The thing about the Graham Platner discourse that's painful is that it touches a whole lot of things from my life while also hitting a bunch of things I don't want to post about.

You could imagine a reboot where there's some agent in the FBI who will not give on Epstein after the 2006 investigation and he gets called "the Eps Files."

There was a guy who was in B-17s in WW2, described it as "a million dollar experience you wouldn't pay a nickel for". And that was Iraq. But the rest of my time I am lucky enough it was sometimes shitty, but never actually shit.

I COMPLY share.google/dXV90mb88xXs...

common misconception: the human in Ratatouille (2007) isn’t called Ratatouille. he’s Ratatouille’s Monster

It’s because of the COINtras during the Surge eras and the OOTW leftovers who demanded no one consider anything but Big Boy War is ‘war’. Everything else is ‘operations other than war’, which is definitionally, conceptually, factually, and theoretically incorrect.

The problem is explicitly Clausewitz (albeit bad Clausewitz) and implicitly Plato (albeit inadvertent Plato).

Wait I’ve seen this one before

More specifically, the markets expect that their panicking will cause POTUS to change policy, which will hose those who panicked. The markets got COVID and Ukraine wrong too. The types of self-esteemed-masters-of-the-universe who go to Wall Street are very bad at International Relations.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil

"Any star destroyer can kill a planet just as effectively as the death star with its tractor beam and a few asteroids." "Oh yeah, you want to tell him that? You got a kink about being force-choked to death?"

Information theory actually applies to DNA because it is code. Saying that “makes it easy” is incredibly stupid though.

So, the poster who wants to hunt the "turbolibs" "for sport" now is complaining about people posting about her?

"It's not a normal pickleball accident. It's a FREAK pickleball accident."

broke: lenin was good woke: lenin was evil bespoke: i have heard that on his deathbed lenin received the light of islam and unhesitatingly recited the shahada.

"STOP ORDERING FUCKING PIZZA TO THE LAND NAV SITE"

This is not at all equivalent to the JCPOA. The previous nuclear deal did allow enrichment (with many provisions, but sunsetting over time), did not close or decommission the Bushehr power plant. That deal also did not cover missiles, regional arms control, or proxy financing

What lethality does to a mofo

ALEXANDER III WAS ABLE TO DO THIS WITH LONG STICKS! AND SOME HORSEY BOYS!!

Empire doing PPB&E would be… 😂 A 600-page manual on “How the Empire Runs” Total Empire Analysis done by the Imperial Center for Empire Analysis

I mean I've had that conversation in real life. "Would this work?" "For all these reasons it is a bad idea that cannot work." "Okay but assume all that DOTMLPF gets worked. Would it sork?" "Well if you gave me a million dollars I would be a millionaire."

How do we become more agile to counter an ever shifting insurgent threat if everything requires the emperor's signature and the only thing he likes is giant planet killing battle stations? You really think he's going to read a report that says we can be more effective with AT-ATs?

"Those droids didn't go through the joint requirements board, the Death Star did. No one cares about your operational needs memo, you can't spend program dollars just because a couple action officers sign some papers! The Death Star is a program of record, end of story!"

"Darth Vader is coming? Darth Vader, the Imperial Inspector General, is coming to do an audit?"

“Do you have any idea how many of our personnel came from Alderaan?”

I wonder what the DOTMLPF-P work behind the Death Star was like?

When I worked a sUAS study, GEN Donahue was adamant the army must incentivize master trainers. One option we discussed was a skill identifier promotion boards viewed as equivalent to a master gunner. Also discussed how the position’s name (think flight lead for aviators) mattered.

I think a popular take on here is that the US military neglected to learn from the War in Ukraine -- this is categorically false. The real questions are "what should we learn from Ukraine" and "how" and "can we cut across our internal politics to implement those lessons?"

So I remembered that a Chinese ornithologist (learned his name was Tso-hsin Cheng) was responsible for convincing CCP officials to stop the Eliminate Sparrows Campaign. I did not know that afterwards, he was severely harassed during the Cultural Revolution for opposing the campaign.

God damn no one is an easier mark than anyone CONVINCED they are smarter than everyone else

When you consider the cost ratio between a capability and a counter, if you don’t consider what that counter protects, you are doing the math wrong.

A truly enraging article:

see this is what happens when you put humanities graduates in charge.

What?

The thing that drives me nuts is how superficial it all is. The men in my life who raised and shaped me taught me that being a man meant working hard, being honest, keeping your word, and taking care of your family. None of this nonsense has anything to do with that. All I see are trinkets paid /1

One of those aha moments for me was realizing how much self-care is gender affirming.

just weird to think about how few people there were during the bronze age. like, Tyre, when we first hear about it as influential, is less than ten thousand people. everyone who knows the alphabet works in maybe one of four buildings. one bad harvest and you wouldn't understand any of these symbols.

If “it’s more of a statement than a question” were a bar…

We spent a decade saying we were walking away from COIN to focus on armor and mech units participating in near-peer, force-on-force conflict in thinly veiled training scenarios that everyone knew were based on Iran only to just send in a MEU and the 82nd. Lol. Lmao.

I believe it’s telling…

I’m just so tried it’s like the reverse of the Gizmo cult on here where people say “look at what the Ukrainians can do with drones we should just buy drones” while the moment you talk to a Ukrainian officer they say “please for the love of god more shells and interceptors”

The game theory of it all is that an extremely engaged minority that is willing to defect will overpower a more flexible majority 100% of the time.

Look, Reality Winner sent Glenn Greenwald classified intelligence to prove to him that Russia had backed Trump in 2016 and Glenn almost comically made sure that she got caught. These are not smart people.

Nobody: Absolutely nobody: Solidworks: It’s called Hole Wizard

Crowdsourcing an idea: I’m (likely) the course director for a foundational “strategic art” JPME class in the fall. In addition to targeted readings lesson by lesson, I’m exploring using a single book, read a chapter at a time, as a framing narrative. What should that book be and why? GO!