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The system that needed Lindsey Graham

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Thomas Karat, behavior analyst

The senator died Saturday night of an aortic dissection, at seventy-one, in the middle of a campaign for a fifth term. His communications director cited the medical examiner’s preliminary finding: a rupture in the body’s largest artery, the consequence of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The tributes arrived within hours. Trump called him a true American patriot. Volodymyr Zelensky, who had met him twice in the preceding week, called him a friend who was there when it was needed most. Mark Rutte and Benjamin Netanyahu sent their own. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said there were no words to describe Graham’s impact on the foreign and domestic policy of the United States.

There are words. The obituaries have chosen the wrong ones, and in doing so they have skipped the only question worth asking about a man like this. Not whether he was sincere in his convictions — he was, exhaustingly so — but how a senator whose reflexive answer to every foreign crisis was force spent twenty-three years being handed the committee seats, the airtime, and the ear of four presidents that let him act on it. Graham was not an aberration the system tolerated. He was a product the system manufactured, promoted, and kept in stock because he was useful.

Consider the shape of the career. In March 2003, as the bombs fell on Baghdad, Graham told the country that past disagreements should give way to a shared commitment to see the effort through. The war he blessed that day killed more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians by the most conservative direct-death counts, birthed the insurgency that became ISIS, and left the country a wreck. He drew no lesson from it. When Libya was broken open in 2011 and left to its warlords, he had backed the intervention. When Syria was pulled apart, he had wanted deeper involvement. Across two decades, the country would be devastated, and Graham’s response to each devastation was to locate the next one.

By February of this year the next one was Iran. On the twenty-sixth, under his own Senate letterhead, Graham published an essay that reads now like a confession left in plain sight. Iran, he wrote, was facing a Berlin Wall moment. The regime was at its weakest point since 1979, and his ultimate hope was that regime change would be achieved. He described the October 7 attacks, in his own phrasing — as a silver lining, because the Israeli campaign that followed had degraded Iran’s military. He praised Trump for pursuing, in his words, peace, not war, in the same paragraphs that celebrated a bombing campaign already under way. The strikes had a name: Operation Midnight Hammer. Graham called it the largest opportunity for peace and prosperity in the Middle East in over a thousand years.

He said the quiet part in Tel Aviv, to reporters, on February 16, less than two weeks before the strikes began. The United States was on the verge of eliminating the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the region. On Fox News, days into the war, he offered the ledger in its rawest form: when the regime goes down, he said, there would be a new Middle East, and the United States would make a tremendous amount of money. Venezuela and Iran held nearly a third of the world’s known oil reserves, he noted, and the point of the exercise was a partnership with those reserves. Regime change as a real-estate transaction. He had made the trip to Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia the week before to reaffirm, he wrote, that all of it was attainable and would be extremely beneficial to the United States. Weeks earlier he had met with Mossad, telling reporters they would tell him things his own government would not.

None of this cost him anything. That is the part the eulogies cannot hold in view, because to hold it in view is to indict the institutions doing the eulogizing. A senator who spent a career being wrong about the consequences of American force — wrong about Iraq, wrong about Libya, wrong about what would follow the fall of every regime he wanted to fall — was never demoted for it. He was promoted. The record of his committee assignments tells the story in the driest possible language. For years he sat on the Armed Services Committee, from which he lectured the Senate that its love for the troops bought nothing, that only appropriations did, that a colleague worried about the budget was out of touch with the world. By the time of his death he chaired the Budget Committee and sat on Appropriations — the panels that write the numbers and bless the spending. The man who wanted every war was placed, again and again, on the committees that pay for them.

Follow the money and the shape sharpens further. Graham’s donors, across a career documented in Federal Election Commission filings, clustered where his positions pointed. The defense contractors — the makers of the aircraft, the missiles, the systems — routed money to his committees and his leadership PACs. The specific career totals sit behind a paywall that blocks automated verification, and so no single figure belongs in this account. But the pattern needs no exact number to be legible. A senator who votes for every weapons system, who calls insufficient defense spending an emergency, who treats the reduction of the military budget as a moral failure, is a senator worth funding for the people who build the weapons. The contributions were not a bribe. They did not need to be. They were an investment in a man who already believed, and who sat where belief could be converted into contracts.

The media completed the machine. Graham was a fixture of the Sunday shows and the cable green rooms for a reason that had nothing to do with wisdom and everything to do with format. He was quotable, available, and reliably hawkish, which made him the perfect guest for programs that reward certainty over accuracy and confrontation over reflection. The pipeline ran in both directions. The airtime made him a national figure, and being a national figure got him more airtime, and the whole apparatus rewarded the escalation it claimed only to be covering. When he called for bombing Iran regardless of Iran’s involvement in a given attack, and told Israel to finish the job, the remarks drew condemnation abroad and bookings at home. The market for a war hawk was deep, and he supplied it.

What made Graham durable was that his convictions never had to survive an election of ideas, only the tolerance of the institutions that housed them. He denounced Trump in 2015 as a race-baiting xenophobic bigot and a jackass, and by his second term was among the president’s most consistent defenders, having discovered that proximity to power mattered more than the content of the man wielding it. The pitch that helped start this year’s war was delivered, according to reporting on the strikes, over rounds of golf. Iran was a spoiler for everything Trump wanted, Graham told him; collapse the regime and it would be Berlin Wall stuff. The president was persuaded. The bombs fell. And when a reporter asked Graham what the plan was for the day after — the question that Iraq should have burned into every hawk in Washington — he answered that it was not his job to know. The future of Iran, he said, was for the Iranian people to determine. He had wanted the war. The consequences belonged to someone else.

That was always the arrangement. The wars were his to advocate and never his to own. He would appear on the morning shows to demand them, sit on the committees to fund them, take the money from the firms that profited from them, and when they curdled into the next disaster he would be on television again, demanding the next one, his authority somehow enhanced rather than diminished by the wreckage behind him. This is not the biography of an outlier. It is the biography of an incentive structure, wearing a man’s face.

He died with the seat already in motion. Within hours, before any burial, the reporting had turned to the scramble to replace him, to the governor who will name a temporary successor, to what his absence means for a Republican majority counting every vote. Trump told NBC he already had someone in mind. The machine that made Lindsey Graham did not pause to mourn him. It began, immediately, to fill the vacancy — because the position he occupied was never really about the man. It was about keeping the seat filled by someone who would say what he said. There is no shortage of applicants. That is the dread the eulogies are built to keep you from feeling. He is gone, and nothing that produced him has changed.

***

Thomas Karat has spent a career in multinational technology corporations and is a behavior analyst holding a Master’s in Science and Communication from Manchester Metropolitan University. His work focuses on the psychology of language in power dynamics, and his graduate thesis examined linguistic deception markers in high-stakes business negotiations. He hosts a YT podcast, SaltCubeAnalytics, and publishes at karat.substack.com

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Musk appointed co-director of Pentagon future warfare initiative

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18 hours ago

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02/10/2026

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The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has assumed the co-directorship of a Pentagon initiative focused on the future of warfare, known as “Project Meridian”.

Musk’s new role was announced by US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth.

Musk, who has long expressed his conviction that wars will ultimately be fought with autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, will advise the project as co-director alongside Palmer Luckey, founder of defence start-up Anduril, and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

In a memorandum issued at the Pentagon, Hegseth stated that the group would “examine the battlefields of the future” and “determine which weapons and technologies warfighters must employ to achieve dominance in these environments.”

During his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Hegseth said:

“The best predictors of future conflict do not reside exclusively within the Pentagon. Obvious biases and risks arise when we task ourselves with both framing the questions and answering them.”

Hegseth stated that this initiative would commence immediately and that, following his address, he would convene with Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich at a secure location.

Project Meridian will have 120 days to “ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies”, a process that will culminate in the public disclosure of its findings alongside a classified annex.

Hegseth outlined an expansive mandate extending “from beneath the surface of the Earth to beyond the Moon.”

Rather than formulating new military strategies or policies, the panel will seek to identify “the domains we must seize and the capabilities we must master”, focusing on the effort to “discover, develop, and field” the weapons and systems that next-generation American troops may require.

The group is expected to submit a report containing recommendations to him by the end of January.

In 2024, Musk remarked: “Future wars will be entirely about drones and hypersonic missiles.” This was merely one of several similar statements he has made in recent years.

For Musk, whose oversight role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ended in turmoil and escalated into a dispute with President Donald Trump over Trump’s spending bill, this appointment marks his formal return to government in an official capacity.

Musk and Trump ultimately reconciled, and Musk attended a meeting on artificial intelligence safety at the White House this week alongside other technology leaders.

Meridian forms part of a broader push announced by Hegseth to restructure the military around autonomous warfare and rapidly advancing technologies.

Hegseth announced the establishment of the Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM), a new four-star combatant command endowed with what he termed “service-like authorities” to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.

The Department of War will also begin phasing in new occupational frameworks across all military branches to establish specialised career tracks for what Hegseth described as “the next generation of autonomous warfighters.”

“We should have conceived an Autonomous Warfare Command a decade ago,” Hegseth said, explaining that Meridian aims to gaze far enough ahead to enable the military to anticipate the next technological shift rather than lag behind.

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Pentagon breach exposes personal records of three million people

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3 days ago

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30/09/2026

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A cyberattack targeting the US Department of War’s personnel database has resulted in the leak of personal information belonging to approximately 3 million people.

Speaking to ABC News, a Pentagon official stated that the system accessed by unauthorised individuals contained the records of 2,760,000 living persons and 294,000 deceased individuals.

The Military Times portal, which first broke the news, had reported the number of affected individuals as approximately 4 million based on two sources. The Pentagon official subsequently conveyed different figures to ABC News.

The leak encompasses Social Security numbers and duty information belonging to military personnel and civilian employees. According to an official notification examined by Military Times, the compromised records may also include names, dates of birth, contact information, sex, race, and military occupational specialties.

The unauthorised access to the information system of the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) lasted for approximately nine months, between October 2025 and 16 July 2026.

ABC News reported that the access in question was obtained by a small number of third-party users. The vulnerability was closed after it was identified.

The DMDC is considered one of the Pentagon’s primary personnel records centres. More than 60 million records belonging to active-duty personnel, reservists, civilian staff, contractors, retirees, veterans, and military family members are stored at the centre.

The Pentagon has not detected any evidence that the leaked data has been misused. Military Times reported that affected individuals were offered identity restoration and credit history monitoring services.

A similar data breach previously occurred on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) recruitment website, FBIJobs.gov. According to information obtained by ABC News from internal communications and sources, the FBI is considering the possibility that data belonging to its entire staff may have been stolen.

The New York Times (NYT) examined a portion of the stolen FBI records. Home addresses, telephone numbers, official email addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, hiring dates, and emergency contact details for relatives were identified within these documents.

The database also contained unit designations, duty roles, and information regarding the supervisors of personnel. Some records revealed assignments within counterintelligence and counternarcotics units, as well as departments examining threats originating from Russia, China, and Iran.

Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre, noted that this type of breach could directly affect the FBI’s operational capabilities.

The hacker group known as ShinyHunters had announced that it had seized medical data and security clearance records alongside files belonging to tens of thousands of active and former FBI employees.

Experts evaluating the matter for the NYT warned that this information could be used to track agents, threaten their families, or compile dossiers by foreign intelligence services.

The ShinyHunters group initially threatened to release the data unless the bureau withdrew an advisory it had published concerning the group’s attack methods.

The group later asserted that it had never intended to leak the information and characterised its action as an advertising campaign.

In a report published in May, Reuters noted that the personal data of US military personnel had been used in surveillance and attack preparations.

According to the agency, Washington’s adversaries gained the ability to pinpoint areas where troops were concentrated by exploiting commercially available location data. US lawmakers at the time criticised the Pentagon for failing to adequately protect the personal data of military personnel.

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Canada diversifies oil and gas exports away from US

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4 days ago

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29/09/2026

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US President Donald Trump’s trade policy and the Washington administration’s push to increase Venezuelan oil imports are prompting Canada to diversify its energy exports.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, recent developments are accelerating Canada’s development of new oil and natural gas projects.

Steps taken by the Ottawa administration, which aspires to become an energy superpower, are seen as potentially strengthening the country’s position in global markets.

In Canada, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer and fifth-largest natural gas producer, the energy sector accounts for approximately one-fifth of total exports.

Almost all of the country’s natural gas exports and approximately 90% of its oil exports go to the US.

The newspaper writes that the trade war with Washington and the atmosphere of confrontation entered into with Iran have heightened Canada’s desire to turn to alternative markets outside the US.

Officials plan to increase shipments of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European and Asian markets.

Accelerating infrastructure investments in line with this target, Canada is also shortening approval processes. The government is prioritising the construction of an oil pipeline extending specifically to the west coast.

According to the newspaper’s estimate, if major pipeline projects are implemented, Canada’s daily oil transport capacity could rise to 6.8 million barrels by 2034.

Routes heading to the west coast will make up approximately 30% of this capacity.

The Canadian administration is simultaneously advancing LNG export projects. According to the report, these investments could allow approximately 55% of Canadian natural gas exports to be directed to markets outside the US by the early or mid-2030s.

While the government expands tax incentives for the oil and natural gas sector, the province of Alberta also plans to overhaul its royalty system.

However, the newspaper notes that implementing the new projects requires heavy investment, and the process depends on the final decisions taken by producers as well as the completion of regulatory approval processes.

The expansion of pipeline and LNG infrastructure could gradually reduce Canada’s dependence on the US market while raising its share in the global energy market.

The Canadian Prime Minister’s demand to reduce reliance on the US market had also come to the fore in July.

According to Carney’s statement, the province of Alberta submitted a plan for a pipeline spanning more than 1,000 kilometres to the west coast of British Columbia.

Targeted for completion by September 2027, the line will reach the Pacific coast by following an existing corridor through the mountainous terrain.

This shift in energy comes at a time of strained relations with the US. Donald Trump said that if Canada obtains associate member status in the European Union, he could halt trade with Europe in certain sectors and impose high tariffs.

As reported by the Associated Press, Trump characterised such a rapprochement as a “potentially hostile act”.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had proposed opening the path for Canada to become the EU’s first associate member. The terms of this associate membership status, which is not defined in EU treaties, are not yet clear and require the approval of member states to enter into force.

Canada, which does not seek full membership, aims for maximum rapprochement with the EU.

Following Trump’s return to the White House, relations between Washington and Ottawa deteriorated. The Trump administration, which repeatedly called on Canada to become the “51st state” of the US, introduced additional tariffs.

In July, the US began imposing 50% tariffs on certain Canadian-origin goods.

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