Author: thaobh.leo@gmail.com

NEW DELHI — The United States and Iran have offered sharply different accounts of the sinking of an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean last week, with Washington rejecting Tehran’s claim the vessel was unarmed and Iranian officials insisting it was operating in a noncombat role.The United States Indo-Pacific Command on Sunday rejected Iran’s claim that the warship IRIS Dena was unarmed when it was sunk in a submarine attack in international waters off Sri Lanka on March 4. In a statement on X, INDOPACOM called Iran’s assertion that the vessel was unarmed “false.”The response followed strong objections from Tehran,…

In Beirut, Baghdad, and across the Middle East, the same pattern repeats: a leader is killed, a funeral fills the streets, and within weeks someone new is giving orders.Indeed, despite the setbacks faced by the regional network of armed groups aligned with Iran that calls itself the “axis of resistance,” it has not disappeared. U.S. forces have struck several groups linked to the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, while Israel has sustained operations against Hizballah across southern Lebanon and Beirut. In response to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Hizballah launched a series of rockets and drones into…

The TWZ Newsletter Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy. U.S. and Israeli authorities have reportedly been considering a special operations ground raid to extract or otherwise neutralize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. TWZ previously explored this exact scenario, given that this nuclear material is understood to be stored in deep underground bunkers, presenting challenges for attempting to achieve this objective from the air alone. U.S. and Israeli special operations forces have actively trained for these kinds of missions for decades, and Israel has demonstrated its ability and willingness to carry out…

The Government of the Netherlands has decided to deploy the De Zeven Provinciën-class air defense and command frigate HNLMS Evertsen in the eastern Mediterranean from this week until early April. Dutch MoD press release The frigate will contribute to the defense of the Carrier Strike Group and the defense of Cyprus and allied territory. Ministers Tom Berendsen (Foreign Affairs) and Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius (Defense) announced this today to the House of Representatives and the Senate. Minister Berendsen: “With this commitment, the Netherlands demonstrates allied solidarity and contributes to European cooperation in the protection of the international legal order.” Minister Yeşilgöz-Zegerius: “HNLMS…

Introduction I’ve been getting more and more into the colony simulation genre lately. Colony sims have long been a fan favorite of the gaming world: notoriously difficult to master, breathtaking when everything goes amazingly well, and incredibly engrossing and long-lasting. There’s no better time to jump into Colony sims, as the genre has some of the best games the strategy genre has ever seen, and some of these could even be considered for some of the best games ever made, period. The journey won’t be easy, the road to mastery is perilous and filled with dangers, but the end goal…

A former super heavyweight MMA champion has been found guilty of the murder of his 5-year-old daughter, Charlotte. The criminal now faces 27 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree charges.Robert Buskey of Schenectady, New York, is an amateur mixed martial artist with a 2-1 record inside the cage. Despite being nicknamed ‘Jitspanda,’ Buskey was best known for the power in his hands. After beginning his amateur career with a submission defeat, he would go on to win two straight by first-round knockout and capture the Cage Wars vacant super heavyweight title, before making…

Advanced violence is democratizing.  AI, in conjunction with dramatic improvements in robotics, energy production, and sensors, will increasingly enable ever-smaller groups of people to use targeted violence more effectively, and from a distance. Over time, this shift will dramatically impact all varieties of force projection: state-on-state war, various forms of low-intensity conflict, and how states enforce internal order. Perhaps understandably, however, national security discourse about the AI revolution has generally focused on more earth-shattering scenarios: superintelligence, state-to-state conflict, and the prospect of unleashing new biological weapons. These are all critical questions that deserve extensive scrutiny. But super-empowering small groups of people…

While President Donald Trump has sought to shrink the size of federal agencies since the start of his second term, the Office of Management and Budget for years has struggled to quantify exactly how many government programs there are. Since 2011, OMB has been required to create and annually update a publicly available inventory of federal programs. The agency in 2024 launched an expanded inventory pursuant to additional congressional directives and updated it in January 2025.  The Government Accountability Office in a March 5 report, however, found that OMB is not meeting all requirements with respect to the inventory. The website has spending…

By Patrick M. Cronin and David Glick Introduction Industrial endurance and allied integration are indispensable to making deterrence-by-denial against China credible under the 2026 National Defense Strategy. The Trump administration’s Maritime Action Plan rightly elevates cooperation with South Korea and Japan. But viewing these allies as a temporary bridge to U.S. revitalization understates the scale and longevity of the China challenge. What is needed is a fully integrated, long-term allied shipbuilding ecosystem, that can generate surge capacity, distributed production, and wartime repair across the Indo-Pacific. Without that durable industrial architecture, denial remains declaratory rather than operational. This essay makes that…

General Secretariat of the Gulf Cooperation Council Mar 08, 2026 General Secretariat – Riyadh His Excellency Mr Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi, Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), expressed the Council’s strongest condemnation and denunciation of the grave Iranian attack targeting a residential facility in the city of Al Kharj, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which led to the death of two innocent civilians and the injury of several others. His Excellency underscored that this criminal Iranian attack represents a flagrant violation of all international laws and norms, targeting the safety of civilians and infrastructure in clear contravention of the principles…