So we’re having a moment about John Boyd: The really interesting thing about the Dom Cummings appointment is that we now have someone in charge of No10 who is a devotee of Col. John Boyd, whose central thesis was to confuse your enemy and do the opposite of what they expect (1/4). — Damian McBride…
Read More Round and Round the OODA Loop: Folk Boyd and the BrexitersHere’s a fascinating, long Mediapart piece on Syria. Among much else, you’ll learn that the Russian exit strategy was meant to be a general ceasefire but ended up being scaled down to local arrangements. Also, a major obstacle to it was that Assad wouldn’t accept any restriction of violence – even proposed by the Russians.…
Read More Five links on SyriaI’m feeling positively blog-happy after getting away with an Israel/Palestine post, so what about another one? This one is also about rockets, just on a different scale. A lot of strategic concepts have an odd kind of fractal quality, keeping the same form at different scales. We saw how the rocketing was, in a sense,…
Read More Even more rockets and wilder speculationI started planning this post asking why Palestinian rockets seemed to be steadily increasing in range, but not improving in accuracy. Although nobody publishes circular-error probable figures for these things, various indicators suggested that they were still essentially random weapons. For example, there were no or few reports of them hitting valuable infrastructure or politically…
Read More Wild speculation on a highly controversial subjectFile under “Really Strange”: Southern Californian gangsters turn up fighting for Assad in Syria (from Borderland Beat of course). The explanation seems to be that if you’re an Armenian or indeed Syrian immigrant in LA, you’re considered Latino for purposes of street politics, and of course Armenians do have a dog in the fight. Here’s…
Read More LinksYou know when people say “I hope he doesn’t get on any small planes”? Well, the leader of those Mexican countergangs has done, with proverbial results. He was transferred to the capital for his ambiguous safety and is all right. He may have made some sort of commitment to the government or perhaps not, while…
Read More Your occasional Mexican popular militia updateBorderland Beat needs no introduction, as a great and indeed heroic blog. This week, it has excelled itself. Here is an interview with an American lawyer, a member of an elite Mexican-American family that straddled the border and the law with minimal concern, who became a defence brief to the cocaine traffickers, and eventually one…
Read More A blog you should read if you don’t alreadyFrom Crooked Timber: Speaking of hypocrisy, what of the revelations (big surprise) that CIA had been briefing Pakistan govt on the drone strikes, while the latter was simultaneously denouncing them? From the blog, December 2012, I point out that the CIA and the Pakistanis were evidently cooperating in so far as they coordinated their use…
Read More No surprise bloggingVia Trombly x Exum, an interesting paper on mobile telephony and the Iraq war is here. I was impressed by the fact the authors know there are multiple antenna sectors per cell-site, and that they bothered to find out roughly what an emerging market GSM operator’s roll-out process is like. In fact, if you wonder,…
Read More GSM Warlord, with actual statisticsHere’s something interesting. Andrew Krepinevich is quoted by the AOL News (!) blog criticising various aspects of US strategy, which is what he does. But this quote popped out of the background for me: “The American military is losing some critical sources of advantage that it’s enjoyed over the last twenty years. One is the…
Read More Guided?