Category: Military

6 June 1944, United Kingdom

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces:

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944. Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory.

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory.

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

June 6: A walk across a beach in Normandy

Today your job is straightforward. First, you must load 40 to 50 pounds on your back. Then you need to climb down a net rope that is banging on the steel side of a ship and jump into a steel rectangle of a boat bobbing on the surface of the ocean below you. Others are already inside the boat shouting at you to hurry up.

Once in the boat, you stand with dozens of others as the boat is driven towards distant beaches and cliffs through a hot hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Boats moving nearby are from time to time hit with a high explosive shell and disintegrate in a red rain of bullets and body parts. Then there’s the smell of men near you fouling themselves as the fear bites into their necks and they hunch lower into the boat. That smell mingles with the smell of burnt gunpowder and seaweed.

In front of you, over the steel helmets of other men, you can see the flat surface of the bow’s landing ramp still held in place against the sea. Soon you are within range of the machineguns that line the cliffs above the beach ahead. The metallic sound of their bullets clangs and whines off the front of the ramp.

Then the coxswain shouts and the klaxon sounds. You feel the keel of the LVCP grind against the rocks and sand of Normandy as the large shells from the boats in the armada behind you whuffle and moan overhead. Then the explosions all around and above you increase in intensity and the bullets from the machineguns in the cliffs ahead and above rattle and hum along the steel plates of the boat and the men crouch lower. Then somehow you all strain forward as, at last, the ramp drops down and you see the beach. The men surge forward and you step with them. Then you are out in the chill waters of the channel wading in towards sand already doused with death, past bodies bobbing in the surf staining the waters crimson.

You are finally on the beach. It’s worse on the beach.

The bullets keep probing along the sand, digging holes, looking for your body, finding others that drop down like sacks of meat with their lines cut. You run forward because there’s nothing but ocean at your back and more men dying and… somehow… you reach a small sliver of shelter at the base of the cliffs. There are others there, confused and cowering and not at all ready to go back out into the storm of steel that keeps pouring down. And then someone, somewhere nearby, tells you all to press forward, to go on, to somehow get off that beach and onto the high ground behind it, and because you don’t know what else to do, you rise up and you move forward, beginning, one foot after another, to take back the continent of Europe.

If you are lucky, very lucky, on that day and the days after, you will walk all the way to Germany and the war will be over and you will go home to a town somewhere on the great land sea of the Midwest and you won’t talk much about this day or any that came after it, ever.

They’ll ask you, throughout long decades after, “What did you do in the war?” You’ll think of this day and you’ll never think of a good answer. That’s because you know just how lucky you were.

If you were not lucky on that day you lie under a white cross on a large well kept lawn not far from the beach you landed on.

Somewhere above you, among the living, weak princes and fat bureaucrats and rank traitors mumble platitudes and empty praises about actions they never knew and men they cannot hope to emulate.

You hear their prattle, dim and far away outside the brass doors that seal the caverns of your long sleep. You want them to go, to leave you and your brothers in arms to your brown study of eternity.

“Fifty years? Seventy-five? A century? Seems long to the living but it’s only an inch of time. Leave us and go back to your petty lives. We march on and you, you weaklings primping and parading above us, will never know how we died or how we lived.

“If we hear you at all now, your mewling only makes us ask among ourselves, ‘Died for what?’

“Princes and bureaucrats, parasites and traitors, be silent. Be gone. We are now and forever one with the sea and the sky and the wind. We marched through the steel rain. We march on.”

Pentagon pushes for battlefield AI, some military leaders urge caution.

The Trump administration is looking to push artificial intelligence in the U.S. military as it faces pressure from military leaders and companies to implement safeguards.

In a recent annual special forces conference in Tampa, Florida, Adm. Frank Bradley, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told attendees that troops “have to be very careful about how we come to (AI’s) employment and its inspiration into the delivery of lethality.”

“We, as humans, have to have the confidence that … it’s going to deliver violence only where we intend it to be delivered,” Bradley said.

In response to the remarks, a Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Monterey Herald that the Pentagon was focussing on efforts to make “functional battlefield tools” with AI to help troops identify targets quickly.

Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations Command officials said AI should not be a tool for eradicating targets, but to assist troops to focus on their mission. Sgt. Maj. Andrew Krogman said at the conference that AI could be used for administrative tasks or to modernize workflows.

AI has already been used by the military to identify targets, including the use of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which integrates Anthropic’s Claude AI to speed up targeting and planning.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pushing to integrate AI into the military.

Hegseth said he would reject AI models that “won’t allow you to fight wars,” in a recent speech at Elon Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX in south Texas. He also said that military AI systems should operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.”

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To absent friends
Chief Warrant Officer Five Robert Selje ⭐
Master Sergeant Benjamin Stevenson ⭐
Master Sergeant Jared Van Aalst ⭐
Sergeant First Class Ron Grider ⭐
Sergeant First Class Ryan Savard ⭐
Sergeant Paul Dumont jr. ⭐
Sergeant Jose Regalado ⭐

A Memorial Day Prayer 

Lord who grants salvation to kings and dominion to rulers, Whose kingdom is a kingdom spanning all eternities; Who places a road in the sea and a path in the mighty waters – may you bless the President, the Vice President, and all the constituted officers of the government of this land. May they execute their responsibilities with intelligence, honor, and compassion. And may these United States continue to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

May He bless the members of our armed forces, who protect them from harm on the land, air, and sea. May the Almighty cause the enemies who rise up against us to be struck down before them. May the Holy One, Blessed is He, preserve and rescue our fighters and their families from every trouble, distress, plague, and illness, and may He send blessing and success in their every endeavor.

May the God of overflowing compassion, who lives in the highest and all worlds, give eternal rest to those who are now under his Holy sheltering spiritual wings, making them rise ever more purely through the light of your brilliance, and may he bless their souls forever and may he comfort the bereaved. May those of us who remain free never forget their sacrifice. On Memorial Day, may we as a nation remember those who gave their lives to protect America and our freedoms, and may their memories always be a blessing. May we spend some time today remembering those who sacrificed and praying that God protects their souls and comforts their bereaved loved ones.

Here’s the Background on the Two American Soldiers Who Went Missing Over the Weekend

Two American service members went missing over the weekend while participating in a joint military exercise with partner nations in North Africa. Search and rescue efforts are still underway.

CBS has reported that the two soldiers were off-duty and had decided to go on a hike to observe the sunset when one fell off of a cliff and into the water below. A number of soldiers then attempted to form a human chain to rescue their comrade in the water, but failed to pull them up. The second soldier then jumped into the water for a rescue attempt, but failed. A third soldier also attempted a rescue, but returned to shore after likewise failing.

We should never forget.

Dachau; I’ve been there. At the end of the 1st Gulf War, the troops whose home station was somewhere in Europe got a week long free leave with a planned – and mandatory – itinerary. On the way to a day in Munich, enroute to Berchtesgaden, a morning was spent touring Dachau.

Everyone walked around in silence, and when people did speak, it was always in near whispers.

I don’t know about today, but 35 years ago, you could walk right into the building where the gas chambers and crematory ovens are, and feel the hair rise up on the back of your neck as you looked into the black insides of those ovens that burned uncounted dead.

Murder. Mass murder. Concentrated, premeditated murder on a scale that makes the ‘mass shootings’ the mewling liberal proggies wail about in their rants for gun control, pale in comparison.

And although you could walk right up to multiple little mass grave plots the size of a postage stamp front yard, marked Grave of Thousands Unknown this was ‘merely’ a concentration camp. Not one of the camps in Poland designed for industrial level mass slaughter.

On April 29, 1945 the U.S. Army’s 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow), now a part of the New York Army National Guard, uncovered the concentration camp in the town of Dachau, near Munich Germany. According to a press release by the New York National Guard, the frontline soldiers in the Army unit knew there was a prison camp in the area, but knew few details about the camp’s true nature.

“What the Soldiers discovered next at Dachau left an impression of a lifetime,” the division assistant chaplain (Maj.) Eli Bohnen wrote at the time, according to the release. “Nothing you can put in words would adequately describe what I saw there. The human mind refuses to believe what the eyes see. All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated.”

The U.S. Army unit uncovered thousands of bodies of men, women and children held in the concentration camp.

“There were over 4,000 bodies, men, women and children in a warehouse in the crematorium,” Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz, commander of the 1st Battalion, 222nd Infantry, said in his report. “There were over 1,000 dead bodies in the barracks within the enclosure.”

“Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling high with tangled human bodies adjoining the cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac’s woodpile,” wrote Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, a division public affairs NCO in the 42nd Division World News, May 1, 1945.

“Dachau is no longer a name of terror for hunted men. 32,000 of them have been freed by the 42nd Rainbow Division,” Creasman wrote of the liberation.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum places the estimated number of those freed from the camp at more than 60,000.

John Ʌ Konrad 

Just as I predicted yesterday…. MSM will falsely claim the Secretary of the Navy was fired because of Battleships.

And the NYTimes is actually worse than I thought. Let me explain….

The mainstream media will make this about the ships because the defense “experts” never want more hulls. They want money flowing into consulting fees, AI “solutions,” and think tank white papers. Steel produces nothing for the Beltway class. A flight deck you can launch F-35s off of does not generate PowerPoints.

But the NYTimes is running an even more sinister play.

Throughout the Biden administration, and later during DOGE’s audit work, I translated every major spending bill into a unit every American can actually visualize: one nuclear aircraft carrier.

Nuclear supercarrier cost: $15 billion.

Biden’s BEAD rural broadband program, which connected zero homes to the internet: $42.5 billion, or roughly three carriers.

Pete Buttigieg’s infrastructure package: $1.1 trillion, or seventy three carriers.

Total DOGE savings to date: $215 billion, or fourteen carriers.

Known Somali-linked fraud in Minnesota, per federal prosecutors: $18 billion, or one carrier plus an Arleigh Burke destroyer.

Why do I keep doing this?

Because for the past two decades the NYTimes has run the same story on loop: the military is the reason for America’s skyrocketing national debt.

That is a psyop. It conditions Americans to believe that steel and sailors, not social programs and grift, are what is bankrupting the country.

Human beings are not wired to understand $15 billion. The mind goes blank at that scale. But every American, left or right, understands the sheer weight and menace of a nuclear aircraft carrier. It is the most visible, most photogenic instrument of state power on earth.

So the NYTimes runs the obvious play.

Paint the carrier as expensive. Pile on delays and cost overruns. Quote an anonymous Pentagon source worrying about bloat. Then anchor the defense budget to “discretionary spending,” a small slice of the real pie, and express it as a percentage of that smaller number.

The Pentagon instantly looks like the whale in the room.

But Medicare alone, roughly $1 trillion in 2025, already eclipses the entire defense budget. Add Medicaid and ACA subsidies and federal health spending hits $1.8 trillion, more than double defense. None of those programs are labeled “discretionary,” so by NYTimes accounting, they “don’t count.”

This is a magic act. The NYTimes holds a shiny capital ship up in one hand to keep your eyes off the social programs bankrupting the country in the other.

Once you see the trick, you cannot unsee it. Every time the NYTimes runs a carrier or battleship exposé, ask one question: what is on the page they did not write?

Nine times out of ten, the answer is sitting just outside the “discretionary” column, quietly metastasizing, while a Ford class carrier gets blamed for the deficit.

America is not going broke building warships. Warships are one time expenses that last decades and are a tiny fraction of the total annual budget.

America is going broke pretending the ledgers that matter do not exist, while a national newspaper gets paid to keep the audience looking the other way.

That’s why they hate battleships. That’s why they tell you they are ridiculous and antiquated warships that are a waste of money. To make you think THIS is the reason why the nation is $39T in debt.

And the best part? Their psyop works on both sides of the aisle… on liberals who hate the military and conservatives who hate federal spending.

Battleships are not a waste of money. All the many fraudulent programs that cost more annually than a single carrier are.

Trump orders Navy to destroy any boats laying mines in Strait of Hormuz

President Trump on Thursday said he ordered the U.S. military to “shoot and kill” any boat caught putting mines in the Strait of Hormuz, as his administration ramps up mine-clearing efforts in the critical waterway.

“I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be (Their naval ships are ALL, 159 of them, at the bottom of the sea!), that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. There is to be no hesitation,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“Additionally, our mine ‘sweepers’ are clearing the Strait right now. I am hereby ordering that activity to continue, but at a tripled up level!” he added.

Trump’s post comes amid uncertainty over how long the strait will be unusable as Trump on Tuesday extended the ceasefire with Iran indefinitely and has kept the blockade in place.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the Pentagon told Congress that clearing the mines out of the strait could take six months.

The vital waterway typically sees the passage of about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, but oil-tanker traffic has been less than normal since the start of the war, leaving oil prices high.

U.S. Central Command posted on X overnight that U.S. forces 31 directed vessels to “turn around or return to port as part of the U.S. blockade against Iran.”

In a subsequent post on Thursday, the president said Iran was having a “very hard time figuring out who their leader is.”

“They just don’t know! The infighting is between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY!” he wrote. “We have total control over the Strait of Hormuz. No ship can enter or leave without the approval of the United States Navy. It is ‘Sealed up Tight,’ until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!!”

The White House has said the president is not putting a deadline on when Iran has to provide a new peace proposal to the U.S.

Hysteria Reigns Following Hegseth’s Announcement

When I was in the Navy, I lived on base but, like most service members, my social life was off base. At Portsmouth Naval Hospital, at least when I was stationed there, going out the main gate led to a plethora of options. Straight ahead took you toward the bulk of the city. Turning left took you to an old part of the town with historic buildings and one really great pub, among other things. Hang a right, though, and you’d best have your next of kin on standby.

I didn’t have a gun back then, and I kind of wish I did, but with living on base, it wasn’t really much of an option. There were ways to own one, but to carry it anywhere? Forget it.

Later, I worked at Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany as a contractor. I had to drive through some sketchy areas, but carrying a gun to and from work wasn’t an option. I just had to pray that I wouldn’t be one of those unfortunate souls whose luck ran out. Thankfully, I wasn’t, but it was dumb that I had no other options.

Now, things have changed following Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s announcement on Thursday that bases were no longer gun-free zones.

Unsurprisingly, though, some people are having absolute hysterics about it.

“Troops can now request to carry their own personal firearms on base for personal protection, without having to explain why they need to protect themselves on base,” wrote Reuters chief national security correspondent Phil Stewart.

“If someone is not safe on a military base with armed guards, fences, walls, a personal police force, everyone who comes on base has their id checked, needs a sponsor if non military then we are truly screwed as a country,” wrote California congressional candidate Eric Garcia.

“Hegseth is telling us here that God gave us our legal rights as Americans including gun rights,” wrote USC Center on Communication Leadership and Policy senior fellow Barbara Starr. “He might be interested in some of the military concerns about the relationship between having personal weapons on base and suicide rates.”

“Obsessed with every culture war issue while an actual war is stalled out overseas and his boss just gave a complete belly-flop of a speech on it,” wrote The Atlantic staff writer and former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols.

I swear, it seems Nichols gets more insufferable as the days go by.

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Marines Green Light Optics for Pistol Qualifications

M17 Romeo on an M17 MHS pistol

The Romeo M17 sight (NSN: 1240-01-713-9795), seen attached to an M17 MHS handgun, is a mil-spec, fully enclosed and gas-purged red dot reflex sight with a distortion-free glass aspheric lens. It is submersible to depths up to 35 meters. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

The nation’s 911 force is now officially authorizing pistol quals with a red dot optic, provided it is one very specific system.

On March 13, Marine Administrative Message (MARADMINS) 104/26 updated that the service’s Marksmanship Program will include the paragraph, “Marines are authorized to use unit funded Using Unit Responsibility Item, M17 Romeo red dot optic, National Stock Number 1240-01-713-9795 for Combat Pistol Program (CPP) qualifications.”

In short, so long as the SIG M17 Romeo sight is used – which was designed specifically for the P320-based M17 and M18 9mm Modular Handgun System – and it is bought with unit funds, the country’s premier amphibious warfare force can run red dots in qualifications.

Completely U.S. made and constructed of forged 7075 aluminum with a beryllium copper flexure arm (more on that in a minute) the Romeo M17 has an extremely low deck height so that armorers can reuse standard iron sights, has 15 illumination settings (including three for use with Gen 3+ night vision), beats drop and submersion tests, and, importantly, has an integral loaded chamber gas deflector shield that keeps the MHS from gassing up the lens after 10-15 rounds.

SIG Sauer M17 MHS pistol with Romeo M17 MRD sight
The Romeo M17 is a hoss. This installed example we saw dropped from 10 feet onto concrete at SIG’s plant in Oregon earlier this year with nothing but cosmetic damage to the housing. SIG explained to Guns.com that the Romeo M17 has surpassed 100,000 rounds in testing without loss of zero or parts breakage.  (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
SIG Sauer Romeo M17 MRD sight flexure arm
That magical Romeo M17 flexure arm. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
SIG Sauer Romeo M17 MRD sight flexure arm
Installed near the base of the Romeo M17, the arm provides a backbone – so to speak – for the sight, cutting down on the number of parts that can fail. That, combined with the unique mounting process used on the sight that gives it six points of contact with the pistol host, makes it so tough. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

Marines deployed with the Fleet have already been seen with red dot-equipped M17 Romeo-equipped M18s and Surefire X300 white lights.

M17 Romeo on an M18 MHS pistol
A U.S. Marine with Maritime Special Purpose Force, 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable), fires an M18 pistol during a qualification range aboard San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD 28), while underway in the Caribbean Sea, Feb. 22, 2026. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)
M17 Romeo on an M18 MHS pistol
An inset of the above image, clearly showing the M17 Romeo on an M18 MHS pistol. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)

The Marines adopted the M18 in 2019, ordering 35,000 of the SIGs to not only replace legacy Beretta M9s but also the Colt M45A1 CQB .45ACP railgun and the M007 Glock.

Kurds are a people not to be trifled with. They’re tough, and motivated. Salah ad-Din, known to us as Saladin, the conqueror of Jerusalem, was a Kurd.

Ground invasion launched against Iran as thousands of US-backed Kurdish fighters storm border

Thousands of Kurdish fighters have launched a ground invasion in Iran, according to a US official.

The Kurdish militias, based across the border in Iraq, began the offensive in northwestern Iran on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump on Sunday night spoke with the heads of Kurdish militant groups in Iraq to discuss the situation in Iran.

The CIA was exploring plans to arm the Kurdish forces with the aim of sparking a popular uprising, CNN reported Tuesday.

The Kurdish groups are widely seen as the most well-organized faction of the fragmented Iranian opposition and are believed to have thousands of battle-hardened fighters.

Their entry into the war could pose a significant challenge to the besieged authorities in Tehran and could also risk pulling Iraq further into the conflict.

Asked about Kurdish involvement, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: ‘None of our objectives are premised on the support or the arming of any particular force.

‘So, what other entities may be doing, we’re aware of, but our objectives aren’t centered on that.’

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