by JOSEPH TREVITHICK

When one thinks of the U.S. Army, one generally doesn’t think of squadrons of jets flying around the battlefield. But at the height of the Cold War, the ground combat branch had its sights set on buying a fleet of jump jets.

Though the Pentagon turned the U.S. Air Force into a separate service shortly after World War II, its ground-pounding cousins remained interested in helicopters and other flying machines. A decade later, Army aviators were hard at work with aircraft makers to cook up special craft that could land and take off like helicopters, but fly like normal planes.

“While the 1947 National Security Act created an independent United States Air Force, this did not halt the expansion of Army organic aviation, or the Army’s increasing use of the helicopter,” Dr. Ian Horwood wrote in Interservice Rivalry and Airpower in the Vietnam War. “[But] in the early 1950s, such ‘convertiplanes’ appeared to offer more potential for Army surveillance and air mobility tasks than helicopters.”

In the end, the Air Force scuttled the plans—and buried decades of work.

By 1950, the idea of combining features from helicopters and traditional aircraft was hardly new. Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva invented the autogyro, which blends a free-spinning rotor and a conventional forward- or rear-mounted engine, nearly three decades earlier.

As world settled into the Cold War, major air arms became fascinated by the idea a jump jet that wouldn’t necessarily need a long runway. During World War II, Allied forces bombarded Nazi Germany’s air bases and limited the Luftwaffe’s ability to fight back.

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by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

The weather was cold, wet and miserable when 100,000 German soldiers unloaded their rifles, fixed bayonets and charged the French army.

It was a desperate moment. By Sept. 10, 1914, the German armies closer to Paris were largely retreating after a combined Anglo-French offensive during the First Battle of the Marne.

The bayonet charge—one of the biggest of the modern era if not the largest—was the last hope for a German breakthrough before the war settled into a stalemate.

It ended in complete failure.

It’s impossible to imagine the scale of the attack. That it really happened—now a mere historical footnote—is a ghastly reminder of the rapid changes occurring on the battlefield during the early months of World War I.

Europe’s great powers had mobilized mass armies on an industrial scale and sent them into battle with rapid-fire machine guns, but the front lines were fluid and had not yet descended into the mire of blood and mud of the Somme and Verdun.

That would change after the Marne.

But on Sept. 10, Crown Prince Wilhelm, commander of the German Fifth Army, hoped he could still punch a hole in the French lines near Sainte-Menehould. His army was already in trouble—some 5,000 dead and more than 9,000 wounded after 10 days of fighting, according to Holger Herwig’s engrossing 2011 book The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World.

French artillery opposite the Fifth Army had decimated Wilhelm’s own long-range guns, destroying dozens of them. Wilhelm’s goal was to storm the French positions during the night and put those howitzers out of action.

A successful mass charge days before in another sector convinced him the plan could work.

He failed.

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

On Monday, a small team of Russian infiltrators reportedly slipped 10 km behind the line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian troops just north of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

Sneaking into the town of Druzhkivka, 10 km north of Kostiantynivka along the H20 highway, the Russians reportedly ambushed, captured and executed a group of three or four unarmed Ukrainian drone operators.

It’s possible the drone operators had just arrived in Druzhkivka when the Russians appeared. According to analyst and mapper AMK Mapping, Ukrainian drone operators pulled out of the village of Oleksijevo-Druzhkivka—which lies between Kostiantynivka and Druzhkivka—owing to the increasing threat from Russian KAB glide bombs. “It’s likely that Russian forces monitored the withdrawals of Ukrainian drone operators and sent in [an infiltration group] after the new position was identified,” AMK Mapping concluded.

The atrocity underscores the Russian military’s new approach to ground warfare as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds through its 54th month. An army that once counted on its own artillery to suppress enemy artillery in order to allow mechanized forces to advance now uses precision bombs, small cruise missiles, tiny drones, and, yes, some artillery to suppress the Ukrainian drone teams that represent the main obstacle to a swift Russian advance.

And when the Russian firepower manages to suppress Ukrainian drone operators, allowing small teams of infantry to advance, the infantry’s objective is often to take out the same drone operators whose suppression was a necessary pre-condition of any successful assault.

In short, the Ukrainians largely defend with drones. That means the Russians are fixated on first striking the drone teams in order to prevent them from launching their tiny lethal robots—and then, when they can, assaulting the drone teams’ positions in order to capture or kill them. Or capture then kill them, as reportedly happened in Druzhkivka.

The Russians have learned the hard way that they can’t advance without first finding and attacking Ukrainian drone operators. That hard experience has driven a profound transformation of the Russian way of war in just the last few years.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

The 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid is best remembered in America for the “Miracle on Ice” hockey victory over the Soviet Union. Less known is how scared the U.S. military was of terrorist attacks.

Today, it’s normal for major games to have snipers and sweeping, expensive surveillance hardware. This was far less common in 1980, but tragic events in Germany eight years prior had set events in motion.

During the 1972 Summer Olympics, the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich. Determined to prevent another terrorist attack, the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee asked the Pentagon to set up an electronic dragnet around the winter games.

Congress quickly freed up money for American troops to help protect more than 1,000 Olympians from nearly 40 countries. Adding to the tense atmosphere, the United States was threatening to boycott the upcoming Summer Olympics in Moscow. (It eventually did.)

“The entire … operation was conducted in an atmosphere charged with intense media concentration, in a multi-national ‘community’ of some 1,600 individuals, many from nations whose political ideologies are at variance with those of the United States,” U.S. Army officials explained in a subsequent review of their mission.

“It is safe to say that there are those who would have enjoyed any incident, regardless of how trivial, which would have resulted in embarrassment to the host nation.”

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by JOSEPH TREVITHICK

In space, no one can hear you scream. But in the early days of the space age, the Pentagon had a bigger problem—namely, earthly notions of ballistics and gun-design didn’t apply in vacuum.

As the United States had started to conquer space in the 1950s, the Pentagon envisioned troops in orbit and military bases on the moon. To defend themselves on these new battlefields, the U.S. Army believed soldiers would need a whole new class of weapon.

“Because of the entirely new and different environment and conditions facing man in space, we cannot wait until the eleventh hour to ‘crash’ a weapon program through with any hope of success, for we may even now be standing on the edge of the battleground of Armageddon,” engineers from the U.S. Army Weapons Command’s Future Weapons Office wrote in a now declassified 1965 study.

The entirely theoretical report had the colorful and lengthy title The Meanderings of a Weapon Oriented Mind When Applied in a Vacuum Such as on the Moon. Four years earlier, Pres. John F. Kennedy urged Congress to make putting an American on the lunar surface by the end of the decade a national priority.

The future-minded weaponeers had clearly taken the message to heart, in their own way.

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by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

The U.S. Navy’s armored, steam-powered fleet carriers carried the United States to victory over Japan in World War II. But it wouldn’t have been possible without the help from two coal-burning paddle carriers that sailed Lake Michigan.

The USS Wolverine and Sable do not immediately comes to mind when thinking of war-winning weapons. They never saw combat or tasted salt water. Their home port was Chicago, not Pearl Harbor. They were originally paddle-driven, coal-powered passenger vessels for leisurely voyages along the Great Lakes. But the two reconfigured vessels were crucial for training thousands of pilots when the fleet carriers were needed at sea.

The United States went to war with Japan on Dec. 7, 1941 with eight aircraft carriers, only three of them in the Pacific. Tokyo had 10 … with more on the way. Shipbuilding is a time-consuming job, and it wouldn’t be until the following December before America’s next carrier entered the war.

The Navy needed pilots, who needed training. Practicing taking off and landing from conventional airfields was a start, but there’s no way to fully capture the precision, complexity and mental acuity required for a carrier landing without the real thing or something very close to it. And this was in a time before optical landing systems and computerized simulators.

Hence the two coal-powered paddle carriers.

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by PAUL HUARD

At first glance, you might think the Henschel Hs 129 was the perfect ground-attack airplane.

Twin engines. A heavily-armored cockpit that protected the pilot from small-arms fire. The aircraft even eventually had the heaviest and most powerful forward-firing cannon ever fitted to a production military aircraft during World War II.

The Hs 129 was supposed to be the Luftwaffe’s ultimate aerial tank-killer, dealing death from above to Soviet T-34s on the Russian front. In other words, it would be easy to see it as a World War II-forerunner of today’s formidable A-10 Warthog.

There was just one problem: By all accounts, the Hs 129 was a questionable performer. In fact, the original Hs 129 A-1 series was so bad that the Luftwaffe refused to accept any of the A-1s for service.

The Hs 129 wasn’t a Warthog. It was a turkey.

Still, the aircraft occupies an interesting niche in aviation history. It’s an aeronautical also-ran that reminds us that despite their reputation for Teutonic technical superiority that included producing jet fighters and ballistic missiles, the Nazis could screw up, too.

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by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

Today, the last few active Fairchild A-10 Warthog comes in standard “Compass Ghost” gray paint with some killer nose art for looks …. depending on the squadron.

Times have changed. The A-10 hasn’t always been so plain. One of the most obscure is the frosty-painted “Snow Hog” from early in the warplane’s career. This white and very dark green—almost black—Warthog flew for several days during Exercise Cool Snow Hog (yes, really) in March 1982.

It was dazzling.

Here’s the background. In December 1982, two A-10s from the 343rd Composite Wing made the trip from their Fairchild Republic factory in Maryland to Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.

From there, one of the Warthogs received the winter paint job, and the pair of ground attackers moved to a “forward operating location” in Kotzebue, Alaska for the March “Cool Snow Hog” exercise, according to an official Air Force historical review in 2007.

“Cool Snow Hog represented the Air Force’s first test of forward basing A-10s in Alaska,” wrote Don Fenton, the 354th Fighter Wing’s historian. “Overall, the plan called for the Air Force to fly 16 close-air-support sorties in support of the 3rd Scout Battalion of the Alaska Army National Guard.”

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Russian forces are fighting against time to close a pincer around the last free cities in eastern Ukraine. The deadline: the coming winter, which will strip the leaves from the trees and leave any attacking force exposed to overhead surveillance and attack.

But in one key sector, Ukrainian forces are spoiling the coordinated Russian operation to partially surround Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk. With admirable operational security, or OPSEC, a clutch of Ukrainian brigades under the 3rd Army Corps hasn’t just blunted the advance of the Russian Center Group of Forces—it has pushed the Russians back.

This Ukrainian counterattack along the axis through the town of Lyman, ongoing since May, has largely escaped widespread notice. Yes, there is some scant video evidence of Ukrainian attacks. And yes, a few analysts have adjusted their maps to account for apparent Ukrainian advances, especially in the direction of Nove, a Russian-occupied village 15 km north of Lyman, which itself lies 15 km north of Sloviansk.

But for the most part, Ukrainian and Russian sources have avoided talking about Lyman. “The Ukrainians kept a good level of OPSEC and the Russians have been reluctant to publish videos from these areas” depicting their retreats, analyst and mapper Clément Molin noted in June, just a few weeks after the Ukrainians attacked toward Nove.

Molin, for one, expects the OPSEC to lift in the coming days. “By the end of the month, we should have an official update on the good results of a Ukrainian offensive that has largely remained secret,” he wrote on Monday.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

For four years, Russia launched far more long-range missiles and drones than Ukraine launched back. In the summer of 2026, the balance flipped. That’s when Ukraine began hitting Russia harder than Russia hit Ukraine.

The change didn’t happen fast or easily. The Ukrainians slowly and steadily developed better and cheaper long-range drones and cruise missiles while also striking at Russian factories in order to disrupt Russia’s own production of missiles and drones.

At the same time, the Ukrainians degraded Russia’s air defenses in order to enable the escalating deep strikes on Russian soil.

The Ukrainians’ goal was to raise the cost of the Russian war effort. No one who matters believes bombardment alone can win the war, of course. But it might hasten a negotiated peace.

In June, Russian forces launched around 6,000 Geran one-way attack drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian air-defenses typically shoot down 90% of incoming Gerans, around half of incoming cruise missiles and maybe a fifth of ballistic missiles, but the 600 or more missiles and drones that probably got through in June still amounted to a lot of missiles and drones—and a lot of damage, injuries and deaths in Ukrainian cities.

But the 6,000 munitions figure is actually good news for Ukraine. After all, the Russians launched more than 8,000 deep strike munitions in May. And in both March and April they launched more than 6,500.

And while Russian deep strikes dipped between May and June, Ukrainian deep strikes spiked. The Ukrainians launched 9,000 drones and missiles in May and exceeded that pace in June, finishing the month with 11,500 launches. That’s 2.5 times as many as in April.

How many of the 11,500 munitions got through Russia’s fraying air defenses is hard to say. But it’s possible the Russians enjoy an interception rate that’s similar to the Ukrainians’ own rate: around 90% on average across all enemy munitions types.

All that is to say, it’s conceivable that Ukrainian forces scored 1,150 hits on major targets in Russia and Russian-occupied territories in June. Nearly twice as hits as the Russians scored the same month.

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The Ukrainian army’s 44th Mechanized Brigade has been fighting a rearguard defensive action in and around the ruins of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donestk Oblast. The aim: to slow the advance of the Russian Center Group of Forces toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last free eastern cities.

It’s been a costly fight. The 44th Mechanized Brigade is one of a handful of Ukrainian units that operates donated Leopard 1A5 tanks. And the unit has lost 13 of its 31 Leopard 1A5s along the Kostyantynivka axis since November, according to a tally by French historian Stevius.

Add in five additional Leopard 1A5s the 44th Mechanized Brigade lost before the current battle for Kostyantynivka and the unit is down to just 13 tanks. The 44th Mechanized Brigade may eventually be able to replace those 18 Leopard 1A5s as a German-Danish-Dutch continues to restore and send along the 1980s-vintage tanks.

The consortium has pledged 170 of the 49-ton, four-person tanks, around 135 of which have shipped. The Ukrainians converted two into training tanks and five into engineering vehicles. At least 30 have been destroyed. Of the 100 active tanks, 31 are with the 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade. The others are spread out across the 425th Assault Regiment, the 142nd Mechanized Brigade and the 13th National Guard Brigade.

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Russia is now building its TOS-1A thermobaric rocket launchers with factory armor wrapped around the rocket tubes. The tracked TOS-1A and its flame-producing 220-mm rockets are a powerful and terrifying weapon. But the launcher is also extremely vulnerable to Ukraine’s drones and artillery. The add-on armor may be the only way the launchers can survive.

The TOS-1A is a T-72 with the turret swapped out for 24 thermobaric rockets, and the newest ones arrive inside a welded steel shell that lifts open when the tubes elevate. Russia is armoring the launcher the way it armors the tanks it’s built from. What happens when the armor fails is not the same.

The TOS-1A adds a 24-round launcher onto the hull of a T-72 tank. The system’s MO.1.01.04M rocket travels as far as 6,000 m with a payload of fuel that, once ignited, burns as hot as 3,000 degrees Celsius. The fuel can spread across the ground and into buildings and bunkers, allowing even a single TOS-1A to scorch a wide area.

It’s not for no reason that the TOS-1A is one of Russia’s preferred siege weapons. TOS-1As rolled into action early in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. In one of their first actions, in May 2022, TOS-1As staged on hilltops overlooking the city of Lyman, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, rained fire down on the front-line city. A few days later, Russian troops temporarily occupied Lyman.

The best day the TOS-1A ever had came at Bakhmut. In early April 2023, Russian crews fired across the Bakhmutka River at entrenched Ukrainian positions and opened a 300-m gap in the line, U.S. Army analysts later reconstructed. Wagner mercenaries poured through and covered 1.25 km in a single day.

At Pavlivka, thermobaric fire breached the Ukrainian line and the settlement eventually fell—though it took five months and cost Russia two wrecked naval infantry brigades.

With its origins firmly in the 1970s, the TOS-1A was designed for a different era, however. An era where rocket launchers could, with a little support, safely approach to within a few kilometers of the enemy. Artillery is an ever-present danger, of course. But artillery can be suppressed—usually by other artillery.

The era of relative safety for the TOS-1A ended as tiny explosive drones began filling the sky over Ukraine in 2023. Even the tiniest of these tiny drones has the range to hit a TOS-1A before the TOS-1A can get into position to fire its rockets. Worse, the TOS-1A’s thermobaric rockets are extremely volatile—and tend to explode in massive fireballs when struck.

“Nasty weapons—and also great targets” for anti-tank missiles and other munitions, is how Czech analyst Jakub Janovsky described the TOS-1A in the war’s opening days, before the drones even arrived.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

The Russian navy still has enough missile-armed warships in its battered Black Sea Fleet to sustain Kalibr cruise missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, if recent launches are any indication.

Overnight on Aug. 19, an unscathed Russian corvette lobbed as many as eight Kalibrs at Ukraine. Seven were intercepted. The eighth struck the Antonov Aircraft Plant in Kyiv, according to the open-source monitor OSINT Warfare. Ukrainian commanders had hoped that wouldn’t be possible. A week earlier, they thought they had knocked the Kalibr shooters out of the fight.

Overnight on Aug. 12, Ukrainian drones and missiles targeted the Black Sea Fleet’s main anchorage in Novorossiysk in southern Russia. Russians on the ground recorded fireballs billowing into the night sky, seemingly indicating significant damage to the port or its moored warships, potentially including the Black Sea Fleet’s seven or eight surviving frigates, corvettes, and submarines that are compatible with the 2,500-km Kalibr.

The Ukrainian general staff in Kyiv claimed its forces had struck three Kalibr carriers—the frigates Admiral Makarov and Admiral Essen and a Buyan-M corvette—as well as a lightly armed guard ship. But the uncertainty was, and still is, high. Even the general staff stressed its munitions had inflicted “varying degrees” of damage “according to preliminary information.”

“Information is being clarified,” the general staff stressed.

When the sun rose over the following days, commercial satellites snapped high-resolution photos of Novorossiysk, helping analysts assess damage from the Aug. 12 strikes. The photos were hard to interpret. Yes, there were dark patches on the hulls of the two frigates and single corvette, but the discoloration didn’t necessarily indicate drone or missile damage—to say nothing of confirming serious damage.

The pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team concluded Admiral Makarov and Admiral Essen “sustained damage in the area of their launchers,” potentially impacting the ships’ ability to fire Kalibrs. But even CIT conceded that “the extent of the damage remains unclear.”

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

Dialing down the aerial bombing and dialing up the drone strikes, the Russian Center Group of Forces is pummeling the supply lines of the Ukrainian 19th Army Corps in and around the town of Druzhkivka, the next obstacle and last to a Russian advance on Kramatorsk.

The Kramatorsk-Sloviansk urban conglomeration is the last big free settlement in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. Capturing Kramatorsk and Sloviansk is one of Russia’s top priorities as the wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 54th month. Defending them is one of Ukraine’s top priorities.

There are several possible paths for the Russians as they aim to lay siege to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. They could close on the cities from the north via the town of Lyman or from the northeast via the town of Mykolaivka.

But if they approach from the south, they’ve got to punch through Druzhkivka, three miles south of Kramatorsk. They’re making progress, albeit slowly and at great cost.

There are two routes toward Druzhkivka. The Russians could march through the ruins of Kostyantynivka, six miles southeast of Druzhkivka. Or they could assault Druzhkivka from the southwest via the village of Novomykolaivka.

A recent Russian push toward Novomykolaivka ended in defeat amid a flurry of Ukrainian first-person-view drones. “As of today, the settlement is under Ukrainian control,” mapper Playfra noted. The Russian Center Grouping of Forces is now trying again to get past Novomykolaivka by bypassing it on the right, according to Playfra.

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Ukraine’s southeastern counteroffensive has rolled back Russian advances at the intersections of Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk Oblasts. The Ukrainian attacks set back, by months if not years, the Russian plan for marching on Zaporizhzhia City from the northeast.

But there’s a shorter path for the Russians: the southern approach through the town of Orikhiv, around 50 km from Zaporizhzhia City. And the Russians may not need to travel all of it. The stated Russian objective on this axis, according to the Institute for the Study of War, is to advance within tube artillery range of Zaporizhzhia City—which means getting to within 20 or 30 km of a regional capital, not capturing it. That is what Russian forces did to Kharkiv.

The route is short but hard. And for three years, it has been blocked at its first obstacle by the ruins of a prison.

The first obstacle for the Russians is the village of Mala Tokmachka. In particular, the thickly built ruins of a former prison, which function as an interlocking series of bunkers for the Ukrainian 118th Mechanized Brigade. The second obstacle is Orikhiv itself, which sits astride all the passable roads leading to Zaporizhzhia City.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced the capture of Mala Tokmachka on Nov. 16. Ukrainian government sources still had the village under Ukrainian control in April. Russian milblogger Boris Rozhin’s repeated claims that the village was nearly cleared became, in Meduza’s account, the most popular Russian military meme of the first half of 2026—shorthand for the distance between what the Russian army announces and what it holds.

Observer Thorkill has watched closely as Russian forces have probed for weaknesses in Ukrainian defenses between the disputed gray zone and Zaporizhzhia City—and found very few.

The Russian army’s 270th Motor Rifle Regiment, which is part of the 42nd Motor Rifle Division, has been trying to advance through Mala Tokmachka “for many months,” Thorkill noted. But the Russian attacks “have always faltered against the strongly fortified strongpoint in the complex of ruins of the former prison buildings.”

If the Russians can’t capture Orikhiv, they can’t get their artillery within range of Zaporizhzhia City. But they can’t capture Orikhiv if they don’t first capture Mala Tokmachka. And they can’t take Mala Tokmachka if they don’t overrun the old prison.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

This story was commissioned by The Strategist. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

In six months of on-again, off-again fighting with Iran, the United States has effectively exhausted its supply of heavy air defense interceptors. These are the only interceptors that have any ability to shoot down the most dangerous enemy munitions: ballistic missiles.

Since the U.S. supplies—or supplied—most of the West’s heavy interceptors, the shortage isn’t just an American problem; it’s a global one.

The solution is global, too. America’s allies must work together, and fast, to produce alternatives to the U.S. Patriot and THAAD air defense systems. Ukraine is leading the way with a joint Ukrainian-German interceptor design. Now other countries must follow.

If they don’t, they could be exposed to devastating ballistic missile bombardment in the event of a major war. It’s already happening in Ukraine, where a deepening missile shortage for the country’s half-dozen or so donated Patriot batteries means Russia can now essentially bombard cities and power plants at will.

Ukraine’s only other air defense system with any significant anti-ballistic missile capability is its two Franco-Italian SAMP/T batteries, which are themselves desperately low on missiles.

The U.S. went to war with Iran with a limited inventory of missiles for its 60 Patriot and eight THAAD batteries. The Patriot’s latest PAC-3 radar-guided interceptor can hit incoming ballistic missiles around 50 km up. The THAAD’s infrared-guided interceptor can hit missiles 150 km up. A PAC-3 round costs around $4 million, a THAAD round around $12 million.

Before the first U.S. and Israeli bombs dropped on Iran in February, the Pentagon had around 360 missiles for its THAAD batteries and around 2,300 missiles for its Patriot batteries, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In six months of sporadic fighting, U.S. forces fired as many as 290 missiles from THAAD batteries and as many as 1,430 from Patriot batteries, potentially leaving just 70 rounds left for THAAD and 870 for Patriot. This is far too few to protect U.S. and allied bases during, say, a major war with China.

“We don’t have enough munitions to sustain a long-term fight,”warned Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee.

The Pentagon is paying Lockheed Martin and Raytheon tens of billions of dollars to ramp up production of THAAD and Patriot rounds, respectively. But it takes 42 months to produce a missile for Patriot and 53 to produce one for THAAD.

Read the rest at The Strategist.

by SEBASTIEN ROBLIN

When Israel declared independence from British colonial rule in May 1948, it immediately went to war with the neighboring Arab states. One of the first weapons Israel acquired was a fighter plane designed by a country that had sought the extinction of the Jewish people.

The German Messerschmitt Bf.109—later re-designated Me.109—was the most advanced fighter plane of its time when it first saw combat in 1937 in the Spanish Civil War. Flown by German pilots in support of General Franco’s Nationalists, Bf. 109s secured air superiority over Spain and allowed Fascist bombers to terror bomb cities nearly unopposed.

The Bf.109E model was upgraded with 20-millimeter cannons and a new Daimler Benz 601 engine that increased its speed to 354 miles per hour. It swept its opponents from the skies in the invasion of Poland and the Battle of France.

Only when it met large numbers of Royal Air Force Spitfires in the Battle of Britain did it meet its match—resulting in the Nazi war machine’s first major defeat.

While superior fighter aircraft began entering service on all sides by 1942, Nazi Germany continued upgrading and producing 109s until the end of the war. Much of this production took place in heavily industrialized Czechoslovakia, which had been annexed by Germany in 1938. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Czechs decided to reopen production by making their own version of the 109, the Avia S-199.

The Czechs planned on using their stock of Daimler Benz 605 engines intended for use in 109 aircraft. However, a factory fire destroyed the engines, forcing the Czechs to find an alternative. They settled on tapping a stockpile of Jumo 211F engines and propellers used by Nazi Heinkel-111 twin-engine bombers.

Needless to say, the 211F wasn’t designed to be a fighter engine—and caused endless problems when fitted to the 109’s airframe. Not only were the engines underpowered, but the 109’s original nose-hub cannon was incompatible with it, so the Czechs instead strapped MG 151 cannons under the wings using World War II-era Rüstsatz VI add-on kits. These worsened the S-199’s flight performance.

The Czechs produced 532 S-199s, which served in the Czech air force for 10 years under the unaffectionate nickname mezek—“mule”—because of their difficult handling characteristics.

War in Palestine

In the wake of violent anti-Semitic pogroms in Tsarist Russia during the 1880s, European Jews had begun immigrating to Palestine as part of the Zionist movement, which promoted Jewish nationalism.

They joined a local population of Middle Eastern Mizrahi Jews that had lived alongside Arab Muslims and Christians for centuries.

The growing Jewish population led to increasing tensions with local Arab communities, and many Jews and Arabs began to see themselves as being in a zero-sum competition for control of the territory. Palestine at the time was under British colonial rule, which clumsily attempted to pacify both populations, satisfying neither.

As violent clashes erupted, Jewish groups began forming militias. Haganah, the largest group, was led by David Ben-Gurion. There was also the more hardline Irgun under Menachem Begin, and the violent extremist Lehi or “Stern Gang.”

After World War II, these groups launched a guerilla war against colonial rule that led the United Kingdom to begin withdrawing in 1947 after a deadly attack on the King David Hotel. A United Nations resolution calling for separate Jewish and Arab states cleared the way for Ben-Gurion to declare the creation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.

Fighting between Jews and Arabs for control of Palestine had already begun well before then.

Britain and France had been decolonizing its other holdings in the Middle East, too, and the newly independent Arab states of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Syria intervened against Israeli forces, which they viewed as illegitimate.

Egypt in particular had inherited a lot of military equipment from the British, and soon Egyptian Spitfires were strafing Israeli-held airfields, while C-47 transports converted into bombers began bombing Tel Aviv.

The leaders of the newly formed Israeli Defense Force, drawn out of Haganah’s ranks, scrambled to put together an air force even before the declaration of statehood.

Haganah already operated an assortment of light civilian planes such as Piper Cubs in its Sherut Avir—“air service”—which flew reconnaissance as well as bombing missions. The pilots held bombs and grenades on their laps and threw them out the side of the cockpit. Clearly, that wasn’t going to cut it much longer.

But Israeli agents had difficulty purchasing military equipment because of an arms embargo. Finally, Otto Felix found a Czech arms dealer willing to sell Avia S-199s at the then-exorbitant rate of $180,000 each, equivalent to $1.8 million today. The price included equipment, ammunition, delivery, and flying lessons for the Israeli pilots, many of whom had only civilian flying experience.

The first order for 10 S-199s was followed by another for 15. When the Israelis subsequently received an offer to purchase far more capable P-47 Thunderbolts at a lower price, they turned it down.

The new air force also lacked qualified pilots and mechanics, so it assembled a rag-tag group of volunteers, adventurers and low-paid mercenaries known as Machal or Machalniks.

Of the 609 personnel that served in the Israeli air force in its first war, 181 were Israeli-born, 182 came from the United States, 80 were South African and around 50 each hailed from Canada and the United Kingdom. The remainder came from at least a dozen other countries. Around four-fifths were Jewish.

On May 6, 1948, two of these volunteers and eight Haganah pilots left for the Czech Republic to begin training on the S-199s.

Four broken aircraft save Tel Aviv

On May 18, an Egyptian C-47 dropped bombs on Tel Aviv’s central bus terminal, killing 42 people and wounding more than 100.

When the Israeli pilots learned of the attack, they demanded to return to Israel early. Their Czech instructors objected that the volunteers hadn’t even received basic combat training, and only the experienced pilots had any chance of operating the aircraft safely. But the volunteers got their way and headed back to the Middle East.

Plans to ferry the S-199s directly became impossible because of the arms embargo. Instead, technicians dismantled the S-199s. Each was shipped over in two separate flights by enormous long-range C-46 Commando transport aircraft. These flew first to Corsica and from there to Ekron—now Tel Nof Air Base—in Operation Balak, which began on May 20.

In an omen of things to come, the first S-199 was lost on May 23 when its C-46 transport crashed attempting to land in the fog, the dismantled fuselage sliding forward and killing navigator Moshe Rosenbaum. On other occasions, aircraft carrying the 199s were impounded and their crew jailed at various airports for their violation of the arms embargo.

It wasn’t until noon on May 29 that the first S-199s were assembled and in functioning order under the newly-christened 101 Squadron. The appellation “Messerschmitt” for the knock-off aircraft was shortened to Messrs—which also means “knife” in Hebrew.

By then, an Egyptian column of around 2,300 men drawn from the 2nd Brigade mounted in hundreds of trucks was heading toward Tel Aviv, accompanied by armored cars and 10 Matilda and Mark VI tanks. The force stopped near Ashdod, also called Isdud, delayed by a destroyed bridge only 30 kilometers away from the Israeli capital. If it completed repairs to the bridge, the column was poised to capture Tel Aviv the following morning.

Without even a single test flight, the four operational Avias were dispatched directly into combat. The pilots included Ezer Weizman and Mordechai “Modi” Alon—both combat veterans that had served in the British Royal Air Force—plus Lou Lenart, a Pennsylvania Jew with experience flying for the U.S. Marines over Okinawa and Eddie Cohen, who had flown for the South African air force. Each fighter was armed with two small 154-pound bombs.

Upon spotting the Egyptian vehicles, the four S-199s swooped down on the column as 40-millimeter anti-aircraft shells tore up the sky around them. Releasing their bombs, the fighters made three passes, machine guns chattering and cannons barking—but only briefly, because three of the four aircraft’s cannons immediately jammed.

Cohen’s Messr, likely struck by flak, crashed in flames close to the air base of Hatzor. Alon’s airbrakes malfunctioned while returning to base and a wingtip plowed into the ground while landing.

In this “pathetic little attack” in the words of the 101 Squadron history of the event, the Israeli air force had lost two aircraft and one pilot.

But the Egyptian column ceased its advance entirely, flummoxed to have been attacked from the air. “We have been heavily attacked by enemy aircraft, we are dispersing,” explained a radio transmission to Cairo.

The Egyptian force came under several more air attacks and repelled a major Israeli counterattack on June 2—but it never resumed its advance toward Tel Aviv.

This seemingly minor raid is credited by some as having preserved “the existence of Israel as we know it.” This is far from certain. While many see the column’s halt as marking the turning point of the war, it is debatable whether the Egyptian force even intended to enter Tel Aviv.

Yet the mere presence of the S-199s had made an impact—and would soon do so again.

The following morning, two Avias were back in action strafing an Iraqi column. A bird struck Weizman’s airplane in the cockpit, while a 199 piloted by Milton Rubenfeld sustained damage in a clash with Egyptian fighters. Forced to bail out, Rubenfeld narrowly escaped death at the hands of locals that assumed him to be an Egyptian pilot.

Egyptian Spitfires retaliated by strafing two unassembled 199s on May 30, and the squadron was pulled back to a new air base at Herzliya a week later.

While flying on June 3, Modi Alon spotted two Egyptian C-47s escorted by two Spitfires over Tel Aviv—the 16th raid of this kind. Swooping down on the formation, he chased off the Spitfire escort and then shot down both of the C-47s—the first aerial victories of the Israeli air force.

After that, the bomber attacks on Tel Aviv ceased for good. After being celebrated with gifts of wine and chocolate by the locals, two American pilots designed the logo for the unit that remains today, a winged skull wearing a fighter pilot’s helmet.

On June 8, American Machal Gideon Lichtman and Alon engaged their Messrs against four Egyptian Spitfires on a bombing mission in an ironic rematch for the two types that had battled over England eight years earlier. Lichtman’s guns shot one of them down.

The crash-prone menace

On June 11, the United Nations organized a truce. This gave the Israelis time to assemble five additional Avias to replace the ones they had lost. Other new aircraft included two P-51 Mustangs fighters and two B-17 bombers smuggled via Puerto Rico. More aerial clashes ensued when the truce ended in a month later.

On July 6, Maurice Mann’s S-199 reportedly shot down a Syrian AT-6 Texan trainer bombing a kibbutz, but his wingman Lionel Bloch crashed over the Golan Heights while pursuing another Texan. Syrian records report he was shot down by the tail gunner of the second Texan, Muhi Al Din Wadi, who died from his wounds after landing.

Two days later, on a strafing mission against the Egyptian air base at El Arish, American Bob Vickman’s Messr was seen crashing into the sea—either shot down by flak or possibly a victim of his own machine guns shooting off his propeller.

On July 18, Alon scored a third kill when he downed the Spitfire flown by Wing Commander Said Afifi Al Janzuri.

Yet it soon became evident that the greatest danger to Israeli pilots came not from enemy fighters and flak, but from the Avias themselves.

To begin with, the S-199’s narrow landing gear made the aircraft unstable while landing and prone to flipping over—a problem that the original Bf.109 suffered from, as well. It soon became a routine for neighboring Yemeni farmers to pull down flipped over Avias with wooden poles. Such accidents were made even worse by the side-locking canopy which could not be opened by the pilot.

The Avia’s MG.151 cannons jammed more often than not. The nose-mounted 13-millimeter MG 131 machine guns regularly fell out of synchronization for unknown reasons—with the horrifying result that many Avia pilots shot off their own propellers.

The enormous propellers—intended for use on large bombers—also created intense leftward torque, making landings and takeoffs especially dangerous. The S-199’s accident rate grew so bad that Israeli pilots began taking bets each time an Avia attempted a landing on whether it would crash or not. When Avias flew alongside other aircraft, they always landed last so that any wreckage from a crash wouldn’t obstruct the other planes.

Serviceability rates for the S-199s were abysmal, and no more than four of the 25 were ever in the air at the same time. The volunteer mechanics were unable to decipher the aircraft’s difficult hydraulic systems or its engines, which on several occasions fatally overheated.

On July 18, the United Nations organized a second truce. Neither side had any serious intention of negotiating, and instead frantically recruited, reorganized and rearmed despite an arms embargo. Israeli agents concluded a contract for 50 Spitfires IXs. The superior aircraft cost only $23,000 a piece—$230,000 in 2016 dollars—and began arriving in September 1948. When the second ceasefire ended on October 15, the new Spitfires permitted the Israeli air force to establish air superiority.

The incessant accidents took a grim toll of the pilots, however. On Oct. 15, after providing ground support to an Israeli counter-offensive, the S-199 of Squadron Leader Mordechai Alon developed an engine problem while making a second landing attempt after his landing gear refused to lower.

Streaming fumes from its engines, the 199 suddenly nosed down into the runway and burst into flames while Alon’s pregnant wife watched in horror.

Two other Avias crashed while attempting to land the same day and a third landed on its belly after being hit by anti-aircraft fire. Morale grew low and the Machal became infamous for their raucous partying and their habit of stealing vehicles for use at the airfield.

The last S-199, which had been impounded in Rome for four months, finally arrived in November. S-199s flew a few more combat missions. One crashed while taking off in November, while another shot off its propeller in December and only barely made it back to the ground. When 101 squadron redeployed to Ramat David that winter, Weizman, the new squadron leader, recommended they leave the Czech-built fighters behind.

Fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War came to an end in March 1949. A year later, Israeli inspectors decided to scrap the decrepit aircraft.

Of the 25 Avia 199s, at least five had been lost as a result of enemy fire, six were destroyed attempting to land, three flipped over taking off, another is believed to have shot its propeller off, one had its cockpit shattered by a bird and two were destroyed on delivery. And that doesn’t count all the incidents in which damage was repairable.

Ezer Weizman went on to further glory as a Spitfire pilot—and controversy, as it appears he deliberately led a deadly attack on neutral British Tempest fighters on Jan. 7, 1949. In his later years he became air force commander, defense minister and, finally, the president of Israel from 1993 to 2000, during which he advocated strongly for the peace process with the Palestinian Authority.

Today 101 Squadron flies F-16s out of Hatzerim air base. The only surviving S-199 can be seen there, in the Israeli Air Force Museum.

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Russia’s Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, a version of the ground-launched Iskander, travels as far as 2,000 km at 10 times the speed of sound while packing a 500-kg warhead. It was one of a clutch of purported super-weapons that Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin revealed in a dramatic announcement in 2018.

Launched in mid-air by specially modified Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptors in order to boost its speed and range, the Kinzhal is, in theory, a powerful deep strike munition capable of blasting right through all but the best and rarest air defenses.

In practice, it kept missing. Russia stopped building the $4.5-million missile in April, Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitskyi, Ukraine’s deputy chief of defense intelligence, told RBC-Ukraine—and the rocket fuel and components that had gone into Kinzhals now go into Iskanders, sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles and air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles instead.

The reason is a number. A missile of this class needs to land within five to seven meters of its aim point to be worth firing. The Kinzhal, according to Skibitskyi, lands within 30 meters or more. “We can hardly recall a single instance where this missile hit the target precisely,” he said. Satellite imagery of the Ukrainian air base at Starokostiantyniv, a favorite Kinzhal target, shows the craters ringing the airfield rather than sitting on it.

The Kolomna Machine Building Design Bureau reportedly produced 44 Kinzhals in 2024 and 144 in 2025. The line climbed for two years and then stopped dead.

The Kinzhal isn’t the only munition reportedly getting the ax. The Kremlin is also halting production of the Kh-32 air-launched cruise missile, which Russian engineers repeatedly failed to improve before the program was sent back for further work. “This would explain why Russia has not launched any Kinzhals for multiple months, and very few Kh-32s,” AMK Mapping noted.

At least one analyst anticipated this development years ago. Way back in 2022, Carnegie Endowment analyst Michael Kofman wrote that he didn’t “understand the interest in Russian use of Kinzhal. There’s nothing special or particularly exciting about this system.” It is, according to Kofman, just an Iskander but with a more complicated and expensive launch method.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by MATTHEW MOSS

In 1943, Giuseppe Oliani developed the OG-43, an innovative stamped submachine gun for the Repubblica Sociale Italiana—the German puppet state that controlled northern Italy after the Kingdom of Italy surrendered in September 1943.

Oiliani’s design was extremely compact. The magazine doubled as a pistol grip. It boasted a folding stock and foregrip.

The OG-43 was the product of the puppet state’s effort to boost small-arms production. The same initiative also produced two other, new submachine guns—the FNAB-43 and TZ-45.

Gun-maker Società Anonima Revelli Manifattura Armaguerra built the OG-43 prototypes at its factory near Cremona. The OG-43 featured an L-shape bolt that ran above the barrel, much like the bolt on the later Walther MP. This allowed for a shorter, slimmer and lighter weapon.

Oliani’s prototypes, which were chambered in nine-by-19-millimeter, took advantage of a simple blowback action. They fed from Beretta M38A double-stack, double-feed magazines.

With its stock folded. the OG-43 was approximately 47 centimeters long. Extended, it measured 72 centimeters. The later, fixed-stock OG-44 was 78 centimeters long.

The OG-44 prototype that succeeded the OG-43 is markedly more conservative in its design. The weapon’s fixed stock connected to the pistol grip and hinged downward for disassembly. This change required the designers to move the trigger assembly from in front of the breech to behind it.

Unlike the FNAB-43 and TZ-45, neither of Oliani’s prototype submachine guns entered serial production. Still, the OG-43 marked an important milestone in submachine gun design. It was one of the first, if not the first, submachine gun to combine stamped manufacture, an L-shape bolt and a pistol-grip magazine-housing.

For one reason or another, Oliani’s designs remained in limbo after the war. Other Italian manufacturers such as Beretta seized the market.

This story originally appeared at Historical Firearms.

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Russian forces may have finally found a way to protect their tanks from Ukrainian first-person-view drones. And it’s not the usual add-on armor applications that have defined mechanized combat in Ukraine since the early months of Russia’s wider war.

No, the Russians have begun deploying tanks fitted with the Arena-M active protection system (APS), which detects incoming FPVs and automatically fires a small projectile at them. The first few assaults by Arena-M-equipped tanks ended in defeat for the Russians, but limited combat footage shows the system can destroy incoming FPVs.

At least one Arena-M did work against FPVs—it just did not work long enough to save the tank. Observer Andrei_bt stressed that a reported 12-round loadout “does not match modern realities.”

Footage published on Aug. 7 showed Ukrainian FPVs attacking an Arena-M-equipped T-72B3M near occupied Volodymyrivka, though the Institute for the Study of War assessed that it likely showed the late-July mechanized assault. Ukrainian drone operator Dmytro Putiata reported that one Arena-M shot down seven FPVs before Ukrainian forces destroyed the tank.

That is a smaller problem than the one the Russians had a month ago, and it is why the burned-out tanks along the road in Donetsk Oblast are not the whole story. Russia has spent three years accumulating tanks it cannot safely send anywhere—thousands of them, rebuilt and parked for want of a defense against $500 drones. An Arena-M that does not run dry halfway to the objective is the thing that would let those tanks out of the yard.

The good news for Russian mechanized forces is that developers now know Arena-M needs a bigger ammo loadout. The bad news is that packing more projectiles into the system could prove extremely difficult.

The main problem: adding any further bulk to the turret-mounted projectile launchers could block a tank’s engine compartment, preventing access for maintenance.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.