Robert Barnes: Israel’s Become a Political Pariah, Republicans Take Note
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – August 12, 2026
Col Douglas Macgregor: Ukraine Russia War, Trump is Toothless
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – August 11, 2026
Russia Requests Clarification From US, Turkiye Over Plans to Supply Weapons to Ukraine
Sputnik – 15.08.2026
MOSCOW – The Russian Foreign Ministry has requested clarification from the United States and Turkiye over information released by the US Congress regarding plans to supply weapons to Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on Saturday.
“The Russian Foreign Ministry has requested clarifications from Washington and Ankara in connection with information released by the US Congress,” Zakharova said.
The US and Turkiye still have time to soberly assess the situation regarding plans to supply weapons to Ukraine, she said.
According to documents released by the US Congress, the arsenal is substantial, namely: 12 multiple rocket launchers and over 2,500 unguided cluster munitions for them, 47,000 cluster artillery shells of 203mm caliber, and 70 ATACMS operational-tactical missiles, Zakharova added.
Pumping new weapons would not seriously affect the course of the special military operation but causes serious damage to bilateral relations with the US and Turkiye, she said.
Attempts to use peacekeeping rhetoric while simultaneously supplying weapons to Ukraine are undermining mutual trust, especially given Turkiye’s assurances that it avoids “lethal” supplies.
Zakharova noted that the timing of the transfer of a large-scale shipment of lethal cargo to recipients in Ukraine is unclear.
“It’s worth noting that the circumstances and conditions of such a large-scale ‘transfer’ of lethal materials remain extremely contradictory. It’s unclear who initiated the re-export, how, and when the plan is to transfer the large-scale lethal cargo to recipients in Kiev,” Zakharova said.
It is also unclear what motivated the United States and Turkey to “open Pandora’s box” and prolong the Kiev regime’s agony, she said, adding that this was particularly striking given that both countries claim a special role in resolving the Ukrainian crisis and have declared a political and diplomatic settlement their priority.
“However, multifaceted damage from such supplies is inevitable. It is not only about the casualties and destruction that the authorities in Kiev are seeking to escalate, but also about serious harm to our bilateral relations with Washington and Ankara,” Zakharova said.
Zakharova highlighted that the supply of additional weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces will not affect the course of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
“Flooding Zelensky’s junta with ever more weapons will not be able to significantly affect the course of the special military operation in accordance with a just Russian scenario,” Zakharova said in a comment published on the ministry’s website.
The comment came amid reports of possible US-Turkish plans to supply Ukraine with a large batch of US-made weapons, including multiple-launch rocket systems, cluster munitions and ATACMS operational-tactical missiles.
South Korean Leader Pledges to Replace Unstable Armistice With North Korea With Peace
Sputnik – 15.08.2026
SEOUL – South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on Saturday said the country aims to end the war on the Korean Peninsula and replace the current unstable armistice regime with a peace regime.
“We will begin the path to ending the war and transforming the unstable armistice regime on the Korean Peninsula into a peace regime,” Lee said in a speech marking the 81st anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule.
The president called on both sides to abandon mutual threats and begin inter-Korean talks to end the decades-long “state of war.”
“Let us abandon the intention of threatening each other and begin inter-Korean talks to end this extremely protracted war. Within this process, effective ways to stop the North’s nuclear build-up can also be discussed,” Lee added.
Peace on the Korean Peninsula would contribute to stability and cooperation in Northeast Asia and serve as a milestone toward a “nuclear-free” peace, he said.
Lee also added that South Korea intends to turn the energy of hostility and confrontation into a driving force for peaceful coexistence and shared prosperity, and to fulfill its role as a direct party to the peace process on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea has repeatedly stated it has no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons. In September 2025, leader Kim Jong Un declared the denuclearization issue “closed,” adding that Pyongyang would never give up its nuclear arsenal. In March 2026, he said that North Korea would strengthen its nuclear state status as “absolutely irreversible.” The country’s nuclear status has also been enshrined in law.
In September 2023, North Korea added a provision on the accelerated development of nuclear forces to its constitution, following a September 2022 law on nuclear policy.
US National Debt Grows By Over $500Bln Since Beginning of July
Sputnik -14.08.2026
WASHINGTON – The national debt of the United States has increased by more than $500 billion since July 1 and has come close to a record high of $40 trillion, RIA Novosti calculated based on data from the US Treasury Department.
In early July, that number was $39.389 trillion, by mid-August, the figure reached $39.913 trillion. Thus, the net increase in less than a month and a half amounted to $524.22 billion.
In the first 10 months of the 2026 fiscal year alone, the US government allocated a record $963 billion to service and pay interest on the national debt, RIA Novosti previously found out based on data from the Congressional Budget Office.
In the future, the debt burden will only increase. According to the congressional estimates, the US national debt will continue to grow continuously over the next decade. As early as fiscal year 2027, the figure is expected to exceed $41.3 trillion, the psychological mark of 50 trillion will be reached by 2033, and by fiscal year 2036 it will reach more than $56.2 trillion.
Ukraine provoking Bulgaria with drone incident
By Lucas Leiroz | August 14, 2026
Instances of Ukrainian interference in the internal affairs of European countries continue to grow. The Kiev regime is intensifying its destabilization activities abroad, using even terrorist tactics to boycott its own European allies. As the pro-Ukraine agenda becomes increasingly unpopular in Europe, the regime is left with little choice but to employ illegal interference methods to prevent its source of military and financial aid from drying up.
Recently, Kostadin Kostadinov, leader of the Bulgarian opposition party Revival, publicly advocated for the expulsion of the Ukrainian ambassador to Sofia, Olesya Ilashchuk. He accuses the Ukrainian diplomat of interfering in Bulgaria’s domestic affairs, particularly regarding recent drone incidents.
These comments come amidst the controversy surrounding the incursion into Bulgarian airspace by a Ukrainian drone, which exploded in the Kardam region near energy facilities of the Trans-Balkan Pipeline. Bulgarian Ministry of Defense specialists analyzed the wreckage and concluded it was a “Maya” UAV used by the Ukrainian armed forces.
Following the incident, the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Ukrainian diplomats in the country to provide explanations to the authorities in Sofia. However, Ambassador Ilashchuk’s stance was deemed inappropriate. She downplayed the incident’s significance, regarding it as insignificant, even though the explosion occurred near an energy facility – a situation that could have led to serious consequences, such as larger explosions, massive fires, and the release of toxic gases.
Kostadinov commented on the matter, stating that the ambassador should immediately be declared “persona non grata”. He considers it intolerable for a foreign diplomat to downplay the seriousness of a drone incident on Bulgarian soil. Furthermore, he asserted that by acting this way, she is undermining relations between Ukraine and Bulgaria – doing the exact opposite of what a diplomat is supposed to do.
“She clearly does not contribute to good diplomatic relations between Ukraine and Bulgaria and there are sufficient grounds for her to be declared persona non grata,” he said.
The opposition leader described the case as an “act of aggression” and further stated that Ukraine is likely involved in other similar occurrences that need to be investigated by Bulgarian authorities. Moreover, he believes this is linked to the fact that Bulgaria has recently reduced its assistance to the Ukrainian regime. The apparent goal is to interfere in the Bulgarian government’s decisions, pressuring it to actively participate in the war if it wishes to avoid incidents like this.
It remains unclear what Ukraine’s actual intention is with these drone operations. The regime may be seeking to directly coerce Bulgaria – as well as other European countries – by demonstrating its capacity to damage local energy facilities if its interests are not met. Alternatively, the Ukrainian intention could be to stage “false flag” attacks, leading Bulgarians to believe that Russia is behind these incursions.
Ultimately, the Ukrainians’ goal is to ensure that their source of funds and weapons does not dry up. As European nations see their weapons stockpiles and financial reserves decrease – and with local populations increasingly stopping their support for pro-Ukraine policies – the regime grows concerned about the future of international aid, prompting it to stage provocations designed to spark panic in Europe and thereby attempt to regain support.
However, the Ukrainian strategy to regain support is proving unsuccessful. The Bulgarians did not fall for the regime’s trap and acted rationally, investigating the drone’s origin and demanding explanations from Ukrainian diplomats. Furthermore, stances like Kostadinov’s demonstrate that the local people desired an even harsher response, such as the expulsion of diplomats and the severing of relations.
In other words, the Ukrainian strategy of attempting to regain support through provocations, fear, and terror is actually having the opposite effect – making the pro-Ukraine agenda even more unpopular among Bulgarians and other Europeans as well. Ultimately, this demonstrates how the regime’s true nature is becoming apparent to the Western public, who no longer believe the Ukrainian government’s deceptive narratives and are unwilling to continue contributing to the conflict’s indefinite prolongation.
It is inevitable that this will lead to deeper repercussions. European governments are likely to increasingly scale back their aid to Ukraine in the near future – whether by choice or simply because they lack the capacity to continue assisting, given the depletion of available military and financial resources in Europe. At some point, international assistance will prove insufficient, leaving the regime with no alternative but to recognize its defeat on the battlefield.
Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.
You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.
The Caspian Sea: America’s New Eurasian Containment Arena
By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – August 13, 2026
The Caspian Sea — for thirty years a backwater of great-power politics — has quietly become a battlespace, and most of the world is still treating it as a footnote.
In late July, Iranian officials confirmed that a US strike had damaged the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Seyyed al-Shuhada naval facility in Zibakenar, in Iran’s Caspian province of Gilan — the first time in the current war that Washington has reached into Iran’s Caspian coastline. Days earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Kyiv’s drones had struck several vessels in the Caspian more than 1,000 kilometers from Ukrainian-held territory, including a ship reportedly ferrying military cargo from Iran toward Russia. Iran, however, said one of the vessels hit was carrying iron ore from Astrakhan to the Iranian port of Anzali and summoned Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in protest.
Neither strike, on its own, would rewrite anyone’s map. Together, they are a signal. For the first time, the US and US-backed Ukraine have demonstrated that they have the will and the reach to hit targets on a sea that geography, more than strategy, had long kept insulated from direct confrontation. The Caspian’s basin states — Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan — built an entire diplomatic architecture, including a 2018 legal convention on the sea’s status, around the premise that outside militaries would stay out. That premise no longer holds.
What is emerging is not a contest for territory in the traditional sense. It is a contest over connectivity: over the ports, rail lines, pipelines, and shipping lanes that allow Russia, Iran, and, at one remove, China to function as an integrated economic and strategic space rather than three isolated, sanctioned, or otherwise constrained powers. Call it America’s New Eurasian Containment: a strategy that treats infrastructure, not territory, as the terrain worth contesting.
Severing the Connective Tissue
The clearest evidence of this shift sits not on the Caspian’s water but on its shores, in two projects Washington has spent the past year reshaping.
The first is the International North-South Transport Corridor, a roughly 7,200-kilometer multimodal freight route agreed upon by Russia, Iran, and India in 2000 that links the Indian Ocean, through Iran, across the Caspian, to Russian rail networks and on to Europe. Long stalled by under-investment, the corridor has become a priority for Moscow since 2022, precisely because it offers a way around Western sanctions. Its central artery is the Caspian crossing between the Iranian port of Bandar-e Anzali and the Russian port of Astrakhan. More importantly, it is the same stretch of water where Ukrainian drones struck in July and where Israeli forces had already hit Iranian naval and port assets at Anzali back in March, according to regional shipping trackers. A degraded, contested Caspian corridor is a direct blow to the one overland route that lets Moscow and Tehran trade around US and European sanctions. These attacks are, therefore, not about the US war on Iran; they are about reshaping the very geography of trade passing through the Eurasian landscape.
The second is the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP — the transit corridor Washington brokered in August 2025 between Armenia and Azerbaijan, granting a US-led consortium a 99-year lease to build and manage rail, energy, and fiber-optic links through Armenia’s Syunik province. The deal ended a decades-old territorial dispute, but its geopolitical function is narrower and sharper. It places Iran’s only land border with Armenia under American-supervised transit control, cutting off Tehran’s most direct overland access into the South Caucasus and, by extension, into a region Russia has treated as its own backyard since the Soviet collapse. Whatever the deal’s stated humanitarian purpose, it functions as a wedge driven into Eurasian connective tissue.
Neither project was designed with the other in mind. But together with the Caspian strikes, they describe a single logic: deny Russia and Iran the infrastructure that lets their January 2025 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership — a 20-year treaty covering defense, energy, finance, and counterterrorism cooperation — translate into real economic integration rather than a document signed in Moscow. China, meanwhile, watches from the margins. Beijing has no naval presence on the Caspian and is not a party to any of these strikes or corridors, but its own westward trade ambitions run through the same chokepoints, i.e., the Middle Corridor via the South Caucasus, and Iranian ports as a Belt and Road terminus. A Washington-controlled TRIPP and a contested Caspian complicate China’s overland options as a side effect, even if Beijing was never the intended target.
A Frontier Without a Front Line
The danger in this strategy is precisely that it has no clean edges. Containment during the Cold War had defined lines — the Fulda Gap, the Elbe, the 38th parallel — and a doctrine that most parties understood. Infrastructure containment has none of that. A drone strike on a cargo ship, an airstrike on a naval depot, and a 99-year land lease branded with a president’s name: each is individually deniable, incremental, and justifiable in its own narrow terms, even as the cumulative effect reshapes the strategic map of an entire region. That ambiguity is a feature for Washington, which can advance the strategy without ever declaring it. But it is also a source of volatility because affected countries are left to infer intent from actions rather than respond to a stated policy. And, inferences, in a region this armed and this aggrieved, tend toward worst-case assumptions.
The more durable question is what happens once the corridors themselves become targets, not just prizes. Pipelines, rail lines, and undersea cables may now be legitimate objects of great-power coercion. If so, the Caspian will not be the last “peripheral” space pulled into contested geography. The Arctic shipping lanes, the Malacca chokepoint, and the fibre-optic seabed of the Indian Ocean are all candidates for the same treatment. In this environment, the states that thrive will not be the ones with the largest militaries. They will be the ones that make their infrastructure redundant, diversified, and defensible: multiple routes, multiple partners, no single artery whose loss is fatal. Iran and Russia have bet heavily on a small number of chokepoints. Their partnership may keep deepening going forward. But the deeper it goes, the more attacks it will face and endure.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
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US Spent $533 Million on Shell Factory That Produced Zero Usable Shells — Reports
Sputnik – 13.08.2026
A US Army-funded artillery plant near Dallas, built to produce 155mm shells for Ukraine, never produced a single usable shell, ProPublica reported.
Workers described robots catching fire, machines smashing into equipment, steel cracking beyond repair and giant presses needing to be beaten with a sledgehammer just to function.
“It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night,” one former employee said.
The Army halted work on two of the plant’s three production lines in 2025 after General Dynamics missed multiple deadlines.
The company was still awarded billions in new contracts.
The US keeps pouring money into its proxy war machine — and sometimes the machine cannot even make the shells.
Russia has repeatedly warned that such weapons deliveries only prolong the conflict.
US Says “It’s the Middle of the Game” in Iran /Lt Col Daniel Davis & Brian McGlinchey
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – August 12, 2026
Why does Turkey transfer ATACMS and will this save Neo-Nazi junta?
By Drago Bosnic | August 12, 2026
NATO member Turkey plans to transfer a massive arsenal of US-made long-range strike systems and artillery munitions to the Neo-Nazi junta forces. This includes at least 70 M39 ATACMS TBMs (tactical ballistic missiles), 12 M270 MLRSs (multiple launch rocket systems), 2,524 M26 227 mm rockets (compatible with both the M270 MLRS and the M142 HIMARS) and 47,000 M509A1 203 mm cluster-munition artillery rounds.
This will be by far the largest single transfer of NATO-sourced weapons and munitions to the Kiev regime outside the United States. It comes at a critical moment for the political West, as the Neo-Nazi junta’s ATACMS stockpiles are virtually gone after years of failures against the Russian military, both in terms of losses caused by Moscow’s world-class long-range precision strike capabilities and its no less stellar SAM/ABM (surface-to-air missile/anti-ballistic missile) systems.
With the US embroiled in its disastrous aggression against Iran, the Pentagon is unable to restock its own arsenal, let alone spare some of its missiles for the Kiev regime. Turkey’s decision to deliver these weapons and munitions comes at a critical moment for the political West, demonstrating its loyalty to NATO and its aggression against the world. Namely, arming the Neo-Nazi junta with so many weapons is a clear message to both Russia and Iran, particularly now that the latter has also been targeted by NATO’s favorite puppet regime. As previously mentioned, it also comes amid US aggression against Iran, demonstrating strategic coordination between Ankara and Washington DC. Turkish motives are certainly multifaceted. Apart from showing loyalty, it’s also gaining massive profits from (re)selling its old stockpile of US-made weapons and earning “points” for a potential return to the troubled F-35 program.
The latter is essentially an economic and financial boost to the troubled Turkish economy, which has suffered due to years of Western pressure and low-level sanctions in the decade since the failed NATO coup against Erdogan. Despite all this and Moscow’s critical role in thwarting the plot, Ankara seems to be distancing itself from the multipolar world and seeking deeper (re)integration into NATO. And while it doesn’t support the political West’s economic siege of Russia, primarily because of its own business interests, Turkey has once again emerged as one of the leading Russian adversaries within NATO, particularly in terms of weapons and munitions transfers. Not to mention its role in supporting all sorts of Islamic radicals and terrorists all across the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeastern Europe, including those who overthrew the last legitimate Syrian government.
Obviously, this was done in coordination with the political West and certain Persian Gulf monarchies, all of which were after President Bashar al-Assad for decades. Turkey’s role in destabilizing the South Caucasus and Central Asia should also be noted, particularly as it directly undermines Russian, Iranian and Chinese national security interests. This is a major challenge for the multipolar world, as it undermines stability in regions critical to BRICS and SCO. It leaves no other logical conclusion except that Turkey is deliberately coordinating its extremely aggressive foreign policy with that of the US and EU/NATO. This includes the involvement of Turkish intelligence in various insurgencies and coup attempts in Central Asia, most notably the failed color revolution attempt in Kazakhstan in early January 2022, which was prevented by joint Russian and Kazakh forces.
Ankara has also been one of the Neo-Nazi junta’s leading arms suppliers and has also played a major role in tricking Russia into fake diplomacy, such as the false promise it wouldn’t release members of the openly Nazi “Azov” battalion. All this was designed as a ruse to buy time for the political West and its favorite puppet regime. As for the latest weapons deal, perhaps the most dangerous aspect is the transfer of cluster munitions, which remain a major hazard for civilians long after fighting has ended. With the American arsenal depleted, Turkey remains one of the few major suppliers of these munitions. Unfortunately, its concern for civilian deaths is virtually non-existent, as it has a long history of using highly controversial weapons that are particularly dangerous for civilians, including white phosphorus that was regularly used by NATO-backed terrorists in Syria.
However, apart from NATO’s terrorist tendencies (hardly surprising considering its origins), can Turkish weapons, particularly the ATACMS, really change anything on the battlefield? While 70 missiles are certainly nothing to be ignored, it should be noted this is only a fraction of what the US already delivered to the Neo-Nazi junta. Namely, it supplied the HIMARS with thousands of M30/M31 GPS-guided rockets (approximately 70 km range) and at least 500 MGM-140 ATACMS ballistic missiles (range 165-300 km, depending on the variant). The Russian military’s unrivaled electronic warfare (EW) and SAM/ABM systems were instrumental in countering these weapons. Of the 500 missiles sent, at least 450 ATACMS are “missing”, which is around 25% of the entire US military’s stockpile. So far, there have been around 20 (if not even fewer) confirmed ATACMS hits on Russian positions.
If 450 were delivered to the Kiev regime and are now “unaccounted for”, is it really that difficult to calculate their actual battlefield effectiveness against the Russian military? As previously mentioned, the Neo-Nazi junta got at least 500 ATACMS, which is approximately 25% of the US Army stocks and 15% of the entire production run since 1991.
Of these, only 50 remained in the Kiev regime’s service by late 2024, meaning that the vast majority got shot down or destroyed while in storage. Even if we go out on a limb and say there have been 20 successful strikes on Russian positions, this would mean that the actual combat effectiveness of the ATACMS is 4.44%, although military reports suggest it’s even lower. In other words, these arms transfers only serve to prolong the fighting and can in no way offer any real battlefield advantages to the Neo-Nazi junta.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Britain and Germany Among Largest Suppliers of Parts for Ukrainian Drones – Russian Diplomat
Sputnik – 11.08.2026
The United Kingdom is the most active supplier of main units and components for unmanned aerial vehicles used as killer drones against civilians. Germany supplies weapons in large quantities, and Sweden is also involved. Canada plays an active role, Russian Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik told Sputnik.
“At the very least, these countries, even in their official rhetoric, emphasize as much as possible that they are supplying the Ukrainian regime in Kiev with unmanned aerial vehicles, which have caused civilian deaths in the Russian cities of Nizhnekamsk and Belgorod,” Miroshnik stressed.
“Ukrainian forces have fired more than 7,000 munitions at civilian facilities in Russia in the past week, killing 43 civilians and injuring 376 more, the Russian diplomat said.
He added that Ukrainian troops used large quantities of “weapons with shrapnel and high-explosive fragmentation warheads with the aim of causing maximum harm to civilians.”
The enemy attacked residential areas, infrastructure facilities, industrial and logistics hubs in 16 Russian regions located far from the front lines, according to Miroshnik.
He also said that a Ukrainian drone operator deliberately directed a UAV at a beach with civilians in Arkhipo-Osipovka, Krasnodar Region, which should be classified as a grave war crime under international humanitarian law.
Disregarding the norms and principles of international humanitarian law, the enemy carried out deliberate strikes on medical facilities and medical transport, including those located in the Donetsk People’s Republic, Miroshnik pointed out.
Trump’s $23 billion ship will be outdated before it even hits water
In an era of cheap drones, the new battleship is overly reliant on expensive and highly vulnerable technology
By Dan Grazier | Responsible Statecraft | August 11, 2026
The first proposed Trump-class battleship now has a price tag: $23 billion.
This cost, as assessed by the Congressional Budget Office, will garner a lot of attention. But the primary concern for policymakers and citizens alike should be the complexity of the ship’s design.
The U.S. Navy has a poor shipbuilding record in the 21st century. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Constellation-class frigate have been complete failures. The final verdict of the Ford-class aircraft carrier is not yet in, but when the ship’s crew can’t even rely on the sewage system to work properly, the case isn’t looking too good.
It becomes clear reading through the CBO’s report that Navy officials in Washington have learned nothing over the past 25 years from their shipbuilding mistakes. In typical Washington fashion, the new ship is being touted as “the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” as President Donald Trump put it. In practical terms, the ship will be armed with “antiair, land-attack, and antiship missiles, hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, large lasers, and a rail gun (a weapon that uses electromagnetic energy to fire nonexplosive projectiles at hypersonic speeds),” according to the CBO.
All of these systems will require a tremendous amount of electrical power to operate. To meet this challenge, the new ship will also be nuclear-powered. The addition of a nuclear reactor will dramatically increase both the cost and complexity of the ship’s construction.
The original sin of all the Navy’s 21st century shipbuilding failures is a lack of design discipline. The architects of each program attempted to incorporate every gadget the technologists could imagine, several of which (including cutting-edge rail guns) remain unproven to this day. Excess complexity drives up costs and delays delivery, often by years.
Officials compounded that essential mistake when they began building ships before the underlying technology had been developed. The practice of beginning construction before the development process ends is known as concurrency. When the overlap between manufacturing and development is too great, as it has been with acquisition programs like the Littoral Combat Ship and the USS Gerald R. Ford, costs rise and schedules slip because it becomes more difficult to incorporate the new technology into work that has already been completed.
A glance at America’s shipbuilding capacity suggests that the construction timeline for the battleship program is also unrealistic. Navy leaders plan to buy 15 of the new ships between 2028 and 2056. But naval construction is already years behind schedule.
The next Ford-class aircraft carrier, for example, is already five years late, yet the Pentagon hopes to assemble the new battleships at the same Newport News shipbuilding dock used to build aircraft carriers. The Navy’s current fleet of 289 ships is already far short of the legally required 355 ships. Attempting to build the largest and most complex surface warship in nearly a century hardly seems like the proper course of action to expand the fleet and alleviate the strain on the Navy’s already harried sailors.
The size of the fleet matters because it directly impacts the quality of life and service of the nation’s sailors. The U.S. Navy has played an integral role in maintaining freedom of navigation around the globe since the end of World War II. Having fewer ships in the fleet means that the existing ships and their crews must work longer and harder to meet the Navy’s operational demand. Since leaders in Washington show few signs of reducing the number of missions the Navy must perform, adopting a shipbuilding plan that will see the fleet continue to shrink for the foreseeable future makes little sense.
The fact that the battleship program is projected out over the next 30 years also deserves scrutiny. Instituting a warship program of this size to span three decades at a time when uncrewed vessels and anti-ship missiles are proliferating means that officials today believe a large surface warfare ship will remain viable throughout that timespan. That is a bold assumption to make. It is doubtful many people in 1996 would have anticipated the Ukrainians effectively denying the Russian fleet the use of the Black Sea with uncrewed vessels and shore-based missiles. A $23 billion American battleship will be an inviting target for submarines, anti-ship missiles, and hypersonic weapons.
The current National Security Strategy released in November 2025 calls for the United States to concentrate on defending the Western Hemisphere. Building the largest surface combatant ship since World War II, armed with conventional, hypersonic, and nuclear-tipped missiles, is hardly necessary to defend the seas close to home. Such a ship is designed specifically to project military power around the globe. The battleship plan provides more evidence that the national security establishment will do precisely what it wants to do, no matter what defense strategy the government adopts.
Dan Grazier is a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center. He is a former Marine Corps captain who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. His assignments in uniform included tours with 2nd Tank Battalion in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and 1st Tank Battalion in Twentynine Palms, California.
US Military testing sowing chaos in civilian skies
By Stavroula Pabst | Responsible Statecraft | August 10, 2026
Almost every day, the military tests various emerging technologies across the U.S., including drone and counter-drone systems and GPS jamming.
To a certain extent, this testing is inevitable. But, as experts told RS, the government has in many cases not ensured that the proper safeguards and necessary interagency coordination are in place to make sure such tests can be conducted safely. These testing issues strain civilian airspaces — increasingly disrupting aircraft and even sometimes leading to accidents.
Drone and counter-drone mayhem
In particular, the military’s domestic testing and use of drone- and counter-drone technologies have precipitated several recent high-profile mishaps.
Last March, the Navy and Secret Service tested counter-drone technologies at a military base near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA). As a result, several flight crews received faulty alerts warning of possible collisions with nearby aircraft.
In 2020, an MQ-9 reaper drone crashed during testing at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, which shares its flight line with Syracuse Hancock International Airport. Military officials did not tell the public about the incident, which caused over $6 million in damages, until more than a year later.
Interagency disagreements and coordination issues over the tech’s use in U.S. airspaces have only caused more problems.
Back in February, the military lent a counter-drone laser to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP subsequently used it, without coordinating with other agencies, to target what it thought were Mexican cartel drones. Instead, it hit party balloons.
The incident prompted the FAA — which had concerns about the laser’s possible effects on civilian aircraft — to temporarily close the surrounding airspace. The agency did so without notifying other agencies in advance, causing confusion amid fears that the U.S. could intervene militarily in Mexico.
Later in February, the military shot down a CBP drone with a laser-based anti-drone system after mistaking it for a cartel drone — again prompting the FAA to close airspace around El Paso.
The FAA and Pentagon formally agreed in April that the laser system’s safety controls work and “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft.”
But broader tensions over the testing and use of these technologies in civilian airspace persist.
The FAA’s departing deputy administrator, Chris Rocheleau, said at a drone leadership conference late last month the agency is being “nudged” to accept “more risk” regarding uncrewed drones. FAA officials told Politico last week that the Pentagon’s decisions about aviation often prevail over the FAA’s safety concerns in practice.
Following the repeated airspace closures in Texas, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) called for an investigation into “potential serious and alarming problems and deficiencies” with interagency coordination and oversight over counter-drone systems.
“As we saw with the DCA Midair Collision, failures in interagency planning create an unacceptably dangerous situation where it’s no longer a matter of if but rather when the next catastrophic accident occurs that will claim American lives,” Duckworth wrote, referencing a collision between a commercial flight and an Army helicopter near the DCA airport in January of last year.
As Dana Goward, founder and president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, tells RS, it’s “not clear” the U.S. is prepared for drone and counter-drone operations in its airspace.
He questioned whether officials consistently know where and how such systems are used, and whether they have adequate safeguards to manage them safely and efficiently.
“My sense is that while those things are being worked on, they’re not in place right now,” Goward said. That “should be a concern.”
Aircraft ‘couldn’t navigate safely’ near White Sands
The U.S. military has also been testing GPS jamming across the continental U.S., especially in the American Southwest. While it has worked to notify pilots of its efforts, testing often stands to interfere with civilian aviation in practice.
A notable example is a recent accident back in May in New Mexico, where a small medical plane lost its GPS signal due to military jamming testing in the White Sands region. Attempting to land with older navigation methods, the plane became disoriented and crashed into a mountain.
Under investigation, the crash is the first known case where military jamming testing can be directly linked with a civilian plane crash in the U.S. But many other episodes could have come close.In 2021, engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum revealed internal Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records showing that 233 GPS interference incidents took place in the southwestern U.S., where military testing is especially frequent, during 2017 and the early months of 2018.
In those cases, testing repeatedly led commercial, civilian and medical aircraft to lose their navigation capabilities, drift off course, and sometimes enter restricted airspace. Pilots declared emergencies in five of the incidents.
“The GPS jamming at White Sands was effecting [sic] the safety of flight of the aircraft to the point to where they couldn’t navigate safely,” an air traffic controller anonymously wrote to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System in 2021. They added that the military often refuses to stop testing when asked to do so by pilots nearby.
The military issues Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) before it tests electronic warfare technologies like jamming, spoofing, and anti-jamming and – spoofing capabilities, which can all disrupt aircraft navigation systems.
But these NOTAMs often cover regions spanning thousands of square miles and cannot predict exactly where or when interference will occur. Pilots receive large numbers of NOTAMs with little relevance to their flights and can often fly through NOTAM-affected areas without experiencing interference. Such circumstances mean many pilots overlook or otherwise miss important warnings.
In any case, the air traffic controllers assisting the troubled medical plane crew in New Mexico helped three other aircraft without GPS signal on the same evening — despite a NOTAM having warned pilots of possible interference beforehand.
Pilots are required to know how to use older navigation aids in case they lose access to GPS mid-flight. But, as Goward tells RS, GPS has become central to how pilots navigate in practice.
GPS “is something that they’ve grown up with, and trained with, and used for decades,” Goward said. “When that system is no longer available [due to interference], the workload increases, distractions increase, and safety margins decrease.” (In aviation, safety margins refer to the buffers crews maintain to manage unexpected events, including having additional time and fuel, and maintaining greater distances from other aircraft.)
“You end up with a higher likelihood that something bad is going to happen,” Goward said.
As Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, tells RS, “there is no question that testing increases aviation risk in the short term.”
“But not doing the testing would increase aviation risk in the long term,” he warned. “We need to test anti-jam and anti-spoof technologies if we hope to put them on planes in the years to come.”
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Only a Beginning… Charles Malik’s vision of an emergent Pax Judaica
By David Miller | Tracking Power | November 12, 2026
In August 1949, three months after Israel joined the United Nations, Lebanon’s envoy in Washington sent his government a long report. Charles Malik, no firebrand, had signed the UN Charter and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His Report on the Present Situation lay largely unread until Dar An-Nahar printed it in 2002. … continue
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