I know I'm late to the modern Battleship discussion thing, but it's a very stupid idea. This is the warhead from an AS-4 KITCHEN / Kh-22 Burya. It weighs ≈1000kg. That shaped charge looks somewhere between 500 and 750mm. At a conservative estimate of 2 cone diameters you cannot carry enough armor.

I had no idea that the phrase “Back to the old drawing board” comes from this Peter Arno cartoon from March 1st 1941’s New Yorker. It’s rather splendid to be able to date the birth of what would become part of everyday speech with such precision.

The British Army assembled the world's largest and best equipped Light Infantry Force, got it destroyed and then had to build a mass army from the remnants. Twice. In the space of 25 years.

US conservatives under Obama would sometimes wistfully post training footage of Russian special forces, like "look at what the real manly countries are doing instead of our woke baby military" and then all those VDV guys got annihilated within the first 3 days of the Ukraine invasion

Don't forget that Dewey used ending it as a wedge issue to try and call Truman soft on communism to get the Polish vote

sometimes you do, in fact, need a Darby Force at Salerno or 2nd Rangers to scale Pointe du Hoc but sometimes they get Cisterna'd

It’s pretty emblematic of today’s US Army, if you didn’t go to jump school, Ranger school, or some kind of SOF course, people question whether you were really “in” the Army at all, thus a whole bunch of officers who could be helpful self select out

And this all starts right out of the academies or ROTC, are the top of the class going into arty or armor or logistics, no they’re all going to the 173rd airborne or ranger school, so you can see how the army has become so light infantry/SOF centric

And the cult of SOF is a real problem given that, if we've seen one thing in Ukraine, it is that in a near-peer conflict, highly-trained, ultra-elite infantry cost a lot to form and field but get shredded by firepower at exactly the same rate, if not faster than, regular infantry.

Look, I don't know how you can think the drones over European airports is a media hysteria thing when Russia is doing wildly more aggressive things than fucking with airports and military bases with what I imagine are quadcopters

As a kid, I got into politics partly to do my bit fighting the Soviet Union. Now we have a president who wants to turn us into a country that mimics the Soviet Union. www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Generally a good article but I will not abide Haig slander! Doug was a solid general! If you want to rag on a brit, Jellicoe, Evan-Thomas, Beatty, Gort or French!

Heritage's pro-Putin turn is one of the grossest and most cynical things I've ever seen.

Tom Clancy would have been just an incredible poster. He'd have 500k followers and a name like "TomCatOSINT" or something. He'd have 100 tweet threads on Russian carrier tactics that end with recommendations on the best places in the Barents to place tactical nuclear mines.

Wow, I didn't think it could get worse?

a latent bugbear of mine in historical accounts of The War is the intentional retention of german terms like "generalmajor" when the local language would suffice (brigadier/one-star general). there was a nice writeup about this tendency by @georgy-k-zhukov.bsky.social in @askhistorians.bsky.social:

Petition to allow the UCMJ to introduce execution for poor historiography/methodology.

WAIT MAJ HECHLER WAS THE KEN HECHLER THAT WAS THE REP FOR WV-4 FROM 59-77 AND SECSTATE FROM '85-01? HE DIED AFTER TRUMP WON IN 2016?

WWII historiography if we'd shot Baun, Halder and Gehlen and/or if USAFET G-2, Lt Waldman and Col. Hechler hadn't been uncritical morons who got played by the Nazis.

WAIT I WAS JOKING WHAT THE FUCK STOP IT KEN

Listen, the great man theory is crap, but what about the really dogshit man theory? What the fuck was Maj Hechler thinking?

You think you hate the Wehrmacht enough, but you do not. They are long dead and you still cannot hate them enough. (From Histories by the Defeated: German Veteran Postwar Narratives of the Eastern Front in the US Army Historical Division, MA Thesis, Austin J. Aragon, 2025)

1/ Sanctions and GPS jamming have had a hugely disruptive effect on Russian civil aviation, according to airline pilots. They have had to fly with suitcases full of old paper charts, turn off critical safety systems, and fly defective aircraft with dubious Chinese components.⬇️

This is actually why I mock everyone who yearns for Halo 3 and splitscreen You don't actually miss either of those things, you miss being a teenager and having no responsibilities

Let's get that to 75%! It's decarbonization!

If the President can raise his own revenues and direct his own spending without congressional approval we are squarely in the only situation the Constitution was actually drafted to avoid: English civil war territory

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

This should be enough to prove that whatever the merit of law and order in the abstract, most of the people who lean hard into that rhetoric do do out of hatred of cities, not a desire to make them better

The terminal lance in me is cackiling that these high and mighty gods of war had to sit through a shitty overwrought libo brief by the worst platoon commander this side of the Euphrates. This is what you deserve, as an institution, for the complacency, careerism & intellectual failings of the GWOT

"V-0073 TACTICAL AIR COMMAND 1978 BX 1 of 2," slide 32 of 37 [gallery]

(solemnly) You've had mail.

Ukraine’s air defence forces say they need to deploy three interceptors for every one Shahed, which at current rates means 2,500 a day. “The scale is mind-boggling.” www.ft.com/content/a513... via @financialtimes.com

❗️A new NATO Forward Deployment Brigade will be formed to defend 🇫🇮Lapland, based on 🇸🇪Swedish mechanized units from the 19th (Norrbotten Brigade) Arctic Mechanized Brigade.

I mean I know nobody is going to take this seriously, but it's kind of wild that the Russian Foreign Minister went up on stage and said that a state of war exists between NATO/the EU and Russia and Ivan isn't winning a stupid prize for playing such a stupid game.

What They're Saying: ADMIRALTY ORDERS To: Cpt. J. Aubrey Intercept French Privateer ACHERON en route to Pacific Why it matters: INTENT ON CARRYING THE WAR TO THOSE WATERS What's Next: sink, burn, or take her as a prize

🤷🏻‍♂️

One thing I've been dwelling a lot this year - in the shadow of my work on the Atlantic Charter and the 80th anniversary - is how we lack the compelling if flawed vision of a better world that drove *everything*

Oh man he even uses a Schelling quote about deterrence to argue for compellance, it’s beautiful

Some people were furious with this characterization btw

this is rfkjrs MAHA agenda. they're making your grandma cry.

no matter your political ideology if all your cites were published in the last ten years you are not capable of understanding the world we live in

Recently read an interesting critique of fiction that leans on historical archetypes like Game of Thrones, in completely misportraying the required maturity of civilization itself to actually field armies remotely that large. You're quicy hitting hard productivity/population density constraints.

I am currently reading Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, first published 43 years ago, and it’s giving me more insight into the a-literate [sic] mind of Donald Trump and current American culture than anything I’ve read in a very long time. Perhaps ever. The resonances and parallels are striking.

READ THEORY

“If we would reach a degree of civilization higher and grander than any yet attained, we should welcome to our ample continent all nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples; and as fast as they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship, we should incorporate them ...