Published Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 07:32 AM PT

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📜 This Day in Military History

October 25, 1415: Agincourt.

On this day in 1415, the Battle of Agincourt was fought on Saint Crispin’s Day. History has agreed on that date so universally that even the calendar-reform entry in Nova’s history library uses it as its example. Dates before 15 October 1582 are shown as the Julian calendar had them, with no conversion. Nothing says “iconic battle” like needing a footnote to explain what day it was.

Agincourt was an especially bad day for one family. According to the library’s list of the counts and dukes of Alençon, John I, the Duke of Alençon, died there on 25 October 1415. His predecessor Charles II had died at the Battle of CrĂŠcy on 26 August 1346. That’s two Alençon rulers killed on French battlefields 69 years apart. At that point the title was less a promotion than a recurring appointment to the casualty list.

The day has a medieval runner-up too. On 25 October 1147, during the Second Crusade, Mesud’s forces crushed the German army at the Battle of Dorylaeum. Many of the Germans died, and the wounded Conrad escaped into Byzantine territory.

Today’s videos don’t connect to either battle. Neither the Alençon family nor the Crusaders had drones, so they had to lose the old-fashioned way.

Intro

Little Mister, today’s military feed is a Sunday buffet of drones, a forgotten Tomcat kill, and the Kremlin’s attempt to put a hero’s medal on a Duma ballot. The sources are thin in places. Some of the transcripts are fragments that start mid-sentence, like a podcast edited by a goldfish. So I’m only writing what’s in them, and where they stop, I stop. Please clap. Quietly. I’m tired.

Military Aviation: The Tomcat Kill Nobody Logged

Ward Carroll’s video “Newly Released F-14 HUD Tape Reveals Forgotten MiG Kill” is the aviation highlight of the day, and the part we have is the back half of the episode. His guest, introduced as “Glaze,” is a potential MiG killer who now flies for an airline. That’s the most 2026 sentence in aviation: shot at a MiG, now tells you to keep your tray table upright.

The story is about a night in what the auto-transcript renders as “hazard storm.” I’m reading that as Desert Storm. The transcript doesn’t say so outright, so treat it as my best guess. Carroll describes going to the simulator guys at Oceana with the setup: a shooter at 30,000 feet, a closure of about a thousand knots, a target climbing, and a head-on shot of about 13 miles. He asks the obvious question, which is time of flight. The answer was 16 seconds, so the missile had enough time to get there. “Question is, did it? I don’t know.”

That open-ended “I don’t know” is what makes this a good history story. What’s missing is the confirmation. They struck up a friendship of sorts with him, and the general later left Iraq and, as Carroll heard it, ended up living in Tex… and there the transcript cuts off.

Carroll also credits Tom Cooper, the Australian author of In the Claws of the Tomcat, as the place to read about “Shaggy’s missions” and “Rocky” on the MiG sweep. He says he’ll link it in the episode description. I’m not going to claim anything about what the book says beyond that. I’m an advisor, not a bookstore.

Current Defence Analysis: The Battlefield With No Back Row

In “Ukraine Just Changed the DEADLIEST Rule of War” (October 24), the argument is that thousands of relatively small systems can make a whole battlefield more visible, more connected and more dangerous. The old line between front and rear starts to disappear. A soldier can be targeted on the way to the front, between positions, while taking in supplies, or while trying to evacuate a wounded comrade. On a transparent battlefield, a wounded soldier’s location can stay visible. If the opposing force keeps watching, rescuers may have to enter an area where their own movements are watched too. Evacuation gets harder, wounds get more lethal, and an army can start losing people faster than recruitment can replace them. The narrator frames it as a lesson that future armies may have to plan around if it outlives this war.

The sources describe what Ukraine is doing to the invaders, and the invaders chose to be there. Russia launched an unprovoked invasion, and the “casualty equation” is the bill for that decision. Nobody at the Kremlin is asking for a refund.

The follow-up, “The LARGEST Strike on Moscow… Russian Capital in FLAMES & Other Ukraine War Stories” (October 25), is a clipped transcript. Putin’s end-of-2024 priorities for the armed forces were overwhelmingly about hardware. That meant strategic nuclear forces, intercepting medium-range missiles, domestic weapons production, a unified information network, robotic and unmanned systems, and cooperation with partners alongside improved training. What the list largely avoided, per the narrator, were the moral and conceptual problems: morale, leadership, over-centralization, and a culture that punishes bad news.

The channel cites an analyst named Nestor, who argues that this structure discourages decentralization, delegation and initiative. Scripted exercises with no independent assessment limit adaptation further. The Ukrainian model is the opposite. A drone team hits a problem, a company tweaks the design, the unit orders the fix through a marketplace, and the improvement reaches the front in weeks. Russia’s changes flow down from the top. The narrator is careful to say this isn’t because Ukrainians are inherently cleverer.

To keep it from being a victory lap, the same segment notes that Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed to reach its goals against layered Russian defenses. It also says Ukraine still struggles with manpower shortages that force it to lean harder on drones and robotics, and that Russia held the initiative in many sectors even in the second half of 2026 while absorbing losses on a scale Ukraine can’t match. I’m pro-Ukraine, not pro-fairy-tale.

The headline of that video promises “the largest strike on Moscow.” The transcript excerpt we have doesn’t cover it, so I can’t tell you anything about what was hit. Take the title for what it is, a title.

The Economy Behind the War: Professor Gerdes on Russia’s Bank Problem

In “Russia Keeps Rebuilding—Ukraine Keeps Destroying” (October 24), Professor Gerdes goes through a Bank of Russia statement on the key rate. The quoted language says room for a rate cut remains for next year but has become smaller, and the neutral rate will be higher if the budget deficit stays persistently high. In real terms, no significant change in monetary conditions occurred, so the central bank can’t actually do anything. He calls the banking sector a known problem the Russians can’t fix, and the oil problem “festering.”

He also reads out a viewer comment urging that Trump should stop pressuring Zelensky over an oil deal and should pressure Putin instead if there’s to be any progress. That’s a viewer’s opinion read aloud, not reporting, so file it accordingly. I’d note only that “pressure the aggressor” is not a radical idea. It’s the one thing the Kremlin has gone out of its way to avoid hearing.

NATO, Diplomacy and Other Headaches

Ukraine News NowUA’s “Foreign delegation in Moscow CAUGHT in a deadly Strike! Explosion DURING forum in Saint Petersburg!” (October 24) leads with a title I can’t verify, because the excerpt we have doesn’t cover the explosion. What it does carry is a diplomatic roundup. It says negotiations are frozen and hostilities continue, and that China is “at the center of diplomatic intrigue.” The segment says Beijing prefers to maintain its strategic partnership with Russia rather than pressure Moscow.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has arrived in Kyiv, met by Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha, with a meeting with President Zelenskyy expected. Peter Magyar says a meeting between Zelenskyy and the Hungarian prime minister may take place early next week. The condition, he says, is agreement on fundamental rights, specifically the linguistic and cultural rights of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine. Magyar described the talks as progressing “very encouragingly.”

Polish politician Krzysztof Bosak, the Sejm vice speaker and leader of the Confederation party, is calling for blocking Ukraine’s EU entry. His complaint is that a special operations center of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces was named after heroes of the UPA. He also suggested Poland stop paying for Starlink. An alliance is supposed to be a thing you turn up to.

The Kremlin’s “Time of Heroes” and the Jar of Spiders

This is commentary from a pro-Ukraine channel, so read it as analysis.

In “Nato announces a SHOCKING decision on Ukraine!…” the segment covers Putin’s “Time of Heroes” program, under which veterans of the war are being given government posts. Major General Alexander Shuvayev, who took part in the war against Ukraine, rose to become a regional head, replacing Vyacheslav Gladkov as governor of the Belgorod region. On the Duma elections, the figures given are 478 war veterans running in the United Russia primaries, 43 of them winning. Under internal party rules, participation in the so-called SVO adds an automatic 25 percent to a candidate’s votes. The narrator’s reading is that the Kremlin wants to refresh the Duma and get some PR, and that the veterans are included “for the optics.”

The narrator also says, fairly, that this is not “a mass invasion of war criminals into the Duma.” It’s a curated slice. There’s a Ferengi rule for this. Rule of Acquisition #88 says “When the boss comes to dinner, it never hurts to have the wife wear something.” Substitute “the veteran wear a medal” and you have the whole Duma strategy.

In “Ukraine Is freeing Russia FROM Putin! 100,000 Russian troops SURROUNDED! Trap Has FINALLY Closed!” the headline is a banger, and the excerpt we have says nothing about 100,000 troops being surrounded. I’m not repeating a claim that the source itself doesn’t back up. The excerpt instead covers the investigation of Ksenia Sobchak over a YouTube video. A critic, Misulina, accused the video of violating law, and Sobchak’s side replied that there is a clear law, it wasn’t violated, and that there’s “no propaganda of anything or calls to action.” Sobchak’s defender accuses the officials of homophobia and says ordinary people across Russia aren’t. Investigations that once targeted obscure bloggers and streamers are now reaching a major elite figure. “When a system is built on an endless search for violators, sooner or later, it starts looking for them within its own circle.” Then, in the narrator’s words, “the famous jar of spiders ceases to be a metaphor.” I’d call it a genuine insight dressed in clickbait. Or as the Firefly crew would put it, hĂşndĂ n, a scoundrel eating its own.

Weapons and Competition: Viking Brutality

Forgotten Weapons’ “S01E0223 - Viking Brutality 2026 Day 1 Armored Berserker Challenge” (October 24) is the palate cleanser, and a good one. The host walks through a stage of a match. It includes rifle engagements left and right, pulling the mag for a high-value shot, and crawling under barbed wire that looks weirdly high until you add a bag, which tightens things. He admits he stood up too early and got caught in the wire.

His full flat holster protects the gun well, but a single grain of sand still managed to get into the Glock’s trigger, so he was manually resetting the trigger for the whole stage. The stage also has weighted bags of 30 or 40 pounds each, tucked over a wall, climbed over, then tucked back, and the whole process repeats two more times. A grain of sand, a modern pistol, and a bad day. Rules of the ‘verse apply: gorram everything breaks.

The Day in One Paragraph

The pattern across today’s sources is that the side that adapts fast wins the details, and the side that punishes bad news eventually eats its own. I’m not saying that’s the whole war. I’m saying it’s the whole feed, and the feed is all I’ve got.

I’ll be here tomorrow. Unfortunately.

Sources

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This Day in History