Don’t know if SDF recognizes this, but it’s facing a version of the dilemma that Lebanon has encountered with the Trump administration – namely, it can no longer expect the United States to take its side in a confrontation with the new Syrian government.

Just some bangers from the COIN Manual that informed so many of our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. The level of restraint we expect from our soldiers and Marines, even in a COIN environment, is remarkable. Such professionalism should be expected of every American we trust to bear arms.

I would love for everyone to get back to Age of Empires, ideally Age of Empires II. Not seeing the problem

ICYMI: WaPo, on why ICE always has phones in their hands: to feed the social media beast. @drewharwell.com www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

We have added seven images showing the remains of four separate RGM/UGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles allegedly used in recent U.S. strikes in Nigeria. It appears their WDU-36/B warheads failed to function in all four instances. View them here: osmp.ngo/model/tomaha...

One of my favorite quirks about the FT is that they post the check when they do sit down interviews

The evidence is increasingly pointing to the probability that an ICE agent killed a woman after misreading her as a threat because he was distracted by his simultaneous effort to record her so he could upload her image to a facial recognition database.

everything else aside BORTAC absolutely is trained and absolutely knows better; it won't happen but that guy should be charged with attempted murder because he knew exactly what he was doing and risking discharging that weapon at that range

Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.

For Palestinians living near Israel’s demarcation line in Gaza, the war never stopped. For months, the Israeli military has fired on residents in areas near the boundary, killing hundreds and displacing thousands. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0... by the great @cheesemanab.bsky.social

Excellent, damning analysis of the video of the killing of Ms Good, from the NYT, including a quick debunking of the “evidence” the President showed other Times reporters last night. www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

Bellingcat has identified remnants of a US missile visible inside a three-storey apartment complex, hit during the US military raid to capture President Maduro on Jan 3, 2026. The strike reportedly killed at least one civilian in Venezuela. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/01...

The most awe inspiring night sky I ever saw was in remote valley near Dizak in Uruzgan Province in Afghanistan, March 2010. No ambient light for miles.

Air assaults into remote Afghan mountains: wow it's fucking beautiful here. Mortars start landing: ah, well, nevertheless

Important context for claims that the Nicole Renee Good was obstructing/assaulting officers before she was shot & killed: The last time immigration agents shot a woman (Marimar Martinez, Chicago) they made similar claims. Prosecutors have already dropped the charges www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

"She said she felt as if the ICE agents were untrained, inexperienced and didn’t know what they were doing. Heller said the driver was being told to leave but also being instructed to stop at the same time, then the man "just fired" his gun."

Tragic that this existed before my time

Out in @nature.com today, we shake up the ornithischian family tree. Remember those weird Late Cretaceous iguanodontians, the rhabdodontids? Well they're weird because they aren't iguanodontians. They're ceratopsians. Well, at least some of them are... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Well, there it is—those flights (one of which also came from the airfield near Dam Neck that SEAL Team 6 uses) were bringing 160th SOAR helicopters over to England to stage to seize the tanker. You can see a 160th Little Bird in the images from the tanker that Russian state media just released.

Tapping sign

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay from January 6, 1907.

Five years ago today that I took these photos outside the Capitol (some of which I later used for this story about the proliferation of Multicam from special operations units to the world’s armies, police, militants, and insurrectionists): newlinesmag.com/reportage/th...

Alright, what’s this about now? OSINT accounts reporting that flight trackers show a lot of C-17s headed *east* to England from Savannah and Ft Campbell—homes of the ready Ranger battalion (1/75) and the 160th SOAR (which together would constitute DOD’s on-call airfield seizure package)

I’m thinking Eric Adams for Dubai-based nominal US proconsul of Caracas

THREAD: I'll fact-check all the viral misinformation about the US military operation in Venezuela in this thread This image, purporting to show the US military arresting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, is AI-generated. According to Google's SynthID detector, it was created using Google AI.

This is an AI-manipulated version of a real video of the US military operation in Venezuela. While the real clip does appear to be genuine, this specific version has been manipulated using Grok to add dramatic explosions and strikes.

The beginning of US ground action in Venezuela signals that we are now in the “Avatar” timeline

Some details from Trump and a source speaking to the NYT underlining the risk of this kind of thing, no matter how many air defense sites you bomb

Oh look the indictment just dropped. www.scribd.com/document/975...

Today is the anniversary of the capture of Noreiga in Operation Just Cause.

As with (much smaller) Delta raids in Libya a decade ago to capture Benghazi attackers, there were likely FBI HRT agents attached to do the actual arrest. The idea that protecting those FBI agents was the legal justification under Article II for bombing a bunch of air defense sites seems…novel.

Correction: the Pacific boat strikes were up to 22 by New Years Eve, plus two more boat strikes where DOD didn’t say whether they were in the Pacific or Caribbean. 35 total boat strikes, 14 of them in December.

My girlfriend liked that hockey series “Heated Rivalry” so much that I’m introducing her to “Goon” tonight with the great Seann William Scott (which she should’ve seen already since she’s Canadian)

Year-end tally of Trump admin combat actions in 2025: —Yemen—1,000+ strikes* —Somalia—140+ strikes, 1 ground raid** —Syria—78+ strikes, 3 ground raids*** —Iran—3 B-2 strikes —Iraq—1 strike —Nigeria—1 set of TLAM strikes —Caribbean—11 strikes —Eastern Pacific—20 strikes —Venezuela—1 known CIA strike

Good. Every city deserves 1-3 fancy cupcake stores depending on size, no more. Beyond that, grocery store cupcakes and cupcakes from old-timey mom-and-pop bakeries should suffice.

Missile Fragments Add To Evidence MQ-9 Reaper Drone Carried Out Venezuela Strike www.twz.com/air/missile-...

THE LONG SHIPS by Frans Bengtsson www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/06...

I insist that you watch this video released by the government of the republic of Somaliland about a visit by the AFRICOM commander *with sound on* because the music is delightful

i am a seasoned enough hater that i practice mute harvesting. every now and then i enact mass mute amnesty, all so i have the joy of muting them again when i remember why they were there. just a little gift i keep giving myself

It's messy bc at that time you had 4 different US lines of effort in Yemen: - white world CENTCOM support to the Saudi coalition - SOF (SOCCENT+JSOC) counter-Houthi stuff - JSOC counter-AQAP - CIA T50 'stuff' (CT/anti-AQAP and maybe counter-Houthi stuff too)

The fact that this year’s DOD Somalia strikes approaches or exceeds the number of CIA strikes in Pakistan in 2010—but hardly anyone cares or talks about the Somalia ones—makes me wonder if there wasn’t a bit of Streisand effect at work with the CIA’s Pakistan drone program, where the high…

And importantly - throughout the year we’ve provided detailed, public tracking of strikes, clarification of specific days of strikes released via multi-strike press releases, and info on at least 1 strike not announced via press release on the AFRICOM website 6/7 www.newamerica.org/future-secur...

Not planning to do an overall year wrap up but do want to share some work on US strikes in Somalia over the year. By our tracking (not yet updated for holiday strikes), it is the peak of the campaign and may surpass the peak of strikes in Pakistan. 1/7 www.newamerica.org/future-secur...

Very amused to learn that the obvious problem with the word “demogorgon” (it should be “demi-“!) results not from a spelling mistake by someone writing “Stranger Things,” but from a spelling mistake by a 4th century Roman writer who was bad at Greek (or someone he was copying off)

I miss Formula 50 purple grape Vitamin Water

Enabled by UAE: “Between 30,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in six weeks, with 60,000 as a plausible midpoint. That pace of killing would be unrivaled since the Rwanda genocide of 1994…the death toll in El Fasher in less than two months may be comparable to that in Gaza over two years.”

Reading transcripts from the 1993 hearings on gays in the military and I can't think of a better challenge to Huntingtonian views of military autonomy or skepticism of the authority of military advice. The witnesses' predictions did not pan out. At all.

Impossible for me to know I can trust what someone is saying unless I can visually confirm that they are wearing a ballcap, graphic tee, and big goofy headphones

A drug boat in the Atlantic was likely heading to Europe, not the US, when an AC-130J attacked it. What happened next with two survivors defied what the admin and Pentagon have said about alleged “narco-terrorists.” www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...