The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Crush Depth: Total War in the Drone AgeEighty-one years ago today, after the Allied landings on D-Day, warfare has shifted from amphibious invasions to algorithmic strikes.
Military drones, driven by open-source ingenuity and accelerated by tools like Starlink, are now the decisive factor in modern combat.
Ukraine and Russia are racing to adapt, but Ukraine holds the edge through distributed manufacturing, rapid innovation, and real-time command via satellite.
Fragging incidents among Russian troops, systemic command failures, and Ukraine’s deep strikes into Russian logistics show a war not just of machines but a Psyop war of morale and cohesion.
Drones and this week’s Black Swan Event called Operation Spiderweb have redefined the battlefield as a three-dimensional, always-connected space where latency, speed, and real-time adaptability determine survival. From cheap FPV kamikaze drones to high-end ISR platforms, drone warfare now merges the economic and the strategic.
Russia is hemorrhaging both money and leadership, while Ukrainian forces are turning $500 drones into tank-killers. Fiber optic tethers, AI-driven targeting, and booby-trapped sleeper drones signal that the fight is no longer linear, it’s volumetric and economic. Victory is going to the distributed, the fast, the cheap, and the networked.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical chessboard is shifting. Trump’s diplomatic sidelining of Elon Musk, paired with his Ukraine Recovery Fund push, signals a post-oligarchic war reconstruction effort. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against Mexican lawsuits on U.S. firearms preserves the legal foundation for drone and dual-use tech exports.
The Ukraine war is not just a contest of arms, but a struggle between collapsing autocracies and adaptive democracies.
As with D-Day, the question isn’t just who has the weapons, but who has the will, the system, and the speed to wield them.
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published in 2005. We rerun it annually at college graduation time. Feel quite free to send this to any recent college graduate you may know.]
Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends:
It's funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for you've all reached the finish line: college, goodbye, we're outta here. Yet of course, "commencement" means a beginning, not an end.
But one is supposed to at least start - commence - a talk such as this by saying funny things. So I'll start by talking about Clark Gable movies. If you've heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago. His most famous movie was Gone With The Wind.
He made a movie in 1955 called The Tall Men with Jane Russell as his girlfriend and Robert Ryan as the heavy. It's a pretty ordinary Western flick with outlaws and cowboys and Indians - and at the end, Ryan, the bad guy, and his henchmen get the drop on Gable, the good guy, and all seems lost. Suddenly, surprise, Gable outfoxes Ryan and triumphs. Gable makes his exit, and after he does, Ryan delivers a line that I want you to never forget.
Serendipity is funny, a very funny thing, finding something where you least expect it. Out of the blue, out of a movie awash with pedestrian dialogue, comes a line so profound it detonates inside your brain. Ryan turns to his men and says:
A marriage, a friendship, a close family relationship… all of our important relationships are built on countless moments, innumerable interactions that either build qualities of trust, joy, and respect - or undermine those qualities.
Today I want to show you what is arguably the most important moment for building a trusting, satisfying, loving relationship.
We can often think that what makes a difference in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our kids, or other friends and relatives, are the big things; the romantic getaway for the weekend, or the great gift that we buy.
…but there is a moment that packs more leverage, more meaning, and more potential for doing good – or harm – than almost any other:
Following my article on the India versus Pakistan long range air battle, I decided to make a deeper dive into the subject of air superiority to give TTP readers some better context for what that article discussed, and also to discuss air combat more broadly.
Between old movies and a lack of public information, one might assume that air warfare now might be similar to that of World War Two.
America’s sixth-generation fighter, the F-47, is rumored to be costing up to $300 million dollars for a single aircraft.
That’s on par with a small warship in cost. We have already planned sales of it to allies to make it cheaper, i.e. production of more of these planes lowers costs (?)
Now of all times, Americans need a working knowledge of this subject.
What is all this stuff?
How does it work?
Why does it matter?
Is air combat like those movies?
Why is it so expensive?
And will Snoopy ever beat the Red Baron?
First, let’s talk about “airspace.”
For openers, kudos to President Donald Trump for his leadership on addressing this heretofore missing piece of the energy puzzle.
Incomprehensibly, the preceding administration embarked on a quixotic mission to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, while simultaneously ignoring our single safe, abundant, and non-polluting means of generating electricity.
Somehow, in the midst of ongoing firestorms on immigration, trade, taxes, and two wars, Trump still manages to attend to other important matters that have been lost in the shuffle.
Some call it chaos, but we should be happy to have a president with the stamina to keep so many balls in the air.
Will Trump’s blitz of actions get nuclear power back on track?
The only way to answer that question is to understand how we got so far off track so quickly and so completely.
Why did we suddenly stop building nuclear plants?
It’s a complicated picture with numerous parts and pieces. But in my opinion, it all boils down to one root cause: the realization by prospective investors that nuclear power’s opponents, with sufficient legal and political support, can render a new, multibillion-dollar facility unusable.
If that seems implausible, consider the fate of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, the poster child for anti-nuclear activism.
As one anonymous and unelected judge after another rules against the Trump agenda, Republicans must decide whether they want to abide by the will of the American people.
If Tren de Aragua gang members aren’t “alien enemies” of the United States, aren’t able to be deported by the American president under the ancient Alien Enemies Act, then language itself has lost its meaning. But that’s the world we’re living in.
In a way, it shouldn’t surprise us. The Left, after all, has been at war with the language — and at war with reality — for decades.
Indeed, they insist that men can become pregnant, that women can only be described by biologists, that pedophiles are merely minor-attracted persons, and that last year’s version of Joe Biden was the best Biden ever.
Nor should the current judicial war against Donald Trump surprise any of us. All throughout his first term, Trump and his agenda were sabotaged from within by entrenched deep-state leftists and by old-guard establishment Republicans.
In this second term, though, with Trump having remade the Republican Party and having cleaned up the executive branch, the attacks are coming from without — from the third and supposedly coequal branch of government that Thomas Jefferson once presciently warned could become despotic: the judicial branch.
Since his inauguration, Trump has been busy trying to unscrew the mess bequeathed him by four years of the Autopen Presidency, but he’s been opposed at nearly every turn — from mass-deporting illegal aliens to ending birthright citizenship to trimming down our grotesquely bloated federal government to imposing tariffs on predatory trading partners — by lower-court judges and, in some cases, by the very Supreme Court justices that he nominated for the bench.
On a recent podcast episode, Joe Rogan and his guest Cody Tucker found themselves in a discussion that was clearly skeptical of the atheistic consensus among prominent thinkers of the past few generations.
That atheistic consensus generally states that the following is true. There was obviously once a Great Nothingness that suddenly became our universe and the existence of everything within it -- and all of this happened for no reason whatsoever.
Rogan asks a question that every person has likely asked themselves countless times, “wouldn’t it be crazy if there wasn’t something at some point in time? That seems even crazier than [to think] there has always been something.”
He's not wrong.
To believe that nothing suddenly became everything for no reason whatsoever is an act of pure faith based upon no observable data.
What’s more, the proclamation itself an act of heresy for scientific atheists.
A database search of 12 million books published in the 300 years before 9/11 reveals only one instance of the phrase “Islam is a religion of peace.”
It appears in fiction and is spoken by Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, an Iranian leader in Tom Clancy’s thriller titled Executive Orders.
But the dangerous notion that Islam is peaceful has been so frequently reiterated by world leaders, clerics, and the liberal media-academia complex that it has taken on the status of COWDUNG—a facetious near-acronym for ‘conventional wisdom of the dominant group.’
Denying 1,400 years of history, these apologists would have us believe that extremist Islam is a perversion.
Their sanitized version presents Islam’s prime motif of violent jihad—or religious war against infidels—as an individual’s “inner struggle” for spiritual growth.
To expose these falsehoods—which have circled the globe before the truth even got out of bed—conservative authors Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin wrote Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam.
In light of Robinson’s early release from a British prison a few days ago, an overview of this important book seems fitting.
The key to understanding what the Koran signifies to Muslims is naskh….
All right, I confess. I am a nesophile. I’m addicted to nesophilia. It’s not on any list of psychiatric disorders, however. The term was invented – a “neologism” – by one of the 20th century’s most eminent philosophers, Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) in 1938 while in Ireland.
When there, he combined the Greek word nesos – island, with philia – love, and declared he was a nesophile – a lover of islands. That’s me.
I suppose that’s obvious by now – for I’ve lost count of the number of islands I’ve written about on TTP.
And there are so many more to go! Yet I’ll be writing only about ones that are interesting, not even if they’re famous. I just got back from Majorca and Ibiza, for example. Nice enough, pretty enough – but, frankly, boring. There’s no real there there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California.
So let’s take a quick look at some islands that would blow Gertrude Stein away – such as the one that has the bed Napoleon died in.
Saranda, Albania. Standing on a hilltop here overlooking the Adriatic arm of the Mediterranean, you can’t help but be mesmerized by the beauty of the scene, the Adriatic coastline, “the wine-dark sea” as Homer so often described it, and off the coast the Greek island of Corfu. Yet you can’t help being puzzled by the small mound of concrete in the foreground. What is that, you ask?
It’s a one-man pillbox bunker with a slit in front for the soldier to fire at Albania’s enemies about to invade during the Cold War. Stalinist madman Enver Hoxha ruled Albania for forty years, from the end of WWII to his death in 1985. During which he built 750,000 of these bunkers in a country barely bigger than Massachusetts (11,000 square miles). He maintained his Fascist-Communist rule of total control by constantly claiming that Albania was surrounded by neighbor enemies – Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy – all of whom were preparing to militarily invade, seize, and destroy Albania at any moment. For forty years.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Albania quickly liberated itself from its Communist past. Today it is stunningly gorgeous, a delight to travel through. The mushroom bunkers still litter the countryside, kept as a reminder of how history can go lunatic, and for Albanians to make sure such madness never happens to them ever again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #296, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
National Geographic calls the remote island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen in the Indian Ocean “the most alien-looking place on our planet,” because of its incredibly weird and bizarre plant life like the Dragon’s Blood Tree.
Yet it is safely far away from anarchic Yemen, peaceful and serene in its isolation. And it contains places of mesmerizing beauty – like this natural infinity pool on a cliff edge high above the ocean in full view. Socotra is spectacularly exotic, like nowhere else in our world. It is truly life-memorable to experience it. Wheeler Expeditions was there in the Spring of 2014 – and we’ll be there again soon. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #129 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
There are five Channel Islands in the English Channel. Best known are Guernsey and Jersey. Least visited is Alderney, along with tiny Herm. Most fascinating is Sark, Europe’s only remaining feudal fiefdom. No motor vehicles are allowed, excepting a few farmers’ small tractors. The governor and chief constable is called the Seneschal. He rides to his office on his bicycle.
It’s an ancient office with a tradition of many centuries. When I was there in 2010, it was held by Reginald Guille, a very friendly fellow as all Sarkese are. We rode our bikes around the island, even along La Coupée, the connecting path along the razor sharp high isthmus connecting two parts of the island – it’s pictured above.
There are gorgeous pocket beaches here, and beautiful natural swimming pools. Flower gardens are everywhere, the island could not be safer, cleaner, calmer, and more exquisitely charming. A few days here will do wonders for you. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #131 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
The gigantic forest-covered stone pillars of Zhangjiajie in a remote region of Hunan are so famous for being a featured location in the Avatar movie they’ve been renamed the Avatar Mountains. You can take a cable car through them to view them from above. Hard to get to and certainly worth it. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #269 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
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