Michael Cessna is a former Active Duty United States Marine, a long-time personal protection specialist, security and defense analyst, military subjects instructor, general information researcher and amateur historian. He has been contributing security and defense writing since 2015.
President Trump’s recent comments about potential military action against Venezuela have sent ripples through diplomatic channels and defense planning offices alike, including Congress hysterically trying to invoke the “War Powers Act“. The question isn’t whether the United States could conduct military operations against the Maduro regime — the answer to that is obviously yes. The real questions are whether we should, what it would actually cost, and whether anyone in Washington has seriously thought through what happens on Day Two.
Venezuela presents a deceptively complex military problem wrapped in what looks like a simple regime-change operation. On paper, the Venezuelan military is a sad joke. The Bolivarian National Armed Force fields Soviet-era equipment in various states of disrepair, struggles with spare parts due to sanctions, and has been hollowed out by corruption and political purges. Their Russian Su-30 fighters are mostly grounded. Their navy is a coastal defense force at best. The country’s air defense systems are…”dated”…is a charitable term. In a conventional fight, U.S. forces would achieve air superiority within hours and could strike any target in the country with impunity.
But that’s where the easy part ends.
Venezuela isn’t Iraq in 2003. It’s a country of 28 million people with a long history of guerrilla warfare, sitting on top of the world’s largest proven oil reserves — an estimated 303 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia. The terrain ranges from Caribbean coastline to Amazonian jungle to urban sprawl. Caracas alone has a metropolitan population of 5 million packed into a valley surrounded by mountains and barrios — sprawling hillside slums that would make Sadr City look manageable especially compared to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
The military operation itself would be straightforward enough: establish air superiority, conduct precision strikes on regime leadership and military infrastructure, land forces to secure key facilities. The U.S. Southern Command has surely war-gamed this scenario dozens of times. We could decapitate the Maduro regime in a matter of days, possibly hours if we caught them by surprise.
But then what?
Venezuela’s economy has been in free-fall for a decade. Hyperinflation reached 130,000 percent in 2018. Basic services are collapsing. Over 7 million Venezuelans have already fled the country — the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history. The infrastructure is crumbling, the healthcare system barely functions, and the electrical grid fails regularly. This isn’t a country where you can remove the dictator, install a friendly government, and expect things to stabilize.
More problematically, Maduro isn’t universally despised. He’s incompetent and brutal, but he’s also built a patronage network through Colombian guerrilla groups, narco-trafficking operations, and the military officer corps. The colectivos — pro-government paramilitary groups — number in the tens of thousands and are heavily armed. Unlike Iraq’s Republican Guard, which evaporated when confronted with U.S. armor, these groups would likely melt into the population and wage an extended insurgency. They know the terrain, they have local support in certain areas, and they’ve got nothing to lose.
The logistics alone should give Pentagon planners nightmares. Venezuela shares borders with Colombia, Brazil, and Guyana. Securing those borders to prevent weapons flow and insurgent safe havens would require tens of thousands of troops and cooperation from neighbors who have no interest in hosting a U.S. occupation next door. Brazil, in particular, would likely oppose military intervention strongly — they’ve got their own political complexities and don’t want American forces operating on their northern border.
Then there’s the oil question. Venezuela’s petroleum infrastructure is a disaster after years of mismanagement and underinvestment. The heavy crude requires specialized refining. Simply occupying the oil fields doesn’t mean production magically resumes. You’d need to secure the various facilities, bring in real expertise, negotiate contracts, establish security for workers — all while dealing with potential sabotage and insurgent attacks. Iraq’s oil infrastructure, which was in far better shape, took years to fully restore after 2003.
The regional implications are equally messy. Every Latin American country remembers the history of U.S. military interventions — Guatemala (1954), Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989). Even governments that despise Maduro would face domestic political pressure to condemn American military action. The Organization of American States would fracture. China and Russia, both of which have significant investments in Venezuela, would use the intervention as proof of American imperialism and work to undermine any post-conflict stabilization.
And here’s the fundamental question nobody seems to want to answer: what’s the actual U.S. national security interest that justifies the cost? Yes, Maduro is a thug. Yes, Venezuelan refugees are destabilizing neighboring countries. Yes, the humanitarian crisis is real. But none of that constitutes a direct threat to American security that requires military intervention. The oil? We don’t need it — the U.S. is now a net energy exporter.
Trump’s “Crazy Gaijin” act on the world stage has genuine strategic value—keeping adversaries uncertain about American responses can deter aggression. But there’s a difference between strategic unpredictability and backing yourself into a corner where you either have to act or lose credibility. If the rhetoric about Venezuela escalates much further, Trump may find himself facing exactly that choice.
And if Trump is anything, “unpredictable” fits the descriptive bill.
The question then becomes: is this administration prepared for what an actual shooting war with Venezuela would require? Not the easy part — the invasion. The hard part — the occupation, stabilization, and reconstruction that would consume American resources and attention for a decade or more.
Based on our track record in Iraq and Afghanistan, foolish optimism about anyone’s ability to honestly answer that question before the first shots are fired is not something that we should trust in.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
What’s old is new, apparently. Everyone wants more land…even if the have to build it themselves.
While American attention remains fixated on Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, as well as on Venezuela, a different story is unfolding beneath the surface in the Far East. Vietnam has been building artificial islands at a pace that should make Beijing envious, and the most remarkable aspect isn’t the construction — it’s China’s silence.
Since October of 2021, Vietnamese dredgers have created over 930 hectares of new land across the Spratly Islands, transforming 21 previously marginal outposts into fortified positions complete with ports, helipads, munitions depots, and the infrastructure for military runways. That’s roughly 70 percent of what Communist China built during its infamous “Great Wall of Sand” island-building campaign from 2013 to 2017. At the current pace, Vietnam will match China’s total reclaimed area within two years.
Map of the South China Sea, 1988. CIA image. Public Domain.
The scale is impressive, but the strategic implications are much more so. Take Bark Canada Reef — once barely above water, it now hosts 2.8 kilometers of reclaimed land with foundations laid for a 2,400-meter runway capable of handling military transport aircraft and bombers. Pearson Reef has expanded to nearly 1.3 square kilometers. Tennent Reef, Ladd Reef, South Reef — the pattern repeats across the archipelago: dredge through lagoons, pile sediment into sandbars, build infrastructure.
The construction follows a clear, “cookie-cutter” military logic: Each reef features identical clusters of buildings arranged around central courtyards, munitions depots surrounded by blast walls, and ports capable of servicing Vietnam’s Gepard-class frigates. These aren’t research stations or fishing outposts. They are naval forward operating bases, designed to extend Hanoi’s ability to sustain naval deployments far from the mainland. Ships can now resupply, refuel, and rotate crews without returning to the coast, dramatically extending patrol durations in contested waters.
Espiritu Santo base boat repair dock in World War 2, 1943. US Navy photo. Public Domain.
What makes this particularly interesting is China’s muted response. Beijing, which has spent years aggressively confronting the Philippines over far smaller provocations, has issued only perfunctory diplomatic statements about Vietnam’s construction. No coast guard harassment. No water cannon attacks. No military posturing. The contrast is stark: the Philippines controls just nine land formations in the Spratlys and faces constant Chinese pressure, while Vietnam fortifies 29 positions and Beijing mostly looks the other way.
Three factors explain this disparity. First: bandwidth — China is fixated on the Philippines, which has strengthened its defense ties with the United States, opened additional bases to American forces, and conducted recent joint exercises with Washington’s Pacific allies. Beijing opening a second front against Vietnam risks unifying ASEAN against Beijing, something Chinese strategists would rather avoid.
Second: historical precedent — Vietnam has been expanding in the Spratlys since the 1970s, even seizing a few formations from China itself during a bloody 1988 skirmish that killed 64 Vietnamese sailors. From Beijing’s perspective, Vietnam’s current expansion, while larger in scale, isn’t fundamentally new behavior. The Philippines’ recent pushback, by contrast, represents a more pressing challenge to Chinese dominance.
Third: strategic ambiguity — Vietnam maintains partner status in BRICS, attended Beijing’s Victory Day ceremony, and recently finalized an $8 billion arms deal with Russia. When the Trump administration imposed reciprocal tariffs on Vietnam, President Xi visited Hanoi and signed dozens of economic agreements. China remains Vietnam’s largest trading partner with $25 billion in bilateral trade and over $31 billion in cumulative foreign direct investment. Beijing calculates that Hanoi can be managed through economic incentives rather than confrontation.
But, there is obviously a lot of recent history behind this.
The 1988 incident was hardly the first time Vietnam and China had come to blows, however. In February 1979, China launched a punitive invasion of northern Vietnam with 200,000 troops, ostensibly to “teach Vietnam a lesson” for its invasion of Cambodia and alignment with the Soviet Union. The month-long war proved costly for both sides — China claimed 6,900 killed while Vietnam reported 10,000 casualties, though actual figures were likely higher on both sides. Chinese forces captured several provincial capitals before withdrawing, but the operation exposed serious deficiencies in the People’s Liberation Army, which hadn’t fought a major conflict since the Korean War. Importantly, it is vital to remember that in the 1979 conflict, Vietnam fought on two fronts, with c.150,000 troops in Cambodia, while holding off a c.200,000 man Comminust Chinese army — no mean feat, on its own.
More importantly, it established a pattern: Vietnam demonstrated it wouldn’t be intimidated by Chinese military pressure, while Beijing learned that forcibly changing Vietnamese behavior carried steep costs. This historical context helps explain today’s dynamic — China remembers that Vietnam, unlike the Philippines, has proven willing and able to inflict significant casualties in defense of what it considers its territory.
The difference in Beijing’s reaction is telling. While the Philippines has proven that it can certainly fight invaders defensively, it has never actually fought a large-scale war on its own. The largest battle Filipino forces have fought on their own was the five month long siege of Marawi in 2017 – an urban warfare, COIN operation against Islamic State-affiliated guerillas.
Vietnam’s island-building is only part of a broader military transformation. In April 2025, Hanoi finalized a $700 million deal with India to acquire BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles — both ground-based launchers and air-launched versions for its Su-30 fighter jets. The BrahMos represents a significant capability upgrade: it flies at Mach 2.8, carries a 300-kilogram warhead, and can strike targets up to 290 kilometers away, with precision guidance that makes it extremely difficult to intercept. The missile’s sea-skimming trajectory — flying just 3-4 meters above the water’s surface—and terminal maneuvering make it particularly lethal against naval targets. Former BrahMos Aerospace CEO A. Sivathanu Pillai noted that the missile’s high speed combined with its heavy weight makes it about 15 times more lethal than conventional anti-ship missiles: “Any other anti-ship missile will only leave a hole in the hull of the attacked ship, but the Brahmos missile will completely obliterate the target.” Combined with Vietnam’s reported acquisition of 40 Su-35 fighter jets from Russia, including advanced electronic warfare systems, these weapons transform Vietnam’s fortified islands into what military planners call “unsinkable aircraft carriers.”
Extended Range Version of BrahMos missile successfully launched from a Su-30 MKI. 2022 photo from the Government of India. GODL.
The strategy is clear: create facts on the water faster than China can react, hoping to shape a reality too costly for Beijing to reverse. Whether Beijing’s restraint holds, or whether Vietnam’s bet on “hard power” over diplomacy eventually triggers the confrontation both sides claim to want to avoid, remains to be seen.
So — Why should you care? You should care, because approximately $5.3 Trillion dollars worth of global trade — about 24% — flows through this area. If you are one of the few people who can legitimately say that you have nothing in your home that cam from overseas…this still impacts you, because the systems you rely on come off of trans-ocianic ships. And, a major disruption of trade in this area will up-end the carefully curated global system of trade that all nations — including the United States — now depend on. And if you don’t believe that, just refresh yourself about the global impact of the grounding of the container ship EVER GIVEN in 2021…and that was one ship.
For now, the South China Sea is being remade one dredger-load at a time…and not by the country everyone’s watching.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
The United States relies on overseas trade. That is a fundamental underpinning of the national economy, because as wide an array of resources that North America possesses, there is not enough to satisfy our needs here. In order to ensure that type of trade, the United States has relied on a strong military naval establishment for nearly 150 years.
Navies, however, are expensive. Eye-wateringly expensive. But, spending money is better than spending lives…at least, that is the calculus of rational people, and the elected public servants in Washington, DC are rarely categorized as “rational”.
President Trump recently made headlines discussing a return to building battleships, sparking debate about naval strategy and ship types. But that conversation missed a more fundamental problem: it doesn’t matter what kinds of ships we want to build if we’ve lost the ability to build them at all. And the cold and brutal truth is that America’s shipbuilding industry — once the “arsenal of democracy“, that launched thousands of ships in World War II — has collapsed to the point where China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times greater than ours.
Let that sink in. Not twice as large. Not ten times. Two hundred and thirty-two times. According to leaked Office of Naval Intelligence briefing slides, Chinese shipyards have a manufacturing capacity of roughly 23.25 million tons, while U.S. shipyards manage less than 100,000 tons. One Chinese state-owned company — China State Shipbuilding Corporation — built more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has produced since the end of World War II.
Josef Stalin’s supposed quip about “quantity has a quality all its own”, whether he actually said that or not, does in fact apply here.
Meanwhile, Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy currently operates approximately 370 warships — the largest navy in the world. The Pentagon projects China’s fleet will grow to 395 ships by 2025 and 435 ships by 2030. That’s an increase of 65 ships in just five years, while America’s fleet shrinks. (How good those Chinese ships really are, of course, is still a matter of debate.)
The Navy has a goal of reaching 381 manned ships plus 134 unmanned vessels by the early 2040s. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates achieving this will cost roughly $40 billion per year — about 46% more than historical averages, and double what Congress has actually appropriated over the past five years. The total price tag: $1 trillion. At least.
Why We Can’t Build Ships
The problem isn’t just money. America’s shipbuilding industrial base has been gutted. We currently have only four active public shipyards compared to China’s 35 major sites. The United States accounts for just 0.11% of global commercial shipbuilding. In terms of gross tonnage, China, South Korea, and Japan build over 90% of the world’s ships. America builds 0.2%.
It really does seem that there is a quiet war going on against US shipbuilding.
APL Post-Panamax container ships PRESIDENT TRUMAN and PRESIDENT KENNEDY near San Francisco, CA. NOAA Image ID: line0534. Public Domain.
The Government Accountability Office recently testified that despite nearly doubling the shipbuilding budget over the past two decades, the Navy has failed to increase its fleet size as planned. Ships are consistently delivered late, over budget, and with reduced capabilities. The Navy’s new Constellation-class frigates, for example, started construction before completing ship design — violating basic shipbuilding practices — and are now expected to be at least three years late.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has made 90 recommendations since 2015 to improve Navy shipbuilding. The Navy has fully or partially addressed only 30. Sixty recommendations remain unaddressed.
The workforce crisis compounds the problem. Shipyards rely on decades-old physical infrastructure. Skilled workers are retiring faster than they can be replaced. Finding enough qualified workers remains the biggest barrier to expanding production, even if Congress appropriated more money tomorrow.
What This Means for War at Sea
Communist China’s shipbuilding advantage isn’t just about peacetime fleet size. In a sustained conflict—the kind of war we’d face in defending Taiwan — China could repair damaged vessels and construct replacements far faster than the United States, at least in theory. The Navy faces a significant maintenance backlog and would struggle to quickly repair battle-damaged ships, let alone build new ones.
Former Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told Congress in 2023 that a single Mainland Chinese shipyard had more construction capacity than the entire U.S. industry. This isn’t a matter of China having marginally better capabilities — they’ve achieved total dominance in an industry that’s fundamental to naval power.
The Navy is exploring alternatives: unmanned vessels, utilizing allied shipyards in Japan and South Korea, and smaller surface combatants. These might help, as a band-aide. But they are merely workarounds for a fundamental problem — America destroyed its shipbuilding industry through decades of deindustrialization and offshoring, and China methodically built theirs up.
So much for “guns into butter” and “plowshares into swords“.
The hard reality is that naval supremacy requires industrial capacity, and we’ve ceded that capacity to our primary strategic competitor. All the strategy papers and fleet architecture studies in the world don’t matter if we can’t actually build the ships those plans require. China understands this. We’re still figuring it out…And by the time we do, China’s 435-ship navy may already control the Western Pacific.
Everyone thinks battleships are cool, right? Certain movies not withstanding…
When President Trump floated the idea of bringing battleships back into service, the response from the defense establishment was immediate and predictable: eye-rolling dismissal, lectures about “modern warfare,” and knowing smirks about nostalgia trumping strategy. The think tanks and defense journals lined up to explain why this was obviously impossible, impractical, and frankly embarrassing.
There’s just one problem: The more you examine the actual arguments, the less absurd it looks.
Starting with what Trump actually said, stripped of the mockery:
Modern aluminum-hulled ships are vulnerable
Guns deliver cost-effective firepower compared to missiles
Battleships demonstrated effectiveness in the Gulf War
China’s naval expansion requires a response that doesn’t bankrupt us
The “experts” immediately attacked the metallurgy comment. Aluminum doesn’t just “melt,” they said. Trump doesn’t understand materials science. Except…the U.S. Navy already agrees with him. That’s why the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers went back to steel construction in the 1980’s. The Falklands War demonstrated aluminum’s vulnerability to fire and battle damage. The 1975 USS Belknap fire drove the lesson home. The Navy’s own design decisions validate exactly what Trump said—they just said it in engineering reports instead of campaign speeches.
USS Belknap (CG 26) after her collision with USS John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1975. US Navy photo. Public Domain.
Now consider the actual strategic problem Western – and American – navies face: magazine depth. The Red Sea operations against Houthi drones and missiles – consuming an estimated 30 years of firing in 15 months – exposed a critical vulnerability. Modern warships carry perhaps 90-100 missiles in their Vertical Launch Systems. Once those are expended, you’re done. You’ve got a $2 billion ship that has to withdraw from the fight and spend weeks getting rearmed for anything beyond self-defense. Each Standard missile costs between $2 and 4 million. Each Tomahawk missile runs $1 and 2 million. Between October 2023 and January 2025, Navy ships fired more defensive missiles than they used in the three decades following Desert Storm. You can burn through a quarter-billion dollars in magazine capacity in a single extended engagement.
A Tactical Tomahawk Cruise Missile launches from the forward missile deck aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Farragut (DDG 99) during a 2009 training exercise. US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class L. Stiles. Public Domain.
Compare that to a 16-inch gun. Modern rocket-assisted projectiles could reach 100+ miles. Each round costs perhaps $25,000-50,000 in current dollars — less if produced at scale. An Iowa-class battleship could fire continuously for days, delivering devastating effects on shore targets, surface vessels, and even providing anti-air support with proximity-fused rounds. The math isn’t even close: sustained and accurate fires at a fraction of the cost.
But what about vulnerability to modern anti-ship missiles? This is where the analysis gets interesting. An Iowa’s belt armor is 12 inches of hardened steel, backed by layers of structural protection. Modern anti-ship missiles — whether subsonic Harpoons or supersonic weapons — typically carry 500-1,000 pound warheads designed to penetrate thin aluminum hulls and detonate inside the ship. Against 12 inches of armor backed by compartmentalized protection? The penetration physics are completely different. Modern warheads might crater the armor, but achieving a “mission kill” (rendering a vehicle or craft unable to continue fighting, without destroying it) becomes vastly more difficult.
Survivability
Three cases are instructive in the vulnerability argument:
When HMS Sheffieldwas sunk during the Falklands War in 1982, the warhead of the French EXOCET missile that struck it failed to detonate, or at least did not detonate properly. Instead, the Sheffield was irreparably damaged by fires started by the missile’s still-running engine
In 1987, the USS Stark was attacked and struck by a pair of Iraqi-fired EXOCET missles. Prompt damage control prevented the ship sinking. After extensive repairs, the Stark returned to service, before being decommissioned in 1999, and scrapped in 2006.
Later, in early 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian naval mine while escorting a civilian oil tanker. The severely damaged ship required around a full year off repairs, before being returned to service.
In 2000, the USS Cole was mined in the harbor of Aden, Yemen (although framed as a “bombing”, the actual attack counts as a ‘mining’ in naval terminology) by Al Qaeda terrorists using a massive IED. Following extensive repairs, the Cole remains in naval service.
In contrast, there is the USS Nevada (BB-36), the only battleship on the list. Severely damaged by relentless air attack at Pearl Harbor, the Nevada was repaired and returned to service, serving throughout World War 2. At that war’s end, however, the ship was worn out, and thoroughly outdated, as it had originally been laid down in 1914…So, it was decided to use the old battleship as a nuclear target during Operation Crossroads, the first atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. The Nevada survived not one, but two, close range detonations, to such an extent that she had to be scuttled in 1948 by naval gunfire from the USS Iowa. That, however, was still insufficient to sink her, so she was finished off by an aerial torpedo.
Battleships, it would seem, are remarkably resilient.
Battleship USS Nevada (BB-36) painted in orange as target ship for the Operation Crossroads Able Nuclear weapons test. 1946 photo by US Navy. Public Domain.
Drones
The drone threat is real, but consider the defensive advantage: modern close-in weapon systems, electronic warfare, and updated radar married to a platform that can absorb damage and keep fighting. A kamikaze drone that could cripple an aluminum-hulled destroyer might barely scratch an Iowa’s main deck.
And, as operations in the Red Sea have shown, against actual warships – properly manned with trained crews – drones simply don’t present the threat that many believe to be real.
Manning – The Real Problem
The manning argument deserves serious consideration. Yes, the original crew was 1,500-1,800 sailors. But that was 1940’s technology with manual systems throughout. Selective modernization — updated damage control, automated fire control, modern propulsion plant controls — could potentially reduce crew requirements by 30-40 percent while maintaining the core advantages of proven mechanical systems over fragile digital networks.
Currently, while all services saw an increase in recruiting in the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 election victory, it remains to be seen if this increase will continue. The fact that the only real restriction on a “big-gun” battleship revival is whether the Navy can recruit enough personnel, is telling.
Conclusion
The real question isn’t whether battleships make technical sense. The real question is why the defense establishment is so hostile to the idea. And here’s where it gets interesting: battleships represent everything the current procurement system hates. Simple, proven technology. Conventional construction. Multiple potential suppliers. Long service life. Low-margin, high-volume ammunition. No proprietary software requiring endless updates. No justification for $100 million unit costs or trillion-dollar development programs.
Trump’s idea threatens a very lucrative business model. That’s why it sounds “crazy” to people with consulting contracts and board positions. To people actually concerned with sustainable naval power?
It starts looking remarkably sane.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Since 2017, a war has been raging. Chances are, you have never heard of it. This war, in a remote part of the world, is poorly reported because the goverment is humiliated by its failures, and refuses to allow too much access to report on the fighting.
This matters to you, and to your wealth – because if the Islamic State wins, you will know it…and then some. But in the proximate, there is a serious blind spot that hampers even professionals from understanding the situation fully.
When journalists and analysts discuss the insurgency devastating Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, they often go out of their way to clarify that the group locally called “al-Shabaab” has no connection to Somalia’s better-known terror organization of the same name. But this insistence on separation obscures a more complex — and much more alarming and troubling — reality about modern jihadist networks in Africa.
The truth is that while Mozambique’s Islamic State affiliate didn’t emerge from Somalia’s al-Shabaab, specifically, it operates within a sophisticated transnational network coordinated from an unlikely headquarters: the mountains of Puntland in northeastern Somalia.
Map of the Cabo Delgado insurgency; situation as of in March of 2024. Map by WikiUser BlookyNapsta. CCA/4.0 Int’l.
The Name Game
Understanding the confusion requires backing up to 2017, when armed militants first attacked the small ocean port town of Mocímboa da Praia. Locals and journalists needed something to call this nameless group, and many settled on “al-Shabaab” — Arabic for “the youth.” It was a descriptive term reflecting the insurgents’ demographics, not a claim of organizational affiliation. Some called them “Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama” after their ideological roots, but “al-Shabaab” stuck, creating endless confusion with Somalia’s al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group.
Here’s where analysts are technically correct: Somalia’s al-Shabaab pledges allegiance to al-Qaeda. Mozambique’s group — now formally called Islamic State Mozambique (ISM) — pledges allegiance to ISIS. These are rival international terror networks that actively fight each other. So no, ISM is not an offshoot or extension of Somali al-Shabaab. They’re on opposite sides of the jihadist world.
But that’s not the end of the story.
The Puntland Connection
What many casual observers miss is that ISIS restructured its African operations in early 2020, creating a coordination hub called the “Al-Karrar office” based in Puntland, Somalia. This office, embedded within ISIS-Somalia, was tasked with coordinating support across eastern and central Africa — including Mozambique.
According to the United Nations, ISIS-Somalia in Puntland began coordinating support to Mozambique as early as late 2019. That support included tactical training (documented by 2020), financial transfers routed through agents in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and strategic guidance that transformed ISM from a ragtag local insurgency into a formidable military force capable of capturing towns and threatening major infrastructure.
The impact became clear in 2020 and 2021 when ISM’s operational capabilities dramatically increased. The group launched increasingly sophisticated attacks, culminating in the March 2021 assault on Palma that killed dozens and forced French energy giant Total Energy to suspend its $60 billion natural gas project. The coordinated three-pronged attack, use of combined arms tactics, and disciplined withdrawal all bore the hallmarks of external training and coordination.
Buildings destroyed during the battle of Palma. April, 2021 image from Voice of America (VOA). Public Domain.
Foreign Fighters and Transnational Networks
The transcript of recent analysis on Mozambique mentions captured fighters with “foreign accents” and non-local origins — and this tracks with what researchers have documented. While ISM is predominantly staffed by recruits from northern Mozambique and Tanzania, it also draws fighters from the Democratic Republic of Congo (reflecting connections with ISIS’s Central Africa Province) and other parts of the Great Lakes region.
ISIS-Somalia itself has become remarkably international, with fighters from Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, and even Arab Gulf states joining the Puntland-based operation. Some of these fighters have reportedly moved between ISIS’s various African franchises, bringing experience and expertise with them.
Quirimbas Islands. November, 2021 image from Earth Observatory/NASA. Public Domain.
The financial dimension is equally important. ISIS-Somalia has become one of ISIS’s most profitable branches, generating millions annually through extortion, smuggling networks, and taxation. Some of this money flows through the Al-Karrar office to support operations in Mozambique and elsewhere, creating a self-sustaining transnational terror economy.
Why the Distinction Matters (and Doesn’t)
Analysts aren’t wrong to insist that ISM and Somali al-Shabaab are distinct organizations. The distinction matters for understanding motivations, tactics, and potential diplomatic or military responses. ISM emerged from genuinely local grievances — poverty, government corruption, marginalization of Muslim minorities, and broken promises about natural gas wealth. Addressing those root causes requires different approaches than combating an externally imposed insurgency.
But the insistence on organizational separation can obscure the functional reality: ISM operates within a transnational ISIS network that provides coordination, training, funding, and ideological guidance from Puntland. The “local insurgency” framing risks underestimating the sophistication and resilience of this network.
What this insistence on pedantic nitpicking masks, is a terrifying reality: the remnants of the Islamic State — largely smashed in 2017-2019 — have reorganized themselves into distinctly Western-style “Combatant Commands“, semi-autonomous, regional commands that are all solidly aligned to the IS leadership, but plan and execute operations in their zones as they see fit.
This reorganization has made the organization far more resilient, more flexible, and far harder to attrit by direct military action.
The Bigger Picture
The Mozambique case illustrates how modern jihadist organizations operate in Africa. Rather than monolithic groups expanding from single headquarters, we see franchises that maintain local character while plugging into transnational support networks. ISIS’s pivot to Africa has created a web of affiliated groups that share resources, expertise, and ideological inspiration while adapting to local conditions.
For Mozambique’s suffering population — more than 700,000 displaced and 6,100 killed since 2017 — the organizational charts matter less than the ongoing violence. But for policymakers and analysts trying to disrupt these networks, understanding the Puntland-Mozambique connection is crucial. Cutting the financial and logistical links between ISIS’s regional hubs and its various franchises may prove more effective than treating each insurgency as an isolated local problem.
The insurgents in Cabo Delgado may not be the same “al-Shabaab” that terrorizes southern Somalia, but they’re very much part of the same global jihadist ecosystem—one that has successfully established deep roots in Africa’s most vulnerable regions.
Why This Matters
Mozambique, despite its remote location on the world map, sits on very important real estate…not because of the natural gas finds of Total Energies, but because of its physical location.
As we touched on briefly in 2022, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given in 2021 severely up-ended world shipping, with effects that extended far beyond the six days it took to clear the Suez Canal. Likewise, the explosion in the port of Beirut, Lebanon in 2020. As our 2022 article alluded to, while those incidents were accidents, should a group coordinate similar incidents, such an offensive would devastate world commerce.
More to the point, a deliberate closure of the Suez Canal — unlike the missile and piracy operations of the Houthis in Yemen — would force a rerouting of all ocean-going merchant traffic around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope…which has to travel right past the war zone in Cabo Delgado.
Indian Ocean area. Historic map (1993), Library of Congress, via the Central Intelligence Agency. Public Domain.
And, again as we theorized about in 2022, multiple deliberate strikes like this present a clear threat to the economic vitality of the world, and directly to you.
The question is, are the real professionals paying attention to the nuance?
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
By and large, your humble author has largely avoided talking about the war between Russia and Ukraine that entered its “hot” phase in late-February of 2022, even though it actually began in 2014 – but don’t expect the mainstream media to talk about that too much.
Breaking the “Fourth Wall” a bit, I hate politics, in general. I have strong and rigid opinions, and I am not going to beat dead horses here. So, don’t expect political moralizing. I write about the technical aspects of defense and security – which are completely agnostic, until some idiot decides that their juice is better than that of the other guy across the river.
Moving on.
There has been a toxic fantasy in the West – especially in the United States – that has arisen in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Caused by a putrid mix of slavish devotion among politicians desperately wanting to look good to voters, greedy and craven defense contractors, and military officers looking to pad their retirement portfolios, all of whom adopted the idiotic ideas of Alvin Toffler – a subject we recently touched on – have combined to weaken the military capacity of the West to levels of incapacity not seen in nearly a century.
After the Cold War ended, there was a frenetic rush to make the “butter not guns” dream a reality. The problem? Like all utopian concepts – especially when backed up with “sciency”-looking graphs and densely written tomes filled chock-full of techy-sounding wording – that paradigm drove Western defense infrastructure over a cliff.
What all of those lofty hopes-n-dreams deliberately ignored, was that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the only enemies left – so it seemed – were minor states, like Serbia and Iraq, and later, against various terrorist groups like al-Qaeda as part of the grandiosely-named “Global War On Terror” (GWOT).
The idea of a massive conventional war in Europe was completely dismissed as a thing of the past. In this, to be both as blunt and honest as possible, was a level of “genteel racism” that has run as an undercurrent (and occasionally not so “under”) through the psyches of the Western establishment, as massive conventional wars happened throughout those parts of the world the mainstream media chooses to ignore since the Cold War’s end.
As a result, modern (i.e., 21st Century) Western militaries are barely-hollow shadows of their former selves.
This particular Emperor’s lack of clothing became starkly apparently in 2022, as the war goaded into being by the “globalists”, led by Joe Biden’s autopen, revealed that there were no functional reserves of war material in the West, including within the United States…while Russia – with only minimal support from its allies – was able to easily maintain operations throughout the war, hysterical screaming from the Western/globalists.
Destroyed military vehicles on a street in Bucha, Ukraine, near Kiev, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, March 1, 2022. Picture by REUTERS/Serhii Nuzhnenko. CCA/2.0 Generic.
In a word – the “Arsenal of Democracy” is empty. And deliberately so, in the interests of greed.
Coming Clean
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered a sobering assessment to London audiences in the summer of 2025: “Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year” when it comes to ammunition. The statistic encapsulates one of the most profound strategic failures of the post-Cold War era – the systematic dismantling of the Western defense industrial base just as the world was returning to the high-intensity conflicts it was designed to support.
Three years after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine remains critically short of the basic ammunition needed to defend itself, despite receiving unprecedented Western military aid. The shortage isn’t due to lack of political will or financial resources, but something far more fundamental: the West simply cannot produce enough ammunition to meet the demands of modern warfare. What was once called the “Arsenal of Democracy” now struggles to keep a single medium-sized conflict adequately supplied.
The Arithmetic of Industrial Failure
The numbers tell a stark story. Before the war, [the United States produced approximately 14,400 artillery shells per month – roughly 180,000 annually. Europe’s combined capacity for 155mm shells ranged between 240,000 and 300,000 pieces per year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces were using 2,000 to 9,000 shells daily in active combat – potentially consuming the entire annual Western production in a few weeks.
Russia, by contrast, ramped up to producing an estimated 4.5 million shells annually by 2024, supplemented by millions more from North Korean stockpiles. This allowed Russian forces to fire 10,000 to 80,000 shells daily at their peak – a volume that Western production couldn’t match even if every shell manufactured went directly to Ukraine.
The disparity became operationally decisive. The fall of Avdiivka in early 2024 occurred not because Ukrainian defenders lacked courage or competence, but because they lacked ammunition. Soldiers withdrew from a town successfully defended since 2014 simply because they couldn’t shoot back.
How We Got Here
The post-Cold War “peace dividend” seemed reasonable at the time. With the Soviet threat vanished and conflicts shifting to counterinsurgency operations requiring precision strikes rather than mass artillery barrages, Western militaries optimized for quality over quantity. Production lines closed, skilled workers retired, and long-standing supply chains atrophied. The assumption was simple: modern warfare would be short, decisive, and technology-intensive. Artillery-intensive wars of attrition belonged to history.
A recent academic analysis suggests deeper psychological factors at work. Western militaries over-invested in visible weapon systems – aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, advanced tanks – that could be showcased to signal military strength while neglecting unglamorous stockpiles of shells and propellant. Like luxury goods in consumer markets, these prestige platforms satisfied political and institutional desires for status while the mundane logistics of sustained warfare received inadequate investment.
The result: warehouses that looked full but weren’t. NATO’s own ammunition stockpile targets, set in 2014 to sustain a 30-day high-intensity conflict, were never met. When Ukraine needed support, European nations were drawing from “half full or lower warehouses,” as Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, acknowledged in 2023.
The Response: Too Little, Too Slow
Western nations recognized the crisis early but struggled to respond effectively. The U.S. has invested billions to increase 155mm production from 14,400 monthly shells to 40,000, with targets of 100,000 by late 2025. Europe set goals of 2 million rounds annually by 2025. These are impressive percentage increases but remain inadequate to both supply Ukraine and replenish depleted Western stocks.
The problem isn’t just production capacity – it’s the entire industrial ecosystem. Explosive production, particularly TNT, relies on a single Polish factory. Specialized steel alloys, propellants, and precision components all face similar bottlenecks. It takes two to four years to establish new production lines for high-intensity military equipment, meaning decisions made today affect battlefield realities years hence.
European efforts face additional complications. The EU produces around 170 different weapon systems, with 16 different types of 155mm shells alone. Ukrainian soldiers call this diversity a “zoo,” forced to constantly recalibrate equipment as they receive incompatible ammunition batches. National defense industries resist standardization to protect domestic jobs and capabilities, creating inefficiency precisely when efficiency matters most.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy visiting the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, where components for artillery and mortar shells are produced. Public Domain.
Strategic Implications
The ammunition shortage reveals uncomfortable truths about Western military power. The United States and its allies possess overwhelming technological superiority in sensors, precision weapons, and command systems. They can see the battlefield better, strike more accurately, and coordinate more effectively than any adversary. But modern wars – particularly wars of territorial conquest – still require mass. You cannot hold ground with satellites nor break fortified lines with precision alone, when the enemy can absorb losses and continue fighting.
Russia’s production advantage doesn’t reflect superior technology or efficiency – Russian shells are cruder and less accurate than Western equivalents. It reflects strategic focus and industrial mobilization. Russia maintained cold-war-era production capacity, kept supply chains intact, and prioritized ammunition stockpiling even when it seemed unnecessary. When war came, this unglamorous preparation proved decisive.
The West now races to rebuild what it spent thirty years dismantling. New contracts are signed, facilities are being constructed, and production targets are set. But wars don’t wait for industrial mobilization. Ukraine needs ammunition today, not in 2026 or 2027. Every month of shortfall translates to lost territory, casualties that might have been prevented, and strategic opportunities foreclosed.
The hollowed-out “Arsenal of Democracy” stands as testament to what happens when military planning assumes future wars will resemble preferred scenarios rather than probable realities. Preparing for the wars we want to fight while ignoring the wars we might have to fight is a luxury no serious power can afford – a lesson being relearned at terrible cost on Ukrainian soil.
Russia bet long, and is succeeding. The West bet short, and is failing….It’s as simple as that. The only good thing is that we are not in direct combat with Russia.
Yet.
I can’t tell you how we’re going to fix this, because there are entrenched actors in the West – in government, industry and military departments – absolutely unwilling to bend the knee to take the actions needed to fix the problems outlined above.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. As we wrote back in January of 2025, the various terror, drug and insurgent groups in Afghanistan – not content with fighting each other- are poking what they see as a weakened tiger, in the form of a highly dysfunctional Pakistan.
With Pakistan clearly on the losing end of it brief – and terrifying – war with India in May, the various jihadist groups north of the Hindu Kush smelled weakness, and a steady intensification of attacks have been quietly growing, an intensification largely ignored in the wider world press, in favor of Israel v. Hamas, Ukraine v. Russia, and the “Gen-Z – Discord” revolts erupting in states from Morocco to Nepal.
Landscape of Afghanistan, with the Hindu Kush range in the background, and a T-62 MBT in the foreground. 2007 Public Domain photo by WikimediaUser davric.
The 2025 Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict that erupted in earnest in mid-October represents more than routine border skirmishes—it signals a fundamental breakdown in one of the region’s most consequential relationships. After decades of Pakistan supporting the Taliban as a strategic asset, Islamabad now finds itself conducting airstrikes on Kabul and trading artillery fire with forces it helped bring to power. The bitter irony is impossible to miss: Pakistan’s former proxy has become its primary security threat.
October Escalation
The immediate catalyst arrived on October 8, when militants killed 11 Pakistani military personnel, including a lieutenant colonel and a major, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Orakzai district. Pakistan’s response crossed a critical threshold — airstrikes not merely in border regions but directly on Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, targeting Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leadership allegedly sheltering under Afghan Taliban protection.
The fighting that followed was the deadliest since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Pakistan claims it killed over 200 Afghan Taliban and allied fighters while losing 23 soldiers. Afghanistan counters that it killed 58 Pakistani soldiers while suffering only nine deaths. Both sides claim to have captured or destroyed dozens of enemy border posts. Independent verification remains impossible, but satellite imagery and verified drone footage confirm significant damage to Afghan military compounds.
The violence forced a 48-hour ceasefire brokered by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but border crossings remain closed and tensions simmer. More ominously, Pakistan has adopted what analysts call a “new normal” doctrine: any attack originating from Afghan territory will trigger immediate cross-border retaliation, regardless of diplomatic cost.
The TTP: Pakistan’s Self-Inflicted Wound
At the conflict’s core lies the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, formed in 2007 during America’s “War on Terror.” The TTP seeks to overthrow Pakistan’s government and impose strict Islamic law, demanding the release of imprisoned members and reversal of tribal area integration into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. What makes the TTP particularly dangerous is its ideological alignment with and sanctuary provided by the Afghan Taliban.
The numbers tell a grim story. The TTP conducted at least 600 attacks against Pakistani security forces in the past year alone, with 2025 activity already exceeding all of 2024. August 2025 marked the deadliest month of militant violence in over a decade, with 194 people killed and more than 200 injured in 143 attacks across Pakistan. Pakistani security force casualties in 2025 are on track to be the highest ever recorded.
The TTP has evolved beyond “simple insurgency“, threatening to expand attacks against Pakistan’s military-run commercial enterprises — fertilizer companies, construction firms, housing authorities, and banks. This represents a significant escalation, potentially bringing urban areas into a conflict previously concentrated in remote borderlands.
Briefly, a “simple insurgency”, as defined by Google’s AI search tool can be described as:
A simple insurgency is an armed rebellion by a small, lightly armed group against a more powerful, established government. Because they lack the strength for a conventional military conflict, insurgents use guerrilla tactics and rely heavily on the support of the local population to challenge the ruling authority. [1, 2, 3, 4] Key characteristics of a simple insurgency • Asymmetric warfare: A simple insurgency is defined by the severe mismatch in power between the rebels and the government they oppose. Insurgents, often called guerrillas, compensate by using hit-and-run attacks and avoiding direct, pitched battles. • Irregular tactics: Instead of traditional army maneuvers, insurgents employ a variety of tactics to weaken the government and increase their own control and legitimacy. These can include:
• Protracted struggle: Insurgencies are not short, decisive conflicts. They are typically protracted political-military campaigns designed to outlast and exhaust the government through persistent, focused violence. • Focus on the population: The ultimate target of an insurgency is not just the government’s military forces, but the loyalty and support of the civilian population. Gaining popular support is the key to success. Insurgents accomplish this by:
• Providing services • Discrediting the government • Gaining the trust of people in rural or remote areas
• Driven by ideology: While some rebellions are a temporary revolt, insurgencies are often fueled by a powerful ideology that explains people’s grievances and provides a vision for a new political order. This can include motivations based on religion, ethnicity, or politics. • Control over territory: Unlike purely terrorist organizations, a central objective of an insurgency is to control resources and eventually establish an alternative government in a particular area. [1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
Simple insurgency vs. other conflicts • Revolution: A simple insurgency lacks the widespread, organized structure of a full-scale revolution, even though it may share the same goal of overthrowing the government. • Coup d’état: This is different from a coup, which involves a swift, elite-driven seizure of government power. An insurgency, by contrast, relies on a protracted struggle for popular support and does not have the resources for a quick power grab. • Terrorist organization: While insurgents may use terrorism as a tactic, their ultimate goal is different from purely terrorist groups. Insurgents aim to build an alternative government and control territory, while terrorist groups typically do not. [6, 7, 9, 10, 11]
The current crisis exposes Pakistan’s catastrophic series of miscalculations of the past. For decades, Islamabad’s military establishment pursued “strategic depth” in Afghanistan as a hedge against India, covertly supporting the Taliban even while publicly backing America’s War on Terror. The assumption was straightforward: a friendly Taliban government in Kabul would provide strategic advantage while ending Pakistan’s internal insurgency problems once American forces departed, by exerting control over the “Pakistani Taliban”.
Of course, the opposite promptly occurred. Since the Taliban’s 2021 return to power after the Biden Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from the country, the TTP has grown dramatically more capable and aggressive. Pakistan now faces an irreconcilable contradiction: the same Afghan Taliban it supported for decades now provides sanctuary to Pakistan’s primary internal security threat. Having invested enormous political and military capital ensuring Taliban victory, Pakistan cannot effectively pressure Kabul to eliminate TTP sanctuaries without undermining its broader regional objectives.
When Pakistan demands the Taliban eliminate TTP safe havens, Kabul either urges negotiations with the militants or claims inability to control them—sometimes both simultaneously. Pakistan’s leadership increasingly believes the Taliban deliberately weaponizes the TTP, either to expand Taliban-style governance into Pakistan or enable an allied Pashtun entity to control northwestern Pakistan.
The India Factor
Complicating matters further, India has pursued normalization with the Taliban precisely as Pakistan-Taliban relations deteriorate, almost certainly for that very reason – the brutal calculus of ‘realpolitik‘ usually wins, afterall. Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited New Delhi in October, with India announcing plans to reopen its Kabul embassy and calling the meeting “an important step in advancing our ties.” For Pakistan, which fought its brief war with India in May, this Taliban-India rapprochement represents strategic encirclement…which India well-understands.
Pakistan’s military noted the “serious provocation” of the fighting’s timing during Muttaqi’s India visit. The rhetorical shift is stark: Pakistan no longer refers to the Taliban as an “interim government” but as a “regime,” questioning their legitimacy to govern and calling for a more inclusive Afghan government. This represents a near-suspension of diplomatic ties between former allies.
Strategic Dead Ends
Pakistan’s options appear uniformly unattractive. Military operations against the TTP face fundamental constraints: the militants operate from Afghan territory beyond Pakistani reach, enjoy Afghan Taliban protection, and can simply retreat across the disputed Durand Line border when pressured. Localized clearing operations may temporarily displace militants but cannot hold territory without massive troop deployments that remain deeply unpopular among border populations.
Durand Line Border Between Afghanistan and Pakistan. CIA Image, 2007. Public Domain.
Negotiations offer no better prospects. Previous ceasefires collapsed when the TTP refused to compromise on core demands fundamentally incompatible with Pakistan’s constitutional order. The TTP’s demand for sharia law implementation and tribal area autonomy restoration cannot be reconciled with Pakistan’s governance structure. Moreover, the TTP’s track record of breaking agreements makes any deal inherently unstable.
Cross-border airstrikes — Pakistan’s current approach — risk escalating into broader conflict while failing to address root causes. The strikes humiliate the Afghan Taliban publicly, potentially driving them closer to the TTP and other anti-Pakistan groups. Pakistan is adopting tactics it vehemently criticized when India employed them against Pakistan itself earlier this year—a dangerous precedent that normalizes cross-border military action in a nuclear-armed region.
Regional Implications
The conflict’s reverberations extend beyond bilateral relations. China, with massive “Belt and Road” investments in Pakistan, watches nervously as infrastructure becomes militant targets. Regional powers including Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have urged restraint, recognizing that instability along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border threatens broader security. The Kremlin’s Moscow Format Consultations specifically pressed the Taliban to eliminate the TTP threat – pressures Kabul shows no inclination to heed.
Perhaps most troubling, the conflict validates Pakistan’s historical paranoia about strategic encirclement while simultaneously demonstrating how that paranoia drove the very policies that created current threats. By backing the Taliban as a hedge against India, Pakistan helped create a government that now shelters Pakistan’s most dangerous internal enemy while courting Pakistan’s primary external rival.
And this, in a nuclear-armed nation with a very shaky government.
No Good Options
As the temporary ceasefire holds precariously, at least for the moment – the fundamental problem remains unresolved: Pakistan faces an emboldened insurgency operating from sanctuary areas it cannot easily eliminate without destroying relationships it spent decades building. The Afghan Taliban, meanwhile, must balance protecting ideological allies against managing fallout from Pakistani military actions — a calculation complicated by its own limited control over remote regions and internal pressure from hardline factions…in public, at least.
History suggests leaders within the Taliban understand that Afghan governments ending up on Pakistan’s wrong side rarely survive. Yet the Taliban’s public posture suggests they believe they can continue supporting the TTP without triggering Pakistani countermeasures sufficiently severe to destabilize their regime. Whether this calculation proves correct may determine the region’s stability for years to come.
What seems certain is that Pakistan’s investment in the Taliban as a strategic asset has become a strategic liability of the first order — a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on militant proxies as instruments of state policy. The militants Pakistan once cultivated have become the militants Pakistan can no longer control, operating from territory Pakistan helped them secure. The tragic irony would be complete if it weren’t so dangerous.
…But.
The most important thing to remember in this swirling morass of barely concealed knives, is that the two main players – India and Pakistan – are both nuclear-armed powers…and no one, including them, is quite sure how steady are the hands on those launch keys.
Prepare yourself accordingly.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
For the longest time, at least fifty years, military forces in the West – and especially in the United States – have held fast to the dream of “clean” warfare, where civilian casualties are greatly minimized, if not eliminated. This dream grew out of the nightmare of World War 2’s “Strategic Bombing” campaigns, which were not simply failures, overall, but verge into war crimes territory, if one looks too closely.
While technically requiring fewer weapons dropped, as “smart bombs” are certainly more accurate, the dream of airpower alone ending wars is still a phantasm of science fiction – for all the damage precision munitions can inflict, airpower alone stopped neither Saddam Hussein, nor the Taliban, nor the “Islamic State”. Those forces were definitely damaged by technology, but that damage did not stop those forces on their own, by any stretch of the imagination, or suspension of disbelief.
Modern militaries have spent decades cultivating an image of warfare transformed by technology — conflicts resolved through clean, precise strikes that eliminate threats while sparing innocent lives. Defense contractors promote weapons that promise “one target, one bomb” accuracy. Military briefings showcase grainy video footage of munitions threading through windows and down ventilation shafts. Politicians assure anxious publics that twenty-first century warfare has evolved beyond the brutal arithmetic of earlier conflicts.
The reality on the ground tells a different story.
The Promise of Precision
The evolution of precision-guided munitions represents genuine technological achievement. During the 1991 Gulf War, only 9% of munitions were guided, yet they accounted for 75% of successful hits, proving 35 times more effective per weapon than unguided ordnance. Modern systems like the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) can achieve circular error probabilities of approximately 20 feet, transforming standard “dumb bombs” into satellite-guided weapons for roughly $20,000 per kit.
GBU-31/32 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). 2006 photo by USAF. Public Domain.
These capabilities have fundamentally changed how militaries plan operations. Where previous generations of commanders compensated for inaccuracy through overwhelming volume — dozens, if not hundreds, of aircraft dropping hundreds or thousands of bombs to ensure target destruction — contemporary planners can theoretically strike with surgical economy. The technology exists, and in controlled conditions, it performs as advertised.
But technology is only one variable in an equation that includes intelligence, decision-making, environmental conditions, and the fog of war. These factors, environmental and otherwise, have not changed for millennia, and are unlikely to change anytime soon.
“Accuracy” Is Not “Effectiveness”
The critical distinction between “accuracy” and “effectiveness” undermines much of precision warfare theory. A weapon might strike precisely where it was aimed while failing utterly to achieve its intended effect, a phenomenon researchers call the “Precision Paradox“.
Consider the 2003 strike against “Chemical Ali” — Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s cousin and a high-value target. Two JDAM satellite-guided bombs hit his residence exactly as planned. The strike was accurate. It was also completely ineffective — Chemical Ali survived and remained active for months. When targets are hardened, mobile, or simply more resilient than anticipated, accurate strikes create a destructive feedback loop: the initial precise attack fails, requiring follow-up strikes, then more strikes, with each iteration expanding the circle of destruction and increasing civilian casualties.
This pattern repeated throughout recent conflicts. In battles like the siege of Mosul, accurate but ineffective strikes accumulated, generating precisely the widespread destruction and civilian harm that precision warfare was supposed to prevent.
The Intelligence Problem
Even perfect weapons cannot compensate for imperfect information. Precision-guided munitions hit their designated coordinates with remarkable consistency — but those coordinates are only as good as the intelligence providing them. One USAF officer notes that “the term ‘precision’ does not imply, as one might assume, accuracy. Instead, the word precision exclusively pertains to a discriminate targeting process.”
A view of an Iraqi Su-25 fighter aircraft destroyed in a Coalition attack during Operation Desert Storm. March 1991 photo by US Army SSGT D. Wagner. Public Domain.
This distinction matters profoundly. Military spokespeople describe “precision strikes” knowing that civilian audiences will interpret this as “accurate strikes” — a deliberate misunderstanding military force have little incentive to correct. Yet targeting failures remain common: the 2015 Kunduz hospital strike that killed 42 people, the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade, repeated incidents of strikes on Afghan weddings and Iraqi civilian gatherings.
The Hidden Costs
The gap between precision warfare rhetoric and empirical evidence manifests in sobering statistics. Between 2002 and 2020, U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people — with 800 to 1,750 confirmed civilians among the dead. More recently, drone strikes across six African countries killed over 943 civilians in just three years — casualties that governments either disputed or attributed to “terrorists.”
These figures understate the full toll. Collateral damage — the antiseptic military euphemism for dead civilians and destroyed homes — extends beyond immediate blast effects. Infrastructure destruction cascades into humanitarian crises: a “precision strike” on a power station is “surgical” in execution but indiscriminate in consequence when hospitals lose electricity, water treatment fails, and disease epidemics follow.
Environmental and Technical Realities
The technology itself faces inherent limitations that military public relations rarely acknowledge. GPS-guided munitions are vulnerable to electronic warfare—jamming and spoofing that can render satellite guidance useless. Laser-guided weapons struggle in adverse weather, smoke, and dust—precisely the conditions created by ongoing combat operations. An Australian military study found that 45.5% of laser-guided weapons used in early Desert Storm operations missed their targets due to weather, technical malfunction, or pilot error — hardly the “near-unerring accuracy” promised by manufacturers.
Extended Range Interceptor (ERINT) launch, c.2006. US Army Photo. Public Domain.
Moving targets compound these challenges exponentially. While military marketing showcases successful strikes against vehicles, such footage represents carefully selected successes, not typical outcomes. The failure rate for strikes against mobile targets remains classified, a telling omission.
The Attrition Reality
Perhaps most damning for precision warfare theory: history provides no clear example of precision strikes hastening wars to swift conclusion. Instead, conflicts like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine demonstrate that precision-capable forces still find themselves mired in grinding wars of attrition. When strikes prove accurate but ineffective, belligerents escalate to saturation bombardment — the very approach precision warfare was meant to supersede.
The U.S. military now formally institutionalizes procedures for civilian harm mitigation, acknowledging what operational reality has long demonstrated: even with advanced technology and genuine efforts to minimize casualties, modern warfare remains fundamentally destructive. Recent policy shifts — including the 2025 dismantling of offices dedicated to addressing civilian harm — suggest this institutional knowledge remains fragile and subject to always shifting political winds.
Beyond the Mythology
None of this argues that precision-guided munitions offer no improvement over unguided ordnance. They do, significantly. The problem lies not with the technology but with the mythology surrounding it — the dangerous fiction that modern militaries can wage “antiseptic” wars where force is applied with surgical precision at minimal cost.
This mythology serves multiple audiences. It reassures domestic populations that their military operates with restraint and discrimination. It provides political cover for interventions that might otherwise face stronger opposition. It allows defense planners to minimize discussions of civilian casualties by framing them as aberrations rather than inevitable consequences.
But for those living beneath the drones and missiles, the distinction between precise and imprecise warfare often proves academic. The “smart bomb” that destroys a wedding party because faulty intelligence identified it as a terrorist gathering is no less devastating than a “dumb bomb” that misses its military target. The family killed when an accurate strike proves ineffective and requires three follow-up missions experiences no comfort from knowing that each bomb hit exactly where planners intended.
The path forward requires abandoning comfortable fictions in favor of uncomfortable truths. Precision-guided munitions are powerful tools, but they remain tools of war — and war remains, as it has always been, inherently destructive and unpredictable. Acknowledging this reality doesn’t diminish efforts to minimize harm; it makes those efforts more credible and more effective by grounding them in operational truth rather than technological fantasy.
Until military and political leaders stop marketing “surgical strikes” and start acknowledging the messy, costly reality of modern warfare, the gap between precision rhetoric and bloody fact will continue to undermine both strategic effectiveness and moral credibility.
To restate what should be the obvious, war is inherently destructive; it always has been, and always will be. Sometimes, war is a necessary evil…
…Because sometimes, “peace” is merely another word for “surrender”.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
The world of 2025 is a highly confusing place. For years, if not decades, the news has been a confusing morass, frequently presenting as “news” what the average person clearly understand to be propaganda, only to be denounced and shouted down if they dare to question the Newspeak. It can be both upsetting and confusing.
What is happening?
It’s not so much some overarching conspiracy, for the most part. Some of it certainly is, but the vast majority is news organizations following the dictum of, “If it bleeds, then it leads“. Certain reference sites, like Snopes and Wikipedia, frequently engage in “gray propaganda”, gently seeming to tell you one thing, but in a very carefully curated way, that actually tells you the opposite.
But – how can the average consumer wade through the haze? Below, I will briefly present the method I relay on, for the most part, in writing.
In an era of information overload and competing narratives, the average news consumer faces a challenging question: how should we evaluate new information when we already hold prior beliefs about a subject? The answer does not lie in abandoning skepticism, nor blindly accepting every claim at face value, but in applying a mathematical framework that has served scientists and intelligence analysts for centuries: Bayesian inference.
The Bayesian Approach: Updating Beliefs With Evidence
Named after 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, Bayesian inference provides a structured method for updating our confidence in a hypothesis as new evidence emerges. Unlike binary “true or false” thinking, Bayesian reasoning recognizes that most real-world claims exist on a spectrum of probability. We start with a prior belief — our initial assessment of how likely something is to be true — and systematically adjust that belief as we encounter new information.
The fundamental insight is deceptively simple: the credibility we assign to new information should depend on both the quality of that information and what we already know about the subject. Strong evidence should shift our beliefs significantly, while weak or contradictory evidence should barely move the needle. Recent research has shown that humans can be understood as performing Bayesian inference with systematic biases, suggesting our cognitive processes follow probabilistic rather than purely logical patterns.
Prior Probabilities: What You Think Before The News Breaks
Before evaluating any news story, Bayesian thinking requires honest assessment of your starting position. What did you believe before this new information appeared? This “prior probability” shouldn’t be arbitrary — it should reflect your accumulated knowledge, the base rates of similar claims, and the historical track record of comparable situations.
For instance, if a news outlet reports that a politician has been caught in a scandal, your prior probability should consider: How common are such scandals generally? What is this politician’s past record? What is the news source’s track record on similar stories? A claim that would be extraordinary for one politician might be entirely mundane for another, and Bayesian reasoning accounts for this context.
The challenge is that humans often have poorly calibrated priors. We overestimate the likelihood of dramatic events, underestimate mundane explanations, and let confirmation bias inflate our confidence in beliefs that align with our preferences. Studies have demonstrated that cognitive biases can distort public understanding and contribute to the rapid dissemination of false narratives, with misinformation spreading faster than accurate news because it aligns with existing beliefs and triggers emotional reactions. Bayesian thinking forces us to make these priors explicit rather than leaving them as un-examined assumptions.
Evaluating the Evidence: Likelihood Ratios
Once you’ve established your prior belief, the next step is evaluating how much the new evidence should shift that belief. This is where likelihood ratios enter the picture. Ask yourself: if the claim were true, how likely would I be to see this specific evidence? Conversely, if the claim were false, how likely would I be to see this evidence anyway?
Consider a news report citing “anonymous sources” claiming a major policy shift. If the policy shift were real, would we expect to see anonymous leaks? Almost certainly — major policy changes rarely remain largely secret until they are released. But if the policy shift were not happening, might we still see such reports? Also yes — media organizations sometimes run with unreliable tips, and disinformation campaigns deliberately plant false stories.
The key is that strong evidence is evidence we would expect to see if the claim is true, but not expect to see if the claim is false. Weak evidence is information that would be equally likely under either scenario. A photograph of an event is stronger evidence than an anonymous quote about the event. A leaked internal document is stronger than a second-hand account. Research on misinformation receptivity conceptualizes the problem as weighing the reliability of incoming information against the reliability of prior beliefs.
Common Pitfalls: Where Bayesian Reasoning Goes Wrong
Even when applying Bayesian principles, news consumers make predictable errors. Confirmation bias leads us to treat evidence supporting our existing views as stronger than it actually is, while dismissing contradictory evidence as weak or suspect. Studies show that people fail to update enough when truly strong evidence appears, remaining anchored to their priors even when they shouldn’t be.
Another common mistake is ignoring base rates—the background frequency of events. The base rate fallacy causes people to focus on specific case information while neglecting crucial statistical context. Dramatic claims about rare events require dramatically strong evidence, because the prior probability is low to begin with. A report of political corruption in a notoriously corrupt system requires less evidence to be credible than the same report in a historically clean government.
Media coverage frequently falls prey to this fallacy. If a person is shown a series of news stories about a particular crime, they may overestimate the frequency of that crime, even if it is actually quite rare.
Practical Application: A Daily Discipline
Applying Bayesian inference to news consumption doesn’t require complex mathematics. It requires disciplined thinking: acknowledge your starting beliefs honestly, evaluate evidence quality rigorously, and update your confidence proportionally. When multiple independent sources corroborate a story, your confidence should increase substantially. When evidence is ambiguous or sources are unreliable, your beliefs should barely shift.
The Bayesian framework doesn’t eliminate uncertainty—it manages it. In a media environment designed to generate clicks through certainty and outrage, thinking probabilistically is an act of intellectual resistance. It allows you to remain open to new information while maintaining appropriate skepticism, to change your mind when evidence warrants it, and to resist manipulation by those who exploit cognitive biases.
The news will always be noisy, biased, and incomplete. Bayesian thinking provides a rational method for navigating that noise without succumbing either to cynical dismissal of all information or credulous acceptance of comfortable narratives.
Conclusion
As I point out above, Bayesian methods are not foolproof – they can still lead to mistakes. However, overall, it is a good yardstick to start from. Why is this important? Because if you are reading this in the United States, you have the ability to effect change by voting – and if your thinking is skewed by those seeking to manpulate you, you need to be aware of how those parties are trying to manipulate you, because your vote counts.
This stuff seriously impacts your personal “bottom line”.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Within the military sphere, there are two constants: the idea that newerr is always better, and that a good goal to shoot for is to risk as few of your own people’s lives as possible…Neither of these things are true, but they do remain constants.
As we pointed out last week, the “newer is always better” mantra is fundamentally flawed, both in concept and in execution. The perfect example of this is a situation this author was made aware of just a couple of days ago: there is now, apparently, an offering out there for a belt-fed AR-15 type upper receiver chambered in .300 Blackout. To be clear, this is basically a toy for big kids with big bank accounts – it has zero utility for any real-world tactical application. The .300 Blackout cartridge is designed for a very specific role, at which, it does very well…but for anything outside that role, it is basically dead weight.
But it isneat.
This is not a digression – the .300 Blackout perfectly fits the “newer is always better” paradigm…but ignores the “general use” nature required of almost every type of “tactical” system. And, in line with that idea, is various drives for incorporating “cyberwarfare“.
The evolving landscape of modern conflict has fundamentally altered how nations project power and pursue strategic objectives…in the public eye, at least. As military and political leaders grapple with the complexities of 21st-century warfare, the integration of conventional kinetic operations with cyber capabilities has indicated the possibilities of both a strategic imperative and a source of significant operational challenges. This seeming convergence may represent a paradigm shift that demands careful analysis of the distinct advantages and limitations of each domain…or, it could be simply a re-branding of older, traditional tool kits, with eye-wateringly expensive toys.
The Traditional Foundation: Conventional Warfare’s Enduring Strengths
Conventional warfare retains several critical advantages that cyber operations cannot fully replicate or counter. Physical destruction remains the ultimate form of military persuasion — when infrastructure is physically destroyed, it requires substantial time and resources to rebuild. The psychological impact of conventional military action is immediate and visceral, creating clear demonstrations of state capability and resolve. Moreover, conventional forces operate within well-established legal frameworks under international humanitarian law, providing clearer rules of engagement and attribution mechanisms.
The command and control structures of conventional military operations have been refined over centuries, offering predictable hierarchies and time-tested operational doctrines. When NATO recognized cyberspace as a domain of operations alongside air, land, and sea in 2016, it acknowledged that traditional military structures provide the foundational architecture for multi-domain operations.
Additionally, a little-spoken of aspect of conventional warfare is that it requires little in the way of advanced communications, power systems or satellite support – those things all certainly help, but plenty of lower-tier conventional forces repeatedly fight and win without them.
The Digital Revolution: Cyber Warfare’s Strategic Appeal
Cyberwarfare, however, offers unique advantages that conventional operations cannot match. The speed of digital operations allows for near-instantaneous effects across vast distances, while the relatively low cost of entry democratizes access to sophisticated capabilities. Research indicates that cyber attacks have become increasingly prevalent, with Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine jumping by nearly 70% in 2024, surpassing 4,000 incidents targeting critical infrastructure.
The important thing to remember, though, is that cyberwar campaigns have to be targeted for maximum and immediate impact in support of the conventional battle, versus the “pre-kinetic” oeprational phase.
Perhaps most significantly, then, cyber operations excel in the “gray zone” between peace and war, enabling states to pursue strategic objectives out of public sight, while maintaining plausible deniability about what could be viewed as actual acts of war. This ambiguity complicates adversary response calculations and allows for persistent, low-level campaigns that can achieve strategic effects over time without triggering conventional military responses.
Integration Challenges: Technical and Operational Complexities
The convergence of conventional and cyber warfare presents substantial integration challenges. The UK’s establishment of CyberEM Command represents one approach to addressing the fragmentation of cyber and electromagnetic capabilities across different military units. However, coordinating across multiple government agencies and military branches requires overcoming significant bureaucratic hurdles and distinct organizational cultures.
At the same time, technical integration poses equally complex challenges. For states dependent on legacy military systems, those systems must interface with cutting-edge cyber capabilities, creating potential vulnerabilities and incompatibility holes while demanding substantial investment in both personnel and infrastructure. The military cyber security market, valued at $17.0 billion in 2025, reflects the significant resources required to achieve effective integration.
This creates a significant divide, where wealthier nations with stronger economies potentially have a distinct advantage over poorer nations. However, the inverse is also true, where the perception of dominance is not actually the case, because the poorer nation’s electronic systems cannot be directly impacted by the richer state’s cyber systems.
Strategic Advantages of Hybrid Integration
When successfully integrated, conventional and cyber capabilities create magnified effects that exceed the sum of their individual contributions. Cyber operations can disable enemy communications and sensors immediately before conventional strikes, while kinetic operations can destroy hardened targets that resist digital infiltration. This combined approach enables more efficient resource allocation and creates multiple dilemmas for adversaries who must defend across both physical and digital domains simultaneously.
Recent exercises like Cobra Gold 2025’s CYBEREX demonstrate the value of integrating cyber capabilities into multinational military training, building interoperability and collective defense capabilities essential for modern warfare.
The caveat, of course, is that the targets must be dependent on systems that can be attacked via cyber tools. This is the fundamental flaw in Tofflerian-derived concepts, because cyber advantages do not work in reverse.
Limitations and Vulnerabilities
Despite these advantages, integrated warfare approaches carry inherent risks, as noted above. Cyber weapons can be unpredictable, potentially causing unintended collateral damage or being reverse-engineered by adversaries. Analysis suggests that in sustained conflicts, cyber attacks tend to be “scattershot, unfocused and ineffective against hardened systems“, particularly military command-and-control networks designed with cyber resilience in mind.
The attribution challenge in cyberspace can complicate escalation management, while the interconnected nature of modern military systems creates new vulnerabilities. A successful cyber attack on integrated systems could potentially cascade across multiple military functions, creating systemic failures that purely conventional forces might better compartmentalize. Worse, cyberattacks, as happened with the STUXNET virus, can easily spread far outside the “cyber battlespace”, directly attacking the deploying nation’s own computer infrastructure.
Future Implications
As hybrid warfare continues to mature with AI-enabled operations and increasingly sophisticated state and non-state actors, military organizations must develop comprehensive strategies that leverage the strengths of both conventional and cyber domains while mitigating their respective weaknesses. This requires not only technological investment but also doctrinal evolution, training adaptation, and international cooperation frameworks that address the borderless nature of modern conflict.
The path forward demands careful balance – embracing the transformative potential of cyber-conventional integration while maintaining realistic expectations about what digital operations can and cannot achieve in the broader context of national security strategy.
“Newer“, as stated, is not necessarily “better“. Like any software implementation, careful thought needs to be applied to any new injection into the calculus, because there are “do-overs” in a “digital Blackhawk Down“.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Back FREEDOM for only $4.95/month and help the Freedomist to fight the ongoing war on liberty and defeat the establishment's SHILL press!!
Are you enjoying our content? Help support our mission to reach every American with a message of freedom through virtue, liberty, and independence! Support our team of dedicated freedom builders for as little as $4.95/month! Back the Freedomist now! Click here
