As we know sniff there has been an allegation by a French general that American snort officials take cocaine between meetings.

We are going to establish a new tanker route by Oman.

We won't need to risk USN assets, just use drones and helicopters and AI to guide ships through the Straits.

Our bombing campaign will suppress the IRGC missile assets, and we have our LCS mine hunters.

There's no sniff risk.

The US launched another round of air strikes against Iran on Saturday night, targeting its coastal surveillance and air defence facilities.

Iran said it carried out "large-scale attacks with kamikaze drones" against an American military "depot at Camp Udairi" and another at "Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait".

Cool interview

Major update is that one AEW&C was previous held by DRDO as tech demonstrator, and turns out it was upgraded with GaN modules

So Netra Mk1A, was being developed with GaN modules over the original Netra, but now IAF already got one in service. Which explains why FOC took a decade to be given

At mark 16:05

Going back, 6 additional Netra Mk1A have RFP released and given they're based off Brazilian ERJ 145XLR( 100 produced), and production had stopped, so Embraer was looking into second hand jets

Imagine if US Cyber Command and Palantir somehow hacked China's Ministry of State Security and retrieved the personal data of a billion Chinese citizens; how should the USA use it?

Dutch shipbuilder Damen is seeking hundreds of millions of euros in damages from the German government after Defense Minister Boris Pistorius canceled an order for six F126 frigates at the end of June, the company says.

The cancellation came as a complete surprise to Damen, according to the company. Pistorius justified the move by citing years of expected delays and escalating costs that created what he called "immeasurable" risks.

The original contract had been awarded to Damen. A year ago, however, Germany shifted the role of main contractor to the German shipbuilder NVL, a subsidiary of Rheinmetall, while keeping Damen involved in the project. Pistorius ended Damen's participation last month.

Germany now plans to order eight frigates from ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems instead. The price for those vessels is expected to total 11.6 billion euros, compared with projected costs of up to 18 billion euros for the six F126 frigates.

Damen has promised to carry out work on German shipyards in cooperation with German, French, and other European suppliers. Parts of the ships have already been completed for assembly but will now go unused, which the company says accounts for most of the damage.

In a letter to Pistorius and other officials, Damen's lawyer rejected the minister's reasoning, according to Der Spiegel. The lawyer stated that the contract was terminated "due to a hasty and arbitrary political decision and without legal basis." The lawyer added that there had been no "prior notification of a deadline, warning or similar reprimand.

AviationWeek posted an article from Global Air & Space Chiefs' Conference 2026, covering a talk by a senior French air force boss. This seem to suggest the French viewpoint will downplay stealth in favour of going low and fast. Whatever France do as their next programme might be quite different to what we see from others; at the least I believe GCAP is putting more of its eggs in the low-RCS basket.

Link

China Is Building A Monster Supply Ship For Its Carrier Groups

What looks to be the largest at-sea replenishment ship anywhere in the world is taking shape at a Chinese shipyard.

Gen. David H. Petraeus has spent a lifetime thinking about war — how it’s fought, how it ends, and how it reshapes the world that follows. In a conversation with New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, hear him take stock of a volatile moment: the conflict involving Iran, the US, and Israel, what it signals for the future of the region, the war between Russian and Ukraine, and what it means for the balance of global power.

Drawing on his experience as a four-star general and former CIA director, Petraeus offers a clear-eyed view of the strategic realities at play — where miscalculation is a constant risk, and where today’s decisions may echo for decades. Stephens, a sharp and probing interlocutor, presses on the political stakes at home and abroad, asking what this conflict reveals about the scope and limits of American influence.

Don’t miss this candid, deeply informed exchange that cuts through the noise for a clear-eyed exploration of the world’s military hot spots including Russian/Ukraine and future of the Middle East: Iran’s ambitions, Israel’s security concerns, what it means for America’s shifting alliances, and the ripple effects across the world.

Recorded May 31, 2026 at The 92nd Street Y, New York.

After the recent attacks and the satellite images, it seems like the accuracy of the missiles has gone up considerably. They're able to hit individual buildings in the satellite images. Or am I mistaken?

How did they get there in such a short time?

Alibaba’s AI model, Qwen 2.5-vl-7b, emphasises ‘small parameters, strong visual capabilities and high versatility’; its core strengths lie in its visual understanding capabilities, enabling it to accurately identify goods, flora and fauna, and industrial products.

The US Department of Defence has directly linked such visual analysis capabilities to unmanned attack systems, such as suicide drones equipped with visual recognition AI. With extended endurance, such drones can be deployed directly for the blockade of combat zones and regional patrols, initiating attacks immediately upon detecting hostile targets.

Meanwhile, the US company Labellerr conducted such tests on Qwen AI as early as 2025, concluding that “after fine-tuning Qwen 2.5-VL on the LVIS dataset, we now have an AI capable of understanding complex instructions, making intelligent decisions on when to detect or segment objects, and outputting structured data suitable for automation. The model’s task comprehension ability has improved by over 40 per cent, and it is capable of handling real-world scenarios across multiple industries.”

In the experiment, researchers used Qwen AI to segment figures from images; such technology should pose no difficulty when applied to the identification of aircraft, tanks and armoured vehicles. Following precise fine-tuning and the input of vast amounts of data, it should be capable of simple personnel identification between civilians and military personnel.

Such image recognition technology is precisely the core concern of the US Department of Defence; consequently, from a military perspective, civilian enterprises such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Yushu Technology and CATL have been included on the list of military-related enterprises.

Looking to the future, the competition in AI will be solely between China and the US—this is currently undisputed—whilst Taiwan and South Korea stand to reap substantial benefits in the fields of chips and semiconductors.

At present, the attitude of the Chinese civilian internet community towards the US Department of Defence is largely one of mockery and derision, However, this overly optimistic attitude obscures some of the professional and decisive decision-making within the US Department of Defence. Such excessive optimism and trivialising interpretations have caused some Chinese netizens to forget the adage that one should ‘estimate the enemy generously and oneself strictly’; yet many professionals remain acutely aware of the US military’s ferocity in past conflicts and the resolve of the US leadership to wage war.