In case you wonder, there’s not been much activity around here due to a project over at the Pol. Think Project Lobster, but Eurocratic. Expect an uptick on the blog from now on. First of all, something that has struck me at work and by following Maciej Ceglowski‘s talks. We all remember the crack from…
Read More The menace of correlated hype cyclesSir Humphrey says among much else, all worth reading: An outsider looking in may well conclude that the sort of military assets needed to build and effect long term change, stability and security are those which have effects such as training teams, defence attaches, limited professional training and so on with the nuclear deterrent as…
Read More Some Snowden consequencesSo, speaking of Clausewitz, here are some reflections from reading him. (If you think the blogs are a bit eclectic today, yes, I’m working through a queue of things I drafted in a notebook..) Zweck vs. Ziel – one of the things everyone sort-of knows about him is “the maintenance of the aim”, but I…
Read More A bit of ClausewitzSo, I’ve been having a war with my exciting privatised energy vendor. Again. We had a chat about this in this post on think-of-a-number prices, but another opportunity came around. The day before the monthly direct debit payment went out, a letter lands saying that they’ve just doubled, yes doubled, the amount. Thanks. Anyway, of…
Read More Reading Gambetta and Clausewitz in an emerging low-trust societyHere’s a photo from a MoD-BAE Systems study into future armoured vehicles for the British Army*. OK, so we’ve got some heavy-to-medium, wheeled armoured vehicles, that are clearly battery-electric drive. They’re recharging from either wind power (on the right) or from some kind of deployable, containerised nuclear reactor (on the left – note the radhaz…
Read More it began in the time of our grandfathers, but no-one now knows whyThis PRISM piece has been doing the rounds. I think it’s interesting more for the patterns it reveals, which are those of the early 1970s. The argument is that the British armed forces are unlikely to deploy anywhere in future, for various reasons that aren’t really unpacked, but which are basically “because Iraq was a…
Read More Doomed Britain is doomedThink Defence has been having a very good discussion (practically a CT-style blog seminar) about the Falklands. Which reminds me…I note that Bob Howard has yet to visit, despite the eldritch conjunction of an implausibly massive geostrategic commitment, the deep links between right-wing political Catholicism and the sinister occult, the Antarctic (and you know what…
Read More RecommendedIs 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 bubbleThinking about my last post brought one of the ideas in this one to mind, especially given today’s front page. That is, was the miners’ strike a strategic bombing campaign? You what? But consider the strategy the NUM adopted. The basic idea was to concentrate on the supply of coal to the steel industry –…
Read More the 1980s considered as a battle in the air war over GermanyFollowing up this post, here’s a really interesting piece in Dawn on the Indian-Pakistani nuclear balance and the implications of the COLD START doctrine. It’s an especially good point that if India really wanted to punish Pakistan after a “Mumbai II” terrorist attack, they could do so very effectively and much less dangerously through economic…
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