This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles (Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays) for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to support independent, approachable military analysis with a heavy dose of pro-Ukrainian sentiment and a side of anti-authoritarian humor.

Hey friends. Happy Father’s Day to the dads out there.

Oops! Russia has a math problem.

Russia leans on so much scattered infrastructure to keep this war running that it can’t put a real air-defense umbrella over all of it at the same time.

Still, Moscow can do plenty. It can stack defensive rings around the capital. It can bolt Pantsir launchers onto rooftops. It can keep the good interceptors close to the Kremlin and the parade route.

What it can’t do is cover every refinery, bridge, fuel depot, drone command post, rail junction, port, airbase, and ammo dump from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Not all of them.

Not all night.

Not when the older interceptors are being drained, the newer ones are being rationed, and every cheap Ukrainian drone asks Moscow an expensive question.

Ukraine has been on the receiving end of that math, and now it’s forcing Russia into the same decision nightmare: deciding what you’re willing to leave uncovered.

On the night of June 18 into June 19, Ukraine reported a coordinated set of targets:

Two railway bridges near Rozdolne and Vladyslavivka in occupied Crimea.

A Russian equipment concentration near Sievierodonetsk.

A fuel and lubricants depot in occupied Mariupol.

A cluster of Russian drone command posts near Pokrovsk, Voskresenka, Siversk, and a few other spots along the line.

And, the big boy, the Moscow Oil Refinery, hit days after an earlier strike on the same plant.

Read more

Hey friends.

The Pentagon’s research shop (DARPA) just asked the defense industry a question that should make your shitty Pentagon coffee go cold.

What if China kills our satellites on day one?

Right about now, a staffer at the Pentagon is reading this and hitting delete on his riveting slideshow titled “Space Resilience 2047.”

DARPA is quietly making the rounds and asking for ideas for restoring satellite services within hours to weeks after an attack.

Hours!

So, the assumption here is the US government believes that China could do a significant amount of damage in the opening hours of any future kinetic fight. Well, that’s unsettling.

Okay, I’m going to look at whether China actually has the ability to do this below, but first…

你好，同志。I’d like to welcome the individuals (or AI scrapers) from the People’s Republic of China who have visited my articles in the past 24 hours. I guess I do write the type of smut that gets scraped, indexed, translated, summarized, and fed into adversary OSINT workflows. 我也在盯着你。

The news first

On June 12, DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office released a request for information titled “Rapid Reconstitution of Space Capabilities.” (A request for information is the government version of a help-wanted ad.) No contract, no money on the table yet, just “tell us what you’ve got.” Responses are due July 8.

The ask covers four buckets: the space vehicles themselves (the bus and the payload), launch vehicles, how you bolt the two together, and how you’d actually operate the whole mess in a fight.

DARPA listed dozens of areas of interest: modular and plug-and-play satellite designs, software-defined payloads, rapid manufacturing on the ground and in orbit, proliferated mesh networks, and backup navigation for when GPS gets jammed into uselessness.

Program manager Steven Chambers framed this as expanding the scope of the gap-filler capabilities the Space Force can lean on in a crisis, with the goal of restoring critical services to a minimum level or better on tactical timelines of hours to weeks.

That’s ambitious. Space launches take months to years to plan and execute.

But DARPA isn’t asking how to replace a satellite over three years… It’s asking how to rebuild capability before the enemy can finish exploiting the hole he just punched.

It’s an open secret that the modern American military is particularly dependent on space to wage war. It’s wired into it like a nervous system you can’t see until something cuts a wire.

Communications. Missile warning. GPS and the precise timing that GPS quietly hands out to everything else. Drone navigation. Targeting. Intelligence collection. Command and control. Blue-force tracking, which is the thing that tells your dudes where your other dudes are so you don’t shoot them.

Take that away and the US military goes slower, blinder, less precise, and badly out of sync; like a drunk Russian conscript stumbling into a badger sett at 2 a.m. and discovering, too late, that it was not, in fact, a house of ill repute.

Every advantage America has built since Desert Storm runs on speed, coordination, and knowing more than the other guy. Pull the satellites and you start yanking wires out of the joint force’s brain one at a time.

The body still moves. It just stops knowing exactly where its hands are.

Beijing has been taking diligent notes on the American way of war for thirty years, and they noticed the obvious thing: The US can’t fight across the Pacific without satellites tying the whole orchestra together.

A war over Taiwan would be fought across an ocean. Ships, subs, bombers, tankers, fighters, drones, and supply convoys spread across a battlespace the size of a continent, all of them coordinated through orbit.

China doesn’t have to beat every American platform in a fair fight. It just has to attack the thing that lets those platforms talk to each other.

The goal is friction.

Jam the GPS. Dazzle the optical sensors with ground lasers. Hit the ground stations with cyberattacks. Park a co-orbital satellite next to ours and let it shadow, inspect, or interfere. US Space Force officials have already described China practicing “dogfighting” maneuvers with satellites in orbit.

The empire strikes back

Okay, so does China even have this capability?

It’s a fair question…

The good news is that China is not going to mash one red button and turn the entire American satellite fleet into a cloud of glitter.

Satellites live in different orbits, at different altitudes, doing different jobs, talking to different ground stations, owned by different people, built with different amounts of backup.

Some are giant national-security birds.

Some are commercial comms satellites.

Some are imaging platforms.

Some are GPS or missile-warning systems.

Some are tiny nodes in a swarm of hundreds.

Some are American, some allied, some neutral, and some Chinese.

A big debris-spewing attack wouldn’t happen inside a tidy little military sandbox. It would happen in the same orbital neighborhood China lives in and Beijing has its own growing fleet up there doing surveillance, communications, navigation, and targeting. All of it needs that environment to stay usable.

Start smashing satellites wholesale and you poison the well you drink from.

So, I don’t think the danger was never China deleting space. The danger is China hitting the right satellites, at the right moment, in the right order, to leave the US military slower, blinder, and a half-step behind during the opening of a Pacific war.

China only needs to degrade the handful of space services that decide a Taiwan fight: communications across the Pacific, GPS and the timing signal that rides on it, missile warning, targeting data, radar imaging, carrier tracking, and the command networks lashing ships, subs, aircraft, drones, and ground troops into one coordinated punch.

Knock enough offline at the wrong minute and the joint force starts losing tempo, which in a fight that size is the same as losing ground.

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall gets at the same problem in his forthcoming book, Lethal Autonomy. In his chapter on space war, Kendall warns that responsive launch only matters if the payloads are already built, available, and survivable. Otherwise, a fast rocket is just a very expensive way to get an empty launch pad excited.

DARPA’s request lands in that exact gap between launch speed and actual wartime reconstitution.

By the way, stay tuned for a review of Kendall’s book right here on Substack. I’ll be releasing it a little closer to book’s release day in July. You can pre-order here. I get no compensation for recommending or reviewing this book.

China’s suspected counterspace toolbox

There are five tools in the kit, and they run from loud to invisible.

First, the kinetic option: direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. These are ground-launched interceptors that fly up and physically smash a satellite, mostly in low Earth orbit (the busy lane a few hundred miles up where a lot of imaging and comms birds fly).

China proved it could do this back in 2007, when it destroyed its own dead Fengyun-1C weather satellite and littered orbit with thousands of pieces of shrapnel that are still up there causing problems. The Pentagon assesses China already fields missiles to kill satellites in low orbit and wants the reach to threaten higher orbits too.

Outside analysts at the Secure World Foundation track this under the SC-19, DN-2, and DN-3 test programs. This is the bluntest instrument in the box, and the one most likely to make orbit dangerous for everybody including China.

Second, the co-orbital option: satellites that hunt other satellites. These maneuver in close to another spacecraft. Officially they’re for “inspection, servicing, or refueling,” and that’s a real and useful thing.

The catch is that a satellite that can gently dock with a friendly bird can also grab a hostile one, and the hardware looks about the same either way.

In January 2022, China’s Shijian-21 satellite used a robotic arm to drag a dead BeiDou navigation satellite up into a graveyard orbit, which is genuinely impressive engineering and also exactly the move you’d want for grappling someone else’s satellite.

In 2024, three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two older Shijian-6 craft ran a series of close-up maneuvers in low orbit, some within about a kilometer of each other, that the Space Force compared to dogfighting.

Third, the usable option: electronic warfare. This is probably the first thing China actually reaches for, because it’s reversible, deniable, and easy to dial up or down. Stop transmitting and the effect just ends, no debris, no smoking crater, plausible shrug all around.

The Pentagon says China fields ground-based jammers now and is working toward space-based ones, including kit to spoof GPS-type navigation signals (feeding a receiver a convincing lie about where it is) and to jam military SATCOM across multiple frequency bands, up to the extremely high frequency links the US uses for its most protected communications. They’re also assessed to be building jammers aimed at radar-imaging satellites.

Fourth, the directed-energy option: lasers, pew pew. These dazzle, blind, degrade, or eventually damage a satellite’s sensors, and they’re especially nasty against optical imaging birds, the ones that see by collecting light.

The Pentagon says China has chased directed-energy weapons for decades and has already deployed multiple ground-based lasers able to disrupt, degrade, or damage satellite sensors, with higher-power systems able to hurt the satellite’s structure expected by the mid-to-late 2020s.

Fifth, the quiet option: cyber. Maybe the most practical. You don’t have to shoot the satellite if you can get into the network that flies it, or the ground station that talks to it, or the commercial provider the military quietly leans on.

The Pentagon has tied China to cyberattacks on foreign satellite networks and warns that state-sponsored crews like Volt Typhoon are pre-positioning inside US infrastructure ahead of any fight. The assessment is blunt: Chinese cyber operations would go after satellites, ground stations, and support nodes early to choke the data flow the joint force runs on.

Put it together and you can see what DARPA is actually worried about, where enough of the network gets jammed, blinded, grappled, or hacked that the most coordinated military on Earth suddenly has to fight through fog at the exact moment it needs to see clearly.

That’s how you’d try to win the first day.

Russia has already proven this isn’t theoretical. Germany’s defense minister said Russian reconnaissance satellites were caught tracking two Intelsat satellites used by the German military, and the head of UK Space Command, Major General Paul Tedman, said Russia is persistently jamming British military satellites on a roughly weekly basis while flying close enough to collect off them.

A Canadian space commander put the number of anti-satellite weapons already orbiting Earth at more than 200, which he called a shocking figure. I agree.

So Russia shows you the behavior. China shows you the scale.

Or, Russia is the guy waving a knife in the gas station parking lot at 2 a.m. China is the sober engineer in the corner quietly photographing where the building keeps its fire exits.

Victus Nox solved half the problem

In 2023, the Space Force flew a mission called Victus Nox where Firefly and Millennium launched a satellite 27 hours after getting the order, shattering the old responsive-launch record.

That proved America can get a rocket off the pad fast.

But a fast rocket only answers half the question. The other half is what you’re putting on top of it. If the replacement satellite takes three years to build, a 24-hour launch is just a very expensive Uber idling at the curb with nobody to pick up.

DARPA’s new ask is about the passenger, not the Uber. Can industry build satellites in modular blocks?

Can payloads be reprogrammed on orbit?

Can manufacturers keep partial inventory warm?

Can a commercial production line surge for the military when the shooting starts?

Software-defined satellites are the actual story

A software-defined payload lets a satellite change jobs.

A comms satellite isn’t going to magically become a missile-warning satellite, but future satellites can be built with flexible radios, reconfigurable sensors, and mission software that lets them fill a partial gap when the network takes damage.

The military thinks in exactly these terms already. A platoon loses people, the squad reorganizes and keeps moving.

A ship goes down, another ship takes its station.

DARPA wants the satellite fleet to behave less like a collection of priceless one-off museum pieces and more like a rifle platoon.

Lose a capability, reshuffle, press on. This is why in the infantry we called ourselves “high-velocity projectile interceptors.” (AKA bullet catchers.)

We were, ahem, expendable. Hence, the dark humor I inherited for life.

But it’s on-orbit assembly that changes the repair game.

This is the most futuristic piece, so keep your feet on the ground. Instead of launching one finished satellite, you launch modules. A power block. A propulsion block. A sensor block. Then you dock and combine them in orbit, and you swap out the broken part instead of throwing away the whole spacecraft.

It’s hard.

Rendezvous, docking, robotics, standardized plugs, cybersecurity, debris avoidance, who’s allowed to give the command. Nobody’s pretending this is easy. But if it works, it drags the satellite fleet from “launch it and pray” toward “maintain it, repair it, reconfigure it.”

Right now, most satellites are sealed appliances. If your refrigerator is in orbit, you don’t fix it, you replace it. DARPA’s asking whether the next generation can be built more like field equipment: modular, repairable, and ugly in all the ways that keep you alive.

By the way, there’s a program called the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, and the best way to understand it is the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. CASR is modeled directly on that idea, where the military gets access to commercial aircraft in an emergency, except now it’s commercial satellites.

In a crisis, the Pentagon can lean on private operators for comms, imagery, data relay, and sheer numbers.

Commercial space has exploded, and the military no longer owns the whole problem. Ukraine proved the point in real time. Starlink, commercial imagery, and private radar data have all shaped that war from the first weeks.

The Pentagon is trying to bottle that lesson before a bigger one arrives. Commercial space is becoming the reserve component of the orbital battlefield, the same way the National Guard backs up the active force.

The deterrence payoff

Reconstitution might be about recovering after the punch. But what if you could make the punch not worth throwing? If China believes blowing up our satellites blinds America for months or years, that’s a tempting prize and a reason to swing first.

But if China believes the US can restore the capability in days, the prize shrinks until it’s barely worth the escalation.

“Fast rebuild” quietly takes that trophy off the shelf and tosses it in the trash with the rest of my participation trophys.

But all of this only works if the entire chain works: Spare payloads, launch vehicles, trained crews, hardened ground stations, approval authorities who can say yes in hours instead of months, pre-negotiated commercial contracts, manufacturing that can surge, cyber-secure command links, and funding for boring spare capacity in peacetime, when no crisis is screaming and the spreadsheet looks fat and happy.

That last one is the whole ballgame. You can’t improvise an industrial base after the satellites are already gone. Everybody loves resilience right up until somebody asks who’s paying for the spare parts in a quiet budget year.

There’s plenty still unanswered.

Whether industry can actually build fast enough.

Whether modular satellites can do the hard military missions or just the easy ones.

Whether “software-defined” turns out to be real flexibility or a buzzword with solar panels.

Whether reconstitution can even happen while you’re under cyberattack.

Worth watching… all of it.

What this says about the first day

So, an RFI is the Pentagon thinking out loud, and this one tells you what it’s now assuming.

A future war with China may open with attacks on satellites, navigation, and sensing. The first day might be about blinding, confusing, and delaying the American response before a single ship is hit.

The ships will still sail.

The jets will still fly.

The Marines will still eat crayons.

But the opening shots of the next major war might look like a screen going dark in an operations center while everyone in the room slowly realizes the map stopped updating.

DARPA is basically saying satellites just got drafted into the attrition fight, same as tanks and troops and everything else that bleeds.

America spent decades becoming the most space-enabled military on Earth. We’re learning that the incredible advantages that we once enjoyed may actually have a dark side.

May the Force be with you.

Слава Україні!

This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles (Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays) for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to support independent, approachable military analysis with a heavy dose of pro-Ukrainian sentiment and a side of anti-authoritarian humor.

Hey friends, you know I can’t pass up a good radar development, given my background on the AWACS. I’m actually in the process of sourcing a neon sign that says “Radar Love” to be in the background of my YouTube videos. And yes, the Dutch rock band Golden Earring got a lot of plays in my squadron.

Anyways, the sea has a drone problem now. And Robin Radar Systems, a Dutch company that has spent years teaching machines to tell a quadcopter from a sparrow, just announced IRIS OTM at Sea, a counter-drone radar built specifically for that ugly new reality.

CEO Siete Hamminga says, “the drone threat is no longer confined to the battlefield or to land, and the Strait of Hormuz showed how vulnerable maritime corridors become the moment things get unstable.”

Now, one clarification. This is Robin’s IRIS, not the German IRIS-T.

Completely different beast. Same European habit of naming defense systems like somebody tied a Scrabble bag to the tail of a Dutch cat, blasted an air horn, and wrote down whatever letters fell out. Fucking insanity, I tell you.

Anyways, here’s the important thing to understand up front. IRIS OTM (OTM stands for “On The Move” or just “Oscar Mike” in the US military) finds the drone, tracks it, figures out what it actually is, and hands that information to whatever system is supposed to respond. In the kill chain, it’s the eyes that tell everyone where to look.

And on a pitching ship surrounded by clutter, being the eyes is a genuinely hard job; just ask Frederick Fleet.

Let me walk you through why.

How the Radar Sees

IRIS is a 3D X-band FMCW radar, and every piece of that label matters, so let me translate it.

X-band refers to the slice of the radio spectrum it operates in, roughly 8 to 12 GHz. It’s a sweet spot for this work: high enough frequency to resolve small objects with decent precision, while still behaving well over practical distances.

This is the band a lot of fine-grained tracking radars live in, for good reason.

FMCW stands for frequency-modulated continuous wave, and it’s the clever part.

A traditional pulse radar shouts one big burst of energy into the sky and then shuts up to listen for the echo, like yelling into a canyon and waiting.

FMCW does something smarter. It transmits continuously, but it constantly slides the frequency of that signal up and down in a known pattern. When the signal bounces off something and comes back, the radar compares the frequency of the returning echo against what it’s transmitting at that exact instant.

The difference tells it range. The way that difference shifts over time tells it speed. You get continuous, precise range and velocity data instead of intermittent snapshots, which is huge when your target is small, fast, and trying not to be seen.

The “3D” part is the piece people underestimate. A basic radar plot tells you something is out there at a certain bearing and range. A 3D radar adds height.

For counter-drone work, height is the whole shebang. A drone can skim low over the water, pop up near its target, loiter beside a crane, or hide its approach under the radar clutter thrown off by bigger objects.

If your radar can’t place the contact in three dimensions, you might know something is moving without knowing whether it’s a threat at 50 feet or a fishing boat’s mast return at sea level.

The hardware itself is modest by military radar standards. Robin’s spec sheet lists the IRIS head at around 25 kilograms, roughly 554 by 623 millimeters, with 360-degree coverage in azimuth, 60 degrees of elevation, a one-second update rate, and a standard instrumented range of 5 kilometers.

Small enough to bolt onto a vehicle or a ship’s mast. Which is the whole point.

By the way, Robin Radar just deployed more than thirty IRIS land-based systems at the World Cup. I thought that was cool.

Telling a Drone From a Bird

Here’s the problem that separates a useful counter-drone radar from an expensive anxiety generator: small drones and birds look almost identical to radar.

Both are small. Both move through the air. Both have a similar radar cross section. A system that screams “drone” every time a gull commits suspicious behavior near a ship is worse than useless, because it trains the human watch team to ignore the alarm right before the real one arrives.

IRIS solves this with a combination of micro-Doppler analysis and a deep neural network classifier, and this is the genuine magic trick, so stay with me.

Regular Doppler tells you how a whole object is moving toward or away from the radar. Micro-Doppler looks deeper, at the tiny internal motions within a target. A spinning drone propeller throws off a fast, repeating, highly regular frequency signature. A bird’s flapping wings produce a completely different pattern, slower and more irregular and organic. A wave has motion but no propeller. A crane has a strong return but no flight at all.

Those micro-motions are like fingerprints, and IRIS reads them.

Then the deep neural network does the sorting. It’s been trained on enormous libraries of these signatures until it can look at a return and assign a probability: that’s a quadcopter, that’s a fixed-wing drone, that’s a bird, that’s clutter.

Why Doing This at Sea Is So Much Harder

The land version of IRIS OTM already solved a hard problem: tracking drones while the radar itself moves at highway speed, up to 100 km/h. (I know jets have radar and move much faster than that, but the clutter problem at ground level is much worse.)

On a moving vehicle, the radar knows it’s moving, so the software has to subtract its own motion from everything it sees. Otherwise every stationary tree looks like it’s racing toward you and every real target gets smeared into your own movement.

At sea, that problem gets nasty, because a ship doesn’t just move forward. It pitches, bow rising and falling. It rolls side to side. It yaws, swinging off heading. It heaves straight up and down on the swell. It vibrates. It changes course and speed. I’m getting sea sick just writing this.

The radar is bolted to a platform that is never still. So, before the software can say anything confident about what a drone is doing, it first has to work out what the boat is doing and mathematically cancel it out.

The radar has to understand its own chaos before it can describe anyone else’s.

Then comes sea clutter, and water is a miserable radar neighbor. Waves reflect energy back. Whitecaps move in ways that mimic targets. Spray scatters the signal. Add a coastal environment and you pile on cranes, buildings, moored ships, antennas, buoys, and birds, all throwing returns.

A low-flying drone skimming the waterline can vanish into that mess completely. Robin says the maritime software is built specifically to filter heavy sea reflections and environmental clutter to isolate small threats near the surface.

In practice that means a few things working together. The system builds a picture of what the environment normally looks like and learns to reject returns that behave like waves.

It keeps a track alive through brief moments when clutter swallows the target.

It cross-checks Doppler, altitude, motion consistency, and classification all at once before it commits to calling something a threat.

And above all, it has to avoid drowning the operator in false alarms, because operator fatigue is the real enemy here. A system that cries drone every three minutes gets ignored, and then the actual loitering munition arrives to a very relaxed audience.

Read more

I was thinking recently about the good ole pandemic days; ah, what a simpler time…

At the time, I was writing for military and cybersecurity magazines about whether NASA spacesuits can be hacked and hypersonic tomfoolery.

Six years ago, a defense expo like this was mostly about better armored boxes. Things like thicker protection, a nicer turret, an upgraded engine, a fire-control system with a new acronym.

The headline acts were tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, things that go very high and very fast, and the unspoken assumption underneath all of it was that war would look roughly like it always had, just with more cowbell.

Then 2022 happened.

Then Operation Spiderweb.

Then a year of Russian glide bombs and Ukrainian refinery strikes and FPV drones turning hundred-dollar quadcopters into tank-killers.

Then the Gulf woke up to Iranian missiles in March. And the entire defense industry got the same text message at the same time, written in other people’s blood.

You can read that message on the Eurosatory floor this year.

Almost every serious system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud:

How do I shoot from farther away so I don’t die?

How do I kill cheap drones without going bankrupt?

How do I send a robot instead of a soldier?

How do I keep my tank’s roof from becoming a Thermador pizza oven set to “broil?”

Back then, I also used to write listicles, like “Top Ten Gifts for Veterans!” In that tradition, I’ve put together a hand-picked list of ten weapon systems emerging this year at Eurosatory in Paris, and every one of them is really a story about how much war has changed since 2020.

1. KNDS LORAS: Tube artillery wants to be a rocket

The strongest single reveal of the show, in my humble opinion. KNDS unveiled LORAS, a 155mm artillery demonstrator built around a long 58-caliber gun, mounted on the tracked RCH 155 with its unmanned turret.

The pitch is reach: around 60 kilometers with a new high-explosive round, and up to 100 kilometers with precision or special ammunition, while staying compatible with NATO’s 155mm standard.

A hundred kilometers from a conventional cannon shell is the kind of range that used to belong exclusively to rockets and missiles. The Ukraine lesson driving it is simple: artillery dies in counter-battery duels, and the gun that shoots farther shoots first and lives longer.

LORAS is tube artillery trying to buy rocket range without paying rocket prices on every single shot. In 2020, nobody was building this. In 2026, it’s the headliner.

2. MBDA-Safran Thundart: France builds its own deep strike

France used the show’s opening day to announce it had selected the MBDA-Safran Thundart for its deep-fires competition, replacing a sad little fleet of nine aging LRU rocket launchers.

Thundart, which I’m pretty sure was also a character from ThunderCats in the 1980s, is pitched at 150 kilometers, rides on an 8x8 launcher carrying eight rockets, and is explicitly designed to be scaled up and extended, with a path toward the 1,000-kilometer-plus Land Cruise Missile.

The strategic story here is sovereignty.

Most of NATO answered its rocket-artillery problem by getting in line at the American HIMARS counter like everyone else at the procurement buffet.

France looked at that line and said, “Absolutely not, mon amie! We shall go our own way, merci.” And then decided it wanted a deep-strike capability it controls end to end, built in Europe, not dependent on anyone’s export approval.

That instinct, build it yourself so nobody can switch it off, is one of the loudest themes of the entire post-Trump era.

3. Soframe-Thales X-Fire: shoot, scoot, survive

Another French deep-fires entry, X-Fire sits on a Daimler Zetros 8x8 truck and is built around modular missile pods designed to take weapons reportedly reaching out to 1,000 kilometers.

The numbers that actually matter, though, are the small ones: crew reload in under eight minutes, displacement in under one minute.

That’s the whole drone-war doctrine compressed into a spec sheet.

On a battlefield saturated with reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions, a launcher that sits still is a launcher that becomes a smoke column. X-Fire is engineered around the assumption that the enemy will find you fast, so your only survival is to be gone faster.

Cold War artillery could afford to linger, smoke a stale Russian cigarette, and haze the new conscript in the unit before moving out. Modern artillery has the life expectancy of a fruit fly if it stops moving.

4. MBDA Land Cruise Missile / NCM Mk II: precision at continental range

MBDA showed, for the first time as a complete system, its ground-launched Land Cruise Missile built around the new-generation Naval Cruise Missile Mk II, with ranges beyond 1,000 kilometers.

The upgrades are a checklist of lessons from electronically contested combat: a new infrared seeker, improved electro-optical navigation, and hardened GNSS and inertial navigation for a battlefield where GPS gets jammed, spoofed, and generally turned into a liar.

MBDA paired it with cheaper one-way effectors built for saturation, which is the other half of the modern equation.

You still want a few exquisite 1,000-kilometer missiles for the hardest targets and a flood of cheap one-way drones to soak up the air defenses on the way in.

High-end and low-end, sword and shield, because Ukraine proved you need both.

5. ARQUIMEA’s layered counter-drone interceptors: the Shahed lesson went shopping

Spain’s ARQUIMEA unveiled a multi-layer counter-drone system built around autonomous interceptors, with a family of effectors tuned to different speeds and ranges, the Q-SLAM and Q-FOX series.

Detection, identification, tracking, interception, all stacked into one architecture.

This is what the Shahed war looks like when it goes shopping. Russia and Iran spent three years teaching the world that cheap mass drones overwhelm any defense built around a handful of expensive missiles, because you run out of million-dollar interceptors long before they run out of fifty-thousand-dollar drones.

The answer being built across Europe now is layered, autonomous, and cost-conscious by design.

In 2020, “counter-drone” was a niche line item.

In 2026, it’s a product category with subcategories.

6. Thales RapidStriker: the cheap middle layer

Thales rolled out RapidStriker, a mobile short-range air-defense and counter-drone system using 70mm rockets.

Unglamorous, but I still want one in my driveway, if my HOA would allow it.

Europe has a gaping hole in the middle of its air-defense stack, the zone between a soldier with a machine gun and a battery firing missiles that cost more than the building the drone was about to hit.

Guided 70mm rockets are an attempt to fill that gap with something affordable enough to use every single night, because drone defense built only around exquisite interceptors works right up until the moment your defense budget discovers it has not, in fact, struck oil.

7. Milrem THeMIS and HAVOC: let the clankers take the first hit

Estonia’s Milrem showed a robotic ground ecosystem: the tracked THeMIS fitted with a counter-drone weapon station using a 30mm cannon and specialized ammunition to swat drones beyond 1,000 meters, alongside the larger HAVOC 8x8 robotic combat vehicle that can carry cannons, short-range air-defense missiles, and electronic warfare gear.

This is the “robots absorb the risk before soldiers do” entry, and it’s one of the most important shifts of the whole post-2022 period.

The logic of the modern battlefield, where everything that moves and emits gets seen and hunted, points relentlessly toward putting machines in the most lethal positions and keeping the humans further back, making decisions instead of making targets.

We talked about this with the uncrewed-vehicle trend in Ukraine. Eurosatory is where it becomes a catalog you can order from.

8. Nammo’s Orqa strike drone with the N7 warhead: the one that isn’t vapor

Norwegian ammunition company Nammo unveiled a modular strike system pairing Orqa’s MRM2-10 drone with a 66mm N7 anti-tank warhead that the company says punches through more than 450mm of rolled steel armor.

But here’s the detail that separates this from showroom vapor: the N7 has reportedly already been sold to Ukraine in six-figure quantities. Dayam!

That’s the tell. A lot of what gets unveiled at these shows is a beautiful render, a logo, and a catered lunch, with the actual hardware arriving sometime around the heat death of the universe.

A warhead already in Ukrainian hands by the hundred thousand is a product that has met the enemy, which in 2026 is the only review that counts. The drone-plus-shaped-charge pairing is the single most consequential weapon of this war, and now it’s a modular product line.

9. The post-Ukraine tank: KNDS CAPINT and the Leonardo-Rheinmetall concept

KNDS showed CAPINT, its proposal for France’s next main battle tank, built on an enhanced Leopard 2A8-based chassis with the unmanned ASCALON turret, designed for increased firepower, open digital architecture, counter-drone systems, and connectivity with robotic wingmen.

Leonardo and Rheinmetall, separately, displayed a new tank concept with a 30mm remote weapon station specifically meant to swat down drones diving from above.

The tank is not dead, despite a thousand breathless think-pieces declaring it so.

But it is being forced to evolve fast, and the thing reshaping it is the FPV drone. Suddenly every tank designer on earth is thinking about high-angle threats and onboard drone defense. A tank that talks to robotic wingmen and shoots down quadcopters is a different machine than the one showed off in 2020.

10. Esh-Tech DroneLite: shooting drones with light

The wild card.

Israeli startup Esh-Tech is showing DroneLite, a pulsed laser counter-drone system aimed at small drones, claiming it runs on only 4 kilowatts, mounts on a vehicle, and destroyed 20 drones in testing last year, with a first operational system planned for October 2026.

Big caveat: startup laser claims need independent verification the way a parachute needs a second look, and “we destroyed 20 drones in our own testing” is a sentence that has preceded a lot of disappointment.

But the reason it’s on this list anyway is the economics. A laser’s shot costs roughly the price of the electricity to fire it, which against a swarm of cheap drones is the holy grail.

If even a modest version of this works, it attacks the exact cost problem that defines the drone war. That’s worth watching, with one hand on your flask of skepticism.

What the Floor Is Telling Us

Step back from the individual systems and the pattern is impossible to miss. Look at what’s not the headline anymore. Nobody’s leading with a slightly roomier APC, a slightly improved rifle optic, or a new ramjet cruise missile. The energy of the entire show has moved to four places: shooting from farther away, killing cheap drones cheaply, sending robots instead of people, and building it all in Europe so nobody can turn it off.

Every one of those four is a direct transcription of a lesson someone learned the hard way since 2020.

Now count the flags on that list of ten.

The lone outlier is an Israeli startup.

Go down the entire list of the most interesting, most war-relevant systems at the show, and you will not find a single American prime contractor headlining one of them.

Now, I’ll be fair, because cheap shots are beneath me, (just kidding, I love cheap shots).

Most of that is the venue. Eurosatory is a European land-warfare show in Paris, and the American giants play their home games at AUSA and Sea-Air-Space, where they roll out the x-ray vision, the stealth fighters, and the exquisite missiles they still genuinely dominate.

Nobody should pretend the US defense industry is washed up. For now, it owns the air, the sea, and space in ways Europe can only envy.

But the deeper story survives the caveat, and it’s uncomfortable for Arlington.

The American primes built their empire on a specific model: enormous, exquisite, expensive platforms delivered on decade-long timelines with price tags that require their own zip code.

That model was unbeatable in the world it was built for. It is a poor match for a war that iterates monthly, rewards cheap mass over gold-plated perfection and punishes anything that takes ten years and a billion dollars to field.

While the primes were polishing the next generational platform with a 2035 delivery horizon, the actual revolution in deep fires, counter-drone, and battlefield robotics got seized by European firms responding to a war on their doorstep, and by American startups like Anduril and Helsing that don’t carry the same institutional weight around their ankles.

That’s the quiet bombshell in this trade show.

The war started reshuffling the deck of who builds the weapons.

The companies that ruled the last era of warfare are not automatically going to rule the next one, and the floor at Eurosatory 2026 is the first real evidence that the agility advantage has shifted toward the people closest to the fighting and the people unburdened by the old way of doing business.

Слава Україні!

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

If you want to understand how I build my OSINT dashboard, I wrote about my workflow here. This needs to be updated; it’s on my to-do list.

Let’s jump in. As always, links in the text if you want sources:

BLUF:

The deal is signed in principle, unsigned in practice, and unverified in any meaningful sense. Russia burned a monastery to remind everyone the Ukraine war didn’t end. Ebola is moving faster than contact tracers can follow. And the market is throwing a party with one eye on the exit. Stay sharp.

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This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles (Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays) for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to support independent, approachable military analysis with a heavy dose of pro-Ukrainian sentiment and a side of anti-authoritarian humor.

Hey friends, for almost everyone reading this who was born after 1945, war has had a very specific geography.

War was where the soldiers went.

Home was where everyone else stayed, watched it on television, argued about it at Starbucks, slapped a yellow ribbon on the bumper, and tried not to think too hard about what “deployment” actually meant for the people doing it.

That was the deal. The military went away to fight. The homeland stayed open for business, gassed up, lit up, and stayed fundamentally safe.

The United States literally had a song titled “Over There.” It’s a banger.

Although that song was from 1917 and had more to do with American geography than anything else, that deal is ending, and a NATO commander just said so out loud.

Air Chief Marshal Sir John Stringer, NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the most senior British officer in the alliance, told Business Insider that in a serious near-peer war the West can no longer count on its homelands staying safe while its militaries fight overseas. He put it in almost wistful terms for the UK: the old model was that you deploy two or three thousand miles away, you fight, and then you come back to “a very secure rear area called the United Kingdom.”

Those days, he said, are over.

The reason is mechanical. The front lines learned to travel.

The World We Got Used To

For the better part of eighty years, Western war was an away game. The United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and most of NATO fought expeditionary conflicts.

The homeland supplied the bases, the factories, the money, the politics, and the replacement troops, and it did all of that from behind a wall of distance that the enemy mostly couldn’t reach over.

Korea didn’t put DPRK MiGs over Seattle. The Viet Cong didn’t ambush Londoners on the Tube. Afghanistan never threatened a German rail yard or a British port. Iraq never forced anyone in Ohio to wonder which power plant needed a Patriot battery.

The fighting was genuinely awful, but it was contained, and the containment was geographic.

To be sure, there were cracks in that wall. September 11 demolished the comforting belief that oceans kept non-state actors out. The Cold War carried a permanent nuclear shadow that could have ended everything in an afternoon.

Terrorism, espionage, and cyber intrusions all reached home soil.

But for conventional, state-on-state war, Western publics still carried a deep mental map with a clean line down the middle.

Battlefield over there. Home over here.

The rear area was a product of geology and economics that happened to favor the West for a long time.

To strike Britain, France, Germany, or the continental United States in a conventional war, a Cold War enemy historically needed strategic bombers, ballistic missiles, submarines, or a serious special-operations capability.

All of those were expensive, scarce, and usually tangled up with nuclear escalation, which made any adversary think very hard before using them. So Western militaries got to build their entire war machine on the assumption of safe sanctuary behind the lines.

Look at what that assumption produced: Large, fixed airbases. Centralized command posts. Big, consolidated ammunition depots. Predictable logistics routes running through civilian ports and rail networks. Factories humming along on the assumption nobody would touch them. Power grids assumed to stay up. The whole architecture of Western military power quietly took for granted that the things behind the front would remain unbothered.

That worked beautifully right up until the enemy figured out how to reach the things we assumed were safe.

Ukraine Killed the Rear Area, and Filmed It

Ukraine is the proof of concept, in both directions, and that’s what makes it so instructive.

Russia has spent this entire war firing missiles and drones into Ukrainian cities, power grids, ports, rail hubs, airfields, depots, and factories.

Ukraine has survived by dispersing everything, hardening what it can, repairing under fire, and accepting a brutal new reality: the home front and the battlefront are now the same place. There is no quiet interior to retreat to. The substation in a city hundreds of kilometers from the trenches is a target, because it powers the war.

I think it’s worth noting that Ukrainian daily life has continued to some degree of normalcy despite the constant threat that Russian junk could land anywhere. Some less-informed Westerners, who only see frontline footage or the aftermath of a Russian missile barrage in their Facebook feeds, may be fooled into thinking all of Ukraine looks like the front lines.

This is very much not the case. Life goes on. People, especially Ukrainians, are resilient.

I’ve been thinking lately about the unusually strong connection between UK support and Ukraine.

A quick aside in an already long article…

Why Britain seems to understand Ukraine in its bones

There’s something unusually intense about British support for Ukraine. It feels personal.

Part of that is old-fashioned strategic hatred. Britain and Russia have been side-eyeing each other for a very long time. The Crimean War, the Great Game, Cold War espionage, murdered defectors, poisoned ex-spies, Salisbury, cyberattacks, oligarch money, and Moscow’s general habit of behaving like a Bond villain with worse tailoring have all left a mark.

But I think there is something deeper at work too.

Britain has a national memory of being bombed and not breaking.

The Blitz is not ancient history in the British imagination. It’s part of the country’s self-story. Cities under attack. Civilians in shelters. A larger authoritarian power trying to use terror from the air to break political will. Leaders refusing to leave. Ordinary people discovering that endurance is not glamorous when you are tired, cold, frightened, and still expected to function in the morning.

Ukraine fits into that memory with almost uncomfortable clarity.

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Britain just bought more Martlet missiles RAF Regiment servicemen used them in real Middle East operations against real Iranian drones and ran through their stock.

More than 100 drone shootdowns later, two new contracts worth £36 million were signed in April and May 2026 for hundreds more. Ukraine has 6,000 of the same missile headed its way, for exactly the same reason Britain bought more.

In this video: how Martlet’s laser beam-riding guidance makes it specifically suited to the drone threat, why Britain’s combat record matters more than any range test, and what 6,000 missiles actually add to Ukraine’s layered air defense stack. Deliveries are already underway, RapidRanger is already visible in Ukrainian service, and the additional 1,000 announced in February 2026 appears intended for delivery to Ukraine on an urgent 2026 timeline.

In case video is not your thing, here’s the transcript. But trust me, the video version is better:

Britain just validated one of its most useful weapons of the drone age, not in a test range in Wales, not in a simulation run by someone in VR goggles, but in the Middle East, under real Iranian drones, in real operations.

More than 100 drone shootdowns. A thirteen-kilogram missile built in Belfast by a company most people have never heard of. Two fresh contracts worth £36 million signed in April and May of this year for hundreds more.

The missile is called the Lightweight Multirole Missile. The Royal Navy calls it Martlet. And Ukrainian forces have 6,000 of them coming their way, for the exact same reason Britain just ran out and bought more.

Because when the enemy stops sending fighter jets and starts sending flying mario carts with warheads, the weapon that matters isn’t the most expensive thing in your inventory. It’s the red turtle shell that actually hits the mario cart.

So, on June 1st, 2026, the UK Ministry of Defense announced two new contracts with Thales for hundreds of additional Lightweight Multirole Missiles. One signed in April, one in May, combined value £36 million. Deliveries start in the coming months and continue throughout the year. The contracts support around 700 skilled jobs at Thales in Belfast, where the missiles are built. Defense Secretary John Healey put it simply: the missiles are “battle-proven,” used in action by RAF Regiment gunners over recent months.

The context for those contracts: Britain had been using LMMs in Middle East operations and ran the stockpile down. More than 100 drones shot down. The UK bought more because the UK ran through what it had. In procurement terms, that’s about as clean a validation story as you ever get.

Now, if you’ve been following the Starstreak video on this channel, you know that Thales is also behind the RapidRanger launcher system, which is the vehicle-mounted launcher family being sent to Ukraine. And you might have seen reporting mixing up RapidRanger and Rapid Sentry and come away confused, which is an entirely reasonable response because defense naming conventions are complete lunacy.

Is it the A-10 Warthog or A-10 Thunderbolt II. Who knows?

Here’s the clean distinction.

Rapid Sentry is what the RAF Regiment used in the Middle East. It’s a ground-based counter-drone system that pairs LMMs with early-warning sensors and electronic warfare equipment, operated by RAF Regiment gunners who have apparently been doing well enough that some of them have shot down five or more drones each. The British military has apparently decided this makes them “drone aces,” which is both impressive and extremely 2026 as a career milestone.

RapidRanger is the vehicle-mounted launcher family tied to the Ukraine pipeline. Ukraine has been linked to RapidRanger systems and Martlet missiles through UK-backed funding, with around £1.7 billion in UK-backed commitments announced in June 2025 for that combination.

Same missile. Different system architecture. The common thread is the LMM itself, the little Belfast-built problem solver now ruining drone operators’ evenings on multiple fronts simultaneously.

The Lightweight Multirole Missile weighs 13 kilograms. For reference, that’s roughly the weight of a medium-sized dog, or a very well-equipped backpack, or an amount that will surprise you when you learn what it can do. It has a range of more than 6 kilometers and can be fired from land, sea, and air platforms.

Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters carry up to 20 of them on external pylons. The RAF Regiment fires them from ground-based systems. Stormer armored vehicles can carry them. The Wildcat-Martlet combination was declared fully operationally capable in October 2025, meaning it’s not developmental, it’s a current-readiness system being used right now by 815 Naval Air Squadron out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.

The guidance system is laser beam-riding. The launcher projects a laser beam onto the target’s flight path, and the missile follows that beam to impact. This is meaningfully different from an infrared homing missile, which chases heat. Most cheap one-way attack drones don’t have a nice hot jet engine to chase. They have small electric motors, quiet propellers, and the heat signature of a slightly warm snack. A laser beam-riding missile doesn’t need the target to look like a MiG. It needs the operator to keep the aim point on the target long enough for the missile to do its rude little British thing.

Martlet is also genuinely light and cheap enough to fire at threats that wouldn’t justify burning a premium interceptor. That matters more than the spec sheet makes it look.

What Britain has been building, and what Ukraine is waiting on, is a missile specifically sized and priced to plug part of that seam. Not all of it. Part of it. And in drone warfare, “part of it” is what buys you the night.

The 100-drone figure deserves attention because it isn’t a range result. It’s a combat result, under real conditions, against real threats, with real operators, in an environment where Iranian drones and one-way attack platforms have been testing allied air defenses repeatedly.

That’s the difference between a system that looks good in a demonstration and a system that British gunners trust under operational conditions. Thales has now quadrupled its LMM production capacity since 2022, which is another way of saying that demand has grown fast enough to require a production ramp that most missiles never see. When a manufacturer quadruples capacity, something real is happening in the customer base.

The Wildcat angle is worth highlighting too, because it connects directly to something we covered recently about helicopters finding a new role in the drone age. Royal Navy Wildcats deploying to Cyprus in two-aircraft formations to hunt drones approaching naval vessels and bases, using the same missile as the RAF Regiment gunners on the ground. A helicopter-born Martlet crew can reposition, search with sensors, and reach threats in places ground teams can’t cover. Drones may have given helicopters a problem near the front. They may also have given helicopters a job behind the front.

The UK announced a £1.6 billion deal in March 2025 to procure 5,000 LMMs for Ukraine, manufactured by Thales and covering the full range-of-platforms employment concept. In February 2026, London added another 1,000 rounds. That’s 6,000 missiles, headed toward a country facing a drone threat that makes Britain’s Middle East experience look like a warm-up act.

Ukraine deals with Shaheds, Gerberas, Orlans, Zalas, Lancets, and decoys on a nightly basis. The same problem, at nightmare volume, with Russian industry feeding the production line and no sign of abating. Britain’s 100-drone kill record in the Middle East is proof-of-concept. Ukraine is the full-scale stress test.

The tactical fit is real. Patriot is too valuable and too expensive to burn on every Shahed. Gepards and mobile guns are excellent but need geometry and range and proximity. Electronic warfare jams what it can jam but doesn’t stop everything. Martlet gives Ukraine another mobile, short-range layer, particularly for protecting infrastructure, power plants, logistics hubs, bridges, airfields, and rear-area command posts. The ugly middle zone where a threat is too dangerous to ignore, too far away for guns, and too cheap to justify a premium intercept.

Honest caveat section, because we do this.

The exact volume under the £36 million contracts hasn’t been disclosed. “Hundreds” is the public figure, which is a number large enough to tell you it’s serious and small enough to tell you the MoD PR team did its job. The per-unit cost implied by £36 million across “hundreds” puts each missile somewhere in the range of tens of thousands of pounds, which is quite cheap for a guided missile but still not free.

Ukrainian production localization is the bigger question. The March 2025 deal included language about localizing production, which would help both Ukraine’s supply situation and Britain’s, since both now need more missiles than peacetime planners ever anticipated. The public reporting doesn’t give a clean answer on how far that’s progressed. If Ukraine can eventually produce components or assemblies in-country, that shifts from military aid to war production, which is the sustainable version. The current status is unknown.

And LMM has real limits. It’s a short-range weapon. It requires line of sight. The beam-riding guidance means the engagement has to be maintained. Bad weather, terrain, saturation attacks, and simultaneous multiple threats can all stress the system. It won’t replace Patriot, IRIS-T, NASAMS, Gepard, or EW. It’s part of a stack, not a replacement for one.

And the stack is the point.

The drone war doesn’t care how impressive your missile is if you only have twelve of them and a production line that moves with the urgency of a county planning board. Britain spent three years building a production base, quadrupling capacity, proving the weapon in combat, and now buying hundreds more. That’s what serious stockpile building looks like when the lesson has been fully absorbed.

Drone defense isn’t won by finding one perfect interceptor. It’s won by building enough layers that the attacker runs out of drones before the defender runs out of answers. Guns for what gets close. EW for what can be jammed. Martlet for the middle zone. Patriots and IRIS-T for the high-end threats. And enough production feeding every layer to still be shooting at month four.

Martlet is not the answer to the drone problem. It’s one answer in the stack. And in 2026, the stack is the strategy.

Britain didn’t buy more Martlets because the missile looked good in a brochure. Although, as far as missiles go, it’s is an 8 out of 10.

It bought more because RAF Regiment gunners used them, under real attacks, against real drones, and the drones stopped flying. That’s the kind of battlefield review that procurement officers actually understand.

Ukraine has been saying this for four years: if drones are the new artillery, then short-range air defense is the new body armor. You don’t buy one exquisite system and declare the problem solved. You buy layers. You buy depth. You buy production. And then you buy more, because the enemy gets a vote and Russia and Iran voted for mass production a long time ago.

Six thousand Martlets are headed toward a country that knows what to do with them. Britain proved in the Middle East that they work. Now Ukraine gets to find out what 6,000 of them do to the math.

That’s it for today my friends, subscribing is the best free way to support what I do here.

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

Olé!

In early June, Ukraine’s 146th Separate Repair and Recovery Regiment posted photographs of a Soviet-era BMP infantry fighting vehicle wearing a turret it absolutely did not roll out of a Soviet factory with.

In place of the original conical Soviet turret sat what defense analysts quickly identified as a Guardian 30, a modern remote-controlled weapon station built by the Spanish firm Escribano Mechanical & Engineering, mercifully shortened to EM&E.

Ukrainian authorities haven’t officially confirmed the turret’s identity, and the vehicle appears to have been photographed during transport rather than mid-firefight, so let me put the appropriate caveats on the table up front.

But the sensor layout, the armored housing, and the overall design all match the Guardian 30, and we already knew these turrets were arriving. Ukrainian officials confirmed back in May 2025 that Guardian 30 stations were being delivered for integration onto Soviet armor.

This photo is the first proof one actually got bolted on.

This is a story of Ukraine doing the thing it has become genuinely world-class at: building a hybrid battlefield machine out of whatever survives, whatever arrives, and whatever European industry can weld onto an old Soviet box.

Let’s call it the Franken-BMP.

Eh, that doesn’t really roll off the tongue. How about El Guardián Rojo? The Red Guardian?

Don BMPote? After Don Quixote?

El Camarada Ibérico… The Iberian Comrade?

Wait, I got it. El Sovietico Picante; the Spicy Soviet!

Ukraine has a lot of BMPs, the Soviet-designed tracked infantry fighting vehicle that has been hauling troops into trouble since the 1960s, and Ukraine inherited a large fleet of them along with everything else the Soviet Union left lying around when it collapsed.

The problem is that most of these vehicles were built for a battlefield that no longer exists. The BMP-1 carries a 73mm low-pressure gun and an antique missile system that modern armies regard the way you’d regard a flip phone at a hackathon.

The BMP-2 is better, with a 30mm cannon that’s still somewhat useful, but it’s paired with dated optics and a manned turret layout that requires a crewman to sit up in the part of the vehicle most likely to be turned into an instant easy bake oven.

And yet Ukraine can’t afford to retire these vehicles, because a tracked armored box that can move infantry under fire is always useful, even an old one. Troops need to get to positions. Wounded need to get out. Assaults need support. Defensive lines need reinforcement. The war eats armored vehicles at a brutal rate, between mines, FPV drones, artillery, anti-tank missiles, and Lancets.

Ukraine needs volume, and volume means keeping the old stuff in the fight.

So the question becomes: how do you make a 1960s design relevant in 2026 without waiting years for Western factories to build you a fleet of brand-new IFVs?

You give it new eyes and sharper teeth.

What the Guardian 30 Actually Changes

The Guardian 30 is a remote weapon station, which is the part that matters most, so let me explain why before I get to the gun.

“Remote” means the gunner operates the turret from inside the protected hull rather than sticking his head and shoulders up into the open air. On a 1960s BMP, manning the gun historically meant exposing a crewman in a manned turret.

In the current era of ubiquitous drones, thermal sights, and shrapnel raining from above, exposing a human being above the armor line is an excellent way to generate a casualty report. Keeping the gunner buttoned up inside the hull while the turret does the shooting is a meaningful survival upgrade all by itself, before you fire a single round.

Now the gun.

The Guardian 30 can mount the 30mm Mk44 Bushmaster II autocannon, a NATO-standard weapon, plus a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun, twelve smoke grenade launchers, and even a two-tube anti-tank missile launcher depending on configuration.

That’s a serious firepower package on a relatively light chassis.

But the most important component is the brain attached to it. The Guardian 30 brings a dual electro-optical sensor system, day-night thermal capability, automatic target tracking, dual-axis stabilization, and a ballistic computer. So, the vehicle can now detect targets in the dark, track them automatically, calculate a firing solution on the move, and hit what it’s aiming at with first-shot accuracy the original BMP gunner could only dream about while squinting through Cold War optics.

Against the targets a BMP actually engages, infantry in trenches, tree lines, firing positions, light vehicles, logistics trucks, this is a genuine combat improvement.

It gives the vehicle more responsive direct-fire support than a heavy machine gun and a more sustainable option than burning anti-tank missiles on soft targets. In poor visibility, at night, or during a fast-moving assault, the sensors and the ballistic computer are the difference between suppressing a position and missing it.

The Detail That Makes This Very Ukrainian

Here’s the clever part.

The Guardian 30 can be configured with the NATO Mk44 Bushmaster, or it can mount the Soviet 30mm 2A42 cannon. And the 2A42 is a weapon Ukraine already knows intimately, because it’s the same gun fitted to the BMP-2 and other Soviet-origin vehicles in the fleet.

Ukrainian crews are trained on it. Ukrainian maintenance units know how to fix it. Ukrainian depots already stock its ammunition.

So Ukraine has a choice. Fit the Mk44 and move the vehicle toward NATO-standard armament, which is great long-term but requires standing up a separate ammunition and support chain.

Or fit the 2A42 and get a fully modern remote turret, modern sensors, and a modern fire-control system wrapped around a cannon and ammo supply the country already runs.

The second option is the logistician’s dream: Western eyes and Western fire control on a gun you never have to think twice about feeding.

For a country juggling a chaotic mixed fleet of Soviet BMPs, captured Russian vehicles, donated Western IFVs, and locally modified Franken-machines, that flexibility is worth a lot. War is rude that way. Sometimes the smartest move is to take the old Soviet box, rip out the bad parts, add Western brains, and keep the gun your supply chain already loves.

One photo of one prototype is a curiosity. The reason this might be a real story sits in a meeting that happened in May 2025.

Ukraine’s Ministry for Strategic Industries sat down with EM&E to discuss localizing the production and servicing of Guardian 30 weapon stations inside Ukraine. Ukrainian Minister for Strategic Industries Herman Smetanin talked openly about EM&E’s interest in doing business in Ukraine and taking real steps toward cooperation.

That’s the development worth watching, far more than the prototype photo. If Ukraine can locally produce, integrate, or even just service these turrets domestically, then the Guardian 30 stops being an oddity and becomes a scalable repair-and-modernization pathway.

Picture the loop: damaged BMP comes off the line, goes to a repair regiment like the 146th, gets stripped of its obsolete turret, receives a locally serviced Guardian 30, and returns to the front as a meaningfully better vehicle. Repeat across a large fleet. That’s an industrial process for regenerating mechanized combat power faster and cheaper than buying new.

For Ukraine, local production also means less dependence on external repair routes and a more resilient support structure when, not if, the vehicles take damage. For Spain and the broader European defense industry, it’s a working model of wartime cooperation built on more than just shipping equipment and waving goodbye.

It’s sustainment, integration, and possibly local manufacturing, which is the kind of partnership that actually lasts.

Just a note of caution:

A Guardian 30 BMP is not a Bradley. It’s not a CV90. It’s not a Lynx or a Marder. The turret upgrade does nothing for the hull, and the hull is the part that gets killed.

A BMP is lightly armored, and no amount of clever Spanish optics changes the fact that a mine, an FPV drone, a well-placed ATGM, artillery, or a loitering munition can still end this vehicle and everyone inside it on any given Tuesday.

Even with the new turret, this BMP is not a frontline assault breakthrough vehicle. It’s an old chassis with better eyes and a better gun.

But “better eyes and a better gun” on a fleet of vehicles you already own, regenerated quickly and cheaply, is exactly the kind of unglamorous math that wins long wars. Ukraine needs every protected vehicle, every stabilized cannon, and every locally repairable system it can put back into rotation, because the tempo of operations is decided as much by how fast you can regenerate combat power as by how good your best vehicle is.

The Guardian 30 BMP is a faster, cheaper way to keep yesterday’s armor lethal enough to matter on today’s battlefield.

Take the old Soviet box. Give it modern teeth. Send it back to work.

Congratulations, El Sovietico Picante. You’re NATO-ish now.

Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, Crimea is Ukraine.

Quick note before we start. This one’s different from what you probably signed up for.

You’re most likely here for my Ukraine analysis, or my takes on missiles, drones, armored vehicles, and whatever Russia bolted onto a Shahed this week. This essay has none of that. No order of battle. No kill chain. No artillery range table. No German procurement committee turning a simple decision into a hostage crisis.

Today I want to talk about a movie, a father, and the dangerous little myth a lot of us inherited: if you work hard enough, stay disciplined enough, and refuse to soften, life will eventually pay you back.

Normal programming resumes tomorrow.

If you want to skip this one, no hard feelings.

Also, my wife absolutely despises Terrence Malick films because they largely ignore the usual three-act story structure and drift around drunk Russian conscript. Fair criticism.

I watch them alone.

The Tree of Life found me at a bad time in my life.

The movie is already a strange experience when you’re sober.

I was at my lowest point. I’d lost friends in the military; a kind of loss that doesn’t resolve itself so much as relocate, taking up a permanent space somewhere behind your sternum. A business I’d put real work into had recently failed. I had a few habits that were doing what unhealthy habits do, offering relief on credit and quietly mailing the bill, with interest, to a later version of me. And I was close enough to broke that the idea of my three kids growing up the way I did, (dirt poor), caused a significant amount of anguish.

Then I sat down and watched Brad Pitt play a father whose disappointments had started leaking into the people he loved.

In 2011, it landed harder than I expected.

If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s the short version, and I’ll keep it free of the predatory for-profit university graduate-seminar fog these conversations usually attract.

The Tree of Life is Terrence Malick’s 2011 film about a family in 1950s Texas. It moves through memory, childhood, grief, God, creation of the entire damn universe, death, and family life in the way Malick tends to move through things, which is to say not in a straight line and not with much interest in whether the audience brought a plot map.

Here’s the trailer, which actually makes it seem like it will be a normal film:

Brad Pitt plays Mr. O’Brien, a hard, ambitious, disappointed father. Jessica Chastain plays his wife, a gentler presence in the home. Sean Penn plays their oldest son, Jack, both as a child and in flash-forwards as an adult still trying to understand what childhood did to him.

The thing that cut deepest for me, at the time I first watched the film, was the father’s failure.

Or, more specifically, it was what failure did to him.

Mr. O’Brien isn’t a movie villain. Malick is too honest for that, and life is too complicated for that. He’s a recognizable man. If you grew up around a certain model of masculinity, you know him.

Maybe you were raised by him.

Maybe, on your worst days, you worry you’re becoming him.

He’s a man organized around discipline, ambition, and control.

He believes in a bargain so deeply that he never examines it, because to him it isn’t a belief, it’s just how the world works.

Work hard. Impose order. Deny softness. Sacrifice now. And life, being fundamentally fair to serious men, will eventually reward you.

I grew up in Texas, which means I didn’t have to imagine this man. I had him in the family album. My paternal grandfather, the man who raised me as his son, was a Texas figure straight out of the same hard catechism: work harder than everyone, keep your word, carry your own weight, never flinch.

He did everything the bargain asked of him, in the order it asked, and he still ended up declaring bankruptcy.

I think about him now more than I realized. Here was a man who’d kept his half of the Greatest Generation’s deal down to the last decimal, and the deal simply didn’t keep its half back.

Watching Brad Pitt’s jaw tighten over a failed venture, I wasn’t watching a stranger in 1950s Texas. I was watching my own grandfather, and the quiet wreckage a good man carries when the world hands back a verdict he can’t appeal.

The cruel part is that he’s a believer; both Mr. O’Brien and Grandpa O’Donnell.

He’s not a cynic who games the system. He buys the promise at an emotional level. If you’re talented and disciplined and willing to give up comfort, success is supposed to come. So, when it doesn’t, he can’t shrug it off as bad luck or bad timing or an indifferent universe.

He has no language for that. He turns the blame inward and outward at the same time, and he ends up feeling humiliated, cheated, and exposed all at once.

He’s a man perpetually auditioning for his own worth.

That’s the engine of his sadness and his ambition gives his engine an infinite fuel supply. He keeps reaching, keeps pushing, keeps trying to prove his life amounts to something, and every missed break becomes another piece of evidence that maybe he’s ordinary. Maybe he misjudged himself. Maybe he handed his family all that pressure and severity in exchange for a payout that was never coming.

For a man built the way he’s built, that’s catastrophic. So, he doesn’t dare think it. He acts it out instead.

He has talent. He loves music. He has inventions. He has dreams. He wants greatness, or at least evidence that his life wasn’t normal. He wants the world to look at him and confirm what he already suspects about himself: that he was meant for more.

He can’t master the market. He can’t master his career. He can’t master luck, timing, class, money, or the quiet sense that life has downgraded him without giving him a hearing.

So, he masters what he can.

Control becomes the one thing he can still produce, so he produces it in bulk at home, on the people least equipped to refuse delivery.

That is how public disappointment becomes private tyranny.

But no man walks through his own front door and thinks, I failed today, so now I’ll be hard on my family. He walks in frightened that his life is sliding somewhere he can’t follow, and he grabs onto whatever he can still grip. The tragedy is that the thing he grips is usually a person.

In the movie, his sons absorb his moods. His wife has to build her whole day around his volatility. And the most devastating detail Malick includes is that the father isn’t consistently cruel… He’s sometimes warm, sometimes proud, sometimes playful, and then suddenly humiliating and impossible, with no reliable warning between the two.

That’s terrifying…

That inconsistency is worse than plain meanness, because it fuses love and fear together until a child can’t pull them apart. It’s much easier to process straightforward cruelty than to process love that keeps arriving wrapped in razor wire.

I watched that, broke and grieving and tired of my own shit, and I understood the temptation from the inside. Not because I had a family I was crushing, but because I could feel the gravitational pull of his logic.

I understood, in my own body, how a man starts measuring his worth by what the world has refused to give him, and how that measurement can poison every room he walks into.

I want to be careful here, because the absolute worst thing I could do is use the people I’ve lost as set dressing for an essay.

But the grief mattered to how the film landed.

By the time I watched it, loss had already stripped away whatever illusions I’d been carrying about fairness and control. I’d learned, in the most permanent way there is, that you can do everything right and still lose people who deserve decades more than they got.

The father in The Tree of Life spends the whole movie trying to dominate uncertainty, trying to discipline and out-work and out-tough a world that ultimately answers to none of it.

I was watching that fantasy from the other side of it. Uncertainty had already walked into my life and taken whoever it wanted, and no amount of hardness had slowed it down by a single second.

I was starting to realize that I had quietly believed some inherited version of his bargain. Work harder. Be tougher. Don’t bend, don’t soften, don’t fail where people can see it, and you’ll be safe.

Then adulthood arrived and informed me, with its usual faux warmth and Temu professionalism, that the meritocracy I’d been promised was largely a story that we tell tired people to keep them tired.

What I recognized in Brad Pitt’s face was not a man exactly like me. It was the man I could become if I kept handling disappointment the way he did. A man who carries his frustration into every room like a seeping gas leak and then wonders why the people closest to him learn to hold their breath.

The unhealthy habits were just the leak finding its easiest exit.

Early in the film, Chastain’s voice tells us there are two ways through life. The way of nature and the way of grace. Malick is using those words to draw the moral map of the entire film.

Nature is will, appetite, competition, self-assertion, and survival of the fittest. It wants to win. It wants security. It wants to force a shape onto the chaos before the chaos can swallow it. That’s the father’s whole country. He teaches his boys that the world will eat them alive if they aren’t tough, that they should hit back, stand first, never let anyone get the better of them.

Grace is the other thing entirely. Openness, mercy, receptivity, and love. The mother lives there. She moves through the film like someone who understands that life is fragile and somehow holy even when it’s hurting her, and she isn’t naive about it. She just isn’t organized around conquest.

Malick’s brilliance is that he refuses to call nature a lie. The world really is hard. The father isn’t hallucinating the danger. People really do get crushed. The problem is that Mr. O’Brien believes struggle is the whole truth, the only truth, and he builds an entire theology of manhood on it.

He thinks grace is for people who can afford illusions. He thinks tenderness is a luxury that gets your sons killed.

So, when his career fails to pay out, his operating system has no fallback.

Success was supposed to prove the sacrifice meant something.

Without it, he’s stranded. He can’t surrender to grace, because he spent his whole life calling it weakness, and now nature has failed to deliver the one thing it promised.

He’s a man trapped between two laws, unable to conquer and unable to kneel.

I knew that trap. I’d been living in a smaller, quieter version of it for a while.

So he keeps pressing down on the only battlefield he still controls.

His home.

Professional failure is already painful. It gets worse when a man turns it into a verdict on his worth.

I think a lot of men understand this more than we admit.

We were raised on some version of the bargain. Maybe it came from fathers. Maybe from coaches. Maybe from the military. Maybe from church. Maybe from school. Maybe from the general American background radiation that says hard work will save you if you just keep going and don’t complain too loudly.

Some of that advice is useful.

Discipline matters. Nobody gets very far by waiting for rescue.

But the bargain becomes dangerous when it turns work into identity and failure into shame.

That is where men get into trouble.

If your worth depends on winning, then every loss becomes a personal indictment.

If your identity depends on providing, then financial instability feels like moral collapse.

If you were taught that softness is weakness, then fear has to come out disguised as anger.

If you believe love means preparing people for pain, you may start causing pain and calling it preparation.

Mr. O’Brien loves his sons. That’s what makes him tragic. If he didn’t love them, the movie would be easier. He wants them strong. He wants them ready. He wants them protected from humiliation.

He gives them humiliation as training.

That’s how broken doctrines reproduce themselves. They arrive as advice. As discipline. As toughness. As “this is for your own good.”

A lot of damage has worn that uniform.

The Tree of Life doesn’t let him off the hook, which is why I trust it.

Plenty of people suffer disappointment without making their families live inside it. Plenty of men fail professionally without turning the house into a pressure chamber. Understanding a man doesn’t acquit him.

Malick knows that.

But the film also refuses the cheap satisfaction of flattening him into “bad father” and walking away feeling superior. That would be easy. But it would also be dishonest.

He is loving and destructive. He is sincere and damaging. He wants to protect his children and wounds them in the process. He is a man with real gifts and real failures, and the failures travel farther than he understands.

That is closer to life than most movies want to get.

By the end, the film doesn’t demand forgiveness. It reaches for mercy, which is harder.

Mercy doesn’t pretend the damage didn’t happen.

Mercy sees all of it.

Then mercy sees the frightened man underneath. The man who believed a lie because better men than him had believed it first. The man who thought hardness would protect him from shame, loss, death, and meaninglessness. The man who spent his life trying to win a war that couldn’t be won by force.

I didn’t walk away from The Tree of Life comforted. I walked away exposed.

The film showed me something I needed to see: failure can become contagious if you don’t handle it honestly. It can spread through your habits, your relationships, your temper, your self-respect. It can make you hard in ways that feel like strength until someone else has to live under them.

I’m in better shape than I was when the film found me. The grief sits in a different place. The habits sit in a different place. The money fear no longer has the same command authority it once had.

But I don’t write this like a man who solved the problem.

I write it like a man who survived enough of it to name it clearly.

That is a different thing. A more honest thing.

The Tree of Life understood something before I was ready to admit it: a man can love his family and still make them live inside his disappointment.

It understood that ambition can curdle into control. It understood that professional failure can become moral failure if you carry it home often enough. It understood that the doctrine a lot of us inherited had a fatal flaw.

The doctrine said hard work would make us safe.

Safe from what?

Death?

Shame?

Loss?

Failure?

The quiet terror that maybe life won’t reward us in proportion to what we endured?

Good luck. None of those wars are winnable by force, and a lot of us spend years learning that the hard way. Sometimes we make the people nearest to us pay our tuition.

My grandfather kept his half of a bargain the world didn’t honor. So did a lot of men. So did I, for a while. Maybe you have too.

That’s why Brad Pitt’s character hurts so much. He is not some distant father from a strange art film about 1950s Texas. He is the man a lot of us were warned by, raised by, loved by, feared, pitied, or nearly became.

The movie looks at him clearly. Then it asks the question he never could:

If hardness didn’t save you, what will?

This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles (Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays) for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to fund independent, approachable military analysis with a heavy dose of pro-Ukrainian sentiment and a side of anti-authoritarian humor.

Hey friends, on June 2, Saab rolled out the first Gripen Fox: the two-seat version of the Gripen E, built for and co-developed with Brazil.

And the marketing department had clearly been at the espresso bar. The launch video talks about “commanding complexity with confidence, clarity, and precision” over dramatic lighting and a Hans Zimmer score that sounds like the aircraft personally liberated a small monarchy on the way to the ceremony.

As someone who knows the value of polished packaging, it’s extremely well done. Just watch the first four minutes. You won’t be disappointed:

I actually thought about doing a “react” style video for YouTube, where I play the Saab video for a while then pause to talk about it, etc., but decided to write this instead.

Here’s the thing, underneath the dope unveiling, Saab is making a genuinely serious argument, and it’s one worth taking apart carefully. Because the obvious question almost answers itself in the wrong direction.

We have spent four years watching Ukraine turn the sky into a drone-saturated machine-vision nightmare.

Everyone agrees the future is autonomous, AI-driven, and unmanned. So why, in 2026, would anyone build a fighter with two seats instead of zero?

The answer is workload. And it’s a better answer than you’d expect.

Read more

I know, I know… There are over 130 armed conflicts raging worldwide at this exact moment and I’ve been devoting a lot of ink to my Canadian neighbors to the north. But I find their reaction to Trump’s middle-school-bully-style of diplomacy fascinating.

I wrote recently about Canada reportedly weighing a split buy, keeping around 30 F-35s and adding roughly 60 Saab Gripens instead of the original all-F-35 order of 88.

Most of the commentary since then has focused on the fact that trying to maintain a mixed fleet of different aircraft is hard. And it is hard. But the hardness, ahem, is the easy part of the argument to make, which is probably why everyone keeps making it.

The more interesting case is the one almost nobody is putting on the table: a mixed fleet, under the right conditions, it’s a strategic advantage Canada should want.

If this were a video, I would do a spit take.

Wait, what! Why would Canada want to add complexity to the already herculean task of defending vast stretches of arctic land and the sea approaches around it!?

Well, let’s get into it…

The Critics Are Right About the Pain

I have to start by giving the critics their due, because they’re not wrong about the costs. A mixed fleet creates real, measurable problems.

Canada would need two pilot training pipelines, two maintainer pipelines, two simulator systems, two spare-parts inventories, two depot support models, two software support relationships, two technical cultures, and two long-term upgrade roadmaps. Every one of those is a cost, a complication, and a potential point of friction.

A small air force feels that pain far more acutely than a large one. News flash: The Royal Canadian Air Force is not the US Air Force. It cannot casually absorb complexity with 300 spare pilots, five extra wings, and a logistics apparatus large enough to qualify for its own seat at the UN.

For a force Canada’s size, splitting the fleet means splitting attention, splitting expertise, and splitting a budget that was already doing yoga to stretch far enough.

That’s the strongest argument for buying 88 F-35s and calling it a day. It’s clean. But here’s my problem with it. Clean is not the same thing as resilient.

Here’s the conceptual hinge of my whole argument:

Commonality is genuinely good when it reduces waste. Standardizing your bolts, your fuel, your radios, your training, all of that strips out cost and friction.

Nobody sane argues against “efficiency” as a principle.

But commonality crosses a line when it stops removing waste and starts removing alternatives. At that point it isn’t efficiency anymore. It’s monoculture.

Farmers understand this in their bones. A field planted with a single crop is the most efficient field you can plant. It’s also the field that one disease, one pest, one bad weather event, or one supply disruption can wipe out completely. Diversity in a field looks inefficient right up until the moment it’s the only reason you still have a harvest.

An air force has the same structure of risk. A single-type fleet is easier to run and concentrates every danger into one basket. The question Canada actually faces isn’t “is a mixed fleet more complicated?”

Obviously, it is. The real question is whether Canada wants every fighter it owns tied to the same airframe design, the same sustainment system, the same software ecosystem, the same foreign government, and the same political relationship.

That’s a lot of eggs in one big stealth basket. Commonality is wonderful, right up until the common part breaks.

So let me walk through the five specific ways it can break and then we’ll chat about how the Gripen and F-35 can actually work together like Ebony and Ivory, living together in perfect harmony.

Vulnerability One: The Grounding Event

Take it from an AWACS radar technician… Every aircraft type has technical problems.

That’s not an F-35 insult, it’s just what machines do. Aircraft occasionally discover novel and humiliating ways to break, and the more complex the aircraft, the more creative the failure.

At the risk of losing my immortal soul, we maintainers very much believed in a “machine god” who required blood sacrifices. Anytime one of us would bust our knuckles open or cut ourselves while working on the Sentry, it would magically start working flawlessly. I can’t explain it. A drop of blood and suddenly both radar chains, main and redundant, are fully-mission-capable. Weirdest shit I ever saw.

The thing that matters here is scale. If Canada flies one fighter type and a critical component triggers a fleet-wide grounding for inspections, the entire Canadian fighter force takes a knee at the same moment.

Sure, maybe it’s just for a few weeks. Maybe only certain production blocks. But in a crisis, a short pause can be exactly long enough to hurt, and crises do not schedule themselves around your maintenance calendar.

A mixed fleet doesn’t necessarily eliminate that risk, but it does compartmentalize it.

If the F-35 fleet gets grounded for ejection seat malfunctions, the Gripens keep flying quick-reaction alert, Arctic patrol, training, and homeland defense. If the Gripens hit a snag, the F-35s remain available for the high-end work.

Canada never has to watch its whole fighter force become a hangar display because someone found a fleet-wide defect in the oxygen supply hose on a Friday.

A single fleet fails together. A mixed fleet fails in compartments. That’s the entire argument in one line, and everything else is just elaboration.

Vulnerability Two: Sustainment and Spare Parts

Not going to sugar-coat it… The F-35 is a brilliant stealth aircraft and sexy enough in the looks department to be my desktop wallpaper for the better part of four years.

Unfortunately, its sustainment record has been considerably less sexy. The program has wrestled for years with spare-parts shortages, repair backlogs, limited depot capacity, heavy contractor dependence, and mission-capable rates that have refused to match the Lockheed brochure.

That’s not a hit piece, despite what my hate mail says. It’s just the documented public record, and the US Government Accountability Office has written about it more than once.

For Canada, this collides with geography that already punishes aircraft availability.

Enormous distances. Brutal weather. Arctic operating demands. Thin northern infrastructure. A small fleet to begin with.

A second sustainment ecosystem is an insurance policy against that. The Gripen’s pitch was never that it out-F-35s the F-35. It doesn’t and it won’t.

The pitch is that it gives Canada a second, independent way to keep combat aircraft in the air, one that doesn’t run through the same global supply chain, the same prime contractor, the same engine pipeline, or the same foreign-controlled sustainment architecture.

What I find mildly amusing (and tragic) is the fact that Trump refused to, or rather was incapable of, giving any forethought to what insulting and threatening Canada would do to American companies who do business with Canada…

Did he believe that Canadians would take a knee and embrace becoming America’s 51st state? I doubt he thought that far ahead. But I guarantee he’s thinking about the consequences now because he’s likely getting phone calls from the many American CEOs whose interests he just shit on.

Vulnerability Three: Software Sovereignty

The F-35’s greatest strength is its integration of sensors, mission-data files, electronic warfare, datalinks, logistics, and deep ties into allied combat networks. That integration is exactly what makes it so formidable in a high-end fight.

It’s also exactly why dependence on it carries a hidden cost.

I’ve written about this in the past, but let me state it here: technically, the US does not have a so-called “kill switch” inside its export hardware. It doesn’t need one… Here’s why:

When an aircraft’s combat performance depends on mission-data files, regular software updates, encrypted systems, and a US-managed support structure, the operator gains access to a genuinely remarkable machine. The operator also accepts real limits on control. You’re flying it, but you don’t fully own the keys to it. The good ole, U, S of A doesn’t need a kill switch when it can just refuse to update your jet’s firmware.

For the hardest NATO missions, that trade is probably acceptable.

But should every single Canadian fighter depend on the same software pipeline and the same political ecosystem?

Saab is openly selling a different kind of relationship on the Gripen: more local maintenance, more domestic industrial participation, more control over upgrades, more room for national customization. My argument is not that Canada should abandon the American ecosystem. That would be strategically foolish given NORAD and geography.

My argument is narrower: Canada shouldn’t make the American ecosystem the only door into Canadian airpower. The F-35 gives Canada access to the best air-combat network on Earth. The Gripen gives Canada more room to hold its own wrench.

Vulnerability Four: Political Dependency

This one hits differently in 2026 than it would have a few years ago.

Canada’s fighter decision is happening during a period when US trade policy, NATO policy, and defense politics have all become, let’s say, noticeably less predictable.

Canada cannot relocate its geography. The United States will remain its most important defense partner whether Ottawa likes the current weather in that relationship or not.

But partnership and dependency are not the same word.

An all-F-35 fleet deepens Canadian reliance on the United States for sustainment, upgrades, training, weapons integration, software, parts, and the political permission structures around all of it. Most of the time, that works fine. The trouble is that “most of the time” is not the standard you use when you design a national defense. You design for the bad day, not the average one.

A Gripen fleet wouldn’t make Canada fully independent; the Gripen still has Western components, weapons dependencies, and even an engine with US lineage. We’re not talking about a magic Swedish sovereignty wand, here.

But what it would do is diversify the political risk: a Swedish industrial partner, a European supply relationship, a domestic Canadian production and maintenance path if Saab’s offer is accepted.

Coercion rarely looks like a dramatic kill switch. It looks like delayed approvals, slow-walked export licenses, spare-parts friction, and software bottlenecks that arrive precisely when you need the aircraft most. Canada doesn’t need to assume the United States will become an adversary. It only needs to notice that allies can become difficult suppliers when politics gets insanely stupid, as they did in 2025 and now 2026.

Vulnerability Five: Tactical Predictability

Okay, so this is the big one and I actually made the same case last year against the EU fielding the exact same APC across every country. In that case, it was the CV-90.

A single-type fleet hands an adversary one aircraft to study.

One radar signature family.

One electronic-warfare behavior set.

One tactics ecosystem.

One basing model.

One set of assumptions to build an entire counter-air plan around.

Nobody should pretend Russia can simply “solve” the F-35. But adversaries adapt over time. They build radar networks, passive detection systems, electronic-warfare libraries, infrared-search tactics, and missile-engagement doctrines around the specific aircraft they expect to face.

Give them one target to optimize against, and over years, surprise, surprise, they optimize.

A mixed fleet forces them to solve two problems at once. F-35s and Gripens present different signatures, different tactics, different basing models, different weapons loads, and different sortie rhythms.

The stealthy sensor-fusion aircraft for the hardest nights, and the dispersed, road-operable, fast-turnaround fighter for everything else. That makes Canada’s air force considerably less predictable.

An enemy can plan against one pattern. Two patterns make him work for it, and I’m generally in favor of making Russian planners work. It cuts into their vodka time.

Where They Stop Competing and Start Teaming

Here’s the part that almost never makes it into the mixed-fleet debate, because everyone gets stuck arguing about which aircraft is better and forgets to ask what they do together.

The F-35 and the Gripen, when paired correctly, form a hunter-killer team where each one covers the other’s biggest weakness. That’s the logic behind a concept militaries have been circling for years: pairing a stealthy fifth-generation sensor aircraft with a cheaper, heavily armed fourth-generation shooter.

The Air Force jargon for this is “high-low teaming.”

The idea is older than the jargon.

Start with each aircraft’s actual limitation. The F-35’s superpower is that it can go where nothing else can: penetrate defended airspace, stay nearly invisible, and build a detailed picture of the battlespace using sensors that would make a spy satellite slightly jealous.

Its weakness is the magazine. To stay stealthy, the F-35 carries its weapons internally, and internal space is finite. In a stealth configuration it’s carrying a modest number of air-to-air missiles. You can bolt more onto external pylons, but the moment you do, you’ve hung a bunch of radar-reflecting hardware off a stealth jet, which is a bit like sneaking into a building in a ghillie suit while dragging a wind chime.

The Gripen has the opposite profile. It isn’t stealthy but it’s a missile truck with a serious radar, a genuinely excellent electronic-warfare suite, and the ability to carry a heavy load of weapons externally, including the Meteor, whose effective reach is in a different class from the AMRAAM that most of the West has been flying for decades.

Now put them on the same team and watch Putin soil his big boy pants.

The F-35 pushes forward, quiet and unseen, and finds the enemy aircraft. It doesn’t necessarily have to fire. It passes the target track back to Gripens holding well behind it, outside the threat envelope. The Gripens launch Meteors using that targeting picture, from a distance, and the enemy suddenly has long-range missiles inbound from an aircraft it can see but that’s too far away to be the obvious threat, cued by an aircraft that’s much closer and nearly invisible.

The shooter and the sensor are two different planes, in two different places, and the enemy has to solve both problems at once while missiles are already in the air.

That arrangement fixes both weaknesses simultaneously. The F-35 gets the deep magazine it lacks, because the Gripens behind it are carrying a wall of Meteors. The Gripen gets the sensor reach and survivability it lacks, because the F-35 out front is doing the dangerous looking.

One aircraft brings the eyes. The other brings the fists. Neither is as lethal alone as the two are together.

But I’ll be honest about the catch, because there is one here. The deepest, stealthiest data-sharing the F-35 uses is a closed, US-controlled system designed for F-35-to-F-35 talk, and a Gripen isn’t getting full access to that.

Realistic Canadian teaming would run over Link 16, the common NATO datalink, which works fine but is more detectable than the F-35’s private channel. So the silent, perfect, invisible kill chain is more aspiration than current reality. But even the achievable version, F-35 as forward sensor feeding Gripens as the standoff arsenal over standard datalinks, is a genuinely potent combination, and it’s the kind of thing the RCAF could actually train into doctrine.

The US Air Force is already building this pairing out using their own F-15Es as the missile truck and the F-35 being the forward-deployed sensor.

There’s a quieter strategic benefit too, and it’s about preserving the expensive aircraft. F-35 airframe hours are precious and the sustainment is demanding. If Canada burns those limited hours on routine intercepts and Arctic patrols, it’s spending its most valuable and hardest-to-maintain asset on missions a Gripen could handle for a fraction of the cost. A mixed fleet lets Canada save the F-35 for the nights that require an F-35, and use the Gripen for everything else, which means that when the hard night finally comes, the stealth fleet is rested, available, and not halfway through a fatigue inspection.

You don’t ride your racehorse to the grocery store. You save her for race day.

And the electronic-warfare angle compounds it. The Gripen E was built around survival through electronic warfare rather than stealth, with a jamming and spoofing suite specifically designed to confuse the systems hunting it.

The F-35 brings its own EW strengths.

Operating together, the two present an enemy air-defense network with two completely different problems at the same time: a target it struggles to see at all, and a target it can see but that’s actively scrambling its sensors. Defeating either one is hard. Defeating both, simultaneously, from different directions, is the kind of problem that makes an air-defense commander reconsider his post-college choices.

So, the resilience argument I’ve been making isn’t only about what happens when one fleet gets grounded or one supplier gets difficult. It’s also that on the good days, when both fleets are flying, they’re worth more as a team than as two separate forces. The mixed fleet isn’t just insurance against the bad day. It’s a combat enhancer on the good one.

That’s the part the commonality crowd leaves off the slide.

The Catch: You Have to Do It Right, Canada

Far be it for me, an American sitting in Michigan, to lecture Canadians about the future of their own defense… But, I’m going to do it anyways because I have a platform: this only works with discipline, and you Canucks have to be honest about that going in.

The RCAF must create clear roles, F-35s for the high-end fight, Gripens for homeland defense, Arctic sovereignty, alert duty, and dispersed daily readiness, with no mission drift in either direction.

It needs common communications standards, shared data links where possible, compatible weapons where achievable, and a single command-and-control architecture so the two types fight as one air force rather than two tribes glaring at each other across the flight line.

And critically, it needs enough aircraft in each fleet to actually matter. A tiny boutique F-35 fleet paired with a tiny boutique Gripen fleet would hand Canada all of the complexity and none of the mass.

That’s the opposite of resilience. That’s procurement performance art, and it would give every defense analyst in Ottawa simultaneous acid reflux.

Done badly, a mixed fleet is the worst of both worlds. Done with discipline, it’s an air force that’s harder to ground, harder to coerce, harder to predict, and harder to knock out with a single problem.

So, the case for the mixed fleet was never that two aircraft are easier. They aren’t. The case is that Canada’s actual security problem isn’t easy either and matching a tidy solution to a messy problem is how you end up with something that looks great in the hangar and fails on the one day it counts.

Commonality is efficient in peacetime. Diversity is irritating in peacetime.

But in wartime, irritating has a funny way of looking a lot like foresight.

Stay frosty, Canada.

And as always, Слава Україні!

I know, I know. Canada has been getting a lot of my ink lately. But this is one of the more interesting global security stories happening at the moment. And for all the hate mail I’ve been getting asking why I support Saab… Well, perhaps they’re one of the few large defense firms actually innovating and not resting on their laurels? Maybe I have Saab stock? Maybe I just want a free morale ride in the Gripen? But by all means, keep sending me angry emails. Your hate makes me stronger lol

Canada just named Saab as its preferred supplier for a new airborne early warning and control fleet: six GlobalEye aircraft worth more than five billion Canadian dollars.

Boeing’s E-7 Wedgetail, the plane the US Air Force, Australia, and Britain all chose, didn’t make the cut. Before anyone hands Sweden a trophy, nothing’s signed yet. But the signal Canada just sent is louder than the contract.

In this video: how the GlobalEye and Wedgetail actually compare on the spec sheet, why Canada’s Arctic surveillance problem makes the trade-offs look very different than they do in a NATO air war scenario, and why this decision was never really about which radar sees further.

Слава Україні!

MINOR CORRECTION: I say Canada “bought” or “is buying” multiple times in the video. Just to clarify, this is not a done deal yet. Saab has been named a preferred supplier with Carney expressing his intentions.

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

If you want to understand how I build my OSINT dashboard, I wrote about my workflow here. I’ve since updated my process slightly and I’m debating on whether to update this old piece, or write a new one:

Let’s jump in:

BLUF:

The ceasefire is gone, a 7.8 hit the Philippines on the same morning, the CNN Fear index is reading like March 2020, Ukraine is hitting trains in Crimea, and the proposed solution to the Iran nuclear problem involves giving the material to Russia. Adjust accordingly. Stay sharp.

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This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles (Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays) for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to fund independent, approachable military analysis with a heavy dose of pro-Ukrainian sentiment and a side of anti-authoritarian humor.

Most people think GPS is navigation.

It’s not. Or rather, navigation is just one aspect.

GPS is timing. It’s the synchronization signal underneath cell networks, stock exchanges, power grids, shipping, aviation, logistics, precision agriculture, and the financial transactions that clear trillions of dollars a day.

It’s drones, missiles, tractors, container ships, and the small blue dot that tells you whether you’re on the right side of the street or about to walk with total confidence into a canal.

We built modern civilization on a faint radio whisper from 20,000 kilometers up, decided it was free and permanent, and stopped thinking about it.

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Somewhere inside NATO’s military headquarters at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), there are planning documents that describe exactly how the alliance would respond to a Russian attack on a member state tomorrow.

Those documents list specific forces: fighters, tankers, submarines, maritime patrol aircraft, carriers, drones, destroyers.

They assign readiness timelines.

They assume which nations provide which capabilities within the first ten days, the first thirty days, the first six months.

Those plans may soon be wrong.

Not catastrophically wrong. Not “learn Russian” wrong, yet.

But wrong in a technical and uncomfortable way, because several of the forces those documents assumed would show up are no longer going to show up in the numbers the planners used.

On May 22, Pentagon official Alexander Velez-Green notified NATO allies in Brussels that the United States would be reducing its contribution to the NATO Force Model, the system that assigns allied capabilities to NATO’s defense plans across crisis timelines.

The notification was a closed-door meeting at NATO headquarters, and allies spent the next several days asking each other what the actual fuck just happened and how bad it really was.

Last week, SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) General Alexus Grynkewich answered that question publicly at the June 2-3 force-sourcing conference at SHAPE.

US fighters down by a third. Strategic bombers cut by half. Tankers reduced. Destroyers fewer. Submarines capable of launching cruise missiles: gone entirely. P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft: reduced. Reconnaissance drones cut by half. One of the two US carrier strike groups assigned to NATO: removed.

Then Grynkewich said, “There has been an unhealthy co-dependence in the NATO Force Model on US forces.” He then told European allies and Canada to fill the gap. Quickly.

Let’s unpack this.

First, What NATO’s “Rapid Response” Does

Before anyone panics, or before anyone dismisses this as routine alliance housekeeping, “NATO’s rapid response force” is one of those phrases that means something specific and complicated while sounding like a simple and reassuring thing.

It also sounds vaguely like a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon: Eagle Force! Defending freedom from French tyranny in Europe.

NATO replaced its old Response Force structure with the NATO Force Model, a larger and more flexible system that organizes allied contributions into readiness tiers.

Tier one: forces available within ten days of alert.

Tier two: within thirty days.

Tier three: within 180 days.

Inside that model, the Allied Reaction Force is the spearhead, a high-readiness multinational capability spanning land, maritime, air, special operations, cyber, space, and logistics.

Germany’s Bundeswehr describes the ARF as mission-ready within ten days of alert. Also, am I the only one who loves the word Bundeswehr? I could walk around Costco all day and just say BOON-dus-vare to complete strangers and have a blast.

Anyways, this system is a giant readiness promise spread across 32 countries, multiple domains, and enough acronyms to satisfy the tacti-cool airsoft community. It’s a planning architecture that assumes certain nations will contribute certain capabilities on certain timelines when the call comes.

And it’s that planning architecture, specifically the assumption layer of it, where the US reductions land hardest.

Just to clarify here… The cuts are already happening in the sense that Washington has notified allies. They have not necessarily all happened yet in the visible, physical sense of ships sailing away, aircraft being reassigned, or units packing up tomorrow morning. The dangerous part is the middle zone: NATO planners now have to build defense plans around US capabilities that may no longer be available on the old timeline.

What America Is Pulling Back, and Why Each Piece Matters

Fighters, down by a third. That’s air defense, strike, escort, and air policing missions that either don’t happen or fall to European air forces that are already stretched.

The specific numbers: F-15/F-15E available to NATO falling from 153 to 99.

Strategic bombers, cut by half. Long-range strike. The ability to threaten Russian targets at depth from outside the range of Russian air defenses. The weapon that makes Moscow nervous about what’s coming even before a war starts.

Aerial tankers, cut from 79 to 63. This one doesn’t get enough attention. Tankers are the gas station that makes airpower possible. Without tankers, fighters have shorter legs, strike packages cover less ground, combat air patrols are fewer and shorter, and the entire operational radius of allied airpower contracts.

Every tanker you remove makes every other aircraft slightly less capable.

Cruise-missile submarines: gone entirely from the NATO contribution. Zero.

Public reporting doesn’t reveal how many US submarines were previously assigned to NATO’s crisis-response force pool. That number sits inside classified force-generation planning. What matters is the direction of travel: whatever NATO planners previously assumed they could draw from US submarine forces, that contribution is now reduced to zero.

These are boats that can sit quietly in deep water somewhere in the Atlantic or Mediterranean and launch Tomahawk missiles at Russian command nodes, air-defense systems, ports, ammunition dumps, and missile launch infrastructure, from ranges and positions that Russian air defenses can’t easily reach.

They’re a “first-night” weapon, the kind that degrades Russia’s ability to fight before the ground war even starts. Removing them from the NATO plan is not a small thing.

P-8 Poseidons, reduced. The P-8 is the aircraft that hunts submarines. It’s also a maritime surveillance and anti-surface platform. Fewer P-8s means weaker coverage of the North Atlantic, the Baltic Sea approaches, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean.

Russia’s submarine fleet is not dormant. Russia’s Northern Fleet, which operates some of the most capable boats in the world, uses those waters as its operational playground.

Reconnaissance drones, cut by half. Eyes. The things that watch the battlefield and tell commanders what’s moving, where, at what speed, with what equipment. Fewer drones means less battlefield awareness at exactly the moment when awareness is most valuable.

Carrier strike group, one of two removed. A carrier is a floating airbase with its own air wing, escort ships, and strike capacity. It gives a commander flexibility, sea control, airpower projection without needing a land base inside the theater, and a deterrent visible enough that every satellite watching the Mediterranean or the North Sea can report its position to Moscow.

One carrier is not two carriers…

Put it together and the US is removing the wiring, the plumbing, and several of the load-bearing beams.

The Trump administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy is explicit. US forces will focus on homeland defense and the Indo-Pacific and by God, the middle school bullies currently running my country are actually executing it.

Europe should take primary responsibility for its own conventional defense, with “critical but more limited” American support. Grynkewich framed it as “correcting a dependency,” not abandoning an ally.

Sure, I guess… But that quote is not entirely wrong. The United States has carried European defense disproportionately since 1949. The argument that Europe needs to grow up militarily is correct on the merits. It was correct when Obama made it, when Biden made it, when every NATO secretary general has made it with increasing frustration for thirty years.

The problem isn’t necessarily the destination. It’s the speed of the handoff and the condition of the road.

Europe doesn’t currently have a carrier strike group to replace the American one. It doesn’t have an equivalent number of cruise-missile submarines. It has fewer tankers than the cuts require it to cover.

It has gaps in maritime patrol, strategic bombers, long-range drones, and munitions stockpiles that can’t be filled by pressing a button or signing a contract this month. RUSI’s analysis of the cuts is diplomatic but clear: Europe can eventually fill these gaps if it moves urgently, but urgency and European defense procurement have historically not been on speaking terms.

Actually, I think the cuts fall heaviest on maritime and air assets, not on land forces. There are no reports of US brigades being pulled from Poland or the Baltics.

The conventional ground deterrent on the eastern flank, the one that’s supposed to make Russia calculate that invading Estonia involves fighting Americans, is not the thing being reduced (yet).

The immediate pain shows up somewhere else: the Atlantic, the Arctic, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic Sea approaches.

So, my readers who champion European independence from the US may be applauding this move. That’s fine… But there is real danger in the transition phase.

European officials have been worried for months about a potential Russian window of opportunity in the late 2020s, when Russia’s reconstituted military might feel capable enough to test NATO’s resolve while the alliance is still absorbing the cost and complexity of rearmament.

Whether the specific years 2028 or 2029 are right or wrong, in Putin’s mind, the underlying logic is sound: transitions create vulnerability, and vulnerability creates temptation.

The question is whether Europe can fill the gap fast enough to prevent the transition period from looking like an invitation.

If the US reduces its NATO contribution faster than European nations can commission A330 tankers, order P-8 equivalents, expand submarine fleets, and actually deliver munitions stockpiles that could sustain high-intensity operations for more than a few weeks, then deterrence thins exactly when it needs to be thickest.

I think the more interesting thing about the reshuffle here is that the Indo-Pacific is currently quiet, while there’s an active land and missile war going on in Europe. If you add that together with Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion (42% increase) defense budget proposal for next year, I’d like to ask just what in the hell is all that US hardware going to do if the US has no interest in confronting Putin?

Maybe all this new hardware is just to get us on par with China?

An invasion of Cuba wouldn’t need new ships, aircraft, missiles, drones, AI infrastructure, Golden Dome missile defense, munitions stockpile replenishment, and pay/personnel increases. (Actually, I’m all for pay increases for the troops.)

But my point is that seems like a big investment in military power, just to have an idle military. Or, if Trump’s worst ambitions are realized, and he really does want the entire Western hemisphere under the stars and stripes, well, let’s just say that we’ll need all that hardware if he picks a fight with Canada and all of South America.

The Tomahawk Reversal Shows the Handoff is Already Getting Ugly

One last thing… The US decision to cancel sending Tomahawk-capable systems to Germany makes the NATO Force Model story much more serious.

Germany wanted Tomahawks because Europe has a long-range strike problem. Russia has spent years fielding systems that can hit deep into Europe from protected positions.

Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad already put Poland, Lithuania, and large parts of Central Europe under threat. The reported deployment of Oreshnik systems in Belarus only sharpens the problem.

Moscow has spent the last decade building a conventional and nuclear-capable missile threat that can hold European capitals, airbases, ports, logistics hubs, and command centers at risk.

Germany, meanwhile, is trying to rebuild a military that spent the post-Cold War era being slowly converted into a museum exhibit in Erlangen.

That’s why Berlin’s interest in Tomahawks and the Typhon ground-based missile system was kind of a big deal. Tomahawk-class weapons would give Germany the ability to hold Russian military targets at range; the kinds of targets that matter in the first days of a war, when NATO would need to blunt Russian momentum before it turns into another “temporary” occupation that lasts 70 years.

Now Washington is backing away, officially “out of fear that Moscow would view the deployment as escalatory.” But unofficially because Trump got his feelings hurt by Germany’s chancellor.

If we go with the official version, it’s too late to worry about escalation. Russia has already invaded Ukraine. It leveled cities. It moved nuclear-capable systems into Kaliningrad. It’s used drones, missiles, glide bombs, cyberattacks, sabotage, assassinations, energy coercion, and the usual Kremlin buffet of war crimes and deniable weirdness.

Moscow doesn’t need NATO restraint to not feel threatened. It feels threatened by countries existing without permission.

The other explanation may be more practical and just as alarming: the United States may not have enough missiles to spare. But for Germany, the message is ugly either way.

If Washington is withholding Tomahawks because it fears provoking Russia, Europe has a political reliability problem. If Washington is withholding them because US stocks are too thin, Europe has an industrial reliability problem.

The Upside, If Europe Can Move

I want to be fair about one thing, because this piece would be incomplete without it.

The Trump administration’s delivery on this issue has the verbal finesse of Bobcat Goldthwait. His tone is transactional, the words are often contemptuous of allies who have died alongside Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa, and the timing is about the worst imaginable, given where Russia currently sits on the escalation ladder.

All of that is legitimate criticism.

But the strategic direction is not crazy. Europe spending more on its own defense, building genuine independent capability in tankers, maritime patrol, strike, submarines, and industrial production, is the right outcome.

The positive version of this story is that Europe accelerates procurement of A330 MRTT tankers, builds or buys P-8 equivalents, expands its submarine fleets, invests in long-range strike missiles, grows its air-defense industrial base, and develops the command-and-control systems that stop needing American architecture to function.

In the meantime, if Ukraine keeps bleeding Russia dry, Putin’s window of opportunity may never come. So it’s in Europe’s best interest to support the hell out of Ukraine.

Still, Europe is waking up and starting to slowly march in step.

The US reduction could be the shock that turns the European direction of travel into an irreversible structural shift. Or it could create a gap that Russia exploits before Europe fills it.

In my crystal ball, both outcomes are genuinely possible. Which one arrives first is the question that will define the next ten years of European security.

Слава Україні!

Over the past couple of weeks, images have surfaced on Russian and OSINT social media channels showing Ural and KamAZ heavy trucks covered in bold black-and-white patterns.

Not normal camouflage.

The opposite of normal camouflage.

These trucks are painted to stand out, with high-contrast stripes running across body panels, the cab, the cargo bed, and even the wheels and tires.

There are actually two patterns making the rounds: a zebra-style scheme of broadly straight lines, and a more organic, swirling, leaf-like design.

The white appears to be applied right over the standard dark green base.

Your first instinct is to laugh; mine was too. It looks like the motor pool lost a bet. But the logic behind it is a genuine window into where this war is going.

The Telegraph and a few other outlets ran with headlines suggesting Russia has found a clever way to beat Ukraine’s AI drones. That’s too strong.

They’re not beating AI with these patterns and I’m going to explain why.

Where the Zebra Idea Came From

My audience is likely well aware that this paint scheme isn’t new. It’s about 109 years old.

During the First World War, German U-boats were sinking Allied ships at a rate that threatened to starve Britain out of the war.

In 1917, a British marine painter and naval officer named Norman Wilkinson came up with a counterintuitive answer. You couldn’t make a ship invisible on the open ocean, so don’t try. Instead, paint it in bold, clashing geometric blocks of color, mostly black and white, in patterns designed to break up the ship’s outline. They called it dazzle camouflage.

And I sincerely hope when Wilkinson unveiled dazzle for the first time, someone in the crowd said, “It’s jazzy, it’s snazzy, it’s a regular humdinger!”

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

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

I apologize for this being a day late. I had a security breach on my network on Monday that needed to be isolated. Let’s jump in:

BLUF:

Missiles over Kyiv, an expletive-laden call that almost started a war, zebra-striped trucks losing a battle against thermal cameras, Ebola in three countries with 7% contact tracing, and a stock market that hit a record while everything else is on fire. Stay sharp.

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Inside a Lockheed Martin conference room somewhere in Bethesda, Maryland, two executives stare at a Canadian procurement briefing with abject horror visible on their faces.

“Tell me again how we lost part of an F-35 order to Sweden,” the first executive said.

“We didn’t lose it to Sweden,” the second executive muttered. “We lost it to Swedish aircraft, Canadian jobs, industrial sovereignty, Arctic security, and whatever the hell ‘strategic autonomy’ means.”

In the corner, a junior McKinsey consultant starts furiously flipping through a dictionary.

The first executive rubbed his temples. “So Sweden.”

“Basically Sweden.”

On the screen was a photo of the Saab Gripen E, looking mean, small, practical, and irritatingly affordable. Next to it was a list of Canadian industrial benefits long enough to require its own air defense system.

“Canada was supposed to buy eighty-eight F-35s,” the first executive said. “Eighty. Eight. That’s a beautiful number. That’s a production-line number. That’s a shareholders-call number.”

“And now?” the second executive asked.

“Now Ottawa is apparently flirting with keeping thirty F-35s and buying Gripens for the rest.”

The room went quiet in the way defense contractors go quiet when billions of greenbacks get dumped into an active volcano.

The second executive looked down at his notes. “We need to send a delegation north. Collins! Didn’t you just get back from holiday in St. John’s, Newfoundland?”

From the far end of the table, Collins straightened. “Uh, yes sir. Their ridiculous painted houses drove me nuts.”

“I agree, every home should be monotone and builder-grade,” the second executive said. “But that’s not the point. You have the most experience with them. I assume you speak Canadian?”

“Sir, I think they speak English… Mostly. Occasionally French for some reason?” Collins hesitated. “So you want me to go to Ottawa?”

“To wherever Stephen Fuhr is having lunch.”

“The defense procurement guy?”

“The defense procurement guy. Or better yet, that a-hole McGuinty.”

The first executive leaned back. “Fine. We wine him. We dine him. We explain fifth-generation sensor fusion. We say ‘NORAD interoperability’ until his fucking head explodes.”

“We bring charts?” Collins offered.

“Of course we bring charts, Jesus Collins, I know you’re a Yale man but try to keep up!” the first executive yelled. “We’re Lockheed. We don’t enter a room unless there’s a graph and a retired two-star general within arm’s reach.”

And if that doesn’t work?” Collins asked.

The first executive sighed. “Then we remind them the F-35 is still the best aircraft for high-end combat, stealth penetration, and integrated allied air operations.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Collins said.

“I know. That’s how desperate we are.”

Collins glanced at another slide, this one showing Saab’s promise of Canadian assembly, sovereign maintenance, local software work, and jobs in Quebec.

“I just had a thought… Saab’s not just selling a fighter,” he said.

“No,” the first executive cut him off. “They’re selling a national aerospace strategy with wings. Bastards brought a factory to a knife fight.”

Another pause.

“Should we call the White House?” Collins asked.

The first executive stared at him. “The White House is why we’re in this shit show.”

“Right.”

“From now on, nobody in this building says ‘51st state’ within earshot of a Canadian, a microphone, a trade delegation, or Ryan Reynolds.”

“That includes the president?” Collins asked.

The first executive picked up his mocha Frappuccino horchata and looked back at the Gripen slide.

“Especially the president. And for God’s sake, somebody hide the Greenland binder before Denmark buys Rafales.”

Canada was supposed to buy 88 F-35As.

Nice clean number. Very NATO. Very Lockheed.

Now, according to a May 30 report in La Presse that’s been picked up across the defense press, Ottawa is reportedly leaning toward something messier and far more interesting: keep roughly 30 F-35As, and replace the rest of the planned fleet with about 60 Saab Gripen E fighters.

A split buy. A mixed fleet.

Sources cited in the reporting say support for exactly that outcome has been growing inside the Canadian government, with an official announcement possibly held until after the US midterm elections in November 2026.

Current polling shows Trump on track to be defanged and declawed in the midterms. Delicious.

But before anyone fires up the “Gripen beats F-35” Stephenie Meyer fan fiction, let me be clear about something.

The F-35 is the better aircraft for penetrating defended airspace. It isn’t close. When Canada ran its original fighter competition, the F-35 scored 57.1 out of 60 points, a 95 percent.

The Gripen E/F scored 19.8, a 33 percent.

By the actual evaluation criteria the Royal Canadian Air Force used, the F-35 lapped the field.

So why is Ottawa reconsidering an aircraft it scored at one-third the value of the winner?

Because Canada doesn’t have a fighter problem; it has a sovereignty problem.

Canada has to defend the northern approaches to North America alongside the United States, intercept long-range Russian aviation probing the Arctic, and plug into the integrated air-defense system that covers the continent.

The United States will tell you this mission demands stealth, sensor fusion, and deep interoperability with the US Air Force, which flies the F-35 as the backbone of its Alaska-based air defense.

If stealth is the primary requirement, the Gripen is disqualified by default.

I think we could have a lively discussion about NORAD operations and how important stealth is in the defensive role, but that’s not this article. Suffice-it-to-say, it’s debatable. Stealth is largely an offensive capability.

The F-35 is built for the ugly part of airpower: penetrating contested airspace, surviving advanced radar networks, finding targets, and sharing that picture with everyone else. That’s offensive counterair and strike territory.

NORAD defense is a different animal. Canada’s main job is not to sneak into Russian airspace every Tuesday. It’s to detect, intercept, identify, and if necessary, destroy aircraft and missiles approaching North America.

For that mission, stealth helps, but it isn’t the center of gravity. The center of gravity is the sensor network, the tanker plan, the runway plan, the missile loadout, the command-and-control architecture, and the number of fighters Canada can actually keep flying.

Physics still matters. So does the maintenance bill.

But Canada needs at least some F-35s, or risk NATO expeditionary credibility. When Canada deploys fighters to Europe to reassure allies and deter Russia, those aircraft have to survive in modern, heavily defended airspace and operate seamlessly with allied air forces.

Stealth matters here. So does being inside the F-35’s shared data ecosystem, which is increasingly the connective tissue of allied air power.

But the biggest issue here has nothing to do with which plane is better… Canada wants, no, deserves, industrial sovereignty. Canada deserves more domestic defense work, more control over its own technology, and dramatically less dependence on a southern neighbor whose trade policy lately has the consistency of a Game of Thrones character arc after season six.

For decades, roughly 75 percent of Canadian defense procurement spending has flowed to American suppliers.

Canada’s new defense industrial strategy reportedly wants to flip that, targeting something like 70 percent Canadian content in future contracts and nearly half a trillion Canadian dollars in defense investment over the next decade. Good. I’m American and I have no problem with this.

That’s the tension the whole debate runs on. The F-35 is the aircraft Canada wants when things get ugly. The Gripen may be the aircraft Canada wants when things get expensive, political, and Canadian.

Be Fair to the F-35

Let me spend a section defending the airplane Canada is thinking about buying less of, because the case is real and I don’t want to wave it away.

The F-35’s stealth is the difference between flying into a modern integrated air-defense system and flying into a modern integrated air-defense system and coming back.

It brings sensor fusion that turns a pilot from a person reading six gauges into a person reading one coherent picture.

It brings electronic warfare, allied data-sharing, and integration with the US-led fifth-generation combat network that no fourth-generation fighter, however good, can fully replicate.

The Gripen E is an excellent aircraft. It’s my personal favorite 4.5^th generation fighter actually. But it’s not a stealth aircraft, and on the hardest nights, that gap is the whole game.

Also, Canada has also already sunk years and billions into the Joint Strike Fighter program: infrastructure, training pipelines, sustainment prep, program participation.

Walking away entirely would create legal, industrial, and diplomatic headaches that range from expensive to genuinely dangerous. The US ambassador to Canada warned earlier this year that backing out of the F-35 deal could put the NORAD partnership itself at risk, even floating the idea that the US might need to fly its own fighters in Canadian airspace to cover the gap.

This was so shocking at the time, I had to make a video about it. The US was basically saying, “buy the Gripen and we’ll operate over your airspace with impunity, without permission, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”

Sounds like war to me. But let’s burn that bridge when we come to it.

Look, Trump is not going to be in power forever. At some point, the US will presumably have a leader again who recognizes the amazing value of having allies. Maybe that future mystery leader should give Canada Michigan’s upper peninsula as a sign of good faith; it’s practically Canada anyways. (But you can’t have Mackinac Island; that’s mine.)

But here’s the nuance that makes the split buy possible. Canada is legally committed only to the first 16 F-35As, the ones already in production with deliveries starting this year.

The remaining 72 aircraft of the planned 88 were never covered by a signed production contract. Public perception says Canada bought 88 jets. The contract says Canada bought 16 and reserved the right to buy more.

That distinction is the entire escape hatch, baby.

Canada doesn’t have to cancel the F-35. It just has to stop at 30. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Bob’s you’re uncle.

The Gripen’s Actual Pitch: Sovereignty Per Flight Hour

So, what does the Gripen bring that keeps pulling it back into the conversation despite that brutal test score?

Long distances. Brutal weather. Thin infrastructure. Forward bases scattered across an Arctic that’s getting more contested every year.

The Gripen E was designed by a country, Sweden, that spent the Cold War assuming its airbases would be bombed in the first hour of any war, so it built a fighter that could operate lean and dispersed.

It’s almost as if the Gripen E was custom made just for Canada’s terrain and mission set.

It can fly from road bases as short as 800 meters. It can be turned around for another air-to-air sortie in roughly ten minutes by a small ground crew, including conscripts if needed. And Saab estimates operating costs somewhere around 7,000 to 10,000 US dollars per flight hour, a small fraction of common F-35A estimates.

It’s not a toy, either. The Gripen E carries the Meteor long-range air-to-air missile, IRIS-T, AMRAAM, the Taurus cruise missile, and a full range of precision-guided munitions.

For air policing, Arctic defense, NATO support, and the daily grind of guarding sovereign airspace, that’s a serious combat capability at a price Canada can actually sustain across a large fleet.

Here… Copy and paste the following sentence into any American article’s comments section proclaiming the vast superiority of the F-35 for Canada:

“Canada’s geography punishes expensive aircraft, and the Gripen is the rare modern fighter that doesn’t punish back.” -Wes O’Donnell, 2026.

GlobalEye Changed the Political Weather

I’ve got a full YouTube video coming tomorrow (Wednesday, June 3) on Canada’s airborne early-warning decision, so I’ll keep this tight so I don’t undermine my views on that video.

The relevant point for the fighter debate is that Canada just chose Saab’s GlobalEye early-warning aircraft over Boeing’s E-7 Wedgetail, in a program worth more than five billion Canadian dollars, expected to create over 3,000 local jobs and built on a Canadian-made Bombardier Global 6500 airframe.

To be clear, Carney selected Saab as a “preferred supplier” and opened formal negotiations. In procurement terms that’s an engagement ring, not a marriage. No contract has been signed yet and defense deals have died at this stage before.

Still, Prime Minister Mark Carney framed the choice around Arctic defense, domestic production, and Canada taking more responsibility for its own northern approaches.

That decision did something a sexy Saab brochure never could. It made the company credible inside Canada’s defense-industrial conversation. Once Ottawa was willing to pick Saab for the eyes of its air-defense network, the idea of picking Saab for part of the teeth stopped sounding exotic.

GlobalEye opened the door. The Gripen is now standing in the hallway, pretending it wasn’t waiting there the whole time.

Not to mention the Gripen and GlobalEye work together like Starsky & Hutch.

Like Mork & Mindy.

Like Laverne & Shirley.

You get the point…

The Factory Might Matter More Than the Fighter

Here’s the heart of it.

Saab’s pitch to Canada isn’t really “buy our cool jet, bro.” It’s “build your aerospace future with us.”

The company’s “Built for Canada by Canadians” campaign offers domestic final assembly, sovereign maintenance, local software development, engineering work, broad technology transfer, and a Canadian research and development center.

Saab projects somewhere between 6,000 and 12,600 Canadian jobs over the life of the program.

That’s the political gravity well that’s bending this entire decision. It’s a gravity well so strong, it’s overcoming the pull of Canada south toward Washington DC.

Because Canada isn’t only asking which fighter flies better. By that measure, the review ended at 95 to 33 and everyone went home. Canada is asking a different question, one that doesn’t fit cleanly on a capability scorecard: which fighter leaves more Canadian capability behind once the contract is signed?

The F-35 leaves Canada as a sophisticated customer inside the most advanced air-combat ecosystem on Earth, with the supply chain and the software keys held in Fort Worth and Washington. The Gripen offers to leave behind a factory, an engineering base, and source-code-level control that Lockheed and the US government will never package into a foreign military sale.

Stealth is something you buy. Industry is something you keep.

Just to add to the Gripen conversation, Ukraine is now tied directly into Saab’s future production. Sweden and Ukraine have agreed that Ukraine will acquire 20 new Gripen E fighters, with 16 older Gripen C/D aircraft donated in 2027 and the new jets expected by 2030, on top of a previously signed letter of intent for up to 150 Gripen E aircraft over the long term.

The UK has already agreed to produce a meaningful share of the Gripen work tied to Ukraine under the Sweden deal.

Aviation Week reported that a Saab executive sees a possible role for Canadian industry in Ukraine’s Gripen acquisition, including the planned initial batch of up to 20 Gripen E/F fighters.

If Canada chooses the Gripen and builds the domestic production base Saab is offering, Canada wouldn’t just be buying fighters for the RCAF. It could become part of the long-term industrial pipeline arming Ukraine’s air force.

A Canadian fighter purchase that doubles as a production line feeding Ukraine’s rearmament is a genuinely different proposition than a standard procurement.

Somewhere in Ottawa, a procurement officer just felt a pang of patriotic excitement. In this sense, Donald J. Trump has done more for Canadian nationalism and pride than Celine Dion.

Canada’s fighter review was never just about replacing the CF-18. It’s deciding whether Canada wants to remain a customer inside someone else’s defense ecosystem or become a larger producer inside its own.

The F-35 keeps Canada plugged into the most advanced air-combat network on the planet.

The Gripen offers more Canadian control, a factory floor, and possibly a hand in arming Ukraine for the next decade.

After GlobalEye, that argument has teeth.

The Gripen would make it harder to dismiss as a one-off Swedish win.

It would signal that Canada is done treating defense procurement like a Best Buy loyalty program for US contractors. Ottawa still needs the F-35 for the hardest missions. But it may want the Gripen for something just as important: control.

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When I was in the military, I read a lot of Tom Clancy. He had this way of knowing technical details about things that instantly sold the reader on his credibility; like his inside knowledge of things that only grunts would know from his book Clear and Present Danger. Or, his intimate knowledge of ballistic missile nuclear submarines from the Hunt For Red October.

In his mid-career phase, he also wrote nonfiction books (guided tours) like Fighter Wing (1995), Marine (1996), Airborne (1997), Carrier (1999), and Special Forces (2001).

The novels gave him reach, the technical books gave him authority, and the audience trusted him because they could tell he actually understood the hardware.

I’ve been writing now for over twenty years, but I’ve never written fiction… Now, I’m entertaining the idea of writing a novel in the techno-thriller genre; a spiritual successor to Clancy’s work. So I’ve apprenticed myself to a screenwriter from the American Film Institute to learn sharp dialog.

At the same time, I’m painfully aware of the tens of thousands of writers who fancy themselves novelists, the proliferation of AI-slop on Amazon and elsewhere, and the fact that I don’t yet have a publisher.

We’ll see what happens…

I mention all this because today’s paid subscriber article is half Clancy-esque technical simulation and half informed speculation.

This one’s a bit long today; I’ve been working on it for a couple weeks. But, in October 2022, I wrote a piece for Medium asking what would happen if Putin used a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. I used to run these types of analysis as part of the Good Judgement Open (intel forecasting competition).

In 2022, my Air Force chums at DIA were genuinely worried that Putin, reeling from recent Ukrainian wins, would try to freeze the conflict by detonating a battlefield nuclear device in an unoccupied area of Ukraine, a demonstration shot over the Black Sea, or a low-yield strike against a Ukrainian military target.

I want to note here that about half of the experts I spoke with believed that Putin would break the so-called nuclear taboo if his force in Ukraine collapsed. On the flip side, a handful of others disagreed and said that even Putin isn’t that self-destructive.

So, this piece isn’t meant to make anyone clutch their pearls or frighten the reader; I simply want to explore one possible scenario and how it would realistically play out in the current chaotic geopolitical landscape.

In 2022, I walked through Biden being woken up, the Situation Room lighting up, the slow and lawyered machinery of NATO consensus, and the response options on the table: no nuclear retaliation, massive conventional punishment, a possible NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine, and the prospect of strikes against the Russian unit responsible.

The scenario was terrifying, but it had a certain logical bureaucratic shape. You could almost follow the decision tree.

But Biden is gone…

So let’s run the analysis again.

Why This Is Back on the Table

Putin is having a bad 2026.

On the battlefield, Russia is losing ground in Ukraine for the first time since January 2024. ISW analysis through May 19 showed a net Russian loss of 69 square miles over a four-week period, including 29 square miles in a single week.

Read more

A 105mm artillery cannon mounted on a Humvee sounds like something my butter bar lieutenant would have proposed after three Rip-Its. And for most of military history, physics, and any sane brigade commander, would have killed that idea before it left the wire.

You can’t put a full-sized artillery piece on a light tactical vehicle. The recoil forces would turn the chassis into pile of scrap after the third volley.

Plus, anybody inside would look like that scene from Ace Ventura 2:

Newton’s second law doesn’t negotiate.

And yet… someone figured out how to cheat.

The result is the 2-CT Hawkeye, a 105mm howitzer mounted on an M1152 Humvee, developed by AM General and Mandus Group, and currently operating in the most artillery-intensive wars since good ole dubbya dubbya two.

Ukraine has been running it in combat since spring 2024.

AM General’s program director Mike Evans confirmed the deployment at the US Field Artillery Association’s Fires Symposium in May 2024: “We recently put a 2-CT Hawkeye system into Ukraine. We shipped it in April. It’s going into combat to test on live targets.”

Wait, 2024? It’s now 2026; why haven’t we heard more about this?

That’s precisely why I’m talking about it today.

The lack of news about its success or failure in Ukraine tells us something.

So let’s jump in:

Soft Recoil Technology, or SRT, is how you put a massive gun on a light hummer.

When a cannon fires, the explosion that sends the round downrange also sends an equal and opposite force straight back through the gun. That’s recoil. Managing that force is the central engineering challenge of every artillery system ever built.

The heavier and more powerful the gun, the more recoil it generates, and the more structure you need to absorb it without destroying the platform underneath.

This is why traditional artillery is gi-normous!

The M777 lightweight towed howitzer, specifically designed for portability, still weighs 4,200 pounds. The M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzer weighs about 62,000 pounds. The German PzH 2000 is roughly 55 tons. The French CAESAR is considered exceptionally light for a wheeled 155mm system and it still weighs 18 tons.

Every one of those weight numbers is partly a consequence of the recoil management problem. You build the structure big enough to absorb what the gun produces, and then you build it a little bigger for the margins and safety.

A Humvee, by comparison, weighs about 5,500 pounds unloaded. Asking it to absorb the recoil of a 105mm cannon is like asking your elderly grandma to tackle a pro NFL player.

The big brains at Mandus Group said: what if we changed when the recoil happens instead of how we absorb it?

The Cheat Code

Traditional artillery fires like this: round ignites, gases expand, projectile leaves barrel, gun slams backward thanks to Newton. All that force arrives at once. The platform has to be stiff enough to take it.

Soft recoil reverses the sequence.

But actually, soft recoil isn’t a new idea.

Engineers figured out the basic concept before the First World War. A 65mm Italian mountain gun used a crude version of it, and that gun was still in service after the Second World War.

In the 1970s, the US Army tried again with the XM204, a lightweight 155mm howitzer program specifically built around soft recoil. It failed.

The German arms museum at Koblenz has the prototype and the museum placard is, by all accounts, not flattering.

The problem was always the same: timing.

When a conventional howitzer fires, the propellant ignites and generates an enormous gas pressure inside the chamber, on the order of tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. That pressure accelerates the projectile down the barrel toward the target.

It also, simultaneously and with identical force, pushes backward on the breech. The gun has nowhere to go, so the recoil mechanism takes the hit.

In the standard systems, it’s a hydraulic or hydropneumatic system, (essentially a very heavy-duty shock absorber), that lets the barrel slide backward over a controlled distance while throttling fluid to slow it down.

The energy gets dissipated through the recoil system, into the mounting, and eventually into the ground.

All of that force arrives in milliseconds. The platform doesn’t experience average force over a long period. It experiences an extremely high force spike, briefly, and the entire structure has to be designed to survive that spike without bending, cracking, or launching itself off the ground.

That’s why artillery carriages are heavy.

That’s also why self-propelled howitzers are the size of small houses.

Every kilogram of mass in the system is there partly because the laws of physics require something to absorb what the gun produces at the moment of firing.

Muzzle brakes help somewhat.

They redirect a portion of the propellant gases sideways and rearward as the projectile exits, partially offsetting the recoil impulse before it reaches the gun mount.

That’s why you see those distinctive lateral blast patterns when a muzzle-braked weapon fires, and why the soldier standing directly beside a muzzle-braked gun is having a bad hair day.

Muzzle brakes reduce total recoil impulse but they don’t change when it arrives. The spike is still there. It’s just slightly shorter.

But soft recoil changes the timing of the whole event. That’s the cheat.

Here’s the mechanism, step by step.

The cannon sits in its cradle held back by a latch, under tension from an internal gas spring. When the fire control system initiates the firing sequence, the latch releases and that spring drives the entire barrel assembly forward along its guides at speed, through a predetermined run-up distance.

At the exact moment the barrel reaches maximum forward travel, the round fires. The propellant ignition now pushes against a barrel that is already moving forward. The explosive force first has to stop the barrel’s forward momentum entirely before it can begin pushing the barrel backward.

According to the underlying patent documentation, nearly half the energy of the firing event gets consumed just stopping that forward motion. The residual rearward travel is then absorbed by a conventional hydropneumatic system.

Peak force delivered to the vehicle: down by up to 60 percent!!!

The physics behind this is Newton’s conservation of momentum, applied in reverse of what most artillery designers before the 1970s assumed was the only option.

You don’t have to build the platform strong enough to absorb the spike if you can split the spike in half before it gets there.

The reason this kept failing for a century was that triggering the round at exactly the right microsecond in the barrel’s forward travel is genuinely hard.

Too early and you’re firing while the barrel is still building speed, which reduces the recoil benefit and can cause dangerous misfires. Too late and you’re firing as the barrel decelerates, same problem in reverse.

The timing window is narrow and the consequences of missing it are big. The XM204 program got close enough that the Army funded it. It didn’t get close enough to work reliably.

21st century electronics solved it.

Sensors, processors, and digital fire control systems that didn’t exist in any practical form in the 1970s can now track the barrel’s position and velocity with sufficient precision to trigger firing at the correct moment in the cycle, repeatedly, under field conditions.

The Field Artillery Association’s own technical write-up on the system describes it directly: “Almost no human labor is involved in the preparation for firing nor displacing.” The gun does the timing itself.

That’s the engineering breakthrough the Hawkeye is built on.

It’s like bending your knees when you jump on the ground; the bending spreads that same total force over a longer movement. Same physics. The soft recoil system bends the gun’s knees before impact by giving the barrel somewhere forward to go before the round fires. (My knees, after two services and a decade of bad decisions, no longer bend the way they’re supposed to. The Hawkeye’s recoil mechanism has me beat on this.)

What that actually means for the lightweight Humvee: It can deploy in under 90 seconds from rolling stop to first round.

It can put 8 rounds downrange in the first three minutes.

It can hit a target 11.6 kilometers away with standard ammunition, or nearly 20 kilometers with extended-range rounds. And it can be driving away before the counter-battery radar finishes its solution.

The old Soviet doctrine, roughly summarized as “park gun, fire mission, smoke a stale cigarette, relocate eventually,” now carries survival odds comparable to standing in the Donbas wearing a reflective vest at midnight.

Static artillery positions die. Heavy tracked systems that take fifteen minutes to unlimber and another fifteen to move are essentially fixed targets.

Ukraine’s artillery survival doctrine evolved accordingly: shoot fast, shoot accurately, and leave before the counter-battery cycle closes. Every Ukrainian artillery crew operating on the eastern front is running some version of this calculation on every fire mission. The question isn’t “can we hit the target.” It’s “can we disappear before the response arrives.”

That’s the battlefield the Hawkeye was built for.

What Ukraine Won’t Tell You, and Why That’s Probably Good

The frustrating reality of covering experimental systems in Ukraine is that Ukraine doesn’t publish Google reviews of prototype artillery.

As of May 29, 2026, there are no major public battlefield reports declaring the Hawkeye either a war-winning breakthrough or a categorical failure. No public after-action reviews. No official Ukrainian statements rating the system against the Caesar or the M777. Operational silence.

That silence is probably a good sign.

Ukraine has a well-documented and unsentimental relationship with equipment that doesn’t perform.

Systems that fail in combat at the tactical level become known. Social media footage surfaces. Milbloggers talk. Ukrainian units share feedback through channels that eventually reach open-source analysts.

If the Hawkeye had been failing catastrophically, three deployments of drone footage and an angry Telegram thread would have surfaced by now.

What we do know: AM General described the system as “combat proven” at AUSA 2024. Ukraine apparently continued using it after initial evaluation. And AM General unveiled a next-generation version at AUSA 2025, upgraded and built around the standard M119 105mm gun, directly citing the Ukraine experience as part of the development process.

Companies don’t build second generations of systems that embarrassed them in their first combat trial.

Who Else Is Paying Attention

In October 2024, Kalyani Strategic Systems, the defense subsidiary of India’s Bharat Forge, signed a multi-party agreement with AM General and Mandus Group to co-develop and co-produce next-generation artillery platforms built around advanced recoil technology.

The agreement explicitly targets both 105mm and 155mm applications.

105mm is the weak sauce. We want the big boy 155mm boom!

That’s the brass ring of soft recoil technology… a significantly lighter 155mm system that doesn’t sacrifice range or payload to achieve mobility. If Mandus’s soft recoil approach can scale from 105mm to 155mm, a significant portion of the NATO artillery weight problem starts looking solvable.

The broader Western artillery world is also moving in the same direction through parallel means. The RCH 155, which I’ve covered, achieves shoot-and-scoot survivability through automation, speed, and a high-mobility wheeled chassis rather than through recoil reduction.

The Archer, the CAESAR, the K9 Thunder in its wheeled variant… they’re all trying to solve the same problem the Hawkeye is solving, just from different engineering angles. The problem is unanimous: heavy, slow, predictably positioned artillery dies. The debate is about which solution to that problem gets there first.

Soft recoil is one answer. It’s not the only answer. But it’s the answer that a Humvee can carry.

But think about what this means at the grunt level…

If you can put effective artillery on a Humvee, you can put artillery anywhere a Humvee can go. Infantry units that previously had to wait for dedicated fire support can carry organic artillery capability. In this sense, infantry school graduates would need an additional five weeks of advanced individual training to become proficient on artillery systems.

The queen of battle (the infantry) and the king of battle (artillery) joined together in a single Military Occupational Specialty.

Small units operating in dispersed, drone-era combat can have guns instead of just calling for fires and hoping something’s available.

Now, artillery that was previously massed in battery positions (that once represented lucrative drone targets) can be dispersed across a wide area, each platform too small and too mobile to justify the ISR investment required to target it.

Ukraine’s drones are now the fastest maneuver element on the modern battlefield. The artillery that supports drone-era infantry will need to be lighter, faster, and more dispersed than the systems it’s currently replacing.

The Hawkeye is a step in that direction. A weird, underpowered, probably underproduced step, but a genuine one.

So, the Hawkeye is the proof of concept. Somewhere between the Humvee with a cannon and the next-generation 155mm platform that doesn’t exist yet, a genuine architectural shift in how armies deploy fires is trying to happen.

Maybe my butter bar lieutenant wasn’t batshit crazy after all…

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