What are /r/CredibleDefense's favorite Products & Services?

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What about the air campaign in the Gulf War? The Iraqi Integrated Air Defense System (KARI) was built by the French, and was neutralized in a matter of days, despite being seen as modern and a major threat. United States Gulf War Air Power Survey, vol. IV: Weapons, Tactics, and Training and Space Operations, Air Force Historical Research Agency, 1993. I can't link to the report directly, but it can be found here under the third cited source.

The report does a very good job summarizing the destruction of a modern, albeit poorly integrated, air defense system by a modern air force. Generally, I think the advances in cruise missiles and radar seeking smart ordinance has changed the balance of power. During Desert Storm the coalition lost 39 fixed-wing aircraft and 5 helicopters in combat. The premise stands: An anti-air system can inflict losses, but not win major victories.

Here is an example of a ordinary user playing a fairly complex war sim Command: Modern Air Naval Operations (link).

I've not played the sim myself. I'm sure there are people on this forum who can shed a little more light on whether it's worth the money.

This might be a bit broad for your interest, but I would highly recommend Stanley McChrystal's My Share of the Task. Stanley McChrystal was described by Robert Gates in his memoirs as the most lethal counter terrorism practitioner in the world, and in his book he describes how he fomented a large revolution in JSOC to create an unprecedented operation tempo. Specifically, he changed how the organization was configured in order to rapidly disseminate intelligence and encouraged a climate of information sharing that is the opposite of the pre 9/11 environment of intelligence hoarding among the various agencies in the intel community.

Tonka was a Minnesotan toy company that made little dump trucks for kids. The word "tonka" is a Dakota Sioux indian word meaning great or big. The toys were rugged and almost indestructible, so naturally the British sarcastically used it to describe something that was the opposite.

Forum members who maintained the aircraft reported this was it's most popular name.

> What I'm saying is that you can't, with a given array size, get higher resolution by changing the software alone.

Again, this is dead wrong. Given a specific fixed physical array, we can generate an aperture several times larger purely via software calculation. Your application of RC is not the whole story, because that only applies to scalar amplitude imaging. We have more sources of information in the phase, and the resolution we measure phase with is independent of wavelength. You cannot determine the resolution of a modern radar by noting it's physical size, wavelength, and applying RC. You'll be wrong by a huge factor.

> but also mean that your aperture is only large along one dimension

No. All of these techniques are instances of the same general idea of interferometric array imaging. I say SAR because that's the term people are more familiar with, but by no means is what I'm saying somehow limited to just simple single antenna linear motion based SAR. Once you understand the mathematics its easy to see how they're all special cases of one general principle. We are not limited to expansion in one dimension, but can actually leverage both dimensions against each other to generate a grid of copies of our array in both dimensions. And when we go multistatic, we can leverage each far field location against the others, generating an exponential number of virtual receiver locations.

> Moreover, they are particularly vulnerable to electronic warfare, especially once you add focusing pulses and the like.

No. Much of what is discussed about EW here and on other internet forums is hilariously out of date.

What I've written is clear and accurate. I won't be discussing this further.

Edit: Check section 5 of this paper. The rest of the paper provides a very light introduction to other relevant topics for the state of the art.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/cold-war-coloring-book-taught-a-10-pilots-to-kill-soviet-tanks-a26385113bf0

Yeah I know it is from WIB, but the A-10 coloring book is legit.

EDIT: It seems to me that the GAU-8's ammo is pretty old, upgrading the design might increase penetration quite a bit. Using APFSDS ammo would probably be a massive FOD risk, but APFSDS can outperform API my a large margin.

What you're saying about the f-35 is true in some ways, but versatility is an asset that shouldn't be downplayed.

Say, for instance, that the US is being forced to work in an environment where anti-ship missiles are a serious threat, and super-carriers become a liability. At this point, the ability to launch a supersonic fifth gen strike fighter from a number of amphibious assault ships or other smaller ships will be invaluable. Had the JSF program been replaced by a more conventional fighter program, that wouldn't be possible. The ability to deliver capable, if not dominant, fifth gen fighters from a wide range of naval platforms could be a crucial capability in future conflicts against a country like China.

So while the j-20 might be better than the f-35 in the specific roles it was designed for (we can't even say that for certain), it won't be able to do half the things the f-35 can. I don't even think the j-20 will be capable of being launched off carriers...that of course reflects the fact that the PLA isn't trying to accomplish the same things as the US military. Nonetheless, you can't just compare the j-20 to the f-35 on the j-20's terms.

The way a lot of people think about it is as a form of pulse compression.

Let's take some fixed amount of energy and imagine emitting it as two different simple pulses: one very short, and one very long. Both these pulses have the same amount of energy, but the short pulse will have higher power due to the shorter duration.

What's neat is that instead of literally emitting the short powerful pulse, we can instead use signal processing emit a long signal that is pre-structured in such a way that it creates the same compression effect virtually, by sniffing the signal back out of the noise. To be clear here, it's not just simple pulse compression, but you can think of it as being similar.

Perhaps a better way of coming at it would be in terms of noise. The gain we're talking about is in terms of the signal we care about vs the noise at the receiver. Because we know something about the structure of the signal, we can create an effect that's like the noise floor was pushed down. We aren't emitting a stronger signal in terms of real radiation, but it's as if we did because we're harvesting more out of the noise at the receiver.

With modern signal processing, we can use more time duration and more bandwidth, to virtually create the situation as if we'd emitted a very short higher magnitude pulse.

Anyhow, here's a good source . Section 2 discusses the huge gains that can be created via wideband signals and processing. The rest of the paper is worth skimming to get an idea of how sophisticated the state of the art is, as well the sort of revolutionary capabilities that are going to start appearing.

>The orbiter itself cost around $25 million, with the rest of the $74 million budget being consumed by launch services

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190772-indias-first-mars-satellite-enters-orbit-costing-just-11-of-nasas-own-mars-mission

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/24/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-satellite.aspx

I'm going to agree, and say that while WiB articles from several years ago were often very high quality war reporting, recent WiB articles have been exceptionally bad. Try to avoid rolling your eyes as you read this hilarity. I commented on it here. The author writes like he doesn't know anything about submarines, quite frankly. I've also noticed other errors and oversights on their articles.

The risk isn't that you'll read a bad article; the risk is that you'll read a good article with credible, but incorrect, analysis.

I wrote an article about this very topic which can be found here, and my central thesis is that ISIS is not looking to take Baghdad by defeating the Iraqi military. ISIS knows how heavily it's outnumbered and outgunned, and a fight for the largest and most important city in a five hundred click radius is well beyond the means of 10,000 strung-out guerrillas.

My basic contention is that ISIS hopes to form the vanguard of a wider sectarian war. They're not looking to take Baghdad by blitzkrieg; all they need to do is reach the city, hide in the most extreme of Sunni neighborhoods, recruit some local kids from that group of 16-18 year old boys who grew up during the American occupation and spent their formative years watching the city get ripped apart by the 2006-2007 violence. From there, ISIS takes a page out of the old sectarian handbook, attack some markets with car bombs, and then retreats into their Sunni strongholds to wait for the inevitable anti-Sunni pogroms to create all-out sectarian warfare. From there, ISIS becomes the power broker on the ground: they're rich (all that captured cash), they have connections to certain powerful men in the Gulf States, and though they are extremist they will be one of the only groups able to protect the Sunnis from the death spiral of sectarian violence that will inevitably spread beyond Baghdad. Ergo, ISIS gains de facto power over the Sunni population, and gets to control a whole bunch of more moderate Sunni groups who wouldn't have even considered siding with ISIS just months ago but will end up with nobody else to turn to.

Baghdad has always been a subduction zone on the fault line between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. ISIS intends to trigger the earthquake.

P.S: I'm sort of new to the defense blogging world; any criticism or advice about my piece would be appreciated if you feel so inclined.

I would read the hell out of that. I'm always looking for new reading material about defense issues. If you're serious about this, however, you have a few years of work ahead of you, depending on the scope of the project. It's an absolutely fascinating subject, with a mountain of documentation to read and review. Indeed, one could spend a lifetime studying this topic. You could group the chapters into chronological themes: 1945-1955, 1955-1965, etc. Or by country: United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom/France/Europe, China, etc. Or by aircraft. Or something else. Of course, it depends on the scope of your book. You could make it concise, something in the format of "The American Military: A Concise History" (152 pages), or you could write a more exhaustive work. But that would almost require you to be a full-time professional in a relevant field (aviation, defense, engineering) to have the required expertise and access to documentation you may not have access to otherwise. (Not to mention that such a project would be time consuming, and I assume you have a normal life on the side)

Quality is everything. I would rather read a 150 page long book that is well written, well researched, and factual, than a 600 page book I'd learn little from.

There are entire books on the topic. The Art of War (Sun Tzu), On War (Clausewitz), MCDP-1 Warfighting, and the newly revised US Counterinsurgency Manual (Petraeus, Mattis, Nagl) are all pretty solid examinations of not just war but conflict in general. They are very meticulous in linking battlefield success to political and diplomatic cleverness. Hell, even Rules for Radicals (Alinsky) echoes all of these to an extent as well. And the Art of War is often recommended reading for people outside of the profession of arms, like those engaged in negotiations.

What I'm getting at is that ANY conflict (war, counterinsurgency, political elections, international trade treaty negotiations, haggling with car salesmen) is a clash of opposing wills. While the science of warfare changes with the times due to increasing technology, the art of warfare rooted in the human experience is timeless. Tactics prescribed by Sun Tzu like sowing dissent among your enemies are just as useful when applied by Genghis Khan against steppe peoples as they are now when a political movement capitalizes on the uneasiness between two parts of a big-tent party. Nixon famously accomplished the same thing by formalizing relations with the Chinese Communist Government and essentially walled the Soviet Union off from a major potential ally. Divide your adversaries or undermine their support, disguise your intentions, mask your capabilities, enforce discipline within your alliances, use the environment and prevailing political mood to your advantage - these are universal prescriptions for winning any sort of conflict.

When a nation has the right people and resources to split opposing alliances diplomatically, or to economically deny an adversary the means to resist their aims, armies become less essential to a cohesive foreign policy.

I don't really think that the current state of affairs in Europe is conducive to all out war breaking out. I also believe it wouldn't be especially hard for Germany to try and mount defenses.

Post WWII there was a real hope that the weapons left over from the post destructive period in history would just rot. This wasn't the case, and it's easy to see why. An arms race started because it could. The modern world is not very well suited to another Cold War, especially one that involves Europe.

It's no surprise that the biggest threat to any single sovereign country in Europe is Russia. That's a given. However, the mighty Russian military is a dilapidated shell of it's former self. Of it's Blackjack bombers, around half are in flying condition at any given time. That's just one example of the boogeyman that is Putin being brought down to Earth.

The comment you made about "righting past wrongs" was a little discouraging. I'd like to believe that now, 70 years after, we're past anti-anybody sentiments. Every country that could have a reason to be resentful of Europe is pretty well in tune with the horrors of the 20th century. The proof rests in the lack of action from everybody. Aggressive posturing has replaced actual action. It's just hard to sell fullscale wars these days.

That being said, a state can be a dominant power without a strong military. Obviously super-power status is pretty unattainable, but dominant power is easy. Looking at just the G8, you have Italy and Germany. Neither of those countries are really known for their war prowess.

I would be willing to argue that having a strong economy is better than having a strong army. It's easy to build weapons and supply soldiers if things go south. It's not easy to jump start economic activity if you have to support a massive military.

I frankly don't know what everyone else in this thread is talking about. US successes during the cold war were numerous, and anyone claiming that are not discussed in the literature frankly does not know what they are talking about. It's late here, but off the top of my head you might consider:

• Pyotr Popov
• Oleg Penkovsky
• The VENONA decrypts
• Dmitri Polyakov
• The Berlin Tunnel
• Adolf Tolkachev
• Ryszard Kuklinski

Of these, the most crucially important were probably Kuklinski, Penkovsky, and Especially Tolkachev (he is known as the Billion Dollar Spy for a reason)

Again this is just off the top of my head, so it is broadly skewed toward both human intelligence collection and the Warsaw Pact. Signals intelligence was, if anything, even more crucial, and the NSA unquestionably was the world leader in decryption for the entirety of the cold war.

Similarly, if one were to treat covert action as well as espionage, the list would get quite a bit longer, including operations in Poland, Italy, Afghanistan and Iran, to say nothing of numerous successful political action campaigns aimed at shoring up liberal democratic parties, and the non-communist left in general. The idea that the KGB was perpetually eating America's lunch is nonsense.

This is a good place to start: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Wake-Island-James-Devereux-ebook/dp/B07HY57Y75/ref=sr_1_7?dchild=1&keywords=wake+island&qid=1600803897&sr=8-7 Devereux was not in charge, but second in command and spent the war in captivity with the rest of the captured Marines.

Here is the current weather forecast in Donetsk. It's cool, perhaps enough for hypothermia. https://www.accuweather.com/en/ua/donetsk/323030/november-weather/323030

But the winter in Donetsk seems also warmer than I would have imagined without knowing the country. It's warmer than where I live or perhaps many of us live.

>Exactly how long it would take would depend on exactly what security measures the Soviets had in place. The security measures where designed to prevent errant launches, not someone will physical control of the hardware.

I'll repeat my question: do you have any evidence to suggest that your claim of "a few weeks" is in any way remotely credible? What's your background and knowledge of Soviet nuclear technology?

As to the rest of your points, I suggest you take it up with Budjeryn - once you actually read her paper - she's one of the global experts on this exact topic and disagrees with quite literally everything you're saying. So far you've offered no credible experts and no experts, just your opinion.

I would suggest one of her best pieces of work here.

The screencaptures you posted aren't very legible. This article is freely available in its original form.

​

https://theeconomics.uma.es/malagawpseries/Papers/METCwp2017-1.pdf

Thankfully the US recently removed sanctions on VPN companies operating in Iran (it was forbidden beforehand, just like all other software exports to Iran)

But Iran's firewall has gotten insanely good since September, not even China comes close. I heard from some Iranians that Tor was not working, or was unusably slow. Like OP says, big-name brands like NordVPN are not working (NordVPN works perfectly fine in China).

I had something going that was shadowsocks + wireguard and it got blocked because Iran was able to detect that my servers were using more traffic than is considered "normal". IRGC's technical team is ridiculously competent. It's a real challenge but I'm working on a new method that I think will work.

But not only this, Iran has been completely shutting down internet access for hours at a time. All the fancy encryption in the world does diddly-squat if someone simply unplugs the router.

I'm in Iran right now. Talking to a lot of young people, some are extremely tech savvy. They installed a special vpn (NordVPN is blocked) on my phone and now I can acces the internet through certain WiFi points.

They are all hoping for systemic change but they feel powerless.

>The question is, would we rather live in a world where nuclear terrorism is the means to power and security?

This is, broadly speaking, the world we live in today. The mere position of being a nuclear power means any threats, even if they are not weapon-specific, imply the possibility of nuclear escalation (here's a great article on nuclear blackmail that addresses this very topic).

Indeed, threats and nuclear threats have been a part of the nuclear age since its inception (see: Truman in Korea, Eisenhower in Korea, threats over Taiwan in the 60s, etc.). The difference here is not the mere presence of the nuclear threat itself; its that the threat seems so far outside the boundaries of what we would consider to be "appropriate" in international affairs.

There's a lot written on this exact topic (for a quick read that isn't overly technical I'd recommend The Doomsday Machine) but generally speaking, nuclear weapons are built not to be used but so that we may credibly threaten their use to compel or deter an adversary into an action or outcome we desire.

The risk currently at play (that grows increasingly) is that by pushing up against Russia's "red lines" we may miscalculate and inadvertently wind up in a position where a conventional strike on Russian troops in Ukraine is required as a response to nuclear weapons usage by Russia.

Once that happens? all bets are off in terms of predictability.

> Every accusation is an admission, I swear.

The author overstates the case, but there’s something to the thesis of First Rate Madness. Leaders with troubled mental health backgrounds are quicker to pick up on psych 101 narcissistic disorder traits like projection and just don’t fall for it in the way that more conventional politicians (Buchanan and Chamberberlain) do. Lincoln and Churchill are particularly apt examples.

> Every accusation is an admission, I swear.

The author overstates the case, but there’s something to the thesis of First Rate Madness. Leaders with troubled mental health backgrounds are quicker to pick up on psych 101 narcissistic disorder traits like projection and just don’t fall for it in the way that more conventional politicians (Buchanan and Chamberberlain) do. Lincoln and Churchill are particularly apt examples.

Some time ago there was a question here on whether governments still produced Color Books

It looks like Zelensky publishes all his speeches monthly Amazon link - not quite the same, but maybe close enough for those interested.

Yes of course, but a government at war has tools at its disposal to essentially direct economic activity into production of critical resources if it so desires. Lords of Finance (while not a great book overall) actually describes the various approaches in WW1 taken by the participants, from the German strategy of essentially printing money and going for broke, to the French strategy of more austere rationing.

No.

To put things into perspective, on July 1, 1942, Germany had a mere 135,000 men in Africa and the Balkans.

Let's see what happens if this stays constant in 1943:

-July 1, 1943: 3,138,000 men in the East
-October 1, 1943: 2,568,000 men in the East
-October 1, 1943 (with extra Italy/Balkans forces): 3,096,000 men in the East (99% of 7/1/43, i.e. Germany maintains its force level)

Now let's look at armor. Per Panzertruppen Volume II, p. 110, we see that on June 30, 1943, Germany had 2,584 tanks in the East, of which 2,287 were serviceable (89%). By September 30, 1943, this had fallen to 1,953, of which a mere 605 were serviceable (31%).

Now let's look at what Germany was concurrently keeping in Italy and the Balkans to hold the Anglo-Americans. On p. 136-7, we see that just before Italy switched sides (August 20), Germany had in Italy the following units and vehicles:

1. Units: 5x Panzer-Divisions + 4x Panzergrenadier-Divisions
2. Equipment: 589x tanks + 184x StuGs

Meanwhile, the Germans also kept the 1st Panzer-Division on guard duty in the Balkans. The latter was especially large, adding a further 195x tanks to the aforementioned total. Thus, the final tally amounts to 10x mobile divisions outfitted with almost a thousand AFVs: 784x tanks and 184x StuGs. In terms of serviceable vehicles, this was a comparable or stronger force than the Eastern tank fleet at the end of the summer (821 runners on August 31 and 605 on September 30).

We could also discuss additional units then holding France and Norway, not all of which were formations undergoing R&R, as well as the men and equipment lost in Tunisia, or where most of the Luftwaffe was deployed at the time... But I think you get the picture.

>Understanding the Russian mindset does not make it any less illegal/wrong.

I never said otherwise. Obviously the Russian invasion is abhorrent and unethical. The division of national borders and ethnic communities is, by far and away, the most challenging and potentially violent endeavour that nation-states undertake. Orlando Figes fascinating book on this exact subject has a long discussion on why exactly Crimea is such a complex and storied region that has made it a continuous flashpoint for empires.

That little anecdote does not contradict my statement.

For the beginning stages of the war, the US military made it policy to underreport casualties by not listing non-combat losses. In the run up to 1944 they changed their formula to include this kinds of losses (for political reasons internationally) as a way of exaggerating their war contribution but the US also knew there would be a huge leap of losses in 1944 as a result of the invasion of France. However it also helped them disguise the casualty surge when they again changed the reporting formula beginning 1945, to exclude non-combat losses again.

source

Check out Dancing in the Glory of Monsters which gives a fairly harrowing and interesting account of the collapse of the Congo and its subsequent impacts on political life in Africa.

If you like Overy I would recommend The bombing war: Europe 1939-1945 .

An excellent analysis of the failures and (rare) successes of terror bombing.

Thing is, tanks also needed support from combined arms during WW2. Would the good colonel also have compared the tank to the battleship after Dubno?

Well yes, China does industrial espionage on a massive scale, as part of a multi-vector strategy to rapidly close the gap with the most advanced countries.

The U.S. did precisely the same thing, targeting primarily Britain, between the late 18th to mid-19th century.

I read this one a while back: Legacy of Ashes.

It focuses on incompetence and failures within the CIA. It was an interesting read.

The mere existence of nuclear weapons constrains potential actions of nations that both do and do not possess them.

This has been well documented (check out this spectacular book if you're curious).

Hypothetical conflicts that are impossible or at least extremely unlikely (a NATO / Russia war that doesn't go nuclear, for example) are a waste of time.

yes, it's much more about putin's quest to bring together 'russian world' politically. he sees ukraine as south russians poisoned by the influences of evil russophobic 'nazis' (aka the west, eu, us, and nato).

this is of course, not how ukrainians see it. for example, leonid kuchma, former president of ukraine around 2000, who was accused of being too pro-russia, published a book, in russian, called 'ukraine is not russia'. before him, leonid kravchuk, who engineered state sovreignity, said the best option, security wise, was for ukraine to join nato.

putin saw it more like reuniting west and east germany.

I'd suggest skimming this book, or reading a summary of it online somewhere: https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006

Russian propaganda is not designed to be believable. It's designed to muddle and produce fatigue, cynicism, and easy "thought ending cliche" style slogans to derail substantive discussion or debate.

Eh, the connection between organized crime and the Russian state is well documented and we are in agreement on this particular point. I'll point out that most sources (including the DoJ) highlight equivalent concerns about Ukraine, but now we're just finger pointing. But organized crime cooperating with the state does not a "lawless" territory make.

I would highly recommend Caitlin Talmadge's The Dictator's Army which explores this question in depth and concludes that authoritarian states whose leaders fear coups are incentivized to implement military organization practices that prioritize loyalty over competence, and generally perform worse on the battlefield as a result.

This is not true of all authoritarian regimes, but is true of enough of them that they perform worse than democracies on average.

During the KMT's closed port policy from 1949- 1972, Taiwan legalized piracy against Chinese shipping, the CIA even participated directly and set up shell companies to take advantage. Look up the closed port (Guanbi) policy

https://www.amazon.com/Raiders-China-Coast-Operations-Special/dp/1557503885

I post this pretty often these days, but at least some corners of the US government had known for quite a while that Russia (then the Soviet Union) was a paper tiger:

The Myth of Soviet Military Supremecy

I'm unsure why you're getting downvoted for this. Pre-war Ukrainian politics were messy to say the least - marked by corruption, factionalism between oligarchs and strongmen, and a host of other problems. Many young people in Ukraine were making incredible progress towards overcoming these issues (and building strong institutions in the process) but Ukraine does not become Denmark overnight.

Post-war settlements in nascent democracies are extremely complicated affairs that tend to devolve into pure power politics (for a great read check out <em>Dancing in the Glory of Monsters</em> which details a lot of this same process in post-conflict states in and around the Congo). In an alternate timeline where Azov retains significant battlefield strength post-war and you can imagine how this would impact the post-war political reality of Ukraine.

Anyway there's a worrying trend in these threads of downvoting anything that brings up real issues with Ukraine and the challenges it will face in the post-war period.

Not all manpower is created equal. Modern war is so deadly and so fast that mistakes on the battlefield are extraordinarily unforgiving. Many twitter pundits have a tendency to look at the macro picture of things (e.g., Russia has x number of BTGs, low manpower, vs Ukraine's y number of BTGs and plentiful reserves) and assume that victory logically follows.

In general this is poor analysis. War is complex, to say the least - there is no easy formula for victory. Generally speaking the side that can concentrate and use their forces most efficiently to best achieve outcomes that can be translated to political success typically comes out victorious. The US won pretty much every engagement in Vietnam and lost the war. The German Army in WW1 outnumbered the Allied forces before the 1918 Spring Offensive and subsequently lost. Hitler was incapable of marshalling the vast resources and industrial power he had conquered in Europe (see: The Wages of Destruction for a phenomenal, albeit lengthy, analysis of this).

Anyway the losses for Ukraine are no doubt severe. Whether or not this leads to a major collapse in the UA's fighting power remains to be seen.

>In WW1, the British Army general officer corps suffered horrendous casualties

Every time I wander into this subreddit I remember why I should not. Britain and the Empire had about 1500 generals and lost about 78 of them killed due to action. That is roughly 5% over 51 months of combat.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bloody-Red-Tabs-Frank-Davies/dp/178346237X

I'd recommend this fabulous book by Ellsberg which goes into detail exactly what the nuclear war scenarios look like at the Pentagon, how they come up with casualty estimates and long-term impacts, etc. Ellsberg tends to.. ramble a bit I guess and the last chapter isn't much more than an idealistic call for nuclear disarmament, but overall a great peek behind the curtain into cold war nuclear planning.

Anyway, a full scale strategic nuclear exchange would be insanely damaging and would obliterate numerous major and mid-sized cities all over the United States and Russia. I'm not sure how we can say "oh it'll just look like Germany after WW2" when modern nuclear weapons are an order of magnitude more powerful than the Hiroshima / Nagasaki devices.

> People should be treated as adults who can handle misinformation for themselves.

To push back at this - is there any evidence that people, in general, can handle misinformation for themselves? There's a great deal of evidence to the contrary, that propaganda is an effective way of inducing people to believe things that are untrue and act on those beliefs. With unchecked propaganda, it's very easy to end up in a world where &quot;nothing is true and everything is possible&quot;, to borrow the title of Peter Pomerantsev's excellent book on Russian media. Objective truth (whatever your philosophical interpretation of that term is) loses its privileged status as a foundation for belief and action and reality is increasingly shaped by beliefs that lack any factual basis. This leads to all sorts of bad outcomes.

If you were asking what Russia’s biggest strategic goals are in this campaign I would guess taking Odessa is very high in their list. They have had a historic struggle to obtain warm water ports. I suspect they will target it soon, and it is probably as important to them as taking Kyiv.

What is interesting is that this is not the first time that the Russians are fighting in this area (Ukraine). They fought some of their toughest battles during the Second World War in exactly this area.

It is interesting to go through their experiences then and to compare them with what is unfolding now. I have found the following text very helpful in that regard:

Glanz & Orenstein's Battle for the Ukraine: The Korsun'-Shevchenkovskii Operation (Soviet (Russian) Study of War Book 15).

One observation I would make is that the Russian troops seem to have experienced high losses in those battles during WW2, which is similar to what we are seeing now. But then again, they were facing a much more skillful, tough, battle-hardened and, in many ways, desperate adversary in the Wehrmacht as compared to the Ukrainians now.

My readings suggest that the article is narrow in its focus on logistics and does not take into account the "Russian way of war", which has traditionally been biased in terms of using mass over other options such as manoeuvre. The analysis in the linked article seems to ignore this and appears to make a cardinal analytical error, which is to review a military's performance (in this case, that of the Russians) through the lens of what one has set and accepted as the standard for military operations (the Western model).

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how such analyses are conducted and the conclusions that they reach.

I recommend for those interested to read Ian Easton's book on this very topic . Goes into great detail on how Taiwan has been preparing for decades a potential Chinese invasion.

> I guess part of my though process that through modernization the Russian military would have evolved out of this strstegy and into a more western-style modern warfare approach.

Keep in mind that what's allowed us to evolve away from the old WW2 notion of Total War with massed forces pushing a "front line" is technology. Better tech allows better quality, more precise, and lower latency intelligence, which allows use to identify target "hot spots". Advanced communication capability allows us to position forces to deal with those "hot spots" in a timely manner. The use of PGMs allows us to hit specific targets rather than ruining entire areas with big dumb bombs. We have a version of the AGM-114 Hellfire carried by drones that has blades instead of explosives that we use to kill individuals.

Meanwhile, the Russian Army is randomly bombarding apartment buildings with artillery, cluster bombing city centers, their special forces are running around with sub-$30 Baofeng radios, and their generals are making calls on cell phones. Russia just doesn't have the deep tech base to pull their military out of the previous century. Their defense industry can produce prototypes of advanced systems, but the kleptocratic industrial base simply can't mass produce them.

There’s a great book called How to Make War that I’m a fan of. Goes through a lot of different areas. Very focused on today, although it’s a bit dated (since it’s from like 2004 and a lot has changed since then).

I also like War on the Rocks and its associated publications. Built for US defense wonks, lots of smart people.

It’s also smart to pick one thing and find stuff like podcasts that interview people who actually do/have done that thing (like, say, the Fighter Pilot Podcast for air combat stuff). Militaries and technologies are a lot less perfect in practice than they are on CNN and it helps to see that up close.

You could start from this book - memoirs of former Chief of Staff Ukrainian Armed Forces Igor Lopata

Look for story about 20^th tank division withdrawal from Germany (just for example).

As far as the first bit, learning python's pretty easy and courses like https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning--ud730 make it easy to piece together algorithms to analyze data using TensorFlow. Governments have been really slow to adapt (if they've even started) to the recent advancements in hardware that allow you to run these in a reasonable amount of time at home/cheaply in the cloud so I'm not sure you're at that much of a disadvantage.

That's the definition of shifting goalposts, first you said there were no IRSTs in American doctrine, then you changed it to what was "standardized", and now you say it doesn't count because it's "retrofitted" even though they were built with the IRST system.

Retrofitted-add (a component or accessory) to something that did not have it when manufactured

That with Saudi PR is one of bamboozling things about this war:

• on one side, they're spending immense sums to buy the media critical of them (see: https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/buying-silence)

• on the other side, they're actually silent about their intentions and what are they actually doing.

BTW, where is that excerpt from?

BTW, This helps illustrate my point exactly about post-industrial warfare. During World War Two, the Army Air Corps had what ten weeks and 75 hours of classroom training before you hit the cockpit? With the USAF you cant even sit in the cockpit of an F-15 on your first four year contract, and even once youre qualified to fly you still do thousands of hours of combat training. Good book is Laslie's Air Force Way of War. Its probably the case that USAF pilots in Desert Storm had spent more time training to fight MiGs than Iraqi MiG pilots spent practicing at all.

If you want to read a fun book about this and other special planes I can recommend this:

https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003

Among other planes it covers the "Have Blue" project which led to the first stealth fighter. It has a treatment of RCS and what it means.

>Syria actually used this to their advantage, building a "commando corps"

I'm assuming that the four characteristics of the Arab culture you mentioned, may be better phrased if you frame it as the "Arab military culture" just as De Atkine has done in his 2013 essay.

> To be honest a chemical weapons using locally source materials through the ventilation system would do more harm than a few expensive MANPADS.

I'm not sure that's realistic. You need quite a large volume of precursors to make enough gas to incapacitate, plus it takes some time, heat, and stirring to mix binary agents in your chosen reaction vessel so they react. Vil Mirzayanov covers a lot of the mechanics of the process in his book &quot;State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program&quot;

And remember the cockpit has it's own air system.

I didn't mean to imply that the 'purges' are Stalinist or anything. As far as I know, all of the inappropriately fired editors are still alive and well. But anyone who knows anything about Russian media knows the extent of control exercised by the Kremlin.

It reminds me, I attended a panel discussion on the Russian media 2 years ago yesterday. They had the Washington Post Moscow Bureau Chief, Max Trudolyubov, Evgenia Albats, and Oksana Boyko. As you can imagine, the former two had quite a lot of fun with each other!

Boyko was assuring everyone about how it isn't that bad in Russia, how it's not that repressive, how it isn't that dangerous for dissidents. Even Mr. Trudoluybov wasn't having any of it, and Ms. Albats was...being Ms. Albats. Honestly, however, the way Ms. Albats was arguing could have made one think that all those things she said about media in Russia were just all hysteria...

Boris Nemtsov was dead within 2 hours.

And gee, maybe major American media outlets report the same material in frequently consistent manners because...they're right? Maybe they tend to consistently represent Russia in a negative light because...Russia is really messed up?

And there was nothing untoward about Abramson's firing. As for Russian media, however...

Lastly, I'll note that Sy Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Parry, and even Alex goddamned Jones, despite being seen as loons by a whole bunch of the mainstream (myself included, except for Greenwald, who is more obtuse than crazy) are all alive and well (well, as well as they can be).

Anna Politkovskaya isn't. Neither are many of her peers. The ones who have raked as much muck as she did aren't in Russia anymore.

I did not did that math and read it somewhere, but I found a this website that says the same thing.

>The reentry speed of an ICBM is so great that the reentry vehicle can be filled with concrete for a fixed target, or metal rods for an area target; the kinetic energy of the warhead is so great that a conventional explosive filling would add no appreciable energy.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile

Here is the link to the book. I got the dates wrong tho, the game only went until 1988. Cant remember why they shut it down, I thought it never properly finished. Could be that it was.

Try Killing Pablo.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008UX3ITE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_7EZWWSMMS9CV4Q3FCPNZ

It's about the manhunt for Pablo Escobar. Quick, interesting read. While they are obviously not the stars of the book, some US SOF outfits make an appearance.

Yeah I dont think this is going where you think it does, the Germans did this in tandem with their "Ostpolitik" around 1970 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostpolitik which meant they began to see that even if they successfully defended against a soviet invasion their country would likely have been devastated as ground zero of tactical nuclear war and shifted from preparing for war to making sure this war would not happen in the first place, part of that was voluntary starting to buy gas (through the now infamous Ukraine pipeline) to get in to a business relationship with the soviet union.

https://www.amazon.ca/Soviet-West-German-Pipeline-1970/dp/B01EGQ6UT8

(Btw. you are free to disagree with this reasoning its a specifically German perspective I just share it to let people know how to predict moves by the German Government)

It is tough to summarize succinctly. The book goes into great detail and is a long but good read.

In general though, it takes the opinion that blockade and bombardment (with aircraft, missiles, rockets, etc.) might be enough to force an outright Taiwanese Surrender and make landings unnecessary this is highly unlikely in the view of PRC planners. Domestic and international reprecussions of a long bombardment of the island might prove uniquely dangerous to China. An intense, protracted bombardment would probably stoke the fires of Taiwanese nationalism rather than snuff them out (like a modern day Battle of Britain) so a pre-invasion bombardment should be equal parts short and intense.

The Chinese attacks would focus on early warning networks, communication systems, command and control nodes and would probably need to focus on those things. Of course, the Taiwanese have had decades to think and prepare for all of this and likely have a great degree of redundancy and resiliency for anything that is probably going to be targeted. China's going to get some of their targets through mass and concentration... but probably not all of them.

It's tough to summarize. It was a long, thick read but is pretty interesting. I'd recommend it if you want to get really into the weeds. 8 Bucks on Kindle, haha. #HailCorporate

"The Art of War In World History" is a compilation of writing on military strategy and tactics that is a good read.

Amazon link: https://smile.amazon.com/Art-War-World-History-Antiquity/dp/0520079647

I see Galula and Kincullen are already mentioned here and they are fantastic.

Another one that isnt as widely known about is "The Bear went over the Mountain"

This is a comprehensive look at Soviet tactics in Afghanistan and was required reading at the U.S Army Captain's Career Course when I was there. You can see a lot of interesting parralels between their tactics and American ones. The success of their use of air assault operations to seize key terrain prior to sweeps were particularly effective and you see some of the drawbacks and advantages of the Soviet military in action against an insurgency. Fascinating read.

Link https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008F06UIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1

Predecessors of what became Jabhat an-Nusra were active in Iraq of the 2000s. Some of them returned to Syria already in summer 2011, originally with intention of establishing something like the local branch of the AQI (later ISIL/ISIS, then IS etc.).

Ahrar came into being as an umbrella organization of numerous small Islamist, Salafist, and even a few Wahhabist groups. While most of these were established in 2012, their name stems from a group that became active in summer 2011.

Recommended reading in this regards is Lister's The Syrian Jihad: he's really going to great extension into explaining the coming into being of all such groups.

If you're interested in reading General Bolger's book, the hardcover is only $2.94 new on Amazon with Prime free shipping.

Any relationship to Richard Markinko and his Red Cell experience that he talks about in his book.

Article behind paywall, so unable to read.

an amazing book, one of the best I have ever read. The only competitor on the IJN is Shattered Sword which is nominally about midway, but really more broadly about the strengths and deficiencies of the IJN at war.

If you want a great and contemporary work on this topic I would recommend Robert D. Kaplan's Monsoon: http://www.amazon.com/Monsoon-Indian-Ocean-Future-American/dp/0812979206

On China, India, the US and the shift of both the economic and military center of gravity from the West to the East.