Ulrike Franke

NBC’s Richard Engel: “The White House meme campaign is outraging many former US military commanders… they say only someone who has never really seen combat would think it’s a joke and put out material like this.”

I sometimes wonder if we just named "soft power" something like "tall turgid thrusting power" would these guys have been more in favour of it and thereby less self undermining.

Very much looking forward to this one. In the meantime I’ll prepare my own list 🤓

Also, of course

Mountainhead was really not enjoyable to watch but I think about it *a lot* and also fear it was so accurate on so many levels…

Some X users turned to the platform's AI chatbot Grok to confirm the video's veracity. But in many cases seen by BBC Verify, Grok wrongly insisted that the AI-generated video was real.

Don’t believe AI on AI! (And question their responses in general)

X doing kinda the right thing for once … though the underlying problem of course remains.

AI-generated Iran war videos surge as creators use new tech to cash in The US-Israel war with Iran is being monetised by online creators with AI-generated misinformation.

Who could have predicted this… 😑

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Gift link

faznet.go.link/l219a www.faz.net/aktuell/poli...

Was Deutschland für Frankreichs Atomschirm tun müsste Macron hat den Verbündeten angeboten, seinen Atomschirm über sie auszubreiten. Damit das funktioniert, müssten sie Frankreich konventionell den Rücken freihalten.

Good that the topic is slowly but surely getting the attention it deserves in Germany.
Commentary on Macron’s nuclear offer in FAZ

www.faz.net/aktuell/poli...

I definitely struggle these days to come up with a positive spin to what we are seeing. This was my best effort.

(Filmed at Globalance’s Good Capitalist Forum)

Ich mein, ich finde es auch eher schwach, aber mehr positives fiel mir diese Tage einfach nicht ein 🫠

I definitely struggle these days to come up with a positive spin to what we are seeing. This was my best effort.

(Filmed at Globalance’s Good Capitalist Forum)

No, that’s not the effect we’re seeing. Hobbyist drones have been around for long enough to this not being the relevant variable.

Dissuasion nucléaire : l’offre de la France à l’Europe Le 2 mars à l'Ile Longue, Emmanuel Macron a annoncé le renforcement de la dissuasion nucléaire française, désormais élargie à l'Europe. Quelles sont les conditions de cette dissuasion avancée ? Signer...

Was on Christine Ockrent’s Affaires Etrangeres podcast earlier today to talk about the German take on Macron’s nuclear speech.
Listen here now (in French)

Felt like a good moment to read this one.

Felt like a good moment to read this one.

Dissuasion nucléaire : l’offre de la France à l’Europe Le 2 mars à l'Ile Longue, Emmanuel Macron a annoncé le renforcement de la dissuasion nucléaire française, désormais élargie à l'Europe. Quelles sont les conditions de cette dissuasion avancée ? Signer...

Was on Christine Ockrent’s Affaires Etrangeres podcast earlier today to talk about the German take on Macron’s nuclear speech.
Listen here now (in French)

It’s obviously early in the year, but 2026 is already on track to be the year with the highest number of drone sightings reported by German air traffic control.

Once again we talk about how crucially important Ramstein airbase - a huge US military installation in Germany - is for US operations in the middle east and beyond.

As someone who has been working on US drone ops for ages, I have posted quite a bit about Ramstein. Like this thread 👇

As we now hear about the US LUCAS drone/loitering ammunition, which has been based on the Iranian Shahed, I will bring a thread over from Twitter I did on the German DAR - which is linked to the Israeli Harop - which is again linked to the Shahed.

Ireland urged to assist Cyprus if it invokes EU mutual defence clause Ahead of the Irish presidency of the Council of the European Union, experts say Ireland should be ready to defend a fellow EU state under attack

One neutral EU country wondering how it can (and whether it should) help another neutral EU country.
I have said for years that neutrality in Europe will come increasingly under pressure.

www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41...

You jumped through quite a few loops here to read something into my post that you can criticise, hope you’re proud.

Reactionaries convinced us for decades that something like gender studies has no practical use in society, and I know many reasonable people also believe(d?) this. It was the butt of the joke for as log as I can remember.

But OMG does this video drive home the point they were wrong.

But of course, this is the reality of neutral countries.

Ireland urged to assist Cyprus if it invokes EU mutual defence clause Ahead of the Irish presidency of the Council of the European Union, experts say Ireland should be ready to defend a fellow EU state under attack

One neutral EU country wondering how it can (and whether it should) help another neutral EU country.
I have said for years that neutrality in Europe will come increasingly under pressure.

www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41...

Of course my train goes through the longest tunnel in human existence the moment my conference call gets interesting 😑

I couldn't quite find out how much of this similarity was due to actual cooperation between the companies - some reports suggest they both use the same technology. But in any case - DAR was abandoned, Harpy/Harop became a successful - and highly controversial - system.

But what's the DAR - Harpy link?
Well, DAR and Harpy were developed in parallel. Some reports from the time describe DAR and Harpy as "virtually identical".

We've been hearing quite a bit about the Harpy, or rather its successor model, the IAI Harop, as this is one of the systems Israel has exported to Azerbaijan, and which the country has been using in the current conflict with Armenia.