Dave Liberatore 🇺🇸🇺🇦

New: Trump pardoned nursing home owner Joseph Schwartz just 3 months into his sentence for a $39 million fraud scheme. Meanwhile, families who won multimillion-dollar wrongful death suits against Schwartz haven’t collected a cent. propub.li/4di7xXs

State Sec. Rubio: “Imagine if instead of spending billions on weapons, Iran spent that money on its people. They’d have a much different country.” Follow: @AFpost

@spencernusbaum_ Good

In my now-three years covering the Nationals, I don't think I've ever seen CBP this empty.

@fan_fintwit My fave is "He's been begging to bomb Vermont!"

Trump's Iran Downfall

In what world is it okay for the Defense Secretary to make multi-million dollar investments in defense companies: a) Ever; b) Just before launching a war. FT has the scoop: ft.com/content/744ea8… In a functional democracy, he would offer his resignation tonight.

@aakashgupta And some folks think Taiwan isn't worth defending 🤷‍♂️

The machine that built the chip in this video should mass-humble every human who's ever lived. ASML's latest EUV lithography system costs $370 million, weighs 180 tons, and requires three Boeing 747s to deliver. It contains over 100,000 individual parts from 5,100 suppliers across 14 countries. It shoots 100,000 molten tin droplets per second with a laser, superheating each one past the temperature of the sun's surface to generate light at a wavelength so short that no natural material on Earth can focus it. So they had to invent new mirrors. Each one is polished with 100 alternating layers of molybdenum and silicon. The surface tolerance is so extreme that if you scaled a single mirror up to the size of Germany, the tallest imperfection would be 1 millimeter. Those mirrors took 20 years to develop. The company that makes them, Zeiss, had to build entirely new metrology tools just to confirm the mirrors were flat enough, because no existing measurement instrument on Earth could verify the precision they needed. The machine prints features at 2 nanometers. That's roughly 10 atoms wide. A human hair is 80,000 nanometers. A red blood cell is 7,000. A single COVID virus particle is 100. These machines are etching functional circuits 50 times smaller than a virus. TSMC is now mass producing 2nm chips in a Kaohsiung fab so large the cleanroom is twice the size of any competitor's. Each 2nm wafer costs $30,000 to produce. The entire 2026 production run was booked before a single chip shipped. Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm all reserved capacity years in advance. TSMC is spending $28.6 billion just to build enough fabs to meet demand for this one node. The chip that comes out of this process is smaller than a fingernail, runs on less power than a light bulb, and contains transistors that wrap gates around nanosheets of silicon only a few atoms thick. The raw material it started as was sand. The sand cost a fraction of a penny. The civilization that processed it into this started by banging rocks together.

@aaronklemz @TheJvandy I used to fish from shore at Manomin Park. A little-used gem. Great way to decompress after work with a cold one while listening to the Twins.

@TheJvandy 100%. I love the stretch of the river from Coon Rapids Dam to 694 - it's like the St. Croix with lots of natural shoreline, islands, and the bonus of a 1925 built tower that was used by runrunners during prohibition.

I love the Mississippi River. I feel like Minnesotans don’t hype up the riv as much as we should.

The video shows Marco Rubio first saying that “Ukraine is not America’s war,” and then older video showing him explaining how “America promised to defend Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons.” Rubio has become a prime example of the MAGA cult mentality. He has compromised his own principles in order to follow the cult leader. Rubio is now wearing shoes that do not fit, yet he is too afraid to admit it.

C'mon...it's 5D chess /s

This administration’s refusal to confront Russia is the most consistent aspect of their entire foreign policy.

Here's the retired Brigadier General running to unseat the Russian asset Paulina Luna that organized the guided tour for Russian Duma members to Washington last week.

@SchlossmanGF Three teams from the old WCHA. Thanks @B1GHockey for wrecking that stellar conference and it’s great, decades-long rivalries 😡 But the cream still rises to the top in late March and April

The NCAA Frozen Four features the four teams with the most NCAA national championships. North Dakota vs. Wisconsin Michigan vs. Denver

“We have to count [the] number of drones we use, efficiency of each of them, cost to kill for every Russian,” says Oleksandr Kamyshin, the architect of Ukraine's drone program. “The cost of killing every Russian is less than $1000 now.” cbsn.ws/4bOzHXy

The Israeli military’s top general suspended all operational activities of the reserve battalion involved in my team's detention & assault. The reserve battalion, comprised of hundreds of reservists who served in the ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda battalion, will be immediately withdrawn from the West Bank and reassigned to training until further notice. The sweeping disciplinary action comes about 48 hours after our report first aired. edition.cnn.com/2026/03/29/mid…

@gregbagwell Great thread, thanks! The hardened shelters would need to be upgraded nowadays with doors (or at least nets) to stop drones.

12/ We don’t have the riches that we had 40 years ago, but we still have hardened facilities on many of our Main Operating Bases. Recent events have taught us that we might need to get ready to operate and fight like this once more.

Seeing as airbases under attack are now in the news, here’s a thread about how we used to defend them in the Cold War, when an attack was just 15 minutes away and we expected the Warsaw Pact to throw everything they had at us. 🧵1/12

@CHASE_GUAC @atrupar I think so. But when you get to that level, those two places are excellent. Waaay better than anything Aaron will find back in Minneapolis.

@SuperdaveLibby @atrupar Is the crabcake better than jimmy’s?

Crab cakes hit different in Baltimore

@vcdgf555 @Jeremy9931 @CoffeReport @DefenceGeek @MATA_osint Damn, I appreciate your work! 🫡

@Jeremy9931 @CoffeReport @DefenceGeek I then compared number of airframes in flight data with Sentinel-2 overpass to make sure I wasn't missing any. Only one had 121 ARW livery. Anyways, that's how I figured it out. I'm not sure how others from @MATA_osint came to their conclusions, but I imagine it was similar.

Lost in all this, there is a bigger debris pattern on the main apron. So, I don't think we are done counting the airframe losses for that day.

@RALee85 @RobertG49643388 @ChrisO_wiki Too much operational focus on offense, and too much procurement focus on platform acquisition. Implementation of defensive measures have suffered, along with munitions acquisition.

@RobertG49643388 @ChrisO_wiki There are plenty of people, including senior generals, who recognize this. But the system doesn't always respond appropriately.

A war with Iran was an obvious scenario for CENTCOM and Iran's ballistic missile and OWA UAS capabilities are well-known. The lack of underground command posts and hardened shelters—or even concrete barriers between tents, which were common at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan—at bases well within range of Iranian missiles and drones suggests a deeper problem about how the US military draws lessons. How many senior officers and DoD officials have traveled through these bases and didn't ask about this? Are our bases in INDOPACOM similarly vulnerable? Congress should ask our defense leaders some hard questions.

Great win! Badger Bob is smiling. Go Red, win it all!