Two things can both be silly/dumb at once: • A former SEAL specifying that he was in D Co at Army jump school rather than A, B, or C Co like that’s a flex • The idea of *GWOT* paratroopers being “used to being behind enemy lines”

Imagining if he was rapping here

Here’s a couple of immediate contenders by @wesleymorgan.bsky.social and Simon Akam (I don’t think he’s on BlueSky?)

Disagree! Clancy loved Russians and hated the USSR. Russians were the only opponents he wrote somewhat three-dimensionally and with empathy. The moment he could after the fall of the USSR (DEBT OF HONOR onward), he switched them from noble opponents to natural US geopolitical allies against China.

Yes. The issue is how Americans have come to view terrorism over past 25 years—from a criminal problem that might occasionally require US military response when it poses a threat to US, to something many assume *always* justifies/demands US military force. That’s what the admin is capitalizing on.

Brings back memories of visiting mass graves and forensic labs in Bosnia. A grim and complicated task ahead. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

Peru continuing to impress as far as vultures

I like a country that treats its Gatorade and Gatorade derivatives with respect

Initial impression of Lima—incredibly impressive density of vultures. Standing in this one spot in the Plaza Mayor, I counted 80+ in about three minutes (mostly airborne) Those are practically crow numbers

As at Want, US soldiers died because senior officers had a hard time accepting withdrawal. 2-503 could’ve left the Waygal without consolidating at Want. 1-327 could’ve left the Pech without a risky Watapur pilgrimage. But selling the pullout involved compromises—which cost lives too.

Bulldog Bite killed 7 Americans—the worst US KIA toll in the area since Want—and an ANA officer, and 100+ insurgents. Ryan said it showed the enemy they weren't safe even in Gambir. But it was also about reassuring US generals in Bagram and Kabul of that, as Ryan pitched pulling out of the Pech.

Team Darby (from 1/75 Rangers) flew up from Paktika and inserted outside Gambir along with TF East's 2/75 platoon. 1/75 squad leader Kevin Pape was killed in the ensuing firefight, after which the Rangers holed up and pounded the mountains with air strikes—two AC-130s stayed into daylight.

Abu Company was spent, so Ryan called for help from SOF. A Green Beret A-team and ANA Commando company (pictured) helped clear Katar, but SIGINT showed the enemy retreating up the mountainside to Gambir. For that, the JSOC task force (now renamed TF 310) committed a Ranger unit, Team Darby.

These photos were taken in a house in Katar that one of the Abu Company platoons searched after entering the village the next day. The one on the right appears to show a rifle being fired at a Chinook (not sure what the boat is doing there below it).

Five Abu Company soldiers were killed in the attack, in which the upper platoon—the one in the forest—was nearly overrun before air support could help. These USAF Pave Hawks flying out of Asadabad put PJs on the ground in the forest under fire and hoisted out the WIAs and KIAs.

Katar was only a mile and a half north of Tsangar along the mountainside, but getting there took Abu Company two days. On the outskirts of Katar on Nov. 14, insurgents attacked from uphill, in the forest, where the drones overhead couldn't spot them. This is the battlefield:

Here are two photos I took of the Watapur in 2010 and 2013, looking north from where it meets the Pech. The events of Bulldog Bite in November 2010 took place along the mountainside in the upper right, culminating around Gambir—near where you can see the snow on either side of the .50-cal barrel.

On Nov. 12, 2010, 1-327 launched its Watapur pilgrimage as its A Co (nicknamed Abu) flew up to Tsangar for Operation Bulldog Bite. A platoon was quickly nearly overrun and its medic killed, and Ryan re-directed the company northward, toward the village of Katar deeper in the valley (pictured).

Operation Bulldog Bite ended 15 years ago this weekend. During the 5 days of fighting on the mountain above the Watapur, the 101st Airborne’s 1-327 Infantry and the Ranger Regiment’s Team Darby saw some of the closest-quarters infantry fighting of the Afghan war and lost 7 Americans and 1 ANA KIA.

Got three paragraphs into this article before realizing that it wasn’t a bat like the animal, it was a bat like a baseball bat

With @arynbraun.bsky.social, this week we ran this big look at what ICE/CBP has become under Donald Trump and how the agencies increasingly resemble a sort of national police force he can send to whatever city he likes to intimidate people: www.economist.com/interactive/...

Noteworthy. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

No shortage of stories this week that will make you want to take a shower. Add this to the list:

The Navy rear admiral was Brian Bennett, the Joint Staff’s deputy director for special operations. He has a lot of experience with previous *congressionally authorized* drone strike campaigns in Afg/Yemen/Somalia from his time as SEAL Team 6’s deputy commander, Black Squadron commander, and J-3.

Quite a double standard here: "Despite concluding that an armed conflict is underway, the memo also says the operation is not covered by the War Powers Resolution" www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u...

"Before November ends, Russia will probably suffer its millionth casualty since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on current trends of about 1,000-1,200 soldiers killed or injured every day."

Here are Rafah and Khan Younis without the Yellow Line overlay, so it's clearer that the area between them is farmland and not undemolished urban neighborhoods

Central Gaza (Deir al-Balah, Bureij, Nuseirat, prewar population 310,000) has not seen sustained IDF ground operations since early 2024 so it's the most intact, except for the smaller towns of Juhor ad-Duk and Mughraqa that were fully demolished in 2024 for the Netzarim Corridor

In the north, the Gaza City/Jabaliya/Beit Hanoun metro area (prewar population ~1.2 million) has had about two-thirds of its 24-square-mile area demolished: a belt 0.5-1.5 miles deep around Gaza City, Jabaliya reduced to pockets, Beit Hanoun completely gone

Southern Gaza: Rafah (left, prewar population 175,000) has been almost completely erased by a year and a half of sustained IDF demolition operations Khan Younis (right, prewar pop 200,000) has been reduced to two pockets of standing neighborhoods, one still under IDF control and being worked on

What's left of Gaza: Black—urban neighborhoods the IDF has fully demolished with earthmovers etc. White—undemolished urban neighborhoods (with varying levels of major damage from 2 years of bombing, artillery, and ground fighting) Yellow—IDF-controlled (white areas liable to further demolition)

They’re doing the bit youtu.be/_IL5wTCLEiY?...

By the end of 2026, this one’s going to be in the Apple iOS dictionary without the red underline, I predict. About to have its big year

An eye with a contact lens on it should not be considered “the naked eye.” It is clearly clothed

I’ve seen a lot of boomers use the triple comma instead of an ellipsis,,,but I’ve never seen a space double comma space before

Although the Gaza ceasefire bars “all military operations” in Gaza, the IDF has interpreted that *not* to include neighborhood demolition operations on its side of the Yellow Line (which includes Rafah and most of Khan Younis) and it has demolished 1,500+ buildings in the past month, BBC finds.

Rabbinical judge and IDF bulldozer commander Avraham Zarbiv takes credit in documentary for IDF’s Gaza policy of mass demolitions: “We changed the conduct of an entire army. Rafah is flattened, Jabaliya is flattened, Beit Hanoun is flattened, Shejaiya is flattened, and Khan Younis is flattened.”

Hoping a silver lining to this unfortunate event is that when they retire the Dulles people movers, the prices for surplus ones will be lower www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/u...

Seems to me that a peanut butter derivative would probably have been better than traditional icing for the cement component, but I’m still going to bring one of these Cheez It house kits to every party this holiday season and make it my weird thing

One zoomer security guard at the grocery store is quizzing the other about his knowledge of turn-of-the-century cinema “How about American Pie?” “No” “How about Event Horizon?” “No” “How about, uhh…Deuce Bigelow?” “No”

Happy Veterans Day from Tom Lehrer!

An advent calendar where instead of different candies, each cell contains a little bottle of a different flavor of Gatorade

Chicago winters are rough. A “seasonal foreign fighter presence” is what they used to call this when the Taliban and al-Qaida took a similar approach to eastern Afghanistan.

Somehow I don’t think Cooper’s predecessor Kurilla—who was an infantry and then Ranger battalion commander in the 2004-6 period in Iraq when Sharaa was fighting US troops with AQI under Zarqawi—would’ve been as amenable to this as Cooper

“We’re seeing a velocity of killing [by the RSF] that can only be compared to the Rwandan genocide…- mass casualty event that could exceed in a week the amount of people who have died in two years in Gaza,” based on satellite images of the pipes of bodies, said Yale’s Nathaniel Raymond.

Happy to see a connection formed between Christmas and Cheez-Its. When my brother was a toddler and started hearing about “Baby Jesus” at Christmas time, he thought it was “Baby Cheez-Its.” thelicensingletter.com/cheez-it-cre...

I'm trying to imagine what AQI jihadist al-Sharaa would say if you told him while detained in Camp Bucca that "Someday, you will meet the host of the #1 rated American gameshow, The Apprentice, in the Oval Office."

We need a big-screen Sharaa/Jolani biopic. Sacha Baron-Cohen the obvious casting choice, but I hear Daniel Day Lewis is back from retirement too…