OK, a book. British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Military Strategy and Operational Art), available from the book company. Recommendation from Tom Ricks. I’ve not finished the book yet, but the big stand-out issue here is: Why is nobody responsible? Hardly anyone sees Iraq as anything other than a disaster. Meanwhile, the British armed forces have…
Read More It’s nobody’s fault and nobody is sorry.Remember Kam Air, fabulous Afghan airline, repeatedly blogged here? Sure you do. The U.S. military has blacklisted Afghanistan’s largest private airline, alleging it is smuggling “bulk” quantities of opium on civilian flights to Tajikistan, a corridor through which the drugs reach the rest of the world. Kam Air was barred this month from receiving U.S.…
Read More Kam AirErik Lund has an interesting post on the high, Kipling era of the North-West Frontier and how it essentially got that way due to technology. Longer-ranged rifles meant that the forts the British and their client rulers relied on were over-watched from the hills, and that the numbers of troops needed to manoeuvre up the…
Read More Inventing the mujahideenSpencer Ackerman is depressed about the response to this piece about the MIT Fab Lab team in Jalalabad with their 3D printing of WLAN extended range antennas. Now the funding’s been cut off and the satellite backhaul is going to go down. Well, more to the point, there never was any funding, and the whole…
Read More depressingBack from MWC. Heavy cold. Browser queue jammed with stuff. I’m going to do a brief succession of link posts to clear up. (Happenings last week; huge Leveson revelations, James Murdoch out, King Mob abolished workfare, horse, Borisbus fiasco, debate on Daniel Morgan, even more Leveson..) This one deals with everyone’s favourite global geo-political region,…
Read More Middle Eastern LinksCon “WMD” Coughlin’s piece in the Torygraph is worthy of close reading. You’ll note that this: Whitehall was caught off guard by the seriousness of the situation in Helmand province, where British troops were deployed in Nato’s reconstruction programme. Most Labour ministers supported the view of John Reid, the defence secretary at the time, that…
Read More fighting the real enemyEveryone’s linked to Mark Perry (of Conflicts Forum/Alistair Crooke fame)’s piece on Israeli spooks running around Baluchistan posing as the CIA already, but I will too as it’s very interesting indeed. I’m not sure what their bag in this is, other than the notion of “always escalate” and hope to profit from the general confusion.…
Read More a short telegram, or a very long tweetIs there a drone bubble? It’s not clear whether this is more like the .com bubble, when a lot of useful stuff was built but a couple of years too early, or more like the housing bubble, when a lot of stuff was built in the wrong places to the wrong standards at the wrong…
Read More RQ-170 upshot, part 2: the bubbleThe fact that a majority of this year’s graduates from USAF basic pilot training are assigned to drone squadrons has got quite a bit of play in the blogosphere. Here, via Jamie Kenny, John Robb (who may still be burying money for fear of Obama or may not) argues that the reason they still do…
Read More The RQ-170 hack and the drone bubbleBy the mid-2000s the minimal cost-to-serve a mobile phone user had got down to the point where it was worth Roshan’s while to put base stations in places where British soldiers broke down 105mm light guns to carry them piece by piece up a cliff, in order to fire from the hilltop next to the…
Read More The world’s most expensive mobile network