Ulrike Franke

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.

Yes, that would be the Israeli Harpy.

However, and this is a twist few people know about - look at the picture above. Does it remind you of another system? One that is quite a bit in the news lately?

DAR equally became a casualty of the German post-Cold War defence budget overhaul of 1992, and was abandoned.

According to some documents I found, Germany had planned to procure 4000plus DAR drones, though that sounds like a lot. Reportedly, the UK also wanted to buy the system.

Two prototypes were produced, with a wing-span of 2m, a take-off mass of 110kg and a maximum endurance of three hours.

DAR was supposed to fly along a pre-programmed path with a reach of several hundred kilometres. Once a target was identified, the drone would nose-dive, destroying the enemy radar upon impact. So again, despite the name, we are talking loitering munition more than #drone.

So what was the DAR?
In 1989, the Luftwaffe signed a contract for the development of an anti-radar drone - or DAR - fitted with explosives and designed to combat enemy air defences.

I wrote this thread in 2020 on Twitter, but since this is historical, nothing has changed. I am copying it over as I wrote it then.

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.

Europe Has More Military Leverage Than Trump Realizes America’s ability to use the European continent so freely is a unique military asset that would be painful to lose.

I wrote about this here
www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trump-us-mil...

This is a real video from the official White House account on a war that is currently killing people. I don’t know how the US is going to come back from this.
The post was “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸 🔥”

Jup. With an additional station in Israel in between.

German view of Ramstein from a few years ago

bsky.app/profile/rike...