The overwhelming impression after reading a lot of WWII resistance memoirs is just how miserable it was to work in these networks. It’s not Inglorious Basterds. It’s watching everyone you know & their families get caught, tortured, run against you as doubles & then executed. Over and over again.

The war in Ukraine has highlighted the significant utility of so-called mini cruise missiles. In my last Missile Matters post in 2025, I provide an overview of the European mini cruise missile market in 2026. Access the post here: missilematters.substack.com/p/2026-the-y... Summary below. 1/6

'Heritage American,' noun. 1) An American insufficiently committed to the founding values of the United States. 2) An American actively betraying those principles. 3) A white supremacist euphemism used by [2] to mean 'white people.'

I think the term "Heritage-American" demonstrates an inability to assimilate. Why do these people insist on hyphenating themselves!

Imagine running a capital-intensive firm when the White House can suddenly threaten to shut your industry down. Wind farms today, something else tomorrow. That risk changes what gets built, where, and whether it gets built at all.

Watching so many defense-related blogs and channels trying to somehow explain Trump's "golden fleet" and fixation on "battleships" like it's somehow tied to a real strategy and not a man-baby's fantasy.

"Sodium is nearly 50 times cheaper than lithium and can even be harvested from seawater, making it a much more sustainable option for large-scale energy storage”

This piece is a great illustration of how the long-term effect of Trump’s destruction of US institutions won’t be felt in a dramatic market collapse, but rather in permanently worse economic conditions, and lower prosperity. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... So long, American exceptionalism

Plato argued in the Republic that the 'tyrant,' or someone with unlimited wealth and power, would live the worst possible life because his soul would be devoured by lawless, unlimited desires that could never be sated. I think we've gotten confirmation of this from more cases than Trump lately

They confirmed that wheat causes celiac disease during the post WWII Dutch famine (when celiac kids, like all kids, didn’t get any bread but actually died less than before )

This year's book haul.

I find this acceptable. 💯

I never again want to hear about how the Republican Party is the party of national security. You don’t incinerate our diplomatic capacity & violate all of our treaty commitments if you care about national security.

For #reliefwednesday, here's the Celtic god Cernunnos, torc gripped in one hand, serpent in the other, wishing us all a very Merry Christmas, because that's the sort of chap he is! #history #paganism #ancientbluesky

Photography Year In Review 2025: August Part 1 Grey Flag Not a jet edition #AvGeek #spotter #Mugu #ptmugu #greyflag #photography #nasptmugu #Nikon #aircraft #nikonphotgraphy #OT #F35A #USAF #cvvhrn #TES #VX-9 #USAF

It’s weird how obvious the benefits of public universities are, compared to the amount of piddling complaints aired by established media & right wing politicians

Interesting article but I think it misses the mark by not addressing three key issues: 1) how do you get longshot in range while also having sensor awareness of what it’s going after? What platform is survivable and has the requisite SA to employ?

24 Dec 1941 // Corvette HMS Salvia was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean by U-boat U.568. In addition to her 59 crew she was carrying men rescued from POW ship Shuntien, sunk west of Alexandria on 23 December. There were no survivors. (Image: IWM FL 18637) #RoyalNavy #WW2 #NavalHistory

The USN wants to pick good but only does it in a way that is slow and expensive

Fixed that for you, KCNA. "Comrade Kim Jong Un said that the Party Central Committee is pleased that the [surviving element of the] shipbuilding sector is upholding the Party's new century naval force construction line and achieving brilliant production results ..."

Reminds me of this under-resourced Ukrainian army officer who, nevertheless, described successfully terrorizing a Russian unit for weeks because she "did the math." Someone commented, saying, "yeah, in combat, 'I did the math' beats 'I can do 100 pushups' every time."

I haven't followed this discourse super closely, but one thing worth noting is that the chuds whining on social media about historians only caring about woke topics have no interest in military history as it actually exists, and what they do want is at best cargo-cult scholarship

Cat claims tree fell during questioning.

As an actual Religious Studies scholar, it is an insult to our field to describe anything this student wrote about gender as "Bible-based."

“People take him too literally” is - literally - the attitude that is destroying the world

My HS chemistry teacher upon learning I was studying IR at college: "What a waste of a good mind"

anyway the core things to understand/grapple with are - a fleet should first be designed for what is best at executing its primary reason for being - the precision strike regime means if you are seen you will be shot at - you need to be honest about a)probability and b) consequence of getting hit

We don’t spend enough time discussing how the entire MAGA movement is kept afloat by the constant threats of stochastic terrorism orchestrated by the president of the United States. Congress, the courts, much of the media … all kept in line by the mob boss and his army of anonymous goons.

“Like prime, but with human beings”

If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

A great Canadian thing to stock up on when visiting our Great Northern Land is Buckley’s Cough Syrup. It’s been around since 1919. But, being Canadian, the advertising is awesome. For years, the slogan was “It tastes awful. And it works.” You can watch all their commercials on their site:

This whole process is an absurd parody of great power diplomacy whose very unseriousness is a datapoint for system breakdown in Russia and the US

Strategic incoherence all the way down

My quick and dirty thoughts on Trump's short-sighted, stupid, and self-defeating ban on foreign made drones. Banning foreign drones won't make us safer. Instead, it'll encourage people to build their own drones - which are way harder to track and to control.

People who think evil, corrupt, and incompetent don’t go together have it backwards. Instead of looking to Hollywood to explain real world evil, look to Hannah Arendt. Uncorrupt people of integrity won’t do evil. And evil leaders work to elevate incompetents because that helps ensure their loyalty.

Suggestion regarding Trump-Epstein: Don't focus on finding a smoking gun. There's already so much smoke. Most unconvinced by already-public evidence are cultists who'll deny forever (or like it). The goals should be truth, justice for victims, and an appalled scandal drumbeat that never goes away.

Royal Canadian Navy McDonnell F2h-3 Banshee fighter jet number 126392 over Halifax (1956) (LAC e010777414-v8.jpg) #RCN #Photos #History

Like the Kremlin does.

New ship of Theseus just dropped: is it the same band if all the original members have been replaced

Worth answering on main: infantry depth is primarily psychological and only secondarily about replacing losses or changing out ranks. But that psychological factor is so important that functionally all contact infantry fight with depth and usually quite a lot of it (4 to 10 ranks being normal).

“She was the largest United States sailing warship ever built, the equivalent of a first-rate of the British Royal Navy. Authorized in 1816 and launched in 1837, her only cruise was a single trip from Delaware Bay through Chesapeake Bay to the Norfolk Navy Yard.”

Kicking off my Christmas vacation the best way, with Lorna Shore

The mistake, of the NYT & everyone else, was in participating in the obvious bad faith lie that this lawless authoritarianism was about saving money & reducing the debt. We could have just all acted like adults, & read the laws & constitution, & treated it like the criminal enterprise it always was.

Although not a computer game, my favorite video game Santa moment is fighting his corrupted form in Secret of Mana

GRIFTERS

If incomes aren't a proxy for merit, a lot of other assumptions break down. Preserving those assumptions by treating the poor as deficient or abject is worth the price of less effective solutions

Honestly 'R&D trojan horse that never gets built but is instead a box to smuggle various actually useful projects past this administration' is probably the best case for this 'battleship.'