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The ongoing standoff at the Strait of Hormuz has led to concerns about volatile oil prices, an ongoing war with no easy end, and a possible humiliation for the United States on the world stage.

Now, experts are warning of one other potential calamity: A possible “superspreader event” on the ships that are idle in the region.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62), while participating in Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2024, fires the first naval strike missile from a U.S. destroyer July 18.

Ukraine’s campaign of “long-range sanctions” is working, with economic and political pressure now mounting for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to polling conducted by organizations aligned with the Russian state, a combination of fuel shortages and rising prices is now hurting the president’s approval ratings. 

Putin in March 2022. Creative Commons Image.

For the second year in a row, the annual Russian Naval Fleet Day holiday celebration has been canceled. This naval military showcase usually takes place in St. Petersburg, the traditional birthplace of the modern Russian Navy.

It is also the hometown of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who always makes a point of presiding over the ceremony. No official reason has been provided for this year’s cancellation. All that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) said on the matter came through unnamed sources who spoke to the St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka.

Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Pentagon’s counter-drone hub, awarded CACI International a contract worth up to $500 million for its SkyValor system, the military and vendor announced Thursday, designed to use long-range, “non-kinetic” jamming against unmanned aerial systems.
DefenseScoop reported last month that JIATF-401 had approved SkyValor for use across the military after two days of testing in Arizona.

The Army will start scaling its prototype command-and-control system beyond the two divisions that have been testing it for nearly a year, officials said, but some of it might not move forward.
A top priority for the service, Army officials have billed the Next Generation Command and Control prototype as a data-heavy ecosystem of interconnected hardware and software intended to give commanders the ability to make “more, better and faster decisions” against increasingly sophisticated adversaries.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is launching a clinical trial to see if semaglutide, the chemical used in popular weight loss drugs, can also be used to help treat alcoholism.
The new trial, announced on Thursday, will screen more than 600 veterans with “moderate or severe” alcohol use disorder over the course of 24 weeks, seeing if taking semaglutide-based medications can help reduce alcohol intake.
Enrollment for the Cessation or Reduction of Alcohol Consumption in Veterans trial, or “CRAVE trial,” started this week.

In February 2026, the United States and Israel initiated a war in the Middle East against Iran. Since then, the warring sides have oscillated between strikes, a fragile ceasefire, and the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz. Open hostilities resumed in mid-July. More recently, the Houthis in Yemen have threatened Saudi shipping through the Bab al-Mandab, raising the risk to shipping through that critical waterway.

Zelenskyy Says North Korean Ballistic Missiles Used In Deadly Strike: Russia may have used a North Korean ballistic missile during one of its most recent attacks on Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The missile struck the village of Radushne near Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region during the overnight Russian barrage into July 30, hitting a family home and killing several people.

Not long after the U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran early this year, Iran responded by closing off the Strait of Hormuz.

And while the U.S. has succeeded in achieving some military objectives, they have found that it cannot bomb its way into getting Iran to reopen the Strait, a crucial waterway that’s highly important to global shipping.

MLRS Firing Creative Commons Image

According to a Breaking Defense op-ed by Maximilian K.

Ukraine reported on July 31 that its Security Service and Defense Forces struck an aircraft repair plant in the illegally occupied Crimea, infrastructure at Russia’s Port Taman, and a major Volgograd oil refinery in a coordinated operation.

This latest operation struck three critical parts of Russia’s war-support network: military aviation, maritime logistics, and fuel production.