🧵Feels like shouting into the void, but it is essential to note that the Trump/Rubio gutting of the State Department and blowtorching of US diplomatic capacity and credibility is an accelerant to this spiraling war and will seriously undercut US/allied efforts to pick up the pieces after. 1/
It seems like it’s only a matter of time until some of the many expats that have been left exposed by the exceptionally poor planning and coordination are killed or injured. I suspect this will in turn be cited as justification for further escalation.
We had some Air Force folks in particular who were interested in drones and how they’d be used in a conflict like this. This was a subject where I actually learned a good bit from reading my students’ work. It’s been on their radar for a long while.
Not my wheelhouse personally but can attest that in our little corner of the world some of our students were writing about this sort of thing several years ago.
When was the last time a cabinet secretary was subpoenaed by a chamber controlled by the president’s party?
Wait — IRGC control of the country was the plan?!?
It’s a real problem that many policymakers cannot fathom how restraint and beneficence are maybe compatible with strategic behavior and self interest.
It’s shocking to see the secretary of defense talk like this. Saying “lethality” and “precision” repeatedly while trashing US allies doesn’t somehow erase the fact that these operations are still in pursuit of inherently political goals, only, it seems, without an actual plan to accomplish them.
Even in the best of times lots of people are seriously injured or killed serving in the military. War, especially in a region dotted with lots of different heavily armed states, is going to exponentially increase the room for accidents.
Maybe we get Ewok bonfire parties and a new government, but if we assign probabilities to various outcomes, I think that’s pretty low on the list. More likely those generals and admirals consolidate power. And even if they’re fractured the rebels are still at a big structural disadvantage.
Case in point. The emperor was a bad person. He died. But the remaining imperial generals and admirals didn’t suddenly lose the keys to the armories or their star destroyers. They didn’t lose their vast logistical and intel networks. They remained at a distinct structural advantage.
A lot of people hold a Return of the Jedi view of how regime change works. They seem to believe the ragtag superpower can choose to take out a single evil leader and this will seamlessly lead to people in distant locales toppling statues and Ewok bonfire parties as they usher in a new government.
We have a pundit class full of people who think that just because they believe someone to be bad (and they often are!) this belief alone is a substitute for actual strategic thinking, planning, resources, and work. It’s foreign policy by wish casting.
Unlike Venezuela, where there seems to have been willing support from regime insiders for the leader’s ouster, thereby preserving stability, it’s hard to see how this doesn’t increase chaos and instability as the regime’s middle management start clawing their way over each other to the top.
Trump loves “decapitation” strikes like on Maduro and Khamenei because it’s the pro wrestling version of total victory, even if it changes nothing in the end.
If confirmed this gives Trump an easy out to declare victory and move on, regardless of the actual state of things on the ground.
It doesn’t resolve any of the actual underlying conflicts we we’d probably be doing this all over again before too long.
Not six months ago the Trump Administration fired the head of the DIA for its assessment of the efficacy of strikes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Same here, both for our programs and my own research. I benefit a lot from getting to work with smart professionals who can share their experience and insight.
The PhD itself is a training program to learn how to do research, but it's just the start. Given that most of these folks have to go back to their regular day jobs after finishing means they're often not positioned to spend years researching whatever issue, in sharp contrast to civilian PhDs.
I wrote about this a couple of years ago. The military's programs for helping personnel pursue PhDs are great, but their structure also imposes some fundamental practical constraints on what they can study and how. Meaning these programs will never be able to fully replace civilian expertise.
Progress bar showing 2800/8000 35% ETA: 4m
Help to test new progress bar in CmdStanR by @josswright.bsky.social, see more at discourse.mc-stan.org/t/help-us-te...
For its enormous budget, the military is still pretty resource constrained when you consider the full menu of responsibilities it’s often tasked with managing. There are only so many people and so many hours in the day, so they need partnerships with educational institutions to fill the gaps.
The stakes for service members aren’t trivial and they have a sincere interest in learning. Starting what could very well become a protracted conflict with a major regional power while also picking fights with and excluding the deepest wells of expertise on the relevant subject matter could be bad.
It’s worth noting that the last major US war in the Middle East led to a big increase in demand for relationships with civilian educational institutions because some people thought it wise to develop a deeper upstanding the relevant issues and environments. I fear we’re seeing the opposite now.
I’ll believe this when I can get out MA students to start thinking in terms of predictor and outcome variables, or to write their capstone papers on something other than the Korean War.
I ended up tweaking it a little bit to add a title to the table. I probably could have done it all through the patchwork wrapper but found it easier to just create a gt object and do it all directly with that instead.
Playing with the histogram legend inset and liking it so far.
After a short conversation with importers the tariff refund will be free to go.
This is the one I got. Pretty happy with it so far. a.co/d/070wY3UM
It also seems likely to be especially counterproductive to military leadership. If they can’t help, elected officials, understand how political, economic, social, etc. goals relate to military matters than their own ability to effectively advise is severely curbed.
