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Iran’s strangulation of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s vital maritime chokepoints, has added new impetus to its neighbors’ plans to find alternative overland routes to transport their oil to ports around the world. For the Gulf countries, pipelines that can bypass the Strait are a worthwhile insurance policy — not as a completely viable alternative to the Strait.

Nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil moves through that bottleneck every day, underscoring the volume of oil that transits that waterway.

Today, the global oil market is hampered. But not by the supply of crude oil, but by the world’s refining capacity, which has become the defining bottleneck for fuel and other oil-derived products.

In the past, during energy shocks, markets were concerned about crude oil production and availability. But today, there is considerably more crude available than refiners can efficiently process.

The Australian Army has carried out its first live-fire training exercise using AH-64E Apache helicopters on Australian soil.

A month after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States Army took a drastic step amid the fear and hysteria gripping the nation.
In January 1942, it booted out all Japanese American soldiers and ROTC cadets from the service. Upset by the decision, a group of Japanese American cadets in Hawaii pleaded their case to the state’s military governor.
“Hawaii is our home, the United States our country,” they implored, according to a 2025 article on the Army’s website. “We know but one loyalty, and that is to the stars and stripes.

A Results-Packed Six Months: What Fedorov Accomplished as Ukraine’s Defense Minister: The shockwaves of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s dismissal of his Defense Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, continue to reverberate through the political circles and are generating protests in the nation’s major cities. The young defense chief was known to many as being what some described as a “tech evangelist,” and he was famous for his Silicon Valley style of presentations of new innovations in weapons design and defense strategy – all of which added to his reputation and popularity.

Profits For Russia’s Rostec Arms Export Conglomerate Fall 42 Per Cent: One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oldest and closest confidants is seeing his industrial empire crumble. That empire is the Russian state defense-industrial behemoth Rostec, which has a near-monopoly on the production of major weapon systems.

The massive entity has controlling interests in almost all Russian defense enterprises, which combined manufacture 80 percent or more of the military hardware needed for Russian President Vladimir Putin to sustain his war in Ukraine.

Ukraine to Receive Blueprints to Build the MBDA Storm Shadow ALCM: France has announced it is providing Ukraine with the blueprints for its Système de Croisière Autonome à Longue Portée – Emploi Général Scalp-EG missile as part of a large defense deal. The air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) is also known as the “Storm Shadow” in the United Kingdom and is produced jointly by the Anglo-French air-launched weapons consortium MBDA.

Before the twentieth century gave armies antibiotics, the leading killer of American soldiers in wartime was neither enemy fire nor shrapnel. Two-thirds of the roughly 620,000 deaths in the U.S. Civil War came from diseases like typhoid and dysentery. Spread through contaminated water and crowded camps, they were eventually controlled through inoculation and field sanitation rather than the antibiotics that would not arrive until the following generation. Later in World War I, American forces lost more men to disease than to combat: 63,000 to 51,000.

It’s 2028, and the Fujian carrier strike group has just left Yulin, China, for an unknown destination. The U.S. Navy’s “Hedge Strategy” has let commanders disperse unmanned systems across regional choke points as forward-deployed scouts. But days before contact with Fujian, an unmanned undersea vehicle in the Banda Sea transmits an error code and must head back to Yokosuka for repairs — a 3,000-mile, 15-day trip. A second platform, an unmanned surface vehicle, is overdue for a routine oil filter change in its propulsion system.

Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club (Vintage International, 2014)The noise, the noise, the unrelenting noise of the world: How is any writer with an interest in the long view supposed to escape it, if only for a couple hours to work, let alone maintain their sanity in the remainders of a day? It’s an old dilemma, for certain, but little digital town criers in our pockets bring instant, constant news about slaughter and ruin in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond — grim notices against the background of those chronicling the state of domestic American politics.