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History, Security

This Day in History: 1876 Custer Assault on Women and Children is Destroyed at Little Big Horn

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Today in America we remember how Custer’s men didn’t make a stand, and instead collapsed and scattered into chaos when they were confronted by American Native warriors along the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana Territory.

If Custer stood for anything, it was the Epstein-like kidnapping of young girls to “force surrender” as blackmail. On this day, when he marched on the Lakota, they sent warriors to confront him. History now records this as five companies of his men quickly killed as they fell into chaos and disarray when challenged. The American Native people defended their vulnerable children from a wicked man and his poorly led soldiers.

Unfortunately, like with Epstein, America spent many years ignoring the stories of the women and children who were in danger. The Lakota and Cheyenne were telling the story exactly as it happened. President Grant blamed Custer publicly in the New York Herald on September 2, 1876, calling the defeat a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself, wholly unnecessary. Custer was described back then how Donald Trump is called out today. Sheridan was critical of him too. And yet, pop-culture of America rebuilt the erratic, impulsive, predator into a martyr, a reputation his widow defended for six decades while the mainstream media spun unnecessary and shameful rout into heroic “stand”. Only recently have historians been able to confirm what been said by the American Natives was correct.

Related: over a dozen US bases were severely damaged in the Iran War while Pete Hegseth ranted from a bully pulpit that America now dominated the skies, and that Iran had been totally neutralized. Even today Iran continues to launch attacks on American bases. Hegseth’s chaos has created a reputation of poorly led, poorly defended, “sitting ducks” of the Middle East. Apparently, the Custer mentality hasn’t disappeared yet.

Errors in the Letters

I’ve also been asked to take a look at the 150th-anniversary piece in Letters from an American, which is clearly sympathetic to the Lakota. While it’s the right tone, it’s badly sourced on the facts. Here is what really stood out to me:

The claim The record
Custer led the thousand-man Black Hills expedition in 1875 and returned reporting gold. Wrong year. That expedition was 1874. Custer left Fort Abraham Lincoln in July 1874 and gold was reported in August. The 1875 column into the hills was a Jenney-Newton scientific survey sent to confirm the strike. Custer did not lead that.
Crook planned the three-pronged converging attack. Crook commanded only one, so that was actually Terry. It matters to get this right because it also begs why Custer had been put in prison and demoted to a subordinate. The converging-column plan came from Sheridan’s Division of the Missouri, directed by Terry. He, with Custer under him, came from the east, Gibbon from the west. Crook commanded only the southern column out of Wyoming.
The Great Sioux Reservation ran from the Missouri River west to the Big Horn Mountains. Too big. The 1868 reservation ended at the western edge of Dakota Territory. The Powder River and Bighorn country beyond it was unceded territory, a separate legal category. That line mattered because it defined who could be labeled “hostile” for hunting off-reservation.
The only survivor of the battle was a horse, Comanche. This is mythology of the human trafficking predators, to invoke sympathy for their defeat. Seven of the regiment’s twelve companies survived under Reno and Benteen on the bluffs. Comanche was the best-known surviving horse from Custer’s own wing, not the only one, spun as disinformation into a sole-survivor legend.
Custer lost his entire command. Again, mythology, to erase the actual chaos, leadership collapse and retreat. Custer’s wing of five companies, around 210 men, was destroyed. There were seven other companies of the 7th Cavalry who survived.
The 1865 to 1868 fighting is now known as the Lakota War. A bit of a waffle, as other names are known. The standard name for the 1866 to 1868 war is Red Cloud’s War. The Great Sioux War is 1876 to 1877.
The Lakotas lost about 40. There’s a range, which is why the topic gets revisited for science to improve. Native dead are estimated from roughly 30 to over 100. The figure is uncertain, and 40 is the low end.

Historiography in the Letters

Now lets move from the errors individually, to the overall pattern. In the Letters piece, I can see someone retelling a battle from the losing predator’s side of the field, and undermining a proper framing for the victorious defender.

The biggest indicator is the use of the Comanche survival legend to inflate the “all was lost” fraud. The sole-survivor legend is the most familiar piece of Little Bighorn folklore and it is also well-known for being the least accurate. A historian reproducing mythology as a settled fact marks a synthesis drawn from a disinformation canon rather than the scientifically corrected record.

The reservation boundary error is another example. Pushing the western line out to the Big Horn Mountains erases the line between reservation and unceded land. That line is the entire legal basis for calling Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse the hostile ones, when it is in fact the exact opposite. The mistake is akin to Epstein victims being shamed for being in the wrong place, rather than starting from the moral foundation regarding men who capture women and children for blackmail.

The method in the piece has a deeper problem. It quotes Sitting Bull as if to give context, or invoke sympathy. And yet it narrates fighting through Custer’s eyes instead, with him dividing his command where troops are surrounded and killed to the last man. That is the white man’s method of retelling, where it both gets asserted as fact and also unverifiable because “nobody survived” to correct it. The actual evidence is completely missing from the assertion. However, this is long settled as wrong. After a 1983 fire cleared brush from the battlefield, Douglas Scott and Richard Fox reconstructed the fight from cartridge cases and confirmed what the Lakota and Cheyenne had described all along. The Custer companies had held formation, then broke apart when challenged. A single charge overran them and the survivors died fighting in the chaos of their own making. While the author waves a flag to honor the Lakota and Cheyenne with quotations, the text subtly disagrees and overrules them. The actual history, a detailed examination of battlefield evidence, has popped the Custer myth. This piece tries to inflate it again.

Disinformation research tells us that a quote can give the impression of a position, while it is in fact inverted by the frame built around it. Imagine a picture of a pipe that says “this is not a pipe”. Put “warning: always keep your hands on the wheel” in a car’s manual, yet spread social media commentary about driverless being real, and the warning is useless, evaporated. The words of the warning are there, yet it is the negation that carries all the meaning. That’s a sad reality in The Letters piece, which quotes Sitting Bull and then works hard to erase him and what he’s saying. The quotation is overruled with disinformation. Whether or not the author planned it, that is a method seen plainly in the text.

The sole-survivor fraud was built to be uncheckable, which is how it survived all the checks. The myth said every witness in the war of extermination was dead, so only the predator side could tell the story. That was a lie twice over. The Lakota and Cheyenne had told it accurately from the start, and white audiences refused to hear them for a century due to the Libby Custer white supremacist propaganda machine.

…someone without much of a conscience couldn’t feel very good about it, unless you’re Custer, who glorifies everything. … He is operating from the 17th century cavalier point of view where presence glorifies the act. Washita was a terrible, brutal attack on a basically friendly village of Cheyenne, and in his portrayal, it was his small band against this huge group of Indians where, in actuality, it was not quite as one-sided as that, and really was a pointless military campaign. But Custer, with the help of his wife, Libby, who was a great writer, would elevate this to a story of Western imperial vanguard into the West.

Even Grant had said as much, a sitting president today regarded as the greatest American general in history, and yet even his expert voice didn’t hold back the “imperial vanguard” myth makers promoting genocide.

As an important side-note, Grant had been politically attacked by Custer in March and April of 1876. Custer had testified before the Clymer Committee with sensationalized hearsay about Belknap, a man who had already resigned. Sherman told Custer to see Grant to make peace, and Grant refused him three times and then had him arrested in Chicago by early May. This is why command of the Dakota Column went to Terry while Custer was held under detention.

Grant was hammered by the press siding with Custer, against his expert judgment, to restore Custer and let him march a “hero” into danger. Grant relented in early May, with the crucial condition that Custer only ride under Terry (see table above). Custer thus rode into Little Bighorn as a subordinate to Terry, already relieved and arrested on Grant’s order.

By June, Custer was making erratic, aggressive choices as if trying to make a political point. He had been eyeing the Democratic nomination for the 1876 election, with the convention set in St. Louis for the week after the victory he expected in Montana. He refused to let his men rest, refused the offered Gatling guns, and refused reinforcements. He weakened his own chances as a story-telling bravado tactic. From hearsay aimed at a sitting president, to his own public humiliation, to a daylight raid to seize and kill women and children, he was a man throwing caution aside to turn his lack of judgment into a run for the presidency.

The figure in the White House today is what Custer hoped to become by riding massacre as campaign material: a publicity-built brand whose ambition runs ahead of his judgment, whose cruelty is recast as strength, and whose myth is managed for him. Custer at least rode into the battle he started. The “bone spurs” draft-dodger in the White House has only ever been coddled into control.

The Lakota were right about Custer. Grant was right about Custer. These are the highest-quality sources that should have defined the Custer story from the beginning. And yet, Libby Custer kept the lies going instead. What finally forced the American culture to see truth was evidence documented, the field full of cartridge cases proving military experts were right all along. Not Custer’s wife. The excavated battlefield was physical evidence that the disgraced Custer had dissolved into a rout, not even close to being a stand. It proved the erratic, racist, predator of women and children was always the aggressor, and certainly no martyr.

The propagandists had banked on erasure of their targets forever. They had not anticipated the burn down and field evidence. With ground truth repeating what better men and witnesses had told the world all along, finally the myth of Custer closed. And yet, as we see with The Letters, the shameless mythology still appears.

Food, History, Security

Supreme Court: Bayer’s Monsanto Capture of EPA Shields Mass Harm

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Cuyahoga River burns in 1952. At least twenty years of disasters were suffered before the American government created an agency to find fault.

The early 1970s had some logic. Rivers were burning, air was unbreathable, pesticides like DDT were moving through whole ecosystems. Meanwhile, American tort law crawled case by case. Common-law suits could not regulate the rampant abuse of the public by a continental chemical economy, let alone a foreign one. An agency, however, could set standards before harm. That was the promise of the EPA when it landed: expert protection at scale, faster and broader than a jury in one county.

EPA was built under President Nixon to deliver a remedy the courts were too slow and scattered to provide.

Today, the EPA has been inverted into a blocking function.

Bayer has spent the last decade fighting more than 100,000 lawsuits filed by people who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma they blamed on exposure to the glyphosate weedkillers, and the company has paid out billions of dollars in jury awards and settlements. All of the cases include allegations that the company failed to warn that glyphosate could cause cancer.

Bayer maintains that its products don’t cause cancer, and also asserts that under the Fifra the EPA is the key authority for determining if its product necessitated a cancer warning. The EPA has not required such a warning and has taken the position that glyphosate is “unlikely” to be carcinogenic, so the company cannot be held liable for failing to warn, according to Bayer’s argument.

In the Thursday ruling, the supreme court upheld this argument.

The evidence the agency set aside is overwhelmingly strong. In 2015 the WHO’s cancer agency classified glyphosate a probable human carcinogen, on limited human evidence, sufficient animal evidence, and strong evidence of genotoxicity. IARC, Group 2A. A 2019 Berkeley meta-analysis pooled the 2018 Agricultural Health Study with five case-control studies and found non-Hodgkin lymphoma raised 41 percent in the highest-exposed, a meta-relative risk of 1.41. Zhang et al. Three of its authors had served on the EPA’s own glyphosate advisory panel. The Agricultural Health Study itself, the cohort Bayer leans on, reported elevated acute myeloid leukemia at the top of the exposure range, significant under a twenty-year lag. Andreotti et al. In 2025 the Ramazzini Institute exposed rats from prenatal life and recorded dose-related leukemia deaths down to the European acceptable daily intake, and Europe’s chemical agency has reopened the classification. Panzacchi et al. Four lines of evidence that all point in a single, strong direction.

However, two political shifts happened since President Nixon to enable the Supreme Court’s stupidity.

First, the industry aggressively worked to occupy the agency, staffing it, funding the science it reviews, setting the terms of what counts as proof, completely breaching independence and integrity.

Second, the court practiced a binary judgment, where passive agency absence of action was ruled as active agency judgment against action. When the EPA has not yet acted, the preemption doctrine reads that the silence is a considered federal decision and displaces every active state remedy that would disagree with passivity.

Perhaps states that fight the Trump centralization regime should be called the Free States.

The flawed premise is that a single federal warning flag suppressed should shut down all other warning flags, which makes the federal flag the easy target for corporate capture and suppression. This court has ratified this vulnerability explicitly, which makes these judges complicit in the preventable mass harm that follows from the corporate capture of agency.

Judges made a choice to enable public harm. They had the evidence, the jurisdiction, the dissent in front of them, and they chose preemption to increase preventable suffering and deaths. That is an act, on the record, with names. Kavanaugh wrote it, and six others signed. Elie Wiesel indicted them all decades ago. Silence is the choice, documented, by people with the power to rule otherwise. Complicity attaches to the actor who chose death for profit.

While a state court sided with Durnell and awarded him more than $1 million in damages, Monsanto—now Bayer—appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, arguing that federal law should override state law. The Supreme Court agreed…. Shares of Bayer jumped by more than 16% after the court’s ruling came out Thursday morning.

The dissent was Jackson and Gorsuch, who not only said the majority misread FIFRA, they argued Monsanto could comply with both federal and state law by ending Roundup sales. A simple compliance path existed. There was never an impossibility to claim.

Cipollone in 1992 cut tobacco claims on a federal labeling statute. Riegel in 2008 turned on a different mechanism, the FDA’s own premarket approval. Congress wrote the cigarette warning into statute. The FDA granted the device its approval. The EPA withheld the glyphosate warning. Three federal moves created corporate immunity from documented harm. The shield for profit on suffering was widened with each case. It once required an express command. Now it just takes an agency to do nothing, which means America runs fail-unsafe.

Corporations cause mass suffering on the principle that an agency hasn’t made a warning. It’s like requiring deny lists, instead of allow lists, for things that cause the most harms in history. The court treats absence of a warning as an explicit federal command that no state may evaluate no matter how overwhelming the evidence of failure. In February 2026 Monsanto announced a proposed nationwide class settlement for Roundup non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims, which it described as one element of a multi-pronged strategy to suppress claims against it.

Captured process, legalizing death caused by its captors, invokes some other history about suppressed chemical warnings by the same company as in courts today. Bayer was a founding member of IG Farben, the chemical combine that produced poison gas and supplied the Zyklon B delivered in “Red Cross” vehicles to be used in the death camp “showers”.

The crematorium is a big building with a wide chimney and 15 ovens. Under a garden there are two enormous cellars. One is where people undress and the other is the death chamber. People enter it naked and once about 3,000 are inside it is locked and they are gassed. After six or seven minutes of suffering they die,” he wrote.

He described how the Germans had installed pipes to make the gas chamber look like a shower room.

“The gas canisters were always delivered in a German Red Cross vehicle with two SS men. They then dropped the gas through openings – and half an hour later our work began. We dragged the bodies of those innocent women and children to the lift, which took them to the ovens.”

The Nazi victims never saw a warning label, by design, and neither do the Americans suffering from German chemicals killing them today.

Zyklon B canister. The same hydrogen-cyanide fumigant was used on Mexican border crossers at the El Paso delousing plants from 1917, under Woodrow Wilson, who ran on “America First.” The chemist Gerhard Peters recommended Zyklon B for the camps’ disinfection chambers and illustrated his case with photographs of the El Paso delousing chambers. Hitler, who admired American race laws and based “Lebensraum” genocide on U.S. “westward expansion”, named his command train “Amerika.” A camp within Auschwitz was called Mexico. IG Farben held 42.5 percent of Degesch, the distributor.

The Allies broke IG Farben apart after the war. The German company Bayer was refounded in 1951 and bought Monsanto in 2018. Some have depicted the brand reputation simply, as this:

Source: Unknown

History, Security

Prairieland Ruling by Activist Texas Judge Criminalizes Political Speech in America

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Today’s news is Andrew Jackson in 1835, ordering the US mail inspected to suppress abolitionists, asking Congress to criminalize antislavery speech, and stoking state sanctioned mobs to arrest and torture Americans who opposed slavery.

Donald Trump’s favorite president: Andrew “white republic” Jackson. Historian Matthew Clavin says as terrible as Andrew Jackson was he likely would have despised Trump.

Today’s news is Stalin’s Article 58 (PDF) of the RSFSR code, where “anti-Soviet agitation” was a crime that meant whatever the interrogator needed it to mean.

Today’s news is Dennis v. United States, the 1951 McCarthy-era ruling that upheld the conviction of Americans for organizing and teaching political theory. Not for what they did. For what they taught.

Today’s news is South Africa’s Terrorism Act of 1967, which defined terrorism as anything that might endanger “law and order” and let the police hold suspects without trial.

Today’s news is Trump. Punishment is being wielded in America to deter all political opposition to a white police state.

America has officially criminalized political speech and identity again, in order to recharacterize lawful conduct. Owning a weapon, owning a book, using an app, knowing the wrong people, all of it becomes an overt act of an anti-Trump conspiracy.

To be clear, this is the exact grievance of the KKK, and of the January 6 mob. Prosecuted for their associations, their beliefs, their plans, they called it tyranny. Now they hold the power and have made it into their application of tyranny. Their violent attempts to replace democracy with dictatorship by overturning an election go pardoned, so that democracy will end. The people who oppose dictatorship draw harsh prison terms for having a legally bought gun and a printed paper. The standard that was angrily rejected, now the radical activist right-wing imposes on everyone else. Not an accident. Corruption.

…the biggest reason nothing in America functions in the public interest: rampant corruption…

The “agitator” label fits anything and everything the white police state decides on their whim, exactly as it did under Jackson, Stalin, McCarthy, and apartheid.

That’s how nine people in Texas just drew 30 to 100 years in jail for a Fourth of July protest at an ICE detention center.

Is a 30 year prison sentence for reading material the America you recognize? It’s very Jacksonian, and thus why Edgar Allan Poe sold so many copies of his 1843 guide to cryptoanalysis: “The Gold Bug“.

Poe’s cryptography from 1840 to 1841 was a newspaper challenge daring readers to send ciphers he would crack, which led to his 1841 essay “A Few Words on Secret Writing.” “The Gold-Bug” then became the most widely read work of his lifetime.

President Jackson was one of the most, if not the most unjust, immoral and corrupt men in American history
History, Sailing, Security

Climate Denial Pulls Down US Defense Sea Walls: Sensor Gaps Invite Foreign Attack

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Three thousand years ago, or so the children’s books say, a city fell because its own defenders pulled down their wall and let the attackers stroll in without a fight. It’s a lesson we all are supposed to know, not least of all anyone tasked with defense of their nation.

You probably recognize the story immediately if I say the Greeks left a wooden horse on the beach and sailed out of sight. But the part of the story that gets obscured is how they planted an agent named Sinon, to pose as a deserter, who swore the wooden horse was a sacred offering. The planted deception, the disinformation campaign, is key to the oceanographic sensor story in America today.

The Trojan priest Laocoon saw the horse for what it was, warned against gifts from the Greeks, and threw a spear into its flank. When the sea sent serpents to strangle him and his sons, the Trojans read it as an omen against him: the man who doubted the horse was punished, so that horse was thought even more to be holy, instead of him.

Then there was Cassandra, under Apollo’s curse, who spoke true prophecy and warned everyone only to suffer from them ignoring her. She said light the horse on fire. Instead they breached their own ramparts, gladly brought the horse inside, and celebrated ignorantly.

And so the story goes, the huge strong walls that had held against ten years of Greek armies came down in an evening, by the hands of the Trojans themselves. It was a gift to the Greeks, as if no walls existed at all.

At this point let me remind you that the shrill narrative of the Trump administration has been to build walls and stop the invaders from entering. There is now copious evidence he has been doing the exact opposite, removing America’s most effective barriers to invasion and instead welcoming adversaries inside.

The reason why I’m going back three thousand years, in terms of national security doctrine, is because the mistakes I see today are the same as ever. The oldest surviving military treatise in the West, Aeneas Tacticus on how to survive a siege, spends most of its pages on the enemy within rather than on walls or rations: the traitor at the gate leads to the faction that swings it open, despite the sentinel whose warning gets him silenced. The men now holding the American walls, Hegseth at Defense, Vance a step behind, Trump above them both, are busy re-enacting the worst Greek tragedy, while acting like the Trojans having a feast of defeat.

It is unbelievable but true, that three weeks ago the National Science Foundation started pulling deep-sea instruments off the ocean floor. This was the start of a plan to dismantle four of the five arrays of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, more than 900 sensors in all. The Endurance Array off Oregon and Washington came up first. The Irminger Sea array, between Greenland and Iceland, was booked for 2027.

I say it’s unbelievable because anyone who studied the Cold War knows that second patch of water by another name. Anyone who studied war at all probably knows why you don’t pull deep-sea instruments actively building decades of oceanographic data to accurately map battlefields.

The stretch I want to focus on for a minute is the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap (GIUK). Over many decades the United States had blanketed it with seafloor hydrophones called SOSUS. It caught every Soviet submarine transiting from the Kola Peninsula into the Atlantic. The mission stayed classified until 1991. The arrays were filed for forty years under a single cover word: oceanographic.

I’ll say it again. Ocean science is intelligence gathering of the kind that sets winners apart from losers in battlespace.

The OOI moorings now coming out measure temperature, salinity, and sound speed. Sound speed is the variable that governs how acoustic energy travels through water, which is to say how sonar works. The civilian and military needs are reading the same data from the ocean. Erin Sikorsky, who ran climate and environmental analysis for the National Intelligence Council and now directs the Center for Climate and Security, already put it on the public record two weeks ago so I’m not spilling anything here: the sensors are a national security story far more than the science story. The unbelievable part is that Washington is choosing to see less of the ocean at the exact moment the adversaries are rushing in to use it far more.

The anti-oceanographic plan lasted about two weeks. I would guess that someone with military intelligence authority, someone who hasn’t been purged yet by the evangelicals taking over the Pentagon to eliminate independent thought, was able to get the message through that the sensors are essential to defending the country. On June 18 the Senate passed the Saving the OOI Act, a bill under two hundred words from Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that bars federal money for decommissioning until a genuine review happens.

It passed unanimously.

And then, within a day, the administration walked the plan back. All of that, given the gravestones all around from a congress that can’t act and a president who can’t stop, says this is exactly what I’m saying it is. Stopping a self-inflicted blinding of the North Atlantic took a Republican from Alaska, a Democrat from Oregon, and a rushed floor vote that had zero opposition.

Hold onto how close America came to literally destroying itself by removing all the undersea “walls” and rolling the adversarial horse in like game over.

The reason the GOP gave for taking a hatchet to sensors was ideological and openly stated. Project 2025 named the relevant NOAA research office the source of much of the agency’s climate “alarmism”. Project 2025 doesn’t like alarms it can’t corrupt so it advised that the preponderance of climate work be disbanded. Russell Vought wrote the budget, with a political radical’s hand. The instruments started coming out of the water by an inversion of logic: knowing what’s happening is waste, while knowing nothing is efficiency. They called it “ending woke science” as if being awake is bad and being asleep is the optimal condition for those serving the nation. The plan literally read as a coastal superpower no longer measuring anything about the coast.

There is a simple explanation, left unsaid far too long. To call it ideology and stop there comes up short of what ideology is and does historically. The climate denial fanatics don’t just happen to target undersea defense networks. The faction that wants the monitors gone has been cultivated for a decade by Russian active measures, documented in a Republican-led House report in 2018, and in 2024 it was paid outright, when the Justice Department charged RT with funneling roughly ten million dollars to American influencers whose stated purpose, in the Department’s words, was to amplify domestic divisions and weaken the United States. The administration stood down the service built to catch the Russian corruption, terminating the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force on the Attorney General’s first day and scattering its Russia hands onto immigration files.

This is reflexive control, the Soviet manipulation doctrine running underneath the KGB active measures Putin practiced for sixteen years as an officer. He knows to feed an adversary a constructed reality until they dismantle defenses and experience suicidal acts as their own conviction. It’s the Trojan welcome party for the Greek “gift” horse.

The timing of the threat rise actually corresponds almost directly to the American radicals removing defenses against them. As the pressure to pull the listening posts built, Russian state television host Vladimir Solovyov told Trump on July 10, 2025 that two Poseidon torpedoes could erase both American coasts in a radioactive tsunami. On October 28, Putin claimed a successful Poseidon test, two days after announcing a long-range test of the Burevestnik cruise missile. The second purpose-built carrier submarine, Khabarovsk, is fitting out at Severodvinsk now, a hull conceived to carry that one weapon and little else.

Then China joined the story. In Beijing on September 3, for a parade marking the end of the Second World War, Putin and Kim Jong Un applauded China rolling out the AJX002. This eighteen-to-twenty-meter underwater drone has a silhouette of the Poseidon. And when Russian state media called it a Chinese Poseidon, Chinese social media reframed it with the name “Hello America”. The serious analysts who track these hulls, H I Sutton and the editors at Naval News, will tell you the doomsday label is political and not in the hardware. Fans of Stanley Kubrick movies will recognize that the announcement itself is the weapon.

There is an actual undersea revolution going on and the last twelve months have been accelerating rapidly. Ukraine built theirs out of simple logic after nearly its whole navy became irrelevant in 2014 to modern warfare. Their modern Magura V5, a carbon-fiber boat costing roughly a quarter million dollars, was in February 2024 the first naval drone to sink a warship in combat. Russia was repeatedly embarrassed by the asymmetry of drones. By the end of that year the same boats had put more than half a billion dollars of damage into the Black Sea Fleet and driven it out of Sevastopol. In May 2025 a missile-armed Magura V7 shot down two Russian Su-30 fighters, the first aircraft killed by a sea drone. On December 15, 2025, an SBU Sea Baby became the first uncrewed underwater vehicle to strike a submarine, a Kalibr-armed Kilo-class boat tied up at Novorossiysk, the very port Russia had retreated to for safety.

The lesson is clear for any American studying their own coastline and ports. We’re talking about forces that are attritable, networked, manufactured by the hundred, and lethal to legacy platforms that cost a thousand times more. The American reply so far has been lemons: Anduril’s Dive-XL is the kind of vendor-lock, self-funded, fixed-price theater I already documented. The Russian doomsday torpedo is mirrored in Silicon Valley concepts of future threats. Fantasy is much easier to sell than the truth about how a country wins underwater, building a sophisticated static intelligence network that allows cheap things at volume to dominate the space.

China not only is rattling a large Poseidon-shaped drone at America, it has been constructing a seabed-to-space sensing grid it calls Transparent Ocean and fielding the largest fleet of extra-large underwater drones of any navy, machines tuned in part to exploit any sensor nets it expects adversaries to keep.

By comparison the United States, already holding sunk cost of the most mature undersea surveillance advantage ever assembled, is nuts to pull public instruments out of the GIUK gap. The Trump administration moves are self-defeating. They would tear out America’s own ears, in the one gap where it spent forty years listening for Soviet boats, while its rivals parade torpedoes shaped like press releases, when its internal fights have become someone else’s weapon. Removing sensors means the walls come down, and it would be by the host’s own hand, because the adversary has funded and steered the faction that wants them down.

The undersea battlespace is where foreign military intelligence has been pumping heavy amounts of compromise. The enemy turns quarrels into domestic disarmament, to get right-wing radicals to willingly remove the walls protecting America. A unanimous Senate caught the Trump mistake this time. The buoys will stay, for now. The hand that reached for the door handle to open it is the permanent problem, and it will reach again the first quiet week the national security adults in the room look elsewhere. The technique to open the door was built so the target disarms itself and frames the collapse of American national security as an “efficiency”.

Or consider the mirror image. China pays fishermen bounties to hunt down and pull the adversary’s sensors out of its own waters, a campaign its Ministry of State Security frames as an unseen covert war of espionage in the seas off its coast. One country pays to tear out others’ sensors. The other pays to tear out its own.

The post said foreign spy agencies had for years tried to analyze Chinese naval activities, create “underwater maps” of the country’s maritime coastline and monitor its offshore oil and gas deposits.

The ministry urged researchers, fishermen and vessel owners to remain vigilant and “report suspicious devices.”

China has previously rewarded anglers for turning in alleged maritime spy devices. Some have received up to 500,000 yuan (about $73,000) for their help, according to CBS News’ partner network BBC News.