A little over two years ago, I wrote a piece that felt almost absurd to publish. Ukraine, I reported, was using flat-packed, tape-and-rubber-band drones, made of waxed cardboard, shipped like IKEA furniture, to blow up Russian fighter jets on their home airfields.

Here’s that piece over on Medium if you’re feeling froggy.

The comments were occasionally skeptical.

And yet…

This week, Japan’s Defense Minister was photographed smiling alongside the AirKamuy 150, a disposable cardboard swarm drone developed by a Japanese startup of the same name. The country is already eyeing it for deployment with the Maritime Self-Defense Force.

The cardboard drone has gone from Australian lab down unda, to Ukrainian battlefield improvisation, to mainstream defense procurement in Japan, and it’s accelerating faster than most analysts expected.

Let’s catch up on where this all started, where it stands today, and what Japan’s entry into the arena tells us about where modern warfare is heading.

The Corvo: A Quick Refresher

In August 2023, I covered Ukraine’s use of the Australian-made Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System (PPDS), built by Melbourne-based SYPAQ Systems.

The airframe is made of waxed foamcore, ships as a self-assembly flatpack, has a range of up to 120 km, and costs between $670 and $3,350 depending on the version.

That is EXTREMELY cheap for an attack drone, but somehow still seems kind of expensive for cardboard.

The Corvo was originally designed for reconnaissance and logistics resupply, but Ukrainian forces repurposed it as a highly effective kamikaze weapon, capable of carrying up to three kilograms (about 7 lbs.) of explosives.

The headline moment came on the night of August 26–27, 2023, when the Security Service of Ukraine conducted a special operation against the Russian Air and Space Forces base at Kursk Vostochny Airport, attacking four Su-30 and one MiG-29 aircraft using Corvo PPDS kamikaze drones, (and also destroying an S-300 radar and two Pantsir-S1 air defense systems)!

Sixteen Corvo drones were reportedly used, with three shot down by Russian forces.

A few pounds of waxed cardboard and commercial-off-the-shelf electronics.

Tens of millions of dollars in damage.

Bang. For. The. Buck.

The Corvo’s operational record in Ukraine has continued to impress, and the field innovations coming out of the front lines have been genuinely remarkable.

Ukrainian soldiers have been cutting holes in the bottom of Corvo airframes and mounting GoPro cameras on 10-second timers to film short clips when the drones reach their pre-programmed turnaround point.

This improvised ISR configuration makes the drones even harder to detect, since there’s no datalink streaming video back or receiving navigation instructions. No signal means nothing for Russian electronic warfare to grab onto.

The drone flies its pre-programmed route, snaps its photos at the waypoint, returns, and lands, and the entire mission happens in complete radio silence.

Now I know what you’re thinking… Hey Wes, doesn’t the cardboard make it basically a budget stealth RQ-170 Sentinel?

YES! Well, I mean, technically radar could detect cardboard drones, but they’re much harder to detect than conventional drones of the same size.

The Corvo PPDS airframe is made from waxed foamboard-cardboard-like material, which gives it a tiny radar return compared with an aluminum aircraft or even a drone with more metal structure. It’s slow, small, light, and mostly non-metallic.

That’s a nasty little radar problem.

But “hard to detect” isn’t “invisible.” The drone still has a battery, wiring, motor, servos, payload, fasteners, and either a camera or warhead.

Those components can reflect radar energy. The propeller can also create micro-Doppler signatures, though a small electric prop is not exactly an F-16 waving a neon sign.

Low altitude flight also makes detection harder because the radar has to sort the drone from ground clutter, trees, buildings, terrain, birds (AKA real Corvids lol), and all the other nonsense living near the horizon.

The bigger issue is radar type.

A large air-defense radar is optimized for the big, fast, dangerous things modern militaries have worried about for decades: jets, helicopters, cruise missiles, and ballistic threats.

It uses Doppler processing and clutter rejection to separate real targets from the background. That works well when the target is moving fast enough and reflecting enough radar energy to stand out.

A cardboard drone like the Corvo PPDS attacks that assumption. It is small, slow, low, and mostly non-metallic, which means its radar return can be weak enough and its speed low enough to resemble clutter.

A short-range counter-UAS radar is designed for exactly that ugly problem. These radars often use higher operating frequencies, shorter detection ranges, finer range resolution, high update rates, and specialized algorithms to separate drones from birds and background clutter.

Some systems also exploit micro-Doppler signatures, which are tiny radar modulations caused by spinning propellers or rotor blades. Research on drone radar detection specifically focuses on extracting weak drone signals from clutter using Doppler and signal-to-clutter methods, because small drones often produce weak returns that conventional detection methods can miss.

So, it gives up the massive range of a strategic air-defense radar in exchange for short range sensitivity and classification against small drones.

But by the time a cardboard drone is close enough to be detected by your short-range counter-UAS radar, your reaction time is smashed as thoroughly as your wrecked Su-30 on the ground.

That’s the tradeoff. Big radars protect the sky. Counter-UAS radars police the weeds.

Cardboard drones live in the weeds, because of course the cheapest thing on the battlefield found the most annoying place to hide.

Also, the field-repair culture around the Corvo has been equally impressive. Ukrainian operators have been patching battle-damaged airframes with whatever cardboard they could scavenge from their surroundings.

Individual Corvo units have survived more than 20 flights, and the waxed cardboard wing handles moisture without losing its aerodynamic qualities.

One source puts that durability figure even higher; some PPDS drones in Ukraine have managed to make 60 flights total.

The volume of the program has been staggering. SYPAQ has been churning out 100 Corvo drones monthly for Ukraine since March 2023.

Now, the company has unveiled a heavy-lift version of the PPDS capable of transporting six kilograms of payload, essentially doubling the warhead or sensor capacity of the original design.

The PPDS-HL also adds external hardpoints, meaning it can carry and drop payloads in flight rather than relying solely on the kamikaze profile.

The feedback loop between the Ukrainian military and the manufacturer has been unusually tight.

Heavy Ukrainian use of the drone for complex missions has generated significant feedback that SYPAQ is using to improve the mission planning system, user interface, and ground control station across the entire Corvo drone family.

This is asymmetric innovation at its finest: combat experience, absorbed in real time, fed directly back into the production cycle.

Enter Japan

Which brings us to the AirKamuy 150.

Japan’s post-WWII constitutional framework has created a deep institutional and cultural aversion to anything that looks like offensive military capability.

That aversion actually runs through the venture capital community. While AirKamuy secured 100 million yen in April 2025, roughly two-thirds of approached investors declined; a common reason being internal policies restricting investment in defense-related businesses.

CEO Yamaguchi has described facing a “double barrier” of defense tech and hardware investment skepticism, compounded by the reputational risks unique to the defense sector in Japan’s postwar cultural context.

The strategic logic driving that signal is straightforward.

Japan is an archipelago nation responsible for defending over 6,800 islands, many of them remote, some of them contested.

The Senkaku Islands sit at the center of an active territorial dispute with China.

Taiwan’s strait is close enough to Japan’s southwestern island chain that any conflict scenario there immediately becomes Japan’s problem.

And the Maritime Self-Defense Force, however capable, cannot physically patrol every kilometer of Japan’s sprawling maritime frontier.

A swarm of $2,000 cardboard drones, pre-positioned across remote island outposts, changes that equation considerably.

Like Corvo, the AirKamuy 150 can be assembled in under five minutes, shipped flat-packed in bulk, and deployed by personnel without specialized technical training. Its speed of 120 km/h and 50-mile range make it viable for maritime patrol, early warning, and area denial in exactly the kind of island-chain geography Japan needs to defend.

Japan’s fiscal 2026 budget request allocates 312.8 billion yen for “unmanned asset defense capabilities;” roughly triple the previous year’s amount.

The AirKamuy 150 is arriving at precisely the moment that political will has matured into funding. And Japan is not alone: South Korea unveiled its cardboard “PapyDrone-800” in 2024 and decided to adopt it for military use.

North Korea has also showcased cardboard drones with rubber band-connected wings at a Pyongyang defense exhibition. The low-cost drone development race is already accelerating across Asia.

The proof of concept that Ukraine field-tested over Kursk has now been absorbed by three Asian militaries simultaneously.

Two plus years is a fast adoption curve for any weapons technology. For a technology made of cardboard, it’s remarkable.

When I published my 2023 piece on the Corvo, the core argument was simple: cheap, expendable, and nearly invisible beats expensive and irreplaceable. A $3,000 drone that damages a $30 million fighter jet degrades the adversary’s capacity to replace what it’s lost.

Ukraine proved the concept in a real shooting war, against real air defenses, over Russian territory. The results were damaging enough that the Russians initially denied the August 2023 strike even happened at all. Commercial satellite later proved it did, as Ukraine had described all along.

Now South Korea, Japan, and by all appearances many other militaries are drawing the same conclusions.

The cardboard drone was never a novelty. It was a proof of concept. And the concept passed its test.

I said it in 2023 and I’ll say it again: I hope the US and its allies are taking notes. Close-in weapon systems like the Phalanx are good, but when a swarm of 500 $2,000 drones comes over the horizon, you need something to meet them.

The AirKamuy 150 is proof that at least one nation, Japan, is learning from the Ukraine War.

Слава Україні!

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

The most important thing happening inside Ukraine’s F-16 training program in the UK doesn’t really concern the machine.

I know. That sounds wrong.

The F-16 Fighting Falcon is fast, lethal, battle-tested, and carries so much NATO symbolism it makes Kremlin staffers want to watch Rocky IV.

But for now, the Viper still the shiniest object in the room; at least until Gripen shows up in Ukraine and starts hunting Russian weekend plans. But two recent reports from Business Insider point to something quieter and more consequential happening inside that training pipeline:

Ukrainian pilots are learning to fly a Western fighter. But they’re also learning to think like Western fighter pilots.

Those are very different things. And right now, I don’t think that difference is getting enough press.

Two skills are getting the most attention from British instructors. First, flying in a GPS-denied environment, because Russia’s electronic warfare systems have turned the electromagnetic spectrum over Ukraine into something resembling Soviet-era plumbing: theoretically functional, actively hostile, and prone to failing at the worst possible moment; (usually after taco night).

Second: pilot autonomy. How to make decisions in the air without waiting for a controller, a commander, or a ground-based authority to walk the pilot through every move; the way the Russians currently fly sorties.

Together, those two things describe a pilot who can keep fighting when the battlefield strips away every comfort that NATO aviation built over the last four decades.

Why GPS-denied flying isn’t fun

The Business Insider reporting notes that Ukrainian trainees in the UK are being taught low-altitude flying without relying on satellite navigation, because Russian jamming has made GPS unreliable in combat.

One Ukrainian trainee described learning to use rivers, mountains, and terrain features during training sorties, calling it “really important.”

That sounds basic until you actually picture it.

You’re at low altitude. Enemy air defenses are hunting you. Your radio may be cluttered or jammed. Your cockpit is throwing tons of information at you. And instead of following a blue line on a screen, you’re identifying a river bend you memorized from a paper map two hours ago and counting seconds until the next checkpoint.

The FAA defines pilotage as navigation by reference to visible landmarks, and dead reckoning as navigation by calculation using course, time, speed, distance, and wind correction.

Western pilots, including USAF pilots, are still taught both pilotage and dead reckoning as a backup.

GPS failure in combat means you’ve potentially lost positional awareness, a weapon misses its target, a formation separates, or your aircraft wanders into an air defense envelope that punishes minor attention lapses.

So the pilot’s pre-flight is more than checking weather and fuel.

It’s studying legs, headings, expected times, terrain features, waypoints, threats, emergency options.

Rivers.

Coastlines.

Ridgelines.

Railways.

Towns.

The pilot builds a mental map and then flies against it, comparing what should be outside the canopy to what actually is, while managing airspeed, altitude, heading, fuel, formation position, and the threat picture simultaneously.

At low altitude, that workload moves at 5x speed. The ground comes up quick. Waypoints arrive before you’re ready for them. A few degrees off heading compounded over several minutes can put you miles from where you think you are.

This is brain surgeon levels of cognitive discipline dressed up as navigation. It’s forcing the pilot to continuously rebuild a mental picture of the fight.

Of course, an F-16 has other tools besides GPS.

The first fallback is the Inertial Navigation System, or INS.

Unlike GPS, which depends on signals from satellites 20,000 kilometers above Earth, INS is entirely self-contained. It uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to track motion from a known starting position, which means Russia can’t jam it, because there’s nothing to jam.

It doesn’t listen to the outside world. It watches itself. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that INS drifts. The physics of the system introduce small errors that compound over time, typically on the order of one to two nautical miles per hour of flight.

Read more

I posted this video to my socials yesterday with a very brief caption, but the more I watch the video, the more I think it needs a full analysis. There are a couple of very cool things happening here.

But first, this video is required viewing if you’re going to get the most out of this. I’ll embed it here:

A Ukrainian soldier leans out of the back seat of a Soviet-era Yak-52 trainer aircraft, raises a rifle, and starts shooting at a Russian attack drone.

That sentence sounds like someone fed World War I, cyberpunk, and Charles M. Schulz into a blender and hit puree.

The video looks ridiculous at first. Actually, I thought it was AI on first viewing. (It’s not).

A propeller plane. A human gunner. An AR-style rifle. A Russian drone filled with explosives lumbering through the sky. Then you look closer, pull up the specifications, and realize Ukraine hasn’t lost its mind.

Ukraine has found a cheap answer to a cheap threat, and in doing so, accidentally exposed one of the most expensive structural failures in modern air defense.

By the end of this article, we all should be asking “why.”

Why is Ukraine forced to defend like this?

Why, in the age of supersonic fifth generation fighters, low and slow is so confounding.

And why, or rather what, are some good air defense options that we can present for the low and slow threat?

The aircraft: what the Yak-52 actually is

The aircraft in the footage is the Yakovlev Yak-52, a Soviet-designed two-seat piston trainer built for aerobatic instruction. On social media, commenters are calling this a WWII prop plane. That’s incorrect.

It first flew in 1979, was mass-produced for Warsaw Pact air forces, and has spent most of its life teaching student pilots how not to die. It wasn’t designed for combat. It has no weapons systems, no radar, no self-protection suite, and no provision for turning a passenger into a rear gunner.

Just pure flying.

Ukraine apparently took that last part as a suggestion.

The Yak-52 has a maximum speed around 285 km/h (177 mph), cruise speed approximately 190 km/h (118 mph), stall speed roughly 85 to 105 km/h (53 to 65 mph), depending on configuration, and a service ceiling of around 4,000 meters (about 13,000 feet).

Standard Russian Shaheds cruise somewhere around 170 to 200 km/h (106 to 124 mph). Reuters reported that Russia increased Shahed speeds after Ukrainian interceptor drones began catching them, and some newer jet-powered Shahed variants can reach approximately 400 km/h (249 mph).

The piston-engine Shahed lives squarely in the Yak-52’s performance neighborhood. The jet-powered Shahed does not.

That distinction will become important in a moment.

The Yak-52 offers Ukraine something a truck-mounted machine gun can never provide: geometry. A ground-based crew has to wait for a Shahed to enter their firing arc, hold still long enough to engage, and accept whatever angle the drone decides to present.

A Yak-52 crew can chase the drone, match its altitude, position behind or alongside it, and reduce closure rates enough that a rifleman in the rear seat becomes a realistic threat. The problem shifts from “hit a moving aerial target from the ground at night” to something considerably more tractable.

That’s the entire logic. The airplane is a targeting solution.

The rifle: where the physics get interesting

I can tell you from my infantry service, the weapon is an AR-pattern carbine fitted with a compact red dot optic; the right call for this mission. Magnified optics would slow target acquisition at the ranges this crew is actually working.

A red dot says the gunner already knows he’s solving a close-range problem, not a long-range one.

My farthest qualification target in the Army was 300 meters. That was a stationary target from a stable position.

It was hard. Not impossible, that’s why it was a qualification standard, but there was nothing casual about it. A standard M4-type 5.56mm carbine carries a published maximum effective range of around 500 meters on a point target.

The M16A4 stretches slightly further, around 550 meters for point targets. Those are ground-based figures under controlled conditions.

Now put that same shooter in the rear cockpit of an aircraft moving roughly 100 to 150 miles per hour. The shooter is fighting aircraft motion, turbulence, muzzle blast, awkward body position, sight offset, a limited firing window, and the general physiological experience of hanging partially out of a Soviet trainer at altitude.

The drone he’s shooting at is moving 100 to 125 miles per hour on its own vector. The geometry changes constantly.

And yet the video shows a kill. Several in fact.

The reason is distance.

The Yak-52 crew almost certainly isn’t making a 400-meter rifle shot. They’re closing to a range where the rifle stops being a precision instrument and starts being a close-quarters solution.

That detonation debris cloud is just off the wingtip. The Yak-52’s wingspan is roughly 9.3 meters, and the visible wing section in the video is maybe half that, and the explosion appears to be perhaps 20-40 meters from the aircraft.

Still some decent marksmanship given all of the variables, but it also means that crew is close enough for the detonation to be a genuine threat to the aircraft.

But why does it look so far away in the footage?

Well, the gunner is wearing a Go-Pro-style action cam with its notorious fish-eye view. This makes things around the edges of the frame appear extremely close, and things in the center of the frame appear farther than they are.

This dynamic also explains why shotguns keep surfacing in Ukrainian drone defense.

Benelli’s purpose-built M4 A.I. Drone Guardian, for instance, is advertised for optimal effectiveness from 0 to 50 meters, with an extended range up to 100 meters. The anti-drone small arms conversation has collectively recognized that the weapon isn’t the hard part… closing the distance is.

Once you solve distance, the weapon becomes much less important.

The Yak-52 solves distance. The rifle just finishes the job.

Why not just mount a gun on it

This is the obvious follow-up question, and it has a frustrating answer.

The Aviationist notes that Ukraine appears to be relying on handheld weapons rather than wing-mounted or podded guns because airframe modification is technically difficult and tedious.

A trainer aircraft wasn’t designed around recoil loads, gun harmonization, ammunition feed systems, wiring, sensors, or combat integration. You can bolt something to an airplane quickly. You can make it safe, accurate, reliable, maintainable, and repeatable only after engineers turn it into a multi-month engineering project.

A man with a rifle is available today. A properly integrated gun pod is available after a process that will outlast several Shahed campaigns.

Ukraine picked the option that works now.

There’s a harder problem developing, and it should worry anyone watching this approach with admiration.

Russia is learning.

Business Insider reported in December 2025 that a Ukrainian Sting interceptor drone shot down a Shahed carrying an R-60 air-to-air missile. Wild Hornets assessed that Russia may be actively working to counter the Ukrainian helicopters and aircraft conducting drone intercepts.

That represents a strategic shift: Russia has noticed the hunters, and it’s arming the prey.

A Yak-52 with a rifleman has no answer for a Shahed that shoots back. It has no electronic warfare protection, no missile warning system, no countermeasures, and no margin for error if Russian air defenses or armed drones enter the engagement.

The performance envelope that makes it useful against a slow one-way attack drone, low and slow, also makes it uniquely vulnerable.

This isn’t a reason to dismiss what Ukraine is doing. It’s a reason to understand what needs to come next.

The real argument: fill the gap with something designed for it

This is not a Ukrainian problem. All nations will need to recalibrate their air forces and ground based air defense to adjust to the low and slow problem set.

The Yak-52 has stumbled into a capability gap that NATO should have anticipated and filled years ago.

The Iranian regime may be oppressive assholes, but credit where credit is due. While the rest of the world was dumping millions of greenbacks into hypersonics, they were creating a simple weapon that would destroy the economics of air defense. Then they exported it to Russia where Ukraine has been innovating around it for years.

Modern air defense architecture was built around two assumptions: the threats worth killing are either very fast (jets, cruise missiles) or very small and stealthy (ballistic missiles, maneuvering warheads).

The systems procured to defeat those threats, Patriots, NASAMS, F-16s, F-35s, are extraordinarily capable against those specific targets. Against a 200 km/h propeller drone that costs $35,000 to manufacture, they’re the wrong answer, financially and operationally.

The Yak-52 is Ukraine’s improvised bridge across that gap. What the gap actually demands is a purpose-built aircraft optimized for the low, slow, cheap aerial threat environment.

Three platforms illustrate what that looks like.

The A-29 Super Tucano is a turboprop light attack aircraft designed for counterinsurgency, armed reconnaissance, and operations in low-threat airspace.

Published specifications put it at around 590 km/h maximum speed, roughly 520 to 535 km/h cruise, a stall speed around 148 km/h, approximately 1,800 kg of external payload, and endurance that can stretch for hours depending on stores and fuel load.

That performance band makes it dramatically more capable than the Yak-52 against the full Shahed speed spectrum, including the jet-powered variants, while still slow enough to engage the piston-engine targets without screaming past them at fighter-jet closure rates.

It can carry guns, rockets, and guided munitions. It has a real sensor suite. Its crew doesn’t have to lean out a window.

The A-10 Thunderbolt II makes a compelling case on paper, and the GAU-8 Avenger; a 30mm rotary cannon that fires nearly 4,000 rounds per minute, is exactly the kind of overwhelming kinetic solution you’d want against a drone corridor.

The A-10 is also slower than virtually every other jet in the NATO inventory, armored, survivable, and designed for low-altitude work. There’s one honest complication: its stall speed sits around 220 km/h, which is faster than a piston Shahed’s cruise speed.

Slowing an A-10 down enough to engage the slower Shaheds without departing controlled flight is a real tactical constraint.

Against the jet-powered Shahed variants and as a corridor-clearing platform that can sanitize a known ingress route quickly, the A-10’s argument gets considerably stronger.

The Textron Scorpion might be a good option also. Textron lists it at 450 KTAS maximum speed, a 45,000-foot service ceiling, a 3,000-pound internal payload bay, and six hardpoints.

It was designed for ISR and light strike at a fraction of the cost of high-end combat aircraft. For persistent drone intercept operations, it offers the performance envelope to address fast Shaheds while remaining economically viable as a daily operational platform.

As of now, NATO is content to equip fast-movers with rockets.

That’s where APKWS comes in.

APKWS, the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, is basically a guidance kit that turns a standard 70mm Hydra rocket into a laser-guided precision weapon. It was originally designed to give helicopters and aircraft a cheaper way to hit ground targets without firing a Hellfire missile at every truck, bunker, or unlucky technical that wandered into the wrong grid square.

The US Navy describes APKWS II as a conversion of the unguided Hydra 2.75-inch rocket, adding laser guidance to create a relatively inexpensive precision-kill weapon.

Now that same logic is moving into counter-drone work.

The US Air Force has already used APKWS in an air-to-air role against drones. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the service first demonstrated APKWS II could be used effectively from an F-16 against aerial targets in a 2019 test.

Since then, US fighters have used APKWS to shoot down drones in the Middle East because it gives pilots a cheaper and more plentiful weapon than AIM-9 Sidewinders or AIM-120 AMRAAMs.

Business Insider reported that during Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis, US fighter aircraft used APKWS rockets for nearly 40 percent of drone kills. These were fired from F-16s and F-15s, giving US pilots a lower-cost alternative to burning through premium air-to-air missiles against cheap drones.

The F-15E Strike Eagle has become especially interesting here. Air Combat Command announced in September 2025 that the F-15E had completed expedited testing with the AGR-20F APKWS variant, including live fires against targets over land and water, as part of a rapid fielding effort.

The War Zone reported that an F-15E configured for this role could carry up to 42 APKWS II rockets along with traditional air-to-air missiles, turning the aircraft into a drone and cruise-missile hunting weapons truck.

That’s the key phrase: weapons truck.

An F-15 carrying a few expensive missiles is lethal, but limited. An F-15 carrying dozens of laser-guided rockets has magazine depth. Against a swarm of cheap drones, magazine depth is oxygen.

You don’t want a fighter returning to base after killing three flying mopeds because it ran out of affordable shots. You want it to stay on station and keep deleting targets until the swarm thins out.

The Eurofighter Typhoon is moving the same direction. In April 2026, BAE Systems announced that it had successfully test-fired an APKWS-equipped weapon from a Eurofighter Typhoon, specifically presenting the trial as a lower-cost answer to uncrewed aircraft systems.

I have a YouTube video coming out next Monday about the APKWS Eurofighter Typhoon.

Breaking Defense reported that the test was internally funded by BAE and that the system uses APKWS guidance kits to convert 2.75-inch rockets such as the Hydra 70 into precision weapons.

That matters for NATO’s eastern flank.

Typhoons, F-16s, F-15Es, and potentially Gripens are all being pushed toward a world where fighters don’t just duel other fighters. They hunt drones.

This is where Ukraine’s Yak-52 starts to look less like an oddity and more like the first ugly draft of a new doctrine.

Ukraine is using what it has: trainers, rifles, mobile gun teams, interceptor drones, electronic warfare, helicopters, and Western air defenses. NATO is trying to build the cleaner version: fighters loaded with cheaper guided rockets, supported by sensors, datalinks, and command networks that can assign the right weapon to the right target.

Bottom line

The specific aircraft matters less than the concept: persistent, armed, sensor-equipped platforms with enough speed to intercept slow threats and enough payload to kill them without expending million-dollar weapons.

A layered defense built around electronic warfare, interceptor drones, mobile gun systems, helicopters, and purpose-built low-and-slow manned aircraft represents a sustainable economic answer to mass drone campaigns.

Individual components of that layered defense are already proven. The gap is the dedicated hunter-killer aircraft sitting between the pickup trucks and the F-16s.

The Yak-52 with a rifleman in the back is proof the gap exists. It’s also proof the gap can be closed for far less money than anyone in a peacetime procurement office was willing to spend.

The larger lesson is for NATO planners who should be watching this footage and asking themselves why the most cost-effective drone intercept platform currently operating in the world’s most active air war is a forty-year-old aerobatic trainer armed with a carbine.

The answer is uncomfortable: because nothing better was procured.

Because the threat wasn’t taken seriously until it showed up over Kyiv.

Because the gap between a Patriot battery and a guy with a machine gun in a pickup truck was considered someone else’s problem.

Because APKWS is just a stopgap.

Ukraine filled that gap with what it had.

The question for everyone else is what they’re building to fill it properly.

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

Think of this as your weekly, quick 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. This doesn’t necessarily telegraph what I’ll be writing about this Tuesday (free), Wednesday (paid), Friday (free), or Sunday (paid); rather, these hit my radar and are worth mentioning to kick off your week!

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

Let’s jump in:

1. The Hormuz “Guidance” Mission Is the Most Dangerous Thing Happening Right Now

Let’s be precise about what the US just announced, because the word “guidance” can be confusing. The US Navy is planning to escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway Iran’s parliament is now on record saying will “not return to its pre-war state.” Iran has explicitly warned that the escort mission violates the ceasefire.

Two carrier strike groups, Abraham Lincoln and George H.W. Bush, are sitting in the Arabian Sea.

Trump’s plan, dubbed “Project Freedom,” may soon produce the first US Navy escort convoy in the Strait of Hormuz that draws fire. Iran has declared that Hormuz will not return to business as usual. The United States is now preparing to physically escort commerce through it. Put those two policies in the same narrow waterway and you don’t need a crystal ball to see where the sparks are likely to fly.

Iran has staked domestic credibility on controlling access to Hormuz. The United States has staked credibility on freedom of navigation. Those two positions cannot comfortably coexist inside a 21-mile chokepoint, especially when both sides have already climbed high enough up the ladder that climbing down looks politically expensive. That’s how crises stop being press statements and start becoming radar contacts.

What I’m watching: The first actual convoy movement announcement. Watch Iranian naval and IRGC positioning in the strait in the 24 hours before and after any announced escort. Watch whether China or India formally protests US escort operations on their behalf. And watch Trump. His “not yet paid a big enough price” framing is either a negotiating posture designed to extract maximum concessions from Iran’s 14-point proposal, or it’s a genuine policy disposition that ends with airstrikes resuming.

The escort mission will clarify which one.

2. Ukraine Just Hit Moscow and Three Shadow Fleet Tankers in the Same Week

The overnight Ukrainian drone strike on the Mosfilm Tower, a luxury high-rise in western Moscow, represents something categorically different from previous Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian territory in this escalation cycle.

Read more

Let’s take a fresh look at some old news:

In late February 2024, a group of German Luftwaffe officers held a sensitive operational discussion over Webex. You know… Webex, the conference-call equivalent of off-brand cereal in a plastic bag. It works, technically, but nobody involved feels respected.

This time, Russian intelligence was listening.

The 38-minute recording, passed directly to RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan and released on Telegram, was confirmed authentic by Germany. And buried inside the predictable Kremlin propaganda response (Dmitry Peskov breathlessly announcing it proved the “direct involvement of the collective west”) was something worth examining seriously.

Luftwaffe chief Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, discussing how Britain supports Ukraine’s Storm Shadow employment, said this: “They do it completely in reachback. They also have a few people on the ground.”

Six words. A few people on the ground.

Not an admission of war. Not proof of SAS operators personally selecting Russian targets from a bunker in Zaporizhzhia. But also not nothing.

What “On the Ground” Actually Means in a Modern War

Let’s slow our roll, because sloppy framing does real damage.

The Kremlin wants you to picture British commandos sitting at a terminal in Ukraine, personally authorizing missile strikes on Russian soil. That framing serves Moscow’s narrative that NATO is a co-belligerent and that Russia is justified in whatever escalatory response it dreams up next.

The British government’s preferred framing, reinforced by a decades-old policy of neither confirming nor denying special forces operations, is essentially: please disperse, nothing to see here, move along, as the fireworks factory explodes in the background like that scene from Naked Gun:

Former junior defense minister Tobias Ellwood told the BBC the leak was embarrassing to Berlin, while implying Russia probably already knew about any British presence anyway given the depth of its espionage activities.

Both framings are evasions.

As my paternal grandpa used to say, as he was guarding German POWs in Texas as a military police officer, “there are two sides to every story… then there’s the actual truth.” The honest picture sits in between, and it’s actually more strategically significant than either cartoon version.

Modern long-range strike employment, the kind that puts Storm Shadow warheads on Russian logistics nodes 150 miles behind the front, is not a simple pull-the-trigger operation.

It’s a kill chain. And that chain includes target development, intelligence fusion, route planning, electronic warfare assessment, collateral damage review, mission data preparation, and weapons-system integration.

A British officer who spent years working in RAF strike mission planning, now advising Ukraine on how to run that same process for a weapon the UK donated, is doing operationally decisive work from a room that might be in Kyiv or might be in Buckinghamshire.

Gerhartz’s word, “reachback,” is important. Reachback describes how deployed forces draw on rear-echelon expertise and systems. But he immediately followed it by saying the British approach also includes people on the ground. Which implies two simultaneous lines of effort: remote support and in-country presence.

That’s a senior NATO air commander describing a layered support architecture.

The Evidence Ladder

Let’s walk through what’s actually confirmed, what’s strongly indicated, and what remains in the fog.

Confirmed:

The UK ran Operation Orbital from 2015 to February 2022, training Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, that mission shifted to Operation Interflex on British soil, which by June 2025 had trained more than 56,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

Billions in military support have followed. The UK government has publicly acknowledged a small number of defense personnel remain in Ukraine for “capability development” work.

That last point became tragically concrete on December 9, 2025, when Lance Corporal George Hooley died in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense confirmed Hooley was a serving British soldier observing Ukrainian forces test a new defensive capability, specifically, a drone system, away from the front lines.

Read more

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in earnest in 2022, I had already been writing about the conflict for over five years. I called it “Europe’s forgotten war.” But when the full-scale invasion happened, I actually believed that Russian mass alone would eventually overwhelm the defenders and Ukraine would need to transform itself into an insurgency.

Ya know, make life hell for the occupiers.

I was in good company. The massive US intelligence apparatus got it wrong too.

You see, the instinct when comparing Russia and Ukraine is to count things like tanks, aircraft, artillery tubes, and population…

On that scoreboard, Russia still looks formidable: larger army, larger air force, larger missile inventory, larger industrial base, and a nuclear arsenal designed to end the convo.

But I’ve learned a crucial lesson since then: That scoreboard is dead wrong.

Russia entered February 2022 with every numerical advantage that scoreboard rewards.

Then, it failed to seize Kyiv.

It failed to destroy Ukraine’s air defense network.

It failed to dominate the Black Sea.

It failed to convert numerical superiority into strategic victory.

Four years later, the war has exposed something my tank-counting approach misses entirely: combat power isn’t what a country owns. It’s what its military can see, hit, repair, replace, learn, and adapt faster than the enemy.

By that measure, Ukraine’s story is extraordinary.

2014: The Army That Barely Existed

When Russian aggression began in 2014, Ukraine’s armed forces were hollowed out.

The IISS estimated that only around 5,000 to 6,000 soldiers out of a nominal force of 120,000 to 130,000 were genuinely combat-ready. The initial response to Crimea was handed to the SBU, the security service, which itself was a confession about the state of the military.

Volunteer battalions and civilian networks filled gaps the state couldn’t.

Ukraine had inherited Soviet structures without Soviet scale, and two decades of neglect, the 1990s and 2000s, had turned those structures into bureaucratic shells.

Logistics, readiness, command culture, and mobilization were all weak. Russia’s seizure of Crimea and intervention in Donbas forced the West into the obvious discovery that Putin was, in fact, a threat to his neighbors.

By 2016, Ukraine had expanded the AFU to roughly 250,000 personnel, begun shifting units east, and started reforming command structures toward NATO standards.

Eight years of grinding, low-intensity war in Donbas followed.

US and NATO trainers rotated through western Ukraine for years, helping Ukrainian forces rebuild from the wreckage of 2014 into a more professional, more interoperable, and more survivable army.

The main vehicle was the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine, or JMTG-U. The mission started in 2015 at the Combat Training Center-Yavoriv, located at the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre.

There were also annual multinational exercises like Rapid Trident, which predated the full-scale war and were also held near Yavoriv.

The US Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade began training Ukrainian National Guard forces in April 2015 under Fearless Guardian. The early focus included small-unit tactics and building Ukrainian forces for the fight against Russian-backed separatists in the east.

I was out of the military by this time, but many soldiers I served with told stories of training with the Ukrainians, specifically in awe of their fighting spirit, and very American way of small-unit warfighting where, in the absence of orders, squads reorganize themselves almost organically and keep fighting.

This little American trick, by the way, absolutely astonished the Germans in World War II, (which is ironic because they invented the concept in the 1930s and forgot about it in the 1940s). It was called Auftragstaktik (mission-type tactics), which delegated decision-making to lower-level commanders.

Instead, they were told that the American “dollar army” would surrender if their leaders were killed.

Nope! In the 101st Airborne Division, we were always told, “In the absence of orders… ATTACK!”

So, Putin prepared to conquer a memory of 2014. But Ukraine had spent eight years becoming a problem.

2022: Russia Invaded the Wrong Mother F*cking Country

Russia’s invasion plan rested on several assumptions: rapid political collapse, a paralyzed command structure, and a population that would either submit or wait things out.

Instead, it encountered a Ukrainian military with eight years of combat experience, improved reserves, better local command initiative, Western training partnerships, and a society already wired for resistance. The Euromaidan showed that Ukrainians wanted closer ties with the EU.

But this part is key: Ukraine’s 2014–2022 reforms hadn’t made it a NATO army. They had made it survivable… more durable to shock.

The defense of Kyiv proved Ukraine could absorb this strategic shock and keep functioning. The Kharkiv counteroffensive in September 2022 and the liberation of Kherson demonstrated Ukraine could also maneuver like NATO, seizing collapse points, moving faster than Russian logistics could respond, and exploiting a command culture that had become too rigid to adapt in real time.

But Russia’s biggest failure in 2022 was cognitive. Moscow planned against the Ukraine of 2014 and collided with the Ukraine of 2022.

This was made worse by the sorry state of the Russian military at the time. In fact, the difference between expectation and the reality of the Russian army was the basis for my first dozen or so articles on Medium.

If you go back and read my work here in the early days of the invasion, you’ll find me writing about how pleasantly surprised I was that the Russian army was actually a corrupted mess.

I think one of my early titles was something like “Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Show the Dangers of Believing Your Own Hype”

Actually, here it is:

Putin’s Attack on Ukraine Shows the Danger of Believing Your Own Hype

The Russian invasion of Ukraine reveals a surprising truth about Russia’s conventional military forces: they are not…

wesodonnell.medium.com

But even an incompetent army can still be dangerous.

2022–2023: Learning Under Fire

The first phase of the full-scale war established Ukraine as a serious military. It also revealed what serious military competition now looks like.

Ukraine absorbed Western systems at a pace that surprised even the countries supplying them: HIMARS, NASAMS, IRIS-T, Patriot, Storm Shadow, Leopard 2, Bradley, CV90.

It sank or neutralized large portions of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet as an operational force. It pioneered the use of commercial drones for ISR and artillery correction at a scale no Western military had attempted outside of a defense contractor’s wet dream.

Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive also supplied the sober half of the ledger.

Without air superiority, against layered minefields, Russian electronic warfare, and drone-saturated defenses, Ukrainian maneuver formations paid a brutal price.

Ukraine became stronger because it learned from failure faster than most Western bureaucracies can schedule a low-key appointment at their favorite massage parlor.

Russia adapted too: more Lancets, more EW, deeper defensive positions, and heavier mining. Both sides were turning the front into a continuous military-technical experiment.

2024–2025: Russia Scaled the Old War. Ukraine Industrialized Improvisation

Russia’s adaptation through 2024 and 2025 was largely about volume.

More glide bombs. More Shahed attacks. More North Korean ammunition. More armored assaults absorbing casualties at a rate that would end the career of any Western general who suggested it.

CSIS assessed in January 2026 that Russia’s defense industry was producing significant quantities of tanks, munitions, and drones with support from China, Iran, North Korea, and others.

Ukraine’s adaptation was structurally different.

Ukraine radically shifted from a state-owned defense R&D model toward private companies, civilian engineers, battlefield-driven requirements, and procurement cycles fast enough to move some unmanned systems from concept to fielding in weeks.

The result was a commercial drone industry operating at wartime scale: FPV drones by the millions, naval drones threatening Russia’s Black Sea infrastructure, long-range one-way attack drones reaching deeper into Russian territory, AI-assisted targeting experiments, and improvised counter-drone layers built from interceptor drones, machine guns, and jamming systems.

Russia built a drone war through scale. Ukraine built one through software, workshops, and volunteers.

At the same time, Western defense companies, the big boys and startups alike, were donating weapon systems into Ukraine for a number of reasons: Some wanted to test their shit. Some wanted to hurt Russia. Some had surplus and saw an opportunity to score some diplomatic points.

At the end of the day, Ukraine got its hands on cutting edge Western military kit, like Soft Recoil Technology (SRT) artillery which prioritized “shoot and scoot” tactics.

Russia graciously volunteered to let Ukraine test this equipment on its soldiers and armor. How magnanimous…

Today, the comparison across key categories looks like this:

Russia has the larger population and larger mobilization base. Ukraine faces real infantry strain: exhausted troops, long deployments, mobilization politics, and training quality concerns.

Ukraine’s top general ordered a two-month limit for troops in forward positions followed by mandatory rotation, citing drone-dominated logistics and the need to preserve lives. No amount of drone brilliance fully replaces infantry holding ground in mud, tree lines, and shattered villages. Ukraine has not solved the human problem.

Russia is still ahead in firepower volume. They maintain advantages in artillery mass, glide bombs, missiles, and industrial depth. Ukraine’s edge is in precision, targeting quality, and long-range strike reach.

Ukraine’s deep-strike range grew from roughly 630 km in February 2022 to approximately 1,750 km by April 2026, enabling strikes against oil installations and manufacturing plants sustaining Russia’s war effort.

Russia still has more aircraft, but Ukraine has denied Russia air dominance. Integrated layers of Patriot, NASAMS, IRIS-T, Soviet legacy systems, mobile fire teams, electronic warfare, and drone interceptors have kept Russian aviation from operating freely over the front.

In this war, denial has mattered more than possession.

Ukraine holds the innovation edge with drones and counter-drone systems. Ukraine shot down more than 33,000 Russian drones in March 2026, a monthly record.

Carnegie’s April 2026 analysis concluded that both Ukraine and Russia have moved beyond prevailing Western practices, with the battlefield functioning as continuous military-technical experimentation, and Ukraine ahead in several software and integration categories.

As for defense industries, Russia’s is bigger. But Ukraine’s is faster and closer to the front. About 400,000 people work in Ukraine’s defense sector, and Ukraine’s industry could reduce reliance on Western support if better capitalized.

The structural difference, private-sector speed versus state-sector mass, increasingly favors the side that can iterate.

Ukrainian adaptation is decentralized, unit-driven, and civilian-networked. Russia still adapts, (EW improvements, Lancet refinements, layered defensive doctrine) but the adaptation is slower, more casualty-dependent, and more politically constrained.

Russia adapts after enough men die to prove the previous idea was stupid. Ukraine adapts because survival requires it by Friday.

So, Ukraine has surpassed Russia in modern combat power if modern combat power means: sensor-to-shooter integration, drone and counter-drone adaptation, long-range strike development, electronic warfare flexibility, commercial defense innovation, battlefield software, civil-military technical integration, and the ability to turn scarcity into precision.

Russia still leads in population, mass, strategic missile inventory, aircraft numbers, legacy stockpiles, artillery production, willingness to absorb casualties, and nuclear coercion.

One side is trying to win the 20th century harder.

The other is prototyping 21st warfare under fire.

The Army Russia Created

Russia invaded to demilitarize Ukraine. Then it helped create one of the most combat-experienced, technologically adaptive militaries in Europe.

Whoopsie.

It wanted a submissive buffer state. It got a hardened military-technical power with NATO weapons, domestic drone production, deep-strike reach, combat-tested air defense, and a national memory that won’t be negotiated away.

Ukrainian veterans will be teaching classes at West point and the most prestigious military academies across Europe. They are now the most battle-hardened fighting force on the European continent.

I wonder if Putin feels regret, or at least, a sense of irony for what he’s created? Had he left Ukraine alone and focused on his own military modernization, or at least, eliminate some of the corruption that hollowed out the army, Ukraine may have been an easier target at a later date.

So here we are over four years later. Ukraine is a military technological powerhouse and Russia’s military is a shadow of the mighty Red Army.

Could Putin eventually reconstitute his forces and attempt an attack on NATO? Certainly…

But thanks to Ukraine, NATO forces have increased spending and incorporated lessons learned into their own forces.

And as for me, unlike 2022, I won’t be overestimating Russian combat power any time soon.

Thanks for reading, friends. Слава Україні!

Somewhere inside the Pentagon, someone actually learned something from Ukraine.

Cheap attack drone comes in.

Cheap interceptor goes out.

Expensive missile stays in the magazine.

I know… Revolutionary thinking, right?

Great. Give that Pentagon planner a Dunkin Donut. Possibly a day off.

Then someone followed the corporate trail and discovered that the drone company selling the interceptor is financially backed by the sitting president’s sons.

What worries me is that the Air Force might have chosen an interceptor drone based not on its performance, but to make the Trump family more money.

Because lives will be saved or lost based on the success or failure of these interceptor drones.

The Deal

Bloomberg reported this week that the US Air Force agreed to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from Powerus, a company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

The system in question is the Guardian-2, a semi-autonomous interceptor designed to defeat cheap one-way attack drones of the Shahed variety. The Air Force placed what Powerus is calling a “limited procurement order” after a successful demonstration.

This is happening while the US is in its third month of active conflict with Iran, a war prosecuted under the foreign policy decisions of the same president whose sons are financially tied to the company now selling weapons into that operational environment.

I’ll pause so you can pour some whiskey into your coffee. It helps…

Let’s be honest about something first: America genuinely needs cheap drone interceptors.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than five minutes, you already know this. You’ve heard me talk about the air defense cost curve until you can recite it in your sleep. Shahed-style drones are a real threat. Israel and Gulf states have been bleeding through expensive interceptor missiles trying to knock down $20,000 drones with $2 million Patriot rounds, and the math is killing them. So have US forces in the region.

The solution space is obvious, thanks to Ukrainian ingenuity: you need cheap interceptors that can be produced at volume, fielded by small teams, and replaced fast when they get chewed up.

A perfect system that arrives in 2034 is a war crime against the people who need it in 2026. A decent system that troops can actually hold, launch, and reload, that saves lives.

So, the need is real and Guardian-2 may genuinely be part of the answer. The issue is that we don’t have clear line of sight into the interceptors competing for the same contract, how much better the Guardian-2 presumably is, and whether the decision was weighted by Trump’s sons.

What We Know About Guardian-2

Powerus describes the Guardian-2 as a low-cost, semi-autonomous, high-speed counter-drone interceptor purpose-built to defeat hostile unmanned threats at scale.

The company says the Air Force tested it against capability gaps facing small teams operating in austere environments against Group 1-3 small drones, and that a limited procurement order followed.

A few things worth noting about that framing.

First, a limited procurement order is not a program of record. Powerus itself says so in the forward-looking statement attached to its own announcement.

Second, a purchase order, even a limited one, suggests Guardian-2 cleared some technical threshold. It probably launched. It probably tracked. It probably intercepted something in a controlled environment. That’s not nothing.

Third, and this is the part the press release buries, Guardian-2 is not publicly combat-proven.

A demonstration is a controlled event. Combat is a drunk fucking raccoon with a chainsaw.

Test ranges have planned geometry, known airspace, rehearsed operators, and everyone understands which way is up.

Combat gives you dust, wind, jamming, bad batteries, bent launch rails, operator fatigue, false tracks, friendly aircraft in the kill zone, and a target that absolutely did not read your rules of engagement before it crossed the wire.

“Designed to defeat Shaheds” does not mean “has defeated Shaheds.” “Semi-autonomous” does not mean reliable under GPS denial, electronic warfare, clutter, and the general circus of modern air defense.

Ukraine has taught us this lesson in blood and wreckage.

The battlefield does not grade on a curve. I’ve seen gear that performed beautifully in Kentucky and turned into a Sankara stone from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the first week it encountered real sand and terrified twenty-two-year-olds trying to operate it at three in the morning.

Promising. Demonstrated. Purchased in limited quantity. Not publicly combat-proven.

That’s an accurate description of where Guardian-2 sits.

The company’s co-founder says “the Guardian-2 works. The kill chain works.” I hope he’s right. But hope doesn’t actually save the lives of American servicemembers or our allies (what few we have left).

The Ethics Problem

Reuters reported in March that Aureus Greenway Holdings, (a golf club company… I know, stay with me), backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. planned to merge with Powerus to take the drone company public.

Powerus was founded in 2025. The Trump brothers’ involvement ran through American Venture Partners, a vehicle also backed by Dominari Holdings, a fintech and securities group operating out of Trump Tower.

A golf club company merging with a drone manufacturer sounds like a Mad Libs page from a defense investment conference after the bourbon came out and the prostitutes went home. But that’s the actual structure.

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s former special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, joined Powerus’s advisory board. Powerus was simultaneously trying to sell drone interceptors to Gulf countries that were under Iranian attack and dependent on US military protection.

Remember, these Gulf nations are only under attack because of a war Trump started.

If Obama had done this deal, Congress would already be halfway through impeachment proceedings.

Former Bush White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter warned the arrangement creates “serious conflict-of-interest concerns.”

No shit, Richard. Welcome to the party, pal.

The president controls foreign policy. Okay.

The president controls the chain of command. Slightly more damning.

The president appoints senior defense officials. Is it getting hot in here?

The president shapes the operational environment in which defense contractors make money. Ding, ding, ding! WINNER!

When the president’s family backs a defense company selling weapons into that same environment, the public has every right to demand a full accounting of how that deal happened, who approved it, and whether anyone in the chain of command felt, consciously or not, that a company with that last name attached deserved extra attention.

In a functioning political culture, that would be the boring consensus position. Like “don’t fly into a thunderstorm” or “don’t invade Russia in winter.”

If the Guardian-2 shows up in theater with Trump’s face on the side, or rebranded as 47, or painted gold, I guess we’ll have our answer as to whether this was politically motivated.

The Questions That Require Answers

The best defense of this deal is that the Air Force needed the capability and bought what worked.

Fine.

What was the competitive field? Who else bid? Were other counter-drone interceptors evaluated? What was the unit cost? What acquisition pathway did this run through: rapid acquisition, sole source, Other Transaction Authority?

Did anyone in the White House, the National Security Council, or Trump-adjacent business circles contact Air Force officials about Powerus? Were ethics lawyers consulted? Were conflict checks conducted? Did anyone ask whether purchasing weapons from a company backed by the president’s sons might, at bare minimum, create the appearance of favoritism?

On the capability side: what’s the effective engagement range?

What sensors guide the interceptor?

How does it handle jamming?

Does it require GPS?

Can it operate at night?

What’s the kill probability against actual Shahed-type threats, not a drone that flew a cooperative profile on a clear day in a range environment, but a drone that’s flying low, fast, and autonomously toward something it wants to kill?

Can it discriminate targets in crowded airspace?

What does each interceptor actually cost at scale?

The public record doesn’t answer most of these questions.

That’s a problem.

There’s a corrosive dynamic that gets lost in the procurement weeds.

When foreign governments see the president’s family financially positioned near defense contracts, they start wondering whether buying from that family-adjacent company earns them goodwill.

When military officials see politically connected firms circling procurement opportunities during a live war the president is prosecuting, even unspoken pressure starts to shape decisions.

When the public sees a defense purchase they can’t evaluate because the process wasn’t transparent, every subsequent contract looks like a favor.

What this is, ultimately, is a betrayal of trust.

Democracies run on trust. Western armies run on trust. Procurement systems run on trust. Once people believe the defense acquisition process has become a concierge service for making the president richer, every contract becomes suspect. That’s corrosive to the military itself.

The US military needs to buy fast. The current procurement landscape is devilishly slow. But speed without clean ethics is how you end up with dead soldiers while the rich people are cashing out.

What America Actually Needs

America should buy drone interceptors. It should buy them by the pallet. It should test them hard, break them fast, fix what’s broken, and get the best systems to the people who need them before the threat architecture evolves past the solution.

Powerus may have something real.

Guardian-2 may be part of the answer. The Air Force engineers and acquisition professionals who evaluated it may have made a completely defensible technical decision.

And the Trump family’s financial proximity to this deal is still outrageous.

Those two things can both be true. Simultaneously. In the same sentence.

War is already a machine that consumes money, metal, and young lives at a pace that staggers any honest accounting. It doesn’t need a family rewards program stapled to the side. It doesn’t need soldiers, airmen, or sailors wondering, even briefly, whether the gear in their hands got there because it was the best option or because someone’s sons needed a return on their investment.

The troops deserve equipment selected because it works.

The defense industry deserves a market where companies compete on capability, cost, reliability, and production capacity, not proximity to power.

The public deserves a government that can look them in the eye and explain, with full transparency, how this deal happened and who benefited in broad daylight.

Sunlight, it turns out, is also a pretty effective counter-drone system.

Show the process. Show the procurement path. Show the safeguards. Show the testing standards.

Show who profits.

Because we shouldn’t let anyone make this normal.

— Wes

Слава Україні!

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

I just read a piece arguing that Ukraine’s Leopard 2 tanks haven’t performed “up to expectations” against Russia.

On the surface, the numbers are hard to ignore:

Current Oryx public visual-confirmation data, Ukraine has lost at least 107 Western-supplied tanks, if we count Leopard 1, Leopard 2 variants, Sweden’s Strv 122, Challenger 2, and M1A1 Abrams.

But here’s what analysis almost always gets wrong: the Leopard 2 isn’t failing because tanks are obsolete. It’s struggling because a weapon system is only effective inside the battlefield it was designed to fight on.

“Tanks are Obsolete!” makes for a great, clickbait-y headline.

Here’s a news flash: Leopard 2s also struggle when used in submarine warfare…

When you drop a Leopard 2 into a NATO-style combined arms assault, with artillery suppression, engineers, air defense, electronic warfare, infantry to protect it, tank logistics, and at least temporary air superiority, and you have a terrifying machine doing exactly what it was built to do.

Drop that same tank into a transparent battlefield full of mines, fiber-optic FPVs, loitering munitions, drone swarms, and no friendly air umbrella, and the problem isn’t the tank.

The problem is that the entire system the tank depends on never showed up.

That’s the question NATO needs to be asking right now.

What happens to Western warfare when air superiority doesn’t show up?

The Assumption That Built a Doctrine

To understand why Ukraine is such a disorienting experience for Western defense planners, you have to understand what NATO spent three decades believing about modern war.

It goes something like this: before the first armored column moves, the air campaign clears the way.

Leadership decapitation.

Debilitating cyberattacks.

Runways get cratered.

Air defense networks get dismantled (SEAD/DEAD).

Command nodes go dark.

Electronic Warfare bonanza with Growlers and similar aircraft.

Enemy logistics routes (roads and bridges) get destroyed.

We all just got a front-row seat to this exact playbook in Iran. It’s like CENTCOM followed the US War Bible step-by-step.

And then, only then, does the ground war begin, under conditions where NATO’s maneuver forces can actually maneuver.

If your airpower is good enough, everything else falls into place… At least, this is the way the USAF thinks about it.

I stopped typing and just spent 45 minutes looking through all of my books for an Air Force warfighting doctrine manual I was issued in 2007; it’s quite small and meant to fit in a uniform pocket. I didn’t find it, which means that I need to seriously organize these books into some kind of system.

Anyways, Desert Storm in 1991 became the mental template for a generation of Western military thinking.

Thirty-eight days of coalition air operations preceded the ground campaign. Iraq’s integrated air defense system was dismantled. Iraqi armor moved and died. Coalition armor moved and won. The hundred-hour ground war felt almost inevitable because the air campaign had already hollowed out the opposition before a single Abrams crossed the berm.

NATO internalized that model so completely that the assumption of air superiority became nearly invisible; a given rather than a variable.

The doctrine, the procurement, the training, the expected order of battle: all of it quietly assumed that the hardest part would already be solved before the tanks rolled.

Now, keep in mind that the rest of NATO, with minor tweaks unique to each country, adopted this American model; especially the UK, Canada, France, and Poland.

But Ukraine just spent four years demonstrating what happens when the hardest part never gets solved.

Ukraine isn’t the first battlefield to punish this kind of assumption. It’s just the most technologically spectacular 4K ultra high-definition version of a problem that keeps returning.

World War I is the original data point. The firepower revolution of machine guns, artillery, barbed wire, overlapping defensive fields, outran every attempt at mobility. Armies could still attack. They just paid in bodies for every kilometer. The battlefield rewarded depth, concealment, artillery endurance, and logistics. It punished movement without suppression, and it punished commanders who thought group courage could substitute for fires.

World War II invented maneuver because tanks, radios, motorized logistics, close air support, and operational planning restored the ability to move and exploit. The early German successes weren’t about some mystical superiority of the tank, (although that helped). They were about plugging the tank into a system that could move, communicate, concentrate, and exploit collapse before the defender could react. The tank alone was just a loud metal coffin with ambition. Inside the system, it was decisive.

The Soviet Eastern Front then showed what happens when theater scale and industrial capacity overwhelm operational genius. Maneuver became attrition when the armies were enormous, the front was vast, and the side that could keep feeding replacements into the furnace outlasted the side that couldn’t. Russia has not forgotten this lesson. Europe seems to have.

The Arab-Israeli Wars showed both sides of the airpower equation in rapid succession. In 1967, air superiority enabled devastating armored maneuver in six days. In 1973, dense Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles and anti-tank guided missiles shocked Israeli armor and aircraft in the opening days of the war. The lesson wasn’t that tanks or aircraft were obsolete. The lesson was that combined-arms warfare had become conditional: step outside your protective system, and the battlefield takes you apart piece by piece.

Vietnam offered a different, unconventional flavor of the same humbling: conventional firepower superiority doesn’t automatically translate into strategic success when the opponent refuses to fight on your preferred terms and the political conditions make decisive action impossible.

Each of these wars taught the same underlying principle in different vocabularies. Weapons are only as effective as the system around them. And systems only work inside the conditions they were designed for.

NATO designed its system to keep up with the United States, the most powerful NATO member. The United States, in turn, designed its system for Desert Storm. Ukraine looks nothing like Desert Storm.

The phrase that best captures what Ukraine has become is transparent battlefield.

Across the front lines, you’ll find a drone-driven kill zone extending roughly 20 kilometers in both directions beyond the line of contact. Long-range reconnaissance drones spot movement. Targets are relayed and then struck by precision bombers, kamikaze drones, or fiber-optic FPV systems specifically engineered to resist jamming.

When both sides can see, both sides can strike.

When both sides can strike, movement becomes expensive.

When movement becomes expensive, armies dig.

Once armies dig, mines, drones, artillery, and fortified defensive lines turn what should be a maneuver problem into a grinding engineering problem with a casualty bill attached to every meter.

The Leopard 2 isn’t designed for that. Neither is the Abrams. Neither, for that matter, is the Russian T-90M, which has been turned into burning wreckage by Ukrainian drones, mines, and ingenuity with impressive regularity.

The tank didn’t die in Ukraine. The unsupported breakthrough did.

What collapsed the breakthrough isn’t any single weapon. It’s the intersection of six conditions: neither side can suppress enemy ISR, breach minefields quickly enough, protect assault forces in transit, sustain momentum through the defense, or exploit a breakthrough faster than the defender can rotate reserves to seal it. Ukraine has all six problems at once. So does Russia, on its attacking formations.

This is why the war looks like it does. And this is why Europeans need to understand it clearly rather than treating it as a special case or an aberration.

Because it’s not an aberration, it’s a preview.

What Europe Actually Needs to Build

Read more

Argh, mateys, gather round and let ole Captain Wes tell ya’ a tale about narco-terrorism, congressional improvisation, and America’s hidden pirate kink.

But first, do you have fantasies of swashbuckling on the high seas, answerable to no one except your crew and His Majesty King Trump?

Do you dream about booty, rum, and Port Royal, Jamaica?

Do you have Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean DVD box set proudly on display in your home and watch it at least once a year?

Well then… Your ship has finally come in, because you’re not going to believe this shit.

There is a pirate bill moving through congress at this very moment that would allow private citizens to board and seize vessels belonging to “enemies of the United States.”

First, let’s call it a letter of marque and reprisal, because the Founders had better vocabulary than today’s branding consultants and definitely fewer concerns about search engine optimization.

Basically, this would be a government permission slip that lets private citizens capture enemy ships, seize property, and collect lavish rewards without being hanged by the neck until dead.

Wait, what do 21^st Century pirates even look like?

Pirates with paperwork.

Pirates who invoice.

Pirates who need a Yale-trained maritime lawyer, a Starlink connection, a moderately competent insurance broker, and a Trump-trained accountant who has absolutely seen shit at Epstein Island.

That’s the strange little constitutional ghost now drifting back into public view because Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Tim Burchett introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act… a bill that would allow the president to commission private operators to go after cartel-linked people and property outside US borders.

Before you start recruiting a crew and sailing off to the Strait of Hormuz, you should know that the bill targets cartels, not Iran.

Also, it probably won’t leave committee.

And yet, it’s sitting there on the table like a loaded flintlock.

This isn’t normal.

It is, however, very on-brand for America in 2026.

What a Letter of Marque Actually Is

A letter of marque was, at its core, licensed predation. The government issued a commission. The privateer, a private ship captain, not a Navy officer, was then legally authorized to attack enemy commerce: seize vessels, capture crew, take cargo.

What happened next went to an admiralty court, which sorted out prize claims, took a percentage of the proceeds, and generally maintained the polite fiction that this was all civilized.

The privateer kept the plunder.

The state got deniability, force projection it hadn’t paid to build, and a geopolitical effect it couldn’t easily attribute to itself.

Privateering was a deliberate outsourcing of violence.

During the American Revolution, the Continental Navy was a rounding error compared to the Royal Navy. There was no realistic path to matching British sea power hull-for-hull. So, the colonies leaned on privateers hard.

Private vessels commissioned under letters of marque eventually captured roughly three times as many British ships as the American Navy did. That’s a strategic asymmetry the Founders recognized, built into Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, and used aggressively.

The War of 1812 repeated the pattern. Small public fleet, massive British opponent, privateers filling the gap.

When the Founders put letters of marque in the Constitution, they were solving a real problem with a real tool.

The 1856 Declaration of Paris ended it, formally, for the signatories. Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire agreed that privateering be abolished, and that neutral flags and neutral goods would be respected at sea.

It was a post-Crimean War attempt to make maritime conflict slightly less chaotic.

The United States didn’t sign.

Washington’s stated objection at the time was that abolishing privateering benefited major naval powers at the expense of smaller nations.

The US wanted to preserve the option precisely because it might need it again the way it needed it in 1812.

What actually ended privateering in American practice was the normative shift toward professional military force.

Uniformed soldiers under command authority.

Clear rules of engagement.

Accountability structures.

Courts-martial.

The understanding that when a government commits violence, someone specific is responsible for how it’s conducted.

Privateers didn’t fit that model. They operated for profit.

The current White House loves to pitch privatization as the cure for governmental “inefficiency.”

Need a highway? Toll-road it.

Need a weather satellite? Ask SpaceX.

Need to keep fentanyl out of Kansas? Hire contractors with a letter of marque and tell them to send the receipts to IRS Accounts Payable.

That playbook assumes corporations do everything better than government because they “innovate” and “move fast.” What actually happens is that corporations optimize for share price, not public interest, and their idea of “fast” often means cutting the safety wire and hoping nobody investigates until after the quarterly earnings call.

We’ve seen this play out in uniform.

Blackwater’s convoy shooters turned a Baghdad traffic circle into a kill zone in 2007, torched US credibility, and handed every jihadist propagandist a recruitment video.

Wagner Group did the same on Russia’s dime from Donbas to Damascus, free-agent warlords with shitty judgement and no accountability. Both outfits bragged about doing the job government forces “couldn’t” do.

Handing cartel interdiction to privateers is that same logic in an Old Navy Hawaiian shirt.

Sure, a contractor fleet could nab a few drug barges quicker than the Coast Guard’s deployment cycle.

They could also decide the risk premium isn’t worth it halfway through a pursuit and peel off to protect their insurers; something uniformed crews can’t do because they swear an oath to the US Constitution, not a service-level agreement.

Deregulation fans call this “market discipline.” In practice it means the taxpayer funds a private gun deck, the shareholder creams off a healthy margin, and the public absorbs the diplomatic blowback when a misidentified fishing trawler ends up ventilated.

The chain of blame loops through shell companies, nondisclosure clauses, and Cayman Islands P.O. boxes until Congress finally realizes it just outsourced sovereignty to Delaware LLCs with shitty AI-generated logos.

Professional soldiers wear name tapes and answer to courts-martial.

Privateers wear whatever the contract allows and answer to whoever writes the bonus checks.

Pretending those two systems are interchangeable is how you wake up one morning and discover your foreign policy has a ticker symbol.

But maybe that’s what Trump wants?

The Bill

The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act, introduced in the Senate by Lee in December 2025 and in the House by Burchett the prior February, would authorize the president to commission “privately armed and equipped persons” to seize cartel members and cartel-linked property outside US borders, on land or sea.

Operators would be required to post a security bond. The bill specifies targets as individuals the president “determines” to be cartel members or cartel-linked conspirators “responsible for an act of aggression against the United States.”

Burchett envisions the “pirates” as retired “top-tier” SEALs, Special Forces, Marine Raiders working as private contractors. Lee said, “cartels have replaced corsairs in the modern era.”

Elon Musk replied to Lee’s post on X: “This would work incredibly well, as it has throughout history.” Donald Trump Jr. called it an “effective, efficient, DOGE-compliant way to combat Mexican drug cartels.”

The bill is currently sitting in committee. House version: Foreign Affairs. Senate version: Foreign Relations. Neither is moving at the moment.

Where the Legal Seas Get Rough

Let me run the kill chain on this, because the practical problems stack up fast once you work through even one operational scenario.

Let’s start with sovereignty. The bill authorizes seizures outside US borders. That means operating inside other countries’ territorial waters or on their soil without their permission. Mexico, where most cartel activity is concentrated, has not invited American privateers.

The legal framework for what happens when a privately commissioned American operator seizes a cartel member inside Mexico City doesn’t exist. It would have to be invented in real time, after something goes very wrong.

Then there’s the identification of the bad guys. The president determines who qualifies as a cartel member. That’s a presidential determination, not a judicial finding.

The privateer then acts on that determination in a foreign environment with incomplete intelligence. Cartel networks are deliberately opaque. They use intermediaries, cutouts, and civilians who don’t know what they’re working for.

Mistaken identity in this context is a dead civilian and an international incident.

What about cartel retaliation? Cartels aren’t pirate crews from the 18th century. They have surveillance capabilities, counter-intelligence operations, and a demonstrated willingness to kill people’s families.

Private operators working against cartels without the force protection infrastructure of a military unit are exposed in ways that active-duty special operations forces are not. And unlike military personnel, their families are not on a guarded installation.

The bill says privately armed persons can seize “persons.” Okay. Then what? Who takes custody? What legal process governs detention? Where are they held? What are the rights of the detainee? Is this an extradition? An extraordinary rendition? A citizen’s arrest that crosses an international border under a congressional commission?

Every military lawyer I’ve ever encountered would have a fucking brain aneurysm.

Evidence handling is not to be trifled with. If the point is eventually to prosecute cartel members in US courts, evidence gathered by private operators working under a letter of marque exists in a legal category that nobody has mapped. Chain of custody, admissibility, coercion standards? The discovery phase alone would be a decade of litigation.

When a private operator with a letter of marque commits a war crime, and statistically, someone will, who is responsible? The president who issued the letter? Congress that authorized the authority? The contractor?

If the answer is “mostly just the contractor,” then we’ve built a perfect vehicle for plausible deniability, which is exactly what critics of private military companies have been arguing against for thirty years.

What This Actually Tells Us

The bill will probably not pass. The jurisdictional and legal problems are severe enough that the committee memberships with oversight know it can’t survive serious scrutiny.

And the Trump administration, which has been perfectly willing to use the military kinetically against drug trafficking operations, hasn’t publicly championed the Lee-Burchett approach.

But the bill’s existence is the point worth examining. It shows an administration, cheered on by the deregulate-everything crowd, that’s ready to treat centuries-old legal curiosities as policy pilots.

Expedience over doctrine, results over guardrails.

That urge should worry every sober strategist.

A letter of marque hands lethal authority to contractors who answer to investors first and courts maybe. It bypasses clear chains of command, sidesteps judicial review, and mortgages America’s credibility (whatever we have left) on the promise that profit will align with national interest.

History says it rarely does.

Want bold thinking?

Fine. Fund the Coast Guard, fix inter-agency intel, tighten export controls, pressure the money men who launder cartel cash. Those moves are hard, public, and accountable.

Unfortunately, these are some of the other weird bills making their way through Congress:

A House proposal has suggested adding Donald Trump’s likeness to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

A $250 Bill with Trump’s Image: Legislation was proposed to mint a new denomination of US currency featuring Donald Trump to coincide with the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

Also, proposals have been made to compel the US Department of State to establish a “Trump Peace Prize” award.

But “Pirates” might take the taco, so to speak. When lawmakers start rummaging through the constitutional attic for exotic weapons, remember what happens after the novelty wears off.

The contractors go home and the taxpayer has to mop up the diplomatic spill.

The bill’s mere existence should remind us that the next time frustration meets nostalgia, Congress might actually pull the trigger.

So, here we are. Congress has found the dusty chest labeled, “Things We Probably Shouldn’t Bring Back,” pried it open with a cutlass, nearly grabbed human slavery or Scarlet fever, but grabbed piracy instead.

Yo, ho, ho… Batten down the hatches, hide the booty, and keep one eye on the horizon.

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 and strategic tells 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:

Let’s jump in:

1. Iran’s Peace Proposal Is Real

Iranian officials have transmitted a new proposal through Pakistani intermediaries. The offer is straightforward in structure and complicated in reality: reopen the Strait of Hormuz, end the war, and defer nuclear negotiations to a later phase.

That last part is doing a lot of work.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has now met with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, which tells us Tehran isn’t treating Moscow as background scenery. Russia’s role matters here, whether as diplomatic cover, strategic patron, or possible mediator.

Putin pledged support for Iran and again floated Moscow’s offer to store Iranian enriched uranium.

Trump has publicly said Tehran “can call,” so the diplomatic door is open, at least in the rhetorical sense. But the structural problem hasn’t changed. Iran wants to separate Hormuz from the nuclear file. Washington still wants Iran’s nuclear program dealt with as the central issue.

Prediction markets like Polymarket have a roughly 30% probability of a formal ceasefire extension. That’s sophisticated money saying there’s a real diplomatic channel, and there’s also a decent chance the whole thing collapses once the nuclear issue re-enters the room wearing steel-toed boots.

What I’m watching: Araghchi’s Moscow meetings, especially whether Putin publicly backs the Iranian framework or offers Russia as a guarantor or custodian for nuclear material. That would change the negotiating geometry. I’m also watching oil. WTI was hovering around $95-$96 as talks stalled and Hormuz traffic remained constrained.

A credible breakthrough could knock crude down hard. A collapse could send it back above $100. The futures market will tell you what diplomats won’t, usually with less poetry and more blunt-force trauma.

2. Three Carrier Strike Groups in CENTCOM, The Last Time This Happened, We Invaded Iraq

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April 26, 1986.

April 26, 2026.

Forty years apart. And the same reactor is still in the news.

There’s a dark symmetry to the fact that, on the exact anniversary of the worst nuclear disaster in human history, we’re having a serious conversation about whether Russia is deliberately attacking Chernobyl and using the area as a flight corridor for hypersonic missiles.

While many are spending today holding memorials, reading retrospectives, and watching documentaries about liquidators who sacrificed their lives to contain the uncontainable, Ukraine’s chief state prosecutor is briefing Reuters about 35 Kinzhal missiles tracked flying within 12 miles of the Chernobyl site, and three of them falling within six miles of the Khmelnytskyi nuclear facility after malfunctioning mid-flight.

The cause of those failures? Unknown. The debris showed no signs of interception. They just... fell.

Russian junk.

Where We Left Off

If you’re a long-time subscriber, you may remember my piece from May last year when a Russian kamikaze drone punched a hole through the New Safe Confinement; the $2 billion steel arch that sits over the radioactive ruins of Reactor 4, containing 200 tons of corium, graphite, and cesium-137.

The New Safe Confinement is a pressure-managed envelope; the interior is kept 5 to 8 pascals below outside atmospheric pressure so that any air movement flows inward, not outward.

Think of it as the same logic as a biohazard isolation ward. As long as the shell is unbroken, radioactive particulates stay inside.

Russia broke the shell.

A drone, slow-moving, GPS-guided, programmable, struck the arch, tore through both walls of its double-layered steel skin, ignited the waterproof insulation lining, and burned for nearly three weeks.

Emergency crews had to punch new holes into the structure to reach spreading fire. Every access point became a new potential escape route for radioactive dust.

The negative pressure differential? Gone. The containment logic? Compromised.

The question of the hour is this: Did Russia intentionally strike the New Safe Confinement structure? Or is the Russian military just incompetent?

I’ve struggled with this question since early 2023, when it became obvious that Russia was targeting civilian apartment complexes and other non-military targets.

So, they’re either world-class assholes or woefully unable to strike military targets at long range, (the best they can hope for is terror strikes against civilians).

I’ve since come to the conclusion that it’s actually both.

The Russian military, and the Muscovite culture more generally, have a lesser regard for human life than the West. One needs only look at the atrocities of Bucha to see that reality in all its horror.

But I also think that their kill chain is fundamentally broken; specifically, the Russian military’s ability to find, fix, and track military targets that are on the move. There are a few reasons for this, but they mostly come back to a half-functioning ISR capability. They don’t fly AWACS in Ukraine, obviously, and their poor-quality satellite ISR is delayed by up to 72 hours; by the time they have targeting coordinates, the Ukrainian military targets have relocated.

So, what’s a nuclear regional power with diminishing precision munitions to do? Use them against big, stationary, civilian targets. We can’t miss!

Anyways, back to Chernobyl, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development now puts the minimum repair bill at €500 million, roughly $675 million, and warns that without urgent action, “irreversible corrosion” of the structure could begin within four years.

Four fucking years.

What the New Data Actually Tells Us

Ukraine’s chief state prosecutor, General Ruslan Kravchenko, has been systematically documenting what Russia’s doing in the airspace above Ukrainian nuclear sites, and his findings are worth reading slowly.

Thirty-five Kinzhal hypersonic missiles have been tracked passing within approximately 12 miles of either the Chernobyl site or the Khmelnytskyi nuclear facility in western Ukraine.

Eighteen of those passed near both locations in a single mission.

These aren’t subsonic Shaheds limping toward a target at 115 mph. The Kinzhal is a hypersonic ballistic missile capable of carrying a warhead up to 500 kilograms. It travels at speeds exceeding Mach 10.

At those velocities, even a “near miss” of a nuclear facility is a detonation waiting for a slightly different GPS coordinate.

And since July 2024, when Russia really intensified its drone campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure, 92 Russian drones have been tracked operating within three miles of the Chernobyl containment structure.

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This story is BIG if for no other reason than this is the first “weapon” the famously pacificist country has sent to Ukraine.

But Japan has been in Ukraine’s corner for a while now, politically, economically, and diplomatically.

Still, April 17, 2026, marked something different.

That’s when Tokyo-based Terra Drone, working alongside Ukrainian partner Amazing Drones, began operational deployment of their jointly developed interceptor drone with a Ukrainian unit tasked with hunting Russian uncrewed systems.

This is a Japanese company investing in a Ukrainian defense startup, co-developing a battlefield system, and putting it into a live war.

Putin noticed. Russia summoned the Japanese ambassador earlier this month to protest Terra Drone’s investment in Amazing Drones. When the Kremlin starts lodging formal complaints about someone’s startup portfolio, you’ve touched a nerve.

Aww, is Vlad upset that his old adversary is helping those dastardly Ukrainians?

Of course he is…

Since 2022, Tokyo has quietly stepped up in ways that would put some NATO members to shame.

Humanitarian Gear

Japan has delivered the kind of equipment that keeps soldiers alive and civilians functioning through the grind of war.

This includes drones for reconnaissance, protective helmets, and ordnance-handling kits for clearing unexploded munitions.

Add to that tents for displaced families, winter clothing for soldiers and civilians in freezing conditions, and medical supplies that blunt the humanitarian disaster of Russia’s missile barrages. These aren’t headline-grabbing donations, but they’re the lifeline that makes battlefield survival and recovery possible.

People-Focused Aid

Japan has also opened its doors to Ukrainian evacuees, something many countries far closer to the war zone struggled to manage.

Ukrainian families in Japan have received visas, housing, language training, and even employment support. For a nation known for its historically strict immigration policies, this was a huge shift.

It shows not just solidarity on paper but a willingness to take on the human burden of the conflict, helping Ukrainians rebuild lives even as the war rages.

Economic Pain for Russia

On the economic front, Japan has joined the sanctions coalition with teeth. Russian assets have been frozen, financial pipelines cut, and Tokyo has steadily decreased its reliance on Russian energy, once a cornerstone of its import mix.

Russia counted on Asian buyers to cushion the impact of Western sanctions, but Japan made it clear that it wouldn’t bankroll Putin’s war effort through gas and oil purchases

The SAR Card: Eyes That Never Blink

But here’s where Japan really moves the needle: space. Specifically, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites.

Unlike optical satellites, SAR doesn’t care if it’s cloudy or midnight; it uses radar to paint a high-resolution picture of the ground. Japan’s private company iQPS has already inked a deal to give Ukraine access to its SAR constellation.

I wrote about it here:

That means Ukrainian commanders can see Russian tank movements through cloud cover, track convoys at night, and even monitor camouflage attempts that fool ordinary imagery.

Japan has also sent Ukraine the Morooka PC-065B: the most tactically useful vehicle you’ve never heard of.

But this current aid is a bit of a shift as it’s the first time Japan is co-developing a weapon with Ukraine.

Albeit, a defensive weapon, but still a weapon.

That’s probably why the fielding model is deliberately cautious… perhaps too cautious in my opinion. Japan is sending one unit first, then wider distribution if the system holds up under real combat conditions.

Japan’s Longest Constitutional Pivot

Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution renounced war and constrained its military to a Self-Defense Force in name and doctrine.

For decades, Tokyo layered export restrictions on top of that like limiting arms transfers to five non-combat categories: rescue, transport, warning, surveillance, and minesweeping.

Lethal systems stayed home. Japan was a defense consumer, not a supplier. That posture held through the Cold War, through the Gulf Wars, through the rise of China’s military.

It held right up until it didn’t.

The unraveling has been deliberate and incremental. Shinzo Abe rewrote the foundational framework in 2014. Defense spending got pushed to 2% of GDP, a benchmark that would have been politically unthinkable a decade ago.

Then, on April 21, 2026, the Japanese Cabinet lifted the postwar ban entirely, scrapping the five-category restriction and opening the door for exports of warships, missiles, and other weapons; the biggest overhaul of Japan’s defense export rules in decades.

But removing regulatory barriers does not automatically translate into export competitiveness. Japan’s defense sector has long relied on domestic demand, resulting in limited production scale, and insiders describe a “triple bottleneck” of limited production capacity, fragile supply chains, and a shortage of skilled labor.

Which is exactly why the Terra Drone model is interesting.

Rather than trying to export a legacy system through a new regulatory framework, Terra Drone went and found a partner who’d already solved the hard part, the engineering, in a contested, EW-heavy combat environment.

They brought capital, manufacturing credibility, and global distribution reach. Amazing Drones brought the knowledge that no laboratory can replicate.

The Partner Nobody’s Talking About

Amazing Drones gets one line in most Western coverage of this story. That’s a mistake.

CEO Maksym Klymenko described the company’s origin: “What began as a Ukrainian volunteer initiative by engineers and soldiers has now evolved into a manufacturing hub dedicated to defending our nation.”

Like many Ukrainian defense startups, Amazing Drones built its technical foundation inside one of the harshest drone operating environments on earth: active combat in Ukraine, where GPS jamming, radio-frequency spoofing, and signal denial are daily realities.

Their systems are specifically designed for rapid deployment in conditions where electronic warfare and communication jamming are commonplace.

A drone that fails under Ukraine’s EW conditions will fail in the Gulf, will fail in the Taiwan Strait, will fail anywhere that a peer or near-peer adversary is contesting the electromagnetic spectrum.

Amazing Drones’ engineers have been iterating on hardware with direct frontline feedback, running short development cycles that no traditional procurement process can match.

The company’s own roadmap includes continued improvements to speed, maneuverability, and combat payload; driven by what operators are actually reporting from the field, not what a requirements document written three years ago says they should need.

Terra Drone CEO Toru Tokushige said he personally visited wartime Ukraine multiple times to assess the engineering expertise before committing to the investment.

Meet the Terra A1

The drone itself is called the Terra A1, and the published specs are fairly telling.

Electric propulsion, 300 kilometers per hour top speed, 32-kilometer range (about 186 mph and a roughly 20-mile range for my American readers). It has a low acoustic and thermal signature and VTOL capability.

The Defense Post noted it can accelerate to 200 kilometers per hour in 10 seconds.

Ukrainian operators have specifically praised its handling during sharp turns.

Put that together and you’re not looking at a slow surveillance loiterer. You’re looking at a fast, agile point-defense interceptor, designed to scramble, acquire, and kill, and optimized for quick launch from improvised sites.

Terra Drone is marketing the A1 at roughly 400,000 yen, which is about [carry the one] $2,500.

When this story first broke, Gulf interest in the Terra A1 was framed as “exploratory.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the reporting said, were looking at cheaper options for countering Iranian drone attacks.

As of April 1, 2026, Iran had fired a total of 438 ballistic missiles, 2,012 drones, and 19 cruise missiles at targets in the UAE alone, according to the UAE Ministry of Defense.

Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia all took incoming fire.

In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, drones accounted for roughly 85 percent of strikes, with Iran using drones for persistent, low-cost pressure and missiles where speed or signaling against military facilities was prioritized.

For the first time in history, all the GCC states were targeted by the same actor within 24 hours. Their long-standing nightmare scenario materialized, and they burned through interceptor stockpiles doing it. Terra Drone’s CEO noted a massive surge in inquiries from Middle Eastern clients since the conflict began.

The math the Gulf states are now running is identical to the math Ukraine has been running for two years.

Sophisticated air defense systems, even very good ones, are not designed to sustain a campaign against hundreds of cheap drones per day. As my audience definitely knows, (because I’ve been ranting about it for ages), the missile economics break down at scale.

What the Gulf needs, what Ukraine has been field-testing out of necessity, is a cost-matched response. Kill a cheap drone with a cheap drone.

Terra Drone has said it may eventually localize production in the Gulf region. If that happens, the Ukraine-Japan partnership stops being a bilateral story and becomes something more structurally significant: a new template for how combat-proven drone technology moves from a hot war into allied markets with genuine near-term demand.

What “Combat-Proven” Actually Buys You

In the defense procurement world, those two words, “combat-proven,” are worth something close to a golden ticket.

Defense ministries and their procurement bureaucracies are, as a rule, deeply risk averse.

They will run a system through years of trials, certifications, red teams, and exercises before committing to a contract. All of that due diligence is designed to answer one question: will this thing work when it matters?

Combat experience answers that question in a way no test range can replicate, because Ukraine’s electronic warfare environment, the jamming, the spoofing, the signal denial, is more demanding than anything a procurement official can construct on a budget and a timeline.

It’s why European and American defense firms have been sending prototypes to Ukraine for the better part of four years. Ukraine gets to get its hands on bleeding edge Western tech before those countries’ own forces, and these firms can see how their weapons hold up in real combat.

For their part, the Russians have graciously volunteered to be on the receiving end of these weapons. How magnanimous…

But a system that survives that gauntlet carries a credential that is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable.

It’s also why Ukrainian drone companies are now selling globally, why the US and European militaries are paying close attention to Ukrainian UAS doctrine, and why Terra Drone’s CEO flew to a war zone to find his next business partner rather than attending a trade show in Paris.

Okay, so here’s the skinny: If the Terra A1 continues to perform, if the phased fielding validates the concept and wider deployment follows, Japan has entered the combat-proven drone defense business.

That’s a credential that opens doors in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Warsaw, Seoul, the Baltics, and Washington.

Japan’s answer to the cheap drone problem, built with a lot of Ukrainian help, appears to be this: build something cheaper, faster, and meaner than the thing you’re trying to stop. Then prove it works in the hardest possible environment. Then sell it to everyone who’s facing the same problem.

That’s a market that, as of early 2026, has suddenly gotten very large.

Слава Україні!

I walk through how these weapons work, how they’ve been used before by the U.S. and NATO, and why putting this capability on cheap drones would completely change the cost and scale of infrastructure attacks. This isn’t about explosions. It’s about turning the grid against itself.

Bottom line: whether this specific strike is real or not, the idea is, and it changes the rules of the game.

This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to fund independent military analysis with a moderate dose of pro-Ukrainian/ anti-authoritarian humor. If you’re reading this as part of your free preview, please consider upgrading for exclusive deep dives.

Ukraine’s navy, the one Russia was supposed to have crushed in the opening weeks of the war, is preparing to deploy minesweepers to the Strait of Hormuz.

Actual ships, actual crews, for a multinational operation protecting one of the most critical shipping chokepoints on the planet Earth.

On paper, the Ukrainian Navy should’ve been a footnote by now. Russia started this war with overwhelming naval superiority in the Black Sea: Bigger ships, more missiles, deeper logistics, and a legacy fleet anchored in Crimea that had been there since the Soviet era.

Kyiv didn’t try to match it.

Instead of rebuilding a traditional navy, Ukraine built a denial force made of incredibly successful USVs which I’ve covered numerous times.

But Ukraine still has a traditional navy that never gets any press. Let’s call it TRADNAV. (I know, I’m just making up words now, but as autonomy proliferates, we’ll eventually need to differentiate between “traditional X” and ‘autonomous X.”)

Ukraine is building out a future conventional fleet abroad. Its Ada-class corvette Hetman Ivan Mazepa has already undergone sea trials in Turkey, and the second corvette, Hetman Ivan Vyhovskyi, was launched in 2024 and has been reported for later delivery. So the navy still has larger warship ambitions.

But for now, four Ukrainian minehunters are sitting in Portsmouth, Britain.

A small navy in exile…

Two former Royal Navy vessels, now commissioned as Cherkasy and Chernihiv, plus two more transferred from Belgium and the Netherlands, Mariupol and Melitopol.

All flying Ukrainian colors.

None able to get home, bottled up by the Montreux Convention’s wartime restrictions on warship transit through the Turkish straits. And they likely wouldn’t last long in the Black Sea at present.

So, Kyiv adapted. Again.

If the ships can’t reach the war, send them somewhere they’re needed. But first, let’s get into the nerdy tech details of the ships.

The Sandown class: Cherkasy and Chernihiv

The two former Royal Navy Sandown-class vessels, HMS Shoreham and HMS Grimsby before their transfer, are 52.5-meter single-role minehunters built by Vosper Thornycroft and commissioned in the early 2000s. They displace 600 tons, with a beam of 10.9 meters and a draught of just 2.3 meters; shallow enough to work effectively in coastal waters while remaining stable in open-ocean conditions.

The hull is the first thing worth understanding.

Sandown-class minehunters are built almost entirely of non-magnetic materials using a process called SCRIMP, Seeman Composites Resin Infusion Molding, in which resin is drawn into a sealed fiberglass mold under vacuum.

The result is a hull that won’t trigger magnetic influence mines, which is not a minor design consideration when your job is sailing directly over fields of weapons designed to detonate based on a ship’s magnetic signature.

Propulsion is equally deliberate.

These ships run on Paxman Valenta diesel engines driving Voith Schneider propellers and Schottel bow thrusters; a configuration built for precision maneuvering rather than speed.

Voith Schneider propellers work on a cycloidal principle: rotating blades whose pitch can be changed continuously during rotation, allowing thrust to be vectored in any horizontal direction without repositioning the propeller itself.

In practice, this lets a minehunter hover almost stationary over a sonar contact in a three-knot current and 30-knot winds. Its top speed is 13 knots, but speed is less important when your operational posture is to sit still above something dangerous and kill it carefully.

The primary sensor is the Sonar 2093 Variable Depth Sonar, capable of hunting mines in depths of up to 200 meters, across the entire continental shelf.

Variable depth means the transducer head can be lowered away from the hull on a cable and deployed at different depths to optimize acoustic performance depending on water temperature gradients, thermoclines, and bottom composition.

Sound propagation in shallow warm water, exactly what you encounter in the Gulf, is complicated, and a fixed hull sonar would struggle.

The detachable head solves that problem.

For mine disposal, the Sandowns were originally fitted with the ECA PAP 104 Mk5, a wire-guided underwater vehicle controlled via 2,000 meters of fiber-optic cable, carrying a 100-kilogram disposal charge that can be replaced with a manipulator, plus wire cutters to release moored mines from their anchoring columns.

The vehicle can be deployed to 300 meters depth and carries cameras and sonar to transmit sensor data back to the operations room. Later upgrades replaced or supplemented the PAP with the Atlas Elektronik SeaFox system, which we’ll come back to.

Crew complement is 34, with accommodation for 40. That’s a lean team for the amount of precision work these ships do.

The Alkmaar/Tripartite class: Mariupol, Melitopol, and the incoming Henichesk

The Belgian and Dutch transfers, Mariupol and Melitopol, are Tripartite-class minehunters, known as the Alkmaar class in Dutch service and the Flower class in Belgian service.

This is where the Cold War story of international defense cooperation gets genuinely interesting.

The Tripartite design emerged from an agreement signed in 1973 among the Belgian, French, and Dutch navies. France supplied the mine-hunting and electronics systems. Belgium handled the electrical systems and navigation. The Netherlands took responsibility for propulsion.

Each country built its own vessels to the shared design, resulting in around 40 hulls across three fleets; one of the few genuine examples of multi-nation shared naval construction in the Cold War era.

Principal dimensions sit at 51.5 meters overall length, 8.9-meter beam. Standard displacement around 510 tons at sea, maximum around 588 tons.

Its main propulsion uses a diesel system producing 1,370 kilowatts through a variable and reversible-pitch propeller. The auxiliary electric system runs two ACEC active rudders, each with an 88-kilowatt motor, plus bow thrusters.

Maximum speed is 15 knots under diesel, but during mine hunting operations the ship runs on its quiet electric system at no more than 7 knots; the noise floor of a diesel engine would compromise the sonar.

The dual-propulsion arrangement combined with two Schottel bow thrusters enables the ship to hover accurately over a sonar contact in a three-knot current, 30-knot wind; the same precise positioning requirement as the Sandowns, achieved through different engineering.

The hull is non-magnetic polyester and aluminum, no steel, for the same mine-triggering reasons as the Sandowns.

Original sensor fit was the French DUBM-21B sonar, capable of detecting and classifying objects at distances approaching one kilometer and at depths up to about 80 meters.

Beginning in 2003, the remaining Dutch Alkmaar-class minehunters were upgraded with improved electronics, including the Atlas Elektronik INCMS combat data system, Thales 2022 Mk III hull-mounted sonar, Atlas Seafox mine identification and disposal system, and a Double Eagle Mk III Mod 1 ROV (remotely operated vehicle).

That last piece, the Double Eagle Mk III, is worth a brief note:

It’s a reusable mine identification vehicle; basically a small underwater drone that swims to a contact, interrogates it with sonar and cameras, and returns.

It’s the “look before you shoot” phase of the process.

The Saab Bofors Double Eagle Mk III can also serve as a self-propelled variable depth sonar system, maneuvering in front of or below the vessel, tethered by cable, with its position tracked by an acoustic positioning system.

This gives the operator a mobile sonar platform separate from the hull, effectively solving the same thermocline problem the Sandown’s Type 2093 VDS addresses, through different means.

There is a fifth vessel, the incoming Henichesk, that deserves its own paragraph.

Formerly HNLMS Makkum (M857), laid down February 28, 1983 and commissioned May 13, 1985, the ship served with the Dutch Navy for nearly forty years including NATO exercises such as BALTOPS before decommissioning on November 25, 2024.

It was renamed after a Ukrainian naval vessel lost near the Kinburn Spit in 2022. Ukrainian personnel began training before the formal transfer, initially on sister ships including Vlaardingen, before transitioning to operational sea training.

The pipeline included English-language instruction to ensure NATO interoperability. Once commissioned, Henichesk becomes Ukraine’s fifth dedicated mine countermeasure vessel; a small but increasingly serious fleet.

The weapon they’re all built around: SeaFox

Atlas Elektronik’s SeaFox is the terminal phase of minehunting, the part where you kill the thing you found.

The SeaFox is a man-portable system at 1.3 meters long and 41 kilograms, semi-autonomous and wire-guided, capable of identifying mines with a camera linked to the surface via fiber-optic cable and destroying them with an integral shaped charge.

It has a couple operational variants.

The SeaFox-I (Investigate) is reusable, it has sonar and a camera but no warhead, and it’s what you send when you need to confirm a contact before committing.

The SeaFox-C (Combat) carries a 1.4-kilogram shaped charge warhead and is a fire-and-forget weapon: it travels to the target, re-acquires it using homing sonar, closes to detonation distance, and fires. Obviously, it can’t be recovered.

It can operate at depths from the surface to 300 meters, communicates via fiber-optic cable, and achieves up to 6 knots through four horizontal propellers and a vertical thruster.

The operation sequence is fascinating to a landlocked airborne grunt like me.

The ship’s sonar detects a contact. The contact is classified: is it mine-shaped? Does it match known signatures?

The Double Eagle or SeaFox-I goes down for visual confirmation. If it’s a mine, the SeaFox-C follows. Total time per mine is on the order of hours, not minutes.

This is deliberate, methodical work. There is no fast version.

SeaFox hollow-charge warheads are designed to neutralize all known mine types through co-ignition. Basically, the shaped charge concentrates its explosive energy in a specific direction, driving a penetrating jet into the mine’s casing or triggering its fuse.

Whether it’s a contact mine, a moored influence mine, or a bottom-lying ground mine, the physics of the kill is the same.

What they’re hunting: the Iranian mine threat

Naval mines are probably the most underappreciated weapon in modern arsenals. They’re cheap. They’re patient. They don’t need maintenance once placed. And they’re extraordinarily hard to find and remove.

Contact mines explode when a vessel touches them or comes into close proximity.

Influence mines use sensors that respond to the acoustic, magnetic, or pressure signatures of passing ships.

Moored mines float in the water, anchored by chain, and contain smaller charges optimized to damage hulls at or near the waterline.

Iran also operates the EM-52 rising mine, deployed from its Kilo-class submarines; a weapon that sits on the bottom and launches a homing torpedo upward when its sensors detect a valid target overhead.

It’s the mine equivalent of a surface-to-air missile.

Most Iranian mines currently in use are static mines, anchored at varying depths, equipped with triggering mechanisms based on pressure, contact, acoustics, electromagnetic fields, and optical sensors.

Iran has over 5,000 naval mines in its arsenal according to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a doctrine built around exactly this scenario that dates back to the Tanker War of the 1980s.

After Trump’s folly kicked off in Iran, reports emerged of Iranian mine-laying operations in the Strait, and on March 10, CENTCOM announced the destruction of 16 Iranian minelayers and multiple warships.

SECDEF Kegseth actually stole and rewrote a quote from Admiral Bull Halsey from WWII and said “We’re sharing the ocean with the Iranian (originally Japanese) navy. We get the top half and they get the bottom half.” Which was far funnier in 1945 than it is today.

While initial assessments indicated Iran's mine-laying activity was limited, with reports suggesting a few dozen mines laid so far, but in a constricted and critical chokepoint, the psychological and economic impact of even a modest mining operation is immense. The mere threat of mines is often sufficient to paralyze maritime traffic.

This is the context in which Ukrainian minehunters showing up at a multinational planning summit in London today, April 22, with more than 30 countries at the table, lands differently than a routine coalition meeting.

The tactical problem: why mine hunting is hard

The Strait of Hormuz presents a series of compounding nightmares.

Water temperature varies significantly between surface and depth, creating thermoclines that bend and scatter sonar returns, generating false contacts and hiding real ones.

The seabed in the approaches to the Strait is not uniform; there are wrecks, debris, geological features, lost cargo containers, and all manner of other submerged fuckery that all produce sonar returns resembling mines.

NATO doctrine requires ships engaging in mine countermeasures in a hostile environment to have adequate force protection, and in the Strait, with Iranian shore-based anti-ship missiles and Shahed drones in the picture, conducting slow-speed operations within range of those systems is a significant tactical exposure.

Deploying and recovering that equipment takes time, and the ships must remain nearly stationary during operation. At 7 knots or slower, maneuvering in a contested maritime environment, a minehunter is one of the most vulnerable classes of vessel in any navy.

The politics underneath

There’s a strategic dimension here that goes beyond mine clearance.

Kyiv is aware, not without reason, of the fragility of Western support. Questions about US policy durability have Ukraine worried that Trump may align more closely with Russia after the Iran War ends.

Ukraine’s response is to become indispensable to European security planning beyond its own borders.

Showing up in the Strait of Hormuz is a deliberate signal that Ukraine is a net contributor to the alliance, not just a drain on it. Every cleared mine in the Gulf is an argument against drawing down support.

It keeps Kyiv embedded in coalitions that extend well past its own coastline.

That’s leverage, and Kyiv knows it.

The growing fleet nobody’s talking about

Ukraine’s mine countermeasure force is still expanding, which gets lost when people treat the Ukrainian Navy as though it stopped existing after Mariupol fell.

Once Henichesk is commissioned, Ukraine will have five dedicated mine countermeasure vessels: Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Mariupol, Melitopol, and Henichesk.

All of them are expected to remain based in the UK until the war ends, then make for the Black Sea for what will likely be one of the most grueling, underreported naval campaigns of the postwar period: systematically clearing Ukrainian coastal waters of mines Russia seeded across years of conflict.

That mission won’t get many headlines but it may end up being the most consequential naval work Ukraine does this year, outside of USVs.

Russia spent years trying to strangle Ukraine’s access to the sea. Blockaded ports. Mined approaches. Turned the Black Sea into a kill zone.

Now Ukrainian naval crews are preparing to protect global shipping lanes halfway across the world, using the same technical disciplines Russia was trying to deploy against them.

Same war. Different theater.

And if those minehunters deploy to Hormuz, they’ll be doing something Russia’s Black Sea Fleet spectacularly failed to do: keep the sea open.

Ukraine’s navy doesn’t look like a traditional fleet. No carriers. No cruisers. No meaningful number of large surface combatants.

What it has is a playbook, and the discipline to apply it wherever the geometry fits.

Deny the enemy freedom of movement. Use cheap systems to threaten expensive ones. Turn geography into a weapon. When you get access to more traditional platforms, deploy them surgically where they change the calculation.

Hormuz fits that model.

It’s narrow.

It’s high-stakes.

It’s vulnerable to exactly the kind of patient, technical, asymmetric pressure Ukraine has spent three years mastering.

And with Iran having already demonstrated it will mine the Strait when the situation demands it, the world just got a very expensive lesson in how much a handful of specialized ships and trained crews are worth.

A country that started this war with a shattered navy is now shaping maritime operations on the other side of the world.

That’s not something you usually see.

Then again, nothing about Ukraine’s navy has been typical. I’ll keep tabs on these vessels in the coming weeks through their Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders, assuming they leave them on in theater.

Hopefully I’ll be able to update on their combat performance soon.

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

When I was in high school, I read a sci-fi novel called Cold Allies by author Patricia Anthony.

Released in 1993, the book depicts a near-futuristic world war where an Arab National Army invades Europe amidst ecological collapse, while the combatants simultaneously come to terms with alien visitors who decide that global war is the best time to stop by and say hi.

I still remember this book distinctly for one reason: The American way of warfighting was completely remote-controlled. No human soldiers.

Keep in mind, this was the roaring 90s; UGV’s were pure sci-fi, so the fact that one of the American characters controlled a ground-based combat drone with virtual reality goggles was completely fresh.

(This book actually made me want to buy the Nintendo Virtual Boy, until I tried a demo in Toys R Us in 1995. That thing gave me a headache.)

We’re creeping closer to Anthony’s fictional world every day.

In case you missed it, Ukraine just used unmanned ground vehicles to help seize a Russian position without sending infantry directly into the kill zone. No human soldiers! That’s a real milestone, and it deserves the attention it got.

What it doesn’t deserve is the usual burst of overheated coverage about “robots” taking over the battlefield.

Small gripe here, but that word is doing a lot of damage. To most readers, “robot” implies autonomy, a machine thinking and acting on its own.

That’s not what we’re talking about here. “Unmanned ground vehicle,” or UGV, is the uglier term, though it’s the more honest one.

A UGV may be remotely operated, partially automated in narrow functions like navigation or obstacle avoidance, or, someday, fully autonomous. Those are very different categories, and a lot of the press has been steamrolling right over that distinction and confusing the hell out of the public.

Anyways, Ukraine’s recent UGV success is incredible, but Ukraine is solving one battlefield problem. The US Army is trying to solve another.

Ukraine is fighting a brutal war of attrition along a heavily surveilled static line, where sending a machine forward instead of a soldier can mean the difference between holding a position and losing another squad.

The US Army is built around maneuver warfare, speed, depth, and keeping formations moving across large distances.

Same family of technology, different battlefield job.

Which brings me to an interesting UGV story coming out of Fort Polk, or Fort Johnson, wait, I mean back to Fort Polk, (I wish they’d pick a name) where the Army is grinding through what unmanned ground systems look like inside a maneuver force.

I’ve been to Fort Polk twice. The first time was in high school, when my Air Force JROTC unit drove from Dallas to compete in an obstacle course competition. I don’t remember my time on the course. I do remember learning a valuable lesson about stopping too suddenly after extreme physical activity.

I puked my guts out.

Nobody told me you’re supposed to walk for a while (after sprinting for an hour) to bring your heart rate down slowly. Common sense, you say? Apparently not… lol

The second time was in 2000, when I went back as a light infantryman with the 101st Airborne. JRTC, the Joint Readiness Training Center, is where Army units go to find out whether their nice clean tactics can survive mud, confusion, sleep deprivation, and an opposing force that knows the terrain better than they do.

A capability that looks impressive in a demonstration means shit. A capability that survives JRTC starts to become real.

That’s what makes the Army’s work with unmanned ground systems there worth watching.

As of now, American military doctrine is still built around maneuver, speed, mass, and combined arms effects at depth. The Army wants to dislocate and collapse enemy formations.

Granted, the US may be forced into an attritional fight, like Ukraine’s, at some point in the future, but for now, that difference changes the robot requirement completely.

In Ukraine, a ground robot may need to creep forward through an exposed strip of battlefield and complete a narrow task under constant enemy observation.

In a US Army infantry context, a ground robot has to move with the force, support tempo, extend operational reach, and reduce the number of soldiers doing dangerous but necessary support work.

Less dramatic than “robot captured trench,” sure, but potentially far more consequential in a future US fight.

Meet the Hunter Wolf

The Hunter Wolf is the Army’s selected Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport platform; a hybrid-electric 6x6 unmanned ground vehicle built to carry serious loads over rough terrain and keep pace with maneuver forces.

In this video, a Hunter Wolf unmanned ground vehicle assigned to Charlie Battery, 3rd Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 3rd Mobile Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), holds a steady overwatch position with a mounted remote operated .50-caliber machine gun traversing its sector during a combat simulation exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, Louisiana, April 13, 2026. The Hunter Wolf platform has been selected by the US Army for the Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport (S-MET) program. (US Army video by Master Sgt. Anthony Hewitt)

Depending on configuration, it can haul north of 2,200 pounds, with some variants pushing toward 2,800. It offers long off-road range, a silent-mobility mode that would make any infantryman jealous, steep grade performance, pivot turning, and onboard exportable power.

It’s also certified for transport aboard V-22s, C-130s, C-17s, and C-5s.

Hunter Wolf is already pushing well past the old “robot mule” concept. For years, a lot of unmanned ground vehicle discussion basically amounted to this: what if the robot carried the rucksacks?

Trust me, this might not sound revolutionary to a non-combat arms POG flying a desk at the Pentagon, but I’ve had my knees give out while carrying too much weight and had to be MEDEVAC’ed out by Blackhawk at, yep, you guessed it, JRTC Fort Polk. But at least I didn’t puke.

If I had a mechanical beast-of-burden to carry my machine gunner’s 2,000 rounds of 7.62 ammo, I wouldn’t have gotten a free helicopter ride and six months of physical therapy.

Still, the Hunter Wolf gets more interesting when you stop thinking of it as a pack animal and start thinking of it as a mobile node for payloads, power, sensing, and security.

It can carry ammunition, water, batteries, sensors, and weapons. It can feed power to the systems mounted on it. That means it’s not just reducing soldier load, it’s extending the operational life of sensors, remote weapons, and forward positions without requiring more humans to solve the problem.

That’s a meaningfully different battlefield role.

In this video, US Army Soldiers assigned to Charlie Battery, 3rd Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 3rd Mobile Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), transport cargo using a Hunter Wolf Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) during a combat simulation exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, Louisiana, April 13, 2026. The Soldiers utilized the UGV to move several Pelican cases across rugged terrain, simulating logistics support in a contested environment. (US Army video by Spc. Mariam Diallo)

The radar changes the story

The real signal that this platform is evolving beyond a cargo hauler is what the Army has started pairing with it.

Mounted with Echodyne’s EchoShield radar, the Hunter Wolf starts being a moving sensor platform that can contribute to local surveillance and airspace awareness while the formation advances or holds.

EchoShield is a software-defined, pulse-Doppler 4D radar built around an electronically scanned array. It gives a unit the ability to detect, track, and update moving objects with enough speed and precision to see in a chaotic tactical environment.

The specs are impressive. Wide field of view, fast update rates, the ability to track a large number of objects simultaneously, and the capacity to push target data into larger networks.

It’s designed for static, portable, and on-the-move employment. The advertised detection ranges are significant for both perimeter surveillance and counter-drone work.

Now, spec sheets have lied before, defense marketing has never been a monastery of self-restraint, and real-world performance will take hits from clutter, terrain masking, weather, and the general chaos of combat.

Still, even with that degradation factored in, this kind of radar gives a small unit something it routinely lacks at the edge of a formation: persistent, machine-driven surveillance that doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get distracted, and doesn’t fall asleep at a critical observation post at 0300 because it was on its fourth consecutive night shift. I’ve known soldiers who could have used this coverage.

Ukraine’s drone war has proven that logistics routes, support areas, ammunition points, temporary halts, and exposed flanks are all part of the kill chain now. There are no rear areas anymore; just places that haven’t been hit yet.

A platform like the Hunter Wolf, especially with onboard sensing, gives commanders a way to push that security bubble outward without immediately adding more human exposure to do it.

Tack on a .50-caliber remote weapon station and the concept takes another step.

Now the Hunter Wolf can do three jobs simultaneously: haul sustainment loads, extend the unit’s sensor horizon, and provide local security.

That combination is what makes it doctrinally interesting. It helps a commander solve the ugly little tactical equations that otherwise cost time, manpower, and risk.

Do you send soldiers forward with resupply, or keep them back to secure the route?

Do you post someone on an exposed flank to watch for infiltrators and drones, or accept a blind spot and hope nothing crawls through it?

Do you burn combat power protecting support movement, or gamble and keep moving?

A platform like this doesn’t magically eliminate those choices. But it does give commanders a better set of tools to work through them.

One Hunter Wolf moves cargo. Another sits in overwatch, radar scanning, weapon oriented toward likely threat avenues. The Army imagery from the April JRTC rotation appears to show exactly that logic; one platform hauling, one covering.

The Hunter Wolf doesn’t need to replace infantry to be relevant. It only needs to reduce how often infantry are burned on tasks that machines can handle well enough.

On modern battlefields, useful tends to outlast glamorous by a wide margin.

The Army’s problem is not Ukraine’s problem

This is where the Ukraine comparison requires some discipline.

Ukraine’s robot employment is shaped by attrition, static exposure, and the hard demographic reality of replacing losses in a prolonged war. The US Army’s problem set is different: it’s trying to preserve ops tempo across a dispersed maneuver fight while reducing exposure to drones, indirect fire, and an increasingly transparent battlefield.

That means American unmanned ground systems need to keep pace with formations, cross difficult terrain, integrate into command structures, survive electronic warfare, and remain useful when networks degrade.

That’s a harder engineering problem.

A robot assisting a limited assault across open terrain is one thing. A robot supporting a fast-moving combined-arms force across wide expeditionary distances is something else entirely.

None of this means the Army has cracked unmanned ground warfare.

Terrain remains a serious obstacle. Human legs still go places that wheels and tracks hate. A robot that performs beautifully in a training field can become a liability in dense jungle, urban rubble, mountain trails, or the kind of mud that swallows vehicles whole.

The Army doesn’t get to choose only the battlefields where robots feel comfortable.

The electromagnetic environment is another problem. Any platform dependent on continuous communications is vulnerable to jamming and disruption.

Russia and China both understand that. So do smaller adversaries with increasingly common access to electronic warfare tools.

True autonomy would reduce that dependence though meaningful battlefield autonomy in chaotic terrain under fire is still a long way from ready. Civilian self-driving systems already struggle with traffic cones, bad weather, and edge cases in environments designed specifically for cars. A battlefield is worse in every possible way, with the added feature that the enemy is actively trying to break your machine.

Then there’s the human problem, which is always the real problem. Technology gets fielded faster than doctrine can absorb it. Units need clear procedures for tasking, control, handoff, recovery, and engagement authority.

They need to know what happens when the link drops, who decides whether to risk the platform, and how much trust to place in the machine during movement and contact.

This is where the US can really learn from Ukraine’s pioneering work with UGVs alongside human soldiers.

What the real lesson looks like

Ukraine has shown that any machine capable of absorbing danger in place of a soldier deserves serious attention. That lesson is real.

The mistake is assuming it ends there.

What matters for the Army isn’t whether it can recreate Ukraine’s exact robot assault on another battlefield.

What matters is whether it can develop unmanned systems that support maneuver, extend sensing, protect exposed routes and flanks, reduce support burdens on infantry, and preserve combat power on a battlefield where anything visible is targetable.

That’s why the more revealing robot story may be the one unfolding at JRTC right now. Because it’s asking the harder question: what does a genuinely useful battlefield robot actually look like for the US Army?

The Hunter Wolf doesn’t answer that completely.

The technology is imperfect.

The doctrine is still being written.

The vulnerabilities are obvious.

But it points toward a more serious future than the old robot-mule pitch ever managed. It suggests the Army is starting to think of ground robots less as gimmicks and more as components of a wider tactical system.

That’s the part worth watching.

Слава Україні!

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

Thanks again to my paying subscribers who make this work possible. As a reminder, paid subscribers receive two additional exclusive articles every week, in addition to this preflight briefing. If you’re reading this as part of your free preview, consider upgrading!

By the way, if you want to understand how I build my OSINT dashboard, I wrote about my workflow here:

Let’s jump in:

1. The Touska seizure

USS Spruance, an Arleigh Burke-class (Flight IIA) Aegis guided missile destroyer, disabled the sanctioned Iranian cargo vessel Touska in the Gulf of Oman early this morning, firing its 5-inch MK 45 gun directly into the ship’s engine room before US Marines took custody of the vessel. I’ve seen the video of the firing; the US Navy warned the Touska crew to evacuate the engine room before firing.

Iran responded with drone strikes against US naval assets and called it “armed piracy.” Their Foreign Minister says it violates ceasefire terms.

You can watch the Marines fast-rope onto the Touska here:

The Spruance action is the first direct kinetic seizure of an Iranian vessel in this conflict.

What I’m watching: Whether Iranian drone strikes caused any confirmed damage to US naval assets. A miss is one outcome. Watch CENTCOM statements closely. If they’re vague about damage, assume there’s something they’re not ready to disclose yet.

I’m also watching the insurance markets: if Lloyd’s of London war risk premiums spike on Gulf of Oman transits, that’s confirmation the commercial shipping world thinks this just got more dangerous. As part of my workflow, I scan the 10-day review of reported container shipping casualties on Lloyd’s. If you’d like to do the same just remember there’s a 24-hour delay for updates.

2. North Korea reminds everyone that they still exist

Kim Jong Un personally supervised a ballistic missile test this weekend.

North Korea has a long and documented history of running provocations during periods of US strategic distraction, and right now the US is as distracted as it’s been in decades, with the administration’s diplomatic bandwidth consumed entirely by the Iran file.

Kim reads the room. His ego requires that world leaders notice him. A test under direct leadership supervision, announced through state media, on the weekend the Spruance fired into an Iranian ship is Kim making sure the world still remembers that he’s a threat.

The specific detail worth noting: the missiles are described as “upgraded” which may telegraph a capability demonstration. Upgraded from what, and in which direction, matters enormously. Longer range? Maneuverable reentry vehicles? Hypersonic glide?

Those are different threat profiles with different implications for South Korea, Japan, and US forces at Yokosuka, where USS George Washington is currently in port.

What I’m watching: Additional DPRK launch activity in the 48-72 hour window. Kim rarely stops at one test when the strategic environment is this favorable for provocation. Also watch for South Korean and Japanese government statements; their public tone will tell you more about what the intelligence community is actually seeing than any USINDOPACOM (United States Indo-Pacific Command) press conference will.

3. Ukraine just rewrote naval drone doctrine (again)

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces executed the first-ever intercept of a Russian Shahed drone using a drone launched from an unmanned surface vessel. Yup. A USV, operating in a contested maritime environment, launched an aerial interceptor that successfully killed an incoming drone.

Read more

Ukraine has been promised TigerShark’s little brother, the SkyShark.

Thanks for watching, -W

This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to fund independent military analysis with a moderate dose of pro-Ukrainian/ anti-authoritarian humor.

Whoa boy…

In a normal universe, not our dystopian timeline we’re stuck in, this headline would be all the news outlets talked about for weeks, maybe months.

And yet, Trump requesting a US military budget of $1.5 trillion cash American dollars for 2027 slipped under the radar for most people.

This number is obscenely large, even for Trump, which leads me to believe that somewhere between Venezuela and Iran, he finally realized that he wields the single most destructive force the human race has ever seen.

I’m actually surprised it took this long.

It would be like a toddler stumbling upon Mjolnir... And then smashing everything between him and the cookie jar.

Let’s start with the number itself, because it deserves a moment of silence.

One. Point. Five. Trillion. Dollars.

In a single fiscal year.

For context, the entire US defense budget for FY2026, which was itself a record, was approximately $1.05 trillion.

The proposed FY2027 request represents a more than 40 percent year-over-year increase.

To put that in relative terms: the increase alone is $445 billion. That’s approaching the entire defense budgets of China, Russia, and the United Kingdom combined ($520 billion).

Any chance we can allocate some of that money for homeless veterans? Maybe for expansion of veteran mental health services? No? I didn’t think so, but I had to ask…

So what does $1.5 trillion actually buy you? Quite a lot, it turns out… and the choices the Pentagon has made about where to spend it, and where not to, reveal a strategic worldview that’s worth looking at.

The base defense request sits at roughly $1.1 trillion. Another $350 billion would have to move through congressional budget reconciliation, which gives the administration a procedural path but not a guaranteed outcome.

On top of that, the White House is reportedly weighing an additional Iran-related supplemental, potentially in the $80 billion to $100 billion range, largely to replenish expended munitions and sustain operations.

That would come on top of an already unprecedented request.

In nominal terms, this is the largest defense budget request ever put forward by a US administration, and one of the sharpest non-world-war increases on record.

It’s landing while the United States is still engaged in a major air campaign against Iran and burning through expensive missile and air-defense stocks at a quick pace.

Let’s get into it.

The Munitions Reckoning

This is where the Iran hangover is most visible, and it’s the section I’d read most carefully if I were an intelligence analyst in Moscow or Beijing.

The proposed FY2027 budget requests 785 new Tomahawk cruise missiles, up from 55 in FY2026.

Obviously, Epic Fury burned through cruise missile stocks at a rate that alarmed planners.

Similarly, JASSM series air-launched cruise missiles jump from 381 to 821.

AIM-260 air-to-air missiles, a weapon that’s been in low-rate production and wrapped in a fair amount of classification, sees its procurement funding surge from $894 million to nearly $2.94 billion, which strongly suggests full-rate production is now underway.

The AIM-260 is the long-range air-to-air missile designed to outrange anything Russia or China currently fields. That funding line is a statement.

On the hypersonic front, there are two notable entries: nearly $404 million for Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missiles (HACM) and $452 million for AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons (ARRW)… a weapon the Air Force had previously tried to kill after a rough test record.

In my recent article about Ukraine’s air-launched ballistic missile program, I mentioned that the ARRW was cancelled. Soon, that information will be out of date. Apparently, someone decided that the geopolitical environment no longer permitted the luxury of cancellation.

For missile defense interceptors, the numbers border on staggering.

THAAD interceptor procurement jumps from 31 to 857.

SM-3 Block IIA goes from 12 to 136.

Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors, the workhorse of US and allied air defense, climbs from 357 to 3,163.

Heavy employment in Epic Fury and in the defense of Israel clearly exposed the depth problem in interceptor stockpiles, and this budget is attempting to paper over that gap.

One line buried in the Army section deserves special attention: Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) procurement jumping from 108 to 1,134.

PrSM made its combat debut against Iran. This is the replacement, or rather, the successor to ATACMS.

Apparently, the Army likes what it saw in Iran. The PrSM procurement jump is the clearest sign yet that short-range ballistic missiles with precision strike capability are moving to the center of US ground-force planning.

This should be deeply flattering to Ukraine’s advocates, since PrSM’s targeting logic and operational profile were born from lessons learned in the Eastern European theater.

The DAWG Gets Its Day: $54.6 Billion for Autonomous Warfare

Buried in the reconciliation package, and almost entirely absent from mainstream defense coverage, is the single most extraordinary funding increase in the entire $1.5 trillion proposal.

The Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, launched late last year inside the Pentagon with a modest $225 million standing-up budget and almost no public profile.

For FY2027, the Pentagon is requesting $54.6 billion for the organization, a roughly 24,000 percent year-over-year increase that makes every other line item in this budget look incremental by comparison.

This is effectively the US military’s newest branch and may be formally recognized as such in the next few years. Let’s call it the US Drone Corps/Force, or USDC/F.

I can’t wait to see the uniforms… (I say this sarcastically because the Space Force uniforms are ugly as fuck IMO)

That single allocation represents nearly 15 percent of the entire reconciliation package, and it exceeds the entire Marine Corps budget request of $52.8 billion.

To understand what DAWG is and why that number exists, you have to go back to Replicator, the Biden-era initiative that set out to field hundreds of thousands of one-way attack drones by 2028.

The ambition was admirable, but the execution ran into the wall that every hardware-first autonomous program eventually finds: supply chain bottlenecks and drone reliability gaps.

Replicator’s difficulties forced a reckoning inside the Pentagon about how the US was organizing itself for autonomous warfare.

Individual service branches were pursuing drone programs on their own timelines, with their own technical standards, creating exactly the kind of redundancy and interoperability gaps that have historically prompted Congress to establish unified structures.

Space Command in 2019.

Cyber Command’s elevation in 2017.

The logic that produced both of those decisions appears to be driving the DAWG’s trajectory, with internal documents reportedly indicating intent to eventually elevate the organization into a unified combatant command that would coordinate drone, autonomous aircraft, and unmanned vessel operations across all warfighting domains.

A unified command structure for autonomous systems would, in theory, prevent the Air Force’s CCA program, the Navy’s autonomous surface and undersea vessel efforts, and Army drone initiatives from pulling in incompatible directions; a problem that has already cost time and money across multiple programs.

Golden Dome and the Militarization of Space

Ah, space… A literal and figurative vacuum where money gets sucked out of the treasury and dumped into oblivion. If one section of this budget tells you where American defense thinking is headed over the next decade, it’s this one.

$17.5 billion for Golden Dome, the missile defense initiative that envisions a layered, space-based shield over the continental United States.

The concept encompasses new sensor architectures, space-based interceptors, and a vendor pool of over 1,000 contractors already under contract.

Golden Dome is almost a word-for-word plagiarized copy of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) with some tacky Trump branding.

Russia holds the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, sitting on just under 5,600 warheads. Of those, 1,700 are supposedly ready to launch, 2,700 are in storage, and 1,200 are being phased out but could be brought back into play if needed.

This includes big city-busting bombs and about a thousand tactical nukes for battlefield use.

But even if half of Russia’s nukes don’t work, intercepting the other half with a Golden Dome would be financially impossible. $17.5 billion for Golden Dome gets you a handful of interceptions, not hundreds of warheads.

Regardless, the gap between vision and fielded capability in space-based interceptor programs has historically been measured in decades, not years, and that $17.5 billion is just for one year of development.

More immediately telling is the Space Force’s topline, which rises nearly 80 percent, from $40 billion to $71.2 billion.

That is an extraordinary commitment. For comparison, the entire US Army’s budget in the mid-1990s was in that neighborhood.

What’s the Space Force buying?

Among the most significant new line items: more than $7 billion for Space-Based Air Moving Target Indicator (AMTI) capability, (formerly the AWACS mission set) and just over $1 billion for Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) systems (historically provided by aircraft like JSTARS).

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Okay sports fans, break out a cigarro and put on some I Love Lucy; we might be going back to Cuba.

Wait, Wes! Back to Cuba?

Yep. Because the first invasion went so well. I have no doubt that this time, the Cuban people will almost certainly rise up and take back their island. They just need a little help from Uncle Sam, a few trillion pesos, and a dozen secret-squirrel special operators who definitely have lucrative careers in Hollywood once they retire.

Wow, I just had the strangest sensation of Déjà vu.

Oh well, we’ll just use the same playbook we used in 1961...

Scratch that. My editor is telling me on Slack that we should definitely NOT do that.

No problemo, Señor. Let’s dust off the old Desert Storm invasion manual. The Iraqis were pretty sick of Saddam’s shit, and we went in and [checks notes]... Ah, I see they didn’t actually rise up, even with our superb military assistance.

Huh. Okay, 0 for 2, but hang with me here. We went into Afghanistan and liberated millions of people from the oppressive Taliban regime. Even the mighty Soviet machine couldn’t achieve what we did! We seized the country so quickly it made Moscow rewrite their history books.

One sec. My editor is pinging me again.

What’s that? The Taliban currently control Afghanistan? All of it? Every square inch?

Well, they left eventually, so... no? They never left?

Of course I knew that. OF COURSE I know US history.

Well, you can’t fire me, because I quit!

Hi. I’m back.

I’m sorry you had to see that. I’ve had some water and I’ve reminded myself that independent writing is a noble profession that occasionally requires admitting that we have a very specific and consistent track record when it comes to regime change operations, and that track record is not exactly a 1992 Dallas Cowboys highlight reel.

Actually, there are only two examples, out of around ten, where the US (kind of-sort of) affected regime change successfully post-WWII:

In Panama, the US invaded to remove Manuel Noriega. A lot of Panamanians hated him already, and there was real public support for his removal. Once the invasion shattered the regime’s coercive machinery, local resistance to Noriega effectively collapsed and civilian support for the post-Noriega transition was strong.

The US military did the heavy lifting. The population’s role was more political and social than battlefield-decisive.

Grenada is another partial example. After the murder of Maurice Bishop and the rise of the Revolutionary Military Council, many Grenadians were deeply unhappy with the regime.

When the US invaded, there was broad popular relief rather than mass resistance.

Again, though, it wasn’t a classic bottom-up civilian uprising that defeated the government. The regime fell because US forces crushed it, while the local population mostly welcomed the outcome.

But what you mostly find is a parade of cases where Washington hoped local civilians would do one thing, did not fully understand what those civilians actually wanted, and then acted surprised when the whole operation wandered off into occupation, insurgency, civil war, blowback, or some humiliating hybrid of all four.

I know this sounds cynical… To be clear, I SUPPORT our military. As a multi-branch veteran, I want the best for our armed forces. The military completely changed my life; it freed me from poverty; it gave me purpose and direction.

But I protest the way the military is being used.

It just so happens to be currently run by a hyper-aggressive “we’ll take whatever we want” mindset. The whole point of being a great power is that we don’t always have to use force. There is such a thing as restraint.

When you start to recognize, in your own government, the Russian way of warfighting, it may be a sign that we’re on the wrong track…

So, what’s this about Cuba?

Ah yes…

USA Today published an exclusive this week: the Pentagon is quietly ramping up planning for a possible military operation in Cuba, pending a directive from President Trump.

Where are they getting their information?

Two anonymous Pentagon sources.

An official boilerplate Pentagon non-denial that said nothing while technically saying something.

And Trump himself, who told reporters on April 13th, “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” gesturing vaguely at the ongoing Iran conflict like a man walking through Home Depot and admiring the spring flower selection.

The sourcing is thin, as USA Today acknowledges.

But Trump’s own public statements close most of the credibility gap. This is a president who said he expects to have the “honor” of “taking Cuba, in some form,” and added, helpfully, “Whether I free it, take it … I think I can do anything I want with it.”

When the post-Iran Commander in Chief is saying that out loud on White House property to reporters with functioning recording devices, calling it rumor starts to feel like editorial malpractice. A defense journalist writing off that quote as idle speculation is the same thing as seeing smoke coming from the radar system and assuming someone’s vaping. Nah, bro. That mother f*cker’s on fire!

At this point, we should believe Trump when he says he wants to use the military to do something crazy.

So, let’s take it seriously and think through what this would actually mean.

If you’ve been here a while, you know the drill. I wrote something similar before the Venezuela operation, then for the Greenland operation, and again before the Iran attack.

So, settle in; I’m well-caffeinated today.

We’ve done this before. It did not go well.

On April 17, 1961, roughly 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs. If you’ve never looked at a map of that operation, do yourself a favor and pull one up, because the geography alone will tell you a lot about how un-seriously the planners were taking contingency planning.

The brigade hit a swampy, remote stretch of coastline and immediately ran into coral reefs that the CIA’s own maps had apparently misidentified as SEAWEED.

That was before anything went wrong on purpose.

Within seventy-two hours, the operation had collapsed completely. No popular uprising materialized. Air support was cancelled at the last minute by Kennedy, who was trying to preserve plausible deniability on an operation that had approximately zero plausibility of deniability.

The brigade was captured, and the most charismatic president of the 20^th century was left holding a geopolitical disaster.

Kennedy took full public responsibility, his approval rating went down, and then up again, because Americans apparently have an accountability kink.

The core assumption was that the Cuban people would rise up against Castro the moment outside forces arrived.

They did not…

They watched.

They smoked.

They shook their heads and said, “No me’ gusta…”

Some of them actively fought against the invaders. The Agency’s confidence in a popular uprising had not been based on, in the formal intelligence community sense of the term, “evidence.”

In reality, it had been based on what we would today call “vibes.”

Great for AI-coding. Apparently not great for invading Communist strongholds.

Fast forward to today: The Trump administration executed a covert extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his compound in Caracas on January 3rd.

Thirty-two Cuban military personnel guarding Maduro were killed in that operation.

Then came some joking/not joking Greenland remarks.

Then came the Iran campaign.

Now Pentagon planners appear to be turning their attention ninety miles south of Florida.

Venezuela. Iran. Cuba? Greenland?

The military math is not the hard part

Brian Fonseca, director of the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University and one of the more credible Cuba military analysts working today, is blunt about the battlefield calculus: “This will be a very easy military victory, but a far more difficult political victory.”

He is almost certainly right on both counts, and the “easy military victory” part deserves more examination than it typically gets, because the how of it tells you a lot about the what comes next of it.

Cuba’s military equipment is in deteriorated condition that would be comical if the strategic implications weren’t so serious. Decades of sanctions, Soviet-era hardware aging past any reasonable maintenance schedule, and an economy so strained that the island is experiencing sustained blackouts and fuel shortages have left the Cuban Armed Forces in extremely poor shape by any conventional measure.

We’re talking about an institution whose most sophisticated air defense systems are vintage Soviet equipment that were already fifty years old when I was eating MREs in the field.

The Cuban Air Force has aircraft on its rolls that have not flown operationally in years, maintained not for combat readiness but because removing them from the inventory would require paperwork.

Here’s a fun PDF from the CIA, previously marked as Top Secret, now released, that shows the state of the Cuban military as of 2003.

The Cuban officer corps also presents an interesting variable. Fonseca has noted that officers are unlikely to fight hard for a regime they do not believe in, and a government that cannot keep the lights on has a credibility problem that extends into the barracks. In other words, the Cuban military is in such poor shape, it makes Venezuela look like a veritable superpower.

So, the shooting, if it happened, would probably be short. Cuba may very well be one of America’s regime-change success stories. The problem is everything that comes after the shooting.

What the operation would actually look like: The Venezuela template

Here is where things get interesting, because the Venezuela operation gives us a much more useful reference point than the Iran campaign does.

Iran is big, loud, and involves conventional force packages against an adversary who can do real damage to the US military.

Venezuela was different. Venezuela was quiet, surgical, and designed to achieve a specific objective: the physical removal of one man from one location, rather than a broad campaign to degrade military infrastructure.

Cuba, at least in the early phases, looks more like Venezuela than it looks like Iran.

Ninety miles. That is the distance from Key West to Havana, which is shorter than my drive from Grand Rapids to Chicago and considerably more geopolitically significant.

This proximity fundamentally changes the logistics equation in ways that planners at MacDill Air Force Base, home of SOCOM and CENTCOM, are almost certainly working through at this moment.

The opening phase would almost certainly be JSOC-heavy. Joint Special Operations Command and its subordinate units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six’s DEVGRU in the lead have the targeting packages and the operational template for operations that look like Venezuela.

Small elements, mission-specific, with a defined objective set and a very short timeline measured in hours rather than days. The Maduro extraction lasted approximately forty-five minutes from first breach to exfil.

Cuba is a larger and more complex target environment, but the template is the same: identify high-value leadership nodes, isolate them, and either neutralize or capture them before the broader Cuban military apparatus can organize a coherent response.

Air support for the opening phase would flow out of Florida without breaking a sweat.

Homestead Air Reserve Base sits at the southern tip of Florida, a thirteen-minute flight from the Cuban coast at cruise speed for an F-16.

MacDill gives you more fighter capability.

Eglin and Hurlburt Field in the Florida Panhandle are home to Air Force Special Operations Command, including the MC-130 variants that insert and extract special operations forces in denied environments and the AC-130 gunships that have been the most popular overhead presence in every American small-footprint operation since Grenada.

The AC-130J Ghostrider in particular, a platform that can put 30mm cannon, 105mm howitzer, and precision-guided munitions on target while maintaining communications and ISR functions simultaneously, is exactly the kind of asset that turns a special operations raid into something with real staying power if things go shitty.

At sea, the Caribbean is not a challenging operational environment for the United States Navy. An Amphibious Ready Group with an embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit gives you a self-contained invasion force of roughly 2,200 Marines with aviation and logistics support that can be positioned off the Cuban coast with minimal fanfare.

MEUs operate this way routinely, and a naval presence in the Caribbean would not by itself constitute the kind of visible signal that activates every foreign intelligence service in the hemisphere.

Carrier strike group support is available within forty-eight hours from the Atlantic Fleet.

The Navy’s surface-to-air missile umbrella would neutralize Cuba’s already-marginal air defense capability so quickly that Cuban air defense commanders would spend more time confused than engaged.

The 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg is the conventional follow-on force that would matter most if the operation expanded beyond its initial SOF footprint.

The 82nd is the Army’s designated crisis response force; their entire institutional identity is built around the ability to put a brigade in the air within eighteen hours of a warning order and have boots on the ground within ninety-six hours of a presidential decision.

For a target ninety miles from Florida, the logistics are almost insultingly favorable compared to what the 82nd routinely trains for. You would not need to establish a complex air bridge through multiple theater waypoints. You would need to point them south and tell them to pack light.

Greenland would actually be a harder target than Cuba, logistically speaking.

There is also one piece of terrain that does not appear in most invasion planning discussions but should: Guantanamo Bay.

The United States already has a military installation on the eastern tip of Cuba, complete with airfield, port facilities, and infrastructure. Whatever people think about Guantanamo’s other uses over the past two decades, as a logistics node for a Cuba operation it is a pre-positioned asset sitting inside the objective area.

That is not nothing.

The part nobody wants to plan for

Post-conflict Cuba would require the United States to do several things simultaneously and competently, which is a combination that American administrations across both parties have struggled to produce in environments considerably less complicated than a Caribbean island nation with sixty-five years of revolutionary political culture and an exile community in South Florida that would arrive with opinions. Whew…

Washington would need to impose order quickly enough to prevent score-settling and looting.

It would need to identify and legitimize opposition leadership with actual popular support rather than simply the loudest voice among the exile community in Miami, which has its own political gravity that does not always align with conditions on the ground in Havana.

The Cuban-American community in Florida has been the most influential external constituency in US Cuba policy for six decades, and their preferences have not always matched what actual Cubans living in Cuba want.

That gap tends to become extremely visible approximately seventy-two hours after a regime change.

Washington would also need to manage the Cuban Armed Forces as a political institution, not merely dismantle them as a military target.

An armed organization with no paycheck and no mission is a different kind of threat than a shooting war. We tried the “dissolve the military and see what happens” approach in Iraq in 2003.

Who was the genius who thought disbanding the massive Iraqi army would turn out well? Did you think they would just fuck off and go play Xbox?

In reality, the result was a disbanded army with weapons, grievances, deeply ingrained factional loyalties, primed for radicalization, and nowhere to go.

The subsequent decade of Iraqi instability was not unrelated to that decision. Fonseca has been arguing publicly that the Cuban military is central to any viable transition and cannot simply be wished away.

That analysis is sound and it is also the kind of analysis that gets produced before an operation and then filed in a drawer during an operation.

There is also the population question.

Cuba has approximately eleven million people.

Haiti, for comparison, has roughly twelve million, and American interventions there, in 1915, 1994, and the ongoing disaster of post-earthquake reconstruction, have not produced outcomes that anyone is eager to replicate.

The idea that Cuba is somehow simpler because it is geographically closer and politically legible to the Florida exile community does not survive contact with the actual complexity of Cuban civil society; which has been shaped by six decades of revolutionary institutions, rationing systems, neighborhood surveillance committees, and a public health infrastructure that, whatever its other failures, has produced one of the highest physician-to-patient ratios in the Western Hemisphere.

You don’t walk into that and replace it with something functional in the two-week window that American political attention spans typically allow before the next thing.

The operating environment is already brittle

One last piece of context that tends to get buried in the invasion coverage is the current state of Cuba itself.

The island is under severe internal strain of a kind that has not existed since the Special Period of the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost roughly eighty percent of its import capacity overnight.

What’s happening now is arguably worse in some respects, because in 1990 the regime still had ideological cohesion. What exists today is institutional inertia masquerading as ideology, which is a much more fragile thing.

This creates a paradox that anyone who has studied intervention knows well: A brittle target might be an easy target. But it also produces a fragile post-conflict environment where outside actors have very little margin for error before instability compounds.

The country you walk into and the country you are trying to leave behind stable are not necessarily the same country.

To be fair, USA Today also reported that the US and Cuba have acknowledged early-stage discussions aimed at finding a way out of the current crisis, and that in March the two countries were exploring a possible economic deal.

Whether that diplomatic track survives the current pressure or gets overtaken by events in the Pentagon planning shop remains an open question.

Also, “diplomatic track overtaken by events in the Pentagon planning shop” is, I would note, a phrase that covers a remarkable amount of American foreign policy history if you read it charitably.

I believe modern world history can be defined as “days of peace and years of war.”

Actually, that’s a great future title for a book I should write. Let me ping my editor real quick… Oh that’s right. He fired me, erm, I mean, I quit. Shit.

So here’s what to watch for

Fonseca’s read on the current moment is that this may be more military signaling than actual operational intent.

I think that’s generous given what we’ve seen in Iran. But still, I should note that the Trump administration has not built a public legal or rhetorical case for an imminent Cuban threat, which has been the standard pre-operational argument for past interventions.

The Venezuela operation had its sham BS narco-terrorism scaffolding. The Iran campaign had its own artificially constructed framework, however contested.

Cuba doesn’t have that architecture in place yet, and you generally need some version of that architecture to give the DOD lawyers something to work with.

But Trump has demonstrated a willingness to move quickly when he decides to move. “I can do anything I want with it” is not the language of a president who is thinking about this abstractly over a long planning horizon. It is the language of a man who has already decided he wants the thing and is working backward from the outcome to the mechanism.

After Venezuela and Iran, we should take any threats to Greenland or Cuba very seriously.

Whatever is being planned now is presumably being generated by this administration, for this president, on a ninety-mile target that has frustrated American policy for sixty-five years.

The military assets can handle it. The geography is favorable. The Cuban military is in no shape to offer meaningful conventional resistance. Every variable that planners can control points toward a short, successful kinetic phase.

It’s the variables they can’t control that have a way of writing their own history. In which case… Hegseth, you got some ‘splaining to do…

This article is one of three weekly exclusive articles for my paid subscribers. Thank you for continuing to fund independent military analysis with a moderate dose of pro-Ukrainian/ anti-authoritarian humor.

The British government just announced it’s sending Ukraine at least 120,000 drones this year, calling it the largest package of its kind.

The official release says the bundle includes long-range strike drones, reconnaissance drones, logistics drones, and systems with maritime capabilities, many of them produced by UK-based companies.

London gave us drone categories, and they also gave us the names of some UK companies.

With that information, this should be all we need to make some strong inferences.

So, what specific drones are we actually talking about?

In public, no one in Whitehall has put a clean list on the table.

The Ministry of Defense named three companies tied to the package (Tekever, Windracers, and Malloy Aeronautics), without mapping any of them to a specific slice of the 120,000-drone total.

The most interesting category, “long-range strike drones,” stayed frustratingly vague. But that wasn’t an oversight; we obviously don’t want to telegraph to Russia what they should be preparing to defend against.

And I should note that I’ve noticed both Chinese and Russian IP addresses reading my articles here on Substack; albeit, not behind the paywall (yet). This doesn’t necessarily mean individuals from those countries are snooping, since IP addresses can be masked. But taken at face-value, it stands to reason that open source analysts like me are occasionally monitored.

So, let’s work the problem from the outside. Take the public announcement, compare it against known UK-based drone producers already supplying or producing for Ukraine, and see which systems actually fit the bill.

The Confirmed Pieces

The clearest piece of this package sits on the reconnaissance side. Tekever is already embedded in Ukraine’s drone war.

The company reports its AR3 platform surpassed 10,000 operational flight hours in Ukraine, and it has publicly stated that since spring 2022 it has provided AR3 and AR5 systems for long-range intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.

Tekever is not a speculative entry on this list. It’s already in the war, already battle-tested, and already tied by the UK government to the new package.

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