Of all the branches and specialties in the US Army, the most important target for any ideologue bent on changing America’s armed forces is the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAGC). JAGs are the lawyers of the Army. Any soldier being court martialed will have a judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney from the JAGC. Every commander planning a mission or making a policy will have a legal adviser from the JAGC.

An ideology that takes control of JAGC will be able to impose itself on every level of the force. If you wanted to make the United States military so weak that it cannot function, putting lawyers in charge could do it. A risk-averse force made to worry about legal consequences for every combat decision will spend more time, energy, and resources on staying out of trouble than defeating the enemy.

For example, see the campaign by left-liberal governments in the Anglophone world to put their most elite warriors on trial for not letting the enemy kill them. Ben Roberts-Smith, the most decorated living former special forces soldier in Australia, was arrested in April and charged with five counts of murder as a war crime. UK Special Forces (UKSF) and members of the Special Air Service (SAS) also face scrutiny, referrals, and criminal investigations over their operations in Afghanistan and Syria.

Pacifists are cheering, for they imagine this blinkered campaign will make their countries more respected in the world, when in reality they are indulging the worst sort of navel-gazing self-regard. They cannot imagine a future in which their own countries are conquered by military forces that do not share their western legal traditions or empower pacifistic elements in their societies. They think the world would be more peaceful if we just handcuffed all the warfighters with legal oversight.

This is what happened in the United States military between 2016 and 2025, and reversing the trend has been a primary goal for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. His enemies in the Democratic Party accuse Hegseth of politicizing the Department of War, but in fact both recent Democratic administrations inserted the politics that the current administration is undoing. This campaign, which began during the Obama era, even carried on during the first Trump administration, and Hegseth was determined to make the second Trump administration different.

The political war against American warfighters explains much of the hatred that is directed at Hegseth, and much of the internal opposition has come from within JAGC. When Operation Southern Spear began striking drug boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, an anonymous JAG officer went to The Washington Post with a specious tale of war crimes. Nearly forgotten now, almost one year later, this smear campaign utterly failed because striking a boat full of deadly cargo in the water is a legal act of war — and counter to what some people would have us believe, the laws of war do in fact allow warriors to, you know, actually kill the enemy.

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The problems this kind of lawyering creates in combat are obvious. Soldiers who fear to kill the enemy will be less efficient at killing, whereas Hegseth’s approach to combat is maximum lethality.

However, the more insidious role that a politicized JAGC can play in the Pentagon is peacetime training that undermines good order and discipline and kills fighting spirit before the first shot is fired. During the decade of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, a number of JAGC officers appear to have undertaken just such a campaign.

How to break the law with lawyers

“I was retired before I started noticing any of this”, says Mason Weiss. He left JAGC as a major in November of 2019 after a career in uniform spanning 30 years. No longer on active duty, Weiss began to hear rumors that JAGC had become the home of US Army DEI.

At first, “I couldn’t believe that this was happening in the Army Jag Corps and that this wasn’t some kind of a prank”, he told podcast host Sam Shoemate in February. Shoemate is a retired military intelligence chief warrant officer with his own saga as military whistleblower.

Weiss kept talking to JAG officers still in service, however, and what they told him was disturbing. Colorblind, merit-based promotions were out. Women, racial minorities, and sexual categories received unconstitutional and illegal preferences.

Compared to other jobs in the Army, “these [DEI positions] were stepping stones into coveted positions within the JAG corps.” Imposition of DEI principles across the force, affecting promotions in other branches, was the intended outcome.

Because promotions are a zero-sum game, DEI was already affecting who moved up in the ranks — and it was already clear that white men were the excluded group. “They’re the only people, from what I can tell, who are not included in DEI.”

Then the 2024 election happened, and Weiss noticed that DEI-related materials were being removed from JAGCNet, the central website for the JAGC. To preserve the evidence, Weiss sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) letter to the Department of the Army. He did not get a response back until one year later to the day, the maximum time allowed by law.

During the February podcast with Weiss, Shoemate cited “allegations that I trust that a high-ranking JAG officer ordered their subordinates to ignore the FOIA you sent up and to [allegedly] not report the FOIA to Maj. Gen. Christine”, who took command of JAGC in the middle of 2025. Weiss has submitted a second FOIA request for information on the processing of his first request.

Weiss emailed Christine twice, but received no response. He filed a complaint with Congress. When he finally got his FOIA documents, Weiss was astonished at the brazen prejudice he found among 7,000 pages of material. For while it was couched in the language of “inclusion” and “belonging”, the DEI Army (DEIA) had clearly selected one group to discriminate against.

“If someone is a white male, for lack of a better identifier, and they didn’t get promoted the last several years, based on what I see in these slides, I would have a serious concern that my race could have been a discriminatory factor.” This is poisonous to unit cohesion and trust between ranks, for “it makes you start to question whether the people who are getting promoted really got it for merit or not.”

“The first time anyone suggested that the military begin factoring in race or sex into its recruiting, promotions, or anything else should have been met with a hard and immediate No from military lawyers”, Weiss wrote on LinkedIn. Weiss told Shoemate that in the end, he was forced to conclude that JAGC officers had taken part in “an effort to degrade and destroy the fighting element that protects our Constitution against all all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

“Let’s Talk LGBTQIA+”

A slide from the FOIA response calls out “Microaggressions Against LGBTQIA+” as “subtle acts of exclusion”. Microaggressions are “interactions or behaviors that communicate some sort of bias toward historically marginalized groups”, which of course includes categories created just ten seconds ago, historically speaking. Incredibly, the JAGC had hired a civilian with the equivalent pay rank of colonel to do these trainings.

Potential microaggressions “include misgendering or using the wrong pronouns, using offensive language, excluding LGBTQ+ employees from social activities, assuming a status about their health”, or asking questions such as “Did you have the surgery?”

Anodyne statements like “Being gay is no big deal” are in fact microaggressions, the training says. “Someone making a surface level comment or action can either intentionally, or unintentionally cause harm and drives exclusion and disengagement.”

They might literally die from hearing words. In the Army.

Civilian considerations slip into what is supposed to be a military briefing. The US Army has one single battle dress uniform (BDU) that everyone wears, male or female, yet clothing preferences still bear mention: “One in five LGBTQ+ workers have been told or had coworkers imply that they should dress in a more feminine or masculine manner, even though they were dressed professionally.”

“Microaggressions have the potential of making people feel or believe that they are devalued”, the training says. “They have cumulative effects on one’s self-esteem and can breed chronic mistrust, compound the effects of past traumatic discriminatory situations, and be a risk factor to higher rates of mental health difficulties.” With so may ways to “harm” this “community”, it is little wonder that “62 percent [of them] reported being discriminated against in the past year”.

This is all derived from so-called minority stress theory, a highly-debated concept that blames poor mental health on social marginalization. Problematically for proponents of this theory, about two-thirds of mental health disparity between heterosexuals and people who identify as LGBTQ+ appear to be linked to family and genes instead of the environment. Contrary to the model, psychological or psychiatric distress very often precedes the onset of ‘gender identity’ or dysphoria rather than follows.

Anecdote becomes the only permissible data in these slides. “LGBTQIA+ individuals have been told for too long to internalize their stories as opposed to sharing them”, reads another slide from the FOIA response. Slides offer “resources” such as the Everyday Feminism website, social justice websites, the Human Rights Campaign, and academic critical theory. Soldiers do not learn anything from military or legal scholars in these slides. It is political indoctrination.

The material even pushes a specific, narrow political agenda. Worldwide, political transgenderism has focused on winning the right to ‘self-ID’, that is, to declare oneself the opposite sex without any qualifications or changes. According to the slides, a soldier may simply ask to change their “gender marker” in DEERS, the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, and then they can use all facilities intended for the opposite sex. In fact, they are required to do so, and every other soldier is also required to put up with it, according to the slide. It is self-ID for the Army.

Because “transgender Soldiers are not required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers”, any male soldier can simply ask for a paperwork change and then enter any female space. “Understand anyone may encounter individuals in barracks, bathrooms, and shower facilities with physical characteristics of the opposite sex despite having the same gender marker in DEERS”, the slide reads.

Weiss was shocked to see that DEIA was also being applied to soldiers’ children. A slide evinces concern for same-sex adoptive families moving “to new locations where maybe a transgender child may not have access to medical care” as an example of needed command support. “When I was doing military justice, a Soldier, much less a JAG officer who let their children take puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, get a double mastectomy, or even pee in the ‘right’ bathroom, would probably have gotten court-martialed for child abuse”, Weiss says.

Based on what Weiss could ascertain, he doubts that the Army Human Resources Command ever conducted a legal review of DEIA, or that the Pentagon-wide DEI initiative for the armed forces had a legal review beforehand. As far as he can tell, no one in HRC or the Pentagon challenged the blatantly illegal order to use racial and other preferences.

The FOIA response to Weiss left out 65 pages of internal legal reviews and opinions. While it is normal for the legal advice given to commanders to be withheld from FOIA responses, Weiss appealed that decision. He believes the public should see the legal reasoning that Army lawyers gave to other Army lawyers to implement DEI, given how seemingly unconstitutional it is at face value.

He also hoped it might show whatever convincing legal arguments that he and so many others missed. Weiss points to the Funded Legal Education Program (FLEP), which turns mere officers into JAGC lawyers. “I cannot understand how educated men with decades of legal experience who served in a military that always strived to be based on merit and equal opportunity would then create, advance, and defend a program premised on a foundation of divisive racial and cultural grievances and an ideology of cultural Marxist nonsense”, Weiss wrote to Lt. Gen. Joseph Berger III, the JAGC commander, on 1 February 2025. Why would Berger, a graduate of the FLEP program, participate in a scheme to impose DEI criteria in a key JAGC officer selection system? Weiss feels we are owed an answer.

“I did this among other reasons because I know a lot of people still serving in the organization agreed with me but could not speak up or do anything about it,” Weiss tells Polemology.net. “It’s very disappointing to see an organization you love and were proud to serve in get something so wrong and then do nothing to rectify it afterwards or even try to defend or explain themselves.”

“As soldiers and especially military lawyers, we all make mistakes. I’ve certainly made them, but I’ve tried to learn from them and become better. I always looked up to the leaders of the Army JAG Corps and believed there were certain principles that were non-negotiable. Their handling of the DEI disaster really shook my faith.”

The Biden transgender surge

The US Army lists seven core values: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. These values are based on individual moral accountability and merit-based conduct. Group ‘identity’ is not listed among these values.

In the Army, everyone is green, goes the motto.

President Joe Biden had other ideas. He issued Executive Order 13985 in January 2021, just after his inauguration, and then EO 14035 in June 2021 to implement DEI across the US armed forces.

Lt. Gen. Charles N. Pede, and then his successor Lt. Gen. Stuart Risch, both implemented the directives, turning JAGC into the single most influential DEI organization in the Army.

Executive Order 14004, issued on Jan. 25, 2021, revoked President Trump’s ban on transgender military service.

“‘Gender dysphoria’ patient counts jumped roughly 82% during President Joe Biden’s first year in office, according to internal Defense Health Agency (DHA) records”, The Daily Caller reported in August. “The documents identify 17,596 unique patients in a DHA gender dysphoria dataset from 2014 to 2022, including 3,807 patients under 18” (emphasis added).

“In total, 2,081 were 15 or younger, 833 were 16 and 893 were 17”, creating potential legal liability. Emails obtained by Daily Caller show that the Biden DoD would protect civilians or service members from any legal proceedings related to procedures performed on minor children, even paying any settlements or claims.

The surge in patients, both adults in uniform and minor dependents, shows that “this is just something at the top of their list that they prioritized from day one”, James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America, told Daily Caller. “They weren’t shy about it. They proudly wanted to push trans ideology and trans medical care in our military, and that includes to spouses and to children, and they were not shy about spending government resources.”

The second Trump administration restored the transgender service ban and started proceedings to remove an estimated 4,000 people from the ranks. This ‘Biden surge’ is crucial context for understanding why Trumpo has taken these actions, so of course it has been entirely elided from all the sympathetic mainstream media coverage.

For example, when The New York Times covered the separation boards in August, reporters Greg Jaffe and Dave Phillips lamented “the same process the military uses to determine whether it should kick out troops who abuse drugs, beat their spouses or steal” being used for soldier separation as if some other, nicer process for separation exists, somewhere.

“The Pentagon has treated the trans separation hearings with levels of security and silence usually reserved for state secrets”, they write, noting “the public is not allowed to attend.” Five paragraphs later, however, a civilian lawyer representing transgender clients in separation board proceedings complains that “It’s in a lot of ways a public humiliation ritual,” contradicting the complaint of secrecy.

Male soldiers required to appear before the board with male haircuts are presented in the article as victims of a cruel regime.

“The Trump administration’s ban targeted troops with gender dysphoria”, the NYT article notes. “Not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria” however, and the female trans-identifying captain at the center of the article even tells the separation board that she does not experience dysphoria even though she has been diagnosed.

In fact transgender identification is just as often the result of paraphilia, i.e. a sexual fetish, especially in males, a point the NYT reporters do not address, but which certainly adds important context to their story.

Underlying all the hoopla is a false assumption that anyone, of any description, has a ‘right’ to serve in the military. No such right exists in federal law or the United States Constitution. On the contrary, the Army excludes people with all sorts of conditions from service: food allergies, psoriasis, sleep apnea, and even ADHD can prevent someone from enlisting, or result in their separation from service.

When the Obama administration changed the rules in 2016, they excepted transgender medicalization from the long list of conditions that can bar any person from military service.

This exception is what Trump reversed, that Biden put back, that Trump has reversed again.

Separation panels for transgender service members are consistently reported by liberal media sources as a form of ‘targeting’ when they are in fact a case of special pleading being reversed.

Many observers worried, with justification, that some people were joining the Biden military specifically in order to access transgender medicalization for free. A study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by the Obama administration, determined that a soldier starting surgical transition would be nondeployable for 34 weeks.

Biden specifically waived this convalescent leave, a consideration that has never been applied to any other medical condition at enlistment. Depending on the military occupational specialty (MOS), a soldier can potentially spend half or more of their contracted time in service training for their job and transitioning. The Army gets a raw deal with this plan.

The consequences of transgender medicalization can be severe: males who take estrogen frequently have lower bone density, brain shrinkage, gallstones, pancreatitis, and increased cardiac risk, to name just a few complications. Phalloplasty and vaginoplasty have extremely high rates of urinary complications and revision surgery. The more medicalized a soldier is, the less deployable they are.

A person on exogenous hormones after surgical removal of the gonads will be entirely dependent on continuous supply. Imagine a soldier in the jungle who has run out of estrogen. Imagine a POW in the hands of the enemy who needs regular hormone injections to survive. These are not unrealistic scenarios. Now imagine they wet themselves regularly. How much does that impact readiness?

There are not enough transgender people to make an army

However, the most damaging consequence of DEI and transgender ‘inclusion’ was a severe recruiting crisis. “The military cannot be organized like a Harvard fraternity, catering to ever-more-obscure constituencies”, Secretary Hegseth wrote in his book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. “Our key constituency is normal men, looking to be heroes and not victims.”

DEIA recruits and promotes marginal groups at the expense of the single largest demographic to serve. “There just aren’t enough lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne”, Hegseth writes. “Not only do the lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks.”

Hegseth is hardly alone in his diagnosis. “By signaling that white men were less welcome, DEI initiatives pushed thousands of them away from military service”, Mike Gallagher and Kevin Wallsten wrote in a January op-ed at The Wall Street Journal. Military recruiting is intergenerational, meaning that veterans encourage young people in their families to join, but this traditional system broke down in the decade before Trump was reelected.

The percentage of white male veterans who said in a 2019 Pew study that they would advise a young family member to join the military was 81%. Only 63% said so in the 2024 Survey of Military Veterans, which also asked why. Far more white male respondents pointed to the military’s “DEI and other social policies” (66%) than to the “possibility of physical injury or death” (38%) or the “possibility of psychological problems” (35%).

The trend hit more than just white males, as evidenced by the instant rebound in all demographics after Trump was reelected in 2024. “Female recruitment is up from 16,725 in 2024 to 23,985 in 2025. Encouragement to enlist increased among blacks (9 points), Hispanics (14 points), and women under 55 (15 points) since 2023 in the Reagan National Defense Survey.”

This completely debunks the argument that armed forces need DEI to recruit women and minorities. Exactly the opposite is true: the DEI Army repels them.

DEI was blamed for the recruiting crisis even during the Biden administration. A 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing found that “the Biden Administration’s push for progressivism to be infused into the military has negatively affected military readiness and recruitment.”

Furthermore, DEI training “has taken priority over common sense military capability training, which demoralizes our men and women in the armed forces.” A unit can either devote an hour on the training schedule to DEI, or to combat readiness, but not both.

Examples abound. A Chinese PLA soldier who spends 20 percent of their training time on ‘Chairman Xi Jinping Thought’ will be less effective for it in any actual war. Giving precedence to progressive political indoctrination has the same effects on the readiness of the US Army.

For decades, the Army has prohibited racial and sex discrimination, enforcing that ban through Equal Opportunity regulations. This system worked fine, which undermines the entire case that DEI was ever needed in the first place. Instead, it was a purely political exercise that created problems where none had existed. With so little actual racism and sexism in the ranks, new racism and sexism had to be created to meet the demand of political progressives.

Transgender ‘inclusion’ was an added layer of complication that further deterred the average recruit from joining. After all, if everyone who is not like you will be favored for advancement, even if the difference is absurd, why bother to enlist? In this way, the effects of DEIA mirror the broader diminishment of white men in college acceptance, hiring, and career development in recent years.

JAGC takes over the mission

The US Army Human Resources Command Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Workforce Development was stood up in October of 2021. In October 2024, Lt. Gen. Berger hosted a podcast with Col. Shay Stinson, the head of the brand-new Office of Professional and Organizational Development (OPOD), to explain how OPOD would take over the DEIA mission from HR Command. The podcast was deleted a few weeks later, after Donald Trump was elected to his second term, but it was downloaded and archived on Instagram by a concerned citizen.

Despite Congress limiting all civilian DEI personnel to grades of GS-10 and below, equivalent to a captain, JAG Corps leadership “remains committed to DEIA principles,” Col. Stinson explained. OPOD had a strategic plan to “continue the work started by the team despite the current constraints”, infusing DEIA throughout the JAGC. Promotions, hiring, and firing decisions would still be made on the basis of progressive political priorities.

Berger ran afoul of the new Trump administration right away and lasted only eight months in his position. Shortly after Inauguration Day, he “was asked for his advice about the legality of using Texas National Guard soldiers for immigration enforcement”, according to CNN reporter Natasha Bertrand. Berger “was told by the department’s acting general counsel, Charlie Young, to stop meddling in state affairs” when he questioned the idea.

During February, “Berger and his team began asking questions of civilian leaders about the legality of firing huge swaths of probationary Defense Department employees, which was being pushed at the time by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency” (emphasis added).

Supposedly, DOGE “could break the law and potentially harm the US military’s ability to fight.” Once again, the progressive pet project of DEI was being deliberately misrepresented as a readiness issue. Bertrand fails to provide important context: civilian hiring and firing is not in the wheelhouse of JAGC.

Berger was out of bounds, and he wanted to bring other JAG officers across the line with him. For “when officials in Berger’s office sought to discuss the legal basis of the mass purge — which they would likely have to defend in court — Young refused to speak to them altogether, making clear he would only speak to the Army’s top civilian lawyer at the time, the sources recalled” (emphasis added).

These officers were the JAGC DEI affinity group. The phrase “affinity groups” appears in the Weiss FOIA slides. Black soldiers, Hispanic soldiers, female soldiers, and of course the LGBTQ+ soldiers are each encouraged to form affinity groups. Ostensibly, this is for mentoring purposes, so that women will learn from women, Black from Black, lesbian from lesbian, and so on.

In practice, this form of organizing prevents effective mentorship between unlike soldiers, narrowing the utility of the mentoring. More to the point, however, it is an explicitly leftist organizing tactic.

What Berger appears to have tried to do here is called a struggle session. Developed by Chairman Mao, this tactic has developed into ‘cancel culture’ in western societies during the last decade. Progressive activists exert pressure from within organizations, transforming them in the process.

For example, in 2019 Maya Forstater was forced out of her job for alleged transphobia after an internal process. British choreographer Rosie Kay was forced out of her own dance company in 2021 over accusations of transphobia after a contentious meeting. In 2023, Dr. Sarah Redvers “was accused of transphobia, bullied and harassed out of her child protection job in the NHS” under similar circumstances.

Each organization was cleansed of a heretic. Within political transgenderism, “trans liberation is a class struggle”, i.e. a Marxist cause. The purpose of importing transgenderism into the military is to transform the institution and purge the heretics.

Berger was fired on 21 February 2025. Hegseth reduced the power of JAGC within the Department of War. “I see this as part of an overall strategy to reduce the role of lawyers in the armed forces and move them out of the way,” one source told Bertrand. “Decapitating those organizations”—the Army and Air Force JAG Corps—“was an easy way for Hegseth to send a strong message from the outset and put the entire JAG corps on notice,” said another.

It is highly likely these sources were people in Berger’s DEI affinity group. The absent context that Berger and JAGC have no legal role in oversight of civilian hiring and firing at the Pentagon makes Young seem like the villain when he was quite right to rely on the Pentagon’s top civilian lawyer, the General Counsel of the Department of Defense.

Berger was fired one week after his memorandum announcing his establishment of OPOD, and his appointment of Stinson, leaked on the LibsofTikTok X account. Mainstream media sources focused their reporting on the politics of Chaya Raichik, who runs the account, rather than the implications of the content. “This is an old memo”, the official US Army X account quote-tweeted. “DEI is dead at #USArmy”.

Or is it?

CONCLUSION

Berger and his DEI affinity group demanded to know the “legal basis” under which the Trump administration was about to “purge” transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. That “legal basis” is called the United States Constitution. The president is the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces and gets to reverse political decisions by previous presidents. A new president can always reverse the ban in the future, on the same “legal basis”.

Berger had similarly challenged the authority of the governor of Texas to order the Texas National Guard to patrol the borders of Texas. Under America’s Constitutional framework, the governor of Texas is the commander-in-chief of the Texas National Guard. Yet press coverage of the controversy seldom acknowledged this, and in Natasha Bertrand’s CNN coverage it was slyly supposed to be an overreach of authority by President Trump.

When he replaced Joseph Berger, Secretary Hegseth passed over the deputy commander of JAGC, Maj. Gen. Robert A. Borcherding. Hegseth’s pick, Maj. Gen. Christine, is not a career JAG officer. Weiss lost respect for Berger, with whom he deployed in Iraq for 9 months.

He had great respect too for has great respect for Christine. “Christine is not a career duty JAG officer but rather a highly experienced civilian attorney,” Weiss notes. Before he was chosen to replace Berger, he was a high ranking JAG officer in the National Guard and Army reserve. But Weiss worries that the silence from Christine is an ominous sign something illegal happened inside JAGC. “If you did nothing wrong why don’t you write back?”

Armies need lawyers, but battle is not the place for lawyering. Armies serve politics, but battle is not the place for politics. The US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps has been a scene of ideological contest for the last two decades, an internal struggle by lawyers and political actors.

Pete Hegseth came to the job with a hatred for JAG officers who throw their weight around in headquarters and prosecute warfighters for fighting wars. He serves a president with an aggressive strategy, a president who was elected with a popular mandate, for better or worse.

The campaign to frame them as insider threats to the American Constitutional system is a projection of the progressive political mind. DEIA was a pernicious and destructive insider threat to American national security.

And DEIA can always come back. Mason Weiss notes that the documents he uncovered were not deleted. “They archived them, which tells me they’re just waiting for a sympathetic administration to come back in and start this process back up, and they’re going to come back at it swinging hard.” They aim to change the military completely by changing its culture.

A recruiting crisis is just part of the progressive change theory; a good leftist never wastes a good crisis. Australia has started to address their recruiting crisis by spending more, and so has the UK, though the British Army is still struggling at historic lows. Democrats are wont to throw money at problems on any day of the week, and they can always bring immigrants to America to wear the uniform and carry guns, if they are hard-pressed enough for soldiers. See how that works?

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According to equity investor Alexander Stahel, who specializes in energy markets, there are currently “some 116 hulls active in the Shuttle trade around the Strait of Hormuz, most of them using the Oman Lane, hugging the coast of Oman instead of using the Middle Lane (IMO Lane) or the Tehran Toll Booth hugging the Persian coast.”

All the gulf states are using shuttle tanker fleets to assume the risk of transfer through the strait. A “Saudi Shuttle” (‘Bahri’) “now has 23 hulls positioned in the Arabian Gulf-Gulf of Oman area, which is more than anybody else.” Despite Houthi attacks on Saudi Red Sea oil pipeline infrastructure, “it appears to us that Saudi Aramco will export more crude than ever.”

Iran cannot close the strait with words. Using hard power, CENTCOM has succeeded in opening the strait to the degree that Saudi Aramco no longer needs the Red Sea pipeline they built to circumvent the strait, the one the Houthis hit. “So credit where credit is due: CENTCOM has built a pretty impressive military-facilitated tanker shuttle through Hormuz.” This happening exactly like I said it would.

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As I explained for readers at the beginning of September, these smaller shuttle tankers run the straight at night under American air and sea cover with their AIS transponders turned off to avoid Iranian targeting. Mariners receive a risk premium because the transit is still quite risky.

After transiting the strait, the shuttles transfer their cargoes to VLCCs (very large crude carriers) for global shipment in the Gulf of Oman, far away from IRGC bases. The shuttle assumes all the risk for the VLCC, which is far more expensive.

Rather than escort individual tankers around Oman, American aircraft and ships suppress IRGC ‘mosquito navy’ boats, drones, and missiles while the convoyed tankers pass through the strait. CENTCOM coordinates these convoy movements within a nighttime window of action rather than maintaining a 24-7 posture, which would consume more resources and put more stress on sailors.

Occasional strikes are necessary to prune back IRGC radars, but no systematic strike campaign is taking place. This is a minimal operational tempo for the US Navy. They can literally do it every night, and so they are. Meanwhile, the IRGC cannot export a single drop of crude, anymore.

Mohsen Rezaei, Iran’s national security adviser and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, acknowledged the crisis in a high-level government meeting on Saturday that was reported by state media without a direct quotation.

Mysterious battles are reported in the strait. There are some casualties, but few deaths, on the American side, while Iranian “fishing boats” explode, likely in the act of trying to lay mines in the waterway. As we have seen, Iran is desperate to make the world fear their sea mines, but the IRGC generally fails at tactical deployment.

These events are the fitful ‘resistance’ of a paramilitary organization that cannot win, but also does not know how to lose. The strait was supposed to be their negotiation leverage. It is now fully leveraged against the regime.

“Iran has basically been unable to load crude since August at its main export terminal, Kharg Island”, Stahel writes. “Iran has failed to shut the Strait, the shuttle system is scaling, and time is increasingly working against Tehran.” The strategy is winning.

Tehran was counting on the midterm elections in America to deliver them from this destiny, but that was a poor strategy. Now Iran has tried unleashing a wave of terror: the attempted intrusion at RAF Fairford on Sunday by five men, followed by the arrest of a UK-Iranian national, and then the apparent pilot hijacking of Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on Wednesday.

Both incidents were foiled. Press coverage of the Israeli passengers that took over the Flydubai flight from the hijacker pilot has been notably muted in the same outlets that peddle Free Palestine propaganda. They resist making heroes of Israelis because that is inconsistent with the projected image of a genocidal Israel.

Oman is having a hard time believing an Omani would ever do such a thing and saying very little about what they know. A different cloud surrounds the release of the Fairford suspects on bond. The Trump administration flew its forward-deployed B-1 bombers out of Fairford over the weekend, apparently no longer trusting they were safe in the UK.

Speculation abounds that the 7 October anniversary will bring a new wave of terror attacks across Europe. The IRGC is escalating in hopes of getting Trump to de-escalate because Iran is feeling the internal strain of the collapsing economy. Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad, who had said that exports would continue in defiance of sanctions, resigned on Sunday.

Iran is a multiethnic state, with all that implies in the region. A battle in Sistan and Baluchistan Province on 23 September, reported as a “raid” by state media, reads more like an ambush to me. Brig. Gen. Hossein Zarifi, commander of the IRGC Shahid Sajjad Operational Headquarters in Saravan, was killed in a series of clashes near Jihadabad on the Pakistan border.

The latest confrontation follows a deadly clash in Saravan on Sept. 12, when the IRGC’s Quds Base reported that three Iranian security personnel and four militants were killed during an operation targeting an armed cell. Iranian authorities said the operation involved the IRGC, the Intelligence Ministry and the Law Enforcement Command and was directed against a group allegedly planning an assassination operation.

In complex tribal zones, militant identification can be fluid. Sunni religions plays an ominous role in the violence. With those caveats, the new Popular Fighters Front bears increasing mention as a threat to the internal security of Iran, specifically the IRGC. Baloch separatism clearly perceives its main enemy in the primary security forces of the state.

This can all become entirely too interesting. Even if we swapped out the current regime in Iran for another, it would still want to immediately snuff out separatist terrorism in Iran, and we would be wise to let it do that.

The more immediate implication is that everyone who has any authority in Iran has increasing reason to want a quick end to the war, before the rial has no value and the country is coming apart at the seams, rendering their authority moot.

The Wall Street Journal quotes a London think tank expert who is worried that “the diminishing returns of Iran’s Hormuz approach … could lead to a more explosive dynamic where they will have to provoke or press the go button on a larger conflict themselves in order to get out of this bind.”

However, last week’s events are the biggest escalation Iran has been capable of creating, so far. Worse, Iran’s proxy wars are not going well. News has broken this morning that Houthi militia have lost the Bab al-Mandeb Strait to a combined effort by Saudi and UAE-backed militias.

Despite their own war with the Saudis, Iran’s Houthi proxy was clearly content to maintain a separate peace with the Great Satan. Trump, the great orange devil, embarrassed the Saudis by declining the requests of the crown prince for American fire support when the chips were down.

In the meantime, Aramco ships will shuttle Saudi crude through the strait tonight, then tomorrow night, as the US Navy has scheduled. Stop telling me the president doesn’t know how to manage his allies. It is simply not true that he does not know how to win.

At this hour, there are fresh reports of IRGC Navy targeting “non-compliant” vessels using the Omani route. Speculation that increased American Marine forces may herald shore action are warranted by an uptick in strikes on vessels using the convoy window, but the more likely outcome is a responsive US strike on their sensor capabilities.

The winning strategy in Iran requires time and pressure and adaptation. It does not require genius. Iran cannot win through escalation. They can perhaps raise the death toll, but victory is out of the question. A new normal is coming, and everyone will have to learn to cope with the outcome.

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“People say that the allies didn’t help us”, Gen. Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov told writer Konstantin Simonov in 1963, but he knew better.

Despite the comparative freedom of the post-Stalin USSR, it was still a hazardous admission.

We know about this conversation because the KGB was surreptitiously recording the interview, which took place in Zhukov’s Moscow apartment near the Kremlin.

In his memoir of command, Zhukov never mentioned the Lend-Lease aid from Stalin’s American ally, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Cold War politics of such disclosure were too fraught to discuss in public. For “it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war”, Zhukov admitted to Simonov in private.

American steel and aluminum became Soviet tanks and airplanes. American trucks towed Soviet artillery. American food filled Soviet bellies. Zhukov rode in four-wheel drive Willys Jeeps on his legendary staff rides to the front lines.

In the first essay of this four-part series, I told the story of Zhukov’s first great victory at Khalkin Gol in Mongolia, a stunning defeat of Japan that set the terms for World War II to the advantage of Joseph Stalin.

In the second essay of this series, I explained how the German and Russian doctrinal modes of command in World War II still shape our 21st century understanding of operational art, combined arms, and deep battle concepts.

Beginning with the defense of Moscow in 1941 and throughout the bloody futility of 1942, Zhukov and his Red Army were constantly adapting and innovating as they absorbed the brutal lessons of Operation Barbarossa.

Zhukov was arguably the most consequential general of the 20th century and a standout example of the idealized Soviet man. During 1943, the Red Army systematized those lessons with more powerful weapons than before.

Disenchanted as he was with the postwar Soviet Union in 1963, Zhukov’s memoir impresses ideology on the reader as the secret of battle command. He names the kommissars who indoctrinated his formations and recalls their noble careers and glorious deaths from the opening pages. It is the wellspring of Soviet morale, in his telling.

The general’s book is reticent about the 1942 battles he oversaw in the Rzhev salient, which were unsuccessful. He is more effusive about the defense of Leningrad, which he personally oversaw, and the liberation of Stalingrad, whose commander he supervised.

Stalin’s right hand says nothing about the silent battle that made 1943 so different from 1942. Without American radioelectronic Lend-Lease aid, Soviet ideology might not have survived Hitler’s invasion. That was not a tale that Soviet leaders wanted anyone to tell.

This third essay in our series on Zhukov will focus on the secret history of radioelektronika bor’ba (радиоэлектронная борьба), NATO translation ‘radioelectronic combat’, or REC. Formalized in the late 1970s, the term is in fact ideological.

“Bor’ba is more literally, and perhaps better, translated struggle than combat”, electronic warfare historian David G. Chizum writes in Soviet Radioelectronic Combat.1 Struggle has ominous meaning in the bloody context of communist history.

When Chizum published his survey of the Soviet literature in 1980, REC was a daily struggle of east and west in the form of western news broadcasts and Soviet jamming stations that struggled to drown them out. In the Soviet concept, REC was a wartime struggle that continued in peacetime.

For “the Soviets’ gravest concern is the West’s ability to penetrate Socialist territory without establishing a physical presence”, Chizum wrote. Radio waves had moral power to erode the Soviet mind and undermine the utopian socialist project.

In this respect, REC departs radically from [electronic warfare], which is implemented only in wartime. REC, like the ideological struggle from which it springs, continues as long as the enemy uses the electromagnetic spectrum to the Soviets’ disadvantage. It just would increase in intensity and scope should war break out between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.

Even today, NATO and Russia have two very different battle doctrines that both rely on radio technologies to command battles and wage wars.

Victory in World War II also required technological capacities that the Soviet state did not have in 1941, that had to come from the Anglo-American allies. For better or worse, President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill provided the Soviet Union with the material means of Red Army success at deep battle in 1943.

We begin where we left off in the second essay, as 1942 ended, with the German 6th Army trapped at Stalingrad, as the Red Army had just begun to use their new electromagnetic weaponry and tactics against the Wehrmacht.

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“I tried to educate in my classroom, because it’s clear that citizens need thinking officers to defend them who can respond creatively to fast-changing circumstances”, professor Bruce Fleming writes in his memoir of Annapolis. “The administration begged to differ.”

Fleming means the school administration, not any particular presidential administration. The politics of the service academies are the worst of both left and right, combined. In Fleming’s 2024 book Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers, these “Victorian holdovers” come into question on a more fundamental level. What is their purpose, exactly?

The ostensible reason for a military academy is to bring academic rigor to military science and promote military operational art. But the college campus is a threatening place, and “this opening up to the world has made the military panicked and afraid of what it might mean to actually have tenured professors exercising academic freedom.” Challenging the system is inimical to good order and discipline.

“They can’t have it both ways: both a military and a real college. They say it’s college — that’s to entice unsuspecting students, but the reality is they want military control of what is taught.” Certain conversations cannot be entertained if they threaten good order and discipline. Because the military wants to avoid political bias, almost all of politics is verboten.

Fleming recalls an investigation incurred by simply answering students’ follow-up questions to an acknowledgement of transgenderism in class. When the administration found out, they leaned on students to report their professor. They were astroturfing a student struggle session, but not for left-wing purposes. Fleming did not take a side on the issue in class. He had merely stepped on a kind of land mine.

This talking-to by the cat herder was about answering the midshipman’s question, “Sir, what does it mean to have sex change surgery?” to which I initially responded, “You’re kidding? You don’t know?”—hormone therapy, the mechanics of male to female or female to male body reconstruction. But in fact this objection hadn’t even come from a student. This was before they had begun harnessing student objections to punish professors, or rather to punish one professor: me. Instead, it came from an adult woman, a civilian secretary to whom another student, not the one who asked, was recounting her day. I imagine the student saying, “And oh yes, Professor Fleming explained a sex-change operation.” “He did what?” I imagine this easily shocked secretary saying, starting up from her chair. And she went straight to the Marine colonel with her discovery. Clearly, we had to put a stop to that!

Fleming laments that “the defense of snowflake students has been adopted by the military, this harnessing by adults of the young’s self-righteous, self-centeredness, for the military’s own purposes.”

Rather than a left-wing takeover, this episode was “the co-opting of a hard-left MO (students have the rights to an environment where they are not offended, and they alone can determine when they are offended) to further a hard-right agenda (no academic freedom and toe the party line).”

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“The expectation is that they’re generating warfighters, not philosophers and future bureaucrats,” Restoration of America founder Doug Truax, a West Point graduate, told Fox News Digital in July. Truax is a “right wing” culture warrior. He argues that the academies “gradually adopted the culture and priorities of civilian universities during the Obama and Biden administrations, shifting attention away from preparing officers for combat.”

His organization is touting a paper calling for “permanently banning consideration of race, ethnicity and sex in admissions decisions, requiring at least 75% of coursework to focus directly on military competencies and warfighting, replacing most civilian professors with active-duty or retired military officers and abolishing tenure at military educational institutions.”

Retired Army officer Bradford Duplessis argues that “the cult of lethality approach, characterized by its focus on tactical warfighting at the expense of strategic study, will not produce senior military leaders with the necessary skills and attributes to effectively lead in today’s complex environment.” Again, this is about the academies that produce junior officers rather than strategic leaders. Duplessis is projecting a career path that few Annapolis grads will even follow.

Butterbar lieutenants do not need deep strategic thinking. They benefit most from the socialization of the academy, the rituals and marching and other shared annoyances that come with high-intensity physical training and instruction in the basic knowledge of US Navy culture. Fleming imagines a system in which ROTC officers attend a finishing school rather than producing four-year degrees. His experiences at the hands of the Annapolis administration call the value of tenure into legitimate question.

“The removal of civilian faculty from the war colleges would result in brain drain in vital areas where military officers possess little to no experience or education,” Duplessis says. Some number of future graduates will become senior officers, and then they will need to know about diplomacy and politics and the Thucydides trap. He is piling future responsibilities on kids who are just turning into adults.

The agenda Truax represents has the virtue of ending all questions about who can teach what at the academies, and what the purpose of the academy is. What Duplessis calls “the cult of lethality” is in fact the natural reaction of military culture against efforts to impose ideology in place of lethality.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) devotes more time to Chairman Xi Jinping Thought than communications security training. American civilian academics likewise bring the “authoritarian imposition of left-wing causes on a right-wing institution.”

The cult of ideology had already taken over American service academies by 2023, so that “the service academies have long since moved on from preparing leaders to wage and win wars. Now they’re about enforcing by military rather than constitutionally permitted means (even against civilians) the obsessions of a certain sector of society” (emphasis added).

Asking whether the academies are worth saving, Fleming concludes their present form is unsustainable. The basic problem as he sees it, is that Annapolis puts young men and women together in their sexual prime while also enforcing monastic boundaries with a toxic, punitive approach to alleged violations. Mixing Title IX and the UCMJ doesn’t work. For

teaching everything according to categories of race, gender, and sexual orientation is what has supplanted sexual assault training as topic A at Annapolis: hiring and teaching courses in gay, Latino/a, and African American literature focused on the experiences of recent immigrants to the exclusion of almost everything else, usually to emphasize how tough they had it. For example, two out of three upper-level senior seminars English majors could choose from in Spring 2023 were “The Queering of the Renaissance” and “Queer Communities in Film and Literature.” We have courses in post-colonial studies, African American studies, and Native American Studies, and a “diversity” requirement. I guess we’re really with the Zeitgeist!

Sexual harassment allegations have become a new administrative weapon for keeping people in line, and accusations of ‘racial bias’ will work the same way, Fleming predicted in 2023. DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion, the holy trinity of social justice ideology — and an “epidemic of sexual assault” turn moral panic into political power.

Warrior men are confused by the new, feminized military academy. “Saying men are never to take the initiative simply contravenes the rules of normal male-female interaction”, Fleming admits. “No wonder sexual assault ‘training’ seems so other-worldly to men: they are being told things that simply do not jibe with reality.” The politics of ‘gender bias’ are a poor fit for military culture.

Fleming criticizes the military response to the supposed crisis as “intellectually unjustified … imposed from the top down based on force,” an injustice that “brooks no opposition”, which he likens to “carpet bombing”. That, more generally, is the source of many of the military’s problems nowadays.” The academy “disapproves of all sex, an attitude left over from the old days.”

This is “where the Marine colonels got the idea that it was up to them to use their personal views to police what a professor said in class”, as they did with Bruce Fleming. Any discussion of sex difference is taboo in the academy. In the military, any discussion of sex is fraud with danger. As Fleming’s example illustrates, merely acknowledging transsexualism and transgender identification is a new ideological threat to be extinguished.

“If you say women and men are exactly the same under all circumstances, you’re the one who has to justify that”, Fleming writes. “Men, at least straight men, at least straight white men, don’t see themselves as a marginalized group. In fact, they don’t see themselves as a group at all: each man is his own Rambo. So, the men aren’t listening.”

Fleming objects to “privilege”, the buzz word of the BLM era and Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. For “it’s not true that people in the military are gender-neutral robots — they are men and women, and that makes things complex.” Intersectional feminist ideology bores them.

Still, what they are told is that everybody is part of a group that defines his/her/their essence (which most men do not accept), that being a man is an illusion or a way to enforce power because “gender is socially constructed” (which men do not accept either), and that everybody gets to choose his/her/their “gender”—which apparently means that men who think that God or nature got their gender right are simply wrong. My nuts were not added on to me. They are me. This means nobody is getting through to men, who simply turn off the sound and walk away, because there’s virtually no one expressing maleness as men see it. Feminism in all its various iterations, after all, is about women saying what women are and demanding that men listen — why should it be any different for men?

USNA wants “a subservient faculty, just as — I have repeatedly argued — they want subservient midshipmen.” At great cost to the taxpayer, this present academy produces disappointed young people, the kind who serve their sentence in service and then split for the civilian sector.

Overachievers “are attracted to Annapolis because they believed the hype that they would be surrounded by their kind. They are the most disillusioned because they had the highest expectations, and almost no one else is even near their level.” Even “the relentless machinelike physical and mental overachievers who run ultramarathons and become SEALs, EOD, or Marine infantry, and who never, ever give up” quietly feel their time at Annapolis has been wasted.

Identity-based admissions put “students who have lower predictors and lower performance with a constant stream of remediation that still doesn’t get them up to the level of the people we rejected”. Rather than resolve past racism, this requires everyone to lie and pretend no one was better-qualified for the job. The lie doesn’t actually raise the condition of any race or either sex, it merely empowers the academy administration.

Gender-blindness is another impossible ideological demand of the feminized Annapolis. Young men simply will not respond to women quite the way they do men, which has always required women with rank to be more aggressive, more assertive, more hierarchical than men. Military hierarchy limits the feminine impulse to coddle and exempt the special sailor.

The civilian academy has become notorious for doing the opposite, indeed Professor Fleming seems to not appreciate just how bad the average campus has become. Nor is his experience the end of the topic of cross-sex identification at Annapolis.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March, academy superintendents testified that West Point has stopped teaching both “Race, Ethnicity and Nation” and “Power and Difference” classes, while the Naval Academy has likewise ended two courses “Gender Matters” and “Gender Sexuality Studies” after a Pentagon review of their ‘diversity’ curricula.

Intersectionality demands representation. The class on transgender acceptance should be taught by a transgender person, according to the activist ideal, which is to say the civilian Queer Theory academic ideal. At the very least, it should be taught by an ‘ally’ with proper training and indoctrination in the absolute necessity of medical interventions, pronouns, and full access to female spaces for men.

In the military and its academy, as in the broader world, political transgenderism captures policy ahead of politics. ‘No debate’ is the ‘civil rights’ mantra of political transgenderism. At core, it is a special pleading. Far less onerous medical and psychiatric conditions bar Americans from serving in uniform. The US Constitution does not confer any American a ‘right to serve’ in the military.

Transgenderism is exactly where the academic culture becomes maximally incompatible with a military culture that is good at war. Junior officers do not need to think. They require direction. Fleming does not quite agree, but his book does.

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“Donald Trump’s gambit to buy Greenland may sound ridiculous, but it’s not impossible”, Jack Detsch reported for Politico two weeks before Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Moreover, it made military sense. “The U.S. and NATO allies have significant gaps in surveillance coverage in parts of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.”

Outright purchase was only one option for increasing the American presence on the island. Instead of insisting on complete ownership, Trump might “weave Greenland into a deal like the United States has with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands that gives the U.S. military unfettered access in exchange for defense and financial assistance.”

Such a deal would give the U.S. exclusive military access and the right to determine which other nations can base their troops to Greenland. It could give the Pentagon a larger foothold in the region while pushing back on Chinese access to Arctic shipping routes as the Polar ice caps melt and Russia’s air and naval bases in Murmansk, on the nearby Kola Peninsula.

The Danish armed forces are smaller than the New York City Police Department. Denmark does not maintain any large naval vessels or combat aircraft on station in Greenland. Denmark does not have bunkers for 21st century ammunition storage on Greenland, or any nuclear submarines to go under the arctic ice cap.

Denmark cannot defend Greenland from anyone, even China, let alone Russia. Copenhagen is open to foreign coercion on the doorstep of North America.

Greenland is a geography. It juts out into the Arctic Ocean like a great, unsinkable aircraft carrier and missile base, closing the coverage gap with European NATO partners Norway and Sweden. Subs, planes, and missiles staged out of Greenland can cover the north pole and the undefended islands of northern Canada. More to the point, Denmark cannot use Greenland to do this, nor can NATO, without the US.

Altogether, France and the UK — the only other NATO powers that have nuclear submarines — have 8 or 9 in service at any given time. The US Navy has more than 60 nuclear-powered submarines. There is no question which NATO country was always expected to handle this job.

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France operates the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the world that is not American. Charles de Gaulle carries between 20 and 30 fixed-wing aircraft, mainly Rafale M fighters, with some helicopters and E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft. This is less than half the air power on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The two Royal Navy aircraft carriers, neither of them nuclear-driven, also each carry about half the Lincoln’s actual combat power. This is the sum total of European capabilities to defend the Arctic on behalf of Denmark without the United States, which has 11 nuclear carriers in commission.

America was always going to be the default defender of the Arctic. The question was under what mechanism. Trump was impatient with the previous terms of the 1951 agreement, especially given the new mood in Denmark for Greenland independence. He wanted to lock in a strategic monopoly now, before any such transition. Locking Russian and Chinese military ambitions out of Greenland was essential to that end.

After his casino ambitions failed in the 1990s, Trump reduced his ownership stakes in properties to focus more on licensed branding. This ingrained habit, born of his most embarrassing failures, made speculations of an outright Greenland purchase less likely to actually bear fruit from the beginning of his second term.

Commercial access follows on military access. Speculation about an agreement to exploit mineral resources in Greenland — oil, gas, rare earths — has accompanied the controversy for two years. Such a deal is more likely now that the United States has received a monopoly over the security of Greenland.

Part of the deal includes comprehensive basing rights, and that aspect has led to some of the dumbest ahistorical takes on the matter from newly-minted experts.

Under Article II of the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement, amended in Igalaku in 2004, Pituffik — the airbase formerly known as Thule — is the only existing defense area that does not require an Article II process to improve the infrastructure.

In order to return to any Cold War-era base, reopen it, and build modern things there, the US had to first formally consult both the Kingdom of Denmark and the government of Greenland. Even upgrades to Pituffik could create local consultative disputes to be resolved through diplomatic channels and a Permanent Committee.

Just looking at these abandoned relic sites should give an impression of what makes breaking ground right away critical in the view of the Pentagon. Quonset huts will simply not do for the 21st century air base, missile base, or submarine base. By letting these facilities rot instead of keeping them open, the Department of Defense likely saved untold billions of taxpayer dollars.

There are very practical reasons why these were some of the very first bases to go at the end of the Cold War.

Just operating in, on, and over Greenland is dangerous and expensive. Peak troop presence peaked around 10,000 and now stands at a few hundred. Simply breaking ground on permafrost will require more modern engineering solutions than what existed in the 1960s, at the height of Greenland’s prominence in the Cold War.

Random residents may have to be moved. The forced relocation of 116 Inughuit to expand Thule in 1953 was contested for decades and culminated in the renaming of the base in 2023 under the Biden administration. This sort of tortured land acknowledgement is exactly what Trump wants to avoid in any Greenland base expansion of any size.

Danish Prime Minister H. C. Hansen secretly gave permission to the United States to store nuclear bombs and air-defense missiles at Thule in 1957. In public, he had a nuclear-free policy at the same time. The truth was disclosed in ‘Thulegate’, a series of Danish investigations into nuclear incidents on the island.

During 1968, a B-52 flying in Operation Chrome Dome, an airborne nuclear alert mission, crashed on the ice near Thule carrying four B28 nuclear bombs. The conventional explosives in the weapons detonated without producing a nuclear yield, scattering radioactive material like dirty bombs. Chrome Dome was immediately suspended while Project Crested Ice, the cleanup mission, began.

One legacy of Crested Ice was a series of worker claims, by both Americans and Danes, around later illness and compensation. The disclosure of nuclear overflights embarrassed the Danish government more than the Americans. Project Century and Project Iceworm also left radioactive wastewater, diesel, PCBs, and sewage in the ice as environmental hazards.

The U.S. Army built Camp Century under the ice sheet and presented it to the world as a scientific station with a portable nuclear reactor. But as construction began in 1959, its real, classified purpose was to test whether hundreds of nuclear missiles could be hidden in tunnels under the ice.

Denmark was not fully informed of the plan for a nuclear magazine or the scope of American ambitions. Inexperience with glacial geology led to failure when the ice sheet proved to be unstable. The reactor was removed and the camp was abandoned. Camp Century is the most cited example of at least 17 toxic sites left behind in Greenland from the Cold War.

Trump does not want any responsibility for past problems. So far, the deal does not seem to include cleanup, or a re-litigation of Thulegate. He is free to start building right away, and not soon enough, for Europe is abuzz with expectation of imminent Russian ‘gray zone’ aggression. Greenland is no longer in any sort of gray zone.

For better or worse, President Trump has met the conditions outlined for success in Greenland at the beginning of his second term. He got what he wanted most. Ownership is not always feasible or desirable in any finalized Trump deal. He just wants to put his name on something.

In his ghostwritten book The Art of the Deal, Trump ‘writes’ openly of his penchant for opening a negotiation with maximal demands, remaining persistent, and getting to the real objects of his desire in the end. This haggling process always starts high, takes time, and involves leverage.

I do not say this out of love for the current commander in chief. My analysis is cold-blooded. He has gotten what he wanted out of Greenland. Some people just need to cope harder with that.

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Originally published August 2025.

For their own reasons, majorities of the fundamentalists of Islam and the sectarian critics of Islam both maintain that faith alone made the Arab conquests possible; they merely disagree whether the faith of Islam is itself good. This narrative has little material evidence to support it and is in reality a metaphysical disagreement that cannot be resolved by any scientific historical method.

As a matter of morale, which is real but psychological, and therefore difficult to evidence in the past, the Qur’an certainly provided early warriors of Islam with actual ‘marching orders’ in the form of recitations at the rate of one line per breath. Poetry was the sole art form of the Arabs before Islam, and the poetry of the prophet is very suitable for a walking pace in the desert whilst leading camels, or whilst swaying side to side with the smooth striding as one rides a camel through a desert. I believe the Qur’an was indeed the ‘Airborne Ranger’ cadence call of the armies of the early caliphate.

Ibn Khaldoun, a 14th century historian of the Arab North African maghreb, wrote his masterwork Al Muqaddama from the perspective of a successful leader of nomadic tribes in battle. Of key concern for Ibn Khaldoun is the tribal ‘asabiyya, or shared sense of unity, an Arabic-language analogue to the French term esprit de corps used in western militaries as a shorthand for unit morale and cohesion. Modern leftists have monopolized the term ‘solidarity’ for this same phenomenon.

Fired up by faith, Berber peoples would routinely overcome the mercenary forces maintained by societies that had grown fat and effete. Ibn Khaldoun’s experience in command was very like that of the prophet, as well as the Arab generals who conquered Yemen, Syria, Persia, Central Asia, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain.

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However, by Ibn Khaldoun’s time, the conquered societies in question were as devoutly Muslim as the conquerors. Muslims now conquered Muslims. Religion alone cannot explain the difference in morale that he witnessed. Important, vital, and necessary as they are, moral factors are still never enough on their own to explain material success in warfare. For men cannot fight on faith alone. They must eat. They need weapons and armor and animals. Victories are purchased with gold as well as blood.

From the beginning of Muhammad’s military career, a tension existed between his need to provide his army with booty, tribute, and captives to ransom, versus his desire to end the resistance of his enemies. After his death, the armies of the caliphate were more concerned with their salaries than heavenly rewards, as captured treasures were consistently melted into coins and public treasuries supported the sons of Arab conquerors in the next generation. Whenever the sons of the prophet were asked to fight on faith alone, without pay, courage could desert them. Sinecures were necessary to secure the future of their faith.

In The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, historian Hugh Kennedy writes that tribal loyalties were both sincere and fungible, a matter of literal life and death in nomadic desert existence that could be ignored or discarded whenever such loyalties became inconvenient or disadvantageous.

“When it came to the struggle for resources,” in fact, “tribal rivalries acquired a fierce and brutal intensity which they seldom had in the more open and scattered society of the desert.”1 Despite efforts to replace tribal loyalty with the umma, “tribal solidarities were in some ways reinforced by the conquest,” not the other way around. “In contrast to many narratives of the early conquests, enthusiasm for Islam and the rewards of the afterlife never figure. The values extolled are those of bravery in battle, of loyalty to kin and companions, of endurance and of cunning.”

We cannot ascribe the success of the caliphal armies to mere ‘asabiyya or their strength of faith. It puts the proverbial cart before the camel. Indeed, the Arab conquests were a material matter of maneuver and logistics, made possible by the conversion of the late Roman world to camel transport and commerce. The Arabs conquered where the camel already reigned supreme over the cart.

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Last Friday, a YouTube content creator named Matt Morse started a fake news cascade when he reported that a new passage had been dredged in the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the passage between the Fakk al Asad peninsula and the island of Bab Musandam has been charted for many centuries, and powered vessels use it all the time, including the present hostilities.

A typical loaded VLCC (very large crude carrier) has a draft somewhere between 20 and 22.7 m. The channel is 28.5 m deep, which is enough under-keel clearance to transit the route without any dredging. No spoil banks, cut benches, or new channel geometry appear in satellite images. If they did, we should expect to see the peninsula shrinking and appearing elsewhere as rubble. Sorry Roman Helmet Guy, it’s not the cool labor project you’re thinking of.

The idea is not inherently absurd, of course. If the Omanis did widen the channel, or even remove the island and put it somewhere else in the shape of a flower or a tree or something, it would hardly surprise me. That is exactly the sort of infrastructure solution the Arab princes are into, these days: pipelines, railroads, and even highways are expanding all around the Gulf. The story did have a measure of verisimilitude.

More problematic for navigation, even if the story was true, is that a 1,600-foot wide (.49 km) channel is still a bit chancy for VLCCs, which average 1,200 feet (330 m) in length. Going through at speed, at night, as CENTCOM has been doing, would increase the maritime hazards. This is hardly worth the trade-off of using the island to mask the ship’s movement from Iranian radar — which, to be fair, is something of a minor point for Morse.

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The milk run shuttle tanker traffic told the tale

What actually happened in the contest for the strait is a story of risk management. A total of not more than four dozen shuttle tankers, classed as LR2 (long range 2), assumed the risk of transiting the strait, then conducted ship-to-ship (STS) transfers with VLCCs parked in the Gulf of Oman.

The larger ships never transited the strait, so they never got attacked or mined. Everyone involved in these transfers operates with their AIS (automatic identification system) transponder switched off to make it harder for the IRGC to track them. Open source analysts see ships disappear, then reappear many days later, thousands of miles away.

Markets abhor restrictions. Rather than put up with Iranian demands, the market circumvented their restrictions. The IRGC ‘closed’ the strait as much as markets would allow. By late August, ships on the Iranian blacklist had conducted 284 shuttle runs, and more than half of the LR2 ships involved had done four or more trips.

London-based Navig8 and Abu Dhabi were first to use this method to circumvent Iran, followed by South Korean shipper Sinokor, then the rest of the Arab princely petrostates. Oil traders have referred to them as “Adnoc milk runs”, a name coined from the role of Abu Dhabi in facilitating them.

Iran has used this method to circumvent the US Navy before, but more recent imagery shows their shuttle tankers at anchor instead of lining up at Kharg Island. There are currently 52 laden tankers parked off the coast of Iran. No Iranian crude tanker has successfully left the Gulf of Oman and dodged U.S. enforcement since 12 July.

Meanwhile, open source news aggregators like Kpler, which just retroactively found almost a billion barrels of oil on the market, did not observe the trend until late in the game. It was off their radar, so to speak.

Indeed, the contest for the strait is defined by electronic battle more than big explosive boom-booms. Matt Morse at least got that much right by suggesting the island would mask ship movements for a little bit of the journey. Radar is subject to destruction, but it also reconstitutes with time, indeed radar coverage is restored much faster than missile production, or the component industry plants that were hit during the opening kinetic phase of the war.

Electronic targets must be identified and pruned back occasionally in the course of such a campaign (“mowing the lawn”). That is what we see happening today as I publish these words. During the last several hours, American strikes have targeted Iran’s air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and facilities, mine laying capabilities, and communication nodes.

No one had to dredge a new channel through the strait. The markets were more powerful than any navy. America already enjoyed full-spectrum supremacy. This combination of imbalances has created a no-win situation for Iran. As I publish these words, the regime is acting out once again and the United States Armed Forces are punishing them for it. Iran cannot win, but also does not know how to lose.

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On Tuesday of this week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired two missiles towards the territory of the United Arab Emirates. Both missiles were aimed at marine traffic and fell into the sea without effect, one inside and one outside the boundaries of the Emirates. In retaliation, the UAE suspended all banking and commercial trading with Iran, essentially cutting off one-third of Iran’s foreign economic activity.

Esmaeil Baghaei of the Iranian Foreign Ministry rejected the report as both “baseless” and also a false-flag operation by the enemies of Iran, denying any missiles were launched at all. The civilian politicians of Iran still do not control the IRGC. For example, a strike by an unknown projectile this week on the Liberia-flagged bulk carrier Minoan Dignity killed the chief engineer. The ship was leaving Iranian waters after delivering a cargo of food. It was the second attack on the same commercial management company this month.

“The vessel is beneficially owned by Modion Maritime Management of Greece, with registered ownership under a Marshall Islands entity.” Reader, the Greek shippers and captains are the most courageous in the world. “The recurrence across two vessels from the same manager within two weeks, both following Bandar Imam Khomeini calls, is assessed as warranting examination of a possible commercial dispute dimension, though no confirming evidence is available.” The IRGC picks fights with Iran’s suppliers at sea, first.

Three Chinese vessels aborted Hormuz transits. “The treatment of Chinese-owned tankers is consistent with reporting that China’s two largest state tanker operators, COSCO Shipping Energy Transportation and China Merchants Energy Shipping, are keeping their fleets out of both Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb on guidance from Beijing.” No one can trust the IRGC to do business, anymore, so Iran is not doing any business.

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Pride goeth before the fall of a regime

Abdolnaser Hemmati, governor of the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, admitted this week that oil exports have “fallen to zero” or are “almost completely halted”.

Iran cannot access frozen foreign currency reserves blocked by the United States. “At present, Iranian oil exports have stopped. We are no longer exporting any oil at all. This is a reality we acknowledge. The other problem is that we are also unable to access our own financial resources.”

Or as the Pentagon reportedly insisted of enriched uranium in June, “No dust, no dollars.”

This is all happening because the 60-day ceasefire window that began 17 June expired without a deal. Power was too divided in Iran. The supreme leader is too hidden and the IRGC is too irresponsible.

Speaker of the Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who is a former IRGC commander, wants to close a deal that ends the war. “No matter how much military power we have, if people are hungry and we don’t have financial circulation, economic growth and domestic production, we will not endure”, Ghalibaf said this week.

“The war must end at some point”, President Masoud Pezeshkian said. Critics of his administration “outside the ring” do not understand the limitations of Iranian hard power. Iran loses negotiating leverage every day, Pezeshkian warned. Permanent confrontation will be economically unsustainable.

These ‘pragmatists’ in Tehran have missed their window of opportunity, however. Pride prevented the pragmatists from shaking hands with the Great Satan. Harder-hardliners now argue that Donald Trump will impose even more onerous terms for peace, and they are right.

IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi and Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, are both closer to the hidden supreme leader than Pezeshkian or Ghalibaf. What unites them all, pragmatic hardliners and harder-hardliners, is fear.

They all fear the humiliation of losing, so they choose to keep losing.

All wars are fundamentally macroeconomic affairs

During the first week of June, just before the memorandum of understanding (MOU) and the 60-day ceasefire, I saw three ways that Trump could go.

He could display strategic impatience, restart the war, risk the blowback, and take the domestic political hit.

He could accept a bad deal and take the domestic political hit.

Or he could just hold Iran’s economy by the throat until after the November midterm elections, letting economic pressure crush the Islamic Republic.

I noted at the time that this third option would require Trump to acknowledge that a deal is not simply days away, but weeks or months away, to signal that he is fine with a long delay. The IRGC must find this threat credible for it to work.

This option would require CENTCOM to sustain pressure, and Arab unity to continue. Trump would still take a domestic political hit. Will take the hit. To what degree is debatable. Unpopular as it might be, the conflict is not very high on the agendas of most voters.

The more interesting development, at least from my perspective, is that much more popular outlets than my own are now acknowledging the “ticking clock” works against Iran.

The longer Iranian resistance continues, the more long-term economic damage the Islamic Republic will endure, limiting the future ambitions of the IRGC. Wellhead pressure has been reduced to a trickle, only enough to feed domestic consumption, because no one abroad is buying Iran’s oil.

China does not want Iranian oil. India does not want Iranian oil. The US Navy is detaining or deterring any ship bound for Iranian ports. Meanwhile, CENTCOM reports a steady rise in overnight convoys. Hormuz is more or less constricted as the US Navy chooses, not as the IRGC chooses.

We must note that attempts to ‘fact check’ CENTCOM statements in this regard are made more difficult by the convoy tactic of turning off every ship’s automatic identification system (AIS) transponder during passage. Navy and Air Force tactics suppress IRGC radars, blinding any attack.

Thus missiles fall ineffectually into the sea, demonstrations of stubborn will to resist beyond all reason.

Oil markets reflect the truth of the strait. Iran has failed to create or sustain a global price shock. Markets loathe restrictions. Rather than capitulate to the demands of Tehran, the Arab states have announced or accelerated capital projects to circumvent the strait with pipelines, railroads, and highways.

Iran has made similar pronouncements, of course. But how will the regime pay for the new infrastructure without an economy?

War is merely the continuation of policy by other means

In his most famous work of the western military canon, Carl von Clausewitz wrote that “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.”

Sniffing complaints about the politics of any war are misplaced, for “the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.” A war must serve political ends, which is to say it must be subordinated to a strategy of some kind, or it becomes “pointless and devoid of sense.”

Subordinating politics to military affairs is “absurd” because “politics has produced the war; it is the intelligence, war is merely the instrument and not the reverse.” This is true in both the US as well as Iran, though the policy contexts are very different.

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During the 19th century, French nationalism and widespread literacy developed a mass interest in medieval history and national heroes, with Joan of Arc foremost among the latter. Images of French history appeared regularly in popular publications and posters of the time. As one might expect, artists tended to romanticize their reconstructions of medieval sieges in a contemporary mode, though they turned to the historical texts for their material. Arsenals still held examples of obsolete weapons to serve as models. Here and there lay remains of medieval fortifications to inspect.

So while the above illustration, Remparts d’Orléans pendant le siège (Ramparts of Orléans during the siege) is not contemporaneous to the famous Siege of Orléans in 1428–1429, it is an excellent secondary source based entirely on primary sources, even if it is somewhat of an abstraction in its depiction. We do not have a specific point in the defenses of the city, or a particular moment in the siege, as it actually happened. Instead, we have a menagerie of real things that were going on during the seven-month siege.

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The English commander, Thomas Montagu, 4th Earl of Salisbury, was mortally wounded on 24 October 1428. He was standing at a window to see into the city from the captured stronghold of the Tourelles when a cannonball, reportedly fired from the Tour de Notre-Dame inside the city, struck the window frame, spalling iron and stone into his face. Salisbury died of his injuries a few days later. However, the siege continued, becoming a daily attritional grind.

A more famous episode prompted the end of the siege. Joan of Arc arrived at Orléans on 29 April 1429 with a relief convoy and fresh troops. Her presence dramatically raised French morale. French forces then systematically attacked English positions, with Joan being wounded by an arrow as she led the attack en escalade (up a ladder) against the English bastilles, or field fortifications. Joan fell back but continued to rally her troops. The next day, the English withdrew. The maiden of Arc had saved the city.

Our anonymous 19th century illustration of the Siege of Orléans depicts casualties on the ground or being carried away. Arrows, crossbow bolts, and stone artillery ammunition arrive on random ballistic trajectories to inflict injuries and deaths. Defenders meanwhile keep up a steady rate of fire against the English besieging them this way. Within this dramatic scene, we can see some finer details of the early 15th century artillery park. Perhaps the most striking is the counterweight trebuchet operating alongside early gunpowder cannons.

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Islam did not experience a straightforward or unified progress. The Abbasid caliphate and its capital Baghdad had existed for over a century, surviving defeats and challenges, when the Zanj rebelled in what is today southern Iraq and southwestern Iran, devastating the imperial plantation economy.

According to al-Tabari, Ali b. Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahim, “the abominable one” who led the great slave rebellion, claimed preternatural powers that rivalled the prophet. “I received surahs of the Qur’an, which I had not learned by heart, and yet I was able to recite them in a flash”, his Ali, “the enemy of God”, declares.1

Angels lent Ali b. Muhammad support. A voice from a thunderclap told Ali to advance on Basra. He had psychic insights into the minds of his companions, saw signs in dogs barking, found divine aid in barges overturning. Perhaps it was an act for an audience. He was a messianic figure to the Zanj, East Africans who were victims of a brutal slave economy in a mosquito-infested region.

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The rebels and their leader

The name ‘Zanj’ appears to derive from Persian and Indian words referring to the ‘Country of the Black Man’, namely Zanzibar, the famous slave-trading island on the eastern coast of Africa. Zanzibar had been a slave trading nexus since time immemorial, with the first Arab trading missions arriving soon after the rise of Islam.

As seen in the above illustration of a market-place, black slavery was normal in the early Arab world. By 869, tens of thousands of Zanj toiled in the nitrate-rich alluvial soils of the region that became the site of rebellion. They were organized into work crews under overseers (wakil) who worked them to death. Ali b. Muhammad first mobilized a few work crews, who killed their overseers, and then set free larger camps of thousands of men at a time.

Al-Tabari writes that the people of the northwestern Persian Gulf region “regarded him as a prophet, so much so indeed that, according to report, taxes were collected in his name. He exercised judicial authority over them, and on his behalf they fought against the supporters of the central authorities.” Dissenters however “were afraid and, becoming embittered against him, caused him to withdraw into the desert.”

Now Ali b. Muhammad had an army, and he would use it to carve out a prophetic kingdom. It would last 14 years, easily defeating the ad hoc caliphal armies sent to destroy it. When the Abbasid Empire solved their other emergencies, and finally sent a competently-led force sufficient to suppress the Zanj rebellion, it ended with mass desertions by former slaves who no longer saw Ali b. Muhammad as a divinely inspired figure.

Alexandre Popovic writes that Ali b. Muhammad was “an ambitious, totally unprincipled man” and “a typical revolutionary: a person of humble descent, an educated man, and one versed in the occult sciences. Having had contact with the greats of his time, he embraced different doctrines and attempted several uprisings before kindling the great Zanj revolt.”2

Military weakness in the Caliphate

The Zanj rebellion was the largest slave rebellion in history. Claiming casualties in the tens or hundreds of thousands, it was also one of the bloodiest. A military analysis of the conflict begins with an understanding of why it took so long for the caliphate to respond effectively.

Historian Hugh Kennedy writes that “we are comparatively well-informed about both organization and personnel” in the last armies of the caliphate, which “represent the culmination of that trend towards professionalization of the military and its separation from the rest of Muslim society” that began with the Umayyads.3 In this context, however, “professional” does not imply free.

A turning point came in 870, the second year of the Zanj rebellion, when Ahmed b. al-Mutawakkil was made the Caliph. His 22-year reign “brought to an end the period of violent unrest” that preceded him, and “there is no record of mutiny or riots over pay. Instead, a moderately effective army was built up and some political credibility was restored to the Caliphate.”

Credit however belongs to his brother Abu Ahmed, known as al-Muwaffaq, and the new military elite in the caliphate, the Turks. All the previous factions within the caliphal armies disappear from the records during this period, replaced by the new dominant group. We know they were first-generation arrivals from Central Asia because they mostly have single names in the records.

The arrangement replaced payment with political power, which may go “some way to explaining how the revenues which had proved so inadequate for the military” under the previous two Caliphs “seem to have been sufficient under al-Muwaffaq.” The empire was broke and unable to afford men who demanded pay.

A second trend was the increased use of ghilman (ind. ghulam), or slave soldiers, from the Arabic word for “youths” or “servants” that is equivalent to the European concept of a knight’s page. Led by the prince al-Muwaffaq himself, the ghilman of Mu’tadad “were the élite force which bore the brunt of the fighting” when the Zanj rebellion was put down. The empire of the Abbasids could not put down a slave army until they raised their own slave army, which took time.

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It all feels so familiar because it is familiar, by now. The president calls a timeout for negotiations at the behest of the Saudis, Qataris, and Pakistanis with planes in the air. Then Iran denies any negotiations…

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“[T]here was in the town a [siege engine] built by a carpenter and dragged with its platform from St. Sernin”, writes the anonymous author of Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, or Song of the Cathar Wars.1 “This was worked by noblewomen, by little girls and men’s wives, and now a stone arrived just where it was needed and struck Count Simon on his steel helmet, shattering his eyes, brains, back teeth, forehead and jaw. Bleeding and black, the count dropped dead on the ground.”

The stone arrived just as the brother of the unfortunate Count, Sir Guy, “was speaking and beginning to shout and yell” because of the danger to the “cat”, a siege tower so large that Simon de Montfort intended it to house 400 horsemen and 150 archers. The career of the cat had already been cartoonish.

During the first attempted assault with the siege engine, a stone from a trebuchet inside Toulouse struck the upper part of the tower and knocked the protective hide armor loose. Now vulnerable to attack with fire, the siege engine had to be wheeled away again in ignominious retreat — and was struck again in the back by a second stone, destroying part of the machinery and killing several men inside it.

All the men outside the cat who were helping to push it ran away, ignoring Montfort, who shouted for them to return. The episode had symbolized the decline of his command during the ill-advised siege. Unable to ever actually invest the city, for he never had enough troops to fully surround it, Montfort had turned to an engineering solution that became a liability.

It was during the second attempt with the cat, now improved with reinforced hide shielding and wicker shields (cledis) to protect the men outside it, that Simon de Montfort fell. Once again, trebuchet stones damaged the cat as it approached. ‘‘By God, Dame Traitress Cat, you will never catch rats!” the Toulousains joked, according to Anonymous. They had increased the defensive obstacles in front of their walls, hindering the advance of the crusaders and their cat.

Montfort’s knights endured a barrage of stones and crossbow bolts from within the walls. The horse of Guy de Montfort, the brother of Simon, reared up when it was struck in the head by a bolt, whereupon a second crossbow bolt struck his groin. Guy was struggling to rally support from the dwindling knights as they continued to take hits. Montfort received multiple crossbow wounds before the great stone smashed his head, ending his misery.

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The death of Count Simon de Montfort on 25 June 1218 is certain. All the sources agree he was killed by a stone from a pre-gunpowder siege artillery weapon. Everything else is a contested detail. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, who wrote the Historia Albigensis from his perspective as a Cistercian monk closely aligned with the crusaders and an admirer of Montfort, presents the death in hagiographic terms: it is a scene of martyrdom.

“Suddenly a stone from an enemy mangonel struck Christ’s knight on the head. The blow was lethal. Twice beating his breast he commended his soul to God and the Blessed Virgin”, Peter writes.2 The detail seems dubious, as death from a crushed skull would be instant.

Peter emphasizes five prior wounds from crossbows and compares Montfort to St. Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity, who was stoned to death. Peter also uses the Latin word mangonellus for the machine that threw the killing stone. He does not mention women operating the mangonel.

Anonymous tells us the death of Montfort was instantaneous. The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens, who wrote a history of the siege decades later, says Montfort “died at once” from being struck by the stone.3 He says that Montfort was actually inside the cat when he was struck, and that a mangonel threw the stone.

William also reports that the Count had begun “to pray to God to give him peace by the remedy of death” during the siege, for he “was worn out by his labours, despondent and weakened and exhausted by the drain on his resources; nor did he easily bear the prick of constant accusations by the legate that he was unthinking and remiss.”

Pope Innocent III had declared the Albigensian Crusade, but then failed to finance it. His legate had pressed Montfort to continue the siege against the advice of the Count’s military advisers, then turned on Montfort when the first attempt with the cat had failed so badly. Pressures of leadership under the failing conditions of the crusader army likely did contribute to Montfort’s fate. He took one too many risks, and lost his life.

For modern military historiography, the more interesting divergence in the primary sources is the identification of the machine that killed Montfort as well as the composition of the crew that operated it. Writing in Occitan rather than French, Anonymous uses the word peireira, from the Latin word petraria, which is a more general term than mangonel. Literally translated, it means ‘stone-thrower’. This is not an esoteric engineering point, either. The distinction actually does make a difference.

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Ukraine has surpassed Russia in the scale of their long-range strike capabilities. Successive, overlapping campaigns have created gas lines in Russia, swept the Sea of Azov clear of Russian ships, hammered logistics, and in recent days has expanded to Wildberries warehouses.

Wildberries is frequently…

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Early on the morning of 3 January 2026, at least 32 Cuban guards around Nicolás Maduro were reportedly incapacitated by a weapon that American forces were using for the very first time.

According to an alleged surviving Venezuelan security guard, there was an “intense sound wave” or energy pulse that cause an internal head-exploding sensation, nosebleeds, vomiting of blood, disorientation, and collapse, leaving the guards unable to resist the Americans.

In interviews, President Trump called it “the discombobulator” and a “sonic weapon”. “I’m not allowed to talk about it”, he said, though he added that it was critical to mission success. “Nobody else has it. We have weapons no one knows about... we have some incredible weapons.”

The account of the alleged security guard originated on TikTok and was promoted on X by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Venezuela’s defense minister accused the US of using Venezuela as a “weapons laboratory” for advanced AI-linked technology.

In fact, the “discombobulator” is decades old. So is the debate over it. American electronic warfare firms have produced a new generation of these weapons, yes, but the technology has Cold War roots.

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One historical lens of understanding the capture of Maduru, and the ensuing dominance of American refineries in processing Venezuelan crude oil, is typical military imperialism of the capitalist variety (yawn).

Another, far more interesting lens is the secret history of microwave weapons, their effects on the human body, and their use by Russians against Americans. It is a contentious history, always denied in whole by some who say the discombobulator does not exist, or else its effects are imaginary. Those people are very, very wrong.

I must be frank: it is an actual crime against my intelligence to deny the existence of microwave weapons. High-power microwave (HPM) weapons are already a billion-dollar trade on the global counter-drone market and anti-personnel versions have existed in the open for decades.

Before leaving the office of Director of National Intelligence to care for a cancer-stricken husband, Tulsi Gabbard criticized two Biden administration reports on so-called anomalous health incidents (AHS) linked to a ‘sonic’ microwave weapon. She also promised a full review of ‘Havana Syndrome’. Pending a declassified history, here is a brief on the secret history of the discombobulator.

Its use against the Cuban guards can be seen as American revenge on Russia for decades of deniable attacks on Americans. The secret history of payback for decades of passive-aggressive violence against Americans, by Russians, deserves to be fully told, one day.

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The Chabahar maritime watchtower was 78 meters tall. It was constructed during the 2010s upgrades to the Shahid Beheshti terminal of Chabahar Port. Chabahar is the only deep water seaport Iran has on the Indian Ocean and it has become a regional trading hub. It allows the regime to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Overlooking the mouth of the strait, the maritime traffic control tower was also the cornerstone to Iran’s efforts to control navigation, safety, and coordination for commercial shipping in the region. Now, after a series of strikes over five days, it is a pile of rubble — along with Teheran’s ambition to control the strait.

This week, Trump got people excited by proclaiming US control of the strait and a 20 percent tariff on traffic, then changing his mind the next day, citing “investments” by Gulf Arab countries. Some see this as madness. I see it as Trump trolling his enemies in Iran who keep claiming control of the strait. As the week ends, CENTCOM is contrarily closing the strait to Iran. Tehran has no control.

Tankers are still moving through the ‘Omani route’ despite threats from the IRGC, if at a reduced rate. It is not always visible, since many captains now turn off their AIS transponders while transiting the strait. The leverage is simply gone. Markets have already priced the conflict. Iran isn’t going to spike oil prices like they wish, and now the blockade of their own oil is back in place.

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Trump has been given three policy choices to put further military pressure on the regime, according to The Wall Street Journal. He can put ‘boots on the ground’ to seize coastal real estate, such as the oil terminal on Kharg Island. Or he can expand airstrikes beyond the bridges, piers, railroads, electric utilities, and other infrastructure now getting pounded every day.

Or he can do something about Pickaxe Mountain, “a heavily fortified underground site consisting of tunnels built into granite some 300 feet to 475 feet beneath the surface of a mountain peak—far deeper than Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, which the U.S. and Israel bombed last summer.”

Construction at the site appears to be incomplete. Analysts say there are two shafts, 100 meters and 145 meters deep, that might have 53,000 square feet (5,000 square meters) of floor space. Activity at the site in the last year suggests the regime has plans to restart their nuclear program at Pickaxe Mountain.

“The depth of the Pickaxe tunnels means they may not be vulnerable to direct hits from the Massive Ordnance Penetrators — 30,000-pound ‘bunker buster’ bombs — dropped on Natanz and Fordow”, Laurence Norman reports. “Iranian officials have said the site is designed to make it less vulnerable to that sort of attack.”

“We have eyes on it and Pickaxe Mountain is a possible target for a nice big fat shot,” Trump said in an appearance with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt this week. “Tell the Iranians to be ready.” Take him seriously, if not literally. This is telegraphing. Trump seems to like the idea of taking out Pickaxe Mountain. He cannot do that with bunker busters in the current US inventory.

That leaves boots on the ground as the only option. American troops will have to enter Iran, take control of the site, and use demolitions to destroy it while defending themselves from a siege by Iranian forces, and then extract safely. In military terms, this would be a coup de main, an audacious operation with a simple goal and rapid execution. A raid, not a conquest.

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On July 13, 2026, Ukraine’s 123rd Separate Territorial Defense Brigade conducted what it described as the world’s first known combat operation combining an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) to land an armed unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and engage targets on the Russian-occupied shore of the Kinburn Spit.

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Here is what I wrote in September of 2025, less than…

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The lids on large petroleum tanks like this one are not fixed into place. They float on the surface of the oil, sealed to the wall of the tank, so that pressure changes do not damage the structure. This one was reportedly struck by a Russian surface-to-air missile that failed to intercept a Ukrainian drone that reached Moscow. Iconic now, the images of this explosion have become a visual shorthand for Ukraine’s long-range campaign against Russian economic and military targets and the ineptitude of Russian responses.

Monday’s strike on the Omsk Oil Refinery, Gazprom Neft-ONPZ, using FP-1 drones to reach more than 1,550 miles (2,500 km) into Russia, resulted in fire damage to a crude and distillation unit (DCU) and the shutdown of a second unit. The facility stopped producing gasoline and diesel on the St. Petersburg exchange and local fuel shortages were reported.

Ukrainians hailed the strike as a new achievement, the “deepest long-range strike on enemy territory during the entire full-scale invasion” and the first hit on this previously “unreachable giant.” Ukraine has now hit every Russian facility that produces gasoline. In some parts of the country, Russians already spend days in line waiting for gas, camping out in the summer weather. Their vacation season is spent in the gas line rather than Crimea.

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The logic of targeting logistics

It is worth noting that Ukraine sends hundreds of drones into Russia almost every other night. There is something to be said for the virtue of scale, here.

Ukrainian drones have swarmed the Sea of Azov for the fourth night in a row this week, damaging or destroying dozens of Russian shadow fleet tankers, dry cargo ships, tugs, and a ferry. All these vessels were responding to the logistical emergency that Ukrainian ‘middle strike’ tactics have created on the Crimean peninsula. I noted this Ukrainian strategy to make Crimea unsustainable through long-range fires very early.

Since then, a package of technologies and tactics has extended the range of small UAVs over the peninsula as well as the ‘land bridge’ on the north bank of the Azov. Whether or not Ukraine has the means to retake Crimea, they now have the means to make the decisive terrain of the war untenable for Russia by imposing intolerable costs for continued military occupation.

The tankers destroyed or damaged this week are relatively small, for they are designed to operate on the Russian river network, which makes them uncommon on the global market and difficult to replace. Their normal function is to distribute fuel for the Russian harvest season, which is about to begin. The tugs, cargo barges, and other ‘brown water’ vessels being destroyed in the Sea of Azov would ordinarily support a small, but critical part of Russian industrial and agricultural production that uses bulk transport over water.

Economic risks are meanwhile growing exponentially in Russia. Business investment is nonexistent. All the banks are giving forced loans to military contractors who often fail to pay them back. While the war has produced GDP, it has not produced wealth in Russia. Political demand for a strong ruble has reduced revenues from oil and gas exports that are denominated in dollars. The result is a Potemkin economy in which government costs have soared while real growth has halted under high interest rates.

One part of the Ukrainian middle strike campaign has focused on trains, fuel trucks, and other Russian vehicles in occupied Ukraine. This is already showing results in reduced Russian operations. While this does not herald the end of the war, this shift in momentum is happening right as Vladimir Putin’s Russia achieves a new level of unsustainability. From high finance to the physical logistics of the economy, the damage is everywhere, and it is deep.

Almost one in five airliners is out of service because western-made parts are unavailable due to sanctions. Moscow airports experience near-weekly shutdowns from drone attacks on the Russian capital. Passenger delays, flight diversions, and flight cancelations have a vital economic impact in a country that stretches across 11 time zones without a connecting highway system.

Only the railroads connect most of Russia on the ground. The state monopoly, RZD, is unable to replenish their locomotive stocks due to international sanctions. Rails and rolling stocks deteriorate while the lack of international connections hurts their export trade. Locomotives, oil cars, bridges, and key railroad infrastructure are predominant targets. By land, sea, or air, the logistical apparatus of the Russian economy is being degraded and delayed as it deteriorates.

Raising risks and cost ratios

This all has the effect of making the war more costly for Russia to fight. Making matters worse, Russian strategic culture only knows one answer to adaptation challenges. Inefficiencies have become policies under the ‘command-push’ model of military authority, further re-Sovietizing the war effort.

The Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces (Войска беспилотных систем), Yuri Vaganov, is a vital case in point. He came to the drone warfare industry through his success as a plumbing oligarch. Known as “Yura the Toilet” to Russian military bloggers, he is despised for his “restrictive procurement system”.

The mechanism for these procurements allegedly requires all prospective drone models to undergo testing by operators at the “Rubikon” center for unmanned technologies. Following these field tests, operators are tasked with issuing a formal resolution regarding whether the equipment meets the declared technical specifications.

Yura the Toilet personally oversees the allocation of drones to the front, creating “hunger” in some units to the advantage of others. This top-down approach can pour drones and operators into one area, for example, but the priorities at the top are not necessarily in the best interest of the Russian forces on the receiving end of Ukrainian counterattacks.

Russian centralization of these resources is also problematic. Ukraine targets the Rubikon training sites and production points. Ukrainian ballistic and/or cruise missiles recently visited the Voronezh Semiconductor Devices Plant-Assembly (VZPP-S / Sborka), doing significant damage to production facilities and killing or injuring 5 workers.

VZPP-S produces the transistors, microchips, diode and transistor assemblies, and other electronic components for Kh-101 cruise missiles, Iskander-K systems, Pantsir-S1 air defense, and other Russian weapons systems that rely on semiconductors.

Last week, the Kremniy EL Group microelectronics plant in Bryansk, another of Russia’s leading producers of integrated circuits, power semiconductors, and electronic components for command/control systems, EW, communications, and weapons platforms, got a similar visit. Nearby, the Bryansky Chemical Plant, which makes propellants and explosives, was also set ablaze by Ukrainian long-range fires.

These strikes do not stop Russia from building new missiles to target apartment blocks in Ukrainian cities. Instead, these strikes make it much more expensive for Russia to launch high-value missiles at low-value revenge targets.

Fire Point weapons are developing quickly. FP-5 has a much-improved accuracy and enough explosive power to do serious damage to a building. In a June 26 strike on the Titan-Barrikady plant in Volgograd, a key facility for missile and artillery components including Iskander launchers, 3 out of 5 FP-5s succeeded in striking the target. Repeated strikes recently on the VNIIR-Progress plant in Cheboksary, which produces anti-jamming antennas for Russian drones and missiles, used FP-5. The weapon has likely done as much or more material damage to the Russian war economy now as it cost to develop.

Smaller attack drones have become the daily workhorse for long-range strikes. Fire Point reported at Eurosatory 2026, a defense conference in Paris, that FP-1 and FP-2 drones are used in strikes inside Russia on a near-daily basis, with 5–20 launches per day across the systems. Together, FP-1 and 2 account for about 60 percent of Ukraine’s deep strikes.

The more salient point is that the production of these weapons is distributed across hundreds of sites in Ukraine: concealed workshops, duplicated facilities, redundant sites that can be used if any one site is damaged or destroyed. Engines and some other complex parts are produced overseas. Ukrainian manufacturers can access a global market of microchips and electronics. There is no central node or point of failure for Russia to attack.

International partners are key to the success of Ukraine’s ability to scale up production. The allocation of resources has largely followed a points system on the battlefield. Destroyed Russian air defense systems are worth more points to a Ukrainian drone unit than a Russian tank or soldier. Resources flow towards success rather than access.

Ukraine’s single most important partner has been the United States. Not only has American intelligence continued to aid Ukraine in targeting and avoiding Russian air defense, American manufacturing has helped scale up the Ukrainian drone war machine, with positive results at every level of military operations for Ukraine: from the ‘drone wall’ that holds the frontal ‘gray zone’, through the depth of occupied territory, across European Russia, all the way to Siberia, now. In fact, the security relationship between Kyiv and Washington has never been so close.

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The United States Treasury Department revoked its waiver of sanctions on Iranian oil yesterday. CENTCOM reported strikes on “Iranian air defense systems, command and control networks, coastal radar sites, anti-ship missile capabilities, and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait to degrade Iran’s ability to con…

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Iran is still in crisis. The economy remains devastated. Millions are unemployed. Oil prices have collapsed below pre-war levels, creating a market glut, and nobody is lining up to buy their oil. Because who wants to trade with a lunatic …

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The dictator of the proletariat puffed at his pipe. Stalin was ready to take questions.

Gen. Georgi Konstantinivich Zhukov sat before the Politburo. His victory over Japan at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 had allowed Stalin to enter the war on Soviet terms. The Red Army had entered Poland the day after the ceasefire with Tokyo.

Now it was May 1940. When the current negotiations for a nonaggression pact were concluded, the Soviet Union would have no eastern flank to defend. Stalin would be free to intervene in the European war.

Gen. Georgi Zhukov was blunt, even if his phrasing was careful. “How should one understand the extremely passive nature of the war in the West, and what turn might one expect the further events to take?” Zhukov asked, according to his memoir.1

Stalin chuckled, and said:

“The French Government headed by Daladier and the Chamberlain Government in Britain have no intention of getting seriously involved in the war with Hitler. They still hope to be able to persuade Hitler to start a war against the Soviet Union. They refused to form an anti-Hitler bloc with us in 1939, because they did not want to hamper Hitler in his aggression against the Soviet Union. But nothing will come of it. They will have to pay a high price for their short-sighted policy.”

The next day, Zhukov was elected to the Central Committee, an elevation to elite status in the Soviet system. He received a house near the Kremlin and lived in it for the next 20 years.

In the first essay of this series, I told the story of Gen. Zhukov’s victory against the Japanese on the Mongolian frontier in 1939 and explained how he became the most consequential general of the 20th century. This is the story of Zhukov’s actions during the defense of Moscow in 1941, the problems he encountered in organizing offensives in 1942, and how he became Stalin’s most trusted general.

This is also the story of how two styles of command, Russian and German, clashed along with their armies. These two doctrinal modes of command still shape our 21st century understanding of operational art, combined arms, and ‘deep battle’. Zhukov remains consequential. This essay series is EXCLUSIVELY for premium subscribers.

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