Amentum Services Inc., Chantilly, Virginia, … a $591,653,634 cost reimbursable, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for Foreign Military Sales (FMS) supportability follow-on technical support to provide eligible foreign navies access to a broad range of life cycle support, systems upgrades, systems integration, and other related efforts associated with the transfer and acquisition, operation, and maintenance of naval vessels and systems within their inventory. Work will be performed within the continental U.S. (55%), and outside the continental U.S. (OCONUS) (45%). Work will be performed OCONUS in Iraq (25%); Egypt (25%); the Philippines (10%); and various countries to be determined (40%).

In other news, Deputy Defense Minister Maj. Gen. Khaled Megawer was in Russia last week, attending the 11th Moscow Conference on International Security. He discussed with Russia’s Deputy Minister of Defense Colonel General Alexander Fomin “holding joint combat training events in 2023.”

Megawer is the former director of the Military Intelligence Authority.

After Egypt agreed it wouldn’t send weapons to Russia, it is now resisting requests from senior U.S. leaders to send them to Ukraine, Egyptian and American officials say, posing an obstacle for the Biden administration’s push to generate arms for a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Egypt initially planned to send rockets to Russia but dropped that plan under pressure from the U.S. earlier this year, the officials say. U.S. officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, asked Egypt to supply weapons to Ukraine instead, seeking to help the Ukrainian government overcome a shortage of ammunition.
Austin made the request in March when the secretary of defense met Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, in Cairo. Egypt’s leaders were noncommittal at the time, and senior U.S. officials have raised the request in multiple encounters since then, the officials said.
The U.S. asked Egypt to supply artillery shells, antitank missiles, air-defense systems and small arms for Ukraine, according to a U.S. official. In conversations with U.S. officials, Egypt hasn’t definitively rejected the requests, but Egyptian officials said privately that Egypt has no plans to send the weapons.

WSJ

1) In the discussion of trade union work, the Bolshevik Lozovsky (general secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions) said this about the paper: “Without winning the trade unions, the social revolution is impossible. And, to win the trade unions, we must devote special attention in the coming period to our trade-union press. It must be developed and given a much more practical focus. The agitation and propaganda of our press must be expanded. Our press must take up not only overall political and international questions (although these are extremely important and must absolutely be examined) but also questions of specific, practical struggle, questions of tariffs, of organizational development activity, of social insurance, and so on.
In a word, all issues that interest and arouse the working masses must always find a place in the columns of our trade-union press. Our party press as a whole must be aware that without conquering this fortress of the reformists, we will not be able to move a single step forward.”

2) in the discussion of educational work, the German comrade Hoernle said this about new media: “The Communist parties must therefore set great store on ensuring that their propaganda and agitation utilize new methods, methods that stimulate, that make it possible to seize the attention of the indifferent masses and awaken their interest.
Observe how skilled the bourgeoisie is in dominating the masses through means such as films, slide shows, and the pomp of religious ceremony. Communist parties too must learn to utilize these methods–slide shows, films, artistically designed celebrations, theater performances, political propaganda plays, and so on–a field that has so far been very neglected in Western Europe and that must be systematically developed.”

Our papers are too dry, too abstract, too similar to papers of the old type. They are made up too much of what is of interest to the professional politicians, and contain very little of such items as would be eagerly read by every working woman, every day laborer, every kitchen maid, every soldier. Our papers contain too many ‘learned’ foreign words, too many long and dry articles. We are too eager to imitate the ‘respectable’ papers. All this must be changed …
A daily Communist paper must under no circumstances concern itself solely with so called ‘high’ politics. On the contrary, three quarters of the paper must be devoted to the every day life of the workers …
Our newspapers have to compete with bourgeois and other newspapers. We must give plenty of good material, well set up and readable … We must systematically think why the rank and file of the working class are attracted by … bourgeois newspapers … We must learn from such papers as the Daily Herald which strives to serve all phases of the life of the worker and his family … Furthermore, we must also introduce something that is peculiarly our own and what the bourgeois and social democratic newspapers cannot give. This is precisely the letters from working men and working women from the factories and works, letters from soldiers etc.
We must develop a new Communist reporter. He must be less interested in the lobbies of parliament than in the factories, shops, the workers’ homes, the workers’ dining rooms, the workers’ schools, etc. He should contribute to the paper not lobby gossip, but reports of labor meetings, descriptions of the workers’ needs, the most concrete information about the rise in the cost of living etc. …
The rank and file appreciate very much poignant sarcasm a vitriolic sneer hurled at the enemy. One caricature which hits the nail on the head is of better use than scores of high flown so-called ‘Marxist’ articles … We must often, instead of the customary official daily editorial, insert a more or less remarkable letter by a worker or a group of workers from a certain factory, or a picture of some workers who have been arrested or the biography of a worker who has been sentenced by the bourgeois courts and who has displayed a staunch spirit at his trial. Less abstractness and more concreteness – that is what is needed in our papers … (Bulletin of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, 1921).

This was by far the largest underground printing press in Russia and was literally underground – in a cellar. The printers were seven self-sacrificing party members. They worked 10 hours a day and unlimited hours in emergencies. The cellar was without heat or ventilation. To avoid detection, no one was ever allowed to leave it during the day. At night the printers took it in turns to spend a couple of hours in the open air.

Heroism, self sacrifice, dedication to the cause… that’s what Bolshevism has always stood for.

The most important weapon in this respect, a weapon excelling any other, is at present the cinema. This amazing spectacular innovation has cut into human life with a successful rapidity never experienced in the past. In the daily life of capitalist towns, the cinema has become just such an integral part of life as the bath, the beer-hall, the church, and other indispensable institutions, commendable and otherwise. The passion for the cinema is rooted in the desire for distraction, the desire to see something new and improbable, to laugh and to cry, not at your own, but at other people’s misfortunes. The cinema satisfies these demands in a very direct, visual, picturesque, and vital way, requiring nothing from the audience; it does not even require them to be literate. That is why the audience bears such a grateful love to the cinema, that inexhaustible fount of impressions and emotions. This provides a point, and not merely a point, but a huge square, for the application of our socialist educational energies.
The fact that we have so far, ie., in nearly six years, not taken possession of the cinema shows how slow and uneducated we are, not to say, frankly, stupid. This weapon, which cries out to be used, is the best instrument for propaganda, technical, educational, and industrial propaganda, propaganda against alcohol, propaganda for sanitation, political propaganda, any kind of propaganda you please, a propaganda which is accessible to everyone, which is attractive, which cuts into the memory and may be made a possible source of revenue.

Lenin in a conversation with A.V.Lunacharsky, April 1919:

You are known among us as a protector of the arts so you must remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.

Cinema was a new invention in the age of Lenin and Trotsky, but the Bolsheviks were quick to understand the need to visualize dissent. Today, YouTube and similar online platforms, can provide a venue for revolutionary movements to spread their propaganda and agitation visually to a much wider audience.