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Georgia officially refused to implement the EU's newest sanctions against Iran, Interpress news reported on this week, with Tengiz Sharmanashvili, a member of parliament for the ruling Georgian Dream party, saying Tbilisi backs international measures only when they serve Georgian interests.

"If it goes against Georgia's interests, we do not care whose interests it serves," Sharmanashvili said. 

"The question of whether Georgia joins a resolution or takes steps in international affairs is determined by one criterion alone: whether it serves the country's interests at that particular moment," he added.

Sharmanashvili pointed to Turkey and Serbia, both of which hold EU candidate status and likewise stayed out of the latest sanctions round against Iran. 

The package, announced by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, is built around three decisions. 

The first reworks the existing sanctions regime, dropping and adding individuals and revising the entry for one organization. 

The second extends measures over Iranian military support for armed groups operating in Russia, West Asia, and the Red Sea region, with four individuals removed. The third lists six more individuals over "human rights violations" in Iran. 

Nine countries signed on to the measures. European Economic Area members Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway backed them, as did EU candidates Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Ukraine. 

Georgia's refusal follows a broader loosening of its foreign policy from the bloc's line. 

The EU's 2025 enlargement report states that Georgia's alignment with the Common Foreign and Security Policy was 40 percent as of October 2025, a decrease from 53 percent the previous year.

Brussels has run into growing internal resistance to its sanctions policy, including on measures targeting Russia. 

Diplomatic backing for a recent round of sanctions measures against Russia has collapsed, the Financial Times (FT) reported on 19 July, with Greece, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Portugal each demanding carve-outs or blocking the package altogether to protect industries still profiting from Russian trade. 

Diplomats described the scale of the refusals as "unprecedented," warning that the process risks hollowing out the sanctions themselves.

Responding to new EU sanctions, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson condemned the move as irrational and unlawful, arguing that by punishing Iran for its legitimate self-defense against US-Israeli aggression, the EU is actively complicit in arming genocidal aggressors. pic.twitter.com/wHwXdnLMUP

— Press TV ?? (@PressTV) March 11, 2026

"It is a major crisis for the whole sanctions approach. If everyone demands derogations and loopholes, then at the end of the process, each package of sanctions is just an empty box," one told FT.

At a moment of the ongoing Iran conflict, Israel and Turkey are escalating their competing claims and rhetoric over Syria, to the point that full-blown war is being threatened.

NBC writes of the irony of two American regional allies on the brink: "A pair of key American allies, an attack on a strategic military base and an intense election campaign: The United States has been scrambling to de-escalate this week after Israel launched strikes that appeared aimed not just at the country’s regional rivals but at its voters," in a Saturday report.

The day prior, Turkey issued another arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing the prior Israeli military crackdown on the 'Gaza aid flotilla' last May.

But the big issue which could draw the two powers into a military confrontation is the Israeli airstrikes on an air base in northwest Syria early Tuesday.

Israel had specifically framed the eight strikes on the Abu Al-Duhur airbase in northwest Idlib province as necessary to curtail Turkey's expanding military presence in Syria. A statement indicated the following:

Netanyahu’s office claimed Israel and Syria had agreed to “a status quo in security matters”, which Damascus was “on the verge of breaching” by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at the airbase near Aleppo.

One glaring contradiction is that Israel seemed fine with the Turkish military occupation of northern Syria throughout nearly all of the prior proxy war against the Syrian government when Assad was in power.

But now Turkey is cozying up to the new Sharaa/Jolani regime, even reportedly sending anti-air defenses to central Syria - and only now is Israel vehemently objecting.

Washington has actually been siding with Turkey and Syria, calling the Israeli action an 'unnecessary escalation'.

But Israeli leadership responded: "We conveyed that message: don’t," Netanyahu told Israeli Army Radio. "But apparently they didn’t hear it, so we made sure they understood it better."

South China Morning Post has pointed out that the region is one jet shootdown away from a potential Turkey-Israel clash. "Because Israel gave no advance notice, the sudden appearance of its fighter jets on Turkish air-defense radars near the border could easily have triggered a clash," SCMP writes.

For much of the past two years, President Erdogan has been increasingly vocal in condemning Netanyahu for genocide in Gaza and expansionist policies in the region. There has even been rhetoric on both sides which has come close to calling for assassinations of each's leaders.

This is the first time I heard the Israeli government refer to ???? as an “enemy state” https://t.co/9VXAzOFytG

— Sinan Ciddi (@SinanCiddi) August 21, 2026

Turkey is a powerful NATO ally, while Israel is Washington's closes partner in the Middle East. US diplomats are scrambling to contain the rhetoric and creeping escalation.

Turkey sees the situation as one where Israel wants to eventually push its occupation of southern Syria all the way to Damascus, while Israel has likewise warned that Turkey must not establish a permanent military presence in Syria. Both are going after the post-Assad spoils and seek to be the dominant voice over Syria matters.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Spain's peak summer season has been disrupted once again by a revolting viral trend that has forced the closure of swimming pools and waterparks across the country, leaving families stranded and facilities scrubbed clean at public expense.

At PortAventura World's Caribe Aquatic Park on the Costa Dorada this week, lifeguards evacuated both the adult and children's pools after detecting human faeces in the water.

The incident, reported on a Tuesday afternoon and allegedly repeated the next day, left the popular resort's aquatic areas shut for the remainder of the day under strict health protocols.

In recent years, Foreign Instagram & TikTok users have taken it upon themselves to try and get public pools to close by defecating in the water.

It's caused a serious public health crisis, already leading to the closure of more than 300 pools in Spain, which all had to be... pic.twitter.com/sWXRbaXvLC

— Lozzy B ??? (@TruthFairy131) August 22, 2026

The park, which draws millions of visitors annually including large numbers of British and Irish tourists, applied mandatory cleaning and testing procedures before reopening.

One swimmer captured the scene on social media, writing: "It's 4.33pm in the afternoon and some pig has just defecated in the pool and they've kicked us all out. This isn't AI, this is reality. If you're at Caribe Aquatic Park you'll have seen it. We're all out of the pool."

@bartoloventura1 Holi son las 4:33 de la tarde y un gorrino o gorrina se acaba de defecar en la piscina de Costa Caribe y nos han sacado a todos esto no es Ia esto es una realidad si estáis en Costa Caribe lo habréis visto estamos todos fuera de la piscina#bartoloventura1 #viral #fyp #portaventuraworld #viral ? sonido original - bartoloventura1

The so-called "brown challenge" or "reto marrón" involves deliberately defecating in public pools or releasing faeces from bags concealed in swimwear, with the explicit aim of forcing closures.

?? Meanwhile in Spain

Waterparks are being forced to close in peak season.

Why?

Because culturally enriching Youths are participating in 'The Brown Challenge' whereby they defecate outside in the Swimming Pool Water. pic.twitter.com/RBGIGduWGf

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) August 22, 2026

By law, contaminated pools must be thoroughly cleaned, hyperchlorinated, and often tested repeatedly for bacteria such as E. coli. Facilities typically remain closed for 24 to 48 hours.

Health authorities warn of risks including norovirus, Salmonella and Cryptosporidium, which chlorine does not always eliminate and which can cause severe stomach illness, particularly in children.

PortAventura officials stated: "The safety and well-being of our visitors is our top priority, and our team is trained and prepared to manage this type of situation with the utmost diligence and efficiency."

They added, "We rigorously applied all the health protocols established by current regulations and the Public Health Agency of Catalonia (ASPCAT). Specifically, in the event of any detection and presence of faeces, vomit or other visible organic waste in the water, swimming is immediately prohibited until the situation is normalised after the corresponding protocol has been applied."

This is no isolated prank. Spanish media and local councils report that more than 300 pools have been affected in recent seasons. Municipalities from Galicia and Valencia to Madrid, Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha and Catalonia have issued alerts.

Some towns have closed the same facilities multiple times in a single summer. Costs mount quickly: draining, refilling and lost revenue can run into thousands of euros per incident.

Fines for those caught range from €1,000 to several thousand euros, with bans from facilities, yet identification remains difficult because pools cannot install cameras in changing areas or demand ID on entry.

The Camp de Tarragona area, home to PortAventura, has been among the hardest hit. Nearby municipal pools in Vila-seca, l'Arboç and other towns have faced repeated shutdowns. Similar scenes have played out in Toledo, Zamora, Burgos, Jaén and across the Basque Country, where an Olympic-sized pool was evacuated in the middle of a heatwave.

Deliberately defecating in shared public spaces and spreading one's own filth is not the act of a civilised person. It is literally the behaviour of animals. In nature, certain creatures mark territory with waste precisely to signal dominance, to claim space, and to drive off rivals.

What we are witnessing in Spanish pools is the same impulse, only now performed by humans who have been told their presence is an enrichment rather than a burden. When people treat public spaces as open sewers, they are asserting hierarchy in the most primitive way possible,.

This public health nuisance does not exist in a vacuum. It arrives against the backdrop of Spain's accelerating migration crisis under the socialist-communist government of Pedro Sánchez.

In April, authorities launched a mass amnesty via emergency decree that opened the door for hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants to regularise their status, obtain work permits and move rapidly toward citizenship.

Queues of predominantly young men from Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere formed outside consulates as applicants scrambled for the required documents. The government initially spoke of around 500,000 people; applications soon exceeded one million.

By July the scale was clear: more than one million applications for legal status, granting recipients free movement rights across the entire Schengen zone.

Opposition figures, including Vox leader Santiago Abascal, accused Sánchez of engineering a long-term electoral advantage by naturalising large numbers of foreigners and altering the demographic balance.

European conservatives warned that the policy risks collapsing Schengen itself by allowing unrestricted onward travel. The New York Times, for its part, hailed Spain as a "beacon of the global left."

That same open-border approach has played out dramatically in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. In late July and early August tens of thousands of mostly military-age men crossed from Morocco in a matter of days, overwhelming local services.

Beaches became open-air camps littered with waste. Hospitals reported outbreaks of scabies, measles and other infections. Police and military personnel assigned to clear the sites themselves contracted scabies.

Despite official claims that most would be returned, thousands remained, and the cycle of clearance and reoccupation continued. The visible impunity has emboldened further attempts to reach the Spanish mainland.

Just days ago, dinghies packed with North African men landed on tourist beaches near Cartagena, sending holidaymakers scrambling for their belongings.

Local mayors expressed fury at the ease with which the vessels reached shore undetected. The message from Ceuta appears to have travelled: if thousands can simply walk or swim into Spanish territory and face little lasting consequence, smaller acts of disruption elsewhere become easier to attempt.

The "brown challenge" sits at the intersection of social-media exhibitionism and the broader erosion of shared standards that accompanies rapid, unmanaged demographic change.

Public pools and waterparks are among the last remaining low-cost spaces where ordinary Spanish families and European tourists gather in summer. When those spaces are repeatedly rendered unusable by deliberate contamination, the social contract frays further.

Taxpayers fund the clean-ups. Parents keep children away. Businesses lose peak-season revenue. The pattern is familiar across Western Europe: facilities built by one population become contested or degraded under pressures introduced by another.

A country that once marketed itself as a premier holiday destination now contends with closed pools, stormed beaches and the quiet calculation by many natives that the old rules no longer apply equally to everyone.

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Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Empire of Chaos, Lies, Plunder, Piracy. And bribes.

Mike Pompeo, former aspiring Tony Soprano, admitted: “We lie, we cheat, we steal.” And we bribe.

A Transition Protocol source, as we revealed live, is unequivocal: The President of the United States – despite having “won” the war on Iran countless times, at least in the Vociferation stakes – made a major attempt to induce IRGC Commander-in-Chief Gen. Ahmad Vahidi and senior Iranian military leadership to break with the government in Tehran through enormous financial inducements.

So here we have POTUS playing good ol’ Divide and Rule – which the Brits learned from the Roman Empire – to fracture the IRGC from the inside.

This was not a mere exploratory diplomatic contact. Trump did not merely want to determine whether Vahidi supported U.S.-Iran negotiations.

According to our source – placed in the tight inner circle of Leader Mojtaba Khamenei – this was a full leadership-buyout operation, modeled on the Venezuela playbook, to fracture the Iranian state.

The attempt miserably failed.

Because Ahmad Vahidi completely rejected it.

The Trump administration had already created a somewhat direct conduit to Vahidi through Nechirvan Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, way back in May 2026. Then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard contacted Barzani – fully authorized by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance – and an encrypted connection to Vahidi was subsequently established through Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The channel stayed dormant – or in coma, for nearly 3 months. This time though Trump attempted to turn the channel into a de facto fracturing of the Iranian leadership, employing the conceptual precedent in Venezuela: isolate the central command; handsomely bribe those immediately around it for “cooperation”; and create the internal conditions for regime decapitation.

The source describes “billions of dollars” being waved as inducements to several members of the senior IRGC leadership through Vahidi. All that while Trump was on Hardcore Vociferation mode threatening Tehran and spinning his “control” of the Strait of Hormuz.

Nothing so far has been independently confirmed in public. And probably will not. But that does not mean the source is not credible.

The source is part of Leader Mojtaba’s tight inner circle; heard all about it directly from Vahidi; and later was fully authorized to disclose the extremely sensitive information to Pakistani mediators, especially Field Marshal Asim Munir, who Trump keeps calling virtually every day asking for “help” getting the Iranians back at the negotiating table (when he in fact blew up the negotiating table).

I bribe, therefore I am

Vahidi is not a peripheral military figure. Far from it: he is the commander of the IRGC – the institutional center of gravity of Iranian hard power. The Trump administration wanted access to the top of the IRGC itself.

But they bet on the wrong man. The number two man in Iran right now, overseeing everything including top IRGC decisions, is Mohsen Rezaee: the new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and personal representative of Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mohsen Rezaee is a former IRGC commander and his leadership is uncontested – as proven by the trust placed in him by the Leader. The overarching framework guiding his decisions – and people like Vahidi – is the Shi’te sense of moral duty, ethics, self-sacrifice and the spirit of Sovereign Resistance, values completely alien to an Empire of Grifters.

It’s no wonder that a crass neo-Crassus in War-a-Lago/Washington actually believed that a battle-tested military leader – and those around him – could sell the fate of a civilization-state for a mere bribe, and induced to defect, stand aside or facilitate regime change.

Applying the exact same Venezuela methodology means that the Trump administration actually believed they could translate it to a Shi’ite Iran context. That proves once again an astonishing degree of cultural stupidity.

The methodology may work for corrupt Latin American political/military elites: History tells us it happened so many times.

But to believe that offering protection, political survival, loads of money and/or a future share of the spoils to an IRGC that is far from being a loose political entourage around a vulnerable presidential palace fully demonstrates how the Empire of Grifters has no clue about the institutional cohesion of the Iranian security state.

All across the Global South, this will be regarded for what it is: another episode of the neo-Crassus Art of the Deal.

Complementing another recent episode, where the capo fraternizes with the DPRK then asks South Korea – “I asked for $10 billion” – for protection money.

That’s the pizzo. Not to be confused with pizza. Pizzo is Sicilian slang for extortion money.

Mafia, piracy, bribing, extortion: talk about a flexible Empire at work.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

America’s largest state economies rank alongside some of the biggest economies in the world. Even further down the list, many individual states produce hundreds of billions of dollars in economic output each year.

This map, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, pairs each U.S. state with the country closest to it in nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025, using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the IMF’s World Economic Outlook.

The Big Four State Economies

At $4.3 trillion, California would rank among the world’s five largest economies if it were an independent country. Its closest match on the map is the United Kingdom.

Texas, meanwhile, has a $2.9 trillion economy, putting it closest to Russia. Both are major energy powerhouses, particularly in oil and gas.

The table below lists U.S. states alongside their closest country equivalents in nominal GDP terms.

State	2025 Nominal GDP (billions $)	Approx. Country Equivalent
Alabama	341	???? Peru
Alaska	75	???? Azerbaijan
Arizona	598	???? Austria
Arkansas	198	???? Morocco
California	4251	???? United Kingdom
Colorado	584	???? Thailand
Connecticut	376	???? Iran
Delaware	117	???? Ghana
District of Columbia	193	???? Ukraine
Florida	1835	???? Australia
Georgia	925	???? Taiwan
Hawaii	125	???? Guatemala
Idaho	136	???? Kenya
Illinois	1202	???? Saudi Arabia
Indiana	545	???? Norway
Iowa	277	???? Greece
Kansas	241	???? Hungary
Kentucky	307	???? Kazakhstan
Louisiana	340	???? Finland
Maine	103	???? Costa Rica
Maryland	568	???? United Arab Emirates
Massachusetts	820	???? Taiwan
Michigan	730	???? Belgium
Minnesota	531	???? Vietnam
Mississippi	165	???? Kuwait
Missouri	468	???? Denmark
Montana	82	???? Myanmar
Nebraska	198	???? Ukraine
Nevada	281	???? Algeria
New Hampshire	126	???? Dominican Republic
New Jersey	887	???? Taiwan
New Mexico	153	???? Slovakia
New York	2468	???? Canada
North Carolina	894	???? Taiwan
North Dakota	82	???? Slovenia
Ohio	967	???? Poland
Oklahoma	274	???? New Zealand
Oregon	343	???? Portugal
Pennsylvania	1056	???? Switzerland
Rhode Island	84	???? Uruguay
South Carolina	379	???? Czech Republic
South Dakota	81	???? Turkmenistan
Tennessee	590	???? Singapore
Texas	2904	???? Russia
Utah	316	???? Finland
Vermont	48	???? Bahrain
Virginia	798	???? Belgium
Washington	895	???? Taiwan
West Virginia	109	???? Ethiopia
Wisconsin	473	???? Malaysia
Wyoming	53	???? Zimbabwe
???? U.S.	30762	???????????? China, Germany, Japan

New York’s $2.5 trillion economy is roughly the same size as Canada’s GDP. Meanwhile, Florida’s $1.8 trillion economy is closest to Australia, the largest economy in Oceania.

Together, these four states would each qualify for the Group of 20 (G20) if they were independent countries.

State-to-Country GDP Matches

Further down the list, Illinois has a $1.2 trillion GDP that is roughly the same size as Saudi Arabia’s, though its economy is far more diversified. Pennsylvania follows at $1.1 trillion, placing it closest to Switzerland.

Taiwan is the closest country match for four states: Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington.

The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., has a nearly $200 billion GDP, putting it closest to Ukraine. Nebraska is also similar in economic size.

The U.S. Economy in the World

Overall, the U.S. has a $30.8 trillion national GDP, roughly equal to the combined output of China, Germany, and Japan, the world’s next three largest economies.

That national scale helps explain why individual states can match the economic output of major countries around the world.

To learn more about the future prospects of the world’s largest economy, check out What’s Next for the U.S. Economy? on Voronoi.

Our coverage of America's Group 1 to Group 3 drone industry has centered on Unusual Machines and Ondas, two companies positioned to reap the benefits from what could become a historic procurement cycle next year. The catalyst is the Department of War's Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, which is preparing to direct $55 billion toward autonomous systems. If that spending materializes as planned, companies offering NDAA-compliant drones and drone components, scalable manufacturing capacity, and field-ready platforms should be best positioned to capture the coming flood of orders.

For more clarity on the drone space, Canaccord Genuity recently hosted the "Drone Dominion" panel, which included executives from AeroVironment, Leonardo DRS, Unusual Machines, Codan Tactical Communications, and Juno Industries.

"The panel opened with a consensus that drone warfare has shifted from individual aircraft for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications to massed, expendable strike systems with growing remote autonomy," Austin Moeller, Canaccord Genuity's senior aerospace and defense technology equity-research analyst, wrote in a note Thursday.

Moeller's summary of the panel discussion provides investors with a useful framework for understanding the drone space and identifying the companies best positioned to benefit from a potential procurement supercycle, as demand for Group 1 to Group 3 drones, counter-UAS systems, and domestically sourced NDAA-compliant parts is poised to accelerate.

Drone dominion

We hosted management of Leonardo DRS (DRS), AeroVironment (AVAV), Unusual Machines (UMAC), Codan DTC, and Juno Industries at the 46th Annual Canaccord Genuity Growth Conference in Boston for a Drone/C-UAS panel discussion. Our panel included Leonardo DRS CEO John Baylouny, AeroVironment COO Dr. Robert Smith, Unusual Machines COO Drew Camden, Codan Tactical Communications President and Executive General Manager Paul Sangster, and former Canadian Minister of National Defense and Juno Industries Executive Chairman, Harjit Sajjan. The panel discussed how drone warfare has evolved from being primarily an ISR platform to widespread adoption as autonomous and expendable/attritable tactical and one-way attack systems, along with the corresponding urgent need for counter-UAS layered air defenses, secure supply chains, and integrated battlefield C2 systems and AI edge compute.

The panel opened with a consensus that drone warfare has shifted from individual aircraft for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications to massed, expendable strike systems with growing remote autonomy. John Baylouny stated that drones are now weapons that must make sense of the battlefield, and Harjit Sajjan emphasized that integrating sensors into battle management systems to enable fusion/processing of data is central to making those strike capabilities practical and useful. The panel agreed this transition changes not only platform design but also how forces employ drones; for instance, moving from a handful of high-end assets to large numbers of lower-cost munitions used en masse (swarms) to saturate and overwhelm air defenses and targets. This dynamic forces the industry to prioritize rapid iteration and high-volume manufacturing, modular payloads, and mission-tailored autonomy so systems can be adopted and modified quickly as tactics and countermeasures evolve in the field.

The panel agreed that battlefield advantage now depends on resilient, secure command-and-control (C2) networks that connect drones, sensors, weapons platforms, and operators into rapid decision-making workflows. Paul Sangster explained that today's battlefield is far more networked, requiring secure mesh communications that tie drones, sensors, and vehicles into rapid decision loops. Dr. Rob Smith and the others noted that the tactical advantage now comes from how quickly collected sensor data can be communicated to warfighters and platforms and acted upon, which has elevated architecture, encryption, and waveform design to operational-level priorities. The panel emphasized that interoperability is a prerequisite for scaling effective multi-platform operations. Speakers warned that contested-spectrum environments and adversary cyber-attack tactics could quickly degrade the benefits of massed drone operations unless resilience and redundancy are built into C2 designs.

Counter-UAS defenses being layered and multi-modal were stressed by the panel. Mr. Baylouny described systems combining radar, IR identification, and multiple effectors (e.g., DRS' Sgt. Stout Stryker air artillery Mission Equipment Package). Dr. Smith outlined a layered approach beginning with Radio Frequency (RF) detection and Electronic Warfare (EW) at standoff ranges, then lasers for cost-effective engagement within line-of-sight, and kinetic interceptors when necessary. Speakers emphasized mobility and integrated C2 so that different defeat mechanisms can be applied as threats evolve, reflecting a pragmatic view that no single technology will defeat every class of drone. As a result, the defense tech market is making investments in software/AI platforms, sensors (radar, RF, EO, IR/thermal), directed energy, and affordable kinetic interceptors to create adaptable defense mechanisms for various defensive scenarios for both point-defense and on-the-move.

Drew Camden and Rob Smith argued that expanding domestic production capacity requires predictable govt. demand and long-term procurement commitments. Manufacturers depend on these factors so that they can invest in facilities, automation, and long-term supplier relationships.

They stated that US systems will likely differ in capability from mass-produced foreign drones (Ukrainian drones are using Chinese Raspberry Pis and motors, for example) and that programs like Drone Dominance must create steady, multi-year volume procurement plans such as IDIQs/OTAs to make rapid scaling feasible without stopping and restarting fragile supply chains. Firms are already redirecting R&D and IRAD into domestic tooling and manufacturing readiness to shorten the timeline from prototype to fielded production and advance-purchasing materials inventory for when multi-year contracts are in place, and demand is present. In practice, policymakers must align procurement, financing, and industrial policy to reduce production ramp-up time, reduce lead times for critical components, and stabilize the supply chain.

Speakers raised concerns about deep supply chain and security/espionage concerns. The panel discussed challenges in removing Chinese-made components and subcomponents, as well as securing rare earth materials, noting that compliance requires tracing multiple layers down the supply chain. Many A&D primes have found Chinese materials or components as they investigate deeper into their supply chains. Mr. Sajjan cautioned against focusing on a single supplier or country and urged comprehensive evaluation with trusted national agencies, while Mr. Baylouny described efforts internally to look five or six layers deep to discover where materials and components truly originate from. Mr. Camden explained his company's strategy of bringing parts, and eventually, chips and motors onshore. He added that while Unusual Machines had initially been sourcing drone motors from China, the company is now doing its own winding with machines in a similar production process to Chinese drone company T-MOTOR. Dr. Smith emphasized the importance of firmware screening, cyber red-teaming, and holistic assurance practices. Addressing these challenges will require sustained funding, clearer regulatory standards (e.g., NDAA and ITAR), and closer public-private partnerships to create resilience and chain of custody among supply chains.

Finally, the panel emphasized that training and acquisition practices must be reformed to keep pace with evolving drone tactics and technologies. Mr. Baylouny argued that the old "design, build, and buy thousands" government PoR model is too slow and called for experiment-driven acquisition. Mr. Sajjan highlighted the importance of close user-developer feedback so deployed troops can refine and optimize systems with their designers for real-world missions. Mr. Camden pointed to improvised civilian and government innovations seen in Ukraine as evidence that militaries must be able to adapt new concepts and strategies quickly. Dr. Smith reinforced that predictable demand signals will also enable investment in the training, sustainment, and industrial pipelines needed to scale manufacturing capabilities. To turn technological advances into enduring operational advantage, the panel concluded that reforms across procurement and training must move forward along with technical, military, and industrial initiatives.

Our mid-June initiation report, "How To Profit From the Asymmetric Warfare Boom" ... 

... first identified the leading public and private companies positioned across the drone and counter-drone space.