SOFREP

A $3.7 billion private bet in Maryland is designed to add 15 percent to Virginia-class production capacity. The Navy will pay against production outcomes, a hard test for a shipbuilding logjam that money alone has failed to clear. The United States buys two Virginia-class attack submarines a year and builds roughly one. That is not accounting. It is strategic debt, measured in boats that exist in a budget but cannot hunt another submarine, insert a SEAL team, or put a Tomahawk through a window.

On Oct. 6, Le Vigilant became the first submarine to fire the M51.3. Paris still has not said which boats carry the missile, and the fleet’s oldest hull is next into the yard. About 110 sailors crew a French ballistic-missile submarine on deterrent patrol. They stay submerged for roughly 70 days with no port call, ready to launch a missile on an order only the president of France can give. Firing one is rare.

The UN’s latest assessment of Afghanistan is sobering but not surprising. For those of us who served there, it’s personal. I served four combat tours, three of them in Afghanistan. After I retired, I went back as a NATO advisor to the Afghan Sergeants Major Academy, helping build the kind of professional NCO corps that holds an army together. So when the UN Secretary-General sent the Security Council his latest report on Afghanistan, I read it closely.

A Note From the Editors, Every so often, a manuscript lands in our inbox that we can’t ignore. This one arrived with no return address, a coffee stain, and a note that said, “Run it or don’t. I’ve been shot at by worse people than editors.” So we’re running it. The author goes by Mack Talen. We can’t tell you much about him, partly because he asked us not to and partly because we don’t fully know.

C Squadron (Rhodesian) Special Air Service In March 1951, about 120 Southern Rhodesian volunteers arrived in Malaya as part of the “Far East Volunteer Unit,” led by Major Peter Walls (the man that would eventually head the Rhodesian Security Forces). They were absorbed into the newly reformed British SAS and became C Squadron, Malayan Scouts (SAS), soon redesignated C (Rhodesia) Squadron, 22 SAS.

Scottish trials linked sensors to guns and electronic warfare as Washington handed its new counter-drone contracts to ten companies, none of them BAE. BAE Systems announced on October 1 that BATS (BAE Systems Anti Threat System) completed two weeks of live trials in Scotland, connecting drone detection with weapons through one command-and-control architecture. BATS is the software layer that brings drone sensors and weapons together, helping operators identify a threat and choose how to defeat it.

The War Department picked four directed-energy systems months past its legal deadline. It has not said which base gets which weapon or what any of it costs. Service members at a handful of U.S. bases are about to spend a year running directed-energy weapons against drones. On Oct.

“I was drafted to the Sniper School at Vilnius in Lithuania…to master, especially fieldcraft, concealment, marksmanship, and range estimation…in order to spot the enemy hidden in the natural environment, and to avoid being picked out himself…Among the Soviet infantry, I saw an officer of Asian appearance, driving his men forward toward our trenches with pistol drawn. I shot him down. I kept firing.

There’s a special kind of political trap a man builds for himself, nails in by hand, then climbs inside and pulls the lid shut. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani built one this week, and he did it on the worst possible day to be clever. October 7th marked three years since Hamas fighters crossed into southern Israel and slaughtered more than 1,200 innocent people. Families burned in their homes. Kids taken hostage. Women raped. Pregnant women killed. Young people gunned down at a music festival.

The Army chose the attack site and nearly the earliest lawful date for a method it hasn’t used since 1945. The harder questions start after the rifles fire. At 1 p.m. Central on December 3, the Army plans to execute former Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood, Texas. President Donald Trump approved the death sentence on October 2 after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recommended that method.