Lexington Green sent this extended profile/interview with Charles Hill by Emily Esfahani Smith. The tone of the article is somewhat hagiographic because Hill is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and….well…. this is in Hoover’s journal ;) If you can get past that, it is a worthwhile read about a deep thinker and scholar of grand strategy.
Profile in Strategy: Charles Hill
….In [...]
An observer, who wishes to remain nameless, sends along this dispatch on the recent drumbeat to war with Iran: For some reason, everyone and his cousin are suddenly seized on the idea that there must be an urgent need to (at a minimum) contemplate whether to bomb Iran. No one can quite say why now, [...]
Turning the pages of a few books. Here’s what I am reading right now:
The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts by Peter Coleman
An intriguing book about the nature of intractable conflicts (ex. Israeli-Palestinians), including the mathematical patterns and complexity behind the attractors and how to break the deadly cycle. A courtesy review copy from the publisher, I [...]
Ashley Tellis’ important book, India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture (2001), predicted an “arms crawl” instead of a nuclear arms race on the subcontinent. One major reason for Ashley’s benign assessment was that Indian decision makers “view their nuclear weapons primarily as political instruments intended to promote caution in the minds of their adversaries – while bolstering [...]
Major General Peter Fuller lost it yesterday and committed an unpardonable political sin - spontaneously telling the truth to reporters:
US general fired from Afghan training job
….Referring to Karzai’s recent assertion that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan if Pakistan got into a war with the U.S., Fuller was quoted as calling the comments “erratic,” adding, “Why don’t [...]
I don’t think of STRATFOR as a cyber shop, generally, but this is worth a look.
On War by Carl von Clausewitz has been the most influential book on strategy and war of all time.
We can say this because On War is the standard by which all other works of strategy are measured and only a few compared - notably Sun Tzu’s Art of War and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. The odd [...]The Bomb lends itself to magical thinking on both sides of the usual divide. Died-in-the-wool realists scoff at arms control, let alone the plans of abolitionists. They tend to ascribe powers to nuclear weapons even beyond the Bomb’s destructive capacity, powers that include deterrence stability, escalation control and escalation dominance. As readers of these posts [...]
: , . skip to main skip to sidebar The Nuclear Abolitionist Working towards a nuclear weapons-free world Pages Home Video Photo Y-12 Witness Quotable America needs a new nuclear weapon as much as Lady Gaga needs another new . outfit Rep . Ed Markey D-MA Tuesday , November 1, 2011 A Hibakusha asks , Who will continue the struggle . , Friends Ai Satoh of the Japan Council against A H Bombs Gensuikyo shared the following speech given by Ms . Setsuko Thurlow , a Hibakusha of Hiroshima , to the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly just the other day . nbsp Like so many other Hibakusha , Setsuko has dedicated herself to sharing the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and preventing future nuclear war . nbsp It is right that Setsuko spoke at the United Nations , an organization
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Trick or treat! The About Iran Blog, which is run anonymously, has posted images from a defense exhibition in Tehran. The images show placards with technical data for the Shahab, Ghadr, Qiam and Seijil missiles. This is definitely a treat. The placards contain data relating to range, payload, dimensions and mass. Someone probably needs to [...]
An interesting new blog. An operator type, an Iraq and Afghan vet, quesopaper blogging from AfPakland on situational awareness and much later in the post, on leadership:
Running To Contact
….I thought we’d cover danger in Afghanistan again by examining, “When Insurgents attack.”
A quick aside…over the years one develops a sense for explosions. Some are “ours”…outgoing mortars, rounds from a gun or [...]Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Rose Gottemoeller, in a speech at Stanford, praised one of my students, Tamara Patton, for her outstanding work on modeling Pakistan’s Khushab Plutonium Production Complex: I recently learned about some interesting work of a Master’s Candidate at Monterey Institute, Tamara Patton. Patton is focusing her [...]
Workers at PANTEX dismantled the last B53 nuclear gravity bomb, a nine-megaton behemoth affectionately known as the “Crowd Pleaser.” It sheer size and unfathomable explosive power — 600 Hiroshimas! — are so difficult to comprehend that one can’t help think about the Cold War and ask: What the hell were they thinking? That’s not what [...]