Small Wars Journal publishes articles by military and security analysts on irregular warfare, insurgency, drones, and conflicts such as Ukraine and Iran.
HN links it for military strategy analysis, including a commenter's favorite piece on Iran's strategy; one describes it as a journal on intrastate conflicts.
My apologies for not first reading your link before my curt response. Both the article and website are interesting in their own way.
First a primer on websites reporting military/intelligence affairs: two sites that occupy the ends of the credibility spectrum, http://smallwarsjournal.com and http://www.debka.com.
The first is a forum for junior military officers and professional analysts for discussing tactics and strategy. The articles all have by-lines, mostly by Captains and Majors (i.e. recently promoted Captains). The editorial board is made up of professionals. You will never read any classified information here. You may read some good war stories, but mostly you will read professional treatments of modern tactics by professionals for professionals.
On the other extreme many consider debka a conduit for the Mossad. Good luck separating the information from the disinformation on this site, but the articles can be a good read, if you can deal with the wilderness of mirrors.
In between these extremes keep in mind that intelligence analysis is about connecting the dots. Even the professionals seldom know anything for sure, and sources and means of gathering information are usually more important than any individual datum. If it makes it to print (or html), there’s probably a reason.
So where does this leave http://www.strategypage.com ? Let’s look at the staff bios on the about us page. Of the four "staff" exactly one has any military/intelligence background at all.…
> yes, but there's always some trail this way... travel logs, mailing logs, someone there to set it up, etc
All meaningless if you don't fly and use only cash, and a fake ID
> again, just easier to shoot someone... we don't need to make up imaginary drone violence, there's not much reason for it outside of a warzone
I didn't think it was easier than shooting someone. All of this stems from me saying it's only a matter of time until a psycho mounts a gun onto a drone and flies it over a crowd. We have a mass shooting once a week. Tech is easier and more accessible and only continues to be easier and more available. If soldiers are taking off the shelf drones and using them to easily kill people on the cheap, it's only a matter of time until instead of a box of ammo and trench coat, someone throws on a dji vr headset and flies a drone with either a gun on it or a bomb.
It's not imaginary
> Just a few months ago, a head of state was attacked with off-the-shelf consumer drones — an apparent first. It happened in broad daylight on August 4 in Venezuela. According to police, the drones exploded and missed their target
https://www.defenseone.com/feature/against-the-drones/
> Armed men allegedly identified as members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) attacked the community of Pinolapa, in the municipality of Tepalcatepec, in the state of Michoacán, with drones loaded with explosives.
> residents of the area indicated that the drones were loaded with C4 explosives…
> Yet, they choose not to do so and allowed their enemies to develop nuclear weapons on their own.
If they had a choice to not allow them develop lethal weapons, they would by all means. McCarthyism executed a few, incarcerated several & targeted scores on charges of defense espionage, over a decade, including Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Not a great example. If the world has misunderstood this grandiosity, US should be willing to let Iranians & Koreans build their nuclear weapons, no?
> The US has been an incredible force of good in the world for the most part.
Reference needed to make such "exceptional" statement. The natural status quo would have inadvertently kept some power balance with or without US. International policing has just made the waters murkier. AFAIK US has meddled with politics of dozens of countries for political & economic gains. Count almost the whole of Latin America in it. Confessions of an economic hitman is a good read (it exaggerated several claims but the theme is consistent & accepted to be major US policies) Middle East is a quagmire, and hard to comment in this post - but what was the rationale of pitting Pakistan against India militarily for decades & now India against China. This is setting up a war of attrition on someone else's expense. As an Indian by birth, I know the numbers run into thousands of soldiers & civilians killed in conflict, mostly funded by arms & assistance to Pakistan over 80s & 90s. Could you…
I'm really worried that cheap, abundant and reliable is not something our defense industry is capable of.
- As a result of deindustrialization, we can't ramp up production of critical components. We make up for that by prepositioning supply depots around the world, and these depots allow a brigade or so to fight for a few weeks. But once that runs out, things get hairy. See this article: https://www.csis.org/analysis/united-states-running-out-weapons-send-ukraine which talks about "surge" capability after a four year ramp up time and also here: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/us-not-ready-peer-peer-fight-europe
- We have little sea lift capacity to move gear around to the hot spot even if we were able to produce it in large quantities. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/12/31/the-us-military-ran-the-largest-stress-test-of-its-sealift-fleet-in-years-its-in-big-trouble/ see also https://gcaptain.com/new-report-says-us-navy-capacity-is-very-weak/
A nice summary of US military logistics is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpPuJ_r8Xg
- US gear has a reputation of being expensive to maintain and breaking down easily, even though it is generally best in class.
- We critically rely on air dominance
Basically we've optimized our military for global police actions by pre-positioning small amounts of troops and supplies around the world, rather than maintaining an industrial base with a large amount of slack and the ability to quickly ramp up production to…
Even more surprising is that everyone of these [Wikileaks supporters] I know are ardent freaks about keeping their own lives private.
Privacy of the individual is not the same as privacy of a government[1], we must take into consideration the balance of power. If you look at things with respect to power it makes sense that the most private individuals want powerful organizations to be more transparent as they have disproportionate power over individuals.
The author didn't clearly explain why he hates Wikileaks but presumably it is because of what was leaked: diplomatic cables as opposed to something that uncovered massive criminal conspiracy.
We haven't seen anything to suggest that these leaks are dangerous to the US. Defense secretary Robert Gates basically said they were embarrassing and awkward but won't have much of an effect on foreign policy[2]. For earlier leaks on the US military shootings he said there was no apparent fallout[3].
[Wikileaks] are my enemy, and I support any use of state force against them, up to and including lethal force.
This is an overreaction. The information was not that valuable or that hostile to the US. Most of it was a confirmation of stuff we already knew. And even if it was serious, I don't want my government going around assassinating people for leaking documents to the media. I don't know how that can justify lethal force. Maybe if it was strategic military routes or something that is obviously not newsworthy.
1:…
Long War Journal
http://www.longwarjournal.org/
Small Wars Journal
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/recent
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/
Inter-Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/
Think tanks:
The Hudson Institute leans to the right.
http://www.hudson.org/
The Washington Institute centers on Middle East affairs.
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateI01.php
The US Army has its own think tank.
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/
The Knight Center concentrates on Western Hemisphere affairs and threats to journalistic freedom.
http://knightcenter.utexas.edu/en/blog
Blogs:
Fausta is a capitalist perspective on Latin American affairs, mostly a link aggregator.
http://faustasblog.com/
Jihad Watch mixes world war news with anti-Muslim agitation, but it's one of the only sources for finding detailed news reports on these events. I will recommend reading it, but I do not recommend believing it.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
There are a large number of blogs dedicated to correcting the mainstream media's factual errors in reporting the Arab-Israeli conflict.
http://r-mew.blogspot.com/
http://blog.camera.org/
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/
http://honestreporting.com/backspin-blog/
If you have an interest in Israel, the Elder of Ziyon is one of the better bloggers on that subject, with a pro-Israel bias.
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/