin also did something notable on the nuclear question. He acknowledged that France and Britain are nuclear powers, then added that “no-one else possesses the kind of weapons that Russia has today.”

Russia can’t match NATO in numbers, so it points to the one category where it believes it holds the advantage, and it attaches that advantage to Kaliningrad.

Lucas adds another layer. He argues the exclave survives only on Moscow’s subsidy and political support, and he points to a Baltic crisis-simulation project called Kaliningrad 2050 that is already gaming out what happens if Kremlin control unravels, from fuel shortages to public-health emergencies. You don’t have to agree with his bleakest predictions to see the pattern. Russia is defending a place that costs it money, depends on a single supply thread, and has lost most of its ground troops to a war more than a thousand kilometers away. It helps to be clear about what Moscow says it fears, because the word “blockade” carries more weight than the headlines suggest.

A blockade isn’t an exercise or a patrol. It means a state, or an alliance, uses naval and air power to cut off a territory’s access to the outside world. Under the laws of armed conflict, that’s an act of war.

So when the Russian note says NATO is preparing an air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad, it’s alleging NATO is preparing to start a war, and then promising a nuclear answer to a war nobody has announced.

Now run the scenario from the other side. Suppose NATO really did try to isolate the exclave. The Baltic is a narrow sea with a few chokepoints, including the Danish straits, and NATO navies from Denmark, Germany, Poland, Sweden and Finland now surround it. Analysts such as Nikolai Sokov say the sea route could be blocked fairly easily. The land route through Lithuania is already politically fraught.

But Moscow has an answer, and it’s the same hostage logic in reverse. If Kaliningrad is squeezed, the Baltic states are exposed. Analysts have long identified Sweden’s Gotland, the demilitarized island in the middle of the Baltic, as a likely Russian target in a Baltic crisis, and the Suwałki Gap as the place Russia would try to seize. Each side holds something the other cannot afford to lose, and each side can see the other’s weakness.

That’s the real function of the nuclear language. It tells NATO planners that the cheapest-looking move, strangling a lonely exclave, could be the first step on an escalation ladder that ends somewhere nobody wants to visit.

Nobody in Brussels is eager to learn how fast that ladder climbs.

Here’s what nobody outside the Kremlin can say with certainty, and it’s the most interesting part. Moscow claims to have information that NATO is preparing an air and naval blockade. NATO says none of its exercises or activities threaten Russian territory, and no public evidence shows a blockade plan exists. So the question isn’t whether NATO is preparing a blockade. The question is what Russian planners actually believe they’re seeing, and whether a note like this is a sincere warning, a pre-positioned excuse, or a test of how far European nerves will stretch. Those three possibilities lead to very different Octobers, and the fact that we can’t tell which one we’re in is exactly what Moscow wants.

Kaliningrad works as a nuclear tripwire far more than an offensive base. Russia can’t reinforce it, can’t easily supply it and can’t win a conventional fight over it. So the exclave’s job has shifted from projecting power to making an attack on it unthinkable.

That changes how you read every missile and every threat. The Iskanders make a blockade, or even a serious plan for one, expensive enough that NATO planners think twice, and that deterrent value counts for more than any plan to conquer Poland. The weakness is the reason for the volume.

A fortress shouts when it’s sure of itself. A hostage shouts when it knows the walls won’t hold.

And that’s what makes Kaliningrad the most dangerous kind of flashpoint. It’s the place where Russia’s conventional weakness and Russia’s nuclear doctrine meet, which means a miscalculation there would escalate faster than almost anywhere else on the map.

Think about the strangeness of the situation.

The country with the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth is writing diplomatic notes about a territory the size of Connecticut, and the message boils down to a plea not to test the walls.

Russia built a castle on the Baltic, filled it with missiles, and then watched its ground troops leave for another war. Now it stands at the gate, holding the biggest weapon it owns, hoping nobody checks whether the walls are still there.

Kaliningrad was supposed to be the sword Russia kept pointed at Europe. These days it looks more like a lantern left burning in a window, bright enough to keep people away and fragile enough that Moscow can’t afford for anyone to walk up and find out.

That’s it for today, my friends. If this kind of geopolitical breakdown is useful, hit the thumbs up and subscribe.

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

[VIDEO END]

Hey friends, something shady is afoot in Washington, and Ukraine is suffering because of it.

When Volodymyr Zelensky said last night that Ukraine had received “no early warning from our partners” before Russian ballistic missiles came screaming toward Kyiv, my first instinct was to assume somebody screwed up.

I spent enough years in the military to know that communications systems occasionally develop a shitty personality disorder at the worst possible moment. Weather happens. Links drop. Server farms get moody. Someone on the midnight staff duty shift sends something to the wrong distribution list.

Military communications failures are rarely as sinister as they look from the outside.

Then I woke up to the Starlink story.

That made the innocent explanation harder to dismiss, because Ukraine has now experienced several strange developments within the same five-day window.

First came reports that Trump administration officials had warned Kyiv it could lose American intelligence support if Ukraine continued attacking Russian oil refineries.

I just posted a video today at noon about this to YouTube:

Then, for two consecutive nights, Ukraine says it stopped receiving the ballistic missile launch warnings it normally receives from its partners.

After that, SpaceX imposed a new speed restriction on Starlink terminals used by Ukrainian forces, apparently without warning the units relying on those terminals for combat operations.

The White House insists intelligence sharing continues.

“We are helping them, and we are sharing intel,” President Trump said.

Sure buddy. That sentence may be technically accurate. But that’s also what bothers me.

Because intelligence sharing is not a light switch. There is no giant lever in the Pentagon labeled UKRAINE INTEL that some staff officer pulls into the OFF position. Intelligence has a lot of different streams, systems, classifications, organizations, and delivery mechanisms. Washington could continue providing Ukraine with enormous amounts of information while slowing, restricting, or withholding one particularly important feed.

This started with the refineries

On September 13, Trump publicly urged Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries. He blamed Ukrainian attacks on Russian refining infrastructure for record American diesel prices, although anyone with a simple chart of “Brent crude year-to-date” can see that the US-led war with Iran is the much larger force moving global fuel markets.

Ukraine kept attacking.

On October 5, Ukraine’s defense ministry claimed its campaign had knocked out 51 percent of Russia’s refining capacity. Vladimir Putin himself acknowledged that the attacks have inflicted an economic cost, amounting to roughly 1 percent of Russian GDP by his own admission.

Then, on October 9, Trump spoke with Putin by phone and announced an arrangement intended to return Russian diesel to global markets.

That same weekend, American and Ukrainian officials met in Miami. Axios then reported that a Ukrainian official said Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner warned Kyiv that continued refinery strikes could result in Washington cutting off intelligence sharing.

An American official denied that such a threat was made and said the administration had instead urged Ukraine to avoid actions that “hurt American consumers.”

Then the Financial Times reported something bigger:

According to the FT, the Pentagon contacted Kyiv and several European governments on October 10 and 11 and threatened to halt intelligence sharing as well as PURL, the mechanism that allows European governments to purchase American weapons for Ukraine.

“They are calling Kyiv… they are calling everyone,” one official told the paper.

The next day, Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine.

Zelensky said he learned about it from the Truth Social post.

Ukraine says it has refrained from striking Russian energy targets since then and has said it will honor a genuine reciprocal ceasefire if Moscow stops attacking the Ukrainian grid.

Russia apparently had a different understanding of events. Or no understanding at all.

Two nights of silence

Ukraine’s Air Force says that on October 12 and again on October 13, it received “no information from partners regarding missile launches from enemy territory.”

Presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn publicly described two consecutive days without that information as “unusual.”

Then came the attack on Kyiv.

According to Zelensky, Russia launched 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 drones against energy and critical infrastructure in Kyiv, the surrounding oblast, and Kharkiv. Ukraine’s Air Force reported intercepting only four of those ballistic missiles.

All three of Kyiv’s combined heat and power plants were attacked. About 600,000 people lost electricity. A ballistic missile hit a nine-story apartment building in the Desnianskyi district, where prosecutors said at least three women were killed and 24 other people were wounded, including a seven-year-old girl.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent described an unusually large number of hypersonic missiles directed toward the capital.

Then Zelensky said something that jumped off the screen at me:

“Our system detected these missiles almost as they were approaching Kyiv.”

Ballistic missile defense lives on time.

An Iskander launched from Russian territory can reach Kyiv in mere minutes. Ukrainian ground radars can’t simply peer through hundreds of kilometers of terrain and watch the missile leave its launcher. Radar has a horizon.

The United States has something Ukraine doesn’t: a constellation of infrared early-warning satellites designed specifically to detect the enormous heat signature produced when a ballistic missile’s rocket motor ignites.

That’s the advantage of looking down from space.

For much of this war, American detection has helped provide Ukraine with enough warning for air raid sirens to activate and air-defense crews to prepare. We’re not talking about hours here. Sometimes the warning is measured in minutes.

Those minutes are huge.

A family can move from an apartment into a shelter. A Patriot battery can prepare for an engagement. Commanders can understand what kind of attack may be developing before the missile enters the footprint of Ukrainian sensors.

If Ukrainian crews are first discovering ballistic missiles when those weapons are already approaching Kyiv, the geometry of the engagement becomes extremely hard.

This is where my AWACS experience may be useful, because there’s an important distinction that tends to disappear in online discussions about intelligence: Seeing something and telling somebody what you saw are two separate acts.

A contact someone saw but never transmitted was useless to the fighter pilot who needed it.

The same distinction is at play here. I have no reason to believe American early-warning satellites suddenly stopped seeing Russian ballistic missile launches. I think the more interesting question is what happened after they saw them.

Did the warning fail somewhere in the technical chain?

Or did somebody stop pressing send?

There are innocent explanations

A senior Ukrainian official told the Associated Press that Kyiv had been informed the missing warning resulted from a “failure,” potentially involving weather rather than a policy decision.

I find weather an odd explanation when we are discussing space-based infrared sensors designed to detect enormous rocket plumes, although the warning architecture involves far more than the satellite itself.

I suppose weather could have affected another sensor, communications component, or analytical process.

Without access to the system, I can’t rule that out.

There’s another technical possibility worth considering.

Russia has used S-400 surface-to-air missiles for attacks against ground targets, including 48N6-series interceptors fired toward Ukrainian cities.

Those weapons can follow short, steep trajectories and arrive quickly. Russia also launches surface-to-air missiles routinely as part of its normal air-defense operations, which complicates the warning picture if a system has to distinguish a SAM fired at an aircraft from one being used as an improvised ballistic weapon.

That explanation also has problems.

Nobody has established that converted S-400 missiles accounted for the missing warnings during this particular attack. Russia launched 39 ballistic weapons, including systems described as Iskanders and hypersonic missiles, which should produce the sort of launch signatures American strategic warning systems were built to detect.

And neither weather nor S-400 ambiguity easily explains the timing.

Ukraine says the warnings stopped on October 12. That was the day after the Pentagon finished making calls about intelligence support.

Coincidences happen in war…

Two coincidences deserve your attention.

Then Starlink made it three.

Somebody changed the speed limit

Early this morning, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry and one of the people I follow closely on electronic warfare, reported that SpaceX had imposed a new speed restriction on Starlink terminals in motion.

According to Beskrestnov, the Ukrainian military version now stops functioning at approximately 160 kilometers per hour, or around 100 mph.

“Our defense forces did not receive a warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions,” he wrote.

Ukraine’s 7th Rapid Reaction Corps reported disruptions at even lower speeds, saying connections were dropping for 10 to 20 seconds while traveling at roughly 110 to 120 kilometers per hour. Some missions reportedly had to be canceled because drones kept flying while their Starlink connections repeatedly disappeared.

There is an important backstory here because the original Starlink speed restriction was actually Ukraine’s idea.

Russian forces had been using smuggled Starlink terminals to provide communications aboard Shahed-type and Molniya strike drones. After a Starlink-guided Russian drone struck a Ukrainian passenger train on January 27, Kyiv asked SpaceX for help shutting down that capability.

SpaceX responded by restricting terminals moving faster than roughly 75 to 90 kilometers per hour.

That was a clever solution. Russian strike drones exceeded the speed threshold and lost connectivity, while Starlink terminals registered to Ukrainian military units were placed on a whitelist exempting them from the restriction.

Mykhailo Fedorov, then Ukraine’s digital minister, publicly thanked Elon Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell for acting quickly.

What appears to have changed this week is that the Ukrainian whitelist acquired a ceiling of its own.

Now… to be fair, there may be a perfectly legitimate reason.

Russia may have captured or otherwise obtained access to Ukrainian-whitelisted terminals. If Russian drones had found a way around the original restriction, SpaceX would have good reason to tighten the system again.

Russia has also been actively targeting Starlink infrastructure, including suspected sabotage activities in Europe, so the security problem facing SpaceX is real.

What’s harder to explain is apparently changing the rule without telling the Ukrainian military beforehand.

Combat networks are not consumer phone plans.

If an American company modifies a communications system in a way that interrupts operational drones while those aircraft are already flying missions, coordination is part of the weapon system whether SpaceX likes that description or not.

The Pentagon has paid for Starlink service in Ukraine since 2023. Ukrainian units have incorporated it deeply into command-and-control, reconnaissance, and unmanned operations. Changing a technical limitation overnight without notifying those users would be a remarkable coordination failure.

Unless notification was not the priority.

SpaceX had not publicly explained the change as of the time I wrote this.

What’s changed this time since the intel gap in March of 2025?

When the Trump administration halted American intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025, there was nothing subtle about it: Washington announced the pause. Everybody knew who had ordered it.

Ukraine knew what information it was losing.

Europe knew.

Russia knew.

The policy lasted only a short time, but the mechanism was obvious.

What Ukraine is experiencing now, at least from the outside, looks different.

American officials can truthfully say Washington continues sharing intelligence with Ukraine while individual streams inside that relationship change. Strategic assessments can continue. Satellite imagery can continue. Signals intelligence can continue. Targeting support can continue in some form.

Meanwhile, a time-sensitive ballistic missile warning feed can become intermittent or disappear.

Both can be true.

The same logic applies to Starlink. SpaceX does not have to turn off Ukrainian terminals across the country to affect certain military operations. A technical restriction placed at the wrong speed can interfere with a specific category of drone mission while normal Starlink service continues everywhere else.

That’s why proving “intent” is so difficult.

Within several days, American officials were reported to have warned Ukraine about consequences if it continued attacking Russian refineries.

The administration then announced an energy ceasefire that Ukraine says it had not negotiated.

Ukraine stopped receiving a missile-warning service it had relied upon for much of the war.

Russia subsequently launched a massive ballistic attack on Kyiv.

Then Ukrainian troops discovered that an American-owned communications network central to their drone operations had received a new technical restriction they say nobody told them about.

If I am a Ukrainian commander, I don’t have the luxury of waiting six months for a congressional investigation to tell me whether those events were connected.

I have to plan around the possibility that they were.

That is what military risk management looks like when the consequence of guessing wrong is a missile hitting an apartment building.

There is another political element Kyiv can’t ignore. Trump also said this week that Ukraine should have a new president.

When the president of your most important military partner publicly calls for your president’s replacement at the same moment intelligence warnings become unreliable and a critical communications service unexpectedly changes, suspicion is hardly irrational.

I keep coming back to something I learned in the military that is difficult to put into a weapons roster: reliability is a capability.

For decades, a major part of American power came from the belief among allied militaries that when the shooting started, the enormous American intelligence architecture behind them would work.

Satellites would watch.

Aircraft would patrol.

Analysts would analyze.

Networks would pass warnings.

That confidence allowed allied countries to specialize because they didn’t each need to duplicate every American capability. The United States provided much of the nervous system connecting allies together.

That trust took generations to build. And we’re watching it burn down in mere months…

And that brings me back to the families in Desnianskyi.

If Washington believes Ukrainian strikes against Russian refineries are harming American interests, then make that argument.

Do it publicly.

Tell Kyiv to stop. Explain why. Let Congress argue about it. Let Ukraine object. Let Americans decide whether protecting Russian refining capacity during Russia’s war against Ukraine is a policy they support.

What should never become ambiguous is whether civilians are still receiving warning that ballistic missiles are heading toward their homes.

If Washington has decided that relationship with Ukraine should change, Americans deserve to know it and protest accordingly.

More importantly, the people waiting for the sirens in Kyiv deserve to know it before the missiles arrive.

Usually, I’d end an article with something snarky, occasionally profound, or, at a minimum, tie back to the beginning of the article so the piece feels like it’s come full circle.

I can’t do that this time…

All I can say is damn those who would help Russia kill civilians; damn them straight to hell.

Stay strong, Ukraine. Слава Україні!

When I was in infantry basic training, one of our marching cadence songs said something along the lines of “Oh, hail, oh, hail, oh, infantry…. Queen of battle, follow me….”

(for the longest time, I thought it was “hello, hello, infantry” — smh)

And I always thought it was weird how all these hyper-masculine 19-year-olds in the infantry would call ourselves “queen of battle” while artillery was known as the “king of battle.”

Hey, I’m an ally. You do you. If you’re queens, get on with your bad self. I’ll march with you.

A more mature version of Wes would later learn that it has nothing to do with gender. It’s a chess analogy and represents more of a partnership than a hierarchy. The king is powerful symbolically and central to the fight, while the queen is the most flexible piece on the board.

Infantry can attack, defend, patrol, clear buildings, hold trenches, seize objectives, and operate in terrain, while heavier systems can control the tempo of battle.

Still, it seems like it’s been a while since we’ve talked about “the king of battle” in Ukraine; I know I’ve personally focused on deep strike and air defense heavily over the past six months, both here and on YouTube.

But the Ukrainian guns are still firing…

These kings just have to play chess and do it strategically.

The artillery war continues

Lt. Col. Vitalii Korniienko, commander of Ukraine’s 7th Artillery Brigade, described the change in September to The War Zone. The old practice of massing guns together to create an “artillery wall” has pretty much disappeared in his brigade. A modern fire mission may involve fewer than ten rounds because sitting in one place long enough to fire dozens or hundreds invites the wrong kind of attention.

Researchers from RUSI have seen the same thing. Ukrainian artillery increasingly operates as individual guns rather than traditional batteries. Crews bury positions into tree lines, stretch camouflage and mesh around them, move ammunition away from the weapon itself, and spend a good chunk of time staring upward before firing.

Some resupply is even being pushed forward by unmanned ground vehicles so trucks and soldiers don’t have to make repeated trips into positions that Russian drones may already be watching.

That’s a different artillery war from the one I was writing about in 2022 and 2023.

The artillery duel didn’t disappear.

The drone war grew around it like crabgrass.

We saw that during Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi around Lyman. The robots and drones got most of the attention, naturally, because “air-dropped robot assaults Russian position” makes a more clickable headline than “artillery continues doing artillery shit.”

By the way, here’s a video I hosted at The Sun about Operation Vivaldi:

But in Vivaldi, Ukrainian forces still assembled substantial gun support to suppress Russian movement and help infantry consolidate terrain.

Make no mistake: The guns still matter. They just have less time to do their work before something with a camera notices them.

And that’s why a story at Militarnyi about a fairly boring memorandum signed in Kyiv on October 4 caught my attention.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense signed three agreements with Germany’s Diehl Defense covering IRIS-T air-defense systems, missiles for those systems, and something described by the Ukrainian president’s office as “precision-guided artillery ammunition.”

That last phrase may refer to Vulcano.

German Aid to Ukraine believes the agreement could cover additional 155mm Vulcano ammunition, a family of long-range shells developed by Germany’s Diehl Defense and Italy’s Leonardo.

And actually, Ukraine already has experience with it.

Germany sent 255 Vulcano rounds to Ukraine in 2022, with the first ammunition arriving in March 2023. Ukrainian footage later showed a PzH 2000 crew from the 43rd Artillery Brigade firing the unguided Vulcano 155 BER.

What I’m not sure about is how many of those original 255 rounds are still sitting in Ukrainian ammunition storage, assuming any are left at all.

The 155mm shell that isn’t really 155mm

A normal 155mm artillery projectile is, ahem, about 155 millimeters across.

Vulcano cheats.

The projectile itself is sub-caliber, meaning the actual body flying toward the target is narrower than the bore of the gun that fired it. It sits inside a sabot that lets the smaller projectile travel through a standard 155mm barrel. Once it leaves the muzzle, the sabot separates and the skinny projectile continues downrange.

Why go through all that trouble?

Drag.

A narrower projectile presents less frontal area to the air, which means less aerodynamic resistance trying to slow it down. Vulcano combines that with high muzzle velocity and a shape designed to retain energy efficiently as it travels.

There is no rocket motor tucked into the back that suddenly ignites halfway through the flight. Someone essentially looked at a conventional artillery shell and decided it needed to lose weight and become more aerodynamic.

The payoff is range.

Fire the unguided Vulcano BER, or Ballistic Extended Range version, from a 155mm gun with a 52-caliber barrel such as the German PzH 2000 or RCH 155, and the published maximum range is around 50 kilometers.

The guided GLR, or Guided Long Range version, stretches that to roughly 70 kilometers.

Seventy kilometers is a long way to throw something out of a basic tube cannon.

Also, barrel length matters here, no matter what your friends at the bar have told you.

Ukraine also operates shorter 39-caliber 155mm guns like the American M777. Vulcano works from those weapons too, although the lower muzzle velocity cuts the range. From a 39-caliber gun, the BER reaches about 36 kilometers and the guided GLR about 55.

So, this creates an interesting split inside Ukraine’s artillery park.

Load Vulcano into an M777 and you have given a relatively short-barreled howitzer considerably more reach.

Load the guided version into a PzH 2000 or RCH 155 and now you are reaching distances where some targets might otherwise have received a rocket or missile.

Ukraine doesn’t need to send an ATACMS after everything sitting 60 kilometers behind the front.

There are artillery pieces, command posts, electronic-warfare systems, air-defense components, ammunition points, logistics sites, and other relatively small targets where a precisely placed 155mm projectile may be enough.

The guided Vulcano GLR was built for that sort of work.

Using coordinate guidance, its published circular error probable (CEP) is no more than five meters. Add the optional semi-active laser seeker and that figure drops to roughly three meters, while also creating the possibility of attacking moving targets as long as somebody can keep a laser designator on them.

That changes the old economics of the fire mission.

With conventional artillery, missing by enough may simply mean firing more ammunition until the target has received sufficient persuasion to fuck off.

A precision-guided shell gives the commander another option: spend considerably more money on one projectile in exchange for potentially firing substantially fewer projectiles overall.

Ukraine has good reasons to care about that.

Every artillery round begins its life in a factory somewhere, then has to move through European logistics networks, cross into Ukraine, reach a depot, move forward again, eventually arrive at the gun position via robot, get loaded, fired, and preferably hit something valuable.

So yes, the guided shell costs more… But the relevant question is what the entire fire mission costs.

If one precision round can achieve what might otherwise take ten, twenty, or more conventional rounds, suddenly sticker price becomes a less useful metric.

And we have to acknowledge that physics, naturally, wants its cut.

Vulcano pays for that range and guidance partly by losing explosive mass.

The 155mm projectile is about 950 millimeters long and weighs roughly 36 kilograms. The unguided version contains around 7.5 kilograms of explosive material, while the guided model carries approximately 30 percent less.

Nobody has yet managed to cram guidance electronics into an artillery shell without those electronics occupying space that could otherwise contain something more explode-y.

That makes Vulcano a poor answer to some problems: If you are trying to pulverize a large defensive position, you may still want conventional high explosive and a lot of it.

If a Russian radar vehicle is sitting 63 kilometers away and you have reliable coordinates, five-meter accuracy starts looking sexy.

That’s the trade: Smaller warhead, much better chance of putting it exactly where you wanted it.

Vulcano partly makes up for the smaller explosive charge by surrounding the warhead with pre-formed tungsten fragments. Tungsten is absurdly dense, so those little pieces leave the detonation carrying a huge amount of kinetic energy. Put the shell within a few meters of a radar truck and you turn its antennas, electronics, tires, and anybody standing nearby into Swiss cheese.

Then there’s the laser seeker

Semi-active laser guidance requires reflected laser energy from the target during the terminal phase of flight.

Essentially, somebody has to shine a laser on whatever you want Vulcano to hit. But in Ukraine, “somebody” increasingly means drones.

A reconnaissance platform closer to the target can identify what’s there, generate coordinates, and, with the right equipment, potentially provide terminal designation.

A 70-kilometer gun is only useful if somebody can find a target 70 kilometers away, determine exactly where it is, get those coordinates to the artillery crew, and complete that process before the target decides to bugger off.

Ukraine has spent years building the reconnaissance architecture required to do that.

Drones, electronic intelligence, satellite imagery, battlefield-management systems, special operations teams, and other sensors can feed targeting information toward weapons whose crews may never physically see what they are firing at.

That part rarely makes the cool combat footage on Telegram.

We see the PzH 2000 fire.

We don’t see the hours of reconnaissance, communications, target confirmation, and data exchange that made the shot worth taking.

Artillery has always required information.

Precision artillery requires precision information.

Okay, so what do we know about this most recent agreement?

The October 4 document is a memorandum of understanding, and the public language describes precision-guided artillery ammunition without naming the specific projectile. I also don’t know how many rounds might eventually be purchased, how many would be guided GLR ammunition versus unguided BER, what Ukraine would pay for them, or whether the first delivery could happen before the end of 2026.

The existing inventory is even murkier.

The publicly documented German supply was only 255 Vulcano rounds.

Ukraine has been fighting a very large artillery war for more than three years since those rounds arrived.

Maybe some remain.

Maybe none remain.

And even if the new agreement produces several hundred more shells, that is not enough ammunition to change the artillery war by itself.

Several hundred rounds in Ukraine is a boutique stockpile.

You save them for things worth killing.

Which, I suppose, is probably the point.

The current artillery fight increasingly rewards exactly the behavior Vulcano encourages: find something valuable, shoot fewer rounds, and leave.

The old Soviet image of artillery involved rows of guns, enormous ammunition dumps, sustained barrages, and batteries spending huge amounts of time in one place. Ukraine’s drone-saturated front has become hostile to nearly every part of that picture.

A gun that fires ten rounds from the same position may already be pushing its luck.

The longer an artillery piece remains exposed, the more chances somebody gets to add it to a kill chain.

So, the question facing an artillery commander is whether the crew can find the target, hit it with as few rounds as possible, and be somewhere else before the sky starts looking back… The so-called “shoot and scoot” capability so often publicized in German marketing brochures.

That’s why I find Vulcano more interesting in 2026 than I would have a few years ago.

The marketing specification is 70 kilometers. But I think the battlefield value is time.

A longer-ranged gun can sit farther back. A precision-guided projectile can reduce the number of shots required against the right target. Fewer shots mean less time firing. Less time firing means less time announcing your location to every Russian drone operator in Donetsk.

None of that makes the gun safe, but it does give the crew more options.

Remember, for all the attention we give Ukraine’s thousand-kilometer drone strikes and long-range missiles, there are still exhausted artillery crews sitting in tree lines much closer to the front, listening for drones overhead, and trying to get a fire mission completed before somebody finds them.

They need the “king of battle” to become harder to kill.

A skinny Italian-German shell flying 70 kilometers might help with that.

Слава Україні!

Think of this as your weekly strategic weather report. 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.

I try to keep the preflights light on snark. Let’s see if I’m successful. Source links in the text:

BLUF:

This week we have the Houthis repeatedly hitting Riyadh’s main airport, Trump announcing an energy ceasefire that surprised one of the countries involved, North Korea firing suspected hypersonic missiles seventeen minutes apart, Iran talking diplomacy while its proxy attacks Saudi civilians, and Lithuania just voted 106-18 to remove its constitutional ban on nuclear weapons hosting.

1. The Houthis Killed 18 People at Riyadh’s Airport in One Week

King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s second-busiest, (serving a city of eight million) was struck five times in six days. Three civilians including two foreign nationals were killed at Abha and King Khalid airports on Wednesday.

A Saudi Airlines pilot and two other nationals were killed Thursday.

Then Saturday’s strike killed at least twelve to thirteen people including one American, wounded 309, forced the diversion of all flights, and produced CCTV footage of the moment of impact that has now circled the globe.

Saudi Arabia’s Civil Aviation Authority called it a war crime. The UN condemned it. Canada told citizens to avoid the airport entirely.

Saudi Arabia has now vowed a response. The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen has escalated strikes in Taiz Governorate. But the Houthis have shown throughout this conflict that Saudi retaliatory strikes don’t deter further attacks; they’re operating on a strategic logic that accepts punishment in exchange for demonstrating the ability to impose catastrophic costs on Saudi civilian infrastructure.

What I’m watching: Whether the confirmed American casualty in Saturday’s attack produces a US policy change on direct Houthi engagement.

Trump twice declined Saudi requests for direct American strikes on Houthi positions. But he’s so desperate for fuel prices to come down before the midterms, he’s now considering US strikes against the Houthis. The dead American may give him the additional justification.

Also watching insurance markets and airline operations decisions; if major carriers begin suspending Riyadh routes, it signals the industry has assessed the threat as sustained, not episodic.

2. Trump Declared an Energy Ceasefire Without Telling Zelensky. Russia Violated It Within Hours

Read more

Hey friends,

In January, I made a video about how the CIA was helping Ukraine target Russia’s oil refineries by targeting specific machinery or equipment that can’t be quickly replaced.

Imagine the CIA’s vast industrial knowledge painstakingly accumulated by cataloging decades of Soviet engineering, followed by twenty years operating in and around oil infrastructure in Iraq. The agency nerds know exactly which widget will put one of Putin’s refineries out for 10 weeks or longer.

Now, terrified about losing the midterm elections to those meek, commie, America-hating dems, (and oblivious to the fact that most Americans despise him), Trump is grasping at straws to bring fuel prices down.

I want to show you a chart I pulled out from my OSINT dashboard.

When Ukraine’s refinery campaign intensified in summer 2025, Brent averaged $71.04 in July. By August it was $67.87. By December, after months of repeated Ukrainian strikes against refineries, pipelines and export infrastructure, Brent was down to $62.54.

Wait, Wes! What the hell are you saying?!

That’s right, the average Brent price from August 2025 through February 2026, essentially the period covering the intensified Ukrainian refinery campaign before the Iran war, was only about $66.32 per barrel.

Then February 28 happens.

The US and Israel begin attacking Iran.

Brent’s February monthly average was $70.89.

In March it jumped to $103.13.

April averaged $117.29

The daily prices are even more dramatic. Brent was $71.32 on Friday, February 27, the day before the Iran war began. By March 6 it was $95.74. By March 18 it had reached $118.09, and on April 7 it hit $138.21.

But Trump either doesn’t have this easy-to-source information, or more likely, doesn’t have the capacity to understand that Ukraine’s refinery campaign against Russia doesn’t affect oil supply in the same way the Iran blunder has.

So now, the Trump administration has warned Ukraine that if it keeps hitting Russian oil refineries, American intelligence support could be on the table.

Strangely, Trump seems to actually believe that if Ukraine stops hitting Russian oil today, then diesel prices will immediately drop thus securing his party a resounding victory in four weeks at the polls.

But the Gulf oil fiasco he created? Nah, that’s totally under control. Beautiful even. The most under-control oil situation in the history of the world.

This is a dangerous situation for Ukraine to be in. Trump has wrongly put Ukraine, (actually Zelensky more explicitly) in the middle of his political fight; and we all know Trump will play dirty.

He even said, as I’m typing this, that Ukraine should oust Zelensky, which Russia immediately applauded.

So what about that CIA targeting intel?

How bad would it be for Ukraine if Trump pulled the plug?

Well, unlike Trump’s frequent exaggerations, it’s not hyperbolic to say the United States runs the most capable intelligence machine humans have ever built, with spy satellites, signals collection, reconnaissance aircraft, cyber operations, legions of analysts, and a targeting infrastructure that took four generations, an unholy amount of money, and a Lovecraftian blood pact with Cthulhu to assemble.

Ukraine has leaned on that machine for the entire war.

But let me start by saying this is NOT a kill switch.

Some outlets are reporting that Washington pushes a button, Ukraine’s drones start wandering around western Russia like drunk, syphillitic Russian conscripts looking for a house of ill repute.

I think that assumption gives the United States too much credit and Ukraine too little.

Let’s look at the Ryazan oil refinery. It’s been sitting in roughly the same spot since the Soviet Union. You can find it on commercial satellite imagery, Russian corporate filings describe its processing units, every map on Earth knows where it is, its workers carry smartphones, and Ukraine has already hit it before.

Kyiv doesn’t need the CIA to confirm that the refinery exists.

The harder question is what Russia moved around it last night.

The experiment we already ran

The details of the latest warning are disputed.

Axios reported that during talks in Miami this week, a Ukrainian official said Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner warned Kyiv that Washington could cut its intelligence access if Ukraine kept ignoring American requests to stop attacking Russian refineries.

A US official denied any threat was made, saying the envoys described America as a reliable partner and urged Ukraine to avoid steps that “hurt American consumers.”

The Financial Times has reported on the same friction, and on Ukraine’s intention to keep striking regardless.

I’m less interested in litigating the exact sentence someone used in a Miami conference room than in the leverage itself, because we’ve already run this experiment once.

In March 2025, the Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine, and for several days we got to see what went dark.

WaPo reported that American support ranged from strategic intelligence about Russian intentions all the way down to the tactical information used to build strike packages for Ukraine’s long-range attacks; AKA my CIA widget analogy at the top.

But the support goes a bit deeper than that.

US intelligence helped Ukraine understand Russian jamming and decoys, track Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, and generate the precise coordinates that weapons like HIMARS depend on.

Think of targeting as a ladder of questions that gets harder with every rung:

Where’s the refinery? Commercial imagery answers that one in about five minutes.

Which processing unit came back online after last week’s strike? Now you need somewhat fresh imagery.

Where did Russia move the nearest surface-to-air missile battery, which radar switched on this morning, and did anyone reposition electronic warfare along the drone’s route? That’s harder still, and it gets nastier when you ask which air-defense sites have already fired tonight and are now empty, whether mobile interceptor teams are moving toward the target, and whether somebody put up a decoy next to the damaged unit.

That top half of the ladder is the stuff that turns a grid square on a map into a strike package, and the United States is extraordinarily good at it.

When I was a grunt, the S2 shop would brief us off a map overlay, and every infantryman learned fast that yesterday’s overlay was ancient history. The intelligence that kept you alive was whatever had changed since breakfast.

But let me ask you this…

Do you think Kyiv endured the 2025 intel blackout, shrugged its shoulders, and thanked uncle Don when he magnanimously turned it back on?

Fuck no.

Ukraine realized that American intelligence could become political leverage, so Ukraine and its European partners spent the next year making sure Washington would never again be the only switch on the wall.

Many Eyes, Different Owners

France may have gone further than most people realize.

Read more

Canada just applied to join a military coalition built to respond to a crisis before that crisis turns into a full NATO war. Which sounds a little strange, because the Joint Expeditionary Force is overwhelmingly Northern European.

Britain. Norway. Sweden. Finland. Denmark. Iceland. The Netherlands. Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania.

And now Canada wants in.

The reason becomes much clearer if you stop looking at the normal map of Europe and turn your attention north.

Because from the Canadian Arctic, through Greenland and Iceland, across the Norwegian Sea and into the Baltic, NATO’s northern flank is increasingly becoming one connected military problem.

And Canada is already sitting at both ends of it.

Hey friends, Wes O’Donnell here. Defense journalist, Army and Air Force veteran. And I believe in donut diplomacy. I’m going to eat this whole box of Tim Horton donuts to show my support for Canada.

[Cut away to Wes eating Tim Horton’s.]

I know it’s a sacrifice. But we do what we have to do.

Canada formally applied in September to join the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, or JEF, a ten-country military coalition focused on the North Atlantic, High North and Baltic Sea.

And as I’m recording this, Canada’s defense minister is in Iceland meeting with JEF counterparts while the coalition runs Exercise Lion Protector across the region. The UK says Canada’s membership application is specifically part of the agenda.

At first glance, this looks like another piece of Ottawa’s rapidly expanding defense relationship with Europe.

There’s a much more interesting military story underneath it.

Canada already commands thousands of NATO troops in Latvia.

Canada shares roughly 3,000 kilometers of maritime boundary with the Kingdom of Denmark through Greenland.

Canada has signed new defense agreements with Denmark and Iceland.

Canadian aircraft already participated in a JEF exercise across Estonia, Finland, Lithuania and Latvia last year.

And Canada has built a separate maritime security partnership with Norway, Denmark, Germany and now Iceland across the North Atlantic.

Put those pieces on a map and Canada’s JEF application begins to look much less like a diplomatic side project.

It looks like another piece of a northern defense network stretching from Canada’s Arctic all the way to Russia’s border.

So, what is JEF?

The Joint Expeditionary Force grew out of NATO’s 2014 Wales Summit, right after Russia seized Crimea. Britain acts as the framework nation. The original group included Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK. Finland and Sweden joined in 2017. Iceland became the tenth member in 2021.

Every current JEF member is also a NATO member.

That raises an obvious question…

Why create another military organization when NATO already exists?

Because NATO and JEF solve different organizational problems.

NATO has 32 members spread across a huge geographic area. Decisions can involve governments from Portugal to Türkiye to Canada. The alliance has enormous military resources, formal defense plans and Article 5 sitting behind the entire structure.

JEF is much smaller.

Its countries are geographically concentrated around Northern Europe, the Baltic and the High North. They share many of the same immediate security problems and train specifically to operate together in that region. And JEF has built something called Joint Expeditionary Force Response Options.

These are pre-developed packages for different kinds of crises.

They can begin with intelligence sharing and political signaling, then expand through maritime, air, land or cyber deployments depending on what is happening.

The important word there is pre-developed.

If a suspicious incident occurs, commanders aren’t necessarily beginning with a blank sheet of paper while eleven ministries debate what everyone might theoretically contribute.

The military options have already been discussed, planned and exercised.

That gives JEF a particularly interesting role during the ugly period between obvious peace and obvious war.

And modern Russia spends a great deal of time operating in exactly that space.

Here’s where JEF becomes much more interesting than its terrible bureaucratic name suggests.

Imagine a Russian tank formation crossing Latvia’s border.

That is straightforward.

Nobody needs a committee meeting to determine whether tanks invading Latvia constitute a security problem.

Hybrid warfare is harder.

An undersea communications cable suddenly breaks.

A commercial ship with obscure ownership drags an anchor across critical infrastructure.

GPS signals disappear.

A cyberattack hits a power grid.

An unidentified drone wanders toward a military installation.

A Russian intelligence vessel appears somewhere unusually inconvenient.

Each incident may be serious.

None necessarily gives NATO the clean, unmistakable armed attack its collective-defense machinery was originally designed around.

JEF has increasingly focused on that gap.

At its March summit, the ten participating governments explicitly said they wanted the coalition capable of reacting quickly to security threats that remain below NATO’s Article 5 threshold.

They specifically identified Russia’s shadow fleet and hybrid warfare as priorities.

And they’ve already built a fascinating system for doing it.

This might be my favorite part of the entire story.

In January 2025, after damage to the Estlink-2 power cable between Finland and Estonia, the Joint Expeditionary Force activated an operation called Nordic Warden.

It uses software to monitor ships operating around critical infrastructure.

Automatic Identification System broadcasts, shipping movements and other information feed into a risk-assessment system.

Ships identified as belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet can be entered into the system for closer monitoring.

The software then evaluates vessels approaching areas of interest.

If something looks suspicious, Nordic Warden can flag the vessel, monitor it in real time and distribute warnings to JEF countries and NATO.

So, while most people hear “expeditionary force” and imagine Royal Marines storming beaches somewhere, part of the JEF’s actual job now involves watching tankers creep around subsea cables with computers deciding which one deserves more attention.

Welcome to warfare in 2026.

The coalition has also activated military response options to protect critical undersea infrastructure before.

After damage to Baltic infrastructure in 2023, JEF deployed maritime and air capabilities across the region.

That was the first activation of one of its formal response options.

And this matters enormously for Canada.

Because Canada has exactly the kind of geography where the line between Arctic sovereignty, maritime surveillance, critical infrastructure and military defense gets very blurry very quickly.

Most political maps make Canada and Northern Europe look extremely far apart.

They’re not.

Look across the Arctic and North Atlantic instead.

Canada sits beside Greenland.

Greenland belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark.

Canada says it shares roughly 3,000 kilometers of maritime boundary with the Kingdom of Denmark.

East of Greenland sits Iceland.

Keep moving east and you reach the Faroe Islands, Britain and Norway.

North of there is the Arctic Ocean.

Keep following the northern coastline toward Russia and you eventually reach Finland.

Move south and east and you reach Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Those countries make up most of the JEF.

Russia occupies the other side of that geography.

Canada’s government has spent much of 2026 building bilateral agreements along almost exactly that route.

In February, Canada signed a defense cooperation agreement with Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands covering logistics, exercises, personnel, defense industry and military cooperation. In June, Canada signed another defense cooperation agreement with Iceland focused partly on Arctic security and joint training.

Canada already works with Denmark, Germany, Norway and Iceland through its Maritime Security Partnership, which aims to improve maritime awareness and information sharing across the North Atlantic. None of these agreements replaces NATO.

Taken together, though, they show how Canada’s northern defense relationships are becoming denser.

And then there is Latvia.

Canada joining JEF would sound considerably more dramatic if Canadian forces weren’t already deeply embedded in the exact region JEF exists to defend. Operation REASSURANCE is Canada’s largest overseas military mission. Canada leads NATO’s Multinational Brigade in Latvia. Ottawa says up to roughly 2,200 Canadian Armed Forces personnel are persistently deployed there, within a multinational brigade of around 3,000 Allied troops. Canada also has hundreds of military vehicles in Latvia, aviation elements and cyber personnel working with Latvian authorities.

And in July, Canada took another step upward.

Canada joined Denmark and Latvia as one of three framework nations for NATO’s Multinational Division North.

That division sits above the Canadian-led brigade in NATO’s command structure and helps coordinate the defense of the region.

That detail matters.

Canada isn’t arriving in Northern Europe asking where everyone keeps the coffee.

Canada already has a major command responsibility on NATO’s eastern flank.

It has maintained troops in Latvia since 2017.

It has invested more than $315 million Canadian in Latvian military infrastructure.

Its brigade now includes troops from fourteen NATO countries.

And Canadian forces have already trained directly inside the JEF system.

During Exercise TARASSIS in 2025, Royal Canadian Air Force personnel operated from Estonia while conducting missions involving Finland, Lithuania and Latvia.

Canada wasn’t a JEF member.

It was already learning how to fight with one.

This is the question I kept coming back to while researching this.

If Canada already belongs to NATO, commands forces in Latvia, works with Nordic allies and participates in JEF exercises, what does formal JEF membership actually add?

Speed is part of the answer.

Geographic specialization is another.

JEF’s response options are designed around a fairly narrow map and a fairly narrow group of likely problems.

A Baltic cable gets cut.

A Russian shadow-fleet tanker starts behaving suspiciously.

An unidentified military presence appears around important infrastructure.

A regional crisis suddenly requires additional aircraft, ships, cyber teams or troops.

JEF members have spent years rehearsing those specific contingencies.

Exercise Lion Protector 26 is happening right now.

One portion involved escorting a Danish ship carrying military equipment to Latvia.

Other phases include protection of critical infrastructure in Iceland, operations across the North Atlantic and the deployment of a JEF headquarters into the High North.

Royal Marines even exercised in the Faroe Islands this year for the first time since the Second World War.

That is almost a diagram of Canada’s emerging security geography.

Arctic.

North Atlantic.

Iceland.

Faroe Islands.

Baltic logistics.

Latvia.

Joining JEF would put Canada inside the planning structure connecting those pieces. And there’s another Canadian reason this matters. For most of the post-war era, you could roughly divide Canadian defense into two geographic problems. North America meant NORAD and the United States. Europe meant NATO.

That distinction is becoming much less tidy.

A Russian submarine leaving the Kola Peninsula enters waters relevant to Norway, Britain, Iceland, Canada and the United States.

Russian aircraft operating across the Arctic approaches can matter to NORAD and NATO simultaneously.

The same northern seas contain submarine routes, military bases, energy infrastructure, communications cables and the reinforcement routes NATO would need during a European war.

Canada’s Arctic is not sitting at the end of this system.

It sits along one side of it.

That is why JEF’s own leaders now describe the Baltic Sea, High North and North Atlantic as a single interconnected geostrategic region.

Their words, not mine.

And once you accept that premise, Canada’s application suddenly looks much less exotic.

Canada is an Arctic NATO country with military responsibilities in Latvia.

JEF is a coalition designed around Arctic, North Atlantic and Baltic security.

The overlap is enormous.

There’s another development worth watching here.

Britain is trying to turn the northern European navies around JEF into something much more integrated.

The Royal Navy has proposed what it calls a Northern Navies arrangement.

The concept involves navies that train together, plan together, share logistics, use common digital networks and potentially operate persistent crewed and uncrewed systems across the North Atlantic and High North.

The British First Sea Lord described the ambition as moving from periodic cooperation toward a persistent integrated maritime force.

Canada is not automatically part of that arrangement simply because it has applied to JEF.

That distinction matters.

Still, Canada’s membership bid places Ottawa directly beside the governments building it.

And Canada has its own reason to care about persistent northern surveillance.

The Canadian Armed Forces are expanding Arctic operations.

Ottawa is spending billions on new northern support hubs, sensors and NORAD modernization.

Canada is also negotiating for Saab GlobalEye airborne early-warning aircraft, which would dramatically improve its ability to build a persistent air and maritime picture across enormous northern distances. Canada’s European and Arctic defense investments are beginning to point toward the same requirement:

See farther.

Share the picture faster.

Move forces before a crisis becomes a war.

That is essentially the JEF operating philosophy.

I think this is the bigger change hiding inside Canada’s application.

For decades, people tended to talk about NATO as one giant alliance.

Thirty-two governments.

One treaty.

One Article 5 commitment.

That legal structure remains the foundation.

Operationally, something more distributed is developing underneath it.

Britain and the Nordics work through JEF.

Canada leads a multinational brigade in Latvia.

Canada, Denmark and Latvia now share responsibility for Multinational Division North.

Regional navies are integrating around the North Atlantic.

Nordic countries increasingly coordinate Arctic security.

Smaller groups can prepare responses to specific problems while staying connected to NATO’s larger command structure. That reduces one of the hardest problems in coalition warfare: the time required to organize everyone after the emergency has already started. JEF’s Response Options exist precisely to shorten that process. And the category change is especially important because the opening phase of a future confrontation with Russia may not resemble the opening of February 2022 in Ukraine.

There may be no enormous armored column waiting on a border.

The first crisis could involve a cable.

A tanker.

A cyberattack.

A drone.

An unexplained explosion.

A navigation outage.

A suspicious submarine movement.

The challenge is identifying when several ambiguous events have stopped being random incidents and become a coordinated military campaign.

A geographically focused coalition that already shares information, operational plans and response options becomes very useful in that environment.

For Canada, that means defending the Arctic and defending Europe increasingly involve many of the same allies watching many of the same Russian forces across the same northern battlespace.

There is one very important limit to this story.

Canada has applied to join JEF.

Canada has not yet joined.

The ten existing members still have to complete the membership process, and ministers in Iceland are currently discussing the Canadian application.

JEF also has no equivalent of NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense guarantee.

It is a military cooperation framework, not a replacement alliance.

Its response options are useful because participating governments have planned them in advance, although governments still make political decisions about what forces they contribute during an actual crisis.

And membership doesn’t magically create Canadian military capacity.

A coalition can improve command relationships, intelligence sharing and interoperability.

It cannot conjure another frigate out of Halifax Harbor.

Canada is currently rebuilding large pieces of its military at the same time it is assuming more international responsibilities.

New submarines remain years away.

Canada’s prospective GlobalEye fleet is still in negotiation.

Many Canadian modernization projects remain somewhere between announcement, contract and fielded capability.

So the value of JEF membership will ultimately depend on what Canada can actually contribute.

That is the appropriate test.

Still, look at the map again.

Canada.

Greenland.

Iceland.

The Faroes.

Britain.

Norway.

Sweden.

Finland.

The Baltic states.

That chain runs almost continuously across NATO’s northern approaches.

Canada already has soldiers at the far eastern end in Latvia.

It is expanding its military presence at the western end in the Canadian Arctic.

The Joint Expeditionary Force operates across everything between them.

That is why I don’t think Canada’s application should be understood primarily as Ottawa moving deeper into European defense.

The geography is telling us something more important.

Arctic defense, North Atlantic security and Baltic deterrence are increasingly becoming parts of the same military problem.

Russia already treats the northern approaches as connected.

NATO’s northern countries are beginning to organize themselves the same way. And Canada appears ready to take a seat at that table.

That’s it for today, my friends. If this kind of military and geopolitical analysis is useful, please hit the thumbs up and subscribe. I cover Canada, NATO, Ukraine and the technologies changing modern warfare four times a week.

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

Hey friends,

I have a fondness for the Aussie Slinger system: an automated counter UAS gun turret with expert stabilization thanks to Australia’s Electro Optical Systems (EOS).

There’s a reason my YouTube audience analytics say that a full 29% of my watchers are from down unda. A video on the Slinger system operating in Ukraine (in 2025) was one of my first “viral” hits. Besides, you tend to remember the weapon system you were discussing when that discussion gets viewed by four million people.

(It’s also why I’m fond of the British Starstreak.)

So, I just saw a bit of news about the Slinger’s radar system and I thought this would be a good time to revisit the weapon; albeit, in written form.

The biggest thing that caught my eye was the claim of “4D radar.”

Wait, what the hell is 4D radar?

I went down this particular rabbit hole after EOS Defense Systems USA, the American arm of Australia’s EOS, announced on October 7 that it is finishing development of a new version of its Slinger counter-drone weapon.

EOS plans to begin producing the system in Huntsville, Alabama in 2027, and a lot of the early coverage has grabbed onto the phrase “4D radar.”

Ooh, 4D! It sounds so exotic.

It sounds like somebody at EOS figured out how to detect Russian drones before the Russians have actually launched them; ya know, because the fourth dimension in classical physics is time…

But apparently, I spent a decent chunk of my Air Force career working with “4D radar,” and nobody bothered to tell me.

This is a bit irritating because “four-dimensional surveillance radar journeyman” sounds a hell of a lot more impressive than whatever I was putting on my résumé back then.

Okay, let’s level set here… This is all 4D means: Range, bearing, altitude, and velocity.

My first assumption was that Slinger had received some remarkable new radar and the marketing department had gone completely feral with the terminology. But the first Slinger, unveiled in 2023, already carried Echodyne’s EchoGuard radar, and Echodyne has been selling that system as 4D radar for years.

The new Slinger inherits that capability. What EOS is adding now is what the company calls “enhanced sensing,” along with aided target recognition, selectable autonomy, and an autonomous kill chain intended to operate at scale.

That is MUCH more interesting than the 4D label, particularly because Slinger has already been sent to Ukraine. The system is developing while the Ukrainians and Russians are simultaneously rewriting the counter-drone problem every few months.

So all this talk about 4D buries the lede, methinks.

A basic two-dimensional radar gives you range and azimuth, meaning how far away the target is and which direction you need to look. Add elevation information and you have what the radar world generally calls three-dimensional coverage.

The additional measurement behind the “4D” label is just Doppler velocity.

I don’t think the company is trying to hide the ball here; Echodyne is straightforward about this. Its own descriptions of 4D radar refer to range, azimuth, elevation, and radial velocity. The company even acknowledges that what many people historically called a 3D Doppler radar can reasonably be described as 4D under the newer terminology.

So, sadly, there is no infinite wormhole or closed timelike loop.

The fourth dimension, in this sense, is essentially how quickly the target is coming toward you or moving away.

That measurement comes from the Doppler effect, which is the same physics you experience when an ambulance goes screaming past your car. The pitch of the siren sounds higher while it approaches and lower after it passes because the relative motion between you and the ambulance changes the soundwave frequency reaching your ears.

Same thing applies to light waves, or in our case, a less energetic version, radio waves.

Send energy toward an object, let that energy bounce back, and motion changes the frequency of the return slightly. Measure the shift with a computer and you gain information about the object’s movement relative to the radar.

That was important on AWACS because the earth itself is a gigantic radar reflector that stayed annoyingly directly underneath all the airplanes we wanted to find.

Early airborne radar systems had a difficult time looking down at aircraft flying close to the ground because terrain, trees, buildings, roads, and everything else down there sent energy back toward the radar.

That clutter could bury a low-flying aircraft.

Pulse-Doppler processing helped solve the problem because most of the ground is stationary relative to the radar while the MiG screaming along at 300 feet is very much not. Once the system separates returns based partly on velocity, the moving aircraft becomes easier to distinguish from the clutter below it. That capability helped make the E-3 such an extraordinary surveillance platform.

The Air Force has long credited it with detecting low-flying aircraft at ranges beyond 250 nautical miles under certain conditions (250 is the unclassified range, by the way). One aircraft orbiting high above the battlespace could watch an enormous amount of sky, including aircraft trying to hide down near the terrain.

But Doppler does have a limitation that becomes relevant to our little Australian drone killer.

The radar directly measures radial velocity, meaning the portion of the target’s motion toward or away from the radar. If an aircraft turns roughly perpendicular to the radar beam, with the radar at its 3 or 9 o’clock, that radial velocity measurement can fall dramatically.

Fighter pilots have exploited that for decades. “Beaming” or “notching” a pulse-Doppler radar means maneuvering your jet to reduce your radial velocity enough that your return can fall into, or close to, the Doppler clutter notch the radar uses to filter out the ground.

Modern radars have ways to fight through that, so it is not an H.G. Wells-level of disappearing trick, but the underlying physics are very real.

We dealt with the same physics on AWACS. The tracking computer watched successive returns and calculated what the target was actually doing based on how its position changed over time. If the aircraft was here during one sweep and somewhere else ten seconds later, the computer could start figuring out heading and overall speed even though the Doppler measurement itself represented only part of the motion.

That is why I find the 4D label simultaneously accurate and funny. It makes the radar sound as though it has been granted some new sense unavailable to previous generations, when much of what is happening involves familiar Doppler physics combined with increasingly capable tracking software.

And tracking software is where Slinger starts getting nasty.

My radar needed a Boeing 707. This one rides next to a cannon.

The difference between the radar I worked with and the radar on Slinger gives you a pretty good picture of how far the engineering has come.

My radar lived on a four-engine airliner.

It required a 30-foot rotating dome, massive electrical generation and cooling, specialized maintenance crews, ground support equipment, and a mission crew in the back of the aircraft.

The rotodome rotated six times per minute, so roughly ten seconds passed between complete sweeps.

For what we were doing, that was fine.

If you are monitoring an aircraft 200 miles away, ten seconds is not a long time. The E-3 mission was surveillance, identification, command and control, and battle management. We built the air picture, kept track of who was who, figured out where everybody was going, and helped fighters get into position.

The E-3 never carried offensive weapons. We simply, ahem, arranged introductions.

Slinger has a much shorter and more violent decision cycle.

Imagine one mounted on the back of a pickup moving down a cratered road somewhere in eastern Ukraine. A Russian FPV drone appears around a kilometer away. The drone is moving, the truck is moving, the suspension is pitching and rolling, the cannon is moving relative to the vehicle, and the vehicle itself is moving relative to the earth.

The drone might weigh only a few kilograms and can change direction in the blink of an eye.

Slinger’s fire-control system has to sort through that mess and determine where the target will be when the projectile arrives.

I love military technology partly because enormous amounts of violence so often come down to geometry.

Echodyne’s radar uses what the company calls a metamaterials electronically scanned array, or MESA.

Traditional mechanically scanned radars point their beams partly by moving the antenna. Electronically scanned arrays can steer the beam by manipulating the timing and phase of signals across the antenna face, allowing the beam to move without physically swinging the entire antenna toward the target.

My old APY radar combined approaches. The entire rotodome rotated mechanically around the aircraft for azimuth coverage, while the radar could electronically manipulate the beam in elevation.

Echodyne has packed its radar technology into a package small enough to mount directly alongside a weapon system. This “miniaturization” is the part of this story I find much more impressive than calling it 4D.

Defense engineers use the acronym SWaP for size, weight, and power. Radar historically demanded truckloads of all three. Battlefield systems meant antennas, generators, trucks, cables, and support equipment.

Now the radar is small enough to ride on the gun.

And detecting the drone is just the beginning.

Slinger has to build a reliable track, which means repeatedly measuring the target until the computer has a decent estimate of its location, speed, heading, and likely path. Then the fire-control system calculates lead because you generally do not shoot at where the target is. You shoot where it is going to be.

At counter-drone ranges, tiny errors compound.

The M230LF cannon fires 30x113mm ammunition. Once you account for drag, range, and the actual ballistic characteristics of the round, the projectile takes meaningful time to cross a kilometer.

An FPV drone traveling at 120 kilometers per hour covers roughly 33 meters every second.

If your estimate of its movement is wrong by even a little, the projectile can arrive at an empty piece of atmosphere while the drone continues toward you.

Now compare that with my old radar.

At 120 kilometers per hour, that drone could move more than 300 meters during one ten-second E-3 sweep interval.

That’s manageable when you are tracking a bomber far over the horizon but it would be absurd for a gun trying to swat a small drone at one kilometer.

Slinger needs rapid updates because its target can radically change the geometry of the engagement in seconds. EOS also gave the original system a four-axis sighting arrangement that lets the sensor head move independently of the cannon in azimuth and elevation. That allows the optics to remain on the target while the weapon slews toward the appropriate firing position, which becomes especially valuable when the entire system is mounted on a moving vehicle.

Then the computer has to account for vehicle motion, pitch, roll, yaw, vibration, crosswind, ballistic drop, projectile flight time, and whatever the drone operator decides to do after realizing somebody is shooting back.

An Abrams firing accurately while moving already performs an impressive amount of mathematical housekeeping. Now shrink the target from a tank to a quadcopter, lift the target into three-dimensional space, let it change direction quickly, and mount your gun on a pickup.

Welcome to counter-drone warfare.

Fortunately, Slinger gets some help from the ammunition.

The 30mm high-explosive fragmentation round can use a radio-frequency proximity fuse, which means the projectile does not necessarily need to drill directly through a drone the size of a dinner plate. Get the shell close enough and the fuse can trigger the explosive charge, spraying fragments through propellers, motors, batteries, wiring, flight controllers, and whatever other important pieces of plastic are keeping the drone airborne.

That gives the fire-control system a larger acceptable error than a direct-hit weapon would have.

Ukraine has already been grading Slinger

Slinger’s relationship with Ukraine goes almost all the way back to the weapon’s public debut.

EOS unveiled it in Canberra in May 2023 and was already talking about lessons emerging from the war. Northrop Grumman subsequently ordered three systems, and the Ukrainian configuration placed Slinger on a manned 4x4 truck while integrating it with Northrop’s M-ACE architecture.

M-ACE means acquisition, cueing, and effector.

Defense contractors are legally prohibited from describing anything in fewer than three nouns, so in normal English it means the network detects the target, points the weapon toward it, and kills it.

That tells us something useful about Slinger from the beginning. It wasn’t designed to operate as an isolated gun truck wandering around hoping a drone flew past. External sensors could detect threats and cue the weapon toward the appropriate piece of sky, after which Slinger’s radar and electro-optical sensors could handle the close engagement.

The exact number delivered to Ukraine is still murky.

Reports in 2023 said 160 Slingers were headed there, and that number spread quickly through the defense press.

It appears, however, that some reporting blended Slingers with other EOS remote weapon stations. In 2024, EOS said Germany had purchased Slingers for Ukraine to protect IRIS-T air-defense radars from small drones.

Monocle later reported around 200 Slinger systems in Ukraine, another figure I would hold loosely until we get clearer confirmation.

More recently, Militarnyi reported Ukrainian forces operating Slingers on pickup trucks as part of mobile counter-drone teams and published photographs showing the systems in Ukrainian service.

Whatever the number, the useful part for this story is not necessarily the exact inventory…

It’s what EOS is doing with the battlefield experience.

Company personnel told Monocle that EOS teams travel to Ukraine roughly every other month, sometimes close to the eastern front, and feed what they observe back into development. One employee described the process as learning “day by day, week by week.”

EOS began publicly discussing aided target recognition and “selectable levels of autonomy” for Slinger in 2025. The company described automation as a way to reduce the operator’s workload by helping detect, classify, and engage drones.

The October announcement goes further.

EOS says the next-generation system will use selectable autonomy to respond to threats on a faster decision cycle, and it describes an autonomous kill chain “built to operate at scale.”

Once you chisel away the corpo-speak, the engineering problem looks like this: The radar is fast. The computer is fast. The gun is fast. The incoming drone is definitely fast. The operator is still a slow human. I don’t mean “slow” developmentally. I’m sure they are well-read and well-traveled. I mean slow because the human’s internal computer is wet and squishy and the consistency of Jell-O.

The computer might automatically search for objects, classify them, build tracks, rank threats, point sensors, slew the weapon, calculate firing solutions, and then wait for a biological human being to approve every engagement.

A better configuration would potentially automate additional parts of the sequence.

So, what does any of this have to do with “4D radar”?

This entire story started because I was amused by the terminology, and I am still amused by it. The fundamental questions my old E-3 radar tried to answer were not very different from the questions Slinger asks.

Where is the target?

How far away is it?

How high is it?

How is it moving?

The E-3 answered those questions across hundreds of miles while orbiting at altitude with a 30-foot rotating antenna, four jet engines, and a mission crew sitting in the back of what was essentially a flying office building.

Slinger asks them from the bed of a truck.

What changed dramatically is how quickly the answer has to become action.

On AWACS, we usually had time.

A track appeared. We watched it. We correlated information. We checked identification. People talked over Link-16. Controllers built situational awareness. Fighters could be vectored toward the target.

There was an entire human decision-making architecture between the radar return and whatever happened next.

A Slinger crew facing an FPV drone at a kilometer is in a more harrowing situation.

That is why the next-generation Slinger interests me far more than the phrase “4D radar.”

The radar technology is impressive, particularly because Echodyne has compressed so much capability into such a small package. The gun is impressive. The proximity-fused ammunition is clever.

But I think the real race is happening between detection and decision.

Ukraine keeps shortening that interval because the drones keep getting faster, more numerous, harder to jam, and more disposable. EOS is responding by pushing more of the workload into software and giving the operator less to do manually during the handful of seconds that matter.

I still take the classical approach that the fourth dimension is time. On the AWACS, we had plenty.

On a Ukrainian road with an FPV screaming toward your truck, you may have three seconds.

That’s the dimension EOS is really trying to buy back: time.

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