U.S. Needs a Grand Defense Industrial Strategy | Elon Musk’s Disturbing ‘Truth’ | Top MS-13 Leader Faces Terrorism Charges, and more

It wasn’t the first time Musk echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from his social-media bubble. And it wasn’t the first time he blamed anti-Semitism on Jewish actions, pinning the prejudice on its victims. After months of marinating in the most conspiratorial cesspools of his own site, Musk arrived today at his inevitable destination. But just because Musk’s affirmation of white-nationalist ideology was the unsurprising outcome of his online radicalization spiral doesn’t make it any less devastating—or dangerous. Anti-Semites believe that a minuscule Jewish minority controls the direction of the non-Jewish majority. But the truth is the opposite: The fate of the tiny Jewish community rests in the hands of non-Jewish society. Whether the anti-Jewish ideas of Musk and others become the new normal is not up to Jews; it’s up to everyone else.

One Size Fits None The United States Needs a Grand Defense Industrial Strategy  (Jonathan Caverley, Ethan Kapstein, and Jennifer Kavanagh, War on the Rocks)
The war in Ukraine has been simultaneously described as the first networked war and a “return of industrial warfare.” Lockheed Martin repurposed a diaper factory to make HIMARS launchers, the Ukrainian prime minister claims his country buys 60 percent of DJI’s Mavic drone production, and the conflict has introduced the term “FrankenSAM” for the cobbled together systems — like a Soviet-era Buk launcher firing Sea Sparrow missiles donated by NATO navies — defending Ukrainian air space. 
While relying extensively on heavy artillery, tanks, advanced missiles, and millions of rounds of ammunition, Ukraine has also leveraged both cheap and advanced commercial technology to hold its own against its bigger and better equipped adversary. The scale and complexity of resourcing Ukraine’s requirements has challenged Western backers, and that was before the war in Gaza created further demand on U.S. munitions stocks. Future wars are likely to create still greater burdens.
So, how can the Pentagon ensure that it receives, at scale, the remarkable range of weaponry and military-related systems it needs now and in the future? The Department of Defense has promised to address this question with a new Defense Industrial Strategy to be delivered by the end of this year. The strategy will guide the Department of Defense’s policies, programs, and investments for at least the next three years and is “meant to catalyze a generational change” in how the Pentagon does business. But a real danger exists that this “first-ever” strategy document, like so many others generated by the U.S. government, will collapse into irrelevance under the weight of its many competing demands.

TikTok to Prohibit Videos Promoting Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’  (Sheila Dang and David Shepardson, Reuters)
TikTok will prohibit content that promotes Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter detailing the former al Qaeda leader’s justifications for attacks against Americans, the short-form video app said on Thursday.
Discussions of the 20-year-old letter have spread on the platform this week in the context of debate over the Israel-Hamas war, with some users in the West praising its contents.
The letter, which was written after al Qaeda’s attack on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people, criticized U.S. support for Israel, accused Americans of financing “oppression” of Palestinians, and contained antisemitic comments.

From Pixels to Punches: Geolocating a Neo-Nazi and White Nationalist Combat Event in Los Angeles  (Bellingcat)
Several Active Clubs, which experts say form a dangerous bedrock for far-right activity and recruitment, joined the second annual tournament alongside extremist groups like Patriot Front and the Hammerskins. Active Clubs are a network of white nationalist mixed martial arts crews inspired by the Rise Above Movement, a now-defunct militant streetfighting group whose neo-Nazi cofounder Robert Rundo is currently in jail awaiting trial on federal rioting charges. They focus on training their members in combat skills in order to prepare them to fight against their purported enemies. “Their own propaganda says ‘we are a white nationalist sports network, it’s about fitness,’” said Alexander Ritzmann, a political scientist and senior advisor at the Counter Extremism Project who studies Active Clubs, in an interview. “But reading their documents and listening to their podcasts, I’m curious about if they are a combat sports network or if they are a militia hiding in plain sight.”

Top MS-13 Leader to Stand Trial in New York on Terrorism Charges  (Reuters)
A top leader of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang will stand trial in New York on terrorism charges, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday. El Salvador citizen Elmer Canales, known as “Crook de Hollywood,” was arrested by Mexican authorities last week and sent to Texas, where a federal court on Wednesday ordered him to face trial in New York. Canales, along with 13 other MS-13 members, was indicted in 2020 on terrorism charges relating to his alleged involvement in organized crime in the U.S., Mexico and El Salvador over the past two decades. He “bears responsibility for the gang’s efforts over decades to terrorize communities, target law enforcement, and sow violence here in the United States and abroad,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in the Justice Department’s statement on Wednesday. When Canales’ indictment was unsealed in early 2021, he was behind bars in El Salvador, and the U.S. requested his extradition. But the Salvadoran government released Canales around November 2021, and he illegally entered Guatemala, the Justice Department said. His release has provoked criticism in El Salvador, where a crackdown on alleged gang members has landed tens of thousands in jail since March 2022, drawing accusations of human rights abuses and violations of due process.

Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You’ve Never Heard Of  (Abe Streep, Scientific American)
As recently as 15 years ago, the sentiment of nonproliferation seemed durable. Even American secretaries of state who held office during the cold war were advocating for the final drawdown of atomic weapons. Former president Barack Obama, when he took office in 2009, wanted a world without them and pushed a new treaty with Russia to limit the number of deployed warheads in each country’s arsenal. But after decades of efforts to disarm global powers and reduce tensions, the screw is now tightening again. Russia has suspended its participation in the treaty, and it’s believed that China is increasing the size of its arsenal.
And even while the U.S. was preparing to draw down its total number of nuclear warheads, it sought to replace its existing weapons and modernize its delivery mechanisms. The weapons, which had been designed decades ago, were aging, and their upkeep cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In 2010 Congress authorized an update to the U.S. nuclear triad, the weapons systems deployable by land, sea and air.
No leg of the triad is as controversial as the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, the arsenal of hundreds of weapons spread across 450 underground silos in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. Because the missiles sit in fixed locations—unlike submarines or aircraft—they are seen as potentially vulnerable to attack; because they are considered first-strike weapons, concerns linger that one could be inadvertently launched; because of their geographic sprawl, they have an outsize impact on land use and energy policy. In 2015, two years before General James Mattis was confirmed as U.S. secretary of defense, he suggested to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the military consider removing land-based missiles altogether.

The US Is Normalizing the Cruelest Mass Killing Method to Stop Bird Flu  (Marina Bolotnikova, Vox)
The 2022-2023 spread of bird flu has been the most catastrophic on record in the US. In less than two years, it’s hit hundreds of poultry factory farms across nearly every state in the country, costing the federal government $757 million and counting to manage, and the poultry industry more than $1 billion in lost revenue and other costs (experts also fear that the disease could spark an outbreak in humans). To help stamp out the disease’s spread, all of the more than 62 million chickens, turkeys, and other birds raised for meat and eggs on affected farms have been killed and disposed of, whether or not they actually had the virus, which can spread rapidly and has a very high mortality rate for poultry birds.
This fall, bird flu is surging again. So far in October and November, it’s infected dozens of factory farms largely in the Midwest, including on turkey farms raising animals for Thanksgiving season — resulting in the extermination of 4 million chickens and turkeys in just a month and a half.
I use the word “extermination” deliberately. Although many outlets have written that the birds on farms hit with bird flu are being “euthanized,” the reality of these mass killings is far from the painless end implied by that term.
Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.