@warmatters
Saarf-Londoner. Cat Dad. Assoc Prof at the Swedish Defence University. PhD from KCL. Associate, IWM Institute. Senior fellow at Global & National Security Institute, Uni of South Florida. ex-West Point fellow. FRHistS. Series editor @Hurst Publishers
Yet so what?
What has actually been accomplished after 1 week?
“In 100 hours the U.S. and Israel declared hitting more targets in Iran than in the first six months of the U.S.-led Coalition’s bombing campaign against the so-called Islamic State”
airwars.org/record-pace-...
Friday evening news drop: Iowa State department of history is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor in Modern European History. 3/3 load, 3-year contract, possibility of renewal. Come be my colleague! 🗃️ isu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/IowaStateJob...
I had actually meant to write interpretive/ontological
But I doubt at this point in the evening this will matter.
Hedging again: Illegal or at least dubious targeting choices.
*They can but it involves lots of work arounds and it cant be complete so they have to make educated guesses.
None of which can be sufficient for driving their target analysis UNLESS they just accept short cuts that lead to illegal targeting.
So it occurs to me that the military AI people can’t segment Iranian society*.
If they can’t do that then they cannot define patterns of life in the way that they say they can.
They don’t have a complete data set and the interpretive ontology framework for turning this into meaningful results
JUST FANTASTIC.
I’m pretty convinced this is what Hitler believed just be for he committed suicide.
The best news story of the day!
😀
I can’t be the only one who thinks this.
I’m not convinced it would make sense to get involved even if the UK did have the capabilities available.
But that’s besides the point. We don’t.
Put simply a Tactical Exercise Without Troops is not a strategy, it’s a wargame.
Something to amuse you as you head in to the weekend.😬👇
🪖 ‘Sir Keir’s response to Operation EPIC FURY has been appropriate and entirely understandable. The 🇬🇧 Armed Forces are already stretched, and it makes little strategic sense to extend them further,’ argues @warmatters.bsky.social, Swedish Defence University
#BritainsWorld #BigAsk
Should 🇬🇧 embrace a tougher approach towards 🇮🇷?
We asked 8 experts in today’s #BigAsk
✍️ Dr Hillary Briffa, @warmatters.bsky.social, @willfreer.bsky.social, @joshuachuminski.bsky.social, Dr Louise Kettle, Dr Timothy Less, Dr Marina Miron, Prof. Richard Whitman
#BritainsWorld
Winning Iranians over, one dumb arse presser at a time…
This one is going to repeat on him for the rest of his life.
That the current state of things SHOULD have already been corrected for is besides the point.
If you don’t have the capabilities you need when you need them then (obviously) you don’t have them.
So choosing to fight with something you don’t have is just ridiculous.
The unreality of the armchair strategists - in a country that is already divided, fed up and unwilling to pay more in taxes to keep the armed forces going - betrays a complete misunderstanding of statecraft.
From this side of the North Sea, British commentary just sounds more and more bizarre.
We can’t even house our service people in accommodation with central heating, let alone recruit enough people to make it possible to put ships to sea or generate additional formations.
That the current state of things SHOULD have already been corrected for is besides the point.
If you don’t have the capabilities you need when you need them then (obviously) you don’t have them.
So choosing to fight with something you don’t have is just ridiculous.
The unreality of the armchair strategists - in a country that is already divided, fed up and unwilling to pay more in taxes to keep the armed forces going - betrays a complete misunderstanding of statecraft.
From this side of the North Sea, British commentary just sounds more and more bizarre.
We can’t even house our service people in accommodation with central heating, let alone recruit enough people to make it possible to put ships to sea or generate additional formations.
I am in the process of examining a PhD that deals with much of this but with fewer cherry trees... (unfortunately)
So now they have to attack moving (dynamic) targets.
That’s much harder to do and will probably be a contributory factor for why the campaign won’t achieve whatever passes for Trump’s objectives.
This Claude/AI story is the least bit of interesting news about the war against Iran.
We knew they could generate targets at speed.
What we now know is that they can’t service those targets at speed.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
I wrote Merz and so why does my first post say Metz.
Flaming software
So the Germans dump contracts for Russian gas and buy American instead.
Then they become vassals to the Americans. And now it is clear why Merz was being a slippery sod on the sofa.
Europe is so easily subject US to divide and rule diplomacy.
So I was wondering why Metz meekly sat on the Whitehouse sofa while Trump berated Spain over its intransigence to US actions against Iran.
All became clear this morning when Katja Adler reported on the BBC Today programme that Germany relies on US Liquified Natural Gas for 96% of its supply.
“We are in an undeclared state of war.”
After Mike Johnson says the US is not at war, and Donald Trump says it is, Lindsey Graham tells @premthakker.bsky.social a third answer: an “undeclared state of war” — which, he suggests, allows the US to illegally strike ships in international waters.
🙏🙏🙏
Pete “all about the content” Hegseth didn’t have this to herald him into his little whining presser earlier today.
