A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
As is traditional here, I am taking advantage of the Fourth of July this week to write something about the United States, this time a brief discussion of the nature of civil-military relations in the United States. Civil-military relations (typically shortened to 'civ-mil' or sometimes CMR) is, simply put, the relationship between the broader civil … Continue reading Collections: The American Civil-Military Relationship
Apologies for running a fireside so quickly after the gap week, but with the end of the semester coming as the job market gets busier, I haven't had time to finish the next post on shield walls just yet. That will come out next week for sure though, as it is close to done. I … Continue reading Fireside Friday, December 8, 2023
Fireside this week! Next week we'll finally close out the addenda to the How to Roman Republic 101 series with a look at provincial governance, but I don't think that will be done in time for this week, so I'm throwing a fireside in here in the meantime. That said, I thought it might provide … Continue reading Fireside Friday, October 27, 2023 (On Politics in Strategy)
This week, Michael Taylor, Associate Professor of History at SUNY Albany, returns to offer an interesting argument about the longterm impact of the M1 Garand, the US army's extremely successful World War II and Korean era battle rifle, introduced in 1936. A fantastically successful design, Taylor argues here that it cast a baleful shadow over … Continue reading Michael Taylor on The Development of the M1 Garand and its Implications
Fireside this week! Next week we're going to launch into our next big series on the structure of the Roman Republic, a companion to How to Polis, 101, but because of what is going on with the book project (a topic on which Patrons get monthly updates!) I wanted a lighter week before we dived … Continue reading Fireside Friday, July 14, 2023
This week we're going to take a look at an aspect of contemporary international relations, rather than ancient ones. As has become somewhat customary, I am going to use the the week of July 4th to talk about the United States, or more correctly for this July 4th, the informal coalition (with formal components) of … Continue reading Collections: The Status Quo Coalition
So I stirred up a bit of conversation on Twitter last week when I noted that I had already been handed ChatGPT produced assignments. For those who are unaware, ChatGPT is an 'AI' chatbot that given a prompt can produce texts; it is one of most sophisticated bots of this sort yet devised, trained on … Continue reading Collections: On ChatGPT
This week's post is coming to you all a bit early, as the folks at Paradox Interactive were kind enough to send me a review code for Victoria III - Paradox Interactive's long awaited historical grand strategy game set during 19th and early 20th centuries - so I could have something to say about it … Continue reading Miscellanea: Victoria III Confirmed! (First Impressions)
This week, I'm going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for this post has been Russian efforts to use airpower coercively in Ukraine, we're going to focus more broadly on the topic: what is strategic … Continue reading Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
Fireside this week! Next week we'll be diving into a series (I am imagining four parts) on pre-modern generalship (with a particular emphasis on the broader Mediterranean world in classical antiquity and the middle ages) and the ways that it was shaped by key constraints which are often removed in modern imaginings of command (particularly … Continue reading Fireside Friday, May 20, 2022