//The Wire//2300Z June 5, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: UKRAINIAN DRONE BOATS FOUND IN ROMANIAN PORT NEAR OIL TERMINAL, ONE DETONATION REPORTED. KARMELO ANTHONY TRIAL BEGINS IN TEXAS. SOCIAL TENSIONS CONTINUE IN UNITED KINGDOM.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Middle East: The conflict has continued to expand, with Iranian drone attacks taking place at Oman's oil terminals in Mina Al Fahal. Omani authorities suspended oil export operations this morning, before claiming that operations had returned to normal a few hours later. United Kingdom: Societal tensions continue as old criminal cases reach a conclusion this week. Yesterday, a group of migrants were sentenced for crimes committed during an attempted revenge killing that took place in Stoke-on-Trent back in 2021. Five years ago, this mob of migrants broke into a home and set a woman on fire in front of her child, during a cultural murder attempt that stemmed from one of them stabbing the other, triggering an honor-killing retaliation attempt. Several people were also stabbed during this attack, as a fight between rival migrant factions broke out in the street during the incident. Five of these men were recently found guilty of this attack, and earlier this week two of the attackers, Naveed Hussain and Bilal Ahmed, were sentenced to what ended up being time-served, a small fine, and community service. In Southampton, significant law enforcement operations are underway to identify rioters which pushed garbage cans toward police during the recent Southampton unrest resulting from the Nowak murder trial. So far three demonstrators have been arrested and charged, and continuing the recent trend, one individual who was arrested on Thursday has already been tried, convicted, and sentenced. This individual was sentenced to 3-5 years prison time for throwing a traffic cone in the general direction of the police, which never made contact with them. Analyst Comment: These contrasting incidents are just two of a dozen that have stoked tensions throughout the British Isles this week. As a result, these events have been piling on after the Nowak murder trial elevated public anger to new heights, and last week a different case involved a pair of migrants being acquitted, even though they broke a policewoman's nose during a street fight with officers at Manchester airport two years ago. Romania: This morning at least one (possibly up to four) Ukrainian naval drones were discovered floating in the port of Constanța. One Sea-Baby Mark II (Avdiivka) type Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) was discovered floating inside the port by workers at one of the oil terminals. Before Romanian EOD teams could respond to the scene and tow the boat to a safer location, the explosive boat self-detonated, catching locals off guard who were inside the blast zone. After this explosion, a search was conducted for other drone boats in the general area, and some reports claim that three more Ukrainian USVs were found, though the exact geolocation of these vessels has not been disclosed. -HomeFront- Texas: The Karmelo Anthony murder trial has begun in Collin County, with demonstrations and protests already set up outside the courthouse. The jury in this case has not been sequestered, and they are being sent to their own homes every night without any security or protection measures despite the activists threatening to kill people outside the courthouse. Analyst Comment: This is going to be a hot trial, with a high potential for riots no matter the outcome. Like it or not, this is already a racial thing, and the situation at the courthouse has been rather spicy even though the trial has just begun. So far, the numbers of activists and militant groups on site at the courthouse remains comparatively low; only a maximum of few dozen people have been observed, with most of the persistent protests being hosted by a handful of people who can afford to attend a protest during a workday. Nevertheless, the more hostile crowds are already on site, and the potential for riots and violence is already high, with larger crowds expected to gather over the weekend. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Based on the geolocation alone, there is nearly zero chance that the drones found in Romania were merely off-course munitions, which washed ashore after losing contact or becoming damaged. The main explosive boat that was discovered, was found deep inside the port (past multiple breakwaters) nestled directly adjacent to a major oil terminal where oil tankers normally are berthed to onload petroleum. More broadly, drone boats washing ashore (either from some kind of mechanical failure, or due to combat damage) is not exactly a rare sight along the Black Sea coast as these things happen sometimes in war. However in this case, it would be extraordinarily unlikely for this vessel to end up where it did, just based on the drifting of the tides. The addition of three other drones, all with independent guidance systems and control measures, also being found in the same area decreases the chance that this was an accident. The drones found outside the port can be explained away easily, but the one found deep inside the port right next to a highly flammable oil terminal of all things, is harder to justify. As a result, this was almost certainly a deliberate action, though the motive for such is questionable. Romania and Ukraine are on the same side during this conflict, and it would make no sense to target Romanian oil, because Ukraine itself is one of Romania's biggest clients. It's possible that this attack is a false-flag incident conducted by Russia, but that's unlikely at the moment because Russia has not had much success in mimicking Ukraine's drone boats, and if this was the Russians it would be an uncharacteristically well-detailed deception operation. On the other hand, it's also possible that this was a false-flag attack conducted by Ukraine, using their own drones (which were planned to detonate before being discovered), but due to either jamming or some other mistake, did not explode before the sun rose this morning and the drones were discovered. Regardless of what the investigation eventually discovers, it is almost certain that these drone boats were genuinely Ukrainian, and did not end up inside the harbor by accident. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z June 5, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: UKRAINIAN DRONE BOATS FOUND IN ROMANIAN PORT NEAR OIL TERMINAL, ONE DETONATION REPORTED. KARMELO ANTHONY TRIAL BEGINS IN TEXAS. SOCIAL TENSIONS CONTINUE IN UNITED KINGDOM.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Middle East: The conflict has continued to expand, with Iranian drone attacks taking place at Oman's oil terminals in Mina Al Fahal. Omani authorities suspended oil export operations this morning, before claiming that operations had returned to normal a few hours later. United Kingdom: Societal tensions continue as old criminal cases reach a conclusion this week. Yesterday, a group of migrants were sentenced for crimes committed during an attempted revenge killing that took place in Stoke-on-Trent back in 2021. Five years ago, this mob of migrants broke into a home and set a woman on fire in front of her child, during a cultural murder attempt that stemmed from one of them stabbing the other, triggering an honor-killing retaliation attempt. Several people were also stabbed during this attack, as a fight between rival migrant factions broke out in the street during the incident. Five of these men were recently found guilty of this attack, and earlier this week two of the attackers, Naveed Hussain and Bilal Ahmed, were sentenced to what ended up being time-served, a small fine, and community service. In Southampton, significant law enforcement operations are underway to identify rioters which pushed garbage cans toward police during the recent Southampton unrest resulting from the Nowak murder trial. So far three demonstrators have been arrested and charged, and continuing the recent trend, one individual who was arrested on Thursday has already been tried, convicted, and sentenced. This individual was sentenced to 3-5 years prison time for throwing a traffic cone in the general direction of the police, which never made contact with them. Analyst Comment: These contrasting incidents are just two of a dozen that have stoked tensions throughout the British Isles this week. As a result, these events have been piling on after the Nowak murder trial elevated public anger to new heights, and last week a different case involved a pair of migrants being acquitted, even though they broke a policewoman's nose during a street fight with officers at Manchester airport two years ago. Romania: This morning at least one (possibly up to four) Ukrainian naval drones were discovered floating in the port of Constanța. One Sea-Baby Mark II (Avdiivka) type Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) was discovered floating inside the port by workers at one of the oil terminals. Before Romanian EOD teams could respond to the scene and tow the boat to a safer location, the explosive boat self-detonated, catching locals off guard who were inside the blast zone. After this explosion, a search was conducted for other drone boats in the general area, and some reports claim that three more Ukrainian USVs were found, though the exact geolocation of these vessels has not been disclosed. -HomeFront- Texas: The Karmelo Anthony murder trial has begun in Collin County, with demonstrations and protests already set up outside the courthouse. The jury in this case has not been sequestered, and they are being sent to their own homes every night without any security or protection measures despite the activists threatening to kill people outside the courthouse. Analyst Comment: This is going to be a hot trial, with a high potential for riots no matter the outcome. Like it or not, this is already a racial thing, and the situation at the courthouse has been rather spicy even though the trial has just begun. So far, the numbers of activists and militant groups on site at the courthouse remains comparatively low; only a maximum of few dozen people have been observed, with most of the persistent protests being hosted by a handful of people who can afford to attend a protest during a workday. Nevertheless, the more hostile crowds are already on site, and the potential for riots and violence is already high, with larger crowds expected to gather over the weekend. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Based on the geolocation alone, there is nearly zero chance that the drones found in Romania were merely off-course munitions, which washed ashore after losing contact or becoming damaged. The main explosive boat that was discovered, was found deep inside the port (past multiple breakwaters) nestled directly adjacent to a major oil terminal where oil tankers normally are berthed to onload petroleum. More broadly, drone boats washing ashore (either from some kind of mechanical failure, or due to combat damage) is not exactly a rare sight along the Black Sea coast as these things happen sometimes in war. However in this case, it would be extraordinarily unlikely for this vessel to end up where it did, just based on the drifting of the tides. The addition of three other drones, all with independent guidance systems and control measures, also being found in the same area decreases the chance that this was an accident. The drones found outside the port can be explained away easily, but the one found deep inside the port right next to a highly flammable oil terminal of all things, is harder to justify. As a result, this was almost certainly a deliberate action, though the motive for such is questionable. Romania and Ukraine are on the same side during this conflict, and it would make no sense to target Romanian oil, because Ukraine itself is one of Romania's biggest clients. It's possible that this attack is a false-flag incident conducted by Russia, but that's unlikely at the moment because Russia has not had much success in mimicking Ukraine's drone boats, and if this was the Russians it would be an uncharacteristically well-detailed deception operation. On the other hand, it's also possible that this was a false-flag attack conducted by Ukraine, using their own drones (which were planned to detonate before being discovered), but due to either jamming or some other mistake, did not explode before the sun rose this morning and the drones were discovered. Regardless of what the investigation eventually discovers, it is almost certain that these drone boats were genuinely Ukrainian, and did not end up inside the harbor by accident. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

Look for the smoke. It's going to be a red smoke. Whatever your red smoke. Okay, I got the red smoke. Sun run north to south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke. Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Roger, keep your fires west of the smoke. Commander's initials Bravo golf. Keep the fires west of the smoke. We have three smoke pops. Okay, copy that. I am visual the smoke. I'm going to keep my fires west of the smoke and west of the road. Roger, I see you. There are good days and bad days. Sometimes what starts off as a good day turns into a bad day real quick. But make no mistake, those bad days can always get worse if you're getting shot at with heavy weapons. If you are unfortunate enough to be caught in such a predicament, but are lucky enough to have air support overhead, it would be rather beneficial if those rockets and bombs were to hit the enemy instead of you. When seconds count, you need something that can tell the pilot where you are located, where the enemy is located, and where the bombs need to go. All with no confusion, no foul-ups, and with everybody understanding where everything is happening. From World War II up until the global war on terror, this effect was achieved by everything from smoke grenades to signal flares. But today, we've got something better. Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. Today, we're going to talk about one of the most important tools on the modern battlefield, ATAK, or Android Team Awareness Kit. As of 2026, a lot has changed, and this ecosystem is now a lot more accessible and vastly more useful to the soldier and prepared citizen than it ever has been before. So, we've got a lot to cover, starting with a bit of historical background, moving to the hardware that you will need, downloading and installing the app, installing plugins, some helpful configuration settings, and in part II, we will be demonstrating how all of this comes together in the real world with a fictionalized scenario that will help us understand how we can get out of the office and put this stuff to good use. Fear not, we will get down into the weeds of how to really get the most out of A Tac in due time, but for now, let's get started with the basics. However, we do have to cover a lot of background information that if we understand right up front, it will make it vastly easier when we get into the more advanced stuff. I know you want me to just get to the point, but understanding A Tac along with a lot of the doctrine and history behind it will make things a lot easier in the long run. From the ultra beginners to experienced users who might have been using A Tac professionally for years, there's always something new to learn, and we're going to approach this in a more well-rounded way so that there's something in it for everyone. I would be willing to bet that even if you don't have a use for A Tac, this series will be informative in other ways, and you might just learn something new. But for those who don't care and just want the part covering what to tap on the screen to get started, use the timestamps below to skip to whatever section you want. But for everyone else, let's start with some history. So, what is A Tac? A Tac is a mapping application that was originally developed for one simple purpose, to allow soldiers on the battlefield to share geospatial data with each other. It allowed soldiers to know where they were at and where the rest of their team were located on a shared map, all in a small enough package to be carried anywhere, such as an Android smartphone. Think of this like the mini map from Call of Duty, always there at the bottom of your screen showing where you and your team are located on the map. At the time A Tac was in early development, the smartphone was just becoming a thing in the civilian world, but the military needed cool tactical acronym to refer to these devices, EUD or end user device. So, when you see the term EUD in reference to the Tac ecosystem, just know that it's referring to your smartphone that is running the A Tac app. Over time, the simple goal of situational awareness on the battlefield has expanded to an entire ecosystem, which resulted in the A from A Tac being dropped. So, now the whole project is just referred to as Tac, with only the Android app itself being called A Tac. On the military side, you will also see the ATAC acronym meaning Android Tactical Assault Kit. The term Android Team Awareness Kit is the softer, more civilian-friendly term that is a bit more non-combat oriented for civilian agencies. In the civilian procurement world, where human resources is involved, they might not like a local fire department, for example, using something with tactical assault in the name. So, the term Team Awareness was implemented in order to appeal to a wider audience. This is helpful to know right up front because throughout the documentation and help guides and things like that, you may see differences in terminology that is describing the same thing but for different customers. Over the years, this project has expanded beyond its simple goal to now be much more than a very basic GPS app. ATAC is now the de facto gold standard for most military endeavors around the world. The public services are also starting to catch on, and the wildland fire community has started to embrace ATAC for managing fire crews in the backcountry because in many ways the concerns are the same. The paradox with ATAC is that it's hard to actually answer the question of what can it do because it can do so much and it's far easier to show rather than tell when it comes to what it can be used for. For many people who do serious work, ATAC is one of the tools that is intended to make the worst day of their life just a little bit easier. On the south east side of highway four. Tracking. I got the square building and the uh rectangle building to the northwest. We have a square building and a rectangle building to the northwest. And on the big square building there's a uh uh square rectangular like holding pond next to it. Do you see that? >> Yes, just west of it. >> It's on the west side. It could be the head of light flashing across the western side. Okay, you do see the uh rectangular shaped building next to it, correct? Yes, sir. That's affirmative. Is the mosque uh do not engage the mosque. Roger. The square building is the mosque or is it the rectangle? >> The rectangle. >> building is the mosque. Roger that. Let's go. Roll it in. Okay, in front of the mosque there's three vehicles oriented east-west. Do you see those? Yes. Affirmative. Got a vehicle moving out. One of the vehicles is moving right now. 10-yard now cleared to engage the moving vehicle. New nominals. >> Roger that. Cleared to engage. Any personnel around you see? Send by machine gun. >> Yes, more personnel. Cleared to engage those also. Affirmative. Let's go. Ready. Ready. Good shot. Direct secondaries. People running to the west. >> Missiles away. More people are standing in the vehicle and more people cleared to engage all those. If you ever sit down and listen to the audio tape recordings of firefights or radio chatter from any of the conflicts the United States has ever been involved in, one of the things you might notice is that people spend a considerable amount of time using their radio to talk back and forth to describe something that they are seeing from their position. This is because in the past we had radios and that's pretty much all we had, radios and paper maps. We did not have tools like ATAK in the past, but we've got them now and we can make good use of what we've got. These historical observations help us to start understanding where something like this might be needed. So, you might be sold and you want to try out ATAK. What hardware do we need to get started with? Well, we have a few different options, but preferably we're going to use an Android based smartphone. The ATAK app itself is primarily for Android. However, iTAK does exist for iOS devices. This is not the same application and as of right now it is known to be a bit buggy with some of the more advanced features of the ecosystem. If all you have is an iOS device and you want to give it a try, go for it, but just know that if you experience some frustrations or connectivity issues or some plugins aren't available, just know that chances are if you're having an issue with iTAK, that issue might have been already solved in Android. So, just be aware of that. Don't get frustrated with iTAK and then throw off the entire system. Know that the two are very different applications. There is also WinTAK for Windows desktop PCs, but again, it experiences the same issues of being ported from Android to work with Windows. Not all of the plugins are available, and to be honest, it's kind of a trash system to use. There are other options on the horizon. However, I would strongly recommend starting with the standard Android smartphone hardware just to get started. You can use pretty much any modern Android device. However, if you have some data security concerns, or if you are operating in an environment where you want to reduce your digital signature, you may want to just go and get a refurbished Android smartphone that you can use solely for iTAK. Samsung devices in particular are known for working with iTAK very well, and you can see that there are a lot of accessories that are specifically designed for these Samsung smartphones, like cases and cables, because over time Samsung devices have traditionally been what is procured by the government. In terms of the app itself, it's going to require a lot of permissions, and this app is going to dig really way down into the device that it's installed on because of what it can do. What phone you use is, of course, a personal choice, and it's really up to you. As for me personally, my line of work involves using iTAK daily, so I have a way more intense setup than most people will ever need, and I will have to get into this in a future video because it's too much to cover now. But for the purposes today, I will be showing how to install iTAK on a stock Android device. The reason for using stock Android is because iTAK is not the only application that I need to use personally. Remember, iTAK is just one tool on the multi-tool that is the smartphone, and some of the other apps I need don't run super well on the privacy-centric operating systems. Now, to download the app itself, you might be thinking, "It's installing an app. How hard can this be?" Well, it's not that simple. There are two ways to download the app, and they are not the same. You can download the app from the Google Play Store, which is easy enough, or you can download the APK from the tak.gov website along with the plugins. Now, the Google Play Store version is much quicker and easier to get set up, but not all of the plugins are listed in the Play Store. All of the crucial ones are, such as data sync and tak chat, but there are some plugins that are publicly available to we civilians which are not on the Play Store just yet, such as the reports plugin. There are also some third-party unofficial plugins on GitHub or other websites as well, which are mostly just smaller projects at the moment, but this is growing over time. So, just keep in mind if you are watching this in the future, a more substantial market for third-party ATAK plugins is very likely to develop over time. They're not all in one place, they're not all in one app store, and we'll have to get together a list of more useful ATAK plugins for the future. Personally, I would recommend getting the APK for ATAK from the tak.gov website and sideloading it in that way. If you want to download all of the publicly available plugins anyway, you might as well get everything at once. When you go to download ATAK, it has the option to select which plugins you want in the zip file that you're going to download. You may not use all of these plugins, and I would strongly recommend not having all of these loaded because some of them aren't really useful and they're kind of annoying to have on your screen all the time, but it's helpful to have these saved away for a rainy day just in case. It looks like a super scary government-only website, but rest assured any regular person can create an account on tak.gov. The part that's annoying is that they've instituted a passkey type infrastructure, so you'll need a third-party app on your phone to get a special code every time you want to log in. This is industry standard in the tech world now, but for normal people it's a hassle. So, don't be afraid, create a burner account on tak.gov if you want, and once you're in, you will see that there is a lot of content that isn't on the public-facing side of the website, including a lot of educational content on how to use certain tech features. But most importantly, if you want access to all of the plugins that quietly get released to the public with zero notice, you'll need an account. Honestly, I just log in once every couple of months to see what plugins just miraculously showed up on the website for me to download. But if you want to just get started really quickly without any fanfare, you can install the A Tak app right from the Google Play Store, which is what we're going to do today. Once again, if you're using the Google Play Store version, it's a lot simpler and you just go to the Play Store and search for A Tak and download it just like a normal app. Now, while this app is downloading, you can find some plugins if you like. These are going to install like separate apps and you're going to activate them or turn them on inside A Tak. Depending on the plugin, you may or may not get a prompt to load in the plugin and activate it. From the Google Play Store side of things, it's just going to look like a normal app. Same thing if you download the zip file with all the plugins in it from the tak.gov website, you're going to install the main A Tak app and go through the settings and then you can install the APKs for the plugins, which again install like normal apps. And opening up the app for the first time will walk us through the setup process. Now you see why you may need a tutorial just to install a simple smartphone app. A Tak is legendary for having an obnoxious number of disclaimers during the install process. Why is this? Remember, this app was not meant for you. It was meant for soldiers. And what the developers are trying to do with this setup wizard is make it nearly impossible to have connection issues later on. You don't want private Mukatelli to suddenly not be connected to the unit's network because he set up the app wrong or he hit the wrong button and fat-fingered something during the setup process. So they make absolutely sure that you can't mess this up during the setup process. I'm sure you Marines out there will find a way to break it, which is fair enough, but for most everyone else, that's what the setup process is meant to do. Personally, it's not really a concern for me to just hit yes to everything because I use A Tak on standalone devices that are not the same phone that I use for daily life. Now that we have the app fully installed and all of the permissions handled, let's take a look at what we see on the screen before we go monkeying around in different menus. On the top left, we have the compass rose. Tapping this will toggle the map between north up and the direction you are facing. This will use your phone's compass to determine which direction you are going and this mode is mostly useful for driving in a vehicle because it's a lot smoother and not as jittery when you're standing still. Tapping and holding will bring up a sub-menu which will allow you to tap to rotate and also toggle on the 3D tilt mode for more perspective. Both of these you tap to activate and tap again to lock. To disable both the rotation and the 3D tilting, you press and hold and press and hold again to close the sub-menu. When it comes to navigating both the rotation and the 3D tilting, use two fingers to rotate around a point as you might expect and two fingers moving up and down the screen together to change the angle you want. I would recommend leaving both the rotation and the 3D tilt turned off unless you really need it and then turn it back off again. This is because if you leave your map tilted at, for instance, a 45° angle, it can be a little misleading when it comes to perspective and if you fold this back up on your chest and open it up again later on, you might not remember which perspective you locked it at. Sometimes in life, it's a good idea to anticipate what you might need and know how your monkey brain might react if you're getting shot at. Keeping the map locked, centered on your location, north up, with 0° of tilt makes sure that you can flip your phone down and know exactly what you're supposed to be looking at. No forced perspective. We don't want any cool 3D views and impressionist art projects when we've got a situation to take care of. Plus, the rotation and view angle function are really sensitive when you're using gloves or have a slight bit of moisture on the screen and I have found that the slightest bump will teleport my map to the North Pole randomly. So, to prevent this, I just leave the map north up and just straight down. Underneath the compass rose, we have the self-location button, which brings you back to your own location if you have your location data turned on. This is very helpful if you're working in a different area and you don't want to have to re-find yourself on the map again. One tap will snap your view back to your exact location. On the top right, we have the action bar, which is probably the most important feature to understand getting started. Think of the action bar is like a quick access menu for all of the features of TAC, to include plugins. This allows us to have easy and quick access to certain tools without having to open up any other menu and scroll around for different tools. Here's a quick tip. Tap and hold anywhere on the screen to toggle the action bar on and off. A lot of times, people will accidentally make their action bar go away and probably forget how to bring it back. So, just remember, tap and hold anywhere on the map to bring it right back. Up next, the toolbar. This is an extension of the action bar and holds all of the other items that can't fit on the action bar. The action bar is for quick access and the toolbar is for everything else. Hitting the hamburger menu at the top right will open up the toolbar and we can see all of the other features we can use in ATAC. If you have a plugin installed, the chances are you'll be able to access that plugin from here and depending on the size of your phone screen, this may be a two-wide column or a three-wide column for those of you who have larger screens. But, all of the tools are listed here regardless. Now, you might have noticed, if you're following along, that my action bar looks a little bit different than yours if you have just installed ATAC. This is because we can customize the action bar to add or remove things that we don't want. For instance, let's say that I don't need the shape drawing tool up in the action bar. I can open up the hamburger menu and tap the pencil icon to edit what tools are in the action bar. Dragging a tool from the toolbar will place it in the action bar for quick access and if there's something that you don't want in the action bar, you can drag it back down to the toolbar to delete it. Note that this will not delete that item from your app. It just removes it from the action bar. Tapping the save icon will save your toolbar or action bar arrangement, and you're good to go. You can also tap the bulletized icon here to change the layout of the toolbar if you like it to be more of an itemized list, and you can also create different toolbars altogether so that you don't have items or tools cluttering up your menu that you don't need. I prefer to keep things simple and leave every tool here. I think that creating separate toolbars is too complicated for field use, and in the heat of the moment, you don't want to have to have a need for a tool, but you can't find it because you created a bunch of different toolbars for different things. Leave the action bar for quick access items, and leave the toolbar for literally everything else. At least that's my own preference. Within the toolbar, we can scroll all the way down to the bottom to find one of the most important menu items in the entire app, settings. [snorts] So, before we get too deep into this, let's pause for a moment and make some changes to the initial settings that we can change after a fresh install. You may or may not want to make these changes, but these are the things that I personally change right up front whenever I set up a new device. First up is my location setting in Android. Like I mentioned, this is not within the ATAK app itself. This is within my Android application or my Android operating system. I go in and I turn off the location permissions for ATAK. There is no option in ATAK to turn off your self marker completely, which makes it harder for video production on my end. But personally, I'm also not using ATAK in the way that it was designed. I don't need the team awareness part of the app, and I don't need to share my location with others. So, I can just turn this completely off within Android unless I really need it for something like land navigation. So, if you have a job or you have a career field where you need to share mapping data with people who you may not know or with a small team where you don't want to have your own location, you know, doc'd on the map, just know that if you look at that blue triangle, that blue triangle is your self marker and it is going to stay on the screen no matter what unless you turn off your location data within Android. Future versions of A Tac may correct this, I don't know, but for right now this is the work around. Along the same lines, the self marker location or self marker location box is probably going to be activated on screen when you install A Tac for the first time. If you do not want that feature, you can turn it off. We go to settings, control preferences, additional self coordinate controls, self coordinate information, and I personally set it to do not display. This is again purely optional and if you turned off your location in the Android menu, this won't matter so much, but it's going to declutter the screen because we're not using location data for now. If I was using this app for land nav, I might leave this turned on so that at a glance I could see my MGRS grid coordinate, which is handy. Another more advanced setting that I change because I am using A Tac with A Tac server, which we'll have to get into later on because that is one rather deep rabbit hole, is I change my reporting preferences. So, I go to settings, call sign and device preferences, reporting preferences, and I make sure that send contact information is turned on. This allows you to be able to be seen not physically on the map, but when you open up A Tac, you will populate in everyone else's contacts who's also on the same server with you. This will allow users to see when you're kind of online and when you're offline. If you have your location data turned off, you're not going to be populating on anybody else's map, but your username, your call sign is going to show up in the contacts tab for everybody else, which is helpful if they need to send you a message. I also make sure that I toggle the hide my current location box to on. Checking this box will, you guessed it, hide your location. Once again, I personally am using A Tac via A Tac in a very non-standard way. Normally, A you want to share your location with everybody else, right? Well, sometimes we don't want to share our physical location, but we may want to share location data that's not our own. We may want to drop points on a map and share those with other people without actually explicitly doxing our exact GPS grid. Selecting to hide your current location does exactly that. I prefer this arrangement because this is going to allow things like geo chat to work when we start talking about the chat functions of A will get in will get more into this, but this is also going to prevent others from seeing your location if you're using somebody else's tax server, for example. Another setting that I change is contact preferences, so I go into settings, call sign and device preferences, contact preferences, and I uncheck the box as publish phone number just to be safe. Remember the setup wizard earlier? Some permissions are needed for things that aren't really seen on the front end to just yet. And in the case of phone numbers, this is used for setting up voice calls with certain plugins. So, I myself prefer to just set it to off just so that I don't accidentally docs my phone number if I hop in somebody else's server. It's probably not necessary for 99% of you out there, but it's a good safety setting just in case. And finally, the last thing I do is to change my call sign. I go to settings, call sign and device preferences, call sign preferences, and I put in an appropriate call sign. This is traditionally the very first step that you're going to do when you log in with A and it's mostly useful for those of you who are using A with A server or with a small group of people. This is where you would put in your call sign. You can make up whatever one you want. This is not like a ham radio call sign, and for most of you who are just using A by yourselves, this is going to be completely irrelevant because A is going to populate a random word here anyway, and you don't really need to change your call sign if you are just using A for things like land nav or to visualize KMZs or other types of data. So, if you're using A by yourself, don't worry about it. It's not really necessary. Now that we know the differences between the action bar and the toolbar, and we've configured our initial settings, let's take a look at a few tools that might be helpful to use right out of the box. First up is the imagery tab, otherwise known as the maps tab or tool. This is how you change the background imagery between different maps. Personally, I like to have the map icon in the action bar because I frequently switch back and forth between satellite imagery and other more dark mode maps for use at night so I don't ruin my night adaptation as much. Tapping the map icon will open up the imagery menu, and we have three choices across the top. We have imagery, mobile, and favorites. For now, the only one you want to be in is the mobile tab. This will allow you to switch between different preloaded map layers. Now, this tab is labeled mobile because we are currently streaming this map data from the internet. This is just like Google Maps or Apple Maps. So, as we zoom in and out, we can see the base map updating after a couple of seconds of moving around. Yeah, it's slower than your normal Google Maps or Apple Maps, and for most people this is perfectly fine because as you move around and zoom in and out, A-Tac will cache what you have already seen. This is particularly helpful for some very specific situations out in the field. Just as a field expedient example today, let's say we're working search and rescue and we're we've shown up to the hiking trail, we've shown up to the hiking path to find some overdue hikers. When you show up to the command vehicle parked at the trailhead, you're probably going to be pulling in there really quickly. You're probably not going to have any idea where you're going to go. You probably don't have any details of who's missing, where they went missing, what trail, or anything. You're coming into the situation blind. You've just pulled up in the parking lot, go, right? Most of the time, you're probably going to have internet access. This is 2026. Most search and rescue teams, most private people, even who spend a lot of time in the outdoors, are probably going to have something like Starlink or an internet hotspot. Again, this is 2026. There are many places in the US that do not have cell service, but most of the time most places where people are going to do say for instance go missing at, the trailhead usually does have internet access in most cases. Not always, but most. So, generally speaking when you're going to be showing up to a situation like this, there's going to be an information overload. You're going to probably get a packet of information, instructions, communications protocols. You're going to be giving a lot a lot of information all at once. So, what it would be really nice is if a lot of the information that you're going to bring to the table yourself is already taken care of, right? Well, one of the things you're probably going to do is have to sit there and wait for the rest of the team to show up. And while you're doing that, while you have internet access, while you have either your own personal Starlink or the command center's uh Starlink or some kind of internet access, just open your kit up. Literally, just open your kit up and uh zoom to the map that you want. Go to your area, find out where you're at, and just spend some just spend five five or six minutes scrolling in and out of the area you're going to be operating in. This sounds really stupid simple, but honestly, if I could just get most people to do that, it would be so much more informative. If you were to take 2 minutes and zoom around the area you're going to be uh stepping off into, just take a look at the trail. You don't need to know exactly where every mountain peak, where every river, where every trail, where every road is. You don't need to know that. Just spend a few minutes of zooming in and zooming around. And while you're doing that, while you're doing that initial intelligence preparation of the battle space, that very quick look of I've never been here before in my life. This is totally unfamiliar terrain. Let me just take a few minutes to zoom around, pinch in and out, pan around the area and see where I'm at, right? While you're doing that, ATAK is caching what you're looking at. So, even if you get the call and you say, "Look, we got to go right now. We've got to go run down the trail because we've the situation is much more serious than we thought. We've got to go right now." You can zip your kit up, and guess what? ATAK has cached everything that you looked at. So, you if you don't have time to sit there and and actually physically download an offline map, if you don't have time to get KMZs or map files from say your command center, you just show up, you sprinted up, you're breathless, you're you're you're you're tired already, and you've got to go step off to a trail right now, you actually have something to work from. It's minimal, it's not ideal, but it's something. And that's really what a lot of this stuff baked into ATAK is all about. You would not ordinarily get that from the training manuals, you would not get that from the brochure, and you're not going to get that from say many other competitors, for instance. So, ATAK has these little tiny features baked into it that actually make it really great for emergency response if and when time is of the essence. It's not perfect, but it's something. Now, you don't want to get into the habit of doing this all the time because what you may want to be tempted to do is roll up to a disaster, roll up to a crisis, and you just zoom in and out, pan in and out, and cache the maps. If you have the time, it would be a very fantastic idea to do it properly, download offline maps, load your information in ahead of time, right? 9/10 of success is preparation, right? So, download maps ahead of time if you have the time, but if you don't, if you're thrown into a bad situation, if you don't know where you're going, you don't know what the situation is, and you're and you're just kind of left to sink or swim, ATAK can help you out with that sort of thing. So, the caching feature in ATAK has gotten me out of a bind many times, especially when I've loaded in maps, I've loaded in trail maps, I've loaded in all the KMZs I have, and then I end up walking right off the edge of the map, right? I've walked into the the area that I had not never thought I would be in. So, sometimes that helps when you cache the area around the place you're going to be in, that might help you as well, especially to get you out of a bind. So, what if you want some other kinds of maps? Like I said, by default, ATAK will stream map data to your device using your phone's internet connection, and when you load up ATAK for the first time, you will probably not have the maps that I have shown here today. By default, ATAK will come with a few maps, but I would strongly recommend adding in many other maps, and this is a very good way to segue into showcasing the import tool. The import tool is the way that you're going to add in all kinds of data to ATAK. Anything and everything that needs to be added into ATAK is imported using this one tool. If you have a KMZ file to add into your map, this is the tool you're going to use, and it's incredibly simple because the import tool recognizes which kind of data you are trying to import and puts it in the appropriate spot. Whether it's a hiking trail or a photograph, ATAK will ask you where it needs to go. As an example, let's use the import tool to add in some different kinds of base maps. Going over to GitHub using the link below or just Googling ATAK maps, the user Joshua Fuller has compiled XML files for pretty much any map that you would ever need. These are files which allow us to access the streaming sources for most common base maps. From the main ATAK maps GitHub page, we can click releases and then the ATAK maps zip file. We can save this zip file to our downloads folder on our phone or wherever you want, it doesn't really matter. Then, within ATAK, we open up the import tool, tap local SD, and we can navigate to the folder that we saved the zip file to. Select the zip file and hit okay. Depending on what you are trying to import, you will probably get a prompt to either copy or move the data to the ATAK folder. Personally, if I get this prompt, I always tap copy because I like to keep my data separate, but it's a personal choice, it doesn't really matter. Once we click copy, the import tool will bring in our map layers, and it will recognize that these are map layers, which is handy. You don't need to unzip the file, just import it using the tool. So, we can open up our map tool, and there we go. We have a lot more options for streaming maps, including Google and Bing satellite imagery, which is handy to have. Now again, just to be clear, this zip file just contains the data links for various streaming map sources. You can add your own. It's just that this one is pre-made for us and is a really good source to use. But, you are not downloading offline maps, but rather a way to get offline maps within Avenza Maps. To download the entire globe offline, if that's what you wanted to do, that would be dozens of terabytes of data at least, and no phone on the market could ever hold all of that offline map data. So, what do we do? Well, for the most part, we stream various map sources when we have internet access, and when we need an offline portion, we download those specific sections as we need them. Personally, as a data hoarder myself, I would like to have maps of the entire planet at every zoom level completely offline, but that is simply not possible due to storage space constraints. If you want to download a section of offline map, it's pretty simple to do, but it might take a long time depending on how big of an area you want to download. You may need to do this in sections bit by bit. Once you have the incredibly handy the Avenza Maps data loaded in via the import tool, you can open up your map tab and select which base map you want to download offline. From here, you can tap the tiny arrow at the very bottom right, which opens up the downloader tool. Tap select area and choose whatever shape you want. In this case, I'm going to choose rectangle. Now, Avenza has what they call three-point entry, which takes some time to get familiar with for drawing a lot of the shapes that we use. In order to work with a stylus or gloved hands, we have to tap the first corner, the second corner, and then the third corner, which gives us the depth of the shape. If you mess up, you can always tap the back button and start over. Once you tap that third corner, the shape fills out and you can select the detail that you want. Remember, we're dealing with a sophisticated tool here, and every time we zoom the map in and out, that's actually a different layer, sort of like how we open up Google Maps and we zoom in too quickly and we we have to wait a second for our phone to clear up the image by downloading that level that we are zoomed in to. Avenza lets us select which zoom levels to download data for and we can use the slider tool to make these selections. Course data is more useful for wide areas, but fine data will be helpful for more urban areas. Moving the sliders around will change the number of tiles that you are downloading. Personally, I try to keep this as small as feasible because it's going to take a long time to download if you have thousands of tiles you want offline. Once you have your area selected and you find a good sweet spot for which maps you want offline, hit the download button and this will allow you to create a new tile set or add this to one you've already created. Select the add to a new tile set option and give it a name. Tapping okay will begin the download and depending on how big your data set is and which map layer that you've selected, this could take a long time or it may just be a few minutes. It really depends. Once it's downloaded, you should see the tile set you created under the imagery tab and if you want to see the outline of what you've already downloaded, you can tap the outline toggle to see what's already saved offline. If you don't want to stream any data at all and you just want to work using offline maps, you can also flip the switch at the bottom of the map tab, switching map source to local. So, that's how we use offline maps and depending on how much you have loaded in, you can cache and save offline a good chunk of the world, especially for stuff like the old USGS topographic maps. There are many different data sources that we can bring into A-Tak, which we will cover in depth later on. Just know that for now, this is the very basic way to get maps offline. Elevation data, satellite imagery, and other maps are important, but we're just sticking with the basics today. So, we'll get into it later on. Moving on to the other mainstay of A-Tak, layers and overlays. This is another critical feature to understand. Chances are, if you see it on your screen, it can be turned on or off in the overlay manager. So, you will spend a lot of time in this tab and I myself like to have this tab also in the action menu for quick access. Tapping the layer icon here to open up overlay manager, we can see everything in ATAK organized by type of thing. If it's a marker, it's under the marker tab. If it's an image attachment that's geo-located to a point on the map, it's under the attachments tab, and so on. This is where you can toggle things on or off or see what you've already got loaded. You can also delete data that you don't need anymore or just hide it if you want to keep it, but you don't want to actually see it on your screen. This is also where if you have a KMZ loaded in, you may want to turn off different folders within that KMZ. There is no folder function within ATAK, but a lot of the KMZ files that we download, for instance, some of the KMZ files that I publish every day, some of them have different folders or different levels within that KMZ, and you can turn off what you don't want. This is very handy if you've been given a product by somebody else, and you don't want to turn the whole thing off or the whole thing on, you want to actually just select what data that you need. Well, this is how you would do that within the overlay manager. So, now we understand the more background stuff. We have our background map selected, and we know where to find all of our overlays. Now, we can actually get to putting data on our map, and the first place to start is the point dropper tool. This allows us to, you guessed it, drop points on the map. There are many different types of points, but the four main points point to the point of the app, if that makes sense. Anyway, remember why we had to go on the tangent at the start to explain the history of ATAK? Well, these points are mostly used for military purposes. The yellow clover shape, what we might refer to as a yellow quatrefoil, represents unknown units. The green square is for neutral or sometimes partner nation units. The red diamonds are enemies, and blue rectangles are friendlies. This symbology is based on a common military standard, which is called military standard or MIL-STD 2525. Remember, ATAK is a combat tool, So, we have to get points on the map really quickly sometimes. In that case, we can tap the point we want and tap where it should go on the map. If you place it in the wrong spot, don't worry, we can always move it later. Now, it must be noted that these four points designate generic ground units. What about aircraft or vessels? Well, you can tap this drop-down menu with the word ground in it and choose whatever type of symbol you want. This will change the overall shape and thus the overall meaning of what that symbol is supposed to designate. Apart from the tactical side of things, there are other symbols, too. For instance, the emergency management community has been instrumental in getting their symbols into the TAC ecosystem. If you are so inclined, you can also load in your own custom icons, as well, which I do fairly often for things like mapping industrial accidents and such. Now, once we create a point, we can use the ever-faithful back button to back all the way out of the menus, and we can tap the icon that we just placed. We will get a radio menu that allows us to change everything about that point. Depending on the type of point you drop, this will look different, but this is the generic layout, and you only need to know about a few things to get started. At the bottom, in the 6:00 position, we have the trash can icon, which allows us to delete the point. At the 5:00 position is the edit which allows us to edit all of the data pertaining to that point. So, if you want to change the symbol or add remarks, add notes to the actual point, this is where you will do that. You can also change the name of the point. You can do all kinds of stuff from the edit tab. You can also designate whether that point is present, destroyed, or degraded, etc., which is especially helpful for military units where you want to remember where a unit was destroyed or degraded or damaged, but you want to actually make it clear that that point you're looking at is no longer there or it's just a burning hull of a tank. This is also the menu where you can tap send to send this point to other contacts, a server, or any feeds you may have set up. More on that later on. It's a complicated topic. Just know that this is where that menu is for the time being. At the 8:00 position, we have the move tool symbol, which allows us to move around the point to a more accurate spot. This is very helpful for when you're placing points quickly in the heat of the moment, such as when you're tracking an enemy hiding in the bushes and they keep moving. Similarly, the icon at the 4:00 position is a toggle switch. When you tap it, ATAK is now tracking that point in the background. This is something that is incredibly helpful that not a lot of people know about ATAK. If we turn that toggle on, if we enable tracking on this point, if we move that point, we can start to see that point leaving behind a breadcrumb trail. And as you use the move tool, this breadcrumb trail will continue on for as long as the tracking is toggled on. Now, maybe we can see the utility of something like this. If you are chasing Charlie through the jungle, he's not very likely to have a tracker on him that's going to populate on your own map. Real life is not Call of Duty, and even though ATAK does remind us of that mini-map down in the corner of our favorite video games, in the real world, we're not going to see any little red dots designating enemies popping up on our map automatically. We have to find the enemy ourselves, and the enemy makes us work for it. civilian context, this tool is perfect for tracking a lost hiker or a missing person. It would be a little overkill just for mapping out, say, a hiking trail or something, but you can totally do that as well if you want. Just like the classic Garmin GPS tracking on your handheld GPS, or maybe your GPS watch, you can create a breadcrumb trail of your location and export that as a GPX file for use elsewhere. However, ATAK has another trick up its sleeve, because you can create this breadcrumb trail for any point you drop, not just your own. As we can see, this can get really complicated really quickly, so let's break it down simply. Let's say that you have turned tracking on for a particular point, and you've moved it around the map as you're following it through the mountains. By opening up your radio menu and holding the tracking button, again, using that ATAK feature of tapping versus holding something, you can bring up another radio sub menu. Tapping this search button allows you to search for the tracking data for that point. And you can export that map marker's track in multiple file formats. This is very, very helpful for tracking missing persons because one team can easily export their work to hand off to another team. Of course, it's not like SAR teams don't already do this. They obviously do. It's just way faster than having to go to the talk, plug in your ancient Garmin into a dusty Windows 7 laptop, and pull off a GPX file into Basecamp. Doing it this way will make it so that at the end of the mission, you have an actual ground track where the subject was actually located. And since it's time-stamped, you can play this back on something like Google Earth if you want to create a short video clip of how this movement was observed over time. Again, niche trick, we'll cover it later on. Just wanted to point out this is pretty slick and very professional if you are trying to set yourself or your team apart for a client or just in general. And it's very helpful for missions that seem like they're going to be quick, but eventually turn into multi-day events. Again, ATAK core is built around the idea of being useful, especially when things are going sideways. Now, of course, we should not expect everyone to be walking through the woods with their face glued to their phone in range of potential adversarial forces. That's not the smartest move. But, if you can spot the enemy on the next hilltop, and you can geolocate where you think they are, you can move their point as you see them whenever you get a second. And perhaps that's the best way to think about ATAK in general. This is an app for your phone. It can help you out a lot, but it cannot replace basic soldier skills if that's what you're using it for. It's not going to replace any type of training you may have had, any SOPs for rescue teams, or anything like that. And it's certainly not going to replace legacy systems. Can you navigate with it? Sure thing. Does that mean that you don't also need a paper map and a compass like always? Sure doesn't. In warfare, everything with batteries is going to fail at some point. And usually it's going to fail when you're already having a really bad day. All Paragon 6 over. Alpha 6, this is Alpha 6. We have your smoke. Uh Bravo should be moving shortly. Over. This is Alpha 6 now. Look at this little knoll. We are on this little knoll now reorganized in the uh about uh 400 m from our logger site. We have an extremely large force moving in the valley to the west of us now. We need uh air strikes or anything. You'll have to control it from up there. Put something all around this hill, but still enough to reach spine. Over. This is Paragon 6. He's telling you a large force is moving toward you from the west. Over. This is Alpha 6. I'm not sure whether they're moving away or toward us. We've got heavy movement and firing on our left. I'm thinking that they're trying to break contact. If you can get artillery or air over in the on coordinates uh 9 uh 99 3 170 down in that valley. Don't come below to the south of the 17 grid line. You might catch some more of those bastards. Over. Roger. 9903 0 Roger coming. Over. This is Alpha 6. Roger. Down in that area down there. As serious as this use case is, we also have to remember that most of us are not going to be talking a Cobra gunship onto a target in Vietnam near the town of Dak To. Most of us are going to be using ATAK for vastly different purposes. Stuff that's way less serious than a firefight. Many of us might be using ATAK for search and rescue or even just trying to stay on the trail during a peaceful hike in the woods. We may use ATAK to plot the location of wildlife game cameras or for hunting stands or even just for good bird watching spots. But, the world is a pretty busy place these days. A vicious land war has been fought in Europe for years now. Conflict in the Middle East is popping off, and in the Fa

//The Wire//2300Z November 5, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: ANOTHER MIGRANT CRIMINAL "MISTAKENLY" RELEASED IN SOUTH LONDON ALMOST A WEEK AGO. PLANE CRASH IN KENTUCKY RESULTS IN 11X FATALITIES AS SEVERAL REMAIN MISSING. VEHICLE RAMMING ATTACK CONDUCTED IN FRANCE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- United Kingdom: This morning the Metropolitan Police revealed that another migrant criminal had "mistakenly" been released by the prison services in South London. Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, an Algerian migrant, was released in south London allegedly by accident over a week ago, while he was serving a sentence for trespassing with intent to burglarize. Some sources also claim that the fugitive has a history of sexual offenses, and the Metropolitan Police claim that they were only notified of this mistake yesterday. France: This morning a vehicle ramming attack was carried out on Île d’Oléron, a small island tourist destination on the west coast of France. Many people were wounded after an attacker deliberately drove his vehicle into a crowd. 2x people remain in critical condition, and 9x others were wounded during the attack. The assailant has not yet been identified, however locals state that he was known to local police. -HomeFront- Kentucky: Overnight the casualty count regarding yesterday's plane crash rose to a total of 11x fatalities as several people remain missing. As of this morning, the fires are mostly out, and firefighters remained on the scene throughout much of the day. The main structures that the plane crashed in to on the ground were the Ford auto factory, as well as UPS's own logistics hub that serviced the airport. As a result, this major regional package sorting facility will be offline for some time. USA: Around the United States, the rollup of yesterday's election resulted in a near total victory for Democrat candidates across the board. Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York City by a wide margin, and Abigail Spanberger won the Governorship in Virginia. Also in Virginia, Ghasala Hashmi won the election for Lieutenant Governor, making her the first Muslim woman to hold the office in state history. Jay Jones also won his election for Attorney General, despite the scandal during his campaign surrounding his comments calling for the murder of his enemy's wife and children in a text exchange. Analyst Comment: Jones also quite literally tried to kick a dog at a polling place on election day, which although a unique campaign tactic, didn't seem to hurt his election chances either. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the United Kingdom, the most concerning detail of the second-migrant-release case is that this release took place on October 29th. Per their statements, the Met only found out about this release yesterday afternoon, almost a full week after the criminal was released. This situation was also made worse by comments made (or rather, not made) during the Prime Minister's Questions session in Parliament yesterday. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy was hounded by a few MPs for refusing to answer the question of whether or not any more migrants had accidentally been released since the Kebatu case came to light. After his refusal to answer this question the first time, this ballooned into him being pressed again and again, resulting in him refusing to answer the simple question roughly half a dozen times. At that moment, it didn't make much sense as to why this level of resistance was offered up by Lammy, or why he became so belligerent at this specific question being asked. After all he could just say "not that I'm aware of" and move on, no big deal. Instead, he became quite belligerent to the point that this may have been the indicator for something else. Consequently, this morning the picture became more clear...at the exact moment that he was answering questions in Parliament, the story was about to break regarding the *second* mistakenly-released migrant. He has probably known about this release for a few days, thus the dodging of the question in Parliament yesterday. Interestingly, it is the specificity of this question that probably triggered the Met even acknowledging the release in the first place; going after the Deputy PM with such a specific question conveys the idea that the MP asking the question knows that there has been another prisoner release; asking this question at all reveals the jig is up. Nevertheless, in less than 12 hours, Lammy has pivoted to "outrage" at the prisoner release...completely ignoring that just yesterday afternoon he was insulting MPs for suggesting that this exact situation is what happened. In short, it's bad enough that a second migrant criminal was let out of prison allegedly by mistake, but the poorly-constructed coverup of the second scandal will probably send tensions throughout the Isles to new heights. Little details like this will be important to consider throughout the U.K., but also here in the United States as some parts of the country (such as New York) start to experience the woes that have become all to familiar throughout western civilization. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we have a special briefing that will hopefully shed some light on the recent developments with china their recent military aspirations and why it's important to understand what's going on in southeast asia now before i begin i must note that very few analysts will tell you what they suck at the information superiority complex is a massive problem in the intel world and i myself am certainly not a southeast asia analyst which is why i personally am desperately trying to get smart on chinese military doctrine tactics culture history economics and everything else just as fast as humanly possible i know at some point it would be great to do a longer more in-depth brief on china but for now since we don't have the luxury of ignoring problems we aren't experts on here we are china has been quite busy lately and they have been seemingly preparing for war at a rampant pace as demonstrated by their recent successful test of a hypersonic glide vehicle weird i know because i thought our generals were supposed to be giving each other a heads up before launch but we'll come back to that in a minute in any case it has become public knowledge that china recently launched and successfully tested a hypersonic glide vehicle so why does this matter to understand why this missile system is a problem and will definitely result in your taxes going up we must first go back and examine what has been the status quo for nuclear weapons for the past 70 years now again please forgive the overly simple explanation this is meant to give a very broad brush understanding of why this incident is a big deal or maybe not such a big deal so we're going to go with the michael scott explanation method why don't you explain this to me like i'm five in the not so good old days of the cold war the us and the soviet union spent trillions of dollars bolstering their offensive and defensive weapons during the arms race during that conflict the us and the soviet union really only had to worry about each other and as a result spent their money on systems specifically designed to defeat each other in the case of the us we knew that these soviets if they were to launch an attack at us would almost certainly choose a northern polar route russia would launch her missiles on a northern route over the north pole for a few reasons for one it's a shorter distance this means that the early warning time is reduced and a shorter distance means that the missile systems would be slightly cheaper enabling the soviets to build more of them a northern route also takes the flight path over rough and inhospitable terrain meaning that it wouldn't be particularly easy or cheap to maintain early warning sites in the arctic environment but that's exactly what the us did and still does there are a handful of early warning radar sites in the arctic region that provide early warning of such an attack from missiles and aircraft remember a significant portion of the soviet and now russian nuclear arsenal is delivered via aircraft which again would almost certainly take the northern route in the event of a nuclear attack but times have changed and now in addition to the land-based and sea-based detection platforms we now have satellites to do a pretty good job actually a shockingly good job the us maintains a significant satellite array of what are called overhead persistent infrared or opir sensors these sensors are up in orbit just hanging out and watching and when they detect the launch of a ballistic missile from a certain known missile launch site they can do a lot of quick math to determine when and where that missile will land almost before it even clears the top of the silo pretty slick technology and also partly why the united states and russia both rely on what's called a nuclear triad aircraft submarine and land-based systems to launch their nuclear arsenals due to geography if either the u.s or russia launches a missile from a ground-based silo both countries will know about it immediately and will have hours to prepare for the impact just due to how far the missiles have to travel but if you get a submarine to launch that missile well you can cut the warning time down to just a few minutes and if you do what russia has been doing over the past few decades with torpedoes well you can reduce the warning time to absolutely zero but we'll come back to that in a bit because that my dear friends is a brilliant and utterly terrifying story itself so very generally speaking here's how a launch sequence might look from the old school perspective of the soviet union launching an attack on the u.s for the sake of simplicity i'm going to leave out submarine aircraft and other weapons delivery platforms and just talk about the classic ground-based launch scenario that we've all seen in movies alright so let's say the soviets decided to launch an attack on the us our opir sensors would detect the flashes of light from silos or trains all over the soviet union historically mostly from ukraine but this has changed obviously in recent years and by the time the missiles are a few seconds into their flight our opir sensors can automatically determine where they're going their flight path and time of arrival for a missile to successfully hit its target it has to stay on a very specific course being propelled up in the atmosphere by a rocket engine giving it enough power to reach orbit from there gravity takes over and the re-entry vehicle guides the warheads back into the atmosphere after which the warheads separate and independently glide down to their intended targets for the us one of the first steps is obviously to launch all of our missiles as well if this were to be a total worst case scenario launch this is an important distinction that i will come back to later because i personally think that any strike less than a full-on launch is a far more terrifying option but for the sake of our scenario here let's say that these birds are in the air and the us is trying to intercept the incoming soviet missiles so we launch our own interceptor missiles and try to shoot down the incoming ballistic missiles well here we have a problem we kind of suck at this the us government freely admits that our current ground-based mid-course defense or gmd systems are only about 55 effective in order for them to be 99 effective three interceptor missiles would have to be launched for every incoming warhead and considering that most ballistic missiles carry as many as 14 warheads and russia and china have hundreds of missiles well you can do the math so what does all of this have to do with china well it's pretty simple china's successful test of a hypersonic weapon system means that almost all of our ballistic interception technologies are obsolete and completely ineffective maybe and here's why hypersonic glide vehicles are vastly different than traditional ballistic missiles rather than being propelled to a higher orbit like a traditional icbm a thousand miles above the earth's surface a hypersonic launch vehicle can be launched at a much more shallow orbit maybe 100 miles or so which in theory means that the united states early warning radar sites will have less time to actually detect the missile before it's too late to do anything about it and perhaps most significantly a hypersonic glide vehicle is maneuverable in orbit so unlike a traditional ballistic missile which cannot deviate at all from its course a hypersonic glide vehicle can be launched in any direction and maneuver in orbit this also means that this system can take evasive maneuvers to evade any interceptor missile also remember how i said that our opir sensors can detect the launch angle and the speed of a missile pretty much the instant it leaves the silo well with these new systems china could literally launch a missile in any direction and our systems wouldn't be able to tell when or where it would land and that's exactly what they did in this test the world thought that china was simply launching a rocket for their space program but also on board was a hypersonic glide vehicle so from now on any launch from china no matter how innocent it looks could be a nuclear strike once they get this technology perfected and since this system actually achieves a stable orbit instead of a normal icbm that can't stay in orbit this means that china's new system has an unlimited range it can strike any place on the earth so the bottom line reason for everyone freaking out about this is that china has demonstrated that they have a nuclear weapon system that can be launched in any direction so as to avoid those north facing radar sites evade any interceptor missiles and land in any place on earth with almost no warning pretty scary stuff if you were to turn the video off right now based on the information that we have given the astute observer might ask well if this is such a devastatingly effective weapon system why hasn't anyone thought of it before well it turns out that someone did think of this the soviet union china as a nation but particularly militarily has relied on intellectual property theft as the main tool with which to grow and expand there is almost nothing in the entire chinese military arsenal that hasn't either been stolen or purchased from russia or the united states stealing the research and development of other nation states rather than develop things on their own is just a core part of their military doctrine and from the chinese perspective it isn't necessarily a bad move on their part of course there are exceptions to this policy but when it comes to nuclear development it should come as no surprise that china is essentially copying a program that the soviet union experimented with back in the 1960s a program called the fractional orbital bombardment system or fobs now in china's defense when it comes to strategic strike capabilities and the significant developments made during the cold war there is almost nothing that hasn't been thought of in fact if you are watching this video and you are thinking of different ways of launching or intercepting nukes i can guarantee you that 99 of the time not only has your idea been thought of before but chances are that an entire military development team congressional subcommittee and funding program was established on it back in the day so in the context of strategic weapons it might not be so fair to pick on china's defense industry for copying something that's already been done and this kind of system has been heavily developed by the soviets so you might ask okay the soviets built this system then why don't the russians use it today well it turns out there are quite a few problems and downsides with this system and interestingly enough this is how we know or at least have a pretty solid assessment using only open source data that this new chinese system is pretty much the same thing as the old-school soviet fob system because china's system suffers from the same problems and one of the major problems that the soviets had decades ago was accuracy to put it bluntly the soviets couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with their version of this system remember space travel was in its infancy during the 1960s and the complexities of such a system were simply too significant to overcome at the time another main reason for the soviets eventually scrapping this program was the absurdly small payload that the system could carry simply put it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a really good delivery vehicle if you can only put a single tiny warhead on it unless a nation were to outfit thousands of missiles like this which would have cost at the time several times the gdp of the soviet union having only a handful of missiles that can surgically strike targets isn't really worth it if that nation that you're striking is going to respond with every icbm they have anyway and also the main reason that the soviets developed the fob system was to get around what is generally referred to as the us abm or anti-ballistic missile defense system at the time back in the 60s and 70s the us was putting a serious amount of money into ballistic missile defense with the goal of having a large master system that would function as kind of like a shield over the united states well it turns out the us never really built such a system even to this day we don't really have a massive coordinated ballistic missile defense system what we do have is a selection of interconnected and even some independent systems that work to provide ballistic missile defense at various levels we have ground-based interceptors and naval based aegis systems such as the sm-3 interceptors we have mobile systems like the terminal high altitude area defense or thaad systems and even surface-to-air systems like the hawk which can have some limited success against ballistic missiles in certain situations so the u.s never really built a gargantuan abm system but rather a lot of smaller systems that kind of fill the role and reduce the effectiveness of the fob's system oh and one more thing one of the main reasons for developing the fob system for the soviets was to get around u.s early warning radar sites or at least reduce the effectiveness of such detection capabilities the logic being well the united states has a bunch of radar facing the north pole so if russia developed a system that allowed them to launch a missile around the south pole there would be much less warning time well the us in response simply built a better radar network so when the soviets found out that in a few years the u.s would be able to detect their fob's launches from any direction anyway combined with several failed test launches in a row well this was kind of the final nail in the coffin for the program for the most part now we start to put the pieces together to form a much more clear picture of what this means for china in recent years it has become quite clear that the united states intelligence community senior leadership and chief analysts have been criminally negligent and utterly incompetent as a whole almost all strategic level intelligence is purely politics at this point and not based on any real analysis well it's honestly been that way for decades but for all of these anonymous sources coming out and saying that the us was blindsided by this and that they have no idea how the chinese did it that's bs even the skiff idiot knows that the chinese were working on this technology for a while china literally paraded hypersonic missiles during a military parade last year and has been openly testing this technology for years so the sudden surprise by the so-called unnamed intelligence officials either means that these quotes are made up or the people who gave the quotes are complete and utter morons or they know what they are doing and are feigning surprise so that they can scare congress into funding their defense contracts and even the average citizen not in the intelligence community could have guessed that much like most nuclear states china's space program is mostly a cover for developing their nuclear program in addition to serving as a test bed for future space-based weapons and as we have shown hypersonic glide vehicles are not new either not only did the soviets figure out how to do this at least in testing back in the 1960s but even to this day a variant of that program is still around the general concept of the fob system didn't completely die out and has been tweaked and reworked over time since the fall of the soviet union by russia in fact russia currently has a hypersonic glide vehicle in combat service called the avant-garde system and the us well we've had a system like this in place since 2011 and lockheed is currently in the process of converting all of our missile systems to include hypersonic glide vehicles in fact darpa literally just tested the hypersonic air breathing weapons concept or hawk last month and that's just one of many systems that are currently being tested or in various stages of development granted these systems for both the us and russia are highly classified so we cannot comment on how these already fielded systems stack up next to china's new delivery vehicle but in any case common sense would dictate that it's probably not the same china just demonstrated the proof of concept for their own nation while the united states and even russia have been at the later stages of development for years clearly not the same level of capability and also there is another element to this incident that not many people are publicly commenting on but is a painfully obvious consideration for anyone who reads history china showcasing this capability could just be taking a page out of the soviets book by developing a technology and proving that it works just so that the us is now obligated to spend trillions of dollars on a defense system for it just like the development of the f-22 raptor back in the day that aircraft was developed to combat a new generation of soviet fighter aircraft that were never actually built this is partly due to a variety of factors from the superior soviet deception campaigns to the overzealous nature of our own military-industrial complex plus the desire to just have the best futuristic weapons platforms that we could possibly make just in case but that's a long story and there's vastly more to it than that the point is that maybe just maybe the chinese are doing the same thing with their hypersonic missile this is a brilliant move from a warfare standpoint and exactly the kind of thing that a struggling nation like china would do to even the odds china builds one or two test platforms to show the world look what we can do and the us looks at this and says well now we've got to spend trillions of dollars on defending against this system force the us government to spend trillions of dollars on a defense system for a weapons system that china has no intention of developing further and every dollar that the us spends on a defense system for a weapon that won't be used is a dollar that is not spent on things like aircraft expeditionary resources conventional weapons electronic warfare development things that most assuredly will be used when a war breaks out and this is exactly what has happened the us has already spent billions of dollars and will continue to spend billions of dollars developing both our own weapon systems and detection and interception systems as well but even if this is a deception plan or or even if it's both maybe it's a genuine attempt by china to develop a significant weapons capability and also at the same time force the us to spend money on a defense system for it yeah whatever the case this is still kind of a catch-22 hypersonic weapons clearly are what nuclear nation-states are moving toward that's a given russia has been working on this and now china so it makes sense to develop defenses for these kinds of weapons but what if china is developing this technology just solely to force the us to be preoccupied with defense against it so that when china invades taiwan the u.s doesn't have enough resources to defend china's expansion to the nine-dash line the first island chain or beyond so you can see how this is maddening even if it is largely a deception plan we kind of have to go along with it just in case proving the old adage in the intelligent services that no deception plan can ever fail even if the deception plan is discovered the entity being deceived will either change their behavior just in case or they will think that everything else is a lie muddying the waters see how complicated this stuff can get it's crazy in any case what is certain is that this event and all of the press that has been generated from this in our opinion is certainly not worth freaking out over to the point that we blindly write blank checks to the military-industrial process yes it is clear that the u.s would be smart to develop hypersonic weapons defense capability but from where we said the speed and urgency with which we develop such weapons is certainly up for debate and we definitely don't need to stomp on the gas just because china tested this capability and the press is freaking out about it for us the elephant in the room is the integrity of the entire strategic strike process there is a reason that we keep talking about general milley and the actions of himself vice president pence and speaker pelosi and their collaboration together in the days before and after the january 6 fiasco the fact that these people conspired together to varying degrees and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has openly admitted to tampering with our strategic launch capabilities that is one of the very few things that i am genuinely terrified of so taking into account the extremely rapid developments in the field of nuclear warfare now we see why it is such a big deal for general milley to admit that he withheld strategic strike options from the commander-in-chief and why this seemingly small incident is vastly more terrifying than a chinese nuclear weapon that can strike anywhere without warning which is terrifying enough what if china or any other nation for that matter doesn't launch hundreds of nukes what if it's a single missile a missile that might be a non-nuclear cruise missile obviously we have to respond to this with strategic assets immediately but it might not warrant us hitting the big red button and ending the world a lot of people think that the president's nuclear football is simply just a big red button to launch everything which it most certainly is not there are other options most of the options are not nuclear and since a u.s general admitted to tampering with a process something that no one man should be able to do this brings into question the entire process if a covert iranian cargo ship loitering off the east coast launches a single cruise missile towards washington dc would our national leadership even be able to respond to this without sabotaging each other we used to know the answer to this question or we thought we did for decades the single most secure and well thought out and planned entity on the planet was the u.s strategic strike hierarchy and process but now that confidence has eroded and that's the kind of stuff that keeps analysts like me up at night as we've mentioned before every single nuclear state is absolutely asking themselves these questions if the united states the most militarily dominant nation in the history of the world can't get our act together on procedures standards and processes that should be completely foolproof then what chance do other nations have at preventing a single rogue actor from causing harm or stopping a strike in defense if millie can stop the president from launching a first strike he can certainly stop a strike in self-defense and based on his treasonous phone calls to china we now seriously have to worry that in the highly unlikely event that china launches nukes at us this guy right here might just prevent us from launching back we never used to think about these things but we're certainly thinking about them now and also on the other hand there is another argument that i would like to point out what if millie himself was mistaken what if he thinks that he can stop a nuclear strike but he really can't if you were a person somewhere in the pipeline of the nuclear strike hierarchy and were intimately aware of how the whole thing works right down to the nuts and bolts and a politically extreme and woke general says that he can stop the process but you know that he can't would you correct him no you wouldn't you would let him think that he can influence things like that and if the time comes he will think that he did something right as the birds are taking off and flying to their targets i myself disagree with this theory i think that millie being the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has much more pull than most people realize and he is intimately aware of the strategic strike process more so than most people out of all of the people in the world there are probably only a couple hundred that might know more about the nuclear strike process than him so when he says that he can and did tamper with the process i'm inclined to believe him so talking about the melee problem is a far more worthwhile conversation than talking about china's new but not really new hypersonic missile system it does not matter if we have the best offensive or defensive tools in the world if one woke general can sabotage the entire process and even if he can't sabotage the process the fact that he thinks he can is just as big of a problem the main problem of nuclear or strategic strike capabilities has never been the technology it's always been the humans behind it and this is something that no nation has found an answer to everything can be secure and reliable but communications and authentications methods suffer from the two generals problem or hesitation on the part of the operator or who is even really and truly authorized to make a launch back in the day the soviets tried to fix this problem with systems like the dead hand system but by and large the down and dirty details of a nuclear strike have so many variables that nobody can be totally sure that the system will work like it's supposed to if it's needed and with millie bringing the integrity of the human factor back into the forefront of the issue i hope and pray that people smarter and with better access than me are sitting down and trying to figure out some solutions to these problems because the world is changing fast and there have never been more ways for a global war to break out instantly with zero warning russia has had a nuclear-powered nuclear-capable torpedo for decades and has now fielded it with the launch of their newest class of submarines we have no defense for this other than syncing the submarine before they launch the torpedo so russia could launch a nuclear torpedo into new york harbor with absolutely zero early warning on our part except from the ancient socialist arrays that would probably hear the torpedo but not really be able to do much about it the united states has been developing and testing space-based kinetic weapons for decades tungsten rods the size of telephone poles that are in orbit until they are released re-entering the earth's atmosphere at mach 14 and striking the ground without any explosives at all but the kinetic energy of a small nuclear warhead russia not to be outdone has been working on tapping and tampering with undersea communications cables for decades knowing full well that if they cut only a couple of cables the entire communications infrastructure for the world will fail giving russia a critical non-nuclear first strike capability both north and south korea have demonstrated significant leaps in their submarine launch ballistic missile technology and with their current arms race heating up no one knows how that's going to turn out china is working on hypersonic space weapons and the us is working on laser weapons american diplomats and spies are being medically evacuated around the world because of havana syndrome and clandestine intelligence agencies around the world from all nations have publicly shown embarrassingly bad tradecraft so much so that the cia has revealed that their officers poor tradecraft has gotten too many assets killed all of these things highlight the blatantly obvious fact that we the united states have got to do better and since we here do not necessarily have the faith that our senior military or political leadership will do the right thing we average americans have to start thinking about this stuff say what you want to about the overly willing crooked and corrupt military-industrial complex and most of the time we would agree but that does not mean that other nations are not a genuine threat to the united states and even without devolving into the military-industrial complex debate one thing that is quite clear is that we cannot buy our way out of the problems we face especially the problems within our senior military leadership and how mind-bogglingly severe the problems have become on that front we have to get smart on these topics there has never been more justification for the average american to inform themselves on things like national defense and international diplomacy like it or hate it globalization has worked for the people who wanted it even just a couple hundred years ago civilizations around the world rose and fell without even knowing that other civilizations existed but now a medical illness can start in one country and shut down the world economy within weeks just on speculation alone a single factory shutting down for a couple of weeks on the other side of the planet can mean entire areas of the united states go without a certain product for weeks and we have spent trillions of dollars over the past 70 years to develop the most devastating weapons ever devised only for the actions of two or three people to throw all of that into question it is quite obvious by now that the american people have a lot of enemies both foreign and domestic and with the way things are currently going more and more adversaries pop up every single day sometimes adversaries that used to be close friends so let's get smart and keep an eye out both foreign and domestically because the world is changing fast and we don't have the luxury of slowing down [Music] [Music] you

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