Author: Braxton Taylor

The Pentagon dramatically expanded efforts to censor and remove books with topics such as diversity and anti-racism by ordering all military branches to scrub libraries of “divisive concepts and gender ideology” and pull those materials from shelves, according to a memo issued Friday.The memo, signed by the acting deputy under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, directs all military educational institutions, specifically noting war colleges and the service academies, to “promptly” identify books on about 20 topics and set them aside by May 21.The memo also announces the creation of a temporary Academic Libraries Committee “consisting of knowledgeable leaders,…

A day-care center at an Air Force base in the Florida panhandle will be reducing hours for families amid ongoing staffing issues, a move that comes amid the Trump administration’s mandate to reduce the civilian workforce throughout the Department of Defense.A May 7 memo shared with Military.com sent by the Eglin Air Force Base Child and Youth Services detailed to families that starting next month, child-care hours at the Florida installation would be reduced from 12 hours a day to 10 hours a day due to staffing issues, which “follows a trend” occurring across the department.”This reduction in operating hours…

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered all military service academies to no longer consider race, ethnicity or sex for admissions, according to a memo released Friday.The move appears to not only effectively end affirmative action efforts at the three military service academies, which were spared from a Supreme Court ruling on race-based admissions two years ago, but goes even further by including ethnicity and sex.Hegseth’s memo goes on to say that admission to the academies will be based “exclusively on merit,” because “selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our…

In the midnight hour on May 6, the House Natural Resources Committee passed their portion of the GOP’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, complete with an amendment calling for the sale of what could become tens of thousands of acres of federal lands in Western states. It was the only amendment of over 120 proposed throughout the all-night markup session to garner enough support — the committee is manned by 25 Republicans, 19 Democrats, and one vacant Democratic seat — to pass, E&E News reports. (For more about the last-minute amendment, read Jordan Sillars’ reporting here.)The next day, a press conference…

It’s tough to be the new kid on the block. Just ask the 6.5 Creedmoor. Now, the Fudds have another Hot New Thang to dismiss with a wave and a grunt: the 25 Creedmoor.Announced late last month, the 25 Creed has garnered a healthy amount of praise along with its fair share of cold water. It’s early days for this cartridge, and we’ll know more in the months and years to come, but I still wanted to do a deep dive into the data to see how it stacks up against its extremely popular 6.5mm predecessor.BallisticsHornady bills the 25 Creedmoor…

Between 1978 and 1985, Russian radar expert Adolf Tolkachev passed Soviet military secrets to his CIA handlers that saved the United States an estimated $2 billion in defense research developments. It was an intelligence coup that earned him the nickname “the Billion Dollar Spy.” Despite the care he took to maintain his position inside the Soviet Union’s military apparatus and to protect himself and his family from the Soviet internal security service, he was discovered and executed.A painting of Tolkachev by Kathy Krantz Fieramosca hangs in the CIA’s headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, and his story was recounted in author…

On Wednesday, May 7, North Dakota finalized its 2025 season dates and license quotas. The North Dakota Game and Fish (NDGF) agency notably cut licenses down to 42,300. This is 7,800 tags or 16% fewer than 2024.The tag reductions apply to most of the state’s deer tags, including both either-species tags and specifically designated whitetail tags. Muzzleloader-only licenses were also slashed. The only tag quotas that weren’t significantly impacted were for the state’s Type C mule deer buck licenses and youth antlered mule deer licenses.NDGF officials say the license reductions are necessary to help the state’s embattled deer populations bounce…

TAMPA, Florida—At least part of the public’s fascination with special operations forces concerns the cutting-edge gear they use. Some of it gets its start at the SOF Week conference here, where operators peruse state-of-the-art products and lay out their wishlist. This year, many requests from Special Operations Command centered on “making big things small,” like a DNA forensics lab or an emergency room; or “make a small thing large”: the amount of data that troops can transmit on battlefields where emissions can get you killed.Special operators often work in very small teams and secretly. So if someone gets wounded, medical…

Alternate history writing looks at “what if” scenarios; What if the Soviet Union won the Cold War? What if the Roman Empire never fell? It’s not just interesting escapism; it also allows readers to look critically at the world they really live in and reflect on current events. Popular alternate history stories have even become major television shows or movies. Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel “The Man in the High Castle” is set in an alternate timeline where an assassin killed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Germany and Japan won World War II. The book was later adapted into an Amazon…

TAMPA, Florida–Cruise missiles are getting smaller and that’s opening up ways to give older drones fighter jet-like capabilities, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command said Tuesday. “If you could use a gunship, or an MQ-9, or an OA-1K [Skyraider II] that had a small cruise missile that could go four,  five or 600 miles and hit a target, that seems like a capability that a combat commander could use,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Conley, who spoke to reporters at the Global SOF Foundation’s SOF Week event here. The vision is aspirational, an AFSOC official said. But it’s built on the…