Aidan Milliff

We must convey our displeasure to the US for bringing maritime warfare to our doorstep without informing us or taking us into confidence. It’s an issue of concern. Strategic autonomy must have moral moorings and anchors. This conflict is needless, open-ended, pointless and will only bring grief to the whole world. India must take a stand, convey our concern and ask for hostilities to terminate at the earliest and keep the conflict away from our waters. Admiral Arun Prakash

How Congress politicians in India are discussing the boat strike (the guy she's citing is of India's most decorated GOFOs):

Kanwal Sibal @KanwalSibal The Iranian ship will not be where it was if we had not invited it to talk part in our Milan exercise. We were the hosts. I am told that as per protocol for this exercise ships cannot carry any ammunition. It was defenceless. The Iranian naval personnel had paraded before our president. The attack by the US submarine was premeditated as the US was aware of the Iranian ship's presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute, presumably with this operation in mind. The US has ignored India's sensitivities as the ship was in these waters because of India's invitation.

We are far from politically or militarily responsible for the US attack. Our"responsibility" is at a moral and human plane. A word of condolence by the Indian Navy ( after political clearance) at the loss of lives of those who were our invitees and saluted our president would be in order. Lt Gen DP Pan... @LtGenDPPan…. • 18h Our watch gets over when the Ship leaves territorial water. Not till they get home. Their country is at war. They should have stayed in shelter of India. In international waters, they had Not sought an escort from Indian Navy. A... 11:05 PM • Mar 4, 2026 • 2.4M Views

fwiw here's the sourcing I saw at 1am about the US sinking of an unarmed and knowingly unarmed Iranian Navy ship x.com/KanwalSibal/...

Excited to be co-organizing the Multi-Method Conflict Consortium at Duke May 15-16 with @meganastewart.bsky.social & @dotanhaim.bsky.social! Advanced PhD candidates and postdocs are invited to apply for our funded Junior Fellowship, deadline March 10: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Quotation from Phil Klay's novel Missionaries: "An American officer once described it to me this way: “When civilians think about war, they tend to think about the mechanism of death. The heroic Navy SEAL firing a tight cluster of bullets into a bad guy’s head. The creepy, mechanical drone delivering a bomb. But those are just the flathead and Phillips-head screwdriver at the end of a targeting system. And it’s the system that’s the real killer.”

Thinking a lot about this quote from Phil Klay's Missionaries this week.

Kind of a behavioral law: if you have nine explanations for doing something, you actually don’t have one.

U.S. troops killed amid Iranian counterattack, fueling air defense fears U.S. forces say they have hit 1,000 targets over the past two days in a race to take out Iran’s ability to threaten American personnel and allies across the Middle East.

"There is anxiety among senior leaders that fighting will extend for weeks, stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles. 'There is concern about this lasting more than a few days. I don’t think people have fully absorbed what that has done with stockpiles.'"
www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

At all three places where I taught, veterans and military students are admired for their service, their ability to get their academic work done quickly and extremely well, and for often balancing family and school.

Not *once* have I ever heard a faculty member disparage a military student.

Follow Karim and @carnegiemec.bsky.social generally for this.

In the past, sometimes presidents have said it’s just a military operation or limited airstrikes to skirt Congress. Trump has unilaterally launched major combat operations, declaring war with the goal of regime change. A major violation of the U.S. Constitution, also illegal under international law

A call script for elected representatives: U.S. attack on Iran: YOU: Hi, my name is [NAME]. I’m a constituent from [ZIP CODE]. YOU: I’m calling to demand [MOC/SENATOR] take urgent action after the United States joined Israel in launching strikes on Iran today. YOU: The Trump administration has again taken military action without any specific Congressional authorization. President Trump has also confirmed that the U.S. has undertaken “major operations” in Iran and has also said “U.S. lives might be lost.” YOU: I am calling on [MOC/SENATOR] to call for the following actions immediately: - Public clarification on the scope of U.S. involvement - Call for and support support the Khanna–Massie War Powers Resolution in the House. - Oppose ANY funding for military escalation without Congressional authorization. YOU: Are we or are we not at war with Iran? Congress needs to answer this question, and do it quickly. YOU: [OPTIONAL COMMENTS – e.g. Clarify you’d like a written response]

Do it now.

Yes, you can leave a message. Yes, call the DC offices.

Script here again.

This war would be strategically dumb and morally wrong even if it were “free.”

It is not going to be “free,” for Americans or Iranians.

This is flying below the radar, likely because the US has not fought a high-end conventional adversary in decades.

Even the most expensive military in the world can actually get to the bottom of the stockpile.

Read this whole thread

Trump releases video message on strikes against Iran | CNN In a video posted to Truth Social, President Donald Trump encouraged Iranians to seize control of their government when US military operations conclude. He also warned American lives may be lost as a ...

The notion that this is a war to "defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats" from Iran is simply fantastical. This is a straight-up preventive war a la Iraq 2003.
www.cnn.com/2026/02/28/u...

It’s tempting to say “lose-lose” but MIT will fill the spots easily, and the DoD will be poorer for not having O-5s with the training, perspective, and connections they got in these programs.

I overlapped with three active duty officers in grad school. All were good people. I learned a lot from each, and I think they became better, more thoughtful leaders for their time at MIT.

1/2

NBC ran a piece where Mary Carrillo went to Norway to find out why they're so good at the Winter Olympics and i was yelling BECAUSE IT'S COLD THERE

then she went to a little tiny ski jump for kids and was like "it's free, equipment is provided, & they don't emphasize results"

and i was like.
oh!

Who said “good”? 😉

”What turns people into radical jihadist clerics? A new book suggests thwarted career ambitions. A subset of Muslim clerics who advocate for jihad started out as mainstream clerics looking for state-sponsored jobs…only to become unemployed, disenchanted, and radicalized” news.mit.edu/2017/why-som...

It’s because of the famous Mearsheimer accords.

Journalists Don Lemon, Georgia Fort arrested in connection with church protest against ICE Lemon's attorney said he was taken into custody by federal officers Thursday night in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammy Awards.

"As a member of the press, I filmed the church protest a few weeks ago and now I'm being arrested for that," Indipendent journalist Georgia Fort said. "It's hard to understand how we have a Constitution, Constitutional rights, when we can just be arrested for being a member of the press."

Anti-ICE protesters are following same nonviolent playbook used by people in war zones across the world to fight threats to their communities Americans are learning and doing the kind of work that civilians in war zones worldwide have done for decades: dealing with threats by organizing to help protect their neighbors and communities.

I wrote something... Hope it’s helpful ☮️

I’ve studied Nonviolent protection movements in war zones for 2 decades. Here’s what I’m seeing in the U.S.

theconversation.com/anti-ice-pro...

Happy to announce the 1st ever @isanet.bsky.social conference in South Asia in August 2026. Hosted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, we welcome proposals from scholars based in and/or studying South Asian politics & international relations, but also broader global themes ofc www.isanet.org/Conferences/...

Time is a flat circle, episode 134:

Warren Zevon ad-libbed Bibi Netanyahu's name into a live performance of Mohammed’s Radio shortly after he was first elected PM ... 30 years ago.

archive.org/details/wz19...

BJPolS abstract discussing the impact of US drone strikes on civilian lives in Yemen, highlighting data from various sources and the broader implications on mobility and local disturbances.

From November 2025 -

Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records - https://cup.org/4qy0az4

- Paolo Bertolotti, @aidanmilliff.com, Fotini Christia & Ali Jadbabaie

#OpenAccess

woof!

Until someone has Claude Code clean a new one

Qualitative Analysis with Large-N: A New Method with an Application to Aspirations in Bangladesh* Abstract. The qualitative analysis of open-ended interviews has vast potential in economics but has found limited use. This is partly because the interpret

Exciting new paper on analysis of interviews at scale!

As I've argued elsewhere (APSR, 2024), I think it's important to put humans back in the loop as an additional step *after* the LLM, but this method could easily be extended to do that.

academic.oup.com/ej/advance-a...

I wonder if it’s related to the McKinley/expanding territory fandom

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...