The best part of the book was his discussion of the evolution of the war in Afghanistan/Iraq and the growth in the importance of JSOC in the invasion/occupation. Harp paints a good picture of this trajectory. I wish this aspect of the book had been expanded as I think there is a lot to dig into there: the distribution of opium from Afghanistan out and connection to real international cartels, the budgetary/decision making implications for this unaccountable state-within-a-state, the implications of reliance on special ops on American force projection (I don't think the US could fight a peer war now, let alone win). The book focuses on specific people and crimes, not broad analysis. For newsheads who don't need to be convinced that these people are monsters, the relative absence of structural analysis is a bit disappointing. Maybe in a followup book.

Early in the book Harp makes a throwaway comment about how there are two types of special forces operators: heavily tattoo'd outlaw biker types and straight laced, religious teetotalers. The book centers on the outlaw biker types, specifically the three guys whose murders are discussed. Crashing out into spectacular murders and wild drug crime is by definition more visible and high profile than not crashing out and continuing to quietly do the work of empire. The current activities of JSOC/special forces/general black ops is discussed in the book in general terms, but is not the focus because by definition these things are not as visible as a tweaked out operator murdering his friend in front of both their daughters. The spectacular crashouts by the outlaw types are like the visible portion of the iceberg while the quieter, more stable work lurks invisibly.

Another thing that struck me is that the imperial machine really chews these operator types up and spits them out. I frankly have no sympathy for them on a moral basis, but nevertheless I think it is correct to identify how the machine does not support its elite soldiers as they crash out. I have a bit more sympathy for the young women who joined JSOC and were sexually harassed while they provided administrative support to facilitate the act of extrajudicial murder, but also is it your first fucking day? Who do you think these guys are?

After reading this book I rewatched Sicario from 2015. It is a glamorization of these kinds of guys applying the skills of war crimes against Mexican cartels. The disdain for anyone not part of the unit, the culture of bravado and machismo, insider/outsider attitude, and brutal violence all line up with the world that Harp portrays, though of course that movie is generally dumber and not grounded in any kind of geopolitics the way that Harp's book is.

I'm pretty sure most people don't know that the Battle of Mogadishu was planned by Mohamed Aidid from the beginning to inflict such a sudden and severe tactical defeat on the US that it would sour US public opinion and force a withdrawal. Aidid trained at an infantry school in Rome and was hand selected by the Soviets to attend the elite Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. He calculated that a single prolonged engagement with the American forces in Mogadishu would get the US to withdraw from the county if it involved enough American casualties. He observed that the joint Delta/Ranger teams searching for him would use the exact same helicopter insertion, humvee exfiltration plan every time they raided a house looking for him. So all he had to do was let himself be seen somewhere and mass forces in the surrounding area to encircle the US forces, then set up roadblocks so the humvees wouldn't be able to reach the trapped Americans. Aidid's plan worked perfectly, and his prediction was 100% correct, because Clinton pulled our troops out less than two weeks after the "black hawk down" incident.

The bulk of the casualties on the Somali side were caused by random civilians picking up guns and charging out to fight the Americans. These people wanted revenge on the US force in Somalia because it had caused so much collateral damage and killed so many people during the hunt for Aidid. Aidid's forces tried desperately to get them to put down their weapons and go home because they were just getting in the way, but there were too many of them, and they refused to listen. Aidid lost perhaps 100-200 fighters in the battle, which is an incredibly small price to pay to knock the world's foremost military power out of your country.

This part of the story is more murky, but there's evidence to suggest Aidid grew concerned about causing too many American casualties, inviting a military response, and made the decision to open a corridor for the trapped US troops to exit the encirclement. The quoted post makes another common mistake in missing that the SNA shot down not one but two Blackhawks. Aidid created RPG squads and dispersed them across the area, recognizing the vulnerability of the helicopters, which were always a key part of US raids. Characterizing this as "lucky" doesn't make much sense. Aidid's plan wasn't complicated. His masterstroke was correctly predicting the reaction of the White House and American public (which had no interest in Somalia). Getting this wrong could have triggered escalation instead of a withdrawal.

The Russian military has more armored vehicles than it did on the eve of Russia's wider war on Ukraine in February 2022. And for one main reason. Despite losing as many as 16,100 vehicles in action in Ukraine, the Russians have more than compensated for these losses by pulling nearly 13,000 old vehicles out of long-term storage—and complementing these older vehicles with around 4,000 brand-new vehicles.

also those 16k loss numbers are probably exaggerated since they come from the very trustworthy Ukrainian government, so it's even worse (or better )

The upshot is that the Russians had 20,000 vehicles in February 2022. 45 months later, they have 21,000. Yes, many of those vehicles are less sophisticated than the newer—and lost—vehicles they replaced. All the same, they represent a potent and enduring armored force. If the Kremlin chooses to use them sparingly. The implication is a foreboding one for Ukraine and any other country Russia may target. "Russia is not exhausting its armored reserves," explained analyst Delwin, who crunched the numbers. "Modeling forward with constant 2025 loss levels and stable new production, the total fleet remains above 2022 levels through at least 2030."

How Russia replaced 16,000 lost vehicles

Yes, Russia could struggle to make good major vehicular losses after 2030. That won't help Ukraine, however—at least not now. There are divergent trends inside Delwin's overall figures, of course. According to Delwin's count, which draws on the work of open-source analyst Jompy, there's been a slight decline in the Russian tank inventory since 2022 even as the Russian armed forces have massively expanded with new regiments and brigades. This makes sense, as the tanks' main role has changed. As recently as 2022, large formations of tanks—sometimes dozens at a time—would operate independently or in combined-arms formations with other vehicle types. Tank attacks were still feasible ... and common. But that was before tiny first-person-view drones were everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line of the wider war.

Why tanks matter less in 2025

A handful of $500 FPVs can knock out a million-dollar tank. FPV drones have been responsible for destroying more than two-thirds of Russian tanks in recent months. Now tanks on both sides of Russia's wider war on Ukraine usually stay far behind the front line, hiding in underground dugouts and only occasionally rolling out to fire a few cannon rounds from kilometers away. Tanks are far less central to Russian battlefield doctrine than they were just four years ago. When Russian tanks do roll into direct combat, it's usually as the lead vehicles in small mechanized assault groups including infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and armored personnel carriers (APCs) hauling squads of infantry. Wrapped in layers of improvised anti-drone armor and fitted with mine-clearing plows, the tanks clear a path for the trailing vehicles, detonating mines and absorbing as many drone strikes as possible.

Vital battle taxis

Tanks support the IFVs and APCs, which are now the most important vehicles on the battlefield. They carry and protect the infantry whose job it is to occupy and hold new positions as Russia aims for incremental territorial gains rather than dramatic breakthroughs. And that's why the number of APCs in Russian service has grown—a lot. Delwin noted "a sharp increase of 38%" in the quantity of infantry-carriers as the Kremlin replaces losses and equips new units with their share of the vehicles. The total number of heavier IFVs, such as the BMP-3, has slightly declined, however, as there were never as many of these vehicles in storage compared to lighter, simpler APCs such as the MT-LB.

While many Russian assaults now involve troops infiltrating on foot or on motorcycles—methods of attack that favor a military that's flush with manpower and ambivalent toward casualties

—mechanized assaults "remain a consistent tactic," Delwin wrote, "with monthly losses in the low hundreds during such operations." "These vehicles remain essential for assaulting fortified positions, though increasingly paired with light motorbike units and infiltration-oriented assault teams," he added. As long as the Russians mix infantry assaults with mechanized assaults, they're at low risk of actually running out of vehicles.

To understand that, you have to go back almost twenty years, to the moment the world’s largest oil reserves slipped out of American hands. In 2007 Venezuela forced foreign operators into minority positions in its Orinoco Belt projects. Most companies accepted the new terms. Exxon and ConocoPhillips refused. They walked out, their assets were nationalized, and their claims were annihilated in international arbitration. It was one of the largest expropriations in the history of the modern energy sector. The bitterness lingers beneath everything Washington does in the region. It is the quiet resentment of a superpower that believes it was robbed and has spent nearly two decades waiting for the moment to claw back what it considers its rightful domain.

Even today, even battered and mismanaged, Venezuela runs on oil revenue. Ninety-five percent of its export income comes from the wells. The country is a petrostate by chemistry, not ideology. And while Americans debate fentanyl seizures at the border, the Gulf Coast refinery system is starving for the exact heavy crude Venezuela used to supply. China is sinking capital into the Orinoco. Russia is offering security guarantees. Iran is rebuilding refineries and pipelines. PDVSA is stumbling back toward partial recovery. If you’re an American administration desperate for cheap fuel optics and terrified of Beijing building a Western Hemisphere anchor, you don’t leave that situation alone. You poke it. You provoke it. You look for a justification to treat Venezuela’s coastline the way you treated Iraq’s airspace in 2003. You manufacture a threat where no threat exists.

That is what the boat strikes were. The first publicly acknowledged attack killed eleven people outright — passengers aboard a wooden vessel the Pentagon immediately labeled a “narco-smuggling boat.” Yet the details collapsed under scrutiny. And then, on November 14 and again on November 21, 2025, U.S. Navy MH-60R Seahawks fired Hellfires into two more wooden boats off Venezuela’s coast, killing additional civilians. The Pentagon called them narco-subs. Satellite imagery showed nothing of the sort. What appeared instead was what every Caribbean coastal resident recognizes instantly: long open fiberglass peñeros with outboard Yamahas, the working boats of the region.

And here’s the part they hope no one understands. Boats like that cannot reach the United States. At planing speed those triple-outboard rigs burn one hundred gallons an hour. They would need to refuel four or five times just to cross the Caribbean, or else carry so much fuel there would be no room left for anything else. These vessels aren’t designed for long transits. They are built for life along the archipelago. Gasoline in Venezuela is so cheap it’s practically a public utility, which is why peñeros are everywhere — ferrying families, fishermen, groceries, tools, workers, whatever the day requires.

And that matters because the first strike didn’t kill a cartel crew. It killed eleven people in a peñero. That is not a smuggling configuration. That is a ferry run — workers, relatives, or market-goers moving between coastal towns and islands the way they have for generations. These boats carry plantains to Grenada, cousins to Margarita, fishermen to the banks at dawn. They are the backbone of civilian life across the Lesser Antilles. Calling them narco-subs is not a misidentification. It is a lie crafted for people who have never lived near the Caribbean Sea.

The first missile was reckless. The second was deliberate. Survivors in the water don’t pose a national security threat, but they do pose a political one, because survivors talk. The point wasn’t interdiction. The point was messaging. It was the United States marking the Caribbean littoral as a zone of unilateral enforcement. A shadow blockade without naming it. A hint to Caracas that its shipping lanes, its export routes, and its access to world markets were now contingent on American pleasure. That is not drug policy. That is resource leverage dressed in tactical camouflage.

And now comes the talk of airspace. People underestimate how serious that step is. Closing another nation’s airspace isn’t a diplomatic reprimand. It is a confession that you no longer recognize that nation’s sovereignty. Every major conflict of the last fifty years began with some version of that move. Kosovo. Iraq. Gaza. You close the skies when you are preparing to strike targets beneath them. You close the skies when you want to control who enters and who leaves. You close the skies when you believe the next phase is military and you want the legal fiction on your side. If Trump and Hegseth close Venezuelan airspace, that is war in every meaningful sense, whether Congress debates it or not.

The drug narrative collapses on contact. Fentanyl is almost entirely a China-to-Mexico-to-border pipeline. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. None of that travels in peñeros. Yet here we are, bombing the only country in the region with minimal narcotics production but maximal petroleum wealth. You don’t need paranoia to notice the contradiction. You only need a map and a memory.

This is the old American story in a new costume. Iraq was sold as a WMD crisis that happened to sit on top of massive oil reserves. Afghanistan was counterterrorism layered atop mineral corridors and pipeline dreams. And now Venezuela, the country with the most oil on Earth, is being framed as the beating heart of the fentanyl crisis. It’s too neat. Too convenient. Too familiar. The policy makes no sense until you invert it. Pretend the oil is the point and the drugs are the excuse. Suddenly the entire puzzle locks into place.

The danger is where this leads. If Washington keeps escalating, if the rhetoric hardens and the airspace closes and the shadow blockade becomes a declared one, we may stumble into a war no one voted for and no one truthfully explained. A war sold as a narcotics crackdown but understood privately as an attempt to claw back lost resource dominance. A war born not of fentanyl flowing through Caribbean waters but of Exxon losing an arbitration case eighteen years ago and American power refusing to swallow the insult.

The truth is simple. Venezuela does not have a fentanyl problem. It does not have a cocaine empire. It has oil. A lot of it. More than anyone. Enough to make superpowers lie with conviction. Enough to make men like Hegseth imagine themselves as historical actors. Enough to make a peñero look like a threat worthy of missiles. When the story is this crooked, the motive is always straight.

Annotated Sources

DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 — Venezuela ranked 14th among cocaine transit countries; no fentanyl link Source: U.S. DEA, NDTA 2024 report https://www.dea.gov/.../2024-national-drug-threat-assessment

U.S. Strikes and Casualty Count — first strike killed 11; U.S. justification disputed Source: AP News, CBS News reporting on Sept–Nov 2025 incidents https://apnews.com/

https://cbsnews.com/

Venezuela boat type misidentification — peñeros identified via satellite analysis Source: Reuters regional reporting & maritime imagery reviews https://reuters.com/

Orinoco Belt nationalization & Exxon/Conoco arbitration history Source: ICSID arbitration records + Financial Times coverage https://icsid.worldbank.org/

https://ft.com/

Venezuela oil dependency (90–95% of export revenue) Source: OPEC & World Bank indicators https://opec.org/

https://worldbank.org/

Rixi Moncada denounces media manipulation and narco-political financing behind the ongoing fraud. In an interview with teleSUR, Rixi Moncada, the candidate of the Libre Party and a member of the progressive project led by President Xiomara Castro, described in detail the technical irregularities, media manipulation and external interference in the presidential elections held in Honduras, where transnational right-wing forces are orchestrating an unprecedented fraud in recent Latin American history.

During the conversation, she told journalist Jorge Gestoso that Honduras is undergoing “an electoral coup” designed to preserve a U.S.-backed oligarchic and narco-political power structure.

GESTOSO: You said, “I reiterate my denunciation of foreign interference in the electoral process by U.S. President Donald Trump. With his interference and his pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the desperate bipartisan establishment is imposing an electoral coup against me.” Is this an electoral coup?

MONCADA: This has been completely an electoral coup. An electoral coup that is underway. Three direct messages from the U.S. president, practically against me and my platform. But with an additional component: releasing former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced by U.S. courts to 45 years in prison for trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., in the middle of general elections to define a new government. It is an ongoing electoral coup.

GESTOSO: You have also said that “the elections are not yet lost,” that “the bipartisan establishment did not impose its electoral scheme,” and that there is “a trap in the vote transmission system.” You even describe it as a “sinister plan by the bipartisan system.” The question is: Didn’t you see this coming?

MONCADA: Of course we saw it coming, and it was reported. Remember that Honduras began rebuilding its institutions after the U.S.-backed coup d’etat in 2009. We have a whole history of violent coups. A president was ousted in 2009 by force of arms. There was foreign participation. And now, this electoral coup in progress. Of course we saw it coming, and it was reported at the time.

I reaffirm that I do not accept the vote-transmission system because it is a rigged and compromised. It contains internal mechanisms preventing a transparent and democratic election.

And if we add that interference—violating all international protocols, all international law, the OAS Democratic Charter, agreements signed by states to respect principles—using social media platforms to send three messages, with the U.S. president saying “Do not vote for candidate Moncada, I cannot work with her, she is a communist,” that is direct, brutal interference that harms the interests of the Honduran people.

GESTOSO: You also said, “Let us remain standing and fighting until the final count; the elections are not lost.” And from there comes the question: When all ballots have been counted, are you willing to accept the result?

MONCADA: I am always willing to respect the Honduran people’s will. But when we have a transmission system through which results from each polling station are sent, and we learn that on election night more than 3,300 presidential-level tally sheets with vote results were stuck in the system and were never published… and then a preliminary result is announced.

We also learned that thousands of tally sheets did not go through the biometric fingerprint identity-verification system. That decision was made by the bipartisan establishment inside the National Electoral Council (CNE).

So there is no doubt about these strategies in the transmission system that amount to real adulteration or a trap in counting the popular will. That is why I stand firm and continue the fight alongside the people who went to the polls to vote for me.

So, I will accept the results that appear in 100% of the tally sheets we receive through our party’s system, once they are verified against the data held by the National Electoral Council. That transmission system has no credibility at any of the three electoral levels.

GESTOSO: A relevant fact: On the night of the election, an exit poll was published placing you in first place with 37%, followed by your rival with 32%, Nasralla, and candidate Nasry Asfura with 26%. However, the first official preliminary results did not match. How did you react?

MONCADA: The impact is more than that. Throughout November, we maintained our lead in various polls. But 82 hours before the elections, Trump issued his first message: “She is a communist, do not vote for her.” And he did not come alone.

He was accompanied by millions of messages sent to Honduran phones saying, “If Rixi Moncada wins, December remittances will not arrive.” Honduras has approximately 2.5 million people who receive remittances from the United States. That is extortion, coercion, blackmail.

In my view, it is an interference mechanism being tested in Honduras to see what results it yields, especially with elections upcoming in Chile and Colombia. Never before has interference of this magnitude been seen.

So I am not only facing two candidates, I am facing the oligarchy. My proposal to democratize the economy, make everyone pay taxes, and end privileges enjoyed by a small group of powerful actors in this country—this is not only about me; bringing benefits to social sectors deeply affected especially since the coup—this is not just about the two candidates. I faced the oligarchy and interference by the U.S. establishment.

GESTOSO: You have also said that this campaign was financed by drug trafficking, referring to the bipartisan establishment.

MONCADA: Without any doubt. There is overwhelming evidence: more than 50 politicians, businesspeople and legislators from the bipartisan establishment have been convicted in the United States, including former President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

And now, in the middle of an election, Trump grants a pardon to someone sentenced to 45 years. How can a judicial ruling against a drug lord accused of bringing more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. be overturned, granting him a pardon during an election? That has nothing to do with justice, democracy, or the fight against drug trafficking. It is politics of interests, nothing more.

GESTOSO: Do you believe this election has been a struggle between drug-trafficking groups?

MONCADA: There is drug-trafficking financing. We have had it in the past and we have evidence. Entire municipalities were financed with narco money. The bipartisan establishment governed for 12 years and 7 months with explicit U.S. tolerance. Washington knew it was a mafia connected to cartels. The very day Xiomara Castro assumed the presidency, the United States presented charges against Juan Orlando Hernandez. Five years later, he is freed.

GESTOSO: What do you think of the role of the National Electoral Council?

MONCADA: I have no suspicions—I am certain they are not impartial referees. Since the 2009 coup, this democracy has been overseen by the United States. There is a deeply rooted oligarchy here that does not pay taxes and controls the economy. Those are the interests that have prevailed, and those are the ones I faced.

GESTOSO: The playing field is marked, slanted and full of holes. And that is the trap underway. Did you know the field was completely tilted, and if so, why did you decide to take on the challenge?

MONCADA: These are the challenges and struggles our peoples must fight constantly—not only in Honduras but across the region. These are important liberation processes that build collective awareness. For me, the two-year political campaign has been an extraordinary campaign. What did I learn? It allowed me to travel the country, understand different dynamics, and get closer to people in regions I did not fully know.

The campaign was extraordinary, beautiful, and joyful. Those who turned out to vote for me gave votes of gold that are there, despite all the foreign interference, including the message 72 hours before the election saying Moncada is a communist. Even with that, people went to the polls, and their vote is sacred to me.

GESTOSO: What mechanisms do you plan to use to reverse this scenario?

MONCADA: All available ones: technical, legal, judicial, and political. We will listen to people in different regions, how they are handling the scrutiny process, and how we interpret contradictions between the two oligarchic candidates. Even they cannot reconcile their numbers.

GESTOSO: What do you expect from the international community and election observers?

MONCADA: I expect clear statements from the OAS and the European Union. Trump’s interference 72 hours before the election cannot be ignored. He violated the Democratic Charter, sovereignty, and the self-determination of peoples. If observers remain silent, they will be ignoring their own principles.

GESTOSO: You have also spoken about media control in Honduras.

Like thousands of other military families, Erica’s family learned the hard way that the biggest threat to their health and well-being wasn’t across an ocean or a threat from a foreign enemy. It was inside their own home. The nonprofit Change the Air Foundation recently released an independently administered national survey and a 10-minute documentary, The Hidden Enemy, that puts data and real stories behind what too many in Washington continue to overlook: Military housing is still failing our families, harming their health, and threatening national security. The survey findings echo the experiences of Erica’s family and so many others stationed across the country. The survey, Unsafe and Unheard: Military Service Members and Their Families Sound Off on Dangerous Living Conditions, collected responses from more than 3,400 service members and families at 57 military installations. The results are shocking. Ninety-seven percent of families reported at least one serious housing problem. Mold, mildew, water damage, pest infestations, water contamination, and broken HVAC systems are some of the various housing issues that many military families reported experiencing. Alarmingly, half of all their requests for help go unresolved.

In Erica’s case, she watched her five children develop serious health issues like rashes, headaches, asthma, and GI issues that no doctor could explain. That was until one finally traced the problems back to mold and water damage inside their walls, ceilings, window casing, and HVAC system. They would try to clean it, but then it would return. The housing company insisted the problem was fixed, but her family’s various health symptoms told another story. The Thompson family’s experience is alarmingly common. Seventy-six percent of families surveyed said their health had been harmed by housing conditions, and nearly half said their medical providers confirmed the connection. Brain fog, migraines, fatigue, respiratory problems, even seizures and long-term diagnoses, are being reported by military families across the country. Military children are suffering most of all: rashes, eczema, asthma, chronic infections to name a few. How is this acceptable for the sons and daughters of the people sworn to protect this nation? These housing issues aren’t cosmetic problems. They completely disrupt lives, kid’s schooling, finances, and a warfighter’s ability to adequately perform their duties - in fact, forty seven percent of active duty members reported this in the recent survey. They drive families to emergency rooms and, in many cases, push service members out of the military altogether. When you’re up all night with a sick child because your home is making them ill, you cannot perform your best at work. When families feel like they’re having to choose between their health and their service, it degrades mission readiness.

Yet when military families report these problems, the system designed to help them seems to fall apart. According to the survey, 94 percent of families did everything they were supposed to do by notifying the proper authorities, submitting photos, and begging for inspections or remediation. But only seven percent made it all the way through the military’s so-called “3-Step Process.” Most of the time, families must report the same problem repeatedly before anyone responds. Even then, the housing companies often mark work orders as “resolved” without having made satisfactory repairs. Astonishingly, fifty-three percent of reported issues never got resolved at all. Some families are offered to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA) just to secure basic habitability repairs or temporary relocation, a stunning practice that would be unthinkable in civilian residential housing. Yet military families, because of federal enclave law, lack many of the protections civilian renters are afforded. And far too many of these families live with a fear of retaliation for speaking up. In fact, the survey found that more than a quarter of families feared retaliation; 10 percent experienced it. But it’s not the fault of the commanders on the ground. The dispute resolution process for housing issues at local installations rarely works well, if at all. The Hidden Enemy captures the human cost better than statistics ever could. Families from across the country share stories of medical bills, destroyed belongings, sick children, and battles with housing companies fighting for a safe and habitable living space. For years, these stories were dismissed as isolated incidents. Now, the data shows the opposite: This is a systemic crisis. And it’s been worsening since the military got out of the real estate and housing business in 1996 and let private corporations take over with little effective Congressional oversight and accountability.

A third generation of military families is now paying a terrible price for the lack of oversight, transparency and accountability of military housing that came with the Military Housing Privatization Initiative (MHPI). To date, the Congressional Research Service estimates that more than $28 billion in Defense Department funds have gone to MHPI contractors. Yet, for at least a decade, those in Washington have documented widespread failures across the MHPI program. Our military families have had enough. Earlier this year, Change the Air Foundation and volunteers met with more than 60 congressional offices. Lawmakers asked for evidence with independent data that went beyond anecdote. Military families delivered it. Now it’s time for Congress, the Pentagon, and private housing companies to finally solve these urgent problems. Some of the solutions to begin tackling this are not complicated: for starters, adopt and enforce real mold remediation standards such as the ANSI/IICRC S520; ban NDAs that silence families; create legal protections so military tenants have the same rights as civilian renters; adopt a uniform definition for Life, Health and Safety (LHS) hazards as defined in the FY 2020 NDAA; require independent inspections and documented oversight so the housing system is being assessed by data, facts and successful outcomes. Most importantly, treat military families as partners and allies, not problem makers. Our warfighters and their families are the backbone of our nation’s mission readiness and national security. Their health, their stability, and the health of their homes matter. It’s time to finally fix our nation’s ongoing military housing crisis.

The evidence is in. Families like Erica’s and too many others are speaking out. And, this time, they will not go unheard.

Britain is “no longer capable” of running a nuclear submarine programme after “catastrophic” failures pushed it to the brink, a former Navy chief has said. Rear Admiral Philip Mathias said the UK’s “silent service” was facing an “unprecedented” situation from which it was highly unlikely to recover without radical intervention. The former director of nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence said delays in building new attack boats had reached record levels, while the duration of patrols for crews in nuclear-armed submarines had been driven up from 70 days during the Cold War to more than 200 days now. This had led to a “shockingly low availability” of submarines to “counter the Russian threat in the North Atlantic”, the retired submarine commander warned.

The admiral, who led the Trident value for money review in 2010, called for Britain to pull out of the multi-billion Aukus defence deal with America and Australia to build 12 new nuclear submarines. “The UK is no longer capable of managing a nuclear submarine programme,” he said. “Dreadnought is late, Astute class submarine delivery is getting later, there is a massive backlog in Astute class maintenance and refitting, which continues to get worse, and SSN-Aukus is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale.” “Performance across all aspects of the programme continues to get worse in every dimension. This is an unprecedented situation in the nuclear submarine age. It is a catastrophic failure of succession and leadership planning.” He added: “The public should be aware of the gross mismanagement of this hugely expensive and important programme. Our adversaries certainly will be, not least by counting our submarines alongside using satellite imagery and reading audit reports already in the public domain.”

The Navy’s fleet of Astute submarines is already facing significant problems, with many having been stuck in port for years. Out of the seven planned, six are in service. HMS Ambush is currently inactive, having spent 1,222 days – more than three years and four months – in port, according to defence analysts. Sister vessels Artful and Audacious are undergoing sluggish maintenance programmes, having both spent more than 950 days out of action. Astute and Anson are also in port. HMS Agamemnon, the sixth and penultimate vessel, entered service in September during a commissioning ceremony led by the King, with ministers hailing it a “truly remarkable manufacturing feat”. But Rear-Adml Mathias said: “The uncomfortable truth is that she took over 13 years to build – the longest-ever construction time for a submarine to be built for the Navy.”

Russia, meanwhile, continues to pressure the Navy, having ramped up its activity in UK waters by more than 30 per cent, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, has warned. Last week, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said he was ready to go to war with Europe. The UK’s nuclear-armed submarine fleet is critical to defending the country and deterring Russia and other dangerous states from using weapons of mass destruction. The fleet of four Vanguard stealth boats carries Britain’s nuclear missiles, with one vessel always patrolling the seas at any time. Each of the submarines can carry up to 16 Trident 2 D5 60 ton ballistic missiles armed with up to eight individual warheads, the combined destructive power of which dwarfs the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the Second World War and would wipe out millions of people. However, the boats have faced problems during launch tests issues in the past. In 2016, one of the 44ft Tridents fired from HMS Vengeance veered off course and reportedly self-destructed. Then at Port Canaveral, Florida, on Jan 30 last year, a missile launched from HMS Vanguard misfired and landed back in the sea.

In his critique, Rear-Adml Mathias said Britain’s next generation of nuclear weapon boats, the Dreadnought class, should be the “last class of nuclear-powered submarines that the UK builds”. He said the Aukus programme should be “cancelled now”, with the money instead spent on better “cost-effective” ways of delivering the same capability but with cheaper tech, like aerial drones or smaller unmanned submarines. The naval commander pointed towards historic cuts in defence spending, repeated changes to how nuclear submarine programmes are delivered and a “huge failure” to manage key personnel as contributing factors to the decline. But he also criticised the role of industry giants for delays to programmes and added that not a single one of the UK’s 23 decommissioned nuclear boats had been dismantled since the first, HMS Dreadnought, left service in 1980.

“This is an utter disgrace and brings into question whether Britain is responsible enough to own nuclear submarines,” he said, adding the details he raised were all publicly available and probably known by Russia. A defence source insisted the “right people were in the right place” to continue to oversee Britain’s nuclear programme. The Ministry of Defence said it was committed to delivering the next generation of nuclear submarines, and that the Dreadnought programme remained on track. It added that it was committed to the safe disposal of old boats and was a responsible nuclear operator, meeting the highest standards of safety, security and environmental protection for the current projects in Devonport and Rosyth and through planning for a future disposal capability in the UK. A spokesman added: “We are unwavering in our commitment to renewing and maintaining the nuclear deterrent underlined by the biggest sustained investment into defence spending since the end of the Cold War. “The Strategic Defence Review made clear the need for sustained investment across the Defence Nuclear Enterprise. This will see delivery of the most powerful attack submarines ever operated by the Royal Navy and the investment of £15bn this Parliament into our sovereign warhead programme.”

On Wednesday, an Afghan national shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington, D.C., killing one. Preliminary reporting suggests this Afghan, who was living legally in the US after having his asylum request granted in April, was a member of a “Zero Unit,” a type of special forces unit trained and armed by US forces in Afghanistan to conduct irregular warfare. Zero Units worked closely with American special forces and intelligence agencies during the war and have been characterized as a type of death squad. This event was wholly unsurprising to a certain type of historically aware observer. Whether characterized as “blowback” or something more sinister and deliberate, it represents just another entry in a lengthy legacy of former proxy forces committing acts of terrorism, assassinations, organized gang activity, and random violence on American and European soil after the conclusion of their proxy conflict.

The projection of this legacy into the future with reference to the war in Ukraine is referred to with the tongue-in-cheek moniker “Azov 9/11.” Without historical context, this concept is likely incomprehensible. But when placed within a broader analysis, a clear pattern emerges. In this piece, we’ll establish the case for the enormous danger posed by a postwar Ukrainian proxy force, both as a tool of nefarious state actors and as an organized political entity with its own agenda. First, we’ll establish the historical precedent by tracing the activities of former proxy forces in America and Europe before arguing that Ukraine War veterans are likely to present the most dangerous form of this phenomenon to date.

Cuban Exiles

Following the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959), hundreds of thousands of middle and upper-class Cubans fled the island for the US. From this influx of anti-Castro Cubans, the US military and intelligence apparatus created a network of overt and covert proxy units. Former members of the Batista government’s secret police, which had received funding and support from the CIA since the mid-50s, were a crucial source of operatives. The most brutal of the secret police agencies was the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities (BRAC), which was led by WW2 Nazi hunter Mariano removedet Diaz. Members of BRAC entering the US were organized into a covert special operations unit called Operation 40, so-called because it had 40 initial members. Operation 40 was overseen by both Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, and subordinated to the CIA. The unit was primarily directed to engage in assassinations and acts of terrorism against the Castro government from bases in Florida. With the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 – in which several Operation 40 members were arrested by the Cuban government – the unit transitioned into a small mercenary army operating on US soil. Strong evidence links its members to the JFK assassination. The majority of the “plumbers” who participated in the Watergate burglary operation were either direct Operation 40 members, Cuban exiles associated with them, or American CIA agents who led the group. The assassination by car bomb of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his aide, US citizen Ronni Moffit – one of the most prominent examples of the assassination of a foreign national on American soil in history – was conducted by Operation 40 members. Operation 40 formed the spearhead of an espionage operation on the Cuban population of Florida throughout the 60s. Church committee disclosures revealed the program violated US law.

Operation 40 eventually degraded into a likely state-sponsored drug trafficking organization, which is unsurprising considering their close association with notorious drug runner Barry Seal. In the late 60s, a CIA-chartered flight piloted by an Operation 40 member crashed in Southern California. First responders found kilograms of cocaine and heroin in the wreckage. Shortly afterward, another Operation 40 member trafficking drugs was killed in a shootout with the Miami police. The unwanted attention these incidents brought to the unit resulted in its disbandment, with its membership being transferred to other covert groups. In 1976, former members, including CIA asset Luis Posada Carriles, orchestrated the Cubana Flight 455 bombing, which killed 73 people. Carriles had been trained at the US Army Officer Candidate School in Fort Benning. After a lengthy series of arrests, escapes, prosecutions, and extraditions, Carriles was acquitted of all charges against him by a US court and freed amidst the Global War on Terror, despite being one of the most prolific terrorists in the world. As Operation 40 members were dispersed, some found a home in the Cuban exile paramilitary force known as Alpha 66. The unit’s activities increased as Operation 40’s declined. While Operation 40 was a CIA initiative, Alpha 66 was primarily organized by US Army intelligence, with secondary support from the CIA. From bases in the Everglades, the group used US government supplies to conduct a bloody string of bombings and killings. From the mid-70s to mid-80s, Alpha 66 was involved in two bombings of the Cuban UN mission in New York, bombings of the Cuban Museum, FBI field office, Social Security office, and airport in Miami, several bombings targeting pro-dialogue Cubans in Miami, the assassination of moderate exile leader Euliano Negrin, and bombings targeting Cuban businesses and offices in Florida. The group assassinated a travel agent in Puerto Rico, and attempted to gun down Cuban diplomat Raul Roa Kouri in New York. To finance these operations, Alpha 66 trafficked drugs. Its members were caught with thousands of kilos of cocaine in arrests as late as the 90s.

Alpha 66 grew completely beyond the control of its US government handlers, or so those handlers would later claim. The CIA allegedly terminated its relationship with the group because of its inability to keep their operations in check. The ATF began conducting raids on the group’s bases in the Everglades in the late 70s, seizing automatic weapons and substantial quantities of explosives as late as 1994. Alpha 66 still exists today and maintains a presence in Miami. Alpha 66 wasn’t the only Cuban exile group to allegedly go rogue. The small cell known as Omega 7 was exposed in 1984 when its leader, Eduardo Arocena, was indicted on 26 charges, including murder and a lengthy list of bombings. Arocena, a Bay of Pigs veteran, claimed he was trained by CIA personnel in bomb making and had attempted missions to Cuba to engage in biological warfare to start a war between the US and Cuba. Omega 7 was involved in several of Alpha 66’s operations and assassinated fellow exile Eualio Jose Negrin in New Jersey in 1979. Negrín had been negotiating with the Cuban government to secure the release of political prisoners. In 1980, the group assassinated Felix Garcia, an attaché to the Cuban mission to the UN, in New York. Garcia was the first UN official to have been assassinated in New York since the founding of the organization. The group also bombed a sporting goods store near Madison Square Garden, the Avery Fisher Hall, JFK Airport, the Mexican Consulate in Manhattan, a cigar company in Miami, and more than 30 other locations. To finance their operations, Omega 7 served as security for various drug trafficking organizations and engaged in racketeering. Arocena served 37 years in prison and was released in 2021.

Other Cuban exile groups engaged in similar activities include CORU (an umbrella organization that coordinated operations between smaller groups), Accion Cubana (prolific bombers), FLNC (bombers and assassins), Comandos L (bombed an FBI office), CNM, Gobierno Cubano Secreto (planned to bomb oil refineries in New Jersey), Joven Cuba, Comandos F-4, RECE, Abdala, JURE, and PUND. This spiderweb of terrorist cells shared personnel and missions, and its complex structure ensured it was able to conduct operations on American soil with impunity. All of these groups received funding, training, and supplies from the US government at various times. Their acts of mass murder and terrorism led to domestic instability in the US and prevented US/Cuban détente. Outside anti-Castro operations, they formed a useful yet dangerous manpower pool for illegal intelligence operations and funding of those operations through drug trafficking. It’s difficult to find a US intelligence scandal, terrorist attack, or black operation Cuban exiles were not involved in from the early 60s up to the late 90s. FBI documents show that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh ran explosives to a Cuban exile group – likely PUND – in Florida in the 90s. Cuban exiles also participated in Iran/Contra. When the Department of Defense explored generating a casus belli for war with Cuba using a series of potential false flag operations – including the possible fake shootdown of a drone made to look like a civilian airliner – exile groups were to provide the operatives. The groups participated in over 100 hijackings of flights between the US and Cuba from 1960 to the 2000s, with a hijacking occurring on average every 13 days from 1968 to 1972. Although this history is largely forgotten, Americans have US government-sponsored Cuban terrorists to thank for the permanent securitization of American airports up to 9/11.

At the lowest point of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln characterized the core factor between victory and defeat as finding a general who understood the “awful arithmetic” of war. War is a contest of blood and treasure; each can, and must, ultimately be counted and measured. It has been the same for every conflict before and after. Yet this arithmetic is constantly changing, and never faster than right now. If the United States cannot update its calculations to properly reflect our new era, our failure will not just cost us blood and treasure, but will drive us toward defeat. Cost imposition has long been a tenet of U.S. strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. launched expensive programs such as stealth and Star Wars not just for their tactical value, but to send a strategic signal to the Kremlin: neither your economy nor your war machine can keep up. Gorbachev, persuaded, gave up the decades-long competition with the U.S. The very same concept of cost imposition was also elemental to the most celebrated operations of the past year. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine used inexpensive drones, reportedly costing less than $500 each, to damage strategic bombers worth many millions of dollars, degrading Russia’s long-range strike capabilities for years to come. Similarly, in Operation Rising Lion, cheap Israeli drones took out Iranian surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of command and nuclear facilities worth tens of billions of dollars. In each, the tactical became the strategic through new operational concepts that leveraged the new math of new technologies.

Now contrast this with our own approaches, which overwhelmingly rely on sophisticated but costly overmatch. The most lauded U.S. operation of 2025 was Operation Midnight Hammer, our followup to Rising Lion. One estimate put its cost at $196 million, from combining B-2 bomber’s nearly $160,000 per flight hour and Tomahawk missiles' rough price of $1.87 million apiece. (It does not count the initial purchase of the seven B-2 Bombers that cost $2.1 billion each, nor the $4.3 billion submarine that launched the missiles.) Perhaps it was worth spending one-fifth of a billion dollars to damage Iranian nuclear facilities, but the numbers in Operation Rough Rider—the strikes against the Houthis last spring—illustrate the problem more starkly. The Pentagon spent roughly $5 billion on munitions and operating costs to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, which simply started back up this month.

The same awful arithmetic haunts the current operations in the Caribbean against the Venezuela-based, government-connected Cartel de los Soles. The entity was recently designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of its argument that US forces are engaged in an “armed conflict.” The cartel was declared by the Department of Justice to be the hub of a cocaine transport network, shipping a reported street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion in drugs (the cartel gets an unknown, but clearly lesser, percentage of that overall value in actual profit). To battle this foe, the United States has assembled a fleet that cost at least $40 billion to buy in total. The carrier Ford alone cost $4.7 billion to develop and $12.9 billion to build. The fleet is backed by at least 83 aircraft of assorted types, including 10 F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Predator drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million per), and at least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million). To be sure, all of these assets will continue to serve long after Operation Southern Spear is wound down, but this is how we are using the investment. But the current cost of operations and expendables hardly tells a better story. The Ford alone costs about $8 million a day to run. The F-35s and AC-130J cost about $40,000 per flight hour; the P-8s, about $30,000; the Reapers, about $3,500. Analysis of the strike videos on the 21 boats show that U.S. forces have fired AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 apiece in 2019), Hellfires (running about $150,000 to $220,000) and potentially GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs ($40,000). In some cases, they are reportedly firing four munitions per strike: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.”

All this is arrayed to sink motorboats, 21 at last report. One of the boats was described by Pentagon officials as a 39-foot Flipper-type vessel with four 200-horsepower engines. New ones go for about $400,000 on Boats.com, but the old, open top motorbots in the videos are obviously well below that in cost. Their crews have been reported as making $500 per trip. Put in comparison, the cost of the US naval fleet deployed is at least five times what the cartel makes in smuggling. The air fleet deployed costs at least another two times more. It is roughly 5,000 times the cost of the suspected drug boats that have been destroyed. Indeed, just the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day has still not yet equaled the maximum cost the cartel paid for the boats it has lost.

dang, almost as if drugs have absolutely nothing to do with any of this, and these forces are actually arrayed there to threaten Venezuela!

In the air, the U.S. military spent roughly 66,000 times more to buy each unmanned drone in the operation than the cartel paid each man that the unmanned drones killed. The US spent between 80 to 300 times more for each bomb or missile it has used than the cartel paid each man killed by those bombs or missiles.

The math is arguably even worse when we're on the defense. In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace.. The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles. This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions.

Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy. As a point of comparison, Ukraine is on pace to build, buy, and use over four million drones this year. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, aims to acquire 50,000 drones next year—about 1.25 percent of the Ukrainian total. In its most optimistic plans, it hopes to be able to acquire 1 million drones “within the next two to three years.” ​​When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” And if we don’t change this math, we will need an update to Norm Augustine’s infamous “law” of defense acquisitions. Back in 1979, Augustine calculated that if the Pentagon couldn’t curtail the cost curve of its purchasing, by 2054 we wouldn’t be able to afford a single plane. The 2025 version is that if we don't master the new math of the battlefield, we won’t be able to afford to win a single battle.