Hey, look, everyone. I wrote the first part of a series I was planning on national security policy that Democrats can pursue following the midterm elections. Exciting! othermeans.substack.com/p/restoring-...

For all that a certain kind of right wing pseuodointellectual spent the 2010s pissing and moaning about "woke postmodern leftism", MAGA really is a fully postmodern political movement. Watching Baudrillard of all people be vindicated, very painful

Some welcome news. The Air Force will seek to procure 297 F-15EX beginning with a buy of 24 airframes in FY27. This is a substantial growth over the prior acquisition objective of 129 airframes. breakingdefense.com/2026/04/air-...

we are bringing back the greatest hits of Defense Twitter-That-Was: subtweeting all the US Navy discourse

Stolen from the group text hivemind: "Seb Gorka is why people who pay for their own PhD have the reputation they do."

I'm going to make everyone mad too. You want your bold new left of center security strategy? Here it is. (The title, not the book itself. That's just me being provocative.) There is a global backswing against democracy. It is left or right colored in different countries. But it has to lose.

>catastrophically lose an expeditionary war of choice against Persia >threaten the Pope himself with personal violence >heavy handed promulgation of state religion for social cohesion >misguided attempts to shrink the central bureaucracy Fuck it welcome back Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate

>start war with Iran >lose, somehow >refuse to elaborate >Leave MASTER OF THE DEAL TRULY HE IS INSIDE EVERYONE'S OODA LOOP

There is apparently zero understanding of this in the White House or the Cabinet. Makes you really wonder what they think the point deterring China is, if they don't understand this.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that there's no way any of the parties are fully agreeing to the Iranian 10-point deal without massive final changes. Just to start, $2M per ship to cross the Hormuz Strait would mean nearly $70-80B in revenue for the Iranians per year.

As I understand the situation, 1.) Trump says they agreed to his terms 2.) Iran said he agreed to their different set of terms 3.) Both sides are shameless liars whose self-preservation instincts and hardons for violence are constantly battling one another so who knows?

Meanwhile, the USAF isn’t procuring MAWS for F-15EX

No, I really do not think so. Trump is sort of famously nuclear averse, people are projecting an unlikely fear onto an event which has already realized a number of much more likely fears. "Off limits" here is very obviously about targeting withholds, as it has been for weeks. (Still bad!)

A nuclear bomb is the worst thing a lot of these people can think of. Ergo, Trump (the worst person they can think of) must be getting ready to use one. If you have hundreds of thousands of readers who trust you as a source of truth, you need to live in the real world and not vent your spleen.

Hey guys, it's okay to oppose and dislike Trump while wishing the best for the troops flying and supporting the mission over Iran.

>$30B for Army missile procurement >a $20B+ increase >check inside >$11B for 857 THAAD missiles >$12B for 2,798 PAC-3 MSE missiles

These numbers seem sus. The delivery schedule for USAF in 2025 was 525+ JASSM-ERs, which would have brought the total inventory to 2935~ JASSM-ERs delivered by Jan 2026 (so pre-war inv in reality is 635 higher). The delivery plan for 2026 is 600~ JASSM-ERs and 150~ LRASMs.

Yeah I'm a good old missile buying, ship building, nuke stockpiling hawk, as hawk as they come really, and this budget proposal is a crock of bull. We need a bigger DOD topline, but guess what? We need the rest too, if your aim is keeping Americans safe. A nation can't eat guns. We need butter.

The confirmed pre-2024 inventory of MRBM launchers was around 470. Between June 2025 and now, more than 200+ launchers are visually confirmed to have been struck, many while loaded. Nonetheless, many more are likely buried (in tunnels) and cant be used.

The cost of neutrality on paper even is that the Finns were counting on nobody and the events of a full-scale war would have probably unfolded much like the opening days of prior conflicts where there are last minute attempts of support for them but nothing would ultimately show up.

the best argument in favor of unconditional birthright citizenship has always been the fact that every argument against it is fundamentally European in nature

Whether or not the recent E-3 loss completely fucks over longterm USAF AWACS plans comes down to what the FY27 budget shows (which comes out next week) and what Congress does in response. The USAF will get two E-7 prototypes next year. But longterm procurement has been stalled by the OSD.

One TLAM every hour type war.

How to reduce sortie rates? Easy, kill the pilots at their homes.

TACO Monday

Electrical infrastructure aside, there happens to be a reasonable basis to attack Iranian desalination infrastructure. Its output almost exclusively supports their petroleum industry.

I think a popular take on here is that the US military neglected to learn from the War in Ukraine -- this is categorically false. The real questions are "what should we learn from Ukraine" and "how" and "can we cut across our internal politics to implement those lessons?"

Insert John Pedicini "if only you knew how bad things really are" meme here srsbzns: When people hear "modernization" they think about new nuclear bombs. They think about new military capabilities and expanding the arsenal. Understandable, but mostly not true. My nightmare in one graph (+🧵):

Wew boy, here we go

As I was saying on the other place, it is increasingly probably that the Iranian IRBMs launched at Diego Garcia were derived from space launch vehicles. If accurate, the IDF’s assessment that they were two-stage missiles rules out all publicly known Iranian MRBMs except Sejil or an SLV.

If you are a nuclear modernization advocate, you are intimately familiar with the Republican strategy of deferring spending until the bill reaches an obscene size, then arguing that the project is simply too expensive and must be canceled, because that has been the BAS playbook for decades

There are many potential issues with the overall IAMDS plan for the AOR, both on our part and on the part of the GCC. But good luck figuring that outside a SCIF. While the interception rates are nominally very good, there is still a lot left to be desired. Or so I’ve heard anecdotally.

When you consider the cost ratio between a capability and a counter, if you don’t consider what that counter protects, you are doing the math wrong.

Unspoken in this article is that this is the deterrent playbook NATO has been drilling against the Russians for years now. A fait accompli against a weakly guarded frontier, deterred by a tripwire force. MAGA foreign policy is predation & piracy. It is dangerous and it is anti-American at its core.

I'm gonna say it: Bob is at least directionally right even if I do not agree on all of his prescriptions. "We build, they build. We stop, they build" is back on the menu. It takes two to arms race, but we are categorically NOT the initiators if this race begins in earnest.

I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Education and Training for three years before the office was disestablished last year. I owned the policy on professional military education for all five services. I have listened to Secretary Hegseth's announcement. I have thoughts. 🧵

"You're gonna do so much classified shit that you aren't allowed to speak. It's technically spillage if you breathe outside of a SCIF."

We are clinically retarded

ong fr is the friggin secretary of energy doing oil market manipulation by tweet?? DOE is the main science and innovation department within the Cabinet level departments, to include scientifically innovating a worse & dumber Energy Secy than Rick Perry

Average Kuwaiti pilot seeing an unidentified radar track show up

Just so everyone knows, I am well aware and working to contact Support to resolve the matter. I remain in control of this account and all my other social media.

>the regime functionaries are yellow border posting on main @adam35.bsky.social come get ur mans

Not CENTCOM using two previously undisclosed Tomahawk mods in their opening strikes. A TLAM with new RAM coating (supposedly) and forward-swept wings TLAM (regular Tomahawks don't have forward-swept wings).

This is far from being on the scale of the Gulf Wars. 2003 alone had over 730 fighter (80 allied/655 US) aircraft and 50 bombers taking part. The current build up has only 250 US fighter aircraft in total. This force, when joined by Israel and Jordan, barely rises to 600.

I've deployed a truly excessive number of Clausewitz quotations to address that terrible article on the war colleges. At the same time, these quotes (mainly from book II) illustrate how Clausewitz saw theory as a tool for learning how to learn from experience. open.substack.com/pub/deadcarl...

It's good thing then that Taiwan and Ukraine are not yours to give up. Ukraine fights and Taiwan will fight not because anyone is forcing them to but because they think their countries are worth defending. This level of spineless bootlicking is nauseating.

Something I couldn't possibly comment on, but would like to pull the pin on the discursive hand grenade for anyway, is more granularity when we talk about nuclear latency. There is a spectrum from "we have some plutonium somewhere" to "I have one cable left to plug in before launch". Details matter!