Historically, (and by that I mean world War 2 and later.) roads, rail roads, telecommunications (Telephone , Telegraph etc.) canals , pipelines, can be tactically important in a battlefield environment, and can be easily repaired or rerouted if necessary (even canals if you move enough earth…)

Larger targets such as rail yards, bridges, pumping stations (and by this I mean really large hub of multiple series of several pipelines) refineries, Dams, (and back in the day) when many hundreds or thousands of telephone operators were required to manually connect calls over land line telecommunication’s, telephone switching stations were favored for strategic bombing operations.

I know that in the second Iraq war, the U.S. Air Force (and allies) conducted an air campaign targeting transportation, communication’s and infrastructure across all of Iraq. Not all was successful ( scud hunting was particularly disappointing) but it did disrupt Saddam Husseins ability to exercise command and control.

And the allies tried to avoid hitting the oilfield and refineries in expectation of putting them back into service when hostilities ended. (Another issue when the Iraqis started burning the oil fields.)

I have no knowledge of Tomahawk missile accuracy, so can’t comment on that aspect.

It is commonly known that the Ukrainian military is actively targeting Russian oil refineries and infrastructure, but have not seen any published reports of pipelines being targeted.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 01:55 pm: Edit

Tomahawk missiles have an estimated accuracy of about five yards.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 03:28 pm: Edit

Well, that is the answer.

The average guage width of standard railroad tracks is 4 foot, 8 1/2 inches.

I forget what the standard size is in Russia, I know in World War 2, Russian railroads used a different size, do not know if trhey ever changed.

Point is, five yards is 15 feet.

Not good enough to hit a target only 4 foot, 8.5 inches wide.

Same with many pipelines. (Generally pipelines are buried, unless you are dealing with a more challenging type soil such as permafrost of marshland.)

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 04:45 pm: Edit

Seriously, as an engineer who built roads and pipelines...

If you want to block a railroad, target a bridge. Broken bridges are a lot harder to fix than a big hole in a road. I know crews that could get the trains running again in 24 hours after a bomb crater in the roadway, but knock down a bridge and that rail line is out for weeks.

Pipelines are trickier. They usually are buried BUT the common industrial practice is to come up out of the ground every 20 miles or so (may be a different number in Russia as I'm sure their OSHA is different) with a big expensive hard to replace valve in it called a "block gate." That is there so you can isolate one chunk of pipeline for repair work as needed. Otherwise a small leak would mean shutting down and draining a thousand miles of pipe.

It gets more fun than that. Most pipelines are designed for "pigs" which are mechanic brush things that clean the inside of the pipe. To make those work the pipeline comes out of the ground and "ends" in a big airlock trapdoor "breech of a cannon" sort of thing. Another one facing the other direction is next do it and there is a cross connect for normal pipeline operations. When it's time to "run a pig" down the line (every few months to a year) to clean the thing out. Those "pig gates" are nice at targets and you might want to use two or three missiles but you could pretty much destroy it. It would take a week or so just to get the line back in service, even without the "pig gate".

Gates of either type are by definition accessible via no more than a mile of dirt road that connects to a significant hard-surface road. It's actually better to put the gates right next to a hard surface road. It's not worth the cost to lay a road just for that gate but pipelines cross highways frequently enough you can pick a spot.

To really do a job you send commandos to a pig gate, and use it to insert a dozen bombs into the pipeline and run them down the line by up to a hundred miles. That way you blow up the pipeline from the inside and at a lot of hard to get to places.

By Ryan Opel (Ryan) on Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 04:50 pm: Edit

Russia still uses it's own railroad guage.

GPS Tomahawks are more accurate and most if not all the US ones have been upgraded.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 07:04 pm: Edit

I know this is fiction and fiction almost never translates into reality, but the opening of the classic novel "Red Storm Rising" features a terrorist team conducting a sophisticated attack on a Soviet refinery.

Among their sabotage efforts were opening up gates and running pumps to spill oil all over the facility. A traffic accident lit everything on fire.

With modern computerized systems, a cyber attack could, in theory, accomplish the same thing. Same is true for a similar attack along a distribution network.

If this was followed by a cruise missile attack that had some sort of incendiary warhead, how much could that do to the infrastructure?

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 03:43 am: Edit

Jeff beat me to it.

A good Cyber Attack could easily take it out for 2 weeks (and possibly longer if you was wanting to be 100% certain before you turned it back on).

A 'extorsion/blackmail' attack on Jaguar Land Rover shut down UK car production for over 1 month due to a Cyber attack last month.

On using missiles, James comment about "could a small number of Tomahawks potentially be exported with that same certain individual quietly and deniably authorizing the Tomahawks" I think would be 100% seen through - it's not as if there are naughty 'resellers' elsewhere around the world.

So - it could be done, but the finger of blame would be pointed at the US.

So - either "lose" a couple of million quid of missiles and get blamed - or allow 1 of dozen + groups of Cyber attackers to do the damage?

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 08:32 am: Edit

In other news, it appears that China is going to lose still more business.

Several foreign news sites have posted news that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are moving production services and components out of China to diversify their supply chains. Microsoft is aiming to produce most of its new products outside of China by 2026, Google is expanding server production in places like Thailand, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also reducing its reliance on Chinese suppliers, especially for AI data center servers. These moves are being driven by geopolitical tensions and the desire to reduce supply chain vulnerabilities.
Microsoft: The company has asked suppliers to prepare for the production of Surface laptops and data center servers outside of China, with a goal of having up to 80% of components manufactured elsewhere by 2026.
Amazon: AWS is reportedly looking to reduce its dependence on Chinese component suppliers, particularly for AI data center servers.
Google: The company is working with partners to increase server production in Thailand and is also reportedly shifting production of devices like the Pixel to India.

I do not expect China to admit that they have a economic problem, but if western businesses keep leaving China, Recession will not be a question: they may be heading for a full scale economic depression, the likes of which no one has seen since 1929 or 1937.

It may be a bit controversial, one interpretation of U.S. tariffs, tax policy and new trade agreements is to isolate the United States (and those nations cooperating with the U.S.) from the problems China is experiencing.

One of the problems that made the Great Depression a global economic disaster was international trade agreements in place in the late 1920’s and 30’s. Everyone felt the pain.

By Mike Erickson (Mike_Erickson) on Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 01:39 pm: Edit

>> to isolate the United States (and those nations cooperating with the U.S.) from the problems China is experiencing

That's how I read it. The current set of US economic policies is to push forward with the painful process of decoupling from China. Our China strategy hasn't worked, and we've made (and paid) what amounts to a powerful strategic enemy that has an entirely different set of values and incompatible geopolitical objectives.

--Mike

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 03:33 pm: Edit

Intelligence: Dealing With Chinese Theft and Espionage
October 19, 2025: Two months ago the FBI arrested two Chinese men, Yuance Chen and Liren Lai, charging them with espionage. The two were accused to seeking to establish espionage operations near naval bases. There they would observe and record on video naval activity. More importantly, the two would seek to recruit naval personnel to join their espionage operation.
China has been spying or collecting information about the United States since the early 1800s, when the first Chinese diplomatic mission was established. Since then, despite revolutions, civil war and the establishment of two Chinas in 1949, there has been some Chinese espionage activity in America
Since World War II the FBI, CIA and State Department have been involved with monitoring and seeking to thwart Chinese espionage activities. These involve a long list of activities.
For example, in 2019 the FBI arrested Zhongsan Liu, an employee of the Chinese government. His job was management at the New Jersey branch of China Association for International Exchange of Personnel or CAIEP. Since 2017 Liu was observed arranging illegal visas for Chinese recruiters who used CAIEP and Confucius Institutes at six American universities where these recruiters sought suitable students or faculty for espionage operations. Liu had spent the last 26 years working for CAIEP and was believed to have been active in the Thousand Talents Plan since its inception in 2008. That was about the same time the Confucius Institute program began in 2004 as a means to cultural exchange and, it was later discovered, a means of observing and controlling Chinese students attending foreign universities. As time went by it was discovered that the Confucius Institutes were more about intelligence work than cultural education. Many of the staff at the Confucius Institutes are Chinese with a PhD and a J-1 research visa.
As successful as this espionage effort was, most of the Chinese Americans approached by recruiters were not interested and politely declined. A growing number quietly reported their encounters to the FBI or to friends they knew could do it for them. The Chinese knew this was a risk and felt it was acceptable given the amount of intellectual property that was being stolen and put to work back in China.
Another calculated risk was the Confucius Institutes being exposed as extensions of Chinese espionage efforts and organizing Chinese students to protest against whatever the Chinese government wanted to protest. Many of the students agreed with their government and were not just following orders when they protested some American affront. But these Chinese were students and usually in America for the first time and began to doubt some of the issues they were sent out to protest about. This was especially true with the Hong Kong protests, which had been massive. The Hong Kong Chinese want democracy and the official Chinese Communist Party/CCP line is that democracy is inefficient and not suitable for China or the Chinese. A lot of overseas Chinese, as in Taiwan, Singapore and many Western countries, would disagree. The CCP considers these Chinese misled and in need of reeducation or perhaps the benefits of CCP rule.
Over the last decade, the United States has been prosecuting, prosecuting and convicting a growing number of Chinese born men, and a few women, conspiring to commit or actually carrying out economic and other espionage in the United States. Some of these suspects were naturalized American citizens but a growing number were Chinese citizens here on legitimate visas. As more suspects were identified patterns began to appear and that revealed inner workings of known Chinese intellectual property espionage efforts.
It was known that China had a state-sponsored program to make it easy for foreign-educated Chinese to return home and apply what they had learned in the West to start their own companies. China has made available over $20 billion in venture capital for this program. State-controlled media reported that the government had established nearly a hundred equity investment management operations to run 152 funds and seven debt financing service organizations. All this to help the nearly 50,000 returning Chinese from the West to establish their own companies using what they learned in the West. This program helped create thousands of new firms. Many of these companies were using stolen trade secrets and patents that were being laundered. That is, changed sufficiently to make it difficult for the owners of the stolen intellectual property to easily prove theft.
The FBI and CIA again noted patterns. While many of the returning Chinese students were operating legally, a large number of those new Chinese firms were operating illegally with stolen intellectual property. There were other patterns as well. A lot of the stolen tech seemed to involve those associated with CAIEP, the Thousand Talents Plan and the Thousand Talents' Venture Capital Center. That eventually led to the hundreds of Confucius Institutes associated with Western universities, including a hundred in the United States. This, in turn, led to the arrest of Zhongsan Liu and his prosecution for massive visa fraud via Confucius Institute exchange programs.
Many of the convictions are for conspiring to steal or actually stealing trade secrets. Many of the technologies involved are dual-use for commercial and military applications. Many of these investigations begin when American companies provide the FBI with documentation showing how the Chinese obtained and applied the trade secrets. What the American firms usually lacked was information about who was getting the information, often including detailed manufacturing techniques, to the Chinese. The U.S. is not the only victim here. Many other Western nations are experiencing the same losses. Even Chinese neighbor and ally Russia has suffered heavy losses due to this Chinese economic espionage.
There have been a lot more court cases about this because Chinese firms have become bolder in how they exploit stolen software, trade secrets and other technology. In the past, Chinese were careful in the use of stolen tech when exporting their own military equipment copied from Russian designs. The Chinese had started doing this during the Cold War, which sometimes caused tense relations with the Russian. There were some deadly border skirmishes in the 1970s. This came about because China and Russia developed some territorial and ideological disputes that did not settle down until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
The Russians are still angry about continued Chinese theft of their tech, and growing Russian threats over this caused the Chinese to eventually sign agreements declaring Chinese firms would stop stealing and reselling Russian tech. In practice, this only slowed the Chinese down, but it placated the Russians for a while. Currently, the Americans are starting to sound like the Russians in the 1990s, but the Americans have more legal and economic clout to deploy.
By 2012 most American officials had come to openly admit that a whole lot of American military and commercial technical data has been stolen via Chinese internet-based and more conventional espionage efforts. Details of exactly all the evidence of this is unclear, but apparently, it was pretty convincing for many American politicians and senior officials who had previously been skeptical. These Chinese efforts have resulted in most major American weapons systems having tech details obtained by the Chinese, in addition to a lot of non-defense or dual-use technology. It’s not just the United States that are being hit but most nations with anything worth stealing. Many of these nations are noticing that China is the source of most of this espionage and few are content to remain silent any longer.
It’s no secret that Chinese intelligence collecting efforts since the late 1990s have been spectacularly successful. As the rest of the world comes to realize the extent of this success, there is a building desire for retaliation. What form that payback will take remains to be seen. Collecting information, both military and commercial, often means breaking laws and striking or hacking back at the suspected attackers will involve even more felonies. China has broken a lot of laws. Technically, China has committed acts of war because of the degree to which it penetrated military networks and carried away copies of highly secret material. The U.S. and many other victims have been warning China there will be consequences. As the extent of Chinese espionage becomes known and understood, the call for consequences becomes louder.
China has tried hard to conceal its espionage efforts. Not just denying anything and everything connected to its hacking and conventional spying, but also taking precautions. But as their success continued year after year, some of the Chinese hackers became cocky and sloppy. At the same time, the victims became more adept at detecting Chinese efforts and tracing them back to specific Chinese government organizations or non-government hackers inside China.
Undeterred, China has sought to keep its espionage effort going and has even expanded operations. For example, starting in 2008 China opened National Intelligence Colleges in many major universities. In effect, each of these is an Espionage Department where, each year, several hundred carefully selected applicants are accepted in each school, to be trained as spies and intelligence operatives. China has found that espionage is an enormously profitable way to obtain military and commercial secrets, so now China trains and rewards those who have a talent for such things and make a career of it. The Internet-based operations, however, are only one part of China’s espionage efforts.
While Chinese Cyber War operations in this area get a lot of publicity, the more conventional spying brings in a lot of material that is not reachable on the Internet. One indicator of this effort is the fact that American counter-intelligence efforts are snagging more Chinese spies. This is partly due to increased spying efforts by China, which puts more of their people out there to get caught, as well as more success by the FBI and CIA. All this espionage, in all its forms, has played a large part in turning China into one of the mightiest industrial and military powers on the planet. China is having a hard time hiding the source of the new technologies they are incorporating into their weapons and commercial products. Many of the victims initially had a hard time accepting the fact that the oh-so-eager to export Chinese were robbing their best customers of intellectual property on a grand scale. Now Western firms are a lot more wary about dealing with the Chinese.
China has been getting away with something the Soviet Union never accomplished, stealing Western technology and then using it to move ahead of the West. The Soviets lacked the many essential supporting industries found in the West. These firms were usually founded and run by entrepreneurs. This sort of thing was illegal in the Soviet Union. Because of that, the Russians were never able to acquire all the many pieces needed to match Western technical accomplishments. Soviet copies of American computers, for example, were crude, less reliable, and less powerful. It was the same situation with their jet fighters, tanks, and warships.
China gets around this by making it seemingly profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers can be taught how to make things correctly. At the same time, China allows thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While many of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, a growing number are coming back to China and bringing American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the Thousand Grains of Sand approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit.
This approach to espionage is nothing new. Other nations have used similar systems for centuries. What is unusual is the scale of the Chinese effort, and that makes a difference. Supporting it all is a Chinese intelligence bureaucracy back home that is huge, with nearly 100,000 people working just to keep track of the many Chinese overseas and what they could, or should, be trying to grab for the motherland. This is where many of the graduates of the National Intelligence College program will work.
It begins when Chinese intelligence officials examine who is going overseas and for what purpose. Chinese citizens cannot legally leave the country without the state security organizations being notified. The intel people are not being asked to give permission. They were alerted in case they wanted to have a talk with students, tourists, or businesspeople before leaving the country. Interviews are often held when these people come back as well.
Those who might be coming in contact with useful information are asked to remember what they saw or bring back souvenirs. Over 100,000 Chinese students go off to foreign universities each year. Even more, go abroad as tourists or on business. Most of these people were not asked to actually act as spies but simply to share, with Chinese government officials, who are not always identified as intelligence personnel, whatever information they obtained. The more ambitious of these people are getting caught and prosecuted. But the majority are quite casual, individually bring back relatively little and are almost impossible to catch, much less prosecute.
Like the Russians, the Chinese are also employing traditional methods, using people with diplomatic immunity to recruit spies and offering cash, or whatever, to get people to sell them information. This is still effective and when combined with the Thousand Grains of Sand methods brings in a lot of secrets.
The final ingredient is a shadowy venture capital operation, sometimes called Project 863, that offers money for Chinese entrepreneurs who will turn the stolen technology into something real. No questions asked. If you can get back to China with the secrets, you are home free and potentially very rich. This is the approach Chinese firms are often set up to do, and little else. While these firms are technically supposed to develop new technologies in China, the unofficial mandate was to steal as much as possible from other nations and not get caught.
Not getting caught is becoming more important because that can lead to increasingly dangerous diplomatic and legal problems. When the Chinese steal some technology and produce something that the Western victims can prove was stolen, via patents and prior use of the technology, legal action can make it impossible, or very difficult, to sell anything using the stolen tech outside of China. For that reason, the Chinese long preferred stealing military technology and tried to avoid using stolen commercial tech in a way that made it easy to determine the source of stolen data. This meant keeping stolen commercial technology inside China. And in some cases, like manufacturing technology, there's an advantage to not selling it outside of China. Because China is still a communist dictatorship, the courts do as they are told, and they are rarely told to honor foreign patent claims when stolen tech is discovered in China by its foreign owners.
But increasingly, Chinese firms are boldly using their stolen technology, daring foreign firms to try and use Chinese courts to get justice. Instead, the foreign firms are trying to muster support from their governments for lawsuits outside China. Naturally, the Chinese government will howl and insist that it’s all a plot to oppress China. This has worked for a long time, but many of the victims are now telling China that this conflict is being taken to a new and more dangerous level.

FYEO

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 08:30 pm: Edit

MSNBC is reporting that the U.S. secret Service discovered an “elevated hunting stand” in a wooded area near the position Air Force One will be/has been positioned for the President boarding/debarking from the aircraft.

This is at Palm Beach Florida, and is the main route the President would be using to get to/or leave MaraLago, Fl.

The stand was discovered during a security sweep of the area in preparation for the President’s next departure.

Apparently, the stand had been erected since the last sweep, more than a week before.

No suspects, and an investigation has been launched.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 09:22 pm: Edit

Hamas fired on Israeli troops this morning. This included an RPG and a separate sniper attack. Israel dropped bombs on the site. An Israeli tank destroyed a Palestinian car, killing civilians, when the car crossed the yellow line and refused to stop. The Israelis were concerned that the car might be a suicide bomb and were not obliged to endanger themselves. Hamas released two more bodies. Sixteen remain to be “found”.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 11:24 pm: Edit

Australia Broadcasting Co (ABC) is now calling the hunting stand discovered overlooking Palm Beach Airport a “Snipers nest”.

Confirms the U.S. FBI is investigating the matter as a possible attempt to assassinate the president.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Monday, October 20, 2025 - 03:21 pm: Edit

Trump has unfortunately flipped back to "end the Ukraine War at the current lines", per his statements today aboard Air Force One. This a day after Ukraine managed to take out the Orenburg gas processing plant.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, October 20, 2025 - 04:15 pm: Edit

You keep making the same mistake.

The President is a negotiator, not an arbiter or a judge. He is not announcing his final terms, and he certainly is not in any way disclosing a “final offer”.

He knows that in order to “close the deal” he needs several things accomplished:

1. Needs both parties at the table at the same time,
2. Both sides need to be ready to make compromises,
3. Putin has to understand that in no case, is he going to keep ether of the Ukrainian provinces, likely will not keep Crimea, and if he prolongs the fighting, runs the risk of being deposed.

Putin needs to know that not making the deal could very much result in Russia getting carved up much like China was divided after the Boxer Rebellion 125 years ago.

There has been speculation that part of the price Putin agreed to pay China and North Korea for their help was transferring ownership of Siberia to them.

Heaven alone knows what Putin had to do to keep the other “Federated States” in line while he has been botching the war with Ukraine.

By Robert Russell Lender (Rusman) on Monday, October 20, 2025 - 08:33 pm: Edit

I do not pretend to be the end all subject matter expert on all things Russia or Ukraine.

But if I had to put my money on the minimum outcome this will be settled over from Russia's perspective, it will be that
A. Ukraine NEVER joins NATO under any circumstances.
B. At the bare minimum, Ukraine must cede all interest in Crimea and formally recognize it as Russian territory.

Realistically I'm sure Russia will probably want more territory formally ceded, but as I said, they will not settle for ANYTHING less that the two demands above. Without those two things at the minimum, Russia will continue this war. They are committed and despite all the rhetoric about how poorly they're fighting the war, they certainly don't seem to be losing any ground. If anything, they continue to take more (albeit very slowly).

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Tuesday, October 21, 2025 - 08:46 am: Edit

Jswile: with all due respect, Trump's comments were quite clear in his openness to let Russia have some or all of the Ukrainian territory they currently occupy, which flies in the face of your item #3. And this comes less than two weeks after him saying that he thought that Ukraine could win the war. What you call negotiation appears instead to be a weather vane.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, October 21, 2025 - 11:18 am: Edit

Jeff, you and Jessica are not supposed to talk to each other.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Tuesday, October 21, 2025 - 03:03 pm: Edit

Fair enough, Steve. Thank you for the reminder.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 10:43 am: Edit

The Washington Times - usually a Trump administration-friendly publication - is reporting that SecDef Hegseth has lost the confidence of general officers; the issues appear to be a combination of the Quantico speech, the insistence on using the "Department of War" moniker, his leadership style, and assessment of his overall competency. As phrased by one Army general: "It was a massive waste of time … If he ever had us, he lost us." From another: "Mainly what I see from him are not serious things." And another: "Across the services, we are bleeding talent, talented generals and flag officers, for what appears to be the opposite of a meritocracy. There are people being held back from promotions, or being fired, or removed for sometimes unknown reasons, often for favoritism, or just simple relationships." And so on.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 11:44 am: Edit

China just fired ten of its top generals, supposedly for corruption but probably for lack of loyalty to Xi.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Friday, October 24, 2025 - 01:37 pm: Edit

A quick google question and answer:

how many Generals have been fired in China over the last five years?
Thinking
Kicking off 6 searches
Looking at 61 sites
Putting it all together
While it is impossible to provide an exact, comprehensive figure due to China's opaque political system, the number of top-ranking military generals removed has been significant, particularly during a recent series of purges. Over the last five years, at least 14 generals who were personally appointed by Xi Jinping have been officially ousted, according to an October 2025 analysis by Bloomberg.
Notable dismissals in the 2020–2025 period include:
The October 2025 purge: The most sweeping military crackdown in decades saw the Chinese Communist Party expel nine senior generals. They were accused of corruption and "seriously violating party discipline".
The most senior among them was General He Weidong, a Politburo member and the second-highest-ranking officer in the military's Central Military Commission (CMC).
Other high-ranking officers in this purge included Admiral Miao Hua (former Director of the CMC Political Work Department), General Wang Houbin (former Commander of the Rocket Force), and General Lin Xiangyang (former Commander of the Eastern Theater Command).
2023–2024 dismissals: Key officials were removed from their posts and expelled from the party, including:
Li Shangfu: China's former Defense Minister, who was sacked in October 2023.
Wei Fenghe: Li's predecessor as Defense Minister.
Generals of the Rocket Force: Several top officers in the strategic missile force were purged.
These purges, while officially tied to anti-corruption campaigns, are widely seen as part of President Xi Jinping's ongoing effort to consolidate his personal control over the People's Liberation Army and ensure absolute political loyalty.

There is no doubt that loyalty to Xi is important, but the corruption issue, if not corrected could end in disaster for China and the Communist party.

The PLA failed its latest readiness drill, with the strategic missile forces being particularly poorly graded.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Friday, October 24, 2025 - 03:55 pm: Edit

CVN-78 Gerald R. Ford has been ordered out of the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in order to "bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere", per a statement from the Pentagon.

By Eddie E Crutchfield (Librarian101) on Friday, October 24, 2025 - 04:17 pm: Edit

Jess is that the joke of the day.

By Ryan Opel (Ryan) on Friday, October 24, 2025 - 07:27 pm: Edit

Jeff,

And those are the just the ones who made the news.