Robert Farley

MISTAKES, REPEATED. Kingdaddy has a less rosy appreciation of U.S. theoretical counter-insurgency efforts than I: A separate internal review this year by the military’s Center for Army Lessons Learned, based on 152 interviews with soldiers involved in the training and advisory program, found that there was “no standardized guideline” for preparing advisers and that such […]

PLAN AVIATION. John points us to this report about a Chinese purchase of 2 Russian Su-33 carrier capable fighter attack aircraft. The Su-33 is a carrier based upgrade of the Su-27, and China reportedly may purchase another fifty or so aircraft. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has played around with the possibility of carrier aviation […]

QUAKE ATTACK. Check out this interesting report on conventional bunker busting munitions at Defense Tech. It’s a bit technical, but the upshot is that conventional munitions can do a remarkably good job of destroying underground bunkers, better, in fact, than extant nuclear bunker busters. Drop enough “Deep Diggers” and the result is an earthquake that […]

FUTURE FORCE. Did you like America’s Army, the free first-person shooter designed as a recruitment tool by the US Army? Then you’ll love Future Force Combat, a free game that simulates the experience of a Future Combat System equipped Mounted Combat Team. Future Force Combat accomplishes the nifty trick of being not only a recruitment […]

TAX EVASION. To add a bit to what Ezra argued, the dreadful effects of Republican fiscal irresponsibility extend beyond the question of universal health care. Assisted by the calculated indifference of the administration, the services are hiding an increasing percentage of their day-to-day costs in defense supplementals, allowing them to escape difficult political scrutiny. As […]

AND I THOUGHT DISPLAYING RESOLVE WAS IMPORTANT. Apparently not. Henry Kissinger: �If you mean, by �military victory,� an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies […]

MORE CASH, PLEASE. What, the security fence along the Mexican border may actually cost many times what was projected? The hell you say! The Bush administration’s proposal to secure the nation’s borders with a high-tech “virtual fence” is likely to cost far more than the $2 billion that industry analysts initially estimated, possibly up to […]

OPEN OFFICE SPACE. So, Spencer, could we say that the War on Terror has a been a boon for low level managers at Al Qaeda? More seriously, I wonder where Al Qaeda has made its most serious human capital investments. Every kind of organization, from corporate to military, relies on an expert class that holds […]

STALKING. Last month, a Chinese Song class diesel electric submarine approached, apparently undetected, to within 5 nautical miles of the USS Kitty Hawk, well within both missile and torpedo range. The submarine then surfaced, and was reported by a recon aircraft. What’s going on here? Diesel electric submarines are remarkably difficult to detect, but I’m […]

QUANTIFICATION. Yglesias made a critical point last week: Anyone who follows the contemporary American military will tell you that it’s frustratingly difficult to say how successful it is at minimizing civilian casualties since, after all, the military doesn’t count civilian casualties. But there you have it. If Bush really wanted to minimize civilian casualties, wouldn’t […]