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As more and more IDF soldiers are killed and injured by Hezbollah drones, while demolishing buildings in Lebanon. The soldiers are complaining that they are being used irresponsibly and taking a great amount of damage as a result. An article in Haaretz today shed light on this:

1. Capt. Maoz Israel Rakanti was killed Friday by an explosive drone while securing a tour held at midday despite standing guidelines to minimize daytime movement due to the drone threat. A commander in the division who had argued against the tour put it bluntly: "For what? To secure a visit by the division commander who wanted to see the Litani and the Galilim Bridge. There was no operational benefit to this visit." He added that the timing made the decision especially indefensible, coming a day after Sgt. Negev Dagan of the same Golani battalion was killed by a mortar in the same area: "The directive is not to move during daytime unless it's a matter of life and death. This infuriates me to levels I can't even describe."
2. The army's defense of the decision concedes much of the criticism. A senior military source argued Norkin acted on operational judgment, but acknowledged the security arrangements were inadequate: "Maybe a tank instead of an open jeep. Maybe not staying there 20 minutes after a senior commander leaves." The justification ultimately fell back on command prerogative: "He's the commander, and if he thought he needed to see the bridge with his own eyes in daylight, then we execute." The IDF has not ruled out that Hezbollah identified Norkin's presence and targeted the location accordingly.
3. The incident reflects a broader erosion of operational discipline around the drone threat. Commanders and soldiers describe a pattern in which troops are exposed to serious risk for missions that are neither urgent nor essential, often demolition work that could be done at night. As an officer serving in the north described the dynamic: "Forces that are required to hide all day and avoid unnecessary exposure find themselves on missions that could be done at night, without endangering the troops beyond what's already dangerous."
4. The demolition mission itself structurally exposes troops to the drone threat. A central part of IDF activity in southern Lebanon is the systematic destruction of buildings, with commanders required to report daily tallies of structures demolished. This work demands sustained exposure in open terrain, precisely the conditions in which explosive drones are most effective. One soldier captured the contradiction directly: "We stand exposed securing house demolitions while there are drones in the air. There's no logic to it." An earlier account from a soldier in the sector framed the deeper problem: "The only mission is to keep destroying."

What we are seeing is that the IDF mania to destroy every building in Lebanon is putting their soldiers at risk. But the IDF command would rather put the soldiers at risk in daytime to increase the speed of demolition, than secure the lives of soldiers. Life is cheap for Israel.

“The directive is not to move during daytime unless it's a matter of life and death.” For decades, the American military, and its allies and proxies, operated with the certainty that anything that can be seen could be killed. This was what the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that began in the 1970s had promised and had delivered. American dominance on the battlefield was evident and US adversaries were only able to fight US forces asymmetrically, mostly through guerrilla or insurgent campaigns, emphasizing concealment from observation by operating at night, in forbidding terrain or dense urban areas, or among populations. US surveillance and firepower prevented enemies from massing and rarely were US forces in danger of being tactically defeated in combat. American bases were secure, and, while harried by indirect fire, US bases were, by and large, safe and never in any danger of being overrun (with some exceptions in Afghanistan). IED attacks did greatly hamper and hinder US force and logistics movements but US freedom of movement was never fully denied, and the US was always able to mass forces, set the tempo of operations and take initiative at the tactical and operational levels of war.

Now that advantage is gone. The US, allied and proxy dominance of the enemy through surveillance and applied firepower has been equaled. Whether through Iranian drones and missiles damaging and forcing the evacuation of nearly all US Gulf bases, the inability of US carriers to get closer than 1,000km from the Iranian coast, or the IDF unable to move in daylight in Southern Lebanon, the great advantage US forces and their allies once had has been met. Now, with certainty, if US and allied forces can be seen, they too can be killed. I cannot overstate how dramatic this is for an American empire that depends upon the conquest and control of terrain to achieve, demonstrate and report success and victory. An American military unable to openly operate without challenge upends decades of American warfighting on all levels: tactically, doctrinally, industrially, psychologically, politically… The 1970s RMA brought about the high tech weaponry that provided American dominance at the tactical and operational levels of war. This dominance allowed the US to not suffer battlefield defeats while garrisoning terrain and cities. No enemy could fight the US symmetrically and US forces could not be forced to retreat or hunker in their bases (at least not at the tactical level of war, but certainly so at the strategic and political levels). Now nearly any American adversary enjoys that same “if we see it, we can kill it” guarantee.

The war in Ukraine has been defined by periodic bursts of certainty that Russia is on the back foot, if not close to collapse, and that Ukraine, conversely, is inches away from victory. We appear to be in the middle of one of these moments of euphoria now. Finnish President Alexander Stubb has declared that Ukraine is “on top” and “in a much better place than it has been at any stage in this horrific war,” charging that Russia is unable to recruit enough soldiers to make up for those it’s losing. Ukrainians have “a growing self-confidence” on account of the territory they have supposedly retaken, as one former U.S. ambassador put it, and their growing confidence over military advances “is strikingly higher today than a year ago,” charged another. A spate of reports have it that the walls are closing in on Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Ukrainian military breakthrough is imminent, in other words, and Ukraine’s population remains committed to endless fighting. But this is hard to square with Ukraine’s growing recruitment crisis, most viscerally embodied by the growing violent resistance to its policy of forced conscription.

For years now, videos have circulated of ordinary Ukrainians being “recruited” for military service — or, put more bluntly, being snatched by sometimes masked men from the streets or their homes, and dragged into a minivan to be driven away. It is part of a war mobilization effort that has been wracked with controversy, including a series of bribery scandals going back years, widespread allegations of abuse, and the drafting of mentally and physically disabled men. Unsurprisingly, forced conscription has been unpopular. A petition calling for the end of mobilization in public places quickly passed the 25,000-signature threshold for a presidential response. Before long, recruitment officers started facing angry protests from local communities. Last year, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets publicly labeled it a “coercive system” and revealed that complaints against enlistment officers with the Territorial Recruitment Centers (TRC) had exploded more than 33,000% since the start of the war — from just 18 in 2022 to more than 6,000 in 2025. As the war has gone on, civil disobedience against conscription practices has turned increasingly violent. The year 2025 was bookended by killings of draft officers. At the close of January, a man showed up at a military training center and shot dead a TRC officer who had “recruited” an acquaintance of his. In December, a draft officer was fatally stabbed in the groin by a man whose papers he asked to see, and who went on to attack three other officers before fleeing.

As the Kyiv Independent, hardly an antiwar outlet, noted in its report on the stabbing, videos of violent “recruitment” practices were “initially dismissed as an exaggeration fuelled by Russian disinformation networks,” but were in reality widespread thanks to Ukraine’s manpower shortage and a sharp drop in voluntary enlistment. December also saw a group of people attack TRC officers trying to check their papers, leaving one with a broken rib. The violence has only escalated this year. The end of this past January saw a man kill a draft officer and escape with one of the conscripts he was escorting. February saw at least two separate attacks on TRC officers in Kharkiv and in the Lviv Oblast, with the latter suspected by police of trying to help a conscript escape. A month later, a group ran a minivan driven by recruiters off the road and broke in to free the conscript they were transporting. The first week of April saw three stabbings in four days, including a recruiter pierced in the neck by a customs officer whose brother he and his colleagues allegedly tried to forcibly mobilize. A few days later, a group of teenagers attacked TRC officers to protect a man they were trying to conscript, and the month ended with a 48-year-old soldier going AWOL and firing an automatic weapon at a car that TRC officers and a policeman were in, sending two to the hospital. Only a few days ago, an alleged draft-dodger sent two more recruiters to the hospital in serious condition, stabbing them after they tried to check his papers.

According to government figures, these incidents are just a handful of more than 600 attacks on enlistment officers carried out since the start of the war, with the number of assaults nearly tripling from 2024 to 2025, when 341 were recorded. The first four months of 2026 alone have seen at least 117 attacks, more than 20 times the five that were recorded in the war’s entire first year. How, then, does this square with polling that has tended to show, even recently, a Ukrainian population willing to fight indefinitely until military victory?

“Almost all of those polls are exclusively in the territory under the control of the Ukrainian government,” says Volodymyr Ishchenko, research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. “That means they don’t poll Ukrainians in Crimea, in Donbas, in the occupied territories, in the EU, or Ukrainians who went to Russia as refugees, and there are millions of them.” “So up to one third of the total population of those who carry Ukrainian passports are not even polled,” Ishchenko adds. Other metrics point to a silent reluctance to fight. Ukraine’s own defense minister revealed this year that there were 2 million draft dodgers and 200,000 cases of desertion. While voluntary enlistment drove the war’s early months, conscription is now responsible for 70% of recruitment. Ukrainian nationals who fled to Europe at the start of the war have resisted European efforts to send them back, in some cases to be drafted at the Ukrainian government’s request. While affluent Ukrainians are able to bribe their way out of being conscripted, the commander of Ukraine’s National Guard has urged those who “have money problems” to join the military. According to one analysis of Ukrainian casualty figures, the vast majority of those killed in action come disproportionately from small towns, where poverty rates tended to be higher.

What’s at stake is more than whether Ukraine wins or loses. The prolongation of the war has created and intensified a severe economic and demographic crisis for Ukraine that threatens its future as a stable and functioning state. Last week, the head of Ukraine’s Office of Migration Policy estimated that 70% of those abroad may not return to the country, threatening labor shortages in critical sectors. The Ukrainian state, which already is kept afloat through massive loans from Europe, owes an unsustainable debt worth many billions of euros to the families of dead soldiers, whose numbers have ballooned. Much of this is unknown to Western publics. English-language reports about violent resistance to conscription are dwarfed by stories claiming Russia is faltering. Some Ukrainian-language reports about the country’s recruitment and demographic crises are simply never translated to English. And so, those who most ardently back Ukraine unwittingly cheer policies that ensure its gradual destruction.

Milei sent army planes to Bolivia: humanitarian aid or military interference?

The Argentine government confirmed the dispatch of Hercules aircraft to Bolivia amid the most serious political crisis the neighboring country is experiencing, sparking a controversy that has divided the region: while Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno framed it as a gesture of solidarity, former President Evo Morales and Congressman Juan Grabois accused Javier Milei's government of militarily intervening in an internal conflict to support a government that, they claim, represses the Bolivian people.

The government justified the operation as "humanitarian aid".

Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno confirmed the dispatch of a Hercules aircraft to Bolivia amid the crisis gripping the government of President Rodrigo Paz Pereira , besieged by massive protests from farmers, miners, teachers, and rural sectors demanding his resignation. "Argentina has contributed a Hercules aircraft to transport food supplies—Bolivian food—to bypass the blockades erected by those who sympathize with Evo Morales," Quirno stated in an interview with Eduardo Feinmann on Radio Mitre.

Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo also participated in the radio conversation and publicly expressed his gratitude for the support: "I ask Foreign Minister Quirno to convey the Bolivian people's thanks to President Milei, because in times of tension like these, Argentina's provision of Hercules aircraft for the transport of food and humanitarian aid demonstrates this level of alignment and solidarity," Aramayo stated.

Quirno also confirmed the existence of "a very consolidated group of countries that think similarly" that supports the Bolivian government, made up of Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Peru.

Morales: "They have transported police and military personnel on those planes."

The Argentine government's version of events clashed head-on with the accusations of former Bolivian President Evo Morales , a fugitive from justice in his country, who accused Milei of going far beyond humanitarian aid. "They transported police officers on planes sent by Milei. Military personnel too, to Santa Cruz, to Potosí. The police had no equipment to combat the protests and arrived from Argentina, on Hercules aircraft sent by Milei," Morales asserted in statements to Radio 10.

The former Bolivian president maintained that President Paz himself had acknowledged the operation: "President Rodríguez himself acknowledges it, 'Thank you, Milei, for sending planes for humanitarian reasons,' he says," Morales pointed out, adding that there is "information and photographs that prove that these Hercules aircraft unloaded boxes with riot control materials, but these planes are mainly used to move military troops and police towards the seat of government."

Morales also denounced the existence of an alleged "Operation Condor 2026 ," which he claimed was being promoted by Donald Trump and implemented by right-wing governments in the region, including Milei's. In this context, he described the situation in Bolivia as "a popular uprising" to defend the Constitution, natural resources, and basic services.

Grabois: "We already saw this movie in 2019"

From Argentina, Congressman Juan Grabois harshly criticized the national government on social media, drawing a direct parallel with the arms shipments sent by Mauricio Macri 's government during the 2019 Bolivian crisis. "Milei is starving the Argentine people, but he sends military planes to support a government that represses the Bolivian people and calls it 'humanitarian aid,'" the legislator wrote.

Grabois was emphatic in linking the two episodes: "We already saw this movie when the Macri government sent weapons for the 2019 coup." The congressman also expressed his solidarity with the former Bolivian president: "Solidarity with the Bolivian people and with our brother Evo Morales. The Greater Homeland will not surrender."

Bolivia in crisis: more than 100 arrested and roadblocks in six provinces

Bolivia is experiencing one of its most serious crises since Rodrigo Paz Pereira took office. The protests, which escalated significantly in early May 2026, have brought together miners, teachers, farmers, transport workers, and sectors aligned with Morales, who remains a fugitive with an arrest warrant issued against him on charges of child trafficking.

The riots on Monday, May 19, resulted in over 100 arrests, police vehicles set ablaze, damage to public offices and businesses, and attacks on civilians and officers. On May 14, miners detonated dynamite near the presidential palace, and a group attempted to force their way inside. The tension also spread to the city of El Alto , with road blockades in six of Bolivia's nine departments causing severe shortages of food, fuel, and medicine.

Despite the escalating unrest, the Bolivian government ruled out declaring a state of emergency on Tuesday. Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo was categorical: "There is no possibility of a state of emergency. We are not going to declare it," although he warned that "tough and strict" measures would be applied against those responsible for the disturbances, attributed to groups from Chapare , Morales's political stronghold in the department of Cochabamba. Presidential spokesman José Luis Gálvez justified the refusal by stating that a state of emergency could "aggravate the situation" by giving ammunition to the protesters.

The precedent of 2019 and the debate on regional sovereignty

The controversy surrounding Operation Hercules is not new in Argentine foreign policy. In November 2019, during Macri's administration, Argentina sent riot control munitions to Bolivia in the context of the crisis that ended with Evo Morales' resignation from the presidency, an episode that Alberto Fernández 's government later described as inappropriate and which led to judicial investigations. The parallel drawn by Grabois raises a question that the ruling party does not answer: if in 2019 the shipment of equipment was questioned as interference in an internal matter, what changes today in the political and ideological framework, beyond who receives the support?

What is verifiable is that the Milei government took an active stance in the Bolivian conflict, confirmed the operation, and framed it within a regional alliance with governments of similar ideological orientation. This humanitarian narrative clashes with Morales's accusations regarding the content and true purpose of the flights, claims which, according to the former Bolivian president, are supported by photographic documentation that has not yet been independently verified.

The U.S. Air Force Pilot Problem

US Air Force pilots are highly trained assets, essentially seven- to eight-figure strategic investments. And by most standards, the compensation pilots enjoy is strong. Yet the Air Force has a retention crisis that persists. Outwardly, this may seem like a paradox: good benefits vs high attrition. But the attrition is explainable; while the Air Force offers stability and prestige, commercial aviation simply offers more money and more control over their lives.

Breaking Down USAF Compensation

An Air Force pilot’s base pay is rank-based. An O-1 makes about $50k while an O-4 makes between $75k and $100k. Senior officers can make $150 and beyond. By mid-career, pilots earn between $115k and $155k, while at the senior level, they earn over $200k in base salary. Flight pay bumps total earnings, usually between $150 and $1,000 per month. Retention bonuses sweeten the pot, too, inspiring some pilots to stay in uniform with $50k per year or $600k over the contract length. So compensation is clearly solid—but it’s also capped.

Tax Advantages and Extras

In addition to base salary, pilots receive BAH (housing) of $20k to $40k per year and another $3,900 per year for BAS (food). A large portion of this is tax-free. So the take-home pay is higher than just the base salary suggests. Pilots also receive 100% medical coverage through TRICARE. Families are covered, too, with a minimal out-of-pocket expense. This is one of the strongest healthcare packages in the US workforce. And SGLI life insurance offers up to $400k.

Retirement System

Once an Air Force pilot hits the 20-year pension mark, an immediate payout of roughly 40 to 50 percent of base pay is triggered. For example, an O-5 pension would be $50k to $80k per year. And critically, pilots do not need to wait until they turn 65 to collect the pension; it begins immediately. So a 42-year-old can hit the 20-year mark, retire from the Air Force, collect $60k per year in passive income, and start a second career making an additional six figures. This pension is extremely valuable—but it requires a 20-year commitment. Additionally, the 401(k) equivalent, the TSP, offers a 5% match.

Lifestyle Benefits

Pilots receive 30 days of paid leave per year, double the two weeks many civilian jobs offer. Pilots can also continue their education through tuition assistance and the GI Bill, which can be used for graduate school or transferred to a spouse/child. The Air Force assists with travel, too, allowing pilots and their families to take Space-A flights on military transport, thereby saving on airfare. When a pilot is ready to buy a home, the VA loan allows him or her to do so with zero percent down, saving tens of thousands of dollars up front relative to the twenty percent civilians typically have to put down. So the Air Force offers a strong and comprehensive support structure. So why are so many pilots leaving the Air Force?

The Lifestyle Reality

Healthcare and tax-free allowances aside, there are downsides to life as an Air Force pilot. Deployments can last six to 12 months. PCS moves require the pilot and their family to relocate every two to three years. The schedule is never stable; it constantly changes. The operational tempo is high, owing to the 1,800-pilot deficit. As more pilots leave and the shortage deepens, the operational tempo intensifies, further degrading the quality of life. And the unfortunate truth is that as officers advance, they spend most of their time on administrative tasks, with flying accounting for only a minority of their workload. So the lifestyle is demanding, variable, and ironically, often not centered on flying an aircraft.

Why Pilots Leave

Pilots are leaving because their pay is capped relative to their talent set. They can stay in for 30 years and never earn base pay above the legal cap, barely above $200k. The airlines, meanwhile, cap pay at around $550k. That’s double the money to fly to Amsterdam and back. And because airlines are organized around a rigid seniority system, leaving the Air Force earlier means higher lifetime earnings at the commercial airlines. Of course, commercial pilots choose where to live, thereby granting their families a degree of stability over military life, within which the military decides where you and your family live, forcing relocation every few years. That gets old. The commercial route also eliminates the administrative burden of being an Air Force officer. Pilots want to fly; they don’t join the Air Force to do desk work. At United, Delta, or American, pilots fly; they don’t do desk work. And in the commercials, pilots sidestep the high operational tempo of Air Force life. In short, commercial aviation gives pilots more money, more control, and that pilot-specific identity that desk work stifles.

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Transition Dynamics

This is why one-third of military pilots transition directly into the airlines. The advantage is that most military pilots already have the 1,500 flight hours commercial carriers require for hiring, which means immediate employability. Transitioning early-plug pilots into the seniority rankings earlier means millions more are earned over the course of their lifetime. So the commercial system actually incentivizes an early exit from the military.

Strategic Implications

The draw of commercial aviation has created a retention crisis that impacts readiness. The training pipeline is being strained; replacement pilots are very expensive. And the departure of senior pilots leaves an experience gap, with roles being filled by more junior pilots. Over the long term, this results in degraded combat capability. So pilot retention is essentially a national security issue.