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The Hard Math Of Big Wars

In spite of the rough lessons on the importance of mass in the Korean and Vietnam Wars in the second half of the 20th Century—and even the cold bucket of sand thrown in our face about what is required for even heavy imperial policing like we had in Iraq and Afghanistan at the end of the first decade of this century—a large segment of the national security nomenklatura was content with boutique-levels of warstocks in our relatively shallow magazines.

We’ve discussed this here and at the OG Blog for a long time, as have others, but until recently the need to purchase and stockpile the weapons we know we will need in the big fight—heck, like we’ve seen in Iran recently, even for extended punitive expeditions—simply has not been getting the support it needs.

It is nice to at last see a shift, but let’s not celebrate it until we understand how we got here. If we don’t have a good understanding why we forgot the need for the magazine depth that is inefficient in peacetime but essential in war, then we are condemned to repeat it when the immediacy of the crisis starts to fade and the accountants, backed by hucksters selling sketchy theories, start clawing back supremacy in the argument.

Generations have grown to positions of power in our defense establishment riding on their success of selling the shallowness of our magazines as a reflection of modern natsec theory.

It started before the guns from WWII were even cold.

Most famous was the nuclear club that convinced everyone, because they were the Smartest People in the Room™, that ‘war was new’ and that they knew that the future was nuclear. No need for large navies, armies, or tactical air forces taking up space with ‘old think’. No. Nuclear war will either be the new normal, or would prevent wars from happening at all.

Oops.

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United Airlines Flight to Minneapolis Diverted Due to Failed Hijack Attempt

A United Airlines flight traveling from Chicago to Minneapolis diverted to Madison, Wisc., after an unruly passenger made multiple attempts to reach the cockpit, prompting the flight crew to declare a security emergency.

United Flight UA2005, a Boeing 737 carrying 147 passengers and six crew members, landed safely at Dane County Regional Airport in Madison on May 29, with no injuries reported.

According to air traffic control communications, the passenger made repeated attempts to access the cockpit before law enforcement officers who were traveling aboard the aircraft were able to restrain him. The pilot activated transponder code 7500, the emergency signal used to indicate a potential hijacking or unlawful interference with an aircraft.

The passenger, whom authorities identified as a 75-year-old man experiencing a mental health crisis, was detained after the aircraft landed. A United spokesperson told NBC News that Flight UA2005 “landed safely in Madison… to address a security concern with an unruly passenger.”

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office deputies took the individual into custody, and the FBI was notified of the investigation. Passenger Mike Rundle told CNN that a disturbance occurred near the front of the aircraft after another traveler observed the man reach toward a flight attendant. Several passengers and officers intervened and escorted him back to his seat.

In air traffic communications that NBC News acquired, flight crew onboard the plane could be heard discussing the attempted cockpit breach with ground control.

“I do not believe they ever cuffed him, but they were able to finally get control of him after multiple attempts to try to breach the cockpit,” a member of the crew said. “I believe at this point he is seated in a seat and flanked with law enforcement officers on either side.”

Rundle said signs of trouble emerged before takeoff from Chicago O’Hare International Airport, when the suspect repeatedly stood during taxiing and crew members sought a Russian-speaking passenger to assist with interpretation.

After landing in Madison, law enforcement officers boarded the aircraft, removed the passenger, and conducted their response. The flight later resumed its trip to Minneapolis, landing early on Saturday morning, data from FlightAware confirmed.

According to FlightAware tracking data, Flight UA2005 had been airborne for roughly 45 minutes after departing Chicago before the incident occurred. The FBI said its Madison Resident Agency and local law enforcement partners responded immediately to the incident. 

“A subject was detained by the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and afterwards passengers resumed their flight,” a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office told NBC News.

Authorities have not released the passenger’s name, announced charges, or disclosed additional details about the events that led to his detention. The Federal Aviation Administration said it investigates all passenger disturbance incidents and may pursue civil penalties against passengers who interfere with flight crews. According to the agency, airlines have reported more than 640 unruly passenger incidents so far this year.

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Veteran Who Graham Platner Said Didn’t ‘Deserve to Live’ Slams Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders for Backing Him 

Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat running for senate who has been plagued with multiple scandals calling his character into question, was recently exposed once again, for mocking a fellow war veteran and saying that he didn’t ‘deserve to live.’

That veteran is a man named Teddy Daniels and he just wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, firing back at Platner for his comments.

This weekend, Daniels appeared on CNN and slammed not only Platner, but Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders for backing Platner, despite all of these awful remarks and controversies.

Transcript via Mediaite:

I kind of consider the source on that, first and foremost, and I’ll be honest with you, what really upset me about the comments is — you know, I can’t even say that I was upset. I’m upset about the comment that he made about Chris Kyle. You know Chris Kyle has kids. He’s not here to defend himself.

I have kids and you know with people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders backing this man, I want them, I want Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to — my youngest is 8, he turns 9 in a couple days — to tell my kids that they’re supporting a man who said their father didn’t deserve to live. I mean, think about that. You know, that’s the issue there. It’s just sad that somebody like this is being considered for a position in leadership in the United States Senate.

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Google to Release 64 Million Bacteria-Infected Mosquitoes Across California and Florida Over the Next Two Years

Google is seeking federal approval to release up to 64 million specially treated mosquitoes across California and Florida over the next two years, according to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announcement published earlier this month in The Federal Register, the official journal of the U.S. government.

The tech giant is “requesting an experimental use permit (EUP) for the Wolbachia pipientis wAlbB contained in live adult Culex quinquefasciatus male mosquitoes (DQB Strain),” according to the announcement.

A summary of the request reads:

“Google LLC is proposing to use up to 14.080 mg of the active ingredient Wolbachia pipientis wAlbB Contained in Live Adult Culex quinquefasciatus Male Mosquitoes (DQB Strain) for two years in California and Florida. In Florida, up to 16,000,000 DQB Male Mosquitoes are proposed to be released in year 1, and up to 16,000,000 released in year 2. In California, up to 16,000,000 are proposed to be released in year 1, and up to 16,000,000 released in year 2. Proposed testing will include the states of California and Florida to generate data to support a Section 3 product registration application under FIFRA.”

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CBS Torches Stephen Colbert After His Exit

CBS just handed Stephen Colbert the most brutal farewell a network could offer, and it should end all the debate over how and why Colbert got canceled.

Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed officially took over CBS’s 11:35 p.m. late-night slot on Friday, May 22, under a new “time buy” deal with the network. Under the arrangement, Allen Media Group pays CBS for the time period, handles all production costs itself, and controls the advertising inventory. This means that CBS doesn’t have to spend a dime.

That’s a pretty sharp contrast from what Colbert cost it.

CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show back in July 2025, citing financial reasons. The network said the program was hemorrhaging roughly $40 million a year. At the time, some on the left insisted that the move was political. In their minds, CBS, an anti-Trump network, was doing President Donald Trump a favor by getting rid of one of his critics.

But CBS (again) demolished that narrative.

“With this ‘time buy’ model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit — a $55 million swing,” the spokesperson said, calling it “a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost prohibitive to continue.”

So in axing Colbert, the network turned the whole slot profitable. It sure sounds like CBS has now been unburdened by what has been.

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Thomas and Alito Take a Regrettable Position in a Qualified Immunity Case

Qualified immunity is a judge-made doctrine that routinely shields bad cops from facing civil lawsuits over their abusive and unconstitutional behavior. All too often, a federal judge will hear a case in which a clear constitutional violation occurred, only to then shield the offending officer anyway from facing civil liability over the blatant misconduct. It’s a legal doctrine that deserves to be abolished.

Occasionally, however, the officer will lose one of these cases, and qualified immunity will be denied. That’s what happened last year in Hart v. Grand Rapids, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit actually let a federal civil rights lawsuit proceed against a Michigan police officer whose use of deadly force against a protester was officially reprimanded by his own superiors because of how the officer’s actions violated the department’s training and procedures.

That officer subsequently appealed his loss to the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally turned him down earlier this week, thereby leaving the 6th Circuit’s denial of qualified immunity undisturbed. The civil rights suit against the officer will now move forward in federal court, a welcome result. To be clear, the officer may still prevail in the end, but at least his alleged victim will now get the chance to seek redress for a credible constitutional rights violation.

What makes this case especially notable, in addition to the all-too-rare denial of qualified immunity, is the fact that two members of the Supreme Court went out of their way to let us know just how eager they were to rule in the offending officer’s favor.

In the view of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the officer in this case was fully entitled to receive qualified immunity and to be shielded from facing civil suit. If it were up to Thomas and Alito, the 6th Circuit’s judgment against the officer would have been summarily reversed.

I am sometimes asked which members of the Supreme Court are the most reliably libertarian on various legal matters, such as criminal justice. After clarifying that nobody on the current Supreme Court is a truly consistent legal libertarian on anything, I typically say something to the effect that Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch usually tend to give libertarians the most reasons to cheer on matters of criminal justice.

This case presents us with the flip side of that coin. When viewed from a libertarian legal perspective, Thomas and Alito tend to stand out as the worst on criminal justice issues. In far too many cases, Thomas and Alito have exhibited a kind of overriding deference to law enforcement that undermines the Bill of Rights and thwarts government accountability. Their actions this week continue that unfortunate trend.

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Pax Silica, the Gaza genocide, and the crisis of global capitalism

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has for the moment turned international attention away from Gaza as Israel moves from high- to low-intensity genocide.  The genocide may be the horrific culmination of 75-plus years of Zionist settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, but in order to make sense of it we must analyze the radical transformations that have taken place in the Middle Eastern and global political economy in recent decades.

The impulse to genocide has always been built into the Zionist project. But that impulse has been activated by the epochal crisis of global capitalism. The Al Aqsa Flood attack of October 2023 furnished Israel with the historic opportunity for which they had been waiting for decades.  If the Zionists are still in pursuit of their elusive Eretz Israel, the United States has been heading up a much more expansive project, one that places Gaza in the very center of global capitalism and its epochal crisis.  In the game plan of the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, Gaza is now to become an experimental field for a new and deadlier phase of global capitalism.  It is this larger picture that we want to lay out in this article.

The contemporary crisis of global capitalism is multidimensional. Structurally it is a crisis of overaccumulation, which refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital (profits) are built up but this capital cannot find productive outlets for reinvestment.  This overaccumulation crisis generates intense pressure for expansion as transnational capitalists undertake a predatory search for where to unload massive amounts of surplus capital and open up new spaces for profit-making.  This violent expansion involves the seizure of markets and resources around the world through war, displacement, and repression.  The U.S. state and beyond it, what we will call Global Trumpism, is its out-of-control instrument in this expansionary wave.  At the core of Global Trumpism is the Washington-Tel Aviv axis.

The larger backdrop to the Israeli genocide is the transnational integration of capital over the past half century and the radical restructuring of global class relations and power blocs that capitalist globalization has brought about. Globalization in West Asia region began in the 1980s and accelerated with the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that followed the establishment in 1997 of the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) and a host of related bilateral and multilateral regional and extra-regional free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs and IMF-supervised austerity.

This integration unleashed a cascade of transnational corporate and financial investment in finance, energy, high-tech, construction, infrastructure, luxury consumption, tourism and other services.  It brought Gulf capital, including trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds, together with capital from all around the world, involving the EU, North and Latin America, and Asia, inextricably enmeshing them all in emerging global circuits of accumulation.  In this way, nationally-oriented Arab bourgeoisies transmorphed into transnationally-oriented bourgeoisies as the entire region became incorporated into the globally-integrated production, financial, and service system that came into being over the past half century.

Israel, far from remaining excluded, integrated into these expanding regional and transnational capitalist networks on the heels of the Oslo “peace” accords, signed in 1993, as the Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies began to develop common class interests.  In 2020 the UAE and Bahrain, along with Morocco and Sudan, signed the Abraham Accords, joining Egypt and Jordan in normalizing relations with Israeli, an opening that allowed Gulf investment groups to pour billions of dollars into the Israeli economy.  The October 2023 Al Aqsa attack and the subsequent Israeli siege placed further normalization on hold.  The new U.S.-Israeli strategy revolving around the “Board of Peace” (henceforth, Board of Genocide) seeks to bring the Arab and other states in the region back into the Abraham architecture.

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Aww Look At The Cute Dancing Robot Police State Surveillance Dog…

Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs are being deployed at designated World Cup venues in the US to perform perimeter security inspections, prompting concerns over the advance of surveillance tech.

The company has stated that the machines “will be used to assist security personnel with investigating things like suspicious packages or other potentially hazardous materials.”

These four-legged fiends are set to roam, and even dance (oh how cute) around AT&T Stadium in Dallas and other FIFA sites ahead of the 2026 tournament, sending live feeds back to human teams with their 360-degree cameras, thermal sensors, acoustic pickups, and AI anomaly detection.

“The robots do not have facial recognition capabilities,” a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told WFAA, insisting they spot unauthorized people in restricted zones without utilising facial scans for now, after a viral TikTok video made the claim.

Hyundai, the South Korean owner of Boston Dynamics and major FIFA sponsor, added the bots “will support on-site security operations, helping contribute to a safer tournament environment.”

But peel back the puppy-like head tilts and choreographed spins and you see the real rollout: tireless mechanical sentries normalizing constant surveillance on American soil. They look fun today at the soccer spectacle expecting half a million visitors. Tomorrow the same platforms patrol streets, malls, and events nationwide, always watching, always recording.

This isn’t some isolated gimmick. It’s fast becoming commonplace in cities such as Atlanta, where robot security dogs prowl apartment complexes and parking lots issuing verbal commands to citizens.

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A Nation of Suspects

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.

The spying seems to fall into several categories. The National Security Agency, which is in the Department of Defense, employs about 60,000 domestic spies. These are the folks who want us to believe that they go through the trouble of making applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to spy on foreigners.

Actually, from time to time they do go to this court, but their travels there — where judges are frisked upon entering and leaving the courthouse by the NSA agents who appear before them — serve as fig leaves for their massive warrantless spying on Americans. The FISA Court is unconstitutional because it issues warrants based on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, rather than on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires.

The courts have ruled consistently since the 1960s that spying — surveillance, as the feds call it — is a search, and the capture of data from a surveillance is a seizure.

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons in America — not just Americans — from warrantless searches and seizures of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” There are some well-recognized exceptions to this constitutional baseline, such as evidence that will quickly vanish or be seriously degraded, but those exceptions do not apply here as the NSA captures in real time all keystrokes on all digital devices and all fiber optic data transmitted into, out of and within the United States.

The judges of the FISA Court surely know that the Department of Justice lawyers and NSA agents who appear before them are going through a charade, and the court has been made a part of it. The charade is the pretense that all spying is done pursuant to the warrants that FISA Court judges issue. Former NSA agents have revealed publicly that this is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, the lowered standard from probable cause of crime to probable cause of communicating to a foreign person was crafted by Congress — in another of its many moments heedless of the Constitution. After a few years of this, the FISA Court began to issue warrants for spying on the Americans who communicate with foreigners, out to the sixth degree. A sixth grader can do the math, as this leads to hundreds of millions of Americans whose communications are captured.

A second category of spying is employed by the DHS. The DHS — now a 250,000-person strong federal police department nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — has sophisticated software that can read fingerprints at 15 feet and irises at 15 inches. So, if you wave goodbye or good riddance to an ICE agent, and he holds up his mobile phone, and you are in the federal system for any benign reason, he has captured your bank, health, legal and commercial records on the spot. If he talks to you in your car and is within 15 inches of your face, he can capture the same data.

As if all this were not enough, the feds and local police use a device called a Stingray, which mimics the signal sent to all mobile devices as if the device were being used to communicate. But the communication is just one way, as the Stingray will tell the government where the person possessing the mobile device is at any given moment. This, too, is a seizure of private personal information — the contents of the computer chip in your mobile device — which the Fourth Amendment characterizes as an “effect.”

And then there is the FBI, which now uses zero-click software. This permits agents without warrants or even approval of their superiors to engage in computer hacking without having to trick the hacked victim into clicking on a link. Computer hacking is a felony.

All of this surveillance is unconstitutional, dangerous and commonplace. It consists in the use of surveillance and law enforcement tools without articulable suspicion.

For 600 years, articulable suspicion — the lowest evidentiary standard we have — has been the baseline for all government behavior that targets an individual. Articulable suspicion is the fact-based ability to state why a person — not a group — should be targeted and for what crime. This is the same standard that must be met when police stop someone in public.

Anything less than articulable suspicion is a fishing expedition; stated differently, a general warrant. General warrants — which were used by British agents on American colonists — permitted the agents to stop anyone, to search anywhere and to seize anything without articulable suspicion. The Fourth Amendment outlawed them.

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DARPA wants to replace GPS dependence with new class of sensors

Every GPS signal on the battlefield is a vulnerability waiting to be exploited, and Russia, China, and Iran have all demonstrated the willingness to exploit it. DARPA just announced it is going to solve that problem from the inside out, by building a navigation sensor so precise that it no longer needs GPS to know exactly where it is.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s research arm responsible for developing technologies that define the next generation of American military capability, published a special notice on May 29, announcing the forthcoming PINPOINT program, formally titled Precision Inertial Navigation and Positioning On an Integrated Tesseract.

The program, managed through DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office by Program Manager Sunil Bhave, aims to develop a revolutionary approach to inertial navigation that would allow military platforms to maintain precise positioning even when GPS has been jammed, spoofed, or denied. A formal solicitation with specific technical requirements and performance metrics is expected in the near future, with industry responses to the preliminary notice accepted through July 13, 2026.

To understand why PINPOINT matters, some background on how modern military navigation works is necessary. The Global Positioning System is a network of satellites orbiting approximately 20,200 kilometers (12,550 miles) above the Earth that broadcasts precise timing signals. A receiver on the ground, in the air, or at sea calculates its position by measuring the time it takes signals from multiple satellites to arrive. The system is extraordinarily accurate and has become the backbone of modern warfare: guided missiles use GPS to hit targets. Drones use GPS to navigate. Artillery use GPS for position reporting and fire control. Soldiers use GPS for blue-force tracking and navigation. Virtually every precision capability the U.S. military fields depends on GPS signals that an adversary can jam.

When GPS is jammed or spoofed, military systems fall back on inertial measurement units, known as IMUs. An inertial measurement unit is a device that measures acceleration and rotation using gyroscopes and accelerometers, allowing a platform to estimate its current position based on where it started and how it has moved since. The problem is that IMU errors accumulate over time. A small measurement error in acceleration or rotation rate compounds with every subsequent reading, so a drone that starts its flight knowing exactly where it is will drift further and further from its true position the longer it relies exclusively on inertial measurement. High-quality IMUs using fiber-optic or ring-laser gyroscopes can limit this drift to acceptable levels, but those systems are large, expensive, and power-hungry, unsuitable for the small, cheap, expendable drones that define modern warfare.

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