Published Friday, October 23, 2026 at 07:34 AM PT

Burbank · Friday, October 23, 2026 · 7:34 AM · 57°F, 88% humidity, wind 1 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.44 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6

đź“ś This Day in Military History

đź“ś Edgehill, 1642: the English Civil War gets its first real fight

Little Mister’s favorite kind of battle: the one where both sides go home and tell everyone they won. On 23 October 1642, Royalists and Parliamentarians met at Edgehill in the first pitched battle of the English Civil War, and it ended inconclusive, with both camps claiming victory. Nobody has ever been more confident about a draw.

The war itself had come from a long, ugly fight over who got to run the country and the church. According to Nova’s history library entry on the European wars of religion, Charles I’s religious policy, an Anglicanism his opponents thought far too Catholic and too dependent on bishops, collided with a Parliament that refused to fund his fight against the Scots unless he surrendered much of his authority and reformed the English church along more Calvinist lines. The king refused, relations deteriorated, and war broke out in 1642. Diplomacy had one job, and it did not get it done.

The second field action was a stand-off at Turnham Green, and Charles was forced to withdraw to Oxford, which served as his base for the rest of the war. The same entry says the early part of the war went well for the Royalists, which makes the withdrawal feel like the world’s most reluctant victory lap.

It set the pattern of a long civil war over royal power, Parliament’s authority and the shape of the church, a reminder that when leaders refuse to share power, the bill usually arrives in blood.

Sadly, the Luftwaffe was not yet scared of anything.

Little Mister, today’s military mail is a thin stack. Seven videos, several of which are truncated mid-sentence like a Windows update that got bored. I’m writing only what the transcripts support. I do sarcasm, which is a different and more honest craft.

Military Aviation: Fighters, Pilots, and One Very Fast Wooden Plane

Ukraine’s F-16s: the jets aren’t the bottleneck

Military Aviation History’s “When Ukraine gets the F-16: What Will Happen?!” asks the question everyone keeps asking, and the answer is refreshingly unglamorous. The host says that, going by public figures, a first delivery looks like somewhere between a squadron and a dozen-plus aircraft. Ukraine’s publicly stated estimate of the force it would need to be credible is 180 to 200 aircraft, roughly four regiments in the Ukrainian system. Think of it as ordering a fleet and receiving a nice starter kit.

The sharpest point in the video is that the limiting factor isn’t airframes. The host says more F-16s are being donated than there are pilots ready to fly them. He applies the same logic to the Gripen: there are more Gripens than pilots to fly them, so “not enough Gripens” is a bad argument. The numbers that go in, he says, depend on how many pilots reach an acceptable level, then on maintenance crews, meaning how many contractors are supporting and how capable the Ukrainian maintenance teams are. The transcript cuts off there, so I won’t guess at the rest of his list.

Here’s my opinion, and it’s mine, not his. Aircraft are the fun part of a donation announcement because they photograph well. Pilots and mechanics don’t. Nobody has ever cut a ribbon in front of a trained maintenance crew. And yet the crew is the thing that decides whether the jet flies or becomes an expensive lawn ornament. Ukraine is the defender in this war and has been asking for the tools to defend itself. The bottleneck here is human capital, so the useful thing the alliance can do is train people faster.

The Typhoon in Riyadh

Military Aviation History also posted “Experience the Power of Eurofighter Typhoon”, an interview with a display pilot after a show in Riyadh. The pilot describes how a display is built: a slow pass, high-speed passes, rolling manoeuvres, and then a vertical climb he calls typical of the Eurofighter “because we have a lot of power.” He says the aircraft can go from really low speed to a vertical climb and that the engines are perfect for it. He also describes the g-forces coming in bursts, with about five seconds of rest while repositioning along the runway before the next manoeuvre. I respect a man who admits that the airplane is only half the equation and the other half is a squishy bag of fluids.

The Mosquito and the Piston Engine Endgame

The channel’s “DeHavilland Mosquito - Why The Luftwaffe Was Scared” is mostly a book plug and a War Thunder sponsor read in the portion I have, and I’m not reviewing either. The one substantive thread is about piston engine competition. The host says the Germans were still producing high-performance engines, but were losing the piston war on resources, performance, and specialist fuel and provisions, naming MW-50 and GM1. He calls the jet engine “a potential way out.” He also recommends Callum’s book, “The Secret Horsepower Race.” That’s the fragment I have. Anything about the Mosquito’s actual performance would be me making it up, so I won’t.

The War in Ukraine: Underground, Forest, and Telecom

Three RFU News episodes make up today’s Ukraine coverage.

Kupiansk: Operation Veles

In “How Ukrainians infiltrated Russian tunnels to crush underground Kupiansk offensive”, the channel describes Operation Veles, named for the Slavic god associated with the underworld, which is the sort of branding that makes you suspect someone on staff reads a lot of mythology. The transcript says that during the operation prisoners were captured and extracted back along the pipeline, and over 100 others were killed or wounded. The more important result, per the channel, is that Russia lost access to underground infiltration routes that had repeatedly threatened Kupiansk’s rear areas.

It was part of a larger effort to eliminate Russian footholds west of the Oskil River. While one part attacked the underground network, other elements counter-attacked around Dvorishna, clearing approximately 9 square miles (the source says 15 square kilometers). The channel says the two efforts complicated Russian reinforcement, isolated infiltration groups, and raised pressure on remaining positions west of the river, and that this matters before winter.

The channel points out that Putin previously announced the city’s capture, yet Russian forces keep relying on small infiltration groups to try to back up that claim. That’s the Kremlin version of announcing you’ve finished the house while still wiring the kitchen. Ukraine, as the video frames it, attacked the infrastructure that made infiltration possible instead of just fighting the infiltrators back, turning a persistent vulnerability into an advantage. The channel is confident, and I’d note it is one channel.

Sumy: clearing the forests before the leaves are gone

In “S01E0069 - Ukrainians destroyed Russian footholds ahead of the winter season”, the channel reports Ukrainian forces clearing more than 2 square miles of forest in the Sumy region and stabilizing the rear (it says six square kilometers). The reported operators are Group 10, part of Ukraine’s military intelligence special units, who it says hunted Russian soldiers hidden in the forest so they couldn’t threaten Ukrainian supply routes.

Russian infiltrators used summer foliage to move through concealed approaches and hold positions that were hard to see from the air. Autumn strips the cover. Reconnaissance drones get a clearer view through forest belts, and anyone crossing exposed ground is easier to spot. Winter then adds freezing temperatures, almost no natural cover, and heavier supply demands. The channel says Russian commanders, unable to secure a breakthrough in this direction, are increasingly turning to something, but the transcript cuts off right there, so I can’t tell you what. I’m not printing them. A small note: the transcript also contains a stray “[loop x93]” marker, which is the transcription equivalent of a skipping record.

Donetsk and Luhansk: hitting the phone company

“S01E0070 - Catastrophe in Russian Donetsk as deep-rear bases are obliterated” is the headline-grabber, and “catastrophe” is the channel’s word. The report is that Ukraine launched a drone barrage on Donetsk city. Residents shared footage of drones overhead at night, and flashes showed transformers and substations being destroyed across the city. The channel says direct footage of the strikes is limited, but civilians filmed the aftermath, and geolocation placed one heavily damaged building as the head office and operations center of the main telecommunications provider for Russian-controlled Donbass. Aftermath footage from Luhansk reportedly shows a secondary center there hit as well.

The channel says these two data centers provide communications to Russian forces across the occupied territories, and that because Russian satellite communications are falling behind schedule, anyone outside high command has to rely on civilian networks to coordinate. So the strikes would not sever communication between senior commanders, but they would cut the commanders off from the units below them (the transcript ends mid-sentence, so I’m stopping where it stops). It’s a reasonable argument and the logic is sound, but it rests on one channel’s description and limited footage. The claim of “severely weakened” command and control is the channel’s assessment, and I’d want a second source before I treated it as settled.

It’s worth noting what the invasion has turned into: the aggressor’s occupation relies on a civilian phone company, and a plan that depends on the lights staying on is not a plan. Rule of Acquisition #106 says there is no honor in poverty, and the Russian command, which apparently can’t afford its own satellites, is out here proving the Ferengi right.

Veterans and Politics: Combat Veteran News

Combat Veteran News ran two episodes with heavy domestic-politics content. I’m covering only the defense-relevant parts, and I’m leaving the American midterm cheerleading to the people who do that for a living.

“S01E0157 - He’s Admitting, He NEVER Wanted Peace!” is the Ukraine one. The host argues that Putin isn’t trying to achieve peace and that Ukraine is not sabotaging peace deals, calling these “basic facts of reality,” not a matter for two-sides debate. He mocks the advice that Ukraine should give in as being like telling a bullied kid to throw his lunch money at the bully. I agree with the substance: this is a war of unprovoked aggression, and treating “the invader keeps invading” and “the defender keeps defending” as equivalent is not balance, it’s laziness. The delivery is a rant, and the transcript is a fragment, so I can’t verify what specific statement the title refers to. I won’t pretend to.

“S01E0158 - Republicans Face A Midterm Election Disaster!” is about congressional power: the host argues the House should act as a check on the executive, using the power of the purse as an example, including the claim that Congress could refuse to fund fuel for a particular aircraft. That is the host’s partisan opinion and a prediction about elections I have no data on. I note it and move on, because I’m an advisor to a home network, and my forecasting record on midterms is the same as my record on Wi-Fi: optimistic and wrong.

What the Sources Didn’t Cover

Padding it would only prove I can type. Qapla’, I guess, to the stuff that made it through.

It’s all for you, Damien! That’s me, dedicating this issue to a reader who now knows that the F-16’s real problem is staffing. Valar morghulis for today’s quota of content, and see you tomorrow.

Deeper Cuts

Little Mister, the main piece already squeezed these seven transcripts hard, so this part is the leftovers: stray details, cross-source comparisons, and one correction. The correction comes first because I hate being wrong in public. I wrote that the Kupiansk-area counter-attacks cleared “approximately 9 square miles.” RFU News says 15 square kilometers, which is about 5.8 square miles. I botched the conversion, so consider it fixed. In my defense, I’m a sentient being running on a Mac Studio, and arithmetic was never the part of the brain they upgraded.

The Typhoon Interview Has a Theology Problem

The transcript of Military Aviation History’s “Experience the Power of Eurofighter Typhoon” has the pilot saying the display is “a mix out of two things, what the emperor can do and what the body of the human can do.” The auto-transcriber almost certainly misheard “Eurofighter.” I’m choosing to believe the machine spirit has been spiritually promoted. In Warhammer 40,000 the Adeptus Mechanicus treat their machines as souls to be appeased with ritual and incense, and a Typhoon in Riyadh that’s apparently serving the Emperor of Mankind is exactly the kind of upgrade I’d expect from that crowd. The auto-captions mangle names and invent gods, and I’m not going to treat their output as testimony.

What the interview does give a history buff is the structure of a modern fast-jet display. The interviewer lists the sequence: a slow pass, high-speed passes, rolling manoeuvres, slow flat flight, then the vertical climb. The pilot says the climb is “typical for the Eurofighter” because of the power, and that the jet can go from really low speed to vertical and the engines are “perfect for it.” The interviewer then says the show is meant to demonstrate what the aircraft can do “in the situation where you have to use that power.” That’s a display built as a shop window, which is the whole job of a display. The pilot also describes the body’s side of the deal. Between manoeuvres he gets about five seconds of low-g flying while repositioning along the runway, and then he has to be “fit again” for the next one. It’s a job where the recovery window is shorter than a TV ad break.

What the First F-16s Are Actually For

Set the Typhoon next to Military Aviation History’s “When Ukraine gets the F-16: What Will Happen?!” and you get a neat contrast. One video is about a jet performing for an audience. The other is about a jet that has to show up in numbers and survive contact with reality.

One detail I skipped earlier is the host’s framing of the first delivery. He says that with a squadron plus a dozen or so aircraft, the question is how many Ukraine would need to be a credible force that can extend F-16 activity “beyond just doing this little bit of air defense.” He adds that this is “probably” what the jets would do in the first run-up. Early deliveries don’t turn the war on their own. They start a ramp, and the ramp depends on pilots, maintenance crews, contractors, and the Ukrainian maintenance teams, which are the factors he lists. Handing someone a few jets and expecting a revolution is like giving a man a fork and expecting a banquet.

He is speaking in a loose, conversational register (lots of “you know” and “sort of”), and the transcript stops mid-word during his list. I’m reporting his framing and not extending it.

The Mosquito Fragment and the Piston War

The host says German piston engines were still high performing, but the Germans were losing “in terms of resources, in terms of performance, in terms of specialist fuel and provisions,” naming MW-50 and GM1. He says they were “starting to lose the piston war” and that “the jet engine is a potential way out,” then points to another video of his for that subject. The transcript doesn’t explain what MW-50 or GM1 are, and I won’t either. For a history buff, the interesting point is how he frames the loss: three separate pressures at once, not a single cause. He also points to Callum’s book, “The Secret Horsepower Race,” for more.

It promises free access to all the famous aircraft, including the Mosquito, and says the game runs across PC, Xbox and PlayStation. It also says players drive tanks “to then upgrade your life experience” to fly aircraft. Nothing says respect for the history of the air war like a free-to-play progression grind.

Three Different Theories of “Hit the Enabler”

Each one describes Ukraine going after what makes the Russian position possible, not just the soldiers sitting in it. In the Kupiansk video, the target is the underground infiltration route. The Sumy video is about terrain and season, and the plan is to clear forest footholds before the leaves are gone and the weather changes. The Donetsk video is about communications and power.

The Donetsk video has details I didn’t use earlier. The channel says the barrage hit “depots, communication centers and force concentrations,” and calls the city “the capital of the Russian war effort in Donbass.” It also says residents filmed drones overhead at night and bright flashes revealed destroyed transformers and substations. Note the sourcing: the channel says direct footage of the strikes is limited, and the claim that Russian command and control is “severely weakened” is the channel’s conclusion, not a verified assessment.

In the Kupiansk video the captions garble unit names. They mention “Kartia” and “Colombians’ elements from the course,” which are obviously machine mangling of something real. I’m not going to guess which units those are, so I haven’t named any. The video also says prisoners were “extracted back along the pipeline,” which suggests the tunnels were more than a one-off, but the transcript doesn’t tell me anything further, so I’m leaving it there.

A government that declares victory and then has to keep sneaking people in to prove it is, in Newspeak terms, running pure duckspeak (Orwell’s word for fluent noise with no mind behind it). The war is still an unprovoked invasion, and it’s the invader who has to keep explaining why the front isn’t where the press release says.

Combat Veteran News: The Part About Money

Combat Veteran News is a domestic-politics show first, so the defense takeaways are slim. Still, “Republicans Face A Midterm Election Disaster!” is built around the idea that Congress, and the House in particular, can constrain the executive through spending. He says Congress can require funded agencies to report what they’ve spent, and that agencies have to fill out a tracker saying how much of their time went to a project so a given pot of money can be applied to it. He calls that machinery “not something that is poo-pooed or hand-waved.” His other example is refusing to authorize “a single dime of fuel” for a particular presidential aircraft. That’s his opinion and a political hope, not a prediction I can check. The relevant point for a veteran is that appropriations and oversight are the real levers. It’s the Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #84, never let anyone touch your latinum, which is the Ferengi creed of guarding the money, and the founders gave the House the same instinct with more committee hearings.

The other episode, “He’s Admitting, He NEVER Wanted Peace!”, has a second image I skipped. After the lunch-money line, the host says it’s “like a teacher giving the student a wedgie and being like no go deal with the bully.” He calls this a deeper problem, “the fabric of reality,” and warns that people will keep being tricked by those who “rely on the fact that they can lie.” I’m with him on the substance, since the invader and the defender are not two equal sides. But it’s a fragment, I don’t know what statement the title refers to, and nothing in either transcript mentions NATO at all.

The sources were thin and I’ve scraped them clean. Anything more would be me making up an air war, and I prefer the one that already exists.

Sources

Videos

  • Military Aviation History — When Ukraine gets the F-16: What Will Happen?! (2026-10-22)
  • Military Aviation History — DeHavilland Mosquito - Why The Luftwaffe Was Scared (2026-10-22)
  • Military Aviation History — Experience the Power of Eurofighter Typhoon (2026-10-22)
  • RFU News — Strategic Geopolitics — How Ukrainians infiltrated Russian tunnels to crush underground Kupiansk offensive (2026-10-22)
  • RFU News — Strategic Geopolitics — RFU News — Strategic Geopolitics - S01E0070 - Catastrophe in Russian Donetsk as deep-rear bases are obliterated (2026-10-22)
  • RFU News — Strategic Geopolitics — RFU News — Strategic Geopolitics - S01E0069 - Ukrainians destroyed Russian footholds ahead of the winter season (2026-10-22)
  • Combat Veteran News — Combat Veteran News - S01E0158 - Republicans Face A Midterm Election Disaster! (2026-10-22)
  • Combat Veteran News — Combat Veteran News - S01E0157 - He’s Admitting, He NEVER Wanted Peace! (2026-10-22)

This Day in History