SOFREP Cartoon: U.S. Southern Command’s Pirate Upgrade
SOUTHCOM’s Pirate Upgrade. The mission is sus, but the fit is fire!
SOUTHCOM’s Pirate Upgrade. The mission is sus, but the fit is fire!
Three quick hits this evening: Lockheed just fired up a new Huntsville hypersonics lab to speed Army strike programs, Benin swatted down a coup attempt when most of the army stayed loyal, and back in D.C. Pete Hegseth is catching shrapnel for allegedly pushing Yemen strike details over Signal like OPSEC is optional.
If the bombing of that vessel is ultimately judged to have targeted civilians or used grossly disproportionate force, then everyone in the chain of command, from the trigger-puller up to President Trump and his Pentagon leadership, must answer for it as a potential war crime rather than dismiss it as routine business of war.
On that brutal Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor, Captain Mervyn Bennion stayed on the burning bridge of West Virginia with his guts torn open, still fighting for his ship and his men long after any reasonable man would have let go.
Congress is tightening bipartisan oversight on the Trump administration’s Caribbean counter-narco strikes even as the White House keeps pressure on cartel networks and Maduro’s inner circle. At the same time, Maduro is trying to project calm from behind blacked-out glass in Caracas, while New York’s anti-ICE protest at Federal Plaza crossed from lawful dissent into street-level disorder and drew a firm NYPD response.
November has repeatedly served as war’s decision month, delivering hinge battles from El Alamein and Guadalcanal to the Somme and Fallujah that either broke enemy momentum or forced conflicts into their endgame.
When people ask if Navy SEALs fear sharks, I tell them the truth which is that during BUD/S you are too focused on surviving the next evolution to waste a thought on whatever might be circling beneath you.
Graduating from BUD/S demands nothing less than unyielding mental toughness and the refusal to quit, no matter how brutal the training gets.
Parked off Venezuela like a steel cathedral, the Ford isn’t here to chase panga boats — it’s a billion-dollar warning flare meant to make someone, somewhere, think very hard about what happens next.
He stepped into the open, phone in hand and grit in his teeth, trading the last of his cover for a handful of breaths for his teammates — the kind of small, brutal choice that carves a quiet legend out of an ordinary life.
Two U.S. Navy aircraft falling within minutes in the South China Sea hands Beijing a propaganda gift and turns “routine” operations into a spark near the region’s powder magazine.
In the black churn of the Arabian Sea, a Pakistani smuggler’s greed met two American warriors’ courage—and the ocean, as always, took its due.