Fun and games on civ-mil relations with @eliotacohen.bsky.social and Eric Edelman, arguing over Huntington, military resignations, and whether mil or civ deserve more blame for failure in Iraq.

Sad outcome in an important case. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

Yes, Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. But there also are 1 million Puerto Ricans in Florida and 5 million more in the Northeast. I grew up in a neighborhood w/ a population that's about a quarter Puerto Rican. Tonight's halftime show was American, friends. Just a different kind.

A site tracking recent purges in the PLA vs purges at the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon purge-comparison.vercel.app

Really important questions.

SERE school: "We are authorized to do this solely for training purposes."

Arch of Hysteria, by Louise Bourgeois, 1993, 📸 by @jaredctilton

Look at Denmark..

Really living up to the quote: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." www.reuters.com/world/us/pen...

Many killed by the Iranian regime have left behind social-media presences that “open windows, however narrow, onto their lives, their aspirations, and why and for what they risked their lives,” Arash Azizi writes.

🇲🇩🇺🇦 Moldovan President Sandu said that she is against her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, because there are more worthy candidates - Ukrainian prisoners of war. Sandu emphasized that it is Ukrainians who are truly sacrificing themselves for the sake of peace and security in Ukraine and the EU.

Money that should not be in the defense budget —>

In this debate, @maxboot.bsky.social and I made the case the Trump administration is doing real damage with threats to Greenland

Happy Black History Month from the president of the United States of America.

The Blue Star Families 2025 Military Family Lifestyle Survey is live! Dive into the report to explore how service-connected pressures shape family stability, quality of life, readiness, retention, and the future of military service. See the findings here bit.ly/4qmDsbQ

Join FT journalists and special guest @kschake.bsky.social for a @financialtimes.com subscriber webinar on Thurs 12 Feb at 1300 UK: The transatlantic relationship: can Europe go it alone? Register, send us your questions, and take part in our poll transatlantic-relationship.live.ft.com/home

My take, building on arguments by James Comey, on the extraordinary degree to which federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have successfully checked the Trump administration in the last year. open.substack.com/pub/executiv...

NSS: "We seek... peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change..." www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u... "The US state department is set to fund Maga-aligned think-tanks and charities across Europe..." www.ft.com/content/f869...

The longer Trump stays in power, the worse things will get. They're threatening Poland, they're talking about invading Denmark - not a single day goes by where they don't their insult their strongest allies. But the system can only take so much, this isn't sustainable

"Rather than reducing prices, China simply found other buyers for their goods. Consequently, these data imply that US consumers and individuals are likely bearing most, if not all, of the tariff on Chinese goods." 😲 www.econlib.org/econlog/the-...

What military-grade intelligence tactics look like

I worked this issue hard with my Afghan Evac partners when Kabul fell. We had volunteers from all walks of life, from every political stripe. This cause united us in purpose unlike anything else. And now, death sentences. Enraged.

I'll be giving a talk on using open source tools to estimate China's nuclear forces, past and present at @stanfordcisac.bsky.social on February 12. cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/events/open-...

To elaborate: I regularly encounter National Guard soldiers deployed to DC as props in POTUS's theatrical production. They are unfailing professional and polite. There is no basis to believe that any of these troops have beaten supposed Tren de Aragua members. This is all authoritarian fantasy.

One of the best books about former soldiers turning into mercenaries (while not about Colombia) yet remains to be translated into English

The president just released a statement that, I believe interpreted fairly, explicitly threatens Mauritius if the country ever decides it does not want a giant GCHQ-NSA eavesdropping station there.

“try to reassure worried friends in Asia that America will not abandon its commitments to allies, even as Mr Trump switches his focus to Venezuela and Greenland, contemplates a grand bargain with China and routinely expresses his contempt for many of his nato allies in Europe.”

“His appointees are more likely to be keyboard warriors. They are obsessed with spectacle, and every government decision presents a potential opportunity to own the libs.”

Love Lithuania: : “They will be fighting, definitely, even before the reinforcements come.”

“Our assessment is that Russia will be able to move large amounts of troops within one year,” the Netherlands Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans said.”

Remember the big foreign aid cuts? Estimates are that more than 760,000 people, including 500,000 children, have died over the past year since American assistance suddenly vanished - figures cited by Senate appropriations member Sen. Schatz.

That’s some cover.

The earlier belief in Berlin and other capitals was that Russia wouldn’t be able to threaten NATO until 2029 or so. There is now a growing consensus that such a crisis could come much sooner—before Europe is in a position to fight back www.wsj.com/world/europe...

Trump's constant degradation of female reporters is unsurprising but the press corps' collective decision to treat it as background noise is actually kind of sickening

There is not a chance in hell that the EU, Brazil, India or anyone else is going to work together to roll back Chinese influence if the first thing supposed China hawks in Washington do is collapse in a heap when Trump decides Xi is a great guy actually

The CIA World Factbook, a reliable source of information about the countries of the world, has been publicly available since 1997. It is now going away. Please consider supporting @wikipedia.org and @ourworldindata.org. The world desperately needs trustworthy data. www.cia.gov/stories/stor...

What? AI just reinforces human cognitive biases and can't do abductive reasoning? Who could have guessed? www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/ai-c...

One of the most annoying aspects of much geopolitical debate is how far it obsesses over supposedly superninja style US special forces or hyperflashy precision weaponry rather than the real foundations of American power that were once in logistics, naval strength, maintenance and mass production

@philklay.bsky.social saw this coming in his amazing novel Missionaries — which also has the scariest scene not written by Cormac McCarthy.

If I was still doing my PhD and based in London, I would absolutely and without hesitation apply for this. It's a unique opportunity in the field in a really impressive and agenda-setting think tank.

The most predictable outcome of the Trump's hostility to immigrants is mass outsourcing of those jobs from the United States. This is another example of damage being done to the economy which will be hard to reverse in a few years when people finally figure out how badly Trump screwed things up.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t... Adaptability and moral authority

NEW | Iran conducted two probing operations against the US Navy in the Persian Gulf likely designed to test US Navy defensive reactions and demonstrate Iran’s ability to threaten US forces and assets. Read more from CTP and @thestudyofwar.bsky.social: www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/ira... (1/7)

This is insane. The military should not arbitrarily cut all support for Scouting. Beyond the support for military families, the program is clear recruiting pipeline www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

"The key lesson is not “sell your Treasuries to punish Washington”, but “change your marginal demand and your reserve composition quietly”.

Russia fired around 450 drones and 70 missiles at Ukraine overnight, just days after Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin had promised him a one-week truce due to sub-zero winter temperatures.

Xinhua: "China's shipbuilding output reached 53.69 million deadweight tonnes in 2025, up 11.4% year on year and accounting for 56.1% of the global total. New orders reached 107.82 million DWT last year, representing a 69% share of the global market." english.news.cn/20260203/900...