The Americans created the "Monroe Doctrine", basically the ambition to keep European powers out of messing in the Americas. They weren't able to enforce it until they were. It's a rare example of clear-cut grand strategy, and it kinda worked for a very long time. Anyone who thinks clearly about the security of free Europe and uses the publicly available (and certainly not very far off) data understands that the Russians aren't able to challenge free Europe in war, certainly not after squandering the Soviet legacy equipment and millions of artillery shells and rockets. The only really trouble ..read more

The Russo-Ukrainian War turned into a trench war contrary to my expectations. The Russian ground forces' ability to break through such defences is shockingly and ridiculously marginal - I did not expect that. This is a shocking display of incompetence in no small part because the recipe for breakthrough has very largely been found in 1917 already (Bruchmüller's artillery tactics and modern infantry training and small unit manoeuvring of Stoßtruppen).   You don't even need armoured vehicles for it. A skilful and sufficient application of artillery (and nowadays glide bombs) and a si ..read more

My thesis is that the West doesn't understand nationalism (any more). It understood it until about the Second World War. The First World War almost shattered our societies, the second one kind of did. Back in 1950 when North Korea attacked South Korea 'we' interpreted that as the spearhead of communist world revolution, but it was an attempted war of national unification. When North Vietnam attacked South Vietnam we interpreted it as the spearhead of communist world revolution, but it was a (successful) war of national unification (with an additional war for small farmer liberation from rich ..read more

The Russo-Ukrainian War brought something to public view that wasn't obvious. Even I didn't really grasp it, despite having mentioned it years ago. There's a huge range of targets for small, cheap cruise missiles with a rather small (~ artillery grenade size rather than aircraft bomb size) warhead.  The embodiment of this kind of cruise missile is the Shaheed-136.    Shaheed-136 (c) alexpl Hobbyist-grade propeller propulsion and navigation. ~ 200 kg total mass ~ 50 kg warhead 2,500 km claimed range (more likely less than 2,000 km) It's obvious that this can be impro ..read more

So he doesn't understand why, and I suppose that's because his training never equipped him to understand something like this even with benefit of hindsight.  It's an issue in which figures and calculations are very important, and in abstract ways that are simply not taught in preparation of most professions.   So being a merchant mariner by heart and profession, he thinks the Suez Canal is super important. A "most important lifeline", even. That's quite some prose. An economist isn't satisfied with such prose. An economist asks "How important?", and expects figures with currency ..read more

The political consequences. I wrote in 2016 that one shouldn't quit NATO ASAP when America turns fascist, despite the summer of 1914 experience with Austria-Hungary.  We should quit eventually (there's a 12 month period between quitting and actually leaving the treaty, see article 13), though. The time should be used to build up deterrence & defence against the United States of America (that would be part III of the series).   The lessons learned about Putin's fifth columns in Hungary, Slovakia and kind of (more complicated) Poland point strongly at the EU not being fit for act ..read more

It appears that drone teams greatly complemented ATGM teams and Panzerfaust/Bazooka/RPG style short range weapons in anti-tank missions in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Anti-tank mines proved essential to prevent breakthroughs through well-fortified sections of the frontline. Military history showed that heavy weapons (anti-tank guns, assault guns, tank destroyers, tanks) destroyed by far the most tanks. Even millions of Panzerfausts didn't change that outside of the urban battlefield of Berlin. ATGMs and MBTs were expected to be the big tank killers during the Cold War and justified this expecta ..read more

https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2019/12/lets-open-our-eyes-to-ugly-reality-as.html https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2022/07/threat-country-ranking-for-germany-top.html  https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2022/08/it-security-for-real.html https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2024/07/free-europes-security-challenge-if.html https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2024/07/free-europes-security-challenge-if_8.html https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2024/07/free-europes-security-challenge-if_19.html https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2024/07/free-europe ..read more

Why don't we run a society infiltrating and disintegrating campaign against the Russian government as it does to us? We have literally a million Ukrainians in the West, hundreds of thousands of them are mothers who cannot work full-time except in the flat.    They all speak Russian, understand the Russian mind, know Russian habits, know Russian history, know Russian institutions and places. They could (1) make corruption an omnipresent discussion topic (2) expose hypocrisy & lies (3) sow distrust vs. Chinese, North Korean, Iranian governments (4) spread 'conspiracy theories ..read more

Imagine the developed world well before the 1970's: blue collar workers' children would become blue collar workers, children of academics would become white collar employees. There was little social mobility. The result was that there were great many highly intelligent workers and craftsmen. This was the pool from which workers' parties could draw their politicians, their organisers. The result was that we had several generations of very intelligent politicians in workers' parties who actually had a strong socio-economic links to workers. Such worker parties were effective at improving socia ..read more