Oh man haha

@andrewfacini.com do you have that "THE ITAR LOOMS" poster you photoshopped? I think it probably needs to be hung inside Anthropic HQ right now

The obvious historical analog to this conflict is Beirut 1983, in which an American administration inserted itself into what the defenders considered an existential conflict but the administration was not willing to actually accept American casualties.

Latest Substack post on the Rueters story about Chinese "launch pads." The highlighted facilities cannot support a nuclear LOW mission and are almost certainly not even related to the PLARF. horsdoeuvresofbattle.substack.com/p/on-reuters...

foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/12/i... My latest in FP, on how the missile defense fight in China will look nothing like how it did in Iran, and some nerdy stuff about Rundstedt.

Meanwhile, at the other rogue state, Kim Jong Un tours an enrichment site and looks over some warhead designs.

Trying to avoid the 100 books discourse but I gotta say including Invisible Cities is really stretching the definition of the novel.

Playing the ancient city building game Songs of Syx and getting absurdly mad at how much time and how many resources go into maintaining a library. I would have absolutely set my people back another thousand years if I was a Sumerian king.

The Middlebury Institute of International Studies is potentially being purchased by uhhhh (checks notes) Soka Gakkai? www.soka.edu/monterey-ins...

The missile hunting stuff is probably the least problematic aspect of the war. Im much more startled by the amount of munitions that we seems to have expended on honestly irrelevant targets.

In the White House's new Counterterrorism Strategy released today, narcoterrorists are placed above "Legacy Islamic Terrorists."

Every time I log on to this platform all I see are smart people I respect arguing with the dumbest people every to grace the earth. Do you know there is a beautiful outside world full of wonder

Some thoughts on the war and where we go from here. open.substack.com/pub/horsdoeu...

"The presence of a chemical"

There is a third road - one I do not think is likely but is entirely possible - in which no deal is reached, the Strait gradually defacto reopens, and the conflict ends status quo ante bellum.

I have written something very silly that likens deterrence to assembling IKEA furniture. open.substack.com/pub/horsdoeu...

Sometimes history truly is cyclical. In 1967 in order to support the Vietnam war, US pulled formations earmarked for NATO, deployed them to Vietnam, and expended vast amounts of munitions. In order to close the gap the US complained to the allies about their defense expenditure.

@dexeve.bsky.social & I have a new piece out in Survival. In 2024, South Korea secretly deployed more than 300 KTSSM missiles at soft, fixed sites--suggesting that, in a crisis, Seoul may strike first & giving Pyongyang 300 reasons to beat them to it. doi.org/10.1080/0039...

I really do think we need some sort of disparaging term for people whose only interaction with fiction is Weir and qntm.

My latest in FP, on how Iranian deterrence has collapsed over the last two years: foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/24/i...

Experts from the @fpri.bsky.social analyze the latest military developments from the Third Gulf War @slair.bsky.social @dexeve.bsky.social @michaelbpetersen.bsky.social @salisbot.bsky.social & Guy Plopsky www.fpri.org/article/2026...

Drone launches are down for the same reason missile launches are down. Its a posture issue. You can have the biggest drone arsenal in the world but if your forces aren't postured to effectively continue operations under fire, eventually you won't have the capability to use them

An update on how the Iranians are fairing. We're seeing lots of hits on stationary abandoned launchers, which implies either a high missile failure rate or Iranian crews are simply abandoning launchers after firing.

Unlike the 12 Day War in which Iran used a certain segment of its missile force to retaliate in distinguishable waves, this is complete chaos. Many missiles across many fronts, potentially with units acting without centralized authority.

Some really interesting questions now arise. I don't recall something like this ever happening in the precision munitions era: how do you handle regime transition when your adversary can track and eliminate leadership targets?

Consequence of Iran targeting US bases across the region is that it's attacks have to get through the fresh air defense networks of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, etc, countries the United States has spent the last two decades equipping for just this sort of thing.

This is probably correct. Also makes it easier for missile defenses to deal with it.

My latest Substack post, with some thoughts on Chinese testing, and some half-baked thoughts on its effects on the arms control framework. horsdoeuvresofbattle.substack.com/p/causes-and...

We are quickly moving past "will there be a war" and into "what kind of war will it be" territory. What US chooses to strike in the first 48 hours will set the tone here.

I refuse to believe that the shih tzu with the bow in its hair is not a paid actor dog.

My latest in FP, on the risks of New START's demise and the problem with focusing too much on numbers in a new technological era. Gift link: foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/09/n...

True Promise I and II may go down as the most cataclysmicly counterproductive military operations in history. Shattered threat perception on Iran in to a million tiny pieces.

Three possibilities, possibly overlapping, none of them good for China's ability to fight: A) the PLA is so ludicrously corrupt that basically everyone above a certain rank is either involved or knows about it and is compromised by it

No, Reddit automatically scrubs that data. And the sub was almost certainly in port at the time.

Reading a book, originally written in Russian, that uses Chinese words regularly, but A) the Russian author clearly did not speak Chinese and B) there are no tones. So an already borderline unintelligible experience becomes truely unintelligible.

This is oughtslop. You only like it because its what ought to be.

Some thoughts on the recent Oreshnik madness: open.substack.com/pub/horsdoeu...

Theres a lot of talk about Oreshnik being a "psychological weapon." This is, I think, an oversimplification - its true that Oreshnik has some operational limitations. I would argue that those limitations are not all that different than other conventional ballistic missiles.

Seeing potentially credible reports and videos of a new Oreshnik launch against Ukraine tonight.

My latest in Foriegn Policy, where I pour cold water on normative arguments with the technical reality. foreignpolicy.com/2026/01/06/v...

Trying to commit to reading 3-4 books a month. Here is January's reading stack.

[black SUVs pull up to a ski chalet in Vermont] "You're a hard man to find...Mr. Bremer." "Apparently not hard enough." "We need you. One last job."

What is a "black swan" military performance? That doesn't make any sense.

putin is already pretty unconstrained in ukraine (the people saying "zelensky is next" seem unaware russia has tried to kill him many times). the bigger danger is it emboldens putin to step up sabotage and hybrid warfare in europe

Funniest tweet of the year so far.

Yemen, Iran, and now Venezuela, without a single aviation casualty. That's really amazing.

A federal judge waking up, checking his email, and seeing the Maduro arraignment on his schedule

I am going to caution against people assuming that he must have been turned over by the Venezuelan military - much too early to tell. Lack of anti-air fire can be explained by lack of readiness/competence and US SEAD/DEAD.