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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 the students 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 these web pages are to share it more broadly.

But first, my thoughts over the past month:

September 9: A block of ice in Kyiv

"After the initial invasion [of Ukraine in 2022], a military operation that uses music, painting, and sculpture for "cognitive defense" put a life-sized iron heart in downtown Kyiv. The heart was cut out of a rusting steel plate and encased in a block of ice. Since it was winter, the ice would not melt on its own; only human hands could do that. People gathered around and put their hands on it for as long as they could stand and, person by person, day by day, the Ukrainian people melted the block of ice. I'm not a military man, but I would say that any country capable of thinking like that will be a tough country to defeat." -- Sebastian Junger on Substack

September 7: Get your one-dollar coin here, just $1.55!

(Plus shipping, of course...)

Donald Trump glories in breaking norms, most recently the norm that American coins don't show the face of an individual who's still alive. There's another that a dollar should buy a dollar's worth of something or other, though that's a norm that's probably been violated by every president. But the gold-colored President Trump coin can't do that, since it sells for $154.50 per hundred-coin bag, plus $12.95 for standard shipping. That works out to $1.67 each, meaning you experience the inflation of Trump's, Biden's, and Obama's presidencies, plus some of Duba's, all in a single purchase. And if instead you frame the Donbuck and hang it on the wall, it will continue to lose value with every passing year.

September 1: Will Putin tangle with NATO?

Certainly the Russian dictator has increased his "gray war" conflict with Western Europe in recent weeks, deploying his cyber minions to harass the Baltic governments (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which his predecessor Joe Stalin seized in 1939 as part of his deal with Hitler to divide Europe between the two dictatorships) and sending "accidental" drones onto German airports and other targets. Nor would he be the first to try to get out of an unsuccessful war by expanding it. When Hitler was talked out of invading Britain in 1940, he launched Operaton Barbarosa against Soviet Russia, a much more formidable foe. Similarly, Japan's army and air forces were stalled in China for ten years before it decided to change its luck by invading the Dutch Indies, Thailand, British Burma, and -- fatally -- Hawaii in December 1941. And Richard Nixon had a great plan to end the Vietnam War, which depended upon first invading Cambodia. Will Putin follow those bad examples?

August 24: A win for Orange Man

A tip of the virtual hat to President Trump for his NASCAR race in Washington DC the other day. Some money was spent, but nobody was hurt, and more than a quarter-million people were entertained at no cost to themselves other than getting there. 250 miles of triple-digit speeds in honor of American's 250th birthday! There have been worse days in the 21st century so far.

(If it wasn't NASCAR, forgive me. I'm not much into auto racing myself.)

August 19: Book burners, from Hitler to Putin

Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Emily Hamilton has a new word for Russia's attempt, now in its fifth year, to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainian culture: Bibliocide, the planned, systematic destruction of books. "It is," Ms Hamilton writes, "a common tactic of totalitarians and terrorists."

Like so many of Vladimir Putin's crimes in Ukraine, his inspiration was Adolf Hitler. In Germany, the effort began in April 1933, with the first books condemned to the flames being those of a Jewish scholar at the Institute of Sex Research in Berlin. From there it expanded to 4,000 titles and tens of thousands of copies of works by Marx and Engels, H G Wells, Felix Mendelssohn, Stefan Zweig, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Helen Keller, and of course Lenin and Trotsky.

Bibliocide was similarly practiced by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo, and ISIS in Iraq.

In Ukraine, Putin has damaged or destroyed 906 libraries since the full-scale invasion of February 2022. In the town of Kapytolivka, when the librarian returned after it was liberated, she counted 4500 books remaining from her collection of 16,500. A particular target of the Russians were books on Ukrainian history and culture, which she found piled in the toilets, smeared with human excrement.

August 1: Murdered by Vladimir Putin

The Voronov family from the village of Radushne, in the south of Ukraine, was hit by a Russian missile on Thursday. Ten bodies have been found, and six identified, while work continues to excavate the wreckage of their home.