GA ASI Reveals First Wildfire UAS Renderings

 

I shamelessly clipped this from "Aviation week"..   I'm wondering how much AI is having an effect on drone and UAS operation. 

A Wildfire UAS Fires a one of potentially 4 AGM-158c's

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI) released the first renderings of the proposed Wildfire uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) on Sept. 9, revealing a configuration that the company hopes will gain support from the U.S. Air Force amid a pending competition to replace the MQ-9A Reaper fleet.

Three renderings released on social media reveal a fuselage shape that for the first time lacks the familiar, upside-down-spoon profile of the satellite communications radome common to the company’s Predator A/B series.

But the renderings released on the eve of the Air, Space and Cyber convention next week also show off the full weapons capacity of the Wildfire design. One image shows the aircraft potentially equipped with up to two Lockheed Martin AGM-158C Long-Range Anti-Ship (LRASM) cruise missiles, each weighing nearly 2,800 lb. for a maximum payload weight of 5,600 lb.

Two other renderings present the aircraft with four Kongsberg Joint Strike Missiles, a 900-lb. anti-ship cruise missile.

GA-ASI shows the Wildfire UAS launching anti-ship cruise missiles at a distant naval fleet.

A GA-ASI spokesman previously said that other features being considered for the Wildfire UAS are a 10,000-nm ferry range, and an ability to swarm 100 of the aircraft together at the same time. One rendering appears to show an attack by a swarm of Wildfire UAS on a fleet of naval ships.

The renderings have been released as the Air Force looks for an affordable Massed Modular Aircraft (MMA) to backfill a dwindling supply of Reapers, which have sustained dozens of losses in combat operations against Iran and Yemen since 2024. For the first time, the MMA program threatens GA-ASI’s grip on the Air Force’s hunter-killer mission that was largely defined by the Reaper over the last 20 years. A new group of startup companies, including Swarm Aero, are likely to propose new aircraft to meet the Air Force’s goal for a $10 million MMA that still offers a hefty payload and range.

25 years later......

 

I have posted this before in remembrance of 9-11-01.  Unfortunately I believe that we as a society have forgotten what has happened, and we are importing people that believe the same way as the people that crashed into the buildings back in 2001.  I fear that we are in for a rude awakening....again.   We have a mayor of New York that is a muslim and supports the goal of the same people that caused 9-11-01. 

 When they celebrate "Muslim American Heritage Month and orders Freedom plaza to be lit green that to me is bowing to islam and sends the wrong message and we have the same governor of New York wearing a hijab in the presence of muslim men, they are putting their culture and beliefs above our own.  When you keep importing 3rd world to our world, you will make our world like theirs, look at Europe, the elites are sheltered by the poor decisions they make but the common people are having to deal with the ramifications of unfettered immigration and the grooming gangs.  It is no wonder that the "right leaning party AFD" won elections in Germany a few days ago...the regular Germans are getting pissed, despite the constant bombardment of propaganda they are getting from the state, it ain't syncing up with they are seeing.

      Well anyway, it is 25 years since 9-11-01 and the world changed for us.

  I set to post this on the scheduler thingie to drop on Sept 11, 2026.  I wrote this post back in November of 2018,  I have blogged before about Rick Rescorla, to me he went to Valhalla on the wings of Valkyries.  To use a phrase that isn't used much anymore, "He died Well".  Everyone dies, that is the truth of our existence, but some choose to run forward despite the almost certainty of death to make a difference.

 

 

 

The Battle of la Drang Valley was the first major battle in the Vietnam War. 36 years later, the first major battle of the War on Terror was the bombing of the Twin Towers.

There are many people who remember both events, but Rick Rescorla is the only person who was at the heart of both.
Rick Rescorla was born in Cornwall, United Kingdom, but was one of the most distinguished heroes in the initial battle of Vietnam. He gave his life on September 11, 2001.
 

 

Just before the collapse of WTC 2. You can see all floors fully involved with fire and         structural failure is imminent

Rescorla’s career in the military started at the age of 17 when he joined the British military. There he trained as a paratrooper and would later serve in Cyprus. At the end of his Short-Service Commission, he joined the Northern Rhodesia police before returning to London to join the Metropolitan Police Service.
Rescorla’s tenure with the Met police was short-lived and he soon emigrated to the United States where he lived in a hostel in Brooklyn. He stayed there until he was able to enlist in the United States Army. He completed basic training at Fort Dix.

After basic training, he completed Officer Candidate School and airborne training, graduating with the assignment of platoon leader.
He became infantry leader of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. Rescorla and his men were one of the first combat units on the ground in Vietnam.
In November 1965, he and his unit were involved in the battles in the la Drang Valley. One of the moments from these battles was captured by a war correspondent and appears on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once And Young. This iconic image is of Rick Rescorla holding his rifle with bayonet attached and marching forward into battle.

Rick Rescorla during the war, 1965

Rescorla and his unit fought at Landing Zone X-Ray before being extracted and provided with a brief rest. They were then instructed to return to the valley and reinforce another unit. The battles lasted three days, during which time the companies faced superior numbers but were able to hold off and drive the enemy forces back.
For his part in the war, Rescorla was honored with the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster.

Some U.S. Army soldiers air-lifted into LZ X-Ray.

After leaving active duty, Rescorla remained a reserve, retiring with the rank of colonel. He used his military benefits to study creative writing and eventually earned a law degree from the Oklahoma City University School of Law.
He would go on to teach criminal justice for three years and publish a textbook on the subject.
His teaching career was short-lived and he moved on to the world of corporate security, joining Dean Witter Reynolds at their office in the World Trade Center.
It was during his time there that Rescorla became concerned with the security of the towers. This was prompted by the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland.

The remains of the forward section from Clipper Maid of the Seas (Pan Am Flight 103) on Tundergarth Hill, Lockerbie Scotland, 21 December 1988

The bombing pushed Rescorla to invite his old friend, Daniel Hill, to assess the security of the World Trade Center. Hill was trained in counterterrorism and determined that the basement would be the easiest target for a terror attack.
The two of them used the findings to write a report to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey insisting that more security be added to the parking garage. Their recommendations were ignored due to the costs, leaving the building open to the 1993 terrorist attack.
During the 1993 attack, Rescorla was upset by the poor evacuation of the building and vowed that it would never happen again. In 1997, he became the director of security for Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley and was able to make some of the changes he wanted.

Procession of emergency vehicles at the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993. The Tower is on the far right of the frame. Photo taken by Eric Ascalon from an adjacent pedestrian walkway. 

Rescorla did recommend that the company find different office space due to the vulnerability of the building, but lease obligations made this impossible. This left Rescorla to create an emergency evacuation plan that all employees had to practice again and again.
The emergency plan ensured that Morgan Stanley employees were ready for any attacks. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rescorla heard the explosion from the North Tower and saw it burning from his office window on the 44th floor of the South Tower.
An announcement from Port Authority came over the PA system telling people to remain at their desks. Rescorla ignored the announcement, grabbed his bullhorn and ordered Morgan Stanley employees to start evacuating.

The north face of Two World Trade Center (south tower) immediately after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175

He directed the employees down the staircase and continued to encourage them when the building lurched as the second plane hit. To keep everyone calm, Rescorla started to sing as he had done for his platoon in Vietnam.

 Rick pushing people out of the building in Sept 11, 2001 saving their lives, this was the last pic that was taken of that man.

2,687 employees of Morgan Stanley owe their lives to Rick Rescorla as they were successfully evacuated. After seeing to this, Rescorla returned to the South Tower to ensure that everyone was out.
He was last seen on the 10th floor heading up shortly before the tower collapsed. His remains were never found and he was declared dead three weeks later.

The exterior support columns from the lower level of the South Tower remain standing after the collapse of the building.

Rick Rescorla was a man who saw battle with two armies and the start of the War on Terror. All but 13 employees of Morgan Stanley were able to exit the South Tower safely because of his leadership and foresight.

 Rescorla's name is located on Panel S-46 of the National September 11 Memorial’s South Pool

One of my favorite pics, it shows the indomitable spirit of the American People.

9-11-2002

"The Battle For Japan, 1944, 1945"

 

From everything that I read about the Japanese Soldier in WWII was that they were fanatical, dedicated, would sacrifice everything for the goals set by their commanders, they were imbued by a form of "bushido" or Martial spirit or the samurai spirit. Please realize that my descriptions are very simple, I could go on for pages if I wanted to do a deep dive.  I respected the Japanese Soldier of WWII for what he could do, I did not admire them  They were often cruel to the people they captured, but that was to me part of the draconian disciplinary system of the Japanese Army, where the lower enlisted were beaten by their NCO's for the smallest infractions, and they were frequently treated with disdain by their officers.  They viewed the west as "weak" especially the United States, the Pacific War was brutal compared to the European war, it matched the savagery of the Eastern front, and in some cases exceeded it because there was no quarters given by either side.  The Americans learned to be very wary of accepting "surrendering" japanese soldiers because it was frequently a ruse to kill more Americans, and if there were any wounded Americans, captured, they were almost always bayoneted by the Japanese. Like I said, very savage. compared to the War in the European Theater.  The Americans had no compunctions of using flame throwers and other weapons on japanese positions during the island hopping campaigns.  It was a very different war.

    I got this off "Quora"

n "Nemesis" The Battle for Japan 1944–45’ by Max Hastings, a British army officer is quoted as making the observation that the Japanese were first class soldiers fighting in a third-rate army.

The soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army were brave, well trained and highly disciplined. They would rather die than surrender and, consequently, fought to the death to avoid the dishonour of being captured. However, technologically the IJA was backward compared to the other key armies of WWII. It lacked a decent tank nor a doctrine of how to use the ones they did have. In open ground warfare where there was space to maneuver the IJA was hopelessly outclassed, as Slim in Burma and the Red Army in Manchuria before and at the end of the war, proved. Moreover, senior IJA leadership were often appallingly incompetent in sending their forces into battle in adverse circumstances and this manifested especially in the manner in which logistical challenges were fatally underestimated, as noted in the question. This stemmed principally from a shocking underestimation of their enemies. It was frequently assumed that the lightly burdened, fast moving Japanese soldiers would overcome their enemies quickly - as they had done in Malaya and early on in Burma- and capture all the supplies they required from their defeated enemies. But by 1943, the offensive weaknesses of the IJA had been more fully recognized, its initial victories notwithstanding. It became clear that whilst the Japanese soldier was a formidable and ferocious enemy when defending in place behind fixed defensive positions, he was much less so out in the open when attacking.

Unfortunately for the Japanese army, in all three battles mentioned (and others besides) its enemies failed to cooperate by collapsing, forcing the Japanese soldiers to retreat with little food and in difficult conditions. The wounded who could not keep up were either killed or left to kill themselves with grenades, hopefully taking a pursuing Allied soldier with them. In Guadalcanal, on the Kokoda Trail and at Imphal/Kohima, the disastrous result of their offensive failures resulted in mass starvation amongst retreating Japanese soldiers as well as death from disease. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific were bypassed and left to rot on scores of islands and atolls as the United States Navy juggernaut continued its inexorable and innovative island-hopping advance towards Japan’s home islands.

A stark example of the hopelessly unrealistic ambitions of senior Japanese commanders, and their inability to comprehend logistical challenges, was the idiotic plan to disrupt British plans to retake Burma by attacking Imphal and Kohima in northeastern India. The brainchild of General Renya Mutaguchi commanding 15th Army, it would compel Japanese forces to traverse some of the wettest and most rugged country in Asia where annual rainfall sometimes reached 800 inches, with only a tenuous logistical lifeline, mounted against an enemy with overall numerical superiority and command of the air. It also came at a time when Japanese fortunes elsewhere had taken a decided turn for the worst. Mutaguchi proved a complete incompetent but his plan was approved in Tokyo after the most cursory examination of its feasibility by higher command, possibly because Burma was considered very much a sideshow.

The result was a battle in which the Japanese soldiers fought for many weeks with their usual ferocity but with decreasing prospects of success. Worst of all the 15th Army’s already weak logistical lifeline was disrupted by Allied air attacks, and they began to starve. After Mutaguchi refused pleas from subordinates to retreat, one divisional commander took it upon himself to order his division to do so. The incompetent army commander finally had no option but to order a general retreat. But by this time the monsoon had set in, tracks and trails had become all but impossible to navigate and thousands of Japanese soldiers died of starvation, disease and/or their wounds. The despised Mutaguchi was eventually fired.

One key consequence of this calamity was that the Japanese forces available to contest Field Marshal Bill Slim’s masterful campaign to retake Burma were greatly weakened , and even their fighting spirit in the later stages of the campaign was significantly diminished.

Logistics undoubtedly proved an Achilles heel for the IJA throughout the war.

"A Field Guide To Hamburgers"

 

Yes I snagged this from "Art of Manliness" and do I have shame about it.....nope.   Now that is settled, lets get to hamburgers.  I am not a fan of "chain burgers", now if I go to some hole in the wall restaurant or some actual restaurant/bar, I will occasionally get a hamburger.  I love hamburgers, but too much beef ain't good for my cardiovascular system.  but I do occasionally imbibe.  Surprisingly Pineapple is good on burgers....and yes I am one of those heathens that like it on pizza....so there  :P  

Americans love hamburgers, and few foods have been interpreted in as many different ways. From Connecticut to Southern California and everywhere in between, cooks and grillmasters have developed their own regional takes, each with a particular ingredient or preparation methodology that sets it apart.

Regional burgers are perhaps a little less rigid than you might expect (especially when compared to regional hot dogs). While some styles have strong traditions around their toppings, most are defined less by a strict list of ingredients than by one key cooking method or signature ingredient: cheese sealed between the patties, peanut butter melted over the patty, or a pile of hot pastrami, for example.

In most cases, what matters is nailing the element that gives the burger its regional identity. Consider this a guide to the essential character of each style rather than a set of hard-and-fast rules. 

The only thing left is to either embark on the great American road trip to test them out or simply do some experimenting in your own kitchen or backyard. Dig in! 

"What would Berlin look like if Germany had won WWII

 

I snagged this off Quora, I thought it was an interesting take.  I recall reading in Albert Speer's book "Inside the 3rd Reich", the Architect and his team had created the future capital of the greater German empire after Hitler had completed his dream of conquest, Berlin would have been renamed "Germania" as I recall and there was a huge model of the capital that Hitler would frequently visit before the demands of the war took all of his time.  Albert Speer was eventually named "Armaments Minister" and streamlined the fragmented German economy and turned it into a wartime economy which should have been done a lot sooner than it was, and he mentioned it in his book,  I read that book when I was sixteen, I snagged it from my Dad, and I still have it.

This was the vision of Berlin presented by Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect. You would see a city of monumental architecture where order would be the rule of the day.

The population of the city would likely be like in the Gulf States today. That means that you would have 3 classes of people. First you would have Berlin citizens, all of which would be ethnic Germans or Austrians. The second class would be guest workers. They would be people from all over the world to do the kind of jobs that Berliners would shun: maids, janitors, construction workers, etc. Third you would have hoards of tourists, business visitors, diplomats, and foreign students who would be there temporarily.

Very likely you would have surveillance cameras on every street corner. Gestapo would be everywhere but they would wear civilian clothing and would likely keep a low profile. Jews and Gypsies would be extinct by now so the main job of the Gestapo would be to keep an eye out for any political dissidents.

Everywhere you would see signs advertising the glories of the Third Reich and urging citizens to behave orderly (don’t jaywalk, don’t litter, etc.). Berlin would probably be the wealthiest city in Europe because all the wealth of occupied countries would eventually flow there. You would have museums filled with art confiscated from other countries, grandiose monuments and statues interspersed throughout the city, and probably at least as many statues of Hitler as you had statues of Lenin in a large Soviet city during Soviet times.

Industry would probably be limited within the city to keep pollution down. Berlin would be a city of administrators, finance, art, and educational institutions. You might have industrial suburbs outside the city but more likely industry would be relegated to other German cities.

Well, that is my projection of Berlin in an alternate universe where Nazis won World War II.

"Thunderstruck"

 Posting this using my cell phone,  normally Today is "Monday Music" but, well kinda, we had a heavy electrical Storm hit several days ago, it fried all my Tv's , the modem, router, several outlets in my house, my laptop power cord, house A/C  and assorted lights.

          Assorted covers of the plugs, blew the covers off of them

        This was my modem plug......

        The surge protector.....yeah, getting replaced also.

          So since I am off from work till tomorrow, can't really post until I get to work.  I have some stuff from Amazon coming, my internet provider is sending a Tech out because the signal coming onto the house is damaged also, so the new modem  and router ain't working because the incoming signal is degraded.  Fun..fun.

"The First Soviet Defector"

One of my farcebook friends had posted this, and I shamelessly cribbed it from her.   And I did look into the book mentioned..."I Choose Freedom"  I would have bought the book, but too rich for my blood, but I do check out used book stores...maybe I will get lucky.

"Viktor Kravchenko walked out of the Soviet embassy in Washington and never came back.

April 1944. He took a train to New York. Disappeared into the city.

A few days later, he held a press conference at the New York Times. Told American reporters Stalin was a tyrant. The Soviet system was a lie.

He was 38. An engineer. A captain in the Red Army. A senior Soviet bureaucrat.

The first Soviet official to publicly defect.

He had a wife and a son back in Moscow. He would never see them again.

Stalin would spend the next 22 years trying to have him killed.

Here's how he got there.

Kravchenko was born in 1905 in Ukraine. His father was a railway worker and a revolutionary socialist.

He grew up believing in the revolution. Joined the Communist Party in 1929. Trained as a metallurgical engineer.

At engineering school he was friends with a young man named Leonid Brezhnev. The same Brezhnev who would later rule the Soviet Union.

Kravchenko rose fast. Ran steel mills. Got promoted to senior official in the war industry.

Then he saw what the system actually was.

1932-33. The Holodomor. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians starved to death.

Kravchenko was sent to villages to enforce grain seizures. Watched peasants die in their houses. Watched mothers go mad from hunger.

""People dying in solitude by slow degrees,"" he wrote later. ""Dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause.""

Then came the purges. Stalin's terror. Millions arrested. Shot. Sent to gulags.

Kravchenko's own friends started disappearing. Colleagues vanished overnight. He waited for his turn.

It never came. Instead, in 1943, he was sent to Washington with the Soviet Purchasing Commission. Job was to acquire American industrial equipment for the Soviet war effort.

He saw his chance.

For months he prepared. Studied English. Memorized the city. Planned his escape.

In April 1944, he slipped out of his Washington apartment. Took a train to New York. Held a press conference. Defected publicly.

The Soviets demanded he be returned immediately. Called him a traitor.

Ambassador Joseph Davies took Stalin's request directly to FDR.

FDR refused. Granted Kravchenko asylum.

He lived under a pseudonym for the next 22 years.

He started writing. A memoir about life inside Stalin's system. A first-person account of the famine, the purges, the gulags.

Published in 1946 as I Chose Freedom.

It became one of the most important books of the Cold War. Bestseller in over 20 countries. Translated into 22 languages. Republished 73 times in English alone.

The first major Western account of Stalin's crimes from a senior insider.

Stalin's response was immediate. The NKVD tracked Kravchenko's family in Ukraine. More than 30 of his relatives were arrested, harassed, or killed.

His Russian wife was forced to denounce him publicly. His son Valentin grew up branded ""son of a traitor to the motherland.""

But the most public attack came from France.

On November 13, 1947, the French Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises published an article titled ""How Kravchenko Was Manufactured.""

The piece claimed he was an alcoholic. A liar. A CIA stooge. That American intelligence had written the book, not him.

Les Lettres Françaises was a prestigious publication. Sartre had written for it. Paul Éluard. François Mauriac. The literary heart of the French left.

Kravchenko sued them for libel.

The trial opened in Paris on January 24, 1949. Lasted two months. Eighteen sessions. Over 100 witnesses.

Newspapers called it ""The Trial of the Century.""

The Soviet Union flew in his former colleagues. His ex-wife. His old bosses. They all accused him of being a traitor, a draft dodger, an embezzler.

A KGB officer testified that Kravchenko was mentally deficient. Kravchenko jumped to his feet.

""We are not in Moscow,"" he screamed. ""If you were not a witness, I'd tear your head off.""

Then his lawyers brought their witnesses.

Survivors of the gulag. Ukrainian refugees who had seen the famine.

The most devastating testimony came from Margarete Buber-Neumann. Widow of a German communist leader killed in Stalin's purges. Sent to a Soviet gulag in 1937. Then handed over to the Nazis under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

She had survived both Soviet and Nazi camps. She testified about both.

Simone de Beauvoir was in the courtroom. After hearing her, de Beauvoir said: ""Since I heard this German woman, I believe. I believe that Kravchenko is telling the truth about everything.""

On April 4, 1949, the court ruled in Kravchenko's favor. Les Lettres Françaises was fined 500,000 francs. Ordered to pay 150,000 francs in damages.

The French Communist Party was humiliated.

But they appealed. A higher court upheld the verdict. Then reduced the damages to 3 francs. Less than one dollar.

The court said the publicity had helped him sell more books.

He won. And was awarded one dollar.

After the trial, Kravchenko's life unraveled.

He moved to Peru. Tried to start mining ventures. Wanted to use the profits to help poor farmers.

The businesses failed one after another. His biographer later suspected the KGB was orchestrating the failures.

He moved back to New York. Lived alone. Wrote less. Drank more.

His American partner Cynthia raised their two sons under a fake name. Anthony and Andrew didn't know their father's real identity until 1965.

Andrew met his father once. He was 15.

On February 25, 1966, Viktor Kravchenko was found dead at his desk in his Manhattan apartment. Gunshot wound to the head. A note beside him.

Officially ruled suicide.

President Lyndon B. Johnson didn't believe it. Ordered the FBI to determine if the suicide note was authentic or a Soviet forgery.

The FBI eventually said the note was real.

But the details never added up. His son Andrew has spent his life arguing the KGB killed him.

Either way, he was dead. 60 years old. The man who had told the West about Stalin.

Here's what makes his story matter.

Kravchenko was the first major Soviet defector. The first senior insider to tell the world what the Soviet system actually was.

He wrote about the Holodomor when no one else would. Exposed the gulags when Western intellectuals still defended Stalin. Compared Soviet and Nazi camps when that comparison was banned in polite company.

For this, the Soviets killed his relatives. The French left called him a fraud. Sartre's friends called him a CIA stooge.

He won his case. Got vindicated in court. And destroyed in the process.

Thirty years after the trial, the editor of Les Lettres Françaises who had run the attack articles wrote in his memoir: ""Kravchenko was right.""

Three words. Decades too late.

Solzhenitsyn read about the trial verdict in a Soviet prison camp. He said it gave him a glimmer of hope. That maybe the West wouldn't stay fooled forever.

The book is still in print. Almost nobody outside Ukraine and Cold War historians remembers Kravchenko's name.

He told the truth about Stalin's crimes. The truth got him hunted for 22 years.

He died alone in a Manhattan apartment with a bullet in his head. Maybe his own. Maybe not.

Viktor Kravchenko. Engineer. Defector. Author. The man who showed the West what was happening behind the Iron Curtain.

His crime? Telling the truth too early. Too loudly. Too publicly.

His legacy? A book the Soviets couldn't kill. 30 dead relatives in Ukraine he never got to mourn.

He died vindicated. He died destroyed.

The two often go together when you tell the truth about an empire.

"What Can Iran's Drone and Missile War teach Taiwan"

I got this article from "Aviation Week" that I subscribe to in my email,  It is a good article.  I decided to add the wiki link for the "Dragon's Jaw"  I remember reading about it in a massive Vietnam war book I had in high school and later found and purchased for my personal library.

 

                                            The Book in question..

Iran's one way Attack Shahad Drones have created a "Hellscape in the strait of Hormuz

During the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1972, the U.S. military flew 871 combat sorties and lost 11 aircraft to destroy a single

bridge vital to North Vietnamese Army supply lines. The Thanh Hoa Bridge, nicknamed the

Dragon’s Jaw, was the cause of great frustration and, it was put out of action only with the use of laser- and television-guided bombs—the first generation of

precision-guided munitions.

By the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. had honed smart-munition-based warfare. Laser-guided bombs and terrain-contour-matching cruise missiles, paired with a target list mapped from reconnaissance satellites and other intelligence sources, hit critical systems across Iraq’s air defense, command-and-control and communications networks.

• Tehran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz offers lessons for Taipei
• Precision strike is no longer the exclusive domain of the U.S. or other advanced nations

With its brain-nerve-muscle connections snipped, the military of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein collapsed in the face of U.S.-led coalition forces. The dictator’s attempts to split the coalition with Scud ballistic missile strikes on Israel and Saudi Arabia failed. The Soviet-built munition’s crude gyroscopes caused it to miss targets by wide margins.

Roughly 35 years later, however, the precision strike capabilities that were once the exclusive domain of the U.S. and its close allies are accessible not only to rival powers, such as China and Russia, but also small countries defending against more powerful aggressors.

The Iran-Israel-U.S. war offers a case study in the technological shift and potential lessons for other small nations, such as Taiwan, that want to defend themselves against larger aggressors.

If Tehran’s resilience in the face of superior U.S. forces shows anything, it is that commercial products with dual uses can be rapidly retrofitted into precise weapons that can frustrate even the most advanced adversary. GPS receivers, accelerometers, satellite communications and imagery, and chips—ironically, hardware often developed decades ago in Silicon Valley with Defense Department funding—have eroded U.S. technological advantages.

Many of those technologies have been combined in Iran’s Shahed one-way drones to attack and scare off commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, hurting Gulf state economies and raising gas prices for Americans. Fixed and slow-moving targets are more vulnerable than ever.

Tehran has also shown particular sophistication using one-way attack drones and ballistic missiles—some guided with commercial accelerometers and gyroscopes—to target infrastructure critical to U.S. military operations. Precision strikes on radar systems, communication nodes and missile warning architecture is no longer solely for advanced militaries, according to a U.S. Space Command report published this year.

Countries do not necessarily need to launch their own global navigation satellite systems or reconnaissance satellites to orchestrate a precision strike campaign, the report states. “Through commercial partnerships, foreign-enabled capabilities and automated analysis, competitors can pool resources to impose disproportionate operational risk at significantly lower cost and investment,” Space Command says.

Taipei is paying attention. In a March special report to the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said the U.S.-Iran conflict showed the difficulty of defending against simultaneous missile and drone attacks and called for low-cost interceptors and stronger uncrewed aircraft system defenses.

On the other hand, Iran is demonstrating that low-cost drones and missiles are a nasty counterpunch to an aggressor. “I think we should learn from Iran, because what Iran is doing in the [Strait of] Hormuz is actualizing the Hellscape [strategy],” Cathy Fang, a policy analyst with the Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET) in Taiwan, tells Aviation Week.

The Hellscape concept predates the Iran war. The term first surfaced publicly in 2023, when then-U.S. Indo-Pacific Command head Adm. John Aquilino described a concept for hitting an incoming Chinese invasion force with a flood of uncrewed systems, thus turning the Taiwan Strait into a “Hellscape.” The idea reflected years of U.S. experimentation and observations from the Ukrainian battlefield, Aquilino said.

Taiwan has not formally adopted the Hellscape strategy but is increasingly taking on aspects of the concept, including plans to buy tens of thousands of drones alongside more conventional weapons such as anti-ship cruise missiles. The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology is developing Shahed-like attack drones such as the Mighty Hornet II.

“Iran’s asymmetric blockade tactics in the narrow, shallow chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz offer a template for exploiting geographical vulnerabilities to paralyze global maritime commerce,” says Republic of China Navy Rear Adm. (ret.) Chauluen Lin, who is an adjunct associate research fellow with Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research.

Even if low-cost, one-way attack drones, exemplified by the Shahed, cannot destroy warships, they can tie up a navy that is attempting to protect commercial shipping.

“Escorting just 5-6 slow-moving tankers through a 12-hr. transit requires upward of 10 destroyers, littoral combat ships and continuous air cover,” Lin says. “Furthermore, defending against cheap one-way attack drones and coastal cruise missiles forces escort navies to expend high-cost interceptors against low-cost targets, creating an unsustainable cost-exchange ratio.”

About 33% of China’s imports and 16% of its exports pass through the Taiwan Strait, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. Whether Taiwan would be willing to attack China’s commercial shipping is not known, but if it were pushed into an extreme situation, that could be conceivable, says Melanie Sisson, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

“China probably would think so also and would take anticipatory measures to make that [commercial shipping] less available to Taiwan in the event,” Sisson says.

For all the success Iran has had in creating havoc in the Strait of Hormuz, it has been unable to break the U.S. Navy’s distant blockade, which is crippling Iran’s economy. The roughly 81-mi. distance across the narrowest point of the Taiwan Strait is about four times wider than the Strait of Hormuz. People’s Liberation Army Navy ships enforcing a distant blockade would likely be even farther away. To break a blockade, Taiwan would need a mix of long-range weapons, Lin says.

“Taiwan can significantly weaken a Chinese blockade by threatening China’s extensive commercial shipping and energy supply lines using land-based mobile anti-ship missiles, [such as the] Hsiung Feng II/III, uncrewed surface vessels (USV), and anti-ship drone swarms,” he notes.

Explosive USVs, sometimes controlled via SpaceX’s Starlink, have helped Ukraine push back Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Credit: Ukrinform/Alamy Stock Photo

Here, the Russia-Ukraine war might be more instructive. Ukrainian USVs, anti-ship missiles and one-way attack aerial drones have pushed backed the Russian Black Sea Fleet hundreds of miles to Novorossiysk. Kyiv has been able to command USVs over great distances by relying on SpaceX’s Starlink low-Earth-orbit (LEO) communications constellation.

USVs could be useful for Taiwan as one-way attack boats, mine-laying vessels, platforms for anti-aircraft missiles or as launchpads for pallets of small drones, say Fang and Samara Duerr, another policy analyst at DSET.

However, the concept is nascent because Taipei has not approved a budget to buy USVs in large enough numbers, Duerr says. “They’re still trying to get the numbers to test, develop and deploy them and see what use cases would be most feasible in the Taiwan Strait compared to what we see in the Black Sea,” she says.

“Further, despite excitement about how USVs have revolutionized naval warfare, most Russian naval losses have been to long-range precision missiles against stationary ships in port, not surface drones,” Mark Cancian, a senior advisor with the CSIS, wrote in a 2025 report. “USV use in warfare is just beginning.”

And then there is the other problem: “We have no Starlink,” Fang says.

SpaceX has not said it plans to deploy Starlink to Taiwan, although it is activated in the nearby Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore as well as more than 160 markets in total. CEO Elon Musk has extensive business in China through Tesla and has made sympathetic statements that parallel Beijing’s position on Taiwan.

Taiwan also has restrictions on foreign-owned telecommunications companies, and SpaceX has been unwilling to change its corporate structure. However, in July, the country’s legislature authorized case-by-case exemptions, potentially clearing a path for foreign satellite operators such as SpaceX.

Taipei also has agreements for Eutelsat’s OneWeb LEO and SES’ O3b mPOWER medium-Earth-orbit constellations to support emergency government communications, should China cut undersea cables or other telecommunications infrastructure. But Fang says OneWeb’s bandwidth is insufficient and its latency too high.

Ultimately, Taipei can only guess what China will do and how best to prepare and what weapons to buy, which is perhaps the point.

“There’s this huge range of contingencies that the Taiwan government has to try to attend to,” Sisson says. “It’s just literally impossible to attend to them all.”