In today's column, a new twist on FPV drone warfare. U.S. Army Practices Building Drones "In-Theater"

SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods. This column is a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from JWR. Our goal is to educate our readers, to help them to recognize emerging threats, and to be better prepared for both disasters and negative societal trends. You can’t mitigate a risk if you haven’t first identified a risk. In today’s column, a new twist on FPV drone warfare.

U.S. Army Practices Building Drones “In-Theater”

This was linked over at the Whatfinger.com news aggregation site: U.S. Army Changes Tools and Tactics to Prepare for the Next Pacific War.

Increasing Federal Over-Reach

John & Nisha Whitehead published this frank assessment: Government Unchained: The Year the Constitution Lost Its Guardrails. JWR’s Comments: We cannot allow this sort of overreach. As the political pendulum continues to swing in upcoming years, politically-selected targets — from both the left and the right — will get snatched up in this hyper-enforcement.

An Electric School Bus Bursts Into Flames

Reader D.S.V. found this, over at The Liberty Daily: Electric School Bus Bursts Into Flames in L.A..

NATO Chief Issues World War 3 Warning

Reader H.L. suggested this from the MAGA/Rightist National Pulse: NATO Chief Tells People to Get Ready ‘For the Scale of War Our Grandparents and Great-Grandparents Endured.’ This piece begins:

“North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Mark Rutte has delivered a warning to alliance members’ citizens, telling them to brace for the possibility of a major conflict on the scale of the Second World War. Speaking in Berlin, Germany, he pressed NATO governments to dramatically increase defense spending and industrial output to confront Russia.”

WW3 Fears as Germans to Dig Trenches on Poland’s Borders

WW3 fears as Germans to dig trenches on Poland’s borders and Europe ‘can’t rely on US help’.

A New U.S. Measles Outbreak

In The New York Times: A Measles Outbreak Brings With It Echoes of the Pandemic. A pericope:

“What began in the fall as a trickle of measles infections in Spartanburg County, S.C., has since grown into an outbreak that has sickened more than 110 people, prompted more than 250 residents to quarantine and unsettled many more. Across the upstate region of South Carolina, a conservative stronghold where both the manufacturing industry and the population has boomed in recent years, many families have felt familiar echoes of the pandemic this week.”

The Clinton Voter Fraud Machine Flood of Illegal Ballots

H.L. spotted this: The Clinton Voter Fraud Machine Flooded Illegal Ballots for Decades.

U.S. Weapons Are Now the ‘Core’ of Taliban’s Military Machine

Another from H.L.: U.S. Weapons Abandoned by Biden Are Now the ‘Core’ of Taliban’s Military Machine: Report. Here is a fair use quote:

“The office overseeing U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan has released a final forensic audit concluding that billions of dollars in American weaponry and military infrastructure, left behind after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal, now form the “core” of the Taliban’s military force.

The audit, by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), finds that U.S.-supplied weapons, vehicles, aircraft, and other equipment worth at least $7.1 billion ended up in Taliban hands. These were provided over two decades of war and reconstruction, spanning four U.S. administrations after the 2001 invasion triggered by the 9/11 attacks.

According to SIGAR, the U.S. had poured roughly $144.7 billion into Afghanistan between 2002 and mid-2021. Some of those funds went toward building roads, schools, and infrastructure. However, the bulk of this spending, nearly $90 billion, was devoted to security assistance: equipping and sustaining the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) with weapons, vehicles, training, pay, bases, and other support.

Between 2002 and 2021, the U.S. gave the ANDSF hundreds of thousands of weapons, tens of thousands of vehicles, and more than 160 aircraft. Pentagon records from late July 2021, about two weeks before the Taliban seized Kabul, showed the Afghan Air Force had 162 U.S.-supplied aircraft, 131 of them functional.”