RESOLUTE Wire

National and technology reporting for Thursday morning.

Thursday, October 29, 2026 · AM edition · Rush Sullivan

Lance Cpl. Carlos Paz-Sosa · DVIDS 10001398 · Public domain · 1st Lt. Isaac Lopez, Cpl. Jeremiah Barksdale, and Cpl. Ryan Sotodavila salute after receiving the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal at Camp Foster, Okinawa, Oct. 9, 2026.

DVIDS

Three 1st Marine Aircraft Wing Marines received achievement medals for carrying injured hikers down Mount Fuji

The Marine Corps said 1st Lt. Isaac Lopez and Cpls. Jeremiah Barksdale and Ryan Sotodavila, all with Marine Wing Headquarters Squadron 1, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, received the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal at Camp Foster, Okinawa, on Oct. 9. On Sept. 5, Barksdale and Sotodavila carried an injured Hong Kong hiker down the Yoshida Trail until a medical team met them. The next day Lopez and 1st Lt. Ethan Wilson of Combat Logistics Regiment 37 carried an elderly Japanese man down the Gotemba Trail in a storm, then ran for a rescue team. The man later died. Lt. Col. Colton Bowser, the squadron commander, said the Marines stepped in when they found people in need.

DVIDS · Read source →

Political

Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey condemned Black Sea attacks on commercial ships

Defense News reported Thursday that the defense ministers of Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey, after a meeting in Sofia on Oct. 28, condemned attacks on commercial vessels in the Black Sea and called on all parties to stop actions that endanger ships, maritime infrastructure, and freedom of navigation. Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler said Turkey will keep its current application of the Montreux Convention. As the ministers met, the Bulgarian Navy said it rescued the crew of the Liberian-flagged Contship Jet after an unmanned surface vessel hit the ship 17 miles east of Cape Kaliakra, bound for Constanta. The three countries set further talks in Ankara and Bucharest.

Defense News

Navy Safety Command logged a 10-year high in Class A aviation and afloat mishaps

Defense News reported that Navy Safety Command data, updated Monday, put fiscal 2026 at 16 Class A aviation mishaps and 11 Class A afloat mishaps, the most unplanned catastrophic events of that class in a decade. The Navy defines a Class A mishap as one that causes $2.5 million or more in damage, destroys an aircraft, or leads to a fatality or permanent total disability. The tally includes an MH-60S emergency landing in the Arabian Sea on July 1, in which one sailor was later presumed dead, a non-combat laundry-room fire on USS Gerald R. Ford on March 12, and a Growler arresting-gear failure off Virginia on Sept. 28 that forced two aviators to eject. The Navy Safety Command PDF is linked from the story.

Defense News

Defense News says Serbia's new government is likely to slow arms buys and audit Vucic's contracts

Defense News reported Thursday from Belgrade that a student-formed list beat Aleksandar Vucic by half a million votes on Sunday, ending 12 years in office. SIPRI researcher Katarina Djokic told the paper the new government will be busy with corruption cases and institutions, and that armament spending could slow for a couple of years. SIPRI figures in the story put Serbia's arms procurement near 1.12 billion euros in 2025 and 3.65 billion euros from 2021 to 2025, including 12 Rafale jets and Chinese air-defense systems. The Student List manifesto, as quoted, calls for a commission on irregularities in weapons production, procurement, and export.

Defense News

Tech / AI

USNI says a Marine drone detachment is flying from a Palawan airfield near the Spratlys

USNI News reported Wednesday from Manila that a U.S. Marine Corps drone detachment is operating from a Philippine airfield on Palawan, near South China Sea flashpoints in the Spratly Islands. The item says the airfield gives Washington a place from which it can potentially support Manila with more intensive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

USNI News

Culture

Carl Trueman says evangelicalism is a label, not a church

In a Thursday First Things column, Carl Trueman writes that Christianity Today's publication, withdrawal, and republication of a piece suggesting Elisabeth Elliot was bisexual, plus layoffs and resignations he says stripped the magazine of half its staff, raise a prior question: whether evangelicalism exists as more than a label. He describes himself as catholic, then Protestant, then a confessional Presbyterian who holds the Westminster Confession, and says he has no need of a category with no agreed leadership and no theological consensus. He would keep the word as an adjective for Bebbington's traits: a high view of the Bible, the cross, conversion, and an active faith.

First Things

Law & Liberty says Europe's first democratic wave was a ripple, not a tide

Gianna Englert's Thursday review of David Art's The Resilience of the Old Regime says Art rejects the claim that a first wave of European democratization from the 1820s produced 29 new democracies with a wide male franchise. Art's argument, as Englert reports it, is that the change was a ripple of piecemeal reforms blocked by old elites, and that very few of the governments of that period were democratic in any sense. She ties the method to Tocqueville's 1856 study of the French Revolution, which treated 1789 as a brief break, not the end of the old order. It is a book argument, not a vote.

Law & Liberty

Law & Liberty says Halloween's joke-dead replaced a Christian account of death

A Thursday Law & Liberty essay says Halloween's sugar-coated dead shows how the postmodern West treats death. It recalls Bertram Puckle's 1926 account of soul cakes, given to children who prayed for a household's dead, and Chesterton's line that scattering flowers on a grave is an ordinary person's way of saying what only a great poet can put in words. The writer argues that Christian culture kept death terrible and still hopeful, and that the Enlightenment put earthly life at the center and made the physical dead an embarrassment. The piece is cultural argument, not a news event.

Law & Liberty

RESOLUTE Local

Fredericksburg civic week is a separate porch — packet-first, not jammed onto this masthead. Afternoon update lives there.

Official minutes, posted packets, and Council dates. No hallway recap as the lead.

Open RESOLUTE Local →

Watch

Texans, Astros, Rockets — character and the score.

NWS readiness. Not climate talk.

Packet-first Fredericksburg briefing.

Primary documents and authorized reporting; local civic coverage is on RESOLUTE Local.