Tag: perpetual war

Trump’s big, bad battleship will fail

President Trump announced on December 22 that the Navy would build a new Trump-class of “battleships.” The new ships will dwarf existing surface combatant ships. The first of these planned ships, the expected USS Defiant, would be more than three times the size of an existing Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

Predictably, a major selling point for the new ships is that they will be packed full of all the latest technology. These massive new battleships will be armed with the most sophisticated guns and missiles, to include hypersonics and eventually nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The ships will also be festooned with lasers and will incorporate the latest AI technology.

If you think you have heard this story before, you would be right. This will be the fourth time this century that the national security establishment has attempted to build a new surface combatant ship for the Navy. For those of you who may not be keeping score, the previous three attempts have been horrendous failures.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, the Navy already attempted to build a modern version of the battleship in the early 2000’s. That was the Zumwalt-class destroyer program. Navy leaders wanted to build 32 such ships that would be armed with a futuristic gun system to support Marine amphibious assaults. The gun could never be built in a cost effective way so it was cancelled. That left the ship without a clear mission and the entire program was stopped after only three ships had been built. Each of those ships still don’t have a clear mission and now exist as $8 billion anchors around the Navy’s neck.

Less than a month before the president announced this latest shipbuilding program, the Secretary of the Navy cancelled the Constellation-class frigate program after Navy leaders sunk nearly $9 billion into it and before a single hull had been commissioned. That announcement was shocking because the Constellation frigates were intended to be a low risk replacement for the earlier, failed Littoral Combat Ship program.

The Littoral Combat Ships were supposed to be the Navy’s workhorse ships that would hunt mines and submarines, fight other surface ships, and provide security for the rest of the fleet. They were originally to employ a complicated modular design that would see each ship have mission systems swapped out in port to give them the specialized capabilities for their next deployment. The scheme failed spectacularly when modules didn’t work and cost soared. The ships also proved to be quite fractious and suffered several embarrassing mechanical breakdowns. Several Littoral Combat Ships had to be rescued at sea and towed back to port.

The Littoral Combat Ship program was expected to help the Navy increase the size of the fleet because each ship was supposed to cost a mere $220 million when the program began in 2002. By the time Navy officials gave up on the program 15 years later, the cost of each hull had grown to over $600 million.

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EU state denies entry to Russian athletes

Latvia has denied entry to Russian athletes ahead of a crucial Luge World Cup stage hosted by the EU country, its foreign minister, Baiba Braze, has announced.

Like its Baltic neighbors Lithuania and Estonia, Latvia has been one of the staunchest opponents of Moscow since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, calling for more military aid to Kiev and increasingly harsh sanctions on Russia. Riga has provided almost $1 billion in assistance to the government of Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky since February 2022.

On January 3 and 4, the Latvian town of Sigulda hosts the fourth stage of the Luge World Cup. The points scored in the event are essential for athletes to qualify for the Winter Olympics in Italy’s Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo in February 2026.

Braze wrote in a post on X on Wednesday that Russian lugers “are not welcome in Latvia.”

“I have decided to include 14 Russian Federation citizens on the persona non grata list,” she said.

According to the foreign minister, the entry ban, introduced in line with the country’s immigration legislation, is indefinite.

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Kremlin responds to Zelensky’s ‘unhinged’ Christmas address

Vladimir Zelensky’s “strange” Christmas address raises concerns over the Ukrainian leader’s ability to make any rational decisions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. 

Zelensky published a video on his Telegram channel on Wednesday in which he wished Ukrainians a happy upcoming Christmas. However, in the same video, he also wished for a certain unnamed person – presumably Russian President Vladimir Putin – “to perish” before urging everyone to pray for peace.

Commenting on the video, Peskov said it appeared “uncultured, embittered, and coming from a seemingly unhinged person.”

“One wonders if he’s capable of making any rational decisions towards a political and diplomatic settlement,” the Kremlin spokesman added, referring to the ongoing Russia-US efforts to end the Ukraine conflict. Moscow has accused Kiev and its European backers of repeatedly undermining peace talks by making unacceptable demands.

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Canada Is Building The Wrong Army For The War That Is Coming

The next major land war will not reward elegance, boutique modernization, or the comforting belief that advanced technology can replace mass and endurance. It will expose armies built on fragile assumptions. Concealment has largely disappeared. Attrition has returned as a central fact of combat. Sustainment shapes outcomes as decisively as firepower. Yet the Canadian Army remains organized, equipped, and intellectually anchored to a vision of warfare that belonged to yesterday’s world. The problem is not a simple modernization lag or a lack of new kit. It is a deeper conceptual failure—a refusal to absorb how radically and irreversibly the character of land warfare has changed.

That is the larger point. The key change is not this or that technology. The battlespace itself has changed. Artificial intelligence, proliferated drones, commercial satellites, autonomous strike systems, and persistent ISR have combined into a transparent, data-rich battlespace where everyone is on the move, movement is tracked instantly, concentrations are targeted rapidly, and supply lines are targeted as soon as they begin to form—an environment already documented in assessments of modern conflict. An army that cannot scatter, regenerate while under fire, and sustain itself while under persistent observation is not going to muddle through. It is going to break.

Transparency and the End of Concealment

Western armies have operated on the assumptions of concealment and intermittent detection for a generation. Those assumptions are no longer valid. The contemporary battlespace is full of aerial surveillance, open-source commercial satellite imagery, digital emissions that reveal every vehicle and headquarters location, and loitering munitions that make ground above those locations perpetually contested—patterns captured in recent operational analyses.

The issue is time: the time between being discovered and being targeted. The time between when a headquarters can command and when it becomes a targeting point. The time between declaring a movement and becoming a target.

Survival requires dispersion, deception, mobility, and an entire operating paradigm built on the idea that you are observed all the time. The Canadian Army knows about the emergence of drones, ISR, and digital exposure, but it has not yet internalized the ways that they change land warfare’s fundamentals.

Attrition Has Returned—and Canada Is Not Ready

Precision fires promised surgical, inexpensive war. In reality, they have intensified attrition: the ability to strike targets more often, more reliably, and more predictably. Ukraine has demonstrated the scale of this shift: modern war is industrial, not surgical. It consumes people, equipment, ammunition, drones, and spare parts at rates far beyond what most Western forces planned for in peacetime, as shown by studies of wartime industrial demand.

The Canadian Army is not designed for this reality. It is small and brittle. It is optimized for controlled, expeditionary contributions, not for open-ended, high-intensity conflict. Ammunition stocks are low. Maintenance capacity is thin. Replacement cycles are slow. Mobilization—across industry, reserve forces, and training pipelines—is largely theoretical, even as official modernization documents highlight the fragility of the current model.

You can have a small and lethal army if it is small and lethal through design and deliberate choice. You cannot have a small, hollow, and unprepared army if it has to fight for extended periods. In an attritional war, those features are decisive.

Sustainment as a Front-Line Fight

The rise of long-range strike, drones, and cyber means that the old rear area is no more. Supply lines are now a front-line fight from start to finish. Supply depots, railheads, ports, repair facilities, and fuel infrastructure are all high-priority targets. If an enemy cannot stop forward brigades, it will attempt to starve them. Analyses of modern logistics under fire emphasize that industrial capacity and resilient supply networks—not efficiency—determine strategic endurance.

An army for the future must be able to fight under conditions of intermittent resupply, contested and damaged infrastructure, disrupted and overloaded communications, and near-constant threats to supply lines. Planning and organization must prioritize resilience, redundancy, and regeneration rather than peacetime efficiency and timeliness.

The Canadian Army still plans as if reliable resupply were a given and rear areas could stay intact. The moment a capable adversary enters the fight, those assumptions are shattered.

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Russia Captures Another Ukrainian Town While Zelensky Still Insists On Altering Trump Peace Plan

Russian forces continue their steady battlefield gains this week, but Kiev is still seeking to grasp at establishing some sort of leverage at the negotiating table, as the Trump peace plan is still being pushed in back-and-forth US dialogue with Moscow representatives. 

Over the past some 24 hours, Russian troops have captured the settlement of Zarechnoye in the southeast Zaporozhye Region, according to the defense ministry (MoD). “Battlegroup East units kept advancing deep into the enemy’s defenses and liberated the settlement of Zarechnoye in the Zaporozhye Region,” the MoD said Wednesday according to TASS.

The military further issued a grim figure, claiming that the Ukrainian army lost over 1,400 troops in a single day across all front line areas. Additional armor and combat vehicles were also reportedly destroyed.

After weeks ago Ukraine finally lost the strategic logistics hub of Pokrovsk, it’s been setback after setback for Kiev from there. The pace of Russia’s advance has only steadily increased. Reuters conveys Ukraine’s response, which seeks to frame it as a strategic retreat:

Ukrainian forces have pulled out of the embattled eastern town of Siversk, Kyiv’s military said on Tuesday, as Russian troops wage a battlefield offensive aimed at threatening key cities critical to Ukraine’s defences in the east. Sloviansk is a northern anchor of the so-called “fortress belt” of cities in Ukraine’s heavily industrialised Donbas region, which Russia has demanded Kyiv cede before it ends its war.
“The invaders were able to advance due to a significant numerical advantage and constant pressure from small assault groups in difficult weather conditions,” Ukraine’s General Staff said in a statement.
It said it had withdrawn soldiers to preserve lives and resources, adding that they had, however, inflicted heavy losses on the enemy.

And yet, President Volodymyr Zelensky is still pressing for a fresh meeting with President Donald Trump to discuss “sensitive issues” – given Washington and Moscow seem closer than ever to reaching common understanding on the peace deal, after the Miami meetings.

Zelensky has laid out that territorial control of Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland remains unresolved. The US plan hinges on Ukraine giving up territory, specifically in the east where its forces are clearly on the backfoot.

“We are ready for a meeting with the United States at the leaders’ level to address sensitive issues. Matters such as territorial questions must be discussed at the leaders’ level,” said Zelensky in comments released by his office on Wednesday.

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Two Centuries of Russophobia & Rejection of Peace

Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven profoundly self-defeating.

From the nineteenth century to the present, Russia’s security concerns have been treated not as legitimate interests to be negotiated within a broader European order, but as moral transgressions to be resisted, contained, or overridden.

This pattern has persisted across radically different Russian regimes —Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet — suggesting that the problem lies not primarily in Russian ideology, but in Europe’s enduring refusal to recognize Russia as a legitimate and equal security actor.

My argument is not that Russia has been entirely benign or trustworthy. Rather, it is that Europe has consistently applied double standards in the interpretation of security.

Europe treats its own use of force, alliance-building, and imperial or post-imperial influence as normal and legitimate, while construing comparable Russian behavior — especially near Russia’s own borders — as inherently destabilizing and invalid.

This asymmetry has narrowed diplomatic space, delegitimized compromise, and made war more likely. Likewise, this self-defeating cycle remains the defining characteristic of European-Russian relations in the twenty-first century.

A recurring failure throughout this history has been Europe’s inability — or refusal — to distinguish between Russian aggression and Russian security-seeking behavior. In multiple periods, actions interpreted in Europe as evidence of inherent Russian expansionism were, from Moscow’s perspective, attempts to reduce vulnerability in an environment perceived as increasingly hostile.

Meanwhile, Europe consistently interpreted its own alliance building, military deployments, and institutional expansion as benign and defensive, even when these measures directly reduced Russian strategic depth.

This asymmetry lies at the heart of the security dilemma that has repeatedly escalated into conflict: one side’s defense is treated as legitimate, while the other side’s fear is dismissed as paranoia or bad faith.

Western Russophobia should not be understood primarily as emotional hostility toward Russians or Russian culture. Instead, it operates as a structural prejudice embedded in European security thinking: the assumption that Russia is the exception to normal diplomatic rules.

While other great powers are presumed to have legitimate security interests that must be balanced and accommodated, Russia’s interests are presumed illegitimate unless proven otherwise.

This assumption survives changes in regime, ideology, and leadership. It transforms policy disagreements into moral absolutes and renders compromise as suspect. As a result, Russophobia functions less as a sentiment than as a systemic distortion — one that repeatedly undermines Europe’s own security.

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37-second phone signal, Mount Hermon route: Lebanese reports detail ex-officer ‘abduction’

Saudi and Lebanese media outlets reported Tuesday that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency carried out a special operation on Lebanese soil, allegedly abducting a former senior Lebanese security official with possible ties to the long-unsolved disappearance of Israeli airman Ron Arad.

According to the reports, the target of the operation was Ahmad Shukr, described as a former senior officer in Lebanon’s General Security services and a relative of Fouad Shukr, Hezbollah’s chief of staff who was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern Dahieh district last year. Israel has not commented on the reports, which also claimed that Swedish citizens were involved in the operation.

The Lebanese television channel Al Jadeed reported Thursday that Shukr went missing a day earlier in the Bekaa Valley in northeastern Lebanon, a predominantly Shiite region considered a Hezbollah stronghold. The channel said Shukr’s family issued an urgent appeal demanding clarification of his fate and called for intervention by Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and other officials.

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Israeli Defense Minister Vows Permanent Israeli Occupation of Gaza, Establishment of Settlements

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed on Tuesday that the Israeli military will “never leave all of Gaza” and will eventually establish settlements in the northern part of the Strip.

“We are deep inside Gaza and will never leave all of Gaza – that will not happen. We are here to defend and to prevent what happened,” Katz said during an event in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“With God’s help, when the time comes, also in northern Gaza, we will establish Nahal pioneer groups in place of the settlements that were evacuated,” Katz added, referring to an IDF program that establishes communities for Israeli soldiers. “We’ll do it in the right way, at the appropriate time.”

Katz also vowed that Israel would not withdraw “one millimeter” from Syria, referring to the territory it has captured in southwest Syria since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

After his remarks sparked backlash, Katz appeared to walk back the comments on settlements. “The government has no intention of establishing settlements in the Gaza Strip,” his office said in a statement, though it added that he made the comments in a “security context,” suggesting it wasn’t a complete walk back about what he said about establishing military communities.

An unnamed US official criticized Katz’s comments, saying that he was “provoking” the Arab world. “The more Israel provokes, the less the Arab countries want to work with them,” the US official said in a statement to journalists.

“The United States remains fully committed to President Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan, which was agreed to by all parties and endorsed by the international community. The plan envisions a phased approach to security, governance, and reconstruction in Gaza. We expect all parties to adhere to the commitments they made under the 20-Point Plan,” the official added.

Katz did not walk back his comments about a permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza, and other Israeli officials have made similar vows. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said earlier this month that the so-called “yellow line,” the vague boundary separating the Israeli-occupied side of Gaza from the rest of the Strip, is a “new border.”

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A Christmas Gift to the War Machine

Late last week, Congress passed and President Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill marks the first time the US military budget officially passed the one trillion dollar mark. Of course, when you add in other military-related spending such as interest on the debt, veterans’ affairs, and military components of other government agencies, the true number is at least one and a half times that amount.

To paraphrase the famous 1953 President Eisenhower speech, “The Chance for Peace,” each of these dollars spent on military offense and the maintenance of the US global empire rather than on defense of our own nation is taken from the mouths of the hungry and off the backs of hardworking American families.

Congress is so addicted to military spending that they appropriated even more money than President Trump requested, including an unconscionable $800 million for thoroughly corrupt Ukraine. Will Washington ever be called to answer for why Americans, who are seeing their standard of living eaten away by inflation and a declining economy, should continue to subsidize a criminal regime overseas whose ruling class enjoys the comfort of golden toilets?

The Ukraine money also undermines President Trump’s claim to be a neutral mediator in the conflict. How can you be a peacemaker when you are sending nearly a billion dollars in weapons to one side to help kill the other side? It makes no sense.

Congress even included measures in the bill that would prevent President Trump from bringing any US troops home from real “forever wars” in Korea and Europe. For how many more decades must the American worker continue to subsidize a US military presence in countries completely unrelated to our own security? World War II ended 80 years ago and the Korean war some ten years later. Yet the American military empire remains, at an incalculable cost to Americans.

Some fellow critics will say this is all about welfare for rich countries overseas, and that’s partly right. But more than that, it is welfare for the politically-connected US military-industrial complex at home. Imagine how many retired US military officers and former US officials-turned-lobbyists might be financially inconvenienced if we finally “just marched home”?

This week Western Christians will celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace, with the Orthodox celebrating a few days later. It is disheartening that so many Americans who call themselves Christians also hold fast to a view that we must bankrupt our country and impoverish our people by playing policeman to the world and arbiter of whose regime must be changed by Washington.

Christians are among the biggest victims in these overseas operations, including in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. Yet many American Christians turn a blind eye to the suffering and misery produced by neocon-led militarism overseas. They don’t care that unquestioning support for Israel, for example, has nearly erased Christianity from where it was born.

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19 New Apartheid Colonies for the Occupied West Bank

Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday finalized approval of 19 new Jewish-only settler colonies in the illegally occupied West Bank, a move the apartheid state’s far-right finance minister said was aimed at thwarting Palestinian statehood.

Cabinet ministers approved the legalization of the previously unauthorized settler outposts throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, bringing the total number of new settlements in recent years to 69.

The move will bring the overall total number of exclusively or overwhelmingly Jewish settlements — which are illegal under international law — to more than 200, up from around 140 just three years ago.

Included in the new approval are two former settlements — Kadim and Ganim — that were evacuated in compliance with the now effectively repealed 2005 Disengagement Law, under which Israel dismantled all of its colonies in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank.

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