A couple of piracy links. Thomas Wiegold (German link) reports that India is very angry indeed about a group of Italian security men protecting a ship who fired on a fishing boat, thinking she was a pirate skiff, killing several people. Of course, the Indian Navy has form here, having destroyed a Thai trawler in…
Read More Pirate LinksShock! NATO is secretly reviewing its plans to defend the Baltic states and Poland in the event of a war with Russia, a Wikileaked cable reveals. Interestingly enough, the details of this are already public – Gazeta Wyborcza published them on the 5th of November, appropriately enough, detailing that the NATO Response Force would be…
Read More in case of Russian invasion, break glassSometimes, at the moment, politics feels like an entirely unconscious business; just a matter of the right reflexes. Like B.F. Skinner’s religious pigeons (see also here). Tap the right kneejerk and get a pellet. Hence this exchange in a US military press conference: Q Yes. Do you have any evidence that there are more or…
Read More pigeon religionThis BBC Radio 4 documentary about the British nuclear deterrent and the people who operate it is absolutely cracking. Not surprisingly, the man behind it is none other than Professor Peter Hennessy (can we call him Henn-dawg yet?). One of the things that stands out is the amount of desperate psychological coping going on. The…
Read More mentalities, bunker, and otherwiseI don’t believe this; note the lack of any direct evidence, not even packets of Indian steel balls. What I do believe is that we’re heading for a serious catastrophe with regard to Pakistan. As I’ve said before, the American meta-narrative seems to be that it’s something like a 50s-70s rightwing military dictatorship in Southeast…
Read More I see no joy, I see only sorrow, I see no chance of your bright new tomorrowOoh, more Iran-war nonsense, this time from none other than mouthpieceful Russia Today, via this thread. There seems to be a meme floating around that there was a war between Russia and Georgia because the Russians intervened to prevent the Americans using Georgian airbases to attack Iran (obviously, a war with Iran is the universal…
Read More Not Just Armies, But AntonovsPakistan Policy Blog speaks sense: Zardari’s attempt to present himself as a savior belies the reality and the way most in Pakistan and even the United States see him. Billionaire Zardari is part of Pakistan’s feuding oligarchy, not a revolutionary against it. The sad fact is that most Pakistanis have been hostage to this sadistic…
Read More stuck, stuck, stuckI promised more serious content; here goes. Right, everyone is vexed about the RUSI report (PDF download) that was recently published under the names of Gwyn Prins (a minor hero of this blog’s, for his The Heart of War: Power, Conflict, and Obligation in the 21st Century) and the Marquess of Salisbury (no less, who…
Read More Rosyth RUSI RantBecause, on top of one of ’em, there’s a great big phased-array radar, pointing right down to Saudi Arabia. Check out this paper by Pavel Podvig of RussianForces, and scroll right to the bottom for the radar coverage map. Alternatively, there’s this Globalsecurity.org page, which is rather out of date. But the key point is…
Read More Show me all those snowpeaked mountains way down southWell, Mick Smith quotes the Parachute Regiment’s journal as saying that Brigadier Butler was forced into going along with Operation MOUNTAIN THRUST, the offensive the US command in Afghanistan initiated the month before General Richards arrived in Afghanistan. Read the whole thing. This is much as I thought at the time – essentially, neither the…
Read More Here we go again, again, again