Definitely read.

Dragons of-course.

Here's the crap that is the absolute stupidest in the DoW – software ATOs. 1) The DoW has mandated reciprocity for three administrations. @SecWar's DoW is only the latest. 2) A small business goes through all the effort and expense to obtain an Authority To Operate (ATO) with one Authorizing Official with a Joint Authority – in this case @DIU_x. 3) Air Force looks at the AO's name and organization and just says "no," never once actually looking at the body of work. Tell me again that the DoW is friendly to small businesses.

This fall’s batch of squirrels is doing incredible damage to the yard — 10x worse than a normal year. I might have to execute Order 66.

Yet another Georgetown foreign services punk breaking an oath. Let’s see what that gentle, feminine face looks like after 10+ years of breaking large rocks into small rocks.

I didn't have Mod 5, but yeah, I could do magic with it when I was in my prime.

Love it.

We're keeping the @AUTOWAR25 archive website very plain – text and links – with a hope of being more friendly to DoW, gov and other organizational network services. Web address is below.

or...

In no particular order: • Humans have been manipulating the genes of dogs for thousands of years, so whatever... • Call me when @PalmerLuckey is able to deliver my battle elk, goat, pig though.

We have an archive website live for @AUTOWAR25 – both for the twice daily news list and the opportunities list. Link below.

"Damage to the monument, which included the removal of one depicted soldier's head along with additional destruction, is estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars..."

“Yeah, and I can't believe Lindsey Graham was gay. I mean, RINO women loved him! I didn't see that one coming.”

No, The New Kalashnikov Is Not a Weapon – A rebuttal to Gerald Mako's @smallwars opinion. Cheap commercial drones fitted with readily available guidance software have collapsed the cost of precision strikes. Ukraine has demonstrated the method at scale: mass-produced frames, improvised warheads, and increasingly autonomous terminal guidance have given states and non-state actors capabilities once reserved for conventional military forces. The warfare equation has changed. That much is not disputed. What does not logically follow is the policy package offered to reverse it. Gerald Mako's argument for tighter controls on hardware that enables onboard autonomy, enforceable obligations on manufacturers whose platforms are routinely militarized, and a minilateral coalition of component producers treats the commercial dual-use ecosystem as if it were a controllable arsenal. It absolutely is not. The systems in question began as hobby, racing, photography, and agricultural products and became weapons only after conversion. The proposed remedies – manufacturer due diligence, conversion-resistant firmware, and supply denial of enabling components – do not survive contact with how these systems are actually built and fielded. The AK-47 analogy fails as an analogy. The Kalashnikov was purpose-designed as a military weapon and then deliberately proliferated as a geopolitical instrument: cheap, rugged, and simple to operate by design. Small UAVs and FPV platforms followed the opposite path. They began as commercial products before being adapted, often in small shops and wartime factories, into delivery vehicles. The distinction is acknowledged in passing and then ignored. A weapon that begins as a weapon can be regulated as one. A commercial airframe that becomes a weapon only after a user straps on a warhead or swaps the flight controller presents a fundamentally different regulatory problem. Imposing strict due-diligence duties, secure-boot mandates, and market-access conditions on commercial manufacturers because downstream actors convert their products is the gun-control argument applied to dual-use electronics. A manufacturer cannot reasonably be held responsible for every illicit modification any more than a tire company can be held liable for a drunk-driving manslaughter. The article concedes that no firm can be responsible for every conversion, then recommends treating refusal to adopt “reasonable” anti-militarization features as grounds for exclusion from Western markets. That substitutes upstream obligations for downstream enforcement. Such measures may deter some casual misuse and impose compliance costs. They will not stop a knowledgeable bad guy. The practical failures are straightforward. Software is already open and mirrored. Jailbreaks, forks, and companion computers have been routine in the hobby community for years and are now industrialized. Physical conversion does not require defeating firmware. A warhead and basic fuze can be zip-tied or strapped to a commercial platform. Motors, props, batteries, and boards can be stripped from a “conversion-resistant” airframe and reused on an open stack. Middle markets and gray-market channels for commodity components persist as a structural feature of global trade, not a temporary loophole. These realities make conversion resistance a weak foundation for policy. Local fabrication has already collapsed the premise that the original commercial stack is an indispensable chokepoint. Ukraine’s wartime industry is the existence proof. Firms there now machine motor housings, wind stators, fabricate or assemble flight controllers, ESCs, and initiation boards, and produce frames and props at meaningful volume. Localization of 70–90 percent or more is documented across multiple producers, with isolated examples of near-full domestic component sets for FPV systems. Residual dependencies remain – high-grade magnets, battery cells at volume, certain specialized sensors, higher-end edge chips – but they are narrower than a comprehensive supply-denial regime assumes. Once process knowledge and modest equipment exist, a determined actor does not need the original manufacturer for an effective short-to-medium-range system. Targeting commercial makers or the commodity layer cannot be the primary line of effort. The coherent response is therefore actor-centric. If the concern is bad actors using drones, policy should target those actors and the systems they field. That means intelligence and interdiction against the specific groups, workshops, conversion networks, and deployment chains that assemble, arm, and employ them. It means layered detection and defeat once the systems are in the air. It means narrow restrictions only where they can be tied to identified diversion networks and the few high-end items that still materially improve particular programs. It does not mean spreading friction across legitimate commercial markets, component producers, and software repositories in the hope of raising costs for actors who have already demonstrated their ability to substitute and fabricate around those frictions. Two clocks are running, but not the clocks described. One is the conversion cycle on commercial frames. The other is the localization and substitution cycle that has already outpaced upstream controls. Geneva processes and minilateral component coalitions will not stop what small shops and motivated actors can already build. The practical task is to target the people who turn available technology into weapons, not the manufacturers and markets that produce the technology.

Looks good on you though…

Yes!

Here’s their server…

Apparently, I’ve been traveling with a random 556 round in my backpack for the last 3 months. In one of those trips, I was sent to secondary where the guy confiscated my shaving cream, but not the round. Yikes.

This is why we must constantly practice against a competent opposition force. “The authors estimate that roughly 60% of the counter-drone fight at brigade level is fieldcraft and drills.”

If you think it's wild in Ukraine, wait until the whole of Africa commits to drone warfare.

Catastrophic failures — natural or otherwise — are rarely instantaneous. There are almost always signs if you’re paying attention to the right things. In this video (volume up), you can hear the failure in progress. It’s easy to recognize, back away, and pull out your phone. In other events, it’s not so easy. The signs are still there, even if you can’t put your finger on them. Often your best (and only) warning is that something feels different. Trust your instincts. The human brain is extremely good at pattern matching, but much worse at creating meaning from those patterns.

bloodthirsty fascist with a bob bloodthirsty fascist with a bob bloodthirsty fascist with a bob bloodthirsty fascist with a bob

Nah.

Prophetic book. Prophetic book cover.

“Great anguish and concern…” lol

Le premier cas connu, à Aberdeen, en Écosse, était typique. Quelques vétérans se constituèrent en vigilantes pour mettre fin aux émeutes et au pillage, pendirent quelques personnes (dont deux vétérans) et décidèrent de n’admettre dans leur comité que des vétérans. C’était arbitraire au début — ils se faisaient un peu confiance entre eux, ils ne faisaient confiance à personne d’autre. Ce qui avait commencé comme une mesure d’urgence devint une pratique constitutionnelle… en une ou deux générations.

As a product of Jesuit institutions, I was disturbed and baffled by a post from Zac Davis this summer. Bottom line, there has been an effort to dismiss Saint Michael’s Prayer for a while, from both clergy and thought leaders like Zac — feels coordinated. He said, “I cannot express how much I dislike the St. Michael Prayer after Mass. it is so, so jarring to me every time. To say nothing of the intent/content of the prayer, the language, and repetition and prominence given to it breed a sense of paranoia and cynicism. Instead of going out to evangelize the world, everyone is ready to go to war with it. This prayer is totally fine in private devotion. It does not belong in the liturgy (or effectively within the liturgy, when it is said after the final blessing but before the recessional hymn)” Link below.

Nah. They all have to go.

AI has made it easier to reproduce a system’s observable behavior and outcomes without access to its original code, which reduces the lasting value of most proprietary implementations and makes open architecture — clear, stable, publicly specified interfaces — more important.

Hmmmm….

General Lee

Price, Visser, and Carter's The Brigade and the Multidomain Breach raises an important question about restoring maneuver on a battlefield increasingly dominated by sensors, unmanned systems, and precision fires. The perspective I'm focussed on is what happens before we commit the mechanized force. For the last century, artillery, airpower, and armor have helped create the conditions for maneuver. That requirement remains. But autonomous systems may allow us to shift much of the initial battlefield preparation to an attritable force operating ahead of soldiers and expensive, specialized equipment. The mechanized force remains essential. The opportunity is to preserve its combat power, improve the conditions under which it fights, and give commanders more options about when (minutes, hours, weeks) and where to commit it. Three architectural requirements: 1. Sequencing: Computational processing and its effectors move ahead of the main force, executing bounded, preauthorized operational logic at electronic speed. 2. Attritability: The leading force consists largely of expendable or attritable systems. Its design assumes losses while preserving the economic advantage of mass. 3. Continuity: Forward compute maintains operational state and reorders authorized actions as circumstances change, rather than requiring headquarters to manage every transition. This extends the familiar logic of combined arms. Human commanders retain authority, establish intent, and determine acceptable risk. But the computational architecture and its attritable systems can carry more of the preparatory process forward. *The real opportunity may be to realize more of the mechanized force's potential by changing what goes ahead of it.

Mute

I have 900,000,000,000 confirmed kills.

We need a Great Grandmother of all Bombs. Seriously though… how much knowledge came from geology and mining experts in developing deep penetrators and their use — mountains are not bunkers after all.

Sounds like a KL-43

Love this place.