A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
Today marks the end of the first year of Putin's War in Ukraine. I will not call it an anniversary, because I don't think anyone is celebrating. Nevertheless I think this makes a useful moment to look back and take stock of the state of the conflict at present but also on the things I … Continue reading Collections: One Year Into the War in Ukraine
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
For this week, I wanted to expand a bit on a comment I made on Twitter expressing some frustration at the failure of journalists attempting to cover the war in Ukraine (and thus interpret military experts for a lay audience) to master some of the key military terminology being used and to convey its actual … Continue reading Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology
Thanks to our ever helpful volunteer narrator, this post is now also available in audio format. This week I wanted to expand on something I touched on only briefly in our 'explainer' on Putin's War in Ukraine: the "delicate balance of terror" of nuclear deterrence. Of course this is a complex and much debated topic, … Continue reading Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101
Thanks to our volunteer narrator, this post is now available in audio format. This week, in an effort to fill in some of the theoretical basis for thinking about how weaker powers think about fighting against or defending themselves from stronger powers, I'm going to give you all a basic 101-level survey of the theory … Continue reading Collections: How the Weak Can Win – A Primer on Protracted War
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine and in my own experience the traditional news media often struggles to adequately explain complex issues … Continue reading Miscellanea: Understanding the War in Ukraine