India’s air force chief said on Saturday that the U.S. has made no formal offer to sell India F-35 stealth fighters, and added that American personnel have not even allowed Indian officers near the stealth aircraft.
Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh made the comments at a press conference marking the end of the multinational Exercise Tarang Shakti-2026 in Jodhpur, while seated alongside U.S. Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Kevin Schneider.
“Your people don’t even let us go near the aircraft, and you are talking about selling it to us,” Singh said.
Six U.S. Air Force F-35As, accompanied by more than 200 personnel, participated in Tarang Shakti. This was the first time the American stealth fighters had drilled against Indian jets on Indian soil.
Singh also said the Indian government has not yet decided whether the air force should evaluate Russia’s offer of the Su-57.
“Once the decision is conveyed to us (by the government), we will evaluate how well it meets our requirements,” he said.
Earlier in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump said, during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington, that the United States would pave the way for India to acquire the F-35.
Later, Vice President J.D. Vance reiterated the offer during his visit to India in April 2025, saying, “We, of course, want to collaborate more. We want to work together more. And we want your nation to buy more of our military equipment, which we believe is best-in-class. American fifth-generation F-35s, for example, would give the Indian Air Force the ability to defend your airspace and protect your people like never before.”
Earlier, as EurAsian Times reported, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet discussed selling the F-35 to India and raised the prospect of selling the F-21, a highly sophisticated F-16 derivative.
“I think the F-16 also has strong legs, if you will, and more and increasing interest as we go forward from several countries that aren’t quite ready for F-35,” Taiclet said. There are “some countries that could see F-21 or F-16, for India, for example, as a stepping stone to F-35.”
The sale of the F-35 is subject to rigorous U.S. export controls under the Arms Export Control Act, which requires approval from the State Department, the Pentagon, and often Congress. The White House maintains strict policies on technology transfers, regional stability, and the internal politics of the potential recipient state to safeguard its sensitive technology.
The U.S. hesitation is straightforward: sharing it with other countries could put sensitive technology in the hands of enemies, especially if the recipient country has ties to countries like China or Russia, which would try to exploit or reverse-engineer it.
Earlier, writing for EurAsian Times, Air Marshal Anil Chopra (retired) said: The F-35 soft pitch faced almost immediate limitations due to subsequent tariff frictions and India’s core push for technology transfer for domestic manufacturing of its AMCA fifth-gen warplanes and aero-engines.
GE Aerospace has faced immense delays on its 2021 contract to supply 99 F404-IN20 engines to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for the Tejas Mk1A fighter program. Only six out of the promised engines have been delivered instead of the targeted 12-plus a year, prompting HAL to invoke contractual penalty clauses.
Tariffs on “friend” India and delayed engines for AMCA have badly weakened Indo-US ties.
India also operates Russian-supplied S-400 systems, a factor that previously caused friction between the U.S. and Turkey.
India already operates the Russian-origin S-400 AD System. The U.S. fears these networks could compromise classified F-35 stealth data. The jet relies on the U.S.-controlled Operational Data Integrated Network for software and logistics.
The U.S. may already be accessing such data through many other American platforms on Indian soil.
Meanwhile, introducing a complex new Western platform adds severe maintenance challenges to an already diverse military fleet. Even in the U.S., very few airbases can service stealth coatings.
Buying foreign fifth-generation jets risks diverting funds from India’s indigenous AMCA project. Putting too many military aviation eggs in the unreliable U.S. basket is also a risk. Americans can be “very unreliable” when it comes to imposing sanctions and freezing spares and maintenance support.
Operationally, the F-35 could offer major strategic advantages for the IAF, but any deal involves deep geopolitical, logistical, and financial complexities. Acquisition costs range from $80 to $110 million per jet, plus very high hourly operating expenses, creating budgetary challenges for New Delhi.
After two decades of stable ties, the last two years have seen distrust between the world’s largest and oldest democracies.
While many hope this is a transitory phase, it is becoming clear that the U.S. is not interested in India’s rise as a global power. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau stated at the last Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi that Washington will not repeat its past approach (read: mistake) with China by granting India unfettered market and tech access that could lead to strong commercial competition.
The U.S. wants India strong enough only to serve as a bulwark against China, not to become an independent power center or a technology and economic power.
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The U.S. seems keen only to supply platforms to India through large contracts. Even for aero-structures and smaller components, it prefers make-in-India “Build to Print” over significant technology sharing.
Even the proposed India-USA deal to co-produce GE Aerospace F414 engines with HAL faces major hurdles. The main complications include a nearly threefold cost surge, intense disputes over sensitive hot-end technology transfer, and the risk of delays to India’s Tejas Mk2 and AMCA programs.
Many Indians wonder whether we have invested too much in a partner with a high trust deficit and a vacillating foreign policy. U.S. is known to have “dumped” friends and allies for immediate national interests. The Trump administration’s recent public threats and admonishments to its NATO allies further strengthen Indian concerns.
The U.S. has already deepened its ties with India’s airborne platforms, supplying transport aircraft (C-17, C-130), maritime patrol aircraft (P-8I), UAVs (MQ-9), and helicopters (Chinook, AH-64 Apache, and MH-60R).
For a long time, the U.S. was trying to sell the F-16 ‘Viper’ (renamed F-21) and the F-18 Super Hornet as part of India’s Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) proposal. Later, it offered the F-15EX. The U.S. never officially offered the F-35.
Despite being the oldest democracy, the U.S. finds it easier to deal with dependent military Generals, and West Asian Sheikhs, rather than growing democracies. The U.S. has a poor opinion of India’s “Non-Alignment” and “Strategic Autonomy.”
Washington continues to prefer Pakistan, which helps it connect with China, the West, and Central Asia, and is willing to toe the American line for a few bucks. This Pakistan connection further erodes India’s trust.
Most analysts feel that letting the USA into India’s fighter-aircraft ecosystem is not a great idea. Any F-35 deal, like other aircraft deals, will be only a supply-and-support contract. There will be no technology transfer and no “Make-in-India” element.
While India pushes its own AMCA program, the Su-57 may still be the better choice for an interim fighter.
The post India Shuts Down F-35 Talk With One Blunt Line. Says U.S. Crew Won’t Even Let Us Near The Stealth Fighter appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.
Building on the commercial success and popularity of its PAC-3 interceptors, Lockheed Martin unveiled the more advanced PAC-3 Edge, a program that it is advancing with millions of dollars in funding.
The PAC-3 Edge “will add a revolutionary defensive capability against hypersonic and advanced missile threats,” Lockheed said in an official press statement announcing the interceptor’s debut on October 9, 2026.
The interceptor “leverages combat-proven PAC-3 MSE technology and the latest, industry-leading capability to deliver decisive performance against the Army’s most critical threats,” the company emphasized.
Although details about the missile remain limited at this stage, the defense giant has indicated that the PAC-3 Edge will have a longer range, higher altitude reach, and greater effectiveness against maneuverable targets than the PAC-3.
The company noted that the PAC-3 Edge achieves superior performance with a next-generation seeker developed by its Strigo Product Center. This seeker—incorporating the latest defense technologies—is expected to significantly boost the interceptor’s ability to defeat highly sophisticated threats. It also features a multi-pulse solid rocket motor from Northrop Grumman that provides precise, controlled thrust throughout the flight profile.
Furthermore, Lockheed’s additional control-system upgrades extend the missile’s effective range and altitude capabilities, the company added.
Lockheed said the improved PAC-3 interceptor is part of the US Army’s Future Interceptor program, “which is currently under competition,” though it stopped short of naming the other competitors.
“The Army’s decision to progress Lockheed Martin into the next stage of development affirms its confidence in Lockheed Martin’s proven Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) experience and the company’s ability to deliver an advanced, layered defense against what’s next,” the company stated.
The US Army’s Future Interceptor program is meant to develop a next-generation interceptor, primarily as an advanced successor or major upgrade path for the Patriot PAC-3.
The effort focuses on the lower tier of the ballistic missile defense battlespace and aims to counter current and emerging air, missile, and hypersonic threats with improved velocity, altitude, range, and maneuverability. It is meant to strengthen the Army’s layered IAMD architecture against near-peer adversaries like China and Russia.
The unveiling comes as the US military is seeking a Patriot successor amid evolving threats from adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which have amassed sophisticated hypersonic missiles that are typically much harder to intercept because of their high speeds, unpredictable trajectories, and enviable maneuverability.
In fact, this effort may have gained more urgency after the debacle in the Middle East, where US facilities suffered massive damage in Iranian strikes during its ongoing Operation Epic Fury.
Lockheed says PAC-3 Edge is designed to integrate with existing and future IAMD capabilities, including the Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS), the M903 launcher, containerized launchers, and HIMARS Flex. It plans to accelerate missile development in 2027 to match PAC-3 Edge’s rapid deployment schedule for 2031.
A noteworthy aspect of Lockheed offering the PAC-3 Edge for the Future Interceptor Program is that it is putting its own money on the line to deliver the interceptor faster than traditional acquisition timelines usually allow.
Lockheed reportedly plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars of its own funds in the missile alone, in addition to further investments in its solid rocket motor and seeker. “We’ve already probably somewhere between $50 [million] and $100 million or better put into this,” Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin, was quoted as saying by Breaking Defense.
He added that the seeker tech is expected to receive roughly $800 million in total company investment so the technology can be reused across other offensive and defensive systems.
The company has already invested about $250 million in the Strigo Product Center to fund new, industry-leading seeker technology that enables greater precision and maneuverability, as noted in the press statement.
Notably, this heavy investment indicates that rather than waiting for traditional government contracts to fully mature, Lockheed is treating PAC-3 Edge as both a technical leap and a strategic corporate bet.
This approach aligns with Lockheed’s recent emphasis on self-funded prototypes and enabling technologies, including work on a space-based interceptor aimed at an on-orbit demonstration around 2028, or the backward integration of advanced Skunk Works technologies, among other similar efforts.
This overall approach of self-funding projects, or parts of them, reflects the company’s deliberate shift toward “home-run” internal research and development (R&D) that produces real hardware the government can evaluate.
Lockheed Martin is not selling the PAC-3 Edge as a clean-sheet leap into the unknown. Instead, it is deliberately packaging the new interceptor as the logical, low-risk evolution of the US’s most trusted and successful missile-defense weapon. “Lockheed Martin’s PAC-3 Edge interceptor leverages the combat-proven PAC-3 MSE, delivering even greater maneuverability, power and velocity to ensure the Army’s layered defensive architecture remains the most advanced in the world,” Cahill stated.
PAC-3 has been tested against ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and even hypersonic threats in Ukraine and the Middle East, with Lockheed and US officials repeatedly describing high kill rates, despite leaked missiles.
Lockheed claims the PAC-3 Edge inherits the same PAC-3 hit-to-kill architecture and operational pedigree, allowing it to claim continuity. By keeping Edge within the PAC-3 family, including the same launchers, fire-control software, and logistics footprint, Lockheed reduces the usual political and programmatic friction that accompanies a new interceptor.
Notably, Lockheed will leverage the PAC-3’s infrastructure for the new-generation interceptor and, according to reports, will build the PAC-3 Edge on its existing PAC-3 line in Camden, Ark.
Furthermore, the company claims it will cost the same as the PAC-3. “The cost of this would be about that of the existing PAC-3 MSE,” Tim Cahill told Reuters. “At full production, the annual rate would be about 2,000 units a year, comparable with PAC-3 MSE.”
Against this backdrop, Congress and the United States Army can view Edge less as a risky new start and instead see it as the next spiral of a system that is already proven, funded at scale, and desired by allies.
The PAC-3 Patriot interceptors are the most advanced in the US inventory, alongside the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). In fact, the recent conflicts in Iran and Ukraine have driven a massive global surge in the missile’s orders. About 17 countries currently operate or have ordered PAC-3 variants, including the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, the UAE, Taiwan, Kuwait, Qatar, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Romania, Poland, Sweden, Bahrain, Switzerland, Spain, and Denmark.
Many of these have multi-billion-dollar outstanding orders and are actively expanding their stocks.
For foreign customers, Lockheed could position the PAC-3 Edge as a natural path to ordering the next-generation PAC-3 instead of evaluating an all-new option.
Earlier this year, Lockheed also unveiled PAC-3 ACE, a less powerful, more affordable MSE variant accessible to clients outside the US. “It is not designed to replace the MSE, but to supplement it — it has its heritage and maturity, but we bring the costs down by changing some of the components,” Tim Cahill said at the time.
Therefore, it may not be an exaggeration to say that Lockheed is now diversifying its interceptor portfolio within the same brand: the PAC-3 ACE as a lower-cost, high-volume option for less-stressing threats, PAC-3 MSE as the current high-end workhorse, and the PAC-3 Edge as the future higher-altitude, longer-range, hypersonic-capable top end.
The unveiling of the new PAC-3 Edge comes as the company already executes a historic ramp-up of capacity. Earlier this year, Lockheed signed a seven-year framework agreement to increase annual PAC-3 interceptor production from 600 to 2,000 under a roughly $58.6 billion framework agreement. The overall expansion effort reportedly includes new facilities, robotics, automation, and supplier expansions.
In summary, Lockheed Martin is backing the PAC-3 Edge with hundreds of millions of its own dollars while keeping the design closely tied to the existing PAC-3 production base and operational architecture. The strategy aims to offer the Army a faster, lower-risk route to a more capable interceptor. Whether this will pay off now remains to be seen.
The post Lockheed Unveils PAC-3 Edge — Next-Gen Patriot Interceptor To Counter Hypersonic Missile Threats appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.
Science emerged in Christendom because God was transcendent, not pantheistic. Now materialism reigns as a hidden theology – Epstein-funded, preached by ambiguous atheists.
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There is possibly more than one correct answer to the question of why science emerged in Western Christendom, rather than appearing first in one of the many Eastern societies with formidable technology, or within the fold of Greco-Roman paganism.
The Benedictine epistemologist Stanley Jaki offers a detailed answer that is intrinsic to Christianity: as we read in Christ and Science, the distinguishing factor is that Christians are not prone to falling into pantheism. Among Greco-Roman pagans, the cosmos was called “only-begotten” – a title later assumed by Jesus in Christianity, and only in Christianity. In the world of Aristotle, Western Christendom’s favorite pagan, bodies move of their own volition (fire seeks to rise, earth seeks to sink, etc.), and the Prime Mover is part of nature rather than transcending it. In Judaism and Islam, figures such as Spinoza (beloved in the 20th century by Einstein and Sagan, and in the 21st by Sam Harris) and Averroes (with his universal intellect) demonstrate how easily God can be conflated with nature itself. It was in medieval Christendom that the world came to be conceived as a vast clock with inanimate parts adjusted by an intelligent Creator, whose laws we must discover. This way of thinking about the universe, which we associate today with Newton, is medieval. And this worldview, specific to Christendom, is what made the invention of science possible.
Here in this SCF column, I once ventured a more modest answer of a cultural nature. I wrote that the West has been rationalist since before it was Christian; and this fosters not only the emergence of science but also the willingness to uphold it in the event of a conflict with faith. Sunnis, who constitute the majority of Muslims, saw a form of Quranic literalism put an end to the spectacular flourishing of the sciences during the Middle Ages. Jews, who devoted themselves to the exegesis of religious texts, only became scientists following emancipation and secularization. This cultural characteristic helps explain why science emerged in Western Christendom rather than in the East, given that both the Roman and Greek Churches shared the belief in the only-begotten Jesus. It also helps explain why, following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe did not cling to biblical literalism or to Luther’s diatribes against reason, but instead produced science in dialogue with Catholic Europe. This ultimately shifted the locus of Truth from religion (where each group held its own version) to science (to be accepted by all), paving the way for that recent Western invention known as scientism.
Now, an idea intrinsic to Christianity that I wish to highlight is its absolute intolerance of relativism regarding knowledge. In the pagan world, philosophy and religion were disconnected matters. Plato reflected on the good, the beautiful, and the just without investigating Olympus. Cicero, as a philosopher, wrote against the public soothsayers of the Roman religion; yet, as a politician, he showed no intention of altering state religious practices or inventing secularism. Even Aristotle, who wrote on every conceivable discipline, did not write about Zeus, Hera, or Athena. He did create a “theology,” but it referred not to the gods, but rather to the Prime Mover. Zeus, Hera, and Athena were not the objects of any discipline.
It was during the Middle Ages that the Catholic Church invented the university with the aim of studying the universum – that is, everything: metaphysics, physics, politics, theology… Knowledge was organized cohesively, based on the presumption of an objective reality. Thus, physics could not teach something that contradicted theology, and vice versa. (Although the Galileo affair stemmed from the Aristotelianism embraced by the Church through Thomas Aquinas, rather than from a literal reading of the Bible.) This cohesion might seem obvious, yet today the discipline of physics claims that glass is a liquid, while the discipline of chemistry claims that glass is a solid. And that is not even the greatest problem: who would dare ask a university for an unequivocal definition of “man” or “human”? In practice, relativism reigns in the university – and did so even before the postmodernists took over everything.
This fragmentation of knowledge originated in the scientific model that emerged during the Renaissance. Outside the universities, humanists sought out ancient texts that medieval Catholics had discarded, such as De rerum natura by the materialist and Epicurean Lucretius. Since antiquity conferred authority in those days, the occult tradition formed by the fusion of Hermeticism and Kabbalah enjoyed particular credibility among the learned class. Hermeticism derives from Hermes Trismegistus, whom Renaissance thinkers believed to be the teacher of Moses, Plato, and Pythagoras, though in reality, he was a fictional figure dating from slightly after the time of Christ. An etymological trace of Hermeticism’s importance to science is the adjective “hermetic,” used by alchemists to describe their tightly sealed vessels. As for Kabbalah, it stems from a religion that predated Christianity – which is enough for it to be regarded as ancient, even though its principal text, the Zohar, originated in medieval Spain. As I have argued in greater detail here, Renaissance occultism influenced modern science and is responsible for its utilitarian bias. If individual disciplines decide that a certain concept “works,” contradictions between them pose no problem; what matters is not knowledge itself, but practical utility. It is a science inspired by the methods of the sorcerer, who consults ancient books and tests spells to see which ones work.
Thus, the status quo of knowledge within universities is one of practical relativism, resulting from the institution’s lack of a unified vision. On an individual level, however, it is humanly impossible to conduct science without a coherent worldview – even if that worldview is constructed a posteriori based on the “spells” that proved effective, much like the alchemists of the Renaissance. Today, it is quite clear that the scientific mainstream is atheist, but that tells us little. It would be more accurate to say that the mainstream is materialist.
The nineteenth century was the century in which materialism became consolidated within science. It was the century of Darwin’s triumph – Darwin being the first (and perhaps only) great scientist in history that was unequivocally atheist. Before Darwin, the prevailing worldview was the medieval one of God as the “watchmaker,” or of nature as a book written by God in the language of mathematics (to use Galileo’s metaphor). Alternative worldviews began to emerge during the Renaissance. By the Enlightenment, this movement had taken the forms of deism and materialism – concepts that are not mutually exclusive. Deism is the idea that God exists but is indifferent to humanity. This is a very vague notion, as it encompasses the possibilities that: (1) God is a distant architect (as for Voltaire, a “creationist” and admirer of Newton); (2) God is matter itself, or the universe itself (pantheism); or (3) gods exist but are made of atoms, just like the rest of nature – a view found in De Rerum Natura that results in practical atheism. Since this conception of God is psychologically difficult to sustain, it is hardly surprising that, by the nineteenth century, the public face of materialism had become that of atheism.
Even so, as I have shown here on SCF, only one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism (Richard Dawkins) is unequivocally an atheist. The other three (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens) are adherents of either a psychedelic New Age philosophy, Judaism, or both. Sagan was another atheist with this ambiguous profile.
I believe, then, that it is useful to distinguish between these two opposing scientific worldviews: one, which gave rise to science, is that of the transcendent God who acts as the cosmos’s engineer; then there is the materialist view, according to which everything that exists is matter moving randomly, generating at times chaos and at others order. Within this latter framework, one can be an unequivocal atheist – like Dawkins today or Baron d’Holbach in the 18th century – or a New Age type like Sam Harris. Matter itself can also be divinized by crystal-obsessed wine moms and potheads. An ambiguous figure is none other than Epstein; this patron was a Jew religious enough to want to create a GMO kosher pig so he could eat bacon, yet he simultaneously funded Sam Harris’s atheist club. As I have shown here, Epstein was such a committed materialist that he sought to identify the specific part of the brain corresponding to the soul.
One final intrinsic trait of Christianity worth mentioning is its exotericism – that is, its public, non-initiate nature. This characteristic is reflected in universities and libraries: the entire repository of knowledge is open to anyone wishing to study. In the case of materialism, England has maintained a solid tradition of private and secretive scientific societies, often with commercial aims, dating back to the 18th-century Lunar Society. This aligns with the esotericism of the Renaissance. Furthermore, in the 21st century, the Epstein files brought to light discreet societies of materialists, such as the one involving Sam Harris that was funded by the pedophile.
Given that the pedophile also funded university research, it is plausible that this materialism – bordering on both pantheism and atheism – constitutes a hidden “theology”: one that is always presupposed in contemporary science yet never made explicit to the uninitiated.
The more technology distances the actor, the more responsibility must increase.
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From person to target
What becomes of humanity when technology becomes capable of recognising, classifying, tracking and ultimately killing human beings without those carrying out the strikes ever having seen them? My friend Mohammad Reza Dehshiri asked this very question, and his answer is a powerful one. The danger, he writes, is not artificial intelligence but artificial inhumanity – that is, the possibility that machines will become more accurate precisely as humans cease to feel responsible for what those machines do in their name.
With this article, I am launching a series that takes Dehshiri’s analysis as its starting point and attempts to take it further. If the problem is ‘artificial inhumanity’, the answer cannot lie in a ‘more ethical’ AI, as if ethics were a module to be installed as an afterthought to a system that has already been designed. We need to reclaim a category that technological jargon has rendered almost unmentionable: human intelligence, understood not as a remnant to be protected amidst the complexities of automation, but as a form of knowledge with its own distinct characteristics, which no increase in computing power can replace.
I shall call it Human Intelligence, and the ambiguity is deliberate. In intelligence service jargon, HUMINT refers to the oldest of the intelligence disciplines: that which relies on people, sources, languages and the patient frequenting of places. In philosophical terminology, the expression denotes the faculty of understanding. The thesis of this first contribution is that these two meanings now converge, and that their convergence has geopolitical implications that extend far beyond the debate on the ethics of weaponry.
We can describe the operational chain of contemporary warfare in seven stages: detect, identify, classify, predict, prioritise, target, strike. Each link can be technically refined without the sequence, taken as a whole, being morally refined. The resulting phenomenon is called the ‘datafication of human life’: the individual reduced to an identity, a location, a behavioural pattern, a threat score.
This is no abstraction. In April 2024, an investigation by Yuval Abraham for +972 Magazine and Local Call described ‘Lavender’, a system used by the Israeli armed forces in Gaza to assign tens of thousands of people a probability of affiliation with armed groups. According to internal sources cited in the investigation, the human verification of each name often amounted to no more than twenty seconds – the time needed to ascertain that the target was male. The Israeli Defence Forces have disputed this account and described Lavender as a database designed to support analysts. Even if one accepts the official version, however, the crux of the matter remains: a human operator was present, and their presence was not sufficient to transform the system’s recommendation into a judgement.
Cognitive psychology has a name for this phenomenon, automation bias: the tendency of those working with an automated system to treat its recommendations as a substitute for their own verification, and to fail to seek out the information that might contradict them. Back in 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum – who had built one of the first conversational programmes in history – already distinguished between the ability to calculate and the ability to judge, and argued that there are tasks that should not be entrusted to a computer even if the computer were capable of performing them. Half a century on, this distinction has become even more pressing. Computation works on what has already been translated into data. Judgement must decide whether that translation has been faithful.
Dehshiri drives the point home with four distinctions: technical precision is not ethical precision; accuracy is not justice; automation is not responsibility; technological superiority is not moral superiority. I would add a fifth, of an epistemic nature, upon which the others depend: correlation is not understanding. A machine-learning system recognises statistical patterns in a dataset. It does not know what a school is, because it does not know what a child is, and it does not even know that it does not know this.
L’iraniano cites an interesting case study: On 28 February 2026, in the early hours of the war, the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in Hormozgan province, was struck several times during school hours. The figures provided by the Iranian authorities range between 150 and 175 deaths, the vast majority of whom were girls, along with dozens of teachers and a few parents; the district prosecutor put the final death toll at 156. Washington has never directly acknowledged its responsibility nor published the findings of the Pentagon’s investigation. Amnesty International has described the incident, at best, as a serious intelligence failure.
There is one detail, revealed by satellite imagery, which shifts the analysis from the moral to the factual plane. According to Western media, the school stood next to a naval base belonging to the Revolutionary Guards and had previously formed part of it; among the explanations circulating in US circles is that of out-of-date targeting data. If this hypothesis were confirmed, Minab would not be a case of a machine making a mistake, but of a database that had ceased to correspond to reality. The building had changed. The data had not.
No classification algorithm, however sophisticated, can detect that an old military building has become a school if no one has recorded the change. Everyone living in Minab knew this: the parents who took their daughters to school every morning, the schoolbus driver, the teachers. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that HUMINT gathers and that remote warfare tends to regard as superfluous, because it is slow, costly and difficult to scale. Based on publicly available sources, US responsibility appears highly probable, whilst the exact circumstances remain unclear and confidence on this point is low: a database error, a classification error, or a conscious acceptance of the risk. The three hypotheses, however, all converge on the same question. Who, prior to the strike, checked whether there were people in that building?
Beyond ‘human-in-the-loop’
The international debate has long been content with the principle of human-in-the-loop, whereby a human being is part of the decision-making loop.
This formula is insufficient: a person may be present in the loop yet merely rubber-stamp the algorithm’s recommendation. He proposes replacing it with a more demanding principle, which he calls humanity-in-command: the effective ability to question, reject, override and halt the automated process.
The history of the Cold War offers two examples that clarify what this means in practice. On 26 September 1983, the Soviet early-warning system Oko signalled the launch of five ballistic missiles from the United States. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, dismissed the alarm as a false alarm and did not report it as an ongoing attack, reasoning that a first American strike would never consist of just five missiles. He was right: the satellite had mistaken the sun’s reflection off the clouds for missile launches. Twenty-one years earlier, on 27 October 1962, in the Caribbean Sea, the Soviet submarine B-59, isolated and under fire from signal depth charges, was on the verge of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo. The launch required the consent of the three senior officers on board, and Vasily Arkhipov refused to give it.
In neither case did the man approve a recommendation from the system. He contradicted it. And he did not do so because he had more data: indeed, the data were the problem. He did so because he knew how to ask himself a question that no procedure required him to ask, namely whether what he was seeing made sense in the context of everything else he knew about the world. Petrov was familiar with American nuclear doctrine; Archipov knew the difference between an attack and a threat. It is this ability to compare the signal with the bigger picture, the detail with what is plausible, that I call Human Intelligence. It is worth noting that the Dena was sunk by a submarine. We do not know what its officers were asked, nor what scope they had for judgement.
This proposal needs to be clarified, as there is a risk of reducing it to a generic humanistic appeal. Human Intelligence, as I understand it, is structured across three distinct levels, each of which marks a structural – rather than contingent – limit of artificial intelligence.
The first level is epistemic. The scholastic tradition distinguished between intellectus, the act by which the mind immediately grasps a truth, and ratio, the discursive process of moving from one element to another: for Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 79, a. 8), the two are not distinct faculties but aspects of a single intellect, in which reasoning begins with an understanding and returns to an understanding. Current machine learning systems realise a ratio of unprecedented power, capable of inferring, combining and predicting on scales inaccessible to the human mind. They lack the aspect of intellectus, that is, a grasp of the meaning of what they process. This is a philosophical thesis and must be presented as such, but it has precise practical consequences: a system devoid of understanding cannot know when its own model of the world has become false.
The second aspect is practical. Prudentia, in the Thomist definition, is right reason applied to action, and its specific task consists in applying the universal principle to the particular case. The machine generalises: its value lies in mapping the individual case back to a class. Prudence does the opposite, because it must recognise what, in this particular case, falls outside the class. War, which is the realm of the singular and the unforeseen, is the arena where this difference carries the most weight. The Vatican’s Antiqua et nova note of January 2025 took up this line of thought, emphasising the embodied and relational nature of human intelligence and its irreducibility to a mere processing function.
The third level is relational, and it is here that philosophical meaning meets that of the intelligence services. Sherman Kent, who effectively founded the field of intelligence studies in the post-war United States, defined it first and foremost as knowledge, even before organising or activity. HUMINT is the form of this knowledge that passes through the other as a person: someone who speaks their language, knows their customs, can read a neighbourhood, and can distinguish a festival from a rally. Over the last three decades, the major powers have progressively shifted resources towards technical disciplines, from signals intelligence to satellite surveillance, right through to data fusion platforms. Minab illustrates the cost of this imbalance.
None of this implies a rejection of technology. Human Intelligence does not stand in opposition to AI in the same way that a manual stands in opposition to a mechanic. It establishes a hierarchy: the algorithm as a tool subservient to a judgement it cannot produce on its own. And from this it derives a principle, formulated by Dehshiri, which deserves to become an operational criterion: the more technology distances the actor from the consequences of their own actions, the more the conscious responsibility of the decision-maker must increase, not decrease.
Geopolitically speaking
So far, the issue might seem to be one of moral philosophy. It is not merely that. The distribution of algorithmic warfare capability is a distribution of power, and the rules governing it will be written – if they are written at all – by those with an interest in limiting them as little as possible.
The state of international law confirms this. The group of government experts established under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has been discussing lethal autonomous weapons systems since 2017 without having reached a binding instrument. In November 2023, the United States promoted a political declaration on the responsible military use of AI, which is by definition non-binding; in December of the same year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the first resolution dedicated to these systems, whilst the International Committee of the Red Cross has been calling since 2021 for a ban on unpredictable autonomous systems and those designed to target human beings. In June 2024, speaking at the G7 summit in Borgo Egnazia, Pope Francis called for no machine ever to be placed in a position to decide on a person’s life. The gap between these positions and the reality on the battlefields of 2026 is measured in casualties.
There is also a deeper asymmetry. Those who control the data decide who is a target, and the victims of algorithmic warfare are largely found outside the West: in Gaza, Iran, the Sahel and Yemen. For states that do not produce the platforms or control their databases, human intelligence thus becomes a matter of sovereignty. A country that maintains linguistic expertise, regional knowledge and human intelligence networks retains its autonomy of judgement; a country that entrusts its worldview to systems designed elsewhere – often by private companies – surrenders it along with its data. In an order tending towards multipolarity, this distinction will separate the actors who judge from those who are judged.
This leads to a concrete proposal, which I shall develop in future articles. Alongside the general principle of meaningful human oversight, international humanitarian law could codify a specific obligation for human verification of the civil status of every fixed infrastructure included on a list of targets, with an expiry date beyond which the information becomes invalid and must be renewed using direct sources. This is a minimum standard. Applied to Minab, it would have required someone to ask whether that building was still what the records stated it to be.
Technology can determine how a weapon reaches its target, whilst it is up to humanity to decide whether that target should be struck. The question underlying all this is who, in practical terms, exercises that humanity, with what tools of knowledge and within which institutions. In Minab, someone should have known that there was a school there. The fact that nobody knew, or that nobody asked, is the point from which we must start again.
VTM
Um incêndio florestal que deflagrou durante a noite em Mateus, no concelho de Vila Real, alastrou a uma zona de barracas, destruindo totalmente três barracas e duas viaturas. O alerta foi dado às 00h50, tendo sido mobilizados para o local 32 operacionais e sete veículos para o combate às chamas.
A informação foi avançada por José Salcedas, comandante dos Bombeiros da Cruz Verde, que explicou que, à chegada dos meios de socorro, o fogo já tinha atingido a zona das barracas.
O combate às chamas centrou-se sobretudo nessa área. Além dos Bombeiros da Cruz Verde, foram mobilizadas as corporações dos Bombeiros da Cruz Branca e de Sabrosa, num total de 32 operacionais e sete veículos.
Segundo o comandante dos Bombeiros da Cruz Branca, Orlando Matos, da Cruz Branca estiveram no local três veículos e nove operacionais.
José Salcedas esclareceu que os bombeiros não transportaram nenhuma pessoa para o hospital pelos seus meios. No entanto, o comandante dos Bombeiros da Cruz Verde revelou à VTM que uma mulher terá sido transportada num veículo particular para o Hospital de Vila Real.
A Polícia Judiciária confirmou à VTM estar a investigar as causas do incêndio.
The post Incêndio em Mateus destruiu três barracas e duas viaturas appeared first on A Voz de Trás-os-Montes.
The United States is one of the few developed Western democracies that still carries out the death penalty, with dozens of executions every year.
However, even by American standards, the execution planned for December is unusually severe.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, sentenced to death in 2013 by a general court-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), will be executed by firing squad at Fort Hood, Texas, and that the execution will be public.
The Pentagon has since said it will livestream the execution.
It was here in Fort Hood, Texas, that Major Hasan opened fire inside a crowded medical readiness center at Fort Hood, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in 2009.
Before opening fire on unarmed soldiers, Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar.” He also shot at the backs of soldiers fleeing toward the parking lot.
Hasan later said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims.
This will mark the first U.S. military execution in over 60 years, the first military execution by firing squad since World War II, and the world’s first-ever officially livestreamed execution.
The last time the U.S. military carried out an execution was in 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was executed by hanging.
The last time the U.S. military carried out a death sentence by firing squad was in 1945.
The best-known case is Private Eddie Slovik, shot by a 12-man firing squad in France in January 1945 for desertion, the only U.S. soldier executed for desertion during the Second World War and since the Civil War.
Nearly 10 months later, Dan J. Lee was executed by the U.S. military’s firing squad in the Philippines in November 1945 for murder and/or rape.
Hasan, therefore, could become the first U.S. servicemember to be executed by a firing squad in over eight decades.
His execution could also become the world’s first officially live-streamed death penalty.
Public executions were common in the medieval period.
In “Discipline and Punish,” French philosopher Michel Foucault writes that the death penalty was a “spectacle.”
“Public torture and execution of criminals provided one of the most popular spectacles of eighteenth-century France,” Foucault wrote in his book.
However, gradually, most countries outlawed public executions.
The UK abolished public executions in 1868 with the passing of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868, which moved all executions behind prison walls.
France followed suit in 1939. In the U.S., the last public execution was carried out in 1936.
Amnesty International said in its report on executions in 2025 that it knew of at least 17 public executions – 11 in Iran and 6 in Afghanistan.
The U.S., therefore, joins a handful of countries like Iran and Afghanistan where public executions are still carried out.
Notably, the U.S. is currently at war with Iran and fought a 20-year-long war with Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.
The question, then, is what precisely Washington hopes to achieve by joining the league of its adversaries?
It is noteworthy that the general court-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) only awarded the death sentence to Hasan in 2013.
Military appeals later affirmed that sentence. The Supreme Court declined review in 2025.
In October 2026, Defense Secretary Hegseth recommended death by firing squad, and President Trump approved the recommendation.
Hegseth later said that the execution will be public, with the Pentagon clarifying that it will be live-streamed.
Hegseth explained part of the reason himself.
“Execution by firing squad. Army major betrays his country. Radical Islamist kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood. Of course, we’re going to do it at Fort Hood and do it on a Thursday. We’re going to do it at 1 o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said in an interview with Jack Posobiec on Real America’s Voice.
“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be. And we’ll make sure that people can watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.”
“Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack,” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said.
The remarks make it clear that the Pentagon wants to send a strong message against internal threats and reassert the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s (UCMJ) ultimate authority.
It is notable that while, in theory, the UCMJ has the power to award the death penalty for criminal behavior in the armed forces, in practice, the awarding of the death penalty by the UCMJ, and its actual implementation, has had a chequered history.
UCMJ is the federal criminal code and procedural system that governs the U.S. armed forces.
The UCMJ was enacted in 1950 and took effect in 1951.
The code creates one uniform system of military justice for all branches. Its rules apply to active-duty members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Space Force; certain reservists on duty; and others such as prisoners of war or retired members.
Its stated objective is to promote justice, maintain good order and discipline, support efficiency and effectiveness in the armed forces, and thereby strengthen national security. It balances the military’s need for discipline and readiness with procedural protections for the accused.
It contains punitive articles that define both uniquely military offenses, such as desertion, absence without leave, insubordination, and disrespect, and ordinary crimes, like murder, larceny, and sexual offenses.
The general courts-martial under the UCMJ have the authority to impose the death penalty.
From its founding in 1951 till 1961, the U.S. Army carried out 10 executions awarded by the UCMJ, all by hanging.
The last military execution in the U.S. was carried out in 1961, after President Eisenhower approved it.
However, in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment in the Furman v. Georgia case, effectively placed a temporary moratorium on the death penalty across the United States.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed an order that set detailed rules for military death-penalty trials.
It established that the court-martial could not sentence someone to death just because the crime was serious. The prosecutors must also establish one more “aggravating” factor, such as the killing of more than one person, or killing someone during robbery.
Furthermore, the panel could impose the death sentence only if all members agreed on guilt and the sentence. Under these rules, the UCMJ authorized capital punishment again.
From 1984 till mid-2000s, the military sought the death sentence against the accused in 47 cases.
The panel, however, awarded the death penalty in only 15 out of those 47 cases. Even in these 15 cases, many were later reduced to life imprisonment on appeal or commuted.
For instance, former President Barack Obama commuted Dwight Loving’s 1989 sentence to life in 2017.
Currently, four men remain under a UCMJ death sentence: Ronald Gray (1988), Hasan Akbar (2005), Timothy Hennis (2010), and Nidal Hasan (2013).
Notably, former President George Bush approved Gray’s death sentence in 2008, becoming the first U.S. President since Eisenhower, after a gap of 47 years, to approve a death sentence awarded by the UCMJ.
However, a federal judge stayed that execution so Gray could challenge the sentence in court. His execution has still not been carried out.
Now Trump has become only the second President to approve the death sentence awarded by the UCMJ in 65 years.
Hasan’s death sentence is set for December 3.
Notably, President Trump has not only approved Hasan’s death sentence, but also approved his execution by a firing squad and its live-streaming.
Hasan’s execution, therefore, could mark the return of military executions in the U.S. after over six decades.
The post Fort Hood Live Execution: How Nidal Hasan’s Livestreamed Firing Squad Could Strengthen UCMJ’s Authority appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.
O Projeto Emc2 ‘Explorar Matos de Camarinha da Costa’ (MARE-ARNET) que divulga as camarinhas realizou um workshop no evento ‘Conversas Climáticas Intergeracionais’ decorrido na Fortaleza de Sagres de 5 a 6 de outubro de 2026.
Neste workshop Alexandra Abreu Lima (Investigadora do MARE-ARNET e INIAV, I.P.) apresentou resultados do projeto Emc2 e coordenou uma visita às camarinhas que existem na Fortaleza de Sagres.
Os participantes ficaram a conhecer esta planta – Corema album (L.) D. Don. -, espécie que só existe em Portugal e Espanha (sendo por isso um endemismo ibérico), cujas plantas femininas dão as camarinhas, pequenos frutos comestíveis de cor branca.
Esta espécie tem uma distribuição cada vez menor na Península Ibérica onde ocorre ao longo de 1500 quilómetros de costa, desde ‘Camariñas’ (Corunha) até ‘Punta Camarinal’ (Cádiz), sendo que as populações do Sul podem ser mais sensíveis às alterações climáticas.
Sublinhe-se que o evento foi organizado numa colaboração entre o ICLEI Europe, o European Heritage Hub, a Europa Nostra, a Youth Heritage Europe e o Bureau da Marca do Património Europeu.
O programa que contou com apresentações de especialistas, workshops participativos e visitas ao Promontório de Sagres permitiu uma troca de ideias sobre formas como o sector cultural e criativo pode contribuir para a ação climática e um desenvolvimento sustentável em cenários de alterações climáticas.
M. Alexandra Viegas Abreu Lima, enquanto coordenadora do Projeto Emc2, informa ainda que o mesmo é financiado pela Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal), através dos projetos estratégicos UID/04292/2025 e UID/PRR/4292/2025 ao MARE e o projeto LA/P/0069/2020
(https://doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0069/2020) ao ARNET – Aquatic Research Network.
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