From Cancian and Park at CSIS on 27 July:
Source: Cancian & Park/CSIS (July 27, 2026).
So, to paraphrase, are your safer or less safe than a year and a half ago… (and are gasoline/diesel/jet fuel prices lower or higher than a year and a half ago?).
From Cancian and Park at CSIS on 27 July:
Source: Cancian & Park/CSIS (July 27, 2026).
So, to paraphrase, are your safer or less safe than a year and a half ago… (and are gasoline/diesel/jet fuel prices lower or higher than a year and a half ago?).
makes no sense that we went into a war without a plan to restock munitions that would be needed for the war. incompetence from the top.
on another note, you can use senators who are leaving office in January as a proxy for right and wrong decisions. seems the only republicans going against Todd blanche to run justice are Cornyn and Tillis. note they are leaving office. trump still seems to have a stranglehold on the rest of the republicans, who cannot seem to confront trump and do the right thing. the Republican Party has no values or moral strength. trump was right, his party would support him if he shot a man dead on 5th avenue in broad daylight, no questions asked.
Meanwhile…
“China to send rocket launchers to Iran”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/07/29/china-to-send-rocket-launchers-to-iran/
I guess it’s good to have allies, after all.
And while the felon-in-chief has finally OK’d Patriot manufacture in Ukraine, that’s not a solution to Ukraine’s shortage of Patriots right now:
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russia-patriot-missile-defenses-zelenskyy-trump/33799530.html
It has been obvious at least since Ukraine drove the Russian navy out of Crimean waters that naval warfare has changed. It has been obvious since Russia and Ukraine entered into a drone slug-fest that land warfare has changed. The U.S. has been slow in responding. It doesn’t help that our war-criminal-in-chief thinks a giant floating target with his name on it is a good way to spend our military budget.
There is, however, a bigger problem. Since the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “The Influence of Seapower on History” in 1890, U.S. military doctrine has recognized the need to prepare for two simultaneous wars. A two-and-a-half war doctrine was formally adopted as part of the Kennedy/McNamara Flexible Response doctrine and has with us ever since.
It’s not clear from the war criminal’s gassy 2026 “National Defense Strategy ” document whether we still maintain a 2 1/2 war doctrine. That’s a problem – we don’t actually have what can be identfied as a doctrine, just some slogans. What is clear from the quagmire in the Persian Gulf is that we are absolutely unable to sustain even the 1/2 part of the 2 1/2 war doctrine.
And everybody knows it. The joke about Russia is that it has the second best military in Ukraine. What we’re seeing is that, for strategic purposes, the U.S. has the second best military in the Persian Gulf. In the 2 1/2 war doctrine, Iran should be the “brushfire war” we might need to fight while also taking on Russia and China, but we’re runing out of ammo fighting the brushfire.
Know who isn’t running out of ammo? Iran.
The Iran war is stupid and criminal, but the problem with our war-fighting doctrine goes well beyond the stupid 2026 NDS document. We had trouble with our dumb munitions stockpile during Shrub’s war in Iraq. Drone swarms turn cruising the Persian Gulf into suicide by attrition. Hypersonic missiles – which Russia has and China has, but we mostly don’t – hypersonic missiles quite possibly make big naval vessels obsolete, and a big navy is a big part of our current structure. The war criminal wants a 50% increase in what is by far the world’s largest military budget, but we have absolutely no credible plan for dealing with the modern battlefield, as revealed un Ukraine and Iran.
Remember all those black, female, woke officers the war criminal and his alcoholic side-kick have driven out of the military? Sure, they were part of the problem, but also our best uniformed hope for thinking our way out of it. Testosterone treatments won’t hack it.