Nate C

Viva Italia

[Brad Garlinghouse @bgarlinghouse]

@okx Lock in.

[Nate C @NC82Rush]

@PlayStalgiaX SOCOM

[Jack Watling @Jack_Watling]

@shashj No serious person thought the SDR had been costed. And the PM should have considered this when he tripled our commitment to our allies. 'No one told me' isn't good enough. It was obvious to anyone who paid the slightest attention to the subject.

[Nate C @NC82Rush]

@UKDefJournal About the same…

[Secretary of War Pete Hegseth @SecWar]

Thanks to President Trump’s historic $1.5 TRILLION military investment, our troops will receive the LARGEST pay raise in modern history.

We are also making a GENERATIONAL investment in barracks, military infrastructure, and troop support systems.

America First = Troops First

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 NOW: SecWar Pete Hegseth reveals President Trump is instituting the LARGEST troop pay increase in MODERN HISTORY

The troops love Trump and Hegseth!

“We are also making a GENERATIONAL investment in barracks, military infrastructure, and troop support systems. America First = Troops First.” 🇺🇸

“We're also investing over $35 billion into the support systems that our military families rely on every single day.”

“Taking care of our troops isn't about just doing the right thing. It's about military readiness. When our war fighters know that their families are safe and secure and provided for, they can focus on it, the value.”

[Nate C @NC82Rush]

@PolitlcsUK Definitely always felt the lack of cheaper plantains was a problem in my life…

[Tony Blair Institute for Global Change @InstituteGC]

https://t.co/27lbhXTsjk

[Brick Cop©️ @Brick_Cop]

As we edge closer towards all Police Forces having to record traumatic incidents each Officer attends mandatorily; it’s important to realise how far gone we already are.

I was sent the below graph a few weeks before that announcement was made and it demonstrates in combat environments how rapidly soldiers’ effectiveness is eroded by constant trauma.

It also explains why frontline soldiers are rotated away from their ‘day job’ for that very reason.

Now huge disclaimer, no one is saying Police Officers experience the same traumas those in a war zone do. But they do experience constant traumatic incidents daily that the vast majority of society will possibly only experience maybe only once in a lifetime.

So what do we do about it?

Firstly - leaders need to have a conversation with the public, yes, the public; about how many Police Officers we have available to respond to 999 calls. Why? Well if you’re working six days on and you go to one traumatic call a shift, you’ve already beaten the lifetime average for a normal person in one week. We then expect that Police Officer to be rational and calm on and off duty and deal with all that trauma on their own on their days off and then come back ready to go again.

Now I could tell you what it’s like to burn out after years of doing that and how long and hard it is to drag yourself back to a job and a role that’s broken you, but that’s not the point right now.

The numbers on Response Teams are far too low to accommodate how much trauma those teams experience. That’s the fact.

Secondly, we are so focussed on ‘charter times’ that unlike the Ambulance Service, Fire Service, RNLI and Coastguard - instead of debriefing after each emergency, Police Officers are rushed on to the next one.

Why?

To keep Senior Officers happy with their ‘Charter Time’ stats.

Also as a side note - the main charter time that’s focussed on is Domestic Abuse, rightly so.

But when Policing is battered in the media about shoplifting and burglary responses, I never understand why Policing doesn’t push back and say ‘because we prioritise Domestic Abuse because there is a much higher risk of serious injury and death than there is at a shoplifting and we only have x numbers of Police Officers to answer 999 calls’. I think most reasonable people would accept that.

We are at the crest of a wave of finally realising how broken Police Officers are nationally.

If you’re a leader, it’s time to do something now, before the evidence makes you do it.

#ThinBlueLine 🚨

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

The United States has informed European allies it plans to significantly cut its military contributions to NATO, urging them to move quickly to close the gap, according to the German media outlet Der Spiegel.

Alexander Velez-Green, a senior advisor and envoy for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, briefed allies on plans during a confidential meeting last week at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels, with European officials reported to have been taken aback by the scale of the planned drawdown by the Trump Administration.

As part of the drawdown, the U.S. Armed Forces plans to commit much fewer assets to NATO’s pool of readily available forces in the case of a conflict, significantly reducing the number of deployable drones, fighter jets, aerial refueling aircraft, strategic bomber, as well as warships, submarines and other naval assets, with a roughly one-third cut in just its fighter-aircraft contribution to forces in Europe.

[Robert Jenrick @RobertJenrick]

People have asked what Reform’s no tax on overtime means for the Armed Forces Reserves.

You won’t pay *any tax* on time served in the Reserves, where it’s on top of a full time day job.

This will be a huge boost to recruitment.

Thank you to those serving in the Reserves 🇬🇧

[Nate C @NC82Rush]

@giroditalia Oh how I miss living there. 3 years of cycling paradise

[The Critical Drinker @TheCriticalDri2]

Fucking why?! Its a train. It runs on rails. Why is this being treated like some impossible engineering problem that we just can't solve? Why is this country so fucking useless?

[Raise the Black @KTB_500]

The Combined Arms Rehearsal theater is dead.

If you’re still building one in 2025, you’re not training for LSCO—you’re planning your own funeral.

Picture it: 300 leaders in a hangar, 47 projectors, 12 hours of rock-drill perfection, brigade commander walking the miniature terrain like a god scripting every bound.
Meanwhile the enemy’s recon-strike complex just watched the whole thing from orbit: thermal bloom of the hangar, 300 cell phones pinging the same tower, every vehicle parked in neat rows outside for the satellite pass.

Day-1 of war: that rehearsal site is the first precision grid removed from the map.
Day-2: every CP you just rehearsed in place is gone.
Day-3: the brigade commander is either underground or dead, and nobody has comms because we never trained without them.

GWOT taught us that perfect synchronization wins.
LSCO teaches us that perfect synchronization is a targeting signature.

Your 96-hour Exchecl and sync mat -perfect scheme dies in the first 30 minutes when:
- Every emitter is a beacon
- Every static node is a target
- Every rehearsal of record becomes the enemy’s pre-planned fire plan

Mission Command isn’t a nice-to-have.
It is the only thing that survives when the sky is full of drones and the brigade commander’s voice is a memory.

Yet we still measure readiness by how pretty the rehearsal looks, not by how violently a company can attack when higher is burning and the net is black.

Stop building theaters.
Start building leaders who can fight with a map, a compass, and two sentences of intent.

Because in LSCO the rehearsal isn’t in a hangar.
It’s the enemy dropping 40 loitering munitions on the exact grid you spent three days perfecting.

Perfection is the enemy of survival.
Control is the fast lane to the grave.

Kill the GWOT rehearsal culture or it kills you.

#RehearsalTheaterIsCoffinNail #LSCO #MissionCommandOrExtinction #CPTargetingEndsControl

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

This is the best piece on Starmer you will read today, perhaps this year

[Raise the Black @KTB_500]

https://t.co/WKfZdl1XkR

[Modern War Institute @WarInstitute]

"A division that reaches the line of departure late, congested, underprotected, or internally fragmented has already paid for poor command before the first battle starts." https://t.co/l3DyHK1EHM

[Soudal Quick-Step Pro Cycling Team @soudalquickstep]

We’re celebrating our 34th @giroditalia stage win with 3️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼 𝗖𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿 game keys for our fans.

For a chance to get one of these, just follow us and retweet this picture.

[Raise the Black @KTB_500]

The NTC exists because of a professional, free-thinking OPFOR.

That’s not hype — it’s documented from the start.

The National Training Center at Fort Irwin was stood up in the early 1980s as the capstone of the post-Vietnam training revolution led by **GEN William E. DePuy** (first TRADOC commander) and continued by **GEN Donn A. Starry**.

The entire reason for the NTC was a dedicated, full-time **OPFOR** that replicated a realistic, numerically superior Warsaw Pact-style enemy using Soviet doctrine, tactics, VISMOD equipment (T-72 look-alikes, BMPs), and **free maneuver**. BLUFOR battalions rotated through brutal force-on-force fights with MILES lasers, live fire, air, and full instrumentation — not home-station scrimmages.

**TRADOC leadership was crystal clear: do not water down the OPFOR.** In the 1978 planning meetings, senior leaders explicitly cautioned NTC management to “resist pressures to ‘water down’ the OPFOR to permit Blue Force units to make a good showing.”

Starry drove the point home: the goal was “tough, realistic training demanded by the battlefields of today” so “**no American soldier must ever die in combat because we failed to prepare them.**”

The OPFOR was professional and free-thinking by design — schooled in enemy manuals, allowed to win (and usually did), operating without kid gloves. This created **anti-fragile learning**: units got hammered, exposed weaknesses in recon, combined arms, logistics, and command, then received brutal AARs and take-home packages.

**Result?** Most Desert Storm ground forces had NTC experience. That professional OPFOR built the conventional lethality that made the U.S. Army the world’s premier ground force capable of winning decisive land conflict.

A free-thinking OPFOR isn’t a luxury — it’s the only proven way we stay lethal. Water it down for good showings or career optics and you get exactly what Starry and DePuy warned against: hollow readiness and dead soldiers when it counts.

The desert doesn’t lie. Neither should training.

[Jack Watling @Jack_Watling]

The @BritishArmy has been directed to triple its lethality. But how should lethality be measured in force design? Nick Reynolds and I have written a paper on this for @RUSI_org: https://t.co/v4ryyfuoWu

[Nate C @NC82Rush]

@FennellJW Best use of that phrase I have heard in years.