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Demonstrators clashed with police as anger mounts over budget cuts and President Macron’s policies. On Wednesday, French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau informed that 473 people — 203 of them in the Paris region — were arrested during the first day of protests organized by the “Let’s Block Everything” movement.

Authorities acknowledged that about 175,000 people actively took part in nearly a thousand protest actions across the country, even though France was “shielded” with 80,000 police officers deployed in the streets.

While there were no stoppages in essential public service infrastructure, demonstrators staged targeted boycotts on some train lines, such as the route between Toulouse and Auch, and attempted to storm tracks at Paris’ Gare du Nord, the busiest railway station in Europe.

Activists also managed to temporarily block highways and ring roads in major cities including Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Rennes.

Paris was one of the epicenters of the protests. Parts of the city center were closed to traffic, and there were instances of looting in the Les Halles shopping district, where the facade of an Asian restaurant was set on fire.

In an attempt to downplay the unrest, Interior Minister Retailleau said the protests “have nothing to do with a citizen mobilization” because they are being “distorted” by “the far left.”

In the days leading up to the demonstrations, “Let’s Block Everything” activists used social media to call on citizens to oppose the 2026 budget cuts prepared by former Prime Minister François Bayrou and which President Emmanuel Macron appears determined to push through at all costs.

Public anger grew because those cuts are coupled with new public debt intended to meet budgetary commitments with the European Union. On Monday, the National Assembly voted no confidence in Bayrou, who was replaced by Sebastien Lecornu, a conservative politician and close ally of Macron.

One of the “Let’s Block Everything” movement’s driving themes — which shares similarities with the 2018 “Yellow Vests” for its nonpartisan nature and reliance on social media — is the fight against wealth inequality and resentment toward Macron.

From Paris’ Place de la Republique, cordoned off by police, thousands of people joined one of the day’s largest demonstrations. “The government doesn’t listen to us and acts as it pleases without taking us into account,” said an 18-year-old student holding a homemade sign linking today’s governance in France with the causes of the 1789 French Revolution.

A 56-year-old man named Rachid criticized wealth distribution since Macron came to power in 2017. “There’s money in this country, but it’s badly distributed. It’s always the same people who get richer and richer. The main fortunes have multiplied their wealth 14 or 15 times, while ordinary citizens can’t make it to the end of the month,” said the small construction entrepreneur, who had Lebanese, Palestinian and Algerian flags draped over his shoulders.

The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands. Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year. The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said. For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence. The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones. The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations. Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment. “As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said. Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

BY 2027?!

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors. Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap. Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability. “The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September. Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments. “They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

The service had previously expected the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile to reach the end of its service in 2036, the Government Accountability Office said in its report, “ICBM Modernization: Air Force Actions Needed to Expeditiously Address Critical Risks to Sentinel Transition.” But in the four years since that assessment was made, the LGM-35A Sentinel program has run into a series of developmental snags and severe projected cost overruns. Minuteman III currently makes up the land-based portion of the nation’s nuclear triad, with 400 missiles deployed across roughly 450 silos in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. Those missiles are now at least half a century old and their time is running out, prompting the Air Force to contract with Northrop Grumman in 2020 to build the Sentinel successor. That program was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion.

say the line, military-industrial complex!

my program has run into some cost overruns...

That estimate proved to be wildly optimistic, and projected future costs of Sentinel began to spiral. GAO said that the Pentagon concluded an unrealistic delivery schedule, ineffective systems engineering, incomplete basic system design and an atrophied ICBM industrial base all caused the cost overruns. In January 2024, Sentinel’s cost overruns led the government to declare a Nunn-McCurdy breach and a restructuring of the program. The Pentagon said in July 2024 that Sentinel was on a path to costing $160 billion. But even a restructured program will still cost at least $140 billion — roughly 81% higher than the original cost estimate. Sentinel was originally expected to reach initial operational capability in 2029, but is now slipping years behind schedule as problems emerge. Earlier this spring, for example, the Air Force confirmed it will have to dig entirely new silos for the Sentinel missiles, because the existing Minuteman III silos are not in good enough shape to reuse.

No rest for Minuteman III

In the face of those delays, GAO said, the Air Force’s Minuteman III program office took another look at the program and concluded it is feasible to keep it running for 25 more years. But doing so will not be easy. Minuteman IIIs were first deployed at hundreds of Air Force silos across the Plains region in the early 1970s, and at the time, they were expected to be operational for about a decade. If they stay in operation until about 2050, they will have a service life of at least 75 years. That will present multiple sustainment challenges, as obsolete spare parts dwindle and components such as diodes, resisters and capacitors deteriorate, GAO said. And as spare parts supplies diminish, the report said, it will be harder to conduct Minuteman III’s flight tests.

The Air Force regularly conducts test flights of unarmed Minuteman III missiles several times a year to ensure they stay reliable and accurate, as well as demonstrating the United States’ nuclear deterrent to nations around the world. The Air Force was already considering extending Minuteman III test launches past 2030, GAO said. However, with the ICBMs possibly staying online until 2050, those flight tests could continue through 2045. To conserve spare parts for flight tests, GAO said, the Air Force has received permission to conduct fewer tests annually.

ah, skipping testing the nukes since each test brings them closer to falling apart without there being a ready replacement, that sounds perfect! once again, everything Westerners say about how Russian nukes probably don't work is projection, every fucking time

Minuteman IIIs also could be converted to a multiple-warhead configuration to help alleviate the problems from Sentinel’s delays in the meantime, the report said. Today’s ICBMs now hold one nuclear warhead each. But under a MIRV, or Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle, configuration, the missiles could carry up to three nuclear warheads. This would allow a single Minuteman III to strike more targets and maintain the program’s deterrent effect, even if the overall number of missiles goes down. GAO said Air Force Global Strike Command, which oversees the nation’s ICBM force, would be able to switch Minuteman IIIs to MIRV configuration. But it would require a policy change from the government, Global Strike told GAO, and the command’s leadership prefers to have as much lead time as possible to carry out such a logistically complex project. GAO advised the Air Force to prepare a report on the risks associated with transitioning from Minuteman III to Sentinel, outlining how it will address the sustainment risks of operating the older ICBMs for years longer than expected. The Air Force should also consider the personnel and materiel implications of switching Minuteman III ICBMs to a MIRV configuration, if that choice is made, GAO said. The Air Force agreed with GAO’s recommendations.