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WAR IN THE MODERN WORLD

Welcome to the website!

Most of the papers here are from my studies at King's College London in an online "programme" for mid-career British Army officers called War in the Modern World. About half were indeed British Army, including a captain who deployed to Afghanistan midway through the four years. (Alas, upon his return he dropped out of the course, left the army, and began to study law instead.) The rest of us were from other militaries or civilian life, from a Danish pilot to an assistant to the prime minister of Singapore. I learned a great deal, and this website is to share it more broadly.

From the blog:

April 30: How Israel became the bad guy

Younger Granddaughter is a senior at Yale, and one of her best friends is Jewish, so I can understand why they might shrug their shoulders at the keffiyef-masked thugs now holding their campus hostage. For four years, they've been told that the world is a place where Americans, Brits, and other westerners oppress the weak, at home and in the outside world, wherever we can get away with it. It doesn't matter that Hamas came across the border to rape, torture, murder, and kidnap two thousand or so Israelis in order to provoke a war in which Gazan civilians would suffer. Israel is western! It's a prosperous, tolerant, liberal democracy and the homeland of a faith that emerged in the Levant 2,500 years ago -- a thousand years before Gabriel visited Muhammad in his Saudi cave.

No matter! Israelis are seen as colonizers, and Palestinians as colonized, whether in Gaza, on the West Bank, or in Israel itself. Anna believes that, and probably her pal Hannah does as well. What else would they believe, given what they've they heard from the their professors since their first Zoom class in September 2020?

April 23: Sounds like a plan!

"A coalition of faculty and staff at Columbia ... called for faculty to boycott commencement activities unless the school ... remov[es] city police from campus, reinstat[es] student groups that have lost official recognition because of prior protest activity, divest[s] itself from companies tied to weapons manufacturing and offer[s] amnesty for students and faculty disciplined for their recent protest actions."

April 21: Better late than never, I suppose

He may look like a 9th-grader, but Mike Johnson proved yesterday that he's one of the few adults in the US Congress. (Think of Jamaal Bowman, D-NY, who not only pulled a fire alarm to delay a vote but claims he thought it was a door-handle!) Mr Johnson's backbone is even more impressive since he was earlier opposed to aiding Ukraine.

Kudos also to the Democrats who made up for the Republican Clown Caucus voting against Ukraine and what we used to call the Free World. Let's hope that they'll also support Speaker Johnson if Chief Clown Marjorie Taylor Greene tries to unseat him.

It's not that I particularly care for the specifics. The total is impressive enough -- $60 billion! -- but less than $9 billion of that is for ammunition and missiles.

And another milestone was reached yesterday: Russian Mediazona and BBC Russia have compiled 50,471 names of Putin's soldiers killed in the war against Ukraine. The number is certainly higher, meaning that Russia has lost more men in Ukraine than the US lost in nearly ten years of fighting in Vietnam.

April 10: A salute to the brave

Joe Biden is of course "outraged" at the death of seven World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza the other day, but my reaction is pride and admiration for the brave foreigners who put their lives on the line in a good cause. They include a Pole, an Australian, and a Canadian working for WCK, and three Brits who hired out as security guards. (The seventh victim was their Palestinian driver.)

A tip of the virtual hat to them! The thugs of the Wagner Group, and the American contractors who went off the rails in Iraq, have given the profession a bad name, but military veterans doing security work are mostly good-hearted people helping others at the risk of their own lives, as Jim Henderson, John Chapman, and James Kirby have demonstrated. They worked for a British firm, Solace Global, whose motto is "Leave nothing to chance." But chance, alas, always gets its vote.

April 9: On banning arms sales to Israel

"If you want an example of the death wish of Western civilisation, I give you the current proposal from members of the British establishment that this country should ban arms sales to Israel.... The proposed embargo is now supported by [Members of Parliament] on all sides, by the former head of MI6, by some former Supreme Court Justices, and by about 600 members of the legal profession, all of them clamouring for us to turn our backs on the only democracy in the Middle East.

"We are being asked to shun the Israelis ... [who have] only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since World War II; and when 130 hostages, including, for heaven’s sake, a baby, are being kept in dungeons in Gaza by their jihadi captors...." (Boris Johnson in the Sunday Daily Mail)

April 1: Surrendering without a fight

“If there is no U.S. support, ... we have no air defense, no Patriot missiles, no jammers for electronic warfare, no 155-millimeter artillery rounds,” the Ukrainian president told the Washington Post the other day. “It means we will go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.”

We fled from Saigon in 1975, when Congress refused to let the president use American air power to stop North Vietnamese tanks from overrunning South Vietnam. We fled from Kabul in 2021, when President Biden gave up the fight and stranded 100 or more Americans and thousands of our Afghan supporters to the mercy of the Taliban. Now it's Congress again that's the problem, as a handful of Republican right-wingers have blocked a $60 billion military aid package for the past six months. Are we going to see another desperate American airlift from Kyiv?

Meanwhile, the Democrats' left wing -- starting with President Biden! -- is telling the Israelis how to fight their war, and we'll withhold their military aid unless they do it out way. Where does this stupidity end -- with two airlifts, one from Jerusalem (which Israel regards as its capital) and another from Tel Aviv (where we dithering Americans maintain a "branch office" of the US Embassy and many of our diplomatic offices)? How much humiliation can one nation experience before it becomes a laughingstock?

"If Ukraine falls," Zelensky warns, "Putin will divide the world." Not Putin by himself, of course, but Putin in concert with China, Iran, and North Korea, who are already providing overt and covert aid to his invasion of Eastern Europe.

The essays (in more or less chronological order)