The Military Report

12/24/2025

12/23/2025

Big ships don’t deter modern wars — they concentrate risk, targets, and casualties in one place.

The Navy didn’t walk away from battleships because it forgot how to build them.It walked away because battleships get people killed. That lesson didn’t come from theory. It came from steel sinking and sailors drowning. Now we’re being told the answer to modern naval warfare is a 35,000- to 40,...

12/23/2025

Trump touts new “Trump-class” battleships as future flagships, though ships remain in design phase and unfunded.

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Monday announced the U.S. Navy’s intent to develop a new class of large surface combatants, dubbed the Trump-class battleships, under a proposed “Golden Fleet” initiative aimed at expanding and revitalizing American shipbuilding. Trump was joined ...

12/20/2025

They drew American blood. This was the answer.

After ISIS killed American troops last weekend, U.S. forces launched a wide-ranging strike package that hammered more than 70 Islamic State targets across central Syria. Fighters, weapons caches, command nodes—anything tied to ISIS and still standing was fair game. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth g...

12/18/2025

This wasn’t new money—it was December rent dressed up as a ‘warrior dividend.’

By the time the applause faded from President Trump’s prime-time announcement of a $1,776 “warrior dividend” for the troops, a familiar question hung in the air: How, exactly, is he doing that? The answer—first reported by Defense One—is far less dramatic than the rhetoric. This isn’t ne...

12/16/2025

Every few years, Washington rediscovers the same stunt: if you can’t fix the border, pose next to it in uniform. This week’s version comes with a historical flourish. The administration has expanded use of the 1907 Roosevelt Reservation — a 60-foot strip of federal land along the U.S.–Mexico...

12/12/2025

This isn’t a pivot — it’s a break. The White House is done pretending it can dominate everywhere, and Europe just found out the hard way.

For more than a decade, Washington lived inside a familiar frame. Different administrations used different slogans, but the structure held: China and Russia were engaged in major power competition with the United States, and America intended to contest them everywhere that mattered. China was the pa...

12/12/2025

The United States isn’t done grabbing oil tankers off Venezuela—but let’s get one thing straight: these aren’t Venezuelan ships flying the tricolor and heading for friendly ports. According to Reuters, Washington plans to keep seizing tankers tied to a shadow fleet moving Venezuelan crude to...

12/12/2025

What began as a counternarcotics mission now looks like a full-spectrum air posture aimed squarely at Caracas.

The orders from the Pentagon came down last weekend. Quietly. No ceremony. No speeches. The United States is continuing to ramp up its military posture in the Caribbean under Operation Southern Spear, a mission that started as a counternarcotics effort and has since grown teeth. What began as drug i...

12/06/2025

Pfc. Tanner Rubio’s death marks a somber reminder of the risks Marines face even far from combat.

A young Marine who had only recently begun his military career died this week in a vehicle-related training accident at Camp Pendleton, Marine Corps officials said Friday. Private First Class Tanner Rubio, 21, was fatally injured Wednesday afternoon during what the service described as a tactical ve...

12/04/2025

Twenty years, billions spent, thousands lost — inspector general says the real failure was misreading the ground truth

Every nation has moments when it’s forced to confront the distance between what it hoped to accomplish and what it actually did. A new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is one of those moments—half moral inventory, half after-action review from the ...

12/04/2025

The Times is taking the Pentagon to court, arguing the military can’t police the press for doing its job.

The New York Times filed suit Thursday against the Department of Defense, arguing that a new Pentagon press policy violates the First Amendment and gives military officials sweeping authority to punish journalists for routine reporting. The policy, imposed earlier this year, allows the Defense Depar...