🇾🇪🇺🇸🇩🇯 US forces bound for Djibouti now have to fly almost directly over Ansarallah controlled Mayyun (Perim) Island with transponders off. Then they only have a few kilometers between Mayyun island and radar-controlled airspace where they are forced to turn the transponder back on.

🔗 bonzerbarry

🇾🇪⚔️🇺🇸 Ansarallah pulled off a "SAMbush" maneuver during Operation Rough Rider in early 2025 and nearly shot down a USAF F-16 who had to make evasive maneuvers to avoid being hit by the anti-aircraft missile.

The USS Harry S. Truman (CNV-75) had to make evasive maneuvers to avoid being hit by Ansarallah antiship missiles leading to the loss of two F/A-18 Super Hornets who fell overboard due to the sharp turn pulled off by the aircraft carrier.

More recently, Ansarallah shot down a KSA F-15SA fighter jet

🔗 https://t.me/CIG_telegram/69141

🇾🇪⚔️🇾🇪 Ansarallah released a video of the Dhubab airbase which was captured by the Houthis in the recent Red Sea coast offensive.

It was built in 2024 by the UAE for the Southern Transitional Council. When the STC was militarily defeated and dissolved itself, it passed to the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) who abandoned it without a fight earlier this September.

The Emiratis built the base to complement their existing facilities near the city of Berbera, Somaliland and solidify their control over the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. The base was built for drones carrying out Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions.

@CIG_telegram

🇪🇹⚔️🇪🇹 Ethiopia map update as of the 28th of September 2026

Following five days of renewed hostilities, TPLF and ANURF rebels have successfully seized control of the town of Erebti that is in the Afar region. While in the Southern Tigray axis, the ENDF has captured the town of Alamata from TPLF control.

🔗 Faytuks Network

🇺🇸🛢 The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to 283.8M barrels, its lowest level since October 1982.

A year ago, September 2025, the SPR held 406 million barrels.

The current drawdown traces back to a 172 million-barrel release President Trump authorized in March, part of a coordinated 400 million-barrel release by 32 IEA member countries. Discharge began about a week later and was expected to take roughly 120 days, with the administration pledging to refill about 200 million barrels within a year at no cost to taxpayers.

Two different floors govern how far the reserve can fall. Federal law sets an operational minimum of 252.4 million barrels, while the generally accepted operational minimum is 250 to 300 million barrels on hand to pump and process oil efficiently, a level it is now testing.

Ben Cahill, an energy analyst at the Atlantic Council, has warned the releases carry diminishing returns: "at a certain point it becomes a self-defeating move, because releasing more oil into the market is overwhelmed by the perception that we're running out of options."

The decline lines up with what MST Marquee's Saul Kavonic called "living on an oil market credit card" earlier this month: Hormuz flows are still running at about a third of pre-war levels, and stock draws, not new supply, have kept Brent under $110 through most of the crisis.

About 133 million barrels of the drawdown are structured as swaps with Shell, Vitol and Trafigura, who are contracted to return 1.25 barrels for every one they took, with deliveries scheduled to begin early next year.

🔗 https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-Strategic-Petroleum-Reserve-Falls-to-Lowest-Level-Since-1982.html

🇸🇦🛢 Despite earlier reports of the Saudis "restoring" the Yanbu-Abqaiq East-West pipeline and "resuming" oil exports through Yanbu, satellite imagery still shows damage to 3 oil pumps on the pipeline which are out of service.

The "restoration" mentioned by Bloomberg and picked up by every major Western newspaper is partial and no way near close to normal operation levels. If there is oil being exported through Yanbu, its a far cry from the amount of barrels exiting the port before the Houthis damaged the pipeline.

🔗 MenchOsint (@MenchOsint)

🚀 NASA is asking former employees to help it restore the Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird who last flew in 1999.

Mike Relja, a retiree in his late 70s, received an unexpected job offer from NASA about a month ago.

Relja, an ex-U.S. Air Force and NASA test engineer for the SR-71A, could not believe his ears. David Ash, a former U.S. Navy and Joby test pilot who was hired in June as a special projects director for NASA, asked Relja to provide his expertise for a secret effort to return a long-retired and neglected Blackbird to flight.

“I told the guy, ‘You know, I’m too old to be doing this,’” Relja recalls to Aviation Week. “‘I wish you well. I’d like to see you make it. It would be interesting. But I just don’t think you can get there from here.’”

It appears NASA is going to try.

At some point early this year—certainly before May 17 and perhaps even before April, according to commercial satellite imagery acquired by Aviation Week—agency employees removed the SR-71A with Tail No. 844 from a display pole near the corners of Lilly and Walker Avenues at the Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards AFB, California.

That SR-71A had stood there since about Oct. 9, 1999, the day that marked the final flight of No. 844—and of any Blackbird. NASA employees rolled the SR-71A into the hangar that once housed the Space Shuttle at Edwards, Relja says. An inspection of the aircraft followed. By the time Ash extended the job offer to Relja in August, NASA had crews working on the SR-71A inside the hangar.

“I do know they’ve got people working on it,” Relja says. “But again, without equipment, it’s beyond me what they’re doing.”

The first public hint that a return to flight for the SR-71A was brewing came at the exclusive All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Sept. 12-14. On stage as a panelist, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman teased an image of a new X-plane, revealing the famous outline of the SR-71A’s inward-canted vertical tails, bulbous midwing engine nacelles and flush and blended cockpit. The image prompted speculation that NASA is planning to create a modern X-plane based at least loosely on the Blackbird’s distinctive profile.

Retired NASA employees tell a different story. Aviation Week confirmed that the agency approached Relja, Tim Conners, another former NASA SR-71A test engineer and others over the summer with job offers to work on the return-to-flight project for Tail No. 844.

In meetings with the prospective rehires, Ash brushed aside all questions about why NASA wanted to go to the effort and expense of putting the Mach 3-capable SR-71A back in flight.

During his remarks at the All-in Summit, Isaacman provided some context for NASA’s overall campaign to reinvigorate the agency’s aeronautics research mission with a new stable of X-planes pursuing breakthroughs rather than incremental improvements over the state of the art.

“In the service of the first ‘A’ in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet,” Isaacman said. “It will not be long before NASA is once again flying as high and as fast from decades past—and then even more.”

🔗 https://aviationweek.com/defense/aircraft-propulsion/nasa-asked-several-former-sr-71a-staffers-help-secret-restart

🇺🇸 Five people whose work supported missions at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade died by suicide within a month of each other this summer.

The unusual cluster of suicides in June and July follows efforts by the agencies and the Anne Arundel County military installation, where the country’s top cyber warfare units are based, to address the mental health of the 18,000 service members and 41,000 civilian employees there.

The nation’s cyber warriors at Fort Meade put in long, stressful hours, often in secure, windowless rooms called SCIFs, identifying cyberattacks and defending against them. The work has been intensified by the war with Iran and the race for new artificial intelligence models. The jobs, however, often isolate them from friends and family.

The recent suicides highlight that while mental health has become an increasing priority, a culture of silence continues to threaten leaders in one of the state’s most critical defense institutions.

“No one’s really surprised to hear about another suicide,” said Ryan Shaban, an Army veteran and cybersecurity professional who said he has friends in U.S. Cyber Command who are similarly struggling with mental health.

Shaban said many don’t report their concerns for fear of jeopardizing their security clearance. He’s running in Anne Arundel’s 31st District for a seat in Maryland’s House of Delegates and says he’s lost multiple friends in cyber and national security to suicide over the years.

🔗 https://www.thebanner.com/community/local-news/fort-meade-cyber-command-suicides-RC6YIRJO6ZBFVHAPAF62ZDIU3M/

🇨🇳🇺🇸📝 What Xi Actually Thinks of Trump

China’s president has likely concluded that the U.S. under Trump has lost its way.

This has nothing to do with the failure of the delegations to release a joint statement, or even the large discrepancies between each side’s readout of their meetings. Rather, it is about the private estimates that Xi must have made at the conclusion of his visit concerning two related questions: Who, deep down, is Trump, and what does his presidency say about the state of the United States as the world’s incumbent superpower?

A column like this is necessarily speculative, so I am going to venture my best guesses. The first is by far the easiest: Trump’s extraordinary unctuousness in giving Xi the red-carpet treatment and flattering him at every turn stands no chance of turning the two men into genuine friends, as Trump often seems to believe.

Like any nation, China has made many errors and miscalculations over the decades, but in the post-Mao era, it generates policies through a disciplined process, whose goal is a sober and rational assessment of China’s—or at least the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s)—interests. Friendship in the normal, personalized sense of the word has little to do with this. This is a rule that I would even extend to the theatrics of bonhomie played out between Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose Moscow serves as Beijing’s situational ally.

An admittedly more conjectural thought is that Xi may have found it highly amusing to watch Trump perform his interpretation of what authoritarian leadership consists of. It has become commonplace in U.S. political commentary to say that Trump fantasizes about having kingly powers. How else to interpret his lavish use of gold and his craze for monuments, especially ones that he hopes will bear his name down through the ages? But as Trump escorted Xi around the White House, extolling his helipad and the ballroom under construction, I am tempted to say that Xi must have taken him for a fool. For as much authority as Xi has concentrated in his own hands over the last 13-plus years, almost none of his energy has been consumed in the pursuit of personalized grandiosity.

Xi must also have thought poorly of his counterpart when Trump led him through a pavilion whose gilded walls featured portraits of U.S. presidents. They had been hung in ascending fashion, with Trump’s the highest of all. That is tacky enough by itself, but the Chinese leader stood by, looking as impassive as ever, as Trump paused before the frame devoted to his predecessor, Joe Biden. Instead of a portrait of Biden, it bore a photo of the autopen, the device that Biden often used to sign official acts (as other presidents have before him).

What Trump seemed oblivious to is that domestic politics and international relations at the highest level routinely warrant a careful distinction, as per the venerable U.S. saying about foreign policy that politics stops at the water’s edge. Xi caused waves in October 2022, when he had his predecessor, Hu Jintao, removed in front of a congress of the country’s top CCP officials, a rare sign of internal discord in a country where such things do not often surface in public. But it would be unimaginable for Xi to openly speak ill of any of his predecessors abroad. That is because he, like leaders of most nations with a well-developed sense of statecraft, understands that among his first duties while overseas is to promote a unified image of his country and its system.

At a minimum, Xi must have also felt that Trump was deeply confused when Trump dissed the U.S. media in his presence and expressed ill-concealed envy about the fact that the Chinese media reports what Beijing wants it to. Trump seems to believe that pro-government media coverage is a matter of banning news outlets whose criticism offends him. Xi knows better. The difference between the U.S. and Chinese press regimes is anchored in fundamental differences between democracy and dictatorship.

But there is something more in play: Press freedom in the United States, guaranteed by the Constitution, has long reflected not just legalism, but the deeper national self-assurance of a system that does not fear its own critics. Given this, I found myself wondering whether Xi concluded that he was witnessing not merely a president descending into cartoonishness, but the growing signs of a nation that has lost its way, including the self-confidence that Chinese leaders have long respected and even envied.

🔗 https://archive.ph/5tbcM

🇺🇸🇮🇶 US forces exit Iraq by tomorrow after 20+ years, ending a presence where 4,500 Americans died.

Iran-backed groups call it "a historic victory" and "a crushing defeat for the American project."

Iraqi security officials warn the withdrawal is premature.

The last US soldier killed in Iraq died in July during a drone detonation near Erbil.

Seven of 18 US service members killed in this year's Iran war died in Iraq.

🔗 Clash Report

🔋 🇺🇸 🤖 The AI revolution is running into a power bottleneck:

US data center IT power demand is projected to surge +755% from 2025 levels, reaching a record 78.57 gigawatts by 2029.

This year alone, demand is expected to jump +95% to 17.96 gigawatts, and then another +97% in 2027.

This comes as US data centers are set to require 97 gigawatts of power in the 2026 to 2028 period.

Meanwhile, only 21 gigawatts are under construction, and 19 gigawatts of grid capacity are available, leaving a potential 57-gigawatt shortfall.

The gap is widening as increasingly powerful AI systems require far more electricity, while power supply is struggling to keep pace.

At the same time, more complex servers built around Nvidia’s Vera Rubin and Rubin Ultra architectures are expected to push IT power demand 5x from 2025 to 2028.

The AI buildout is running into a significant power constraint.

📎 KobeissiLetter