In late 2025, a major RAND Corporation study on U.S.–China strategy was quietly withdrawn from public view less than two weeks after publication. The unusual disappearance suggests an internal struggle over whether the United States should escalate rivalry with China or first rebuild its own industrial and technological base. The RAND report’s realism posed a challenge to the prevailing hawkish narrative.
Read more...A 21-year-old Japanese snowboarder, Kokomo Murase, just landed a backside triple cork 1620. She’s the first woman ever to do it. 📹Kokomo Murase pic.twitter.com/o5NI9P7xwJ — Science girl (@sciencegirl) November 20, 2025 The Math Shows Jackson Pollock Painted Like a Child Would Nautilus 13 dizzying and dazzling images from 2025 Drone Photo Awards Popular Science ‘Jmail’ […]
Read more...In 1982, the Falklands War rescued Margaret Thatcher from political collapse and turned her into a wartime icon. But the deeper lesson of that conflict is more dangerous: diversionary war is appealing to failing leaders, whether democratic or authoritarian. Donald Trump’s long-standing fascination with invading Venezuela, documented in his first term and now echoed by renewed U.S. deployments, a favored opposition proxy, and drug-war legal framing, fits the same dual pattern that produced the Falklands: a desperate leader seeking escape through external confrontation, and the hope of political resurrection through a short, decisive victory. The Falklands Effect turned crisis into triumph for Thatcher, but a Venezuelan conflict today could result in disaster for Trump. The danger is serious, but the power of Trump’s temptation is quietly growing.
Read more...The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have exposed a new reality: the battlefield is becoming too transparent, too fast, and too automated for mass, low-skill infantry to survive. In that environment, militaries will not get rid of human fighters — they will narrow them. The future elite will be smaller, more cognitively trained, and embedded inside human–machine combat cells that can sense, decide, and act without higher headquarters. Their defining virtue won’t be brute courage but restraint: the ability to override automation, to make lawful and proportional choices when AI reaches its limits. But we should not mistake this refinement for stability. As more states adopt AI-enabled elite formations, the competition for speed, autonomy, and informational dominance may actually make escalation easier, not harder.
Read more...Russia’s new Poseidon weapon, a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed undersea drone, threatens coastal cities with massive radioactive destruction. Its speed, stealth, and long range make very difficult to defend against, forcing adversaries to consider ruinously expensive countermeasures. This article examines Poseidon’s capabilities, the challenge of undersea defense, and why renewed arms control is the only rational response.
Read more...For over a century, U.S. warships projected power through the simple act of showing up offshore. That age is ending. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, conceived as the modern tool of gunboat diplomacy, has collapsed under the weight of strategic obsolescence. This article examines the LCS program’s structural failures, the rise of anti-access/area denial technologies, and recent real-world challenges in Venezuela and Yemen that reveal why coercive naval presence no longer works.
Read more...Every era promises a single decisive weapon. From Greek fire and the V-1 to nuclear arms, stealth, and hypersonics, new systems arrive with grand claims, then meet rapid countermeasures. This essay explains the cycle and shows how the Ukraine war fits a long record of belief, propaganda, and adaptation.
Read more...The U.S. military relies on rare earth elements across missiles, radars, jet engines, submarine propulsion, and advanced magnets, yet the supply chain is fragile and concentrated abroad. This article explains why REEs matter, their role in a trade war with China, and the cost of substituting domestic production or rare earths and other strategic materials.
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