Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The US military is weakening compared to its peers and is too heavily relying on aging legacy systems. US military spending is incredibly low compared to the Cold War. If the US doesn’t remain the strongest country, then the US, for all its flaws, will look like an angel compared to the authoritarian countries who will replace the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0TTtD8l9lI
“While the renewed congressional interest in the legal and moral justification for Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy is welcome, that inquiry should not be limited to the question of whether one particular attack violated the law of war.
The details of Bradley’s defense nevertheless illustrate the outrageous implications of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression. He argues that the seemingly helpless men in the water, who were blown apart by a second missile while clinging to the boat’s smoldering wreckage, still posed a threat because they could have recovered and delivered whatever cocaine might have remained after the first strike.
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In reality, there was no “fight” to stay in. The violence exemplified by this attack is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants”—who, contrary to that label, are not actually engaged in combat.
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Bradley seems to have determined that the flailing men were engaged in a “hostile act” simply by existing near a boat remnant that might have contained salvageable cocaine. As ridiculous as that position is, it is only a bit more risible than Trump’s assertion that supplying cocaine to Americans amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that justifies a lethal military response.
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“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” Cardozo School of Law professor Rebecca Ingber, an expert on the law of war, told The New York Times. “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole—that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/the-threat-that-supposedly-justified-killing-2-boat-attack-survivors-was-entirely-speculative/
Russia likes to heavily support breakaway regions to have influence in a country and to weaken and divide those who may oppose Russia’s power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgxVmB0rvCE
“Texas farmers have long pushed for Mexico to send more water to meet the obligations of the 81-year-old treaty that says Mexico is obligated to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the U.S. every five years. Trump also threatened sanctions and tariffs against Mexico in April, complaining then that the country had delivered less than 30 percent of the requirement over a five-year window that ended in October.
Mexico argues that climate change-driven drought has hindered its ability to send the requisite water, but officials promised to send 420,000 acre-feet to the U.S. by October.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/08/trump-tariffs-mexico-rio-grande-water-00682220
““The only part of the world where the new security strategy sees any threat to democracy seems to be Europe. Bizarre,” said former Swedish Prime Minister and European Council on Foreign Relations co-chair Carl Bildt.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-national-security-strategy-europe/
““On the territory issue, Americans are simple: Russia demands Ukraine to give up territories, and Americans keep thinking how to make it happen,” a senior European official familiar with the negotiation process told POLITICO on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
“The Americans insist that Ukraine must leave the Donbas … one way or another,” the official added.
Ukraine has insisted that any peace deal must involve the war being frozen on current lines. At present, some 30 percent of Donbas is still in Ukrainian hands.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/us-wants-from-ukraine-leave-donbas-one-way-or-another/
China is using its stranglehold on rare earth minerals to wage economic warfare against the world. If a company wants such materials from somewhere else, they will be more expensive, and those companies’ products will no longer be competitive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dASaGYbN0dw
Defenders are more likely to win longer wars. So, the idea that Ukraine can’t win because the war is going on so long, is backwards. The U.S. revolution was an eight year war.
The Americans were largely getting their asses kicked and were dependent on foreign aid, but in the end, they won.
The aggressor usually sustains more casualties compared to the defender. The defender often gains resolve the longer the war lasts, while the invader questions why they are doing this in the first place. The defender is fighting for their homes, their territory, and their independence, while the invader is fighting to gain something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMCTv_9alQ
China has built a super carrier. They may also be building drone carriers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH3zue1Bqvc
“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
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The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
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Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
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The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/01/kill-everybody/