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Half the THAAD and Patriot interceptor stockpile is gone, gas is $4.11, and the best news I have tonight is a firehouse turning one hundred.

The strikes paused this week and everybody's calling it peace. I don't buy it, and I lay out why in the new Dispatch. Oman worked the phones all day on a Hormuz arrangement while drones out of Iraq were hitting Saudi petroleum sites, which means they were talking on one channel and shooting on three others. That's negotiation, not de-escalation.

Here's the number that's been eating at me. Sixteen days into Operation Epic Fury we'd fired over 6,000 munitions, nearly half the ATACMS bin and about 40 percent of the THAAD interceptors. CSIS figures the THAAD and Patriot stockpiles were around half gone by week seven, and the Secretary of War says the rebuild takes months and years depending on the system. I ran the interceptor math for you months ago, and the math didn't math then and it doesn't math now. Deterrence right now is a production line problem, and ours are behind.

Tehran can count too. Their foreign minister flat out said talks should happen when Iran has the upper hand, and today zero tankers crossed Hormuz against 59 a year ago. That ace spends right now, but it won't spend forever, because the Gulf is pouring pipeline capacity around the strait as fast as the concrete cures.

And then there's the half of this one I actually enjoyed writing. The North Beach Volunteer Fire Department turns one hundred on August 4th. I pull duty nights there, and the teenagers and twenty-somethings I serve with run calls at 0200, in their free time, for free, while the whole country swears their generation doesn't show up. 2,458 calls in 2025 says somebody's showing up. Centennial Muster and Parade, August 8th at 3:00 p.m., current and historical apparatus on display. If you're anywhere near Calvert County, come shake a young firefighter's hand.

Full Dispatch with sources: https://tinyurl.com/5bsedvbf

Mahalos for reading.

There is no news this week, and nobody on TV will say it out loud. I sat down to write my usual rundown of what's going on in the world and the honest answer is nothing. The war with Iran is paused. The Strait of Hormuz is open. Crude is back around seventy. Khamenei's funeral is rolling through Tehran and his successor still hasn't shown his face.

But quiet doesn't sell, so the coverage this week has been a rock, some ants walking toward it, and an expert named John speculating about what the ants know. I wrote about that. I also wrote about the shooting coverage that tries to turn every tragedy into terrorism, an opinion on Israel that will probably annoy my friends, and what a slow week actually looks like inside a training company: door knockers, class schedules, and a church that wants its people ready.

Navy put a round through the engine room of an Iranian cargo ship this weekend. Marines took the boat. Iran is vowing retaliation, Hormuz is shut down again, ceasefire expires Wednesday. Oil jumped six percent on Monday.

Wrote the whole thing up because the press conferences are not going to tell you what's actually happening. They're going to spend fifteen minutes gassing up the administration and then tell you we're winning. Maybe we are. I hope we are. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend everything looks like the podium says it looks.
Iran is saying one thing on their state media and the opposite thing to Pakistan.

Proxies are already overseas hitting synagogues in London. Nine pipe bombs got pulled out of a park in DC a few weeks back and nobody's talking about it anymore. Four Americans flew around the moon last week, first time since 1972, and I'd bet you can't name one of them off the top of your head. I couldn't either when I sat down to write this. Full read below.

https://tinyurl.com/3yvh5rnp

This article is about drones, doctrine, and why a scout sniper had to call me for answers the Marine Corps should have given him three years ago. Camp Buehring is a graveyard. The F-15E shootdown proved the sky is not ours. Ukraine figured out the counter-drone fight and we asked them to come help us. And the domestic threat picture is getting worse while nobody is paying attention.

https://tinyurl.com/4ur6xujv

I've been sitting on this one for a minute because it's personal and I wasn't sure I wanted to put it out there. But here it is.

I grew up watching Fallujah and Ramadi on the news. I grew up watching the surge. All I ever wanted to do was be one of those guys. By the time I enlisted I was too late for it. I trained my whole life for a kind of war that doesn't really exist anymore. In 2022 I watched it disappear in real time in Eastern Europe. Guys strapping mortar rounds to hobby store quadcopters. AK contraptions welded together to try to shoot them down. Three years later the drones don't even need a pilot.

I broke down what I saw firsthand, what Operation Epic Fury is confirming right now at scale, and why I think drones are a coward's weapon but I'm still training for them anyway. I sat down with my OSINT Analyst Elias Vance and we put together everything from the Predator program under Obama to the FPV revolution to the Barksdale Air Force Base drone swarms that shut down B-52 launches on American soil during wartime.

https://tinyurl.com/2cx9a9p8

Everyone is watching Iran right now. Makes sense. Day 26 of Epic Fury, oil bouncing around $100, diplomatic signals that may or may not be real. But I spent the last few weeks pulling threads that mainstream coverage is not connecting and I put it all into one piece.

15,000 to 20,000 ISIS affiliates walked out of a Syrian detention camp two months ago when the guards had to redeploy. That got about three days of coverage before the Iran strikes started and buried it. Pakistan is fighting an open war with the Taliban while its energy supply gets strangled through the Strait of Hormuz, and they have 170 nuclear warheads. Nine pipe bombs were just recovered from a national park 30 minutes from DC. The domestic threat infrastructure designed to catch this stuff has been gutted at the worst possible time. Article Below.

https://rb.gy/q16z44