America’s cities are, by and large, bad

September 25th, 2026

America’s cities are, by and large, bad:

The easiest way to see this is to understand the primary reason why they’re so bad: crime. The big benefit of cities for countries is that they’re economic engines of progress due to agglomeration effects: benefits and cost-savings that appear because companies, services, and workers are geographically collocated in them. But agglomeration effects are negatively related to crime.

[…]

But is this causal? Does crime reduce the extent of agglomeration economies? To a major extent, yes, and we know it thanks to a suite of different disasters—bombings, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.—, to random events that displaced populations—the Mariel Boatlift, Japanese internment, close elections that appointed discriminatory mayors, etc.—, to the historical period known as the Great Migration—the mass movement of African Americans from the southeastern U.S. to the rest of the country’s urban areas.

[…]

The Great Migration accelerated thanks to World War II, when draft- and casualty-related labor shortages allowed Blacks to move from low-skilled to semiskilled jobs en masse, and it accelerated once again with the Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, which forbade neighborhoods from having state-enforced racial covenants—agreements to evict Blacks from certain neighborhoods and to prevent them from buying homes in them. What remained post-Shelley were merely private, much more loosely-enforced agreements not to sell property to members of certain races.

Labor shortages and racial covenants provide us with causal leverage: the former are driven by random deaths and pre-war demographics that are displaced by draft boards; the latter are driven in all sorts of unclear ways and broken due to preferences that are plausibly unrelated to the existence of the racial covenants in the first place. Interesting, no? Accordingly, where African Americans wound up and the occupations they were able to enter there had a large degree of randomness to them.

These facts, coupled with African Americans’ persistent association with violent crime, allow us to leverage their inflows to assess effects on agglomeration economies via crime. We can say ‘via crime’, since a mere racism angle doesn’t fit the data given that other racially distinct but lower-crime demographics that were discriminated against do not seem to lead people—in particular White people, in the phenomenon known as ‘White flight’—to leave from the places African Americans show up, even controlling for socioeconomic status, and because anti-agglomeration effects are particularly distinct for violent crime, which is the type of crime African Americans are associated with, as opposed to property crime.

Cities that received more African Americans during the Great Migration saw larger increases in homicide.

Cities attempted to counter this, and those that received the largest African American inflows increased hiring and funding of police in response.

Nevertheless, the homicide rates increased, violent crime overtook America’s urban centers, and White flight went into full swing, with Whites leaving metropolitan areas in favor of suburbs and new homes further afield. As a result, city total populations and population densities declined and labor productivity became worse off for it.

Agglomeration is about two margins: density and returns to density, and crime is bad for both. We can observe and quantify the costs of crime-reduced density and density returns. The cost of the Great Migration density effects alone is about $888 per year per American, and the effect of the 1960s to early 1990s crime wave is another $392 per capita, but even those are lower bounds, as they’re just the costs we see.

Cities are also arranged worse, leading to tangible and intangible losses. On the tangible side, cities are arranged in strange ways and their architecture is hostile so people can avoid crime; on the intangible side, patents are foregone, nightlife is more limited, police presence has to be greater and more concentrated, segregation is stronger, and NIMBYism—which is suboptimal for policy, as it also harms agglomeration, labor mobility, etc.—is reasonable as a means of exposure control.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Pneumonic plague is a fulminant disease

September 24th, 2026

Biological War by Annie JacobsenPlague has been responsible for several of the most fatal pandemics in human history, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), including ones in the sixth, fourteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries:

From around 1347 to 1352, the disease killed 150 million people.

Then she explains that her nightmare scenario involves a modified plague:

This particular plague weapon has been genetically engineered to initially deliver a neurochemical high.

“When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague,” says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, “we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way… to make you want to go out and socialize… this was some horrifying stuff.”

Y. pestis is shorthand for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and Dr. Heine is one of the world’s subject-matter experts. Starting in the late 1990s, he spent eleven years working on biological warfare countermeasures at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Maryland. USAMRIID, or “you-sam-rid” as it’s known, is the Defense Department’s flagship center for high-and maximum-containment infectious disease research and its only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. In the event of a biological attack against America, USAMRIID scientists will be at the fore.

[…]

Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. “I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration,” he tells us. “Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare].” He pauses for effect. “It was evil.”

[…]

“Because of the severity of the disease, the rapid onset of symptoms, sepsis, and multi-organ system failure followed by 100% mortality in untreated patients,” retired colonel Bret Purcell, the former chief of the Division of Medicine at USAMRIID, tells us, “the U.S. military recognizes Yersinia pestis [as] one of the highest bacterial threat pathogens to our military and civilian populations.”

[…]

During Dr. Heine’s tenure at USAMRIID, he spent thousands of hours inside a laboratory studying plague. His efforts, which focused on developing therapeutics against biowarfare and bioterrorism, included work to develop a plague vaccine. It never advanced beyond animal trials. “You can’t defend against every imaginable thing,” Heine laments, citing the undeniable reality at the center of the military’s efforts to defend against biological warfare. Biological warfare is, at its core, indefensible.

[…]

People whose lungs are infected with Yersinia pestis generally begin developing symptoms after an incubation period of between one and three days, depending on an array of factors, from the strength of their immune system, to the dosage they receive. Genetic modifications can further alter this time frame.

[…]

Pneumonic plague is a fulminant disease, meaning it strikes fast and kills quickly.

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The missile was developed with an eye toward future conflicts in the Pacific

September 23rd, 2026

Covenant, a U.S.-Israeli company founded in 2024, unveiled its Anthem weapon system recently:

Covenant has not publicly disclosed the weapon’s range, although unconfirmed reports put it at roughly 1,200 kilometers — over 740 miles. The company is also being somewhat deliberate about how it describes Anthem, referring to it as a “deep precision-strike munition” rather than consistently classifying it as a cruise missile.

On the other hand, Reuters reports Covenant executives saying that the missile was developed ?with an ?eye toward future conflicts in the Pacific. “We were designed for the China fight,” said Covenant President Abby Denburg. That would also seem to point toward significant range.

[…]

The company says Anthem can carry a warhead weighing more than 200 kilograms (441 pounds). That is substantially less than the roughly 1,000-pound-class warhead associated with the Tomahawk cruise missile, which can hit targets at over 1,000 miles depending on the exact configuration. Covenant argues that lower cost and much higher production rates would make it possible to employ larger numbers of their weapons against a given target set.

Anthem uses a solid rocket motor for launch and a heavy-fuel jet engine, underslung below the missile body, for cruise flight. Covenant says the system was designed from the outset around readily available components and a supply chain that would avoid dependence on individual suppliers. The company states that it has, for example, multiple solid-rocket-motor suppliers and long-term agreements covering thousands of jet engines.

Overall, the production ambitions are significant. Covenant’s new Grand Prairie, Texas, facility covers approximately 105,000 square feet and is expected to begin serial production during the first quarter of 2027, eventually reaching a stated capacity of 5,000 Anthems per year. Its facility in Saxony, Germany, is intended to reach a similar production rate, while the smaller Israeli site is planned to produce as many as 2,000 weapons annually.

[…]

Beyond the ground-launched version, Covenant is working on a naval derivative. The company says it has a roughly $70-million contract with the Navy’s Rapid Capabilities Office to adapt Anthem into what it calls Maritime Anthem.

[…]

Reuters reports that Covenant expects the weapon to eventually cost in the mid-six-figure range, although the company has not provided a final unit price. Compared to other competitors in the field, Covenant appears to be the crudest design we have seen so far, underscored by its apparent launch method, in which it takes off from an airstrip under power of its booster.

[…]

The company says it has raised more than $250 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Aleph, and Lightspeed.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

The treaty has no protocols for enforcement

September 22nd, 2026

Biological War by Annie JacobsenBiological warfare is illegal, and biological weapons are illegal, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), yet biological weapons exist:

Over 100 years ago, the international community banned the use of biological weapons with the Geneva Protocol of 1925, but by World War II, various nations were developing robust biological weapons programs, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.

[…]

And then, in November 1969 and without much warning, President Richard Nixon renounced America’s biological weapons program. This led to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention—the BWC—an international treaty prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons.

[…]

The Biological Weapons Convention treaty allows for “defensive” biological weapons research, meaning scientists can conduct research involving the same pathogens that could be used for biological warfare—so long as the research warrants to be “for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” In other words, offensive biological weapons research can masquerade as “defensive” in scope.

“The treaty has no protocols for enforcement,” former assistant secretary of state Mallory Stewart tells us.

[…]

In the second half of the Cold War, after signing the treaty, the Soviet Union secretly and illegally developed and stockpiled massive arsenals of biological weapons, including genetically engineered germs.

[…]

A 2025 U.S. State Department compliance report assesses that Russia and North Korea each “maintains an offensive BW [biological weapons] program” in violation of the treaty, while China and Iran are engaged in biological research and activities that raise unresolved compliance issues.

[…]

“The United States maintains that the Soviet program was absorbed, not dismantled, by the Russian Federation,” says the State Department’s special representative to the Biological Weapons Convention, Kenneth D. Ward, “and that program has continued and evolved in violation of Article I and Article II of the BWC.”

[…]

A deadly germ—genetically modified to be human-to-human transmissible, hypervirulent, able to defeat countermeasures, and with no known cure—could be twenty-first-century humans’ last invention.

Posted in Science, War | 4 Comments »

The Army is planning for between 2-to-3,000 15X soldiers who will fly, fix, and deploy all sizes of drones

September 21st, 2026

Though all new soldiers who join the Army now get basic drone familiarization in basic training, those who join the 15X MOS move on to the 15-week Advanced Individual Training in Arizona, where they learn to assemble, fix, and fly a variety of small, medium, and large drones:

They train to fly in contested environments, day and night, out in the woods, in a desert, and against an enemy opposition force.

They also train on many different kinds of drones.

“The Army has not bought a drone that the 15X is responsible for being an expert on. The Army’s bought a bunch of them,” he said. “For the first time ever, it’s not like ‘Hey, here is your rifle.’ It’s like, ‘Hey, I have 30 weapons that I need to make sure that you can shoot.’”

Because drone warfare is changing so rapidly, Gourgues and his instructors are still actively adjusting the course material for every class. The training focus for the new 15X soldiers is large, long-distance drones, but they also taught small systems like tactical FPV drones so they can be attached to infantry units, or even form drone-specific teams that sit behind front lines, akin to artillery soldiers.

[…]

soldiers will be part of maneuver operations like infantry and armor units, but also more technical fields like military intelligence and cyber formations. The 15X soldiers have to work with drones of all sizes, which the Department of Defense classifies as groups 1, 2 and 3 unmanned aerial systems, or UASs. But the priority is group 3, the largest-sized drones, he said.

[…]

In total, the Army is planning for between 2-to-3,000 15x soldiers who will fly, fix, and deploy all sizes of drones.

[…]

Gourgues said the decision to keep drone programs within the Army’s aviation branch comes from the “sheer complexity” of operating the military’s bigger and longer-range UAS platforms like the Shadow and Gray Eagle. Since those larger systems fly in the same airspace as jets and helicopters, drone operators need to have the same expertise in air traffic control, weather, flight regulations, and other air safety measures for complex military operations, he said.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Nothing prevents a state from concealing a weapons program under the guise of protecting commercial secrets

September 20th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekWe may not realize until too late, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), that we have become the victims of a biological attack:

It is not until days or weeks after such an attack has taken place—after the first wave of deaths—that we will most likely recognize its occurrence.

[…]

A small amount of Marburg or Ebola released in the subway system of Washington, D.C., Boston, or New York, or in an airport, shopping mall, or financial center, could produce hundreds of thousands of victims.

[…]

It is easier to make a biological weapon than to create an effective system of biological defense. Based on our current level of knowledge, at least seventy different types of bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, and fungi can be weaponized. We can reliably treat no more than 20 to 30 percent of the diseases they cause.

[…]

In a simulated attack staged in New York City in 1998, nearly all of the members of an emergency unit dispatched to the scene “died” because they were insufficiently protected. “They did all the right things,” a federal official who watched the exercise told The New York Times. “But the scenario utterly defeated them.” The emergency teams were hampered by their inability to identify which biological agents had been used.

[…]

Most methods involve the exposure of vials or petri dishes containing laboratory-grown cultures to air samples from a suspected target area. This can be a laborious process. A field monitoring device used during the Gulf War took between thirteen and twenty-four hours to make a positive identification. For botulinum toxin, one of the staples of Iraq’s arsenal, this would already be too late.

Technology has improved since then. The Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) cut the time to only thirty minutes, but it can so far only determine the presence of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin, and staphylococcus enterotoxin B.

In September 1998, he explains, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed in Moscow on a program of “accelerated negotiations” to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention:

In America, the loudest protests have come from commercial biotechnology companies, who argue that open-ended inspections of their labs and production facilities will leave them vulnerable to industrial espionage. Biotechnology is a multi-million-dollar industry. Between 1989 and 1996 the number of firms in the United States developing new-generation drugs soared from 45 to 113.

[…]

Nothing prevents a state from concealing a weapons program under the guise of protecting commercial secrets.

Arms treaties are important. They set standards of international behavior regarding the acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction. But they are almost invariably ignored when countries believe their national security is at stake.

The American plan to stockpile and develop vaccines against known agents is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, Alibek notes, but, as parts of that plan have been implemented, its limitations have become clear:

Mandatory immunization of troops has been official Pentagon policy since 1993. All 2.3 million American soldiers have begun to receive shots against anthrax, currently regarded as the principal threat because of its documented presence in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. But no vaccines are contemplated against other agents believed to be in that arsenal, such as aflatoxin, botulinum, and smallpox. The extra cost would be enormous (the six-year anthrax vaccine program alone will cost the military an estimated $ 130 million) and vaccines are not without side effects. Injecting soldiers against dozens of diseases would not protect them from the agents we don’t know about, or from those for which there are no known vaccines.

[…]

Vaccines made of live but weakened microorganisms are generally more effective than those made of nonliving cellular or subcellular components. Both types are usually benign, but in rare cases they can trigger significant changes in the blood and endocrine systems. Some have been known to affect the functioning of the heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs. It is not medically advisable to combine too many different courses of vaccination.

There are currently no known vaccines for brucellosis, glanders, and melioidosis or for many viral diseases, such as Ebola and Marburg. The plague vaccine was found to be ineffective against aerosol dissemination in animal studies. The tularemia vaccine is difficult to culture and potentially dangerous. Of the four possible strains available for viral encephalitis, the first and most potent (a live vaccine) produces adverse reactions in 20 percent of all cases and is ineffective in 20 percent. The second is of restricted effectiveness (it only works against three subtypes of the disease), and the third and fourth are poorly immunogenic and require multiple immunizations. The smallpox vaccine, only available in the United States to lab workers and military personnel, can be administered either before or after infection. It requires periodic boosters and wears out after ten years, though revaccination is required after three years in case of infection. Skin testing is recommended for Q fever and botulinum toxin.

The anthrax vaccine used in the United States has to be administered six times before it becomes effective (three times in two-week intervals and three times in six-month intervals) with annual boosters thereafter.

[…]

American experts maintain that annual boosters are safe—the live vaccine we used in Russia was associated with some risks—but scientists generally agree that excessive vaccination can create complications in the immune system, leading in rare cases to the formation of tumors.

Repeated vaccinations has been known to trigger or aggravate allergies. Thirty minutes after I received my last vaccination against anthrax in 1987, my face became swollen, and I developed a rash and had trouble breathing. I took Dimidrol, a powerful anti-allergy medication available in Russia (though not in the United States) and felt better again in a few hours. For the next ten days I received intravenous preparations at a hospital—a form of allergy treatment we called desensibilization therapy. Several colleagues had been forbidden from anthrax work after similar reactions.

[…]

I received my first anthrax vaccination in 1979 and began a course of annual vaccinations in 1982. I was also vaccinated against smallpox once, twice against tularemia, and four times against plague. The chronic allergies I have suffered throughout my adult life are a direct consequence of repeated exposure to live vaccines, and to other biological substances I worked with.

Vaccines provide excellent protection against specific diseases, but the characteristic that makes them so effective—that specificity—is also the source of their limitations.

[…]

Despite American efforts and expenditures, vaccines have limited value for the protection of civilians.

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Not quite the Wilhelm scream

September 19th, 2026

If you were an adult in 1995, when the original Toy Story came out, you probably had some exposure to old westerns and some exposure to old children’s shows, if only through spoofs of puppet shows or clown shows, so Woody seemed like a classic toy from a fairly recently bygone age — but kids these days don’t even have a passing familiarity with, say, The Roy Rogers Show.

While watching the first episode (at 22:52), I heard a very familiar scream, as a bad guy fell to his death, but it was not quite the now infamous Wilhelm scream:

The Wilhelm scream is an iconic stock sound effect that has been used in many films, television programs and other media, originating in the 1951 film Distant Drums, where the scream was allegedly voiced by actor Sheb Wooley. The scream is often used in scenarios when someone is shot, falls from a great height or is thrown from an explosion. The scream is named after Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 Western in which the character gets shot in the thigh with an arrow. This was its first use following its inclusion in the Warner Bros. Pictures stock sound library, although The Charge at Feather River was the third film to use the effect. It was used in all of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films prior to Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm.

The Roy Rogers Show was produced by Roy Rogers Productions (with many former Republic Pictures personnel), Grok informs me, and filmed primarily at Samuel Goldwyn Studio and outdoor locations such as the Iverson Ranch. It was not a Warner Bros. production and would not have had routine access to that studio’s proprietary stock effects library in the same way.

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Fears that the Germans would use biological munitions in their unmanned “buzz bomb” never materialized

September 18th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekGreat Britain and Canada began investigating biological agents and delivery systems in 1940, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), but President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t establish a program until fifteen months after the United States entered World War II, in March 1943:

Based on what Patrick told me of the early history of their program, Americans knew nothing of the ambitious weapons-making drive we [the USSR] had launched in the 1920s.

[…]

The Americans were not fully persuaded until their British and Canadian allies noted that the Germans were suspected of having used glanders against Romanian cavalry during World War I and seemed to be amassing a larger bacteriological arsenal. The Canadians had converted an agricultural experiment station in Suffield, Alberta, into a testing area for anthrax. In southern England, an old chemical warfare proving ground at Porton Down was adapted for the same purpose.

In America, a secret biological warfare unit called the War Research Service was created to work with its British and Canadian counterparts. George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co. Inc., a leading U.S. pharmaceutical firm, was the unit’s first director.

[…]

They settled on four principal sites: a 2,000-acre tract on Horn Island near Pascagoula, Mississippi; the Dugway chemical warfare testing facility in the Utah desert; a 6,100-acre munitions manufacturing complex at Terre Haute, Indiana; and the old National Guard installation at Frederick, Maryland.

[…]

More than seventeen hundred people worked at Camp Detrick during the war years, investigating glanders, brucellosis, cholera, dysentery, plague, and typhus.

Anthrax was the largest project. Scientists built a pilot plant capable of producing anthrax in ten-thousand-gallon tanks. They were so successful that Britain placed an order for five hundred thousand anthrax bombs from the facility in September 1944.

[…]

Fears that the Germans would use biological munitions in their unmanned “buzz bomb” raids over English cities, or to repel the D-Day force, never materialized.

[…]

Some facilities were phased out, but revelations about Japan’s Unit 731 forestalled any serious discussion about ending the American program.

[…]

Camp Detrick sent scientists to Japan to interrogate the commanders of Unit 731, who gave details of their program in return for avoiding prosecution for war crimes. Their reports convinced Washington that biological weapons could be developed in greater quantities and with far greater effectiveness than anyone had suspected. The British came to a similar conclusion and decided to upgrade their testing and research unit at Porton Down and at a test site on the Scottish island of Gruinard.

[…]

Beginning in 1951, agricultural agents were developed at Camp Detrick and other facilities to attack the Soviet wheat crop and the rice paddies of Communist China. The pathogens were stored at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, as well as at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, which also manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons.

U.S. bioweaponeers went on to explore antipersonnel agents such as tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Aerosols were tested on animals at Deseret Island in the Pacific Ocean and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They conducted experiments with simulated weapons, as we did, in urban areas.

Human tests took place in 1955 on a group of young Seventh Day Adventists who volunteered as an alternative to military service. The volunteers were exposed to Q fever, which is not lethal and can be treated with antibiotics, in a program called Project Whitecoat, or Operation CD-22.

By the late 1960s, twenty-two microorganisms were under study, and there were plans to weaponize hemorrhagic fevers such as the Machupo virus and Rift Valley fever.

[…]

Nixon, convinced by his advisers that biological warfare was impractical, signed an executive order on November 25, 1969, renouncing the use of lethal biological agents and weapons and promising to confine American biological research to “defensive measures” such as immunization and bio-safety.

We didn’t believe a word of Nixon’s announcement. Even though the massive U.S. biological munitions stockpile was ordered to be destroyed, and some twenty-two hundred researchers and technicians lost their jobs, we thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.

Nixon turned most of Camp Detrick’s buildings over to the National Cancer Institute and assigned to the complex the task of finding a cure for cancer.

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The Kheibar Shekan’s guidance system allows it to adjust its trajectory and maneuver rapidly to strike within 10 meters of a target

September 17th, 2026

Iran has fielded a new generation of ballistic missiles that can evade American air defenses and strike with far greater precision:

The centerpiece of that shift is a highly mobile ballistic missile Iran calls the Kheibar Shekan, or “Castle Breaker,” which has a range of 900 miles and a satellite-guided, maneuverable warhead.

[…]

Unlike a conventional ballistic missile that travels a fixed path defenders can track and try to intercept, the Kheibar Shekan can quickly change course in the final phase of its descent, potentially slipping past air defenses and hitting targets with devastating precision, those sources said.

Mounted on mobile launchers, the solid-fuel missile is extremely difficult to detect and destroy before launch, allowing it to survive American bombardment campaigns. It can easily reach U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, including in Israel – and major American bases like Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and the Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.

[…]

Jim Lamson, a CIA analyst from 1998 to 2021, said the Kheibar Shekan’s guidance system allows it to adjust its trajectory and maneuver rapidly to strike within 10 meters of a target, a significant achievement given how far it travels.

And its ability to “maneuver in the terminal phase” means it can “completely avoid” two or three interceptors fired at it by opposing military forces, Lamson, who now tracks Iran’s missile program as a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told USA TODAY.

Since 2024, Iran has stacked on incremental improvements – likely with the help of Chinese and Russian technology – to make the missile a particularly lethal threat to the 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops in the region, Lamson said.

The updates include improved satellite guidance, altered launch trajectories that are harder for missile-defense radar to predict, better resistance to electronic jamming and coordinated barrages that mix ballistic missiles with swarms of drones, he said.

[…]

Hackett, who once worked out of the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, described the July 17 strike as a “live combat test” of the Kheibar Shekan against U.S. bases in Jordan. He said the Kheibar is especially dangerous because its maneuverability allows it to strike “dynamic” targets, including people and military assets that moved at the last minute to dodge them.

That includes valuable aircraft, he said, “and these huge fuel bladders sitting around with tons of jet fuel in them. These can be struck now by this weapon and cause mass explosions and casualties.”

Posted in War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

The same agents, even the same types of aerosols, were used in experiments occurring sometimes less than a year apart

September 16th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekWhen Ken Alibek collaborated on a secret history of the Soviet and American programs after his defection, as he explains in Biohazard, he was amazed to discover how closely the research efforts of both countries dovetailed between 1945 and 1969:

The same agents, even the same types of aerosols, were used in experiments occurring sometimes less than a year apart.

[…]

The uncanny similarity between our programs may have been more than a coincidence. Pavel Sudoplatov, a former general of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), provided an unwitting clue in his memoirs, published in 1996. Sudoplatov reported almost offhandedly that classified U.S. material on bacteriological weapons research had been transmitted on a regular basis to Moscow during the 1940s and 1950s.

[…]

There had to be at least one informer, if not several, in the American program.

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Gamera is the first UAS designed to carry bomber-class strike munitions

September 15th, 2026

California-based Swarm Aero on Monday unveiled a new low-cost unmanned aerial system capable of carrying a payload of more than 2,800 pounds:

In a press release, the company said Gamera is the first UAS designed to carry bomber-class strike munitions such as the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRASM, and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, or JASSM-ER, as well as other cruise and hypersonic missiles.

The company added that it “will be able to deliver all of the capabilities of the MQ-9, as well as employ payloads that the MQ-9 cannot, at a fraction of the price.”

Although Swarm did not give a specific price point, the company said comparable strike effects would cost 10 times less than existing platforms. The company also cited recent Defense Innovation Unit statements, calling existing systems “unsustainable.” The MQ-9 Reaper purportedly costs more than $30 million apiece.

Swarm Aero Gamera UAS

The company said it has a roughly 72-foot wingspan and can fly 9,000 nautical miles before needing to refuel.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention had no provisions for inspections

September 14th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekIn October 1990, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), they were informed that a “trilateral agreement” had been reached between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain to organize a series of reciprocal visits to suspected biological warfare facilities:

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention had no provisions for inspections, a limitation that continues to frustrate the international arms control community to this day. Visits were to depend on the trust and goodwill of all sides.

[…]

The memo from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs notifying us of the agreement had left it to us to decide which facilities to open. The defense ministry quickly signaled it wanted no part in this charade. You can show whatever you want in Biopreparat,” General Yevstigneyev snapped when I asked for his suggestions. “But no foreigner is getting into our military sites.”

Kalinin, sensing a political opportunity, volunteered that Biopreparat act as the host. He ordered me to decide which of our installations could be “sacrificed” in the interests of East-West relations.

The choices were grim. Though some of our explosive test chambers had been dismantled since Gorbachev’s decree, large industrial fermenters at Stepnogorsk and Omutninsk furnished unmistakable evidence of our activities.

At the time, Biopreparat controlled about forty facilities in fifteen cities across the Soviet Union. About a dozen were used exclusively for offensive work, but many others mixed civilian and military functions. Judicious exposure of the Western delegation to these dual-function facilities would protect us while demonstrating our good faith.

[…]

I never believed that we would be able to pull it off. Anyone with basic knowledge of biological weapons would recognize the signs of our activity.

[…]

The strategy, carefully worked out over the previous weeks, was to waste as much time as possible during the nonessential parts of the tour, to reduce the “official” segments in which our visitors could exercise their curiosity. We had also notified our institute directors in advance to stock up on supplies of vodka and cognac, in the hope of befuddling them with Russian hospitality.

[…]

Obolensk, our next destination, was more difficult. It would require finesse to explain the heavily insulated buildings and labs, the animal cages in our bacteriological genetic engineering program, and other elements of a biowarfare infrastructure. It would be hard, I thought, to conceal our projects to develop antibiotic-resistant strains of tularemia, plague, brucellosis, glanders, melioidosis, and anthrax and to pass our work off as biodefense.

[…]

“Could we finally get to work?” Davis said as Urakov paused for breath during an extended welcoming speech.

The general was undaunted. He told the foreigners that they were free to see whatever they wanted in his compound.

“However, I must warn you that biodefense work involves very hazardous organisms as I’m sure you know,” he said. “If you elect to go into some of our labs, we may have to ask you to stay in quarantine for a couple of weeks. Those are our regulations.”

This was partly true. We did have regulations requiring visitors to stay under observation, but they were totally unnecessary in this case: I had given orders that weekend for Obolensk and Vector to be totally disinfected. The delegation could have walked through any one of the labs in shirtsleeves.

Our visitors, naturally, were unaware of this. They hesitated.

“So,” said Urakov brightly. “What would you like to see?”

They asked for a complete tour of the complex. We got our first rude surprise when Davis pulled out a map and pointed to a large building.

“Take us there,” he said, pointing to the structure that contained Obolensk’s newest, and biggest, explosive chamber.

Ah, I said to myself, here it comes. I assumed the map was based on satellite reconnaissance photos. Pasechnik couldn’t have known about this.

[…]

The visitors were allowed to wander in the corridors until they came to a closed door.

“What’s in here?” Davis asked. No one answered. “Could you please open it?”

“We lost the key,” Petukhov mumbled. “I’ll see if I can find a copy.”

While the visitors waited impatiently, Petukhov took his time finding a “new” key. He eventually opened the door, but the room was dark.

“Can you turn the light on?” Davis asked in irritation.

“Not possible,” Petukhov said. “The bulb is out.”

Undeterred, Davis walked right past him and pulled out a flashlight. At that moment, the façade of international cooperation ended.

Petukhov lunged for the flashlight. Davis shouted. The two men tussled back and forth until someone suggested that they take the dispute back to the conference room, where I was awaiting their return.

[…]

When Davis finally went back and turned the flashlight on, he saw that the walls near the door were dented and pitted—the telltale marks left by fragments of explosives.

“You have been using explosives here,” he declared.

Then, in Novosibirsk:

I could see their eyes widen with astonishment as we took them past enormous steel fermenters, larger than what any Western pharmaceutical firm would ever use for the mass-production of vaccines. We had taken them to one of Vector’s principal research labs—but we made sure to keep them on the ground floor.

In the upper levels were floors dedicated to work on smallpox, Ebola, Machupo, Marburg, Junin, and other hemorrhagic fevers, as well as VEE, Russian spring and summer encephalitis, and a number of other deadly viruses.

[…]

They asked whether they could take air samples and smears from some of the lab areas.

“We haven’t tried to hide the fact that we work with dangerous strains—for defensive purposes,” I replied. “But I don’t have any instructions about allowing you to take samples outside the country. We don’t want to be responsible for a terrible accident.”

Neither did they.

“I can always ask for permission,” I added helpfully. “It might take time and you’d have to wait here for an answer, but I’m sure you’ll be well treated.”

They didn’t press further.

Sandakchiev and I noted with relief that they had not brought special equipment. We had feared for months that the visitors would be carrying advanced monitors capable of detecting viral DNA. Such monitors would have picked up irrefutable evidence of smallpox, and we would have a lot of explaining to do.

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The retrofit didn’t envision what happened

September 13th, 2026

The casualty toll at the Pentagon on 9/11 could have been much worse, but the damage was mitigated by reinforcement work that had begun on the building, which was built in 1941 and had marked its 60th anniversary that year:

In light of troubling world events like the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, officials believed it was time to retrofit the building in a five-phase renovation effort that prioritized safety and stability over aesthetics.

“The retrofit didn’t envision what happened,” Mlaker said. “It was more for something like a truck bomb going off.”

Nonetheless, the work included features like blast-resistant windows, ballistic materials and wall reinforcements. And the first phase of work, involving “Wedge 1” of the Pentagon building, divided up like a five-sided pie, had just been completed days before the plane hit the building.

The morning of September 11, Mlaker said, he’d had a conference call scheduled with the American Society of Civil Engineers to develop a standard for blast-resistant design. But of course, the test was coming sooner than anyone had anticipated.

On the west side of the building, according to ERDC officials, the impact of the plane destroyed the first and second floors, but the remaining three floors remained standing for another 35 minutes, allowing hundreds of people the chance to evacuate.

A side-by-side photo of two Pentagon window offices tells the story of the difference the retrofits made. One office just 17 meters north of impact that had received the new ERDC reinforcement technology looks untouched, its curtains still neatly framing its windows. Another non-reinforced office, 90 meters north of impact, is totally destroyed, its windows blown out and walls and ceiling burned and shredded.

Posted in War | 4 Comments »

The poverty of the lab seemed grimmer by comparison

September 12th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekIt was impossible to believe, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) that their most important military rival, the U.S., wasn’t pursuing an active biological warfare program:

As part of my duties at Biopreparat I reviewed our budget regularly with Gosplan, the state economic planning agency. Every time I visited the block-long building on Gorky Street, the resources available to us seemed to increase. General Roman Volkov, the balding, scholarly official in charge of funding Ministry of Defense programs, practically begged me to look for ways to spend money.

“I’ve got three hundred million rubles for you in this year’s budget,” he told me in 1990. “You still haven’t supplied me with programs on which to spend them.”

When I suggested civilian medical projects, he brushed me off irritably.

“If you give me more suggestions like that, you’ll never get any money,” he said.

This made little sense to me. Our health-care system was getting worse every day, and conditions in our hospitals were abysmal. The previous year, Biopreparat had shipped boxes of disposable plastic syringes to medical facilities around the country in response to an AIDS scandal in Elista, a small city on the northern steppes of the Caspian Sea. Two hundred and fifty children at the city’s main pediatric hospital had been diagnosed with HIV after having been infected by contaminated syringes. Nurses complained that shortages of equipment and staff prevented them from employing adequate sterilization methods. Stories like these were rife throughout the country.

In February 1990, Valery Ganzenko, the head of the medical directorate, came to my office with a bagful of dirty vaccine vials.

“These are being produced at our facility in Georgia,” he complained. “Hospitals in the area are sending them back to us because they’re not sterile. When I ask the Georgians what’s going on they can’t explain it, but we just sent them a big grant to upgrade their equipment.”

I was responsible for the civilian institutes operating within Biopreparat as well as for our military research program. The supervision of vaccine production and antibiotic development for our state health system occupied almost 50 percent of our official functions. Kalinin paid almost no attention to this part of our agency, and neither did others in the senior staff. We gave civilian managers free rein, and inevitably much of our equipment ended up on the black market. No one seemed to care. But I found myself increasingly drawn to our medical programs and allocated time to them whenever I could.

“Maybe we should take a special trip down to Tbilisi,” I suggested to Ganzenko. He was pleasantly surprised.

“I didn’t think anyone around here wanted to spend time on this kind of thing,” he said.

So he goes to visit the lab:

“Why don’t we go to your lab?” I said.

“Later,” he said. “You must first enjoy Georgian hospitality.”

On our first night he took us to a restaurant where he’d reserved a private room. The table was laden with meat, cheese, fish, and bottles of wine—all in short supply at ordinary food stores in Moscow.

The poverty of the lab we visited the following morning seemed grimmer by comparison. Some of the equipment was over forty years old. Workers used tiny ovens to culture vaccines. Our host was unapologetic, insisting that Biopreparat’s funds were being spent on wages and operating costs.

I knew he was lying as soon as I began talking to the staff. Most of the three hundred employees were women. They told me they were earning such pitiful salaries that they couldn’t even afford lunch.

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Those re-entering dummy warheads were seen by tens of thousands of people in Peru and Chile

September 11th, 2026

Debt of Honor by Tom ClancyA couple years ago I noted that Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, about a nationalist Japanese plot to cripple the US economy and seize US-controlled islands, is best remembered for presaging the 9/11 attacks, and Roo_ster found “echoes of Jerry Pournelle and his sci-fi buds from the 1960s through the 1980s,” which led Bruce to mention Jerry Pournelle’s foreword for Roswell by Karl Pflock. An old Jerusalem Post piece recounts Pournelle’s explanation for (some) UFOs:

During the Cold War there were reports of UFOs in Chile and Peru witnessed by thousands. And there was even a government conspiracy and cover-up related to the incident.

There are treaties in place that stipulate that no nation may place weapons in orbit and no nation may build or test orbital bombardment systems. This was also generally interpreted to exclude what’s known as fractional orbital bombardment systems, abbreviated with the acronym, FOBS. What is an FOBS? An FOBS is a weapon that is launched into Earth orbit, but is then de-orbited and made to re-enter the atmosphere before it makes a complete circuit around the globe. The Soviets thought they could launch a missile into orbit, swing it around the South Pole and then deorbit it so it came at the US from our southern border and thus avoid all our early warning systems which were watching for Soviet missile launches from the north. One day they decided to develop and test their system, despite the treaties, and they had their dummy missiles re-enter the atmosphere over South America. They hoped no one would notice.

Unfortunately, those re-entering dummy warheads were seen by tens of thousands of people in Peru and Chile, making it impossible to simply dismiss all the reports as hallucinations. So the KGB quickly concocted an explanation. They spread UFO stories and even made up tales of aliens being spotted.

Meanwhile, our government didn’t want the Soviets to know just how much we knew about their experiments. So the CIA did nothing to counter the Soviet rumors. Thus, the test was covered up by both the Soviets and the Americans, each for their own reasons, but with the same result: people believed they had seen “real” UFO’s.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

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