The good news is, we’re on time this week. The bad news is, we didn’t spend much time on article-reading over the holiday week, so we don’t have many stories for you.

Defense

• The European Army, a story which won’t go away – As I snarked last time, hooray! Another army for Europe to chronically underfund, which will undoubtedly have the German Army’s problem of 1. tons of equipment of which 2. maybe 20% works at any given time.
• Big Army wants a new turbine for its helos
• Big Navy: we can’t buy new boomers and a 355-ship fleet at the same time – To sum up, anyway. CDR Salamander has the right answer: “If not, build the boomers.”
• Some fun pictures of the auxiliary thrusters on the Perry frigates – Apparently, there’s talk about bringing some Perry hulls out of mothballs. I’m largely pro, but I wish they hadn’t deactivated the old single-arm missile launchers.

Technology

• NASA extends the American dominance in terms of Mars landings – The Soviets technically succeeded in landing a probe on Mars, but it stopped working so quickly that you can’t really count it.
• China’s social credit score isn’t real – In which Foreign Policy notes that sure, there’s a national system of blacklists and citizen information on anyone who has opened a credit card or taken a loan, and that system is often arbitrary and capricious and certainly totalitarian, but it’s okay because it’s not a single, unified, national system with a single top-line score. I dunno. Seems like an implementation detail to me.