Dr Matthew Ford
@warmatters
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Saarf-Londoner. Co-author @warradical . Assoc Prof @Forsvarshogsk . Forthcoming book “War in the Smartphone Age” with @hurstpublishers
My head is in Silicon Valley
Joined June 2011
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We've now had a string of great reviews for Radical War, my co-authored book with
@andrewhoskins
The book is our effort to think about war in the age of the smartphone, where connected devices mediate our understanding of war.
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Chatham Dockyard?
What is this? A 17th century target list?
🚨🇷🇺 Russia updates the list of European capitals that will be targeted by nuclear weapon first!
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Friends might be an over statement. Kalashnikov made nothing from the AK. He was far from happy about that. It is one reason we had Kalashnikov vodka in the 1990s and why he demanded payment for interviews. This is another reason why books on the AK tend to be thin on detail.
Eugene Stoner and Mikhail Kalashnikov both shooting each others rifles. The day two Kings became friends.
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I'm not an intelligence expert. It isn't my field.
But I can see that we've ALL become intelligence experts.
Twitter is now a full on echo chamber where the noise to signal ratio has gone through the roof.
A short thread on how to avoid the pitfalls of social media.
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My uncle passed away this morning. His local hospital is clearly in crisis. Kept him waiting for 7hrs. Decided to go to an optician. Told him he had a stroke. Sent him back to hospital. Waited another 7hrs. Took him to another hospital. Discharged him early. Collapsed at home.
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It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Ukrainians can now track the movement of Russia's armed forces just by geolocating the bluetooth earbuds that Russian soldiers stole in Ukraine.
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Over the last 7 days Twitter has experienced a bout of war fever.
That war fever has been scripted as part of what I think has been a very successful information war.
I would guess that this has been conducted by the West's info-ops community in support of Ukraine.
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Thirty years of military fads:
Revolution in Military Affairs
New wars
Force Transformation
Adaptation from Below
Population centric COIN
Enemy centric COIN
Proxy war
Remote war
Asymmetric war
Hybrid war
Grayzone war
Liminal war
Surrogate war
Vicarious war
Accelerated war
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Twenty yrs ago I started a self-funded PhD. I wrote about small arms. As of 2020 this had been downloaded 4780 times (KCL has taken the counter down now) & on academia viewed 2223 times.
I did this at my own expense. No would fund a PhD on guns.
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@Violent_Memo
@br4s1d4s
Happily you can download download my PhD and by the looks of it has been around 6000 times (4.7k via KCL & 1.4k via academia).
The spike in July 17 is associated with people not wanting to buy my book - which was very different from my PhD!
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This morning I said goodbye to my Dutch cat, Pablo. When I get home he will be gone.
Born in the basement of a kebab shop on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam, he was a good pal to me, sitting on my desk as I did my PhD. I don’t know why he chose me but I’ll miss him.
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Very pleased to say that my next book will be out with
@HurstPublishers
in March 2022.
Written with
@andrewhoskins
we take a look at war in the age of the smartphone.
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A good description of a Ukrainian Intelligence Fusion Cell - including the role layer by OSINT
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At last!
We finally get to the logical end point. Only taken 4 years but here it is.
A former Brexit Party MEP lays it all out.
Not a clue about European security, history or British power but that’s irrelevant.
Everything must be sacrificed at the alter of Brexit.
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I didn’t think the Tories would actually make cuts to the UK defence budget.
There’s a war on in Europe & IMV this is crazy.
Resource & Capital Departmental Expenditure Limits for Defence reduced to:
23-24 24-25
RDEL £35.0B-> £32.8B
CDEL £19.2B -> £18.9B
UK Govt depts are facing 20% cuts as a minimum this year.
Defence included.
Even if MOD weathers this, do we really think the strategic outlook framed in the Integrated Review can stretch in these conditions?
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I'm just looking at the satellite imagery from
@konrad_muzyka
's Ukraine Conflict Monitor and the number of MBTs, IFVs and other assorted vehicles that the Russians just seem to find out of nowhere is remarkable.
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A coup d’état in a nuclear state that is currently at war with its neighbour.
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Are we watching the implosion of thirty years of International Relations in real time?
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Nick Robinson has just check mated Sajid Javid on
#BBCR4today
The previous Chancellor said a No Deal would cost £90bn.
NR: You’re spending money you don’t have. How much will a No Deal cost?
Javid is blustering & can’t answer...
Cummings is furiously texting the Chancellor
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This short piece by
@Sam_Cranny
is also worth a read this morning.
A lot of fascinating detail about Russia's artillery doctrine & use.
Including: "Russian counter-battery fire is very fast and accurate... [and] can be completed in three minutes"
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It is my birthday today & I listen to the Marriage of Figaro. Had cancer in my twenties. Very pleased to be here now.
I wish it wasn’t but it is rubbish out there.
It isn’t a compensation but have a picture of my gorgeous cat Eleftherio Kyriacou Venezelos to help you through.
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THREAD:
The Kherson pocket contains 20-30 Russian BTGs.
If there is a chance of their destruction, my own view is Putin will not risk an internal coup but push to use Tactical Nuclear/Thermobaric weapons to reshape the battlefield.
Day 2 of
#Kherson
offensive. Am avoiding all comment on tactical info: what matters is the defeat of Russia W of the Dnepr and the strategic consequences spelled out here... 🧵 1/ ✊🏼🇺🇦
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Give everything to Ukraine & the war will still not be over quickly.
Even if Russia is pushed back to its borders the war won’t be over quickly.
Even if Russia is defeated (& I don’t know how that actually happens) Europe will need rearming.
We need to get used to this idea.
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What people in uniform know already.
And a learning point for the rest of us...
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We seem to have attracted a gorgeous stray black cat. All it wants is a cuddle (& food).
I am now contemplating (over my first coffee) when to take this one to Celia Hammond…
*Not that I’m secretly hoping there is no chip and this one will soon join me for my morning coffee 🤥
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For all sorts of reasons, this is my favourite tweet in ages
How is it possible that I’ve seen more videos out of this war in Israel in a few hours than I have from Ukraine in almost 2 years???
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WOW! My book Weapon of Choice just got reviewed in the Journal of Military History AND they liked it!
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@paulmasonnews
@elonmusk
He's not just trolling though is he.
He's actually inciting race violence.
He knows very well that there is a danger the fascists provoke the muslim community on to the streets and then, hey presto, he has his civil war.
Issue an arrest warrant for incitement to hatred.
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All this
#coronavirus
hand washing is killing Norovirus & rotavirus.
Reporting was higher BUT the...
“Overall activity for this 2 week period was 24% lower than the 5 seasoned average for the same period”
UK PHE Summary of surveillance 2019 to 2020
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This article is a powerful, detailed & excoriating critique.
@EmmaLBriant
pulls no punches when she writes that "Britain's exit from Europe...was achieved using illicit means" and that the "Leave campaigns committed criminal acts & actively, serially & demonstrably lied..."
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So if I've understood this correctly, Ukraine has locked down roaming for Russian and Belarus.
Belarus, however, still allows network roaming for Ukrainian devices.
Remarkable.
Ukrainians are locating their devices on the territory of the Homiel region, Belarus, where part of the Russian army retreated.
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EXCLUSIVE:
UK to respond to Iranian crisis in five years time.
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Good article.
A prof willing to call out Western infatuation with “manoeuvre warfare” & argue (correctly IMV) that we’re seeing the war through the lens of a Ukraine info op & consistently poor Western punditry.
An essay by me ‘Russian fortifications present an old problem for Ukraine’ in Engelsberg Ideas, a site that’s really living up to its name.
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While military historians are playing at the history of this war, we need to be attentive to those people who are actually trying to record it.
That’s not an easy thing to do for people given the dangers of recording and uploading stuff.
Forget the hot takes. Think evidence.
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A thread on S.L.A. Marshall & the Ratio of Fire.
Marshall is controversial.
His central claim is that only 25% of soldiers in the line fired their weapons.
Several military historians have disputed this.
My own views on Marshall are framed by my work on Small Arms.
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I said I’d do some Chrimbo threads.
This first one is on guns. In particular it is on the decision by Edward Stanhope, Secretary of State for War to adopt the Lee-Metford in 1888.
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This is pretty cool
Watch World War I Every Day On The Western Front In 60 Seconds
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1st if you want to follow some REAL academic expertise in intelligence studies follow:
@RoryCormac
@77_msg
@WWIPhD
@CKHillebrand
& if you want to try to escape the echo chamber then follow:
@konrad_muzyka
@vpkivimaki
I knew these people before the twitterstorm. They're safe
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My old mentor at the MOD Pattern Room met him on several occasions. He was a proper collector of AK variants (all in the NFC). The story of Soviet small arms innovation is fascinating but entirely unwritten (in English anyway) & appears to now be passed on word of mouth.
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Ok, I am now having to explain the difference between an armoured car, an armoured personnel carrier, a self-propelled gun, a tank destroyer and a tank to my teenager...
I am sure such elementary knowledge used to be taught at secondary school.
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The story of Soviet military innovation demands more analysis in my opinion. From what I know of small arms development, it runs entirely counter to American academic thinking and in many respects was truly innovative.
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So let's get this straight.
10% inflation
10% currency devaluation
22% in poverty
56 MPs under investigation for sexual misconduct
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I’ve subsequently found out he walked to A&E because he couldn’t get an ambulance.
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So back to Blighty I go for a funeral and a passing that has shocked my family.
Tonight I will toast his memory.
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UK Govt depts are facing 20% cuts as a minimum this year.
Defence included.
Even if MOD weathers this, do we really think the strategic outlook framed in the Integrated Review can stretch in these conditions?
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Could you even imagine a drone feed of an artillery strike being uploaded to social media, broadcast all over the planet & given this kind of description in 2010? In 2015?
& who knows whether this is accurate footage?
Ukrainian sources are claiming this artillery strike on a 2nd Army Russian command post near Izyum, Kharkiv Oblast, killed Major General Andrey Simonov.
It's yet to be confirmed by Russian sources but it's significant they named a specific general.
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If it wasn't such a human tragedy story then we might have concluded that this was silly season and that the press hadn't just lots all sense of its mind, purpose and common decency.
Suspected Press pack on boats (nearly all all dive boats) mid channel looking for refugee crossings - No RAF
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I’d like to congratulate Dr
@Salisbot
for successfully defending her PhD.
A fun afternoon with
@jackmcd83
.
Congratulations to
@AJBousquet
for successfully supervising.
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We do not understand Putin's escalation ladder.
We know what the top end of that ladder looks like. He's signalled it very clear.
Stay our or get nuked.
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British politics is in a very unhealthy place.
The electorate are licensing the Tories to use power arbitrarily.
They may not realise this. But that’s what is happening.
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Back to the future
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It feels like the right kind of day for Death of Stalin.
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THREAD:
I spoke to one OSINT mate who told me that the invasion of Ukraine looked exactly like every other large scale operation conducted by the Russians since 1968.
#Armchairgeneral
- re-examining the information war.
Using the Prague Spring of August 1968 as a template for events in
#Ukraine
Image: BBC
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“Between my service in the U.S. Marines and over more than a decade as a foreign correspondent, I’ve been engaged in the professional study of organized human violence for 25 years. But I’ve never seen anything even close to this volume of artillery being unleashed.”
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And I beg forbearance from those intelligence analysts and academics that I have not listed in this thread.
Please say hello so that I can follow you!
And I hope this helps folks.
end/
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Colonel Dax walking the trench before the assault. What a great shot that is.
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I had a very nice letter from the Navy who thanked me for my work.
They wrote:
"...your work has helped to ensure we bring our people home safe. Thank you."
I was quite chuffed with that.
That was for my work on guns. Something everyone laughed at me about a few years ago.
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Dear
@ukhomeoffice
please revoke this man’s visa & remove him from the UK. He is a foreign national inciting violence.
Many thanks
Bannon calls for Brexit supporters to take up arms and fight to take back the U.K.
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THREAD:
Gruesome stuff but a very useful thread.
Several academics have been writing about this sort of thing.
A quick list of things you might want to read.
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By now, many will have seen the video of a Ukrainian drone dropping a small bomb through the sunscreen (!) of a car driven by Russian soldiers. Here's a short thread on how it was done (with thanks to
@ian_matveev
, on whose thread this is based). /1
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Very pleased to have signed a contract for another book to be published with
@HurstPublishers
next year.
Now to get writing!
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The PM has a FIVE year parliament to completely break the fascists.
He has the security apparatus of the entire state behind him.
He knows what that can do.
He knows how to turn Theresa May’s hostile environment on the far right.
They are over & now living in a fantasy world.
The Prime Minister was the CPS who prosecuted the 2011 rioters.
There is absolutely zero chance that the rioters will get away with this last weekend.
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This is very interesting.
The capacity to track jets isn’t owned by Elon. All
@Twitter
can do is amplify content from users who publish this info.
So when Twitter bans an account, the user moves to a platform that doesn’t. In the process Twitter destroys its own value.
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It appears that all automated flight tracking accounts utilizing open source data from
@ADSBexchange
have been banned from Twitter, including
@RUOligarchJets
.
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Useful map from
@konrad_muzyka
& his Ukraine Conflict Monitor briefing. This sets out Russian attacks and Ukrainian counter moves.
Particularly useful for framing how much of the Donbas has been taken since the beginning of the war.
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THREAD:
On Russian views of the war. Based on Ian's scans of Russian telly and Social Media.
Useful.
Big Thread: After a few more days of war, I've been carefully monitoring Russian social media reaction and production and I'm more convinced than before that Putin's regime has totally overestimated its ability to win a propaganda war.
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The problem with social media is that these platforms are DESIGNED to feed your timeline with stuff that you want to see.
They're designed to be sticky. To keep you engaged.
They are a mirror of your inputs to them.
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Hybrid war... a big topic. Thought I'd put a reading list together.
Then I thought, "wouldn't it be nice to share"... so here it is.
Obvs I've missed things, so if the generous inhabitants of the twitter hive mind have suggestions then drop me a tweet👍
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I’ve decided to liberally block.
Got bored of libertarians, accelerationists and civil war junkies calling the police and the law courts into question.
I just can’t be arsed with the endless whinging and conspiracy nonsense.
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It is all happening today.
Jeez.
What happens when they get to the border...😬
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Revenge with a smile
Ken Clarke - "The PM has a great skill in keeping a straight face while he's being so disingenuous"...
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I've read
@konrad_muzyka
Ukrainę Monitor Report for the past few weeks.
He tells us that the Ru Army has now committed its 1st line of troops & must consider mobilising the rest of its Army.
That's 2 million people.
Will they be in any state to fight? Probably not...but 😬
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The Russians fighting with 1960s tanks.
FV432 armoured vehicle in use designed in the 1960s.
Meanwhile MOD spent £3.2bn on a replacement that only injured it’s occupants.
The UK is as hollowed out as Russia but no one wants to admit it.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 27 May 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response:
🇺🇦
#StandWithUkraine
🇺🇦
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Happy Birthday to me
Happy Birthday to me
Got to be a Manhattan as a celebration!
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Military history type twitter friends.
Lots interesting things happening this next few weeks. All military history related. A new society AND I think the British Journal for Military History has just been saved.
More soon.
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From Today’s Ukraine Conflict Monitor Report by
@konrad_muzyka
“It is possible we are about to witness the full absorption of Belarus back into Russia.”
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Ben Wallace interviewed on
@BBCr4today
Blames the run down in military capability on 30 years of underfunding.
True Ben… but your party has been in power for ten of those years!
Jeez, you only bought NLAW replacements in Dec 2022!
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After nine years, this is my last day at
@IRSussex
. I've learnt a huge amount from my brilliant colleagues & I am sorry to be leaving them.
I wish everyone at the department all the very best for the future and look forward to catching up with people on the conference circuit!
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Let's face it, military AI isn't going to work. Datacentres already consume 20 per cent of Ireland's electricity production.
The infrastructure for cloud based AI applications that aim to identify 1500 targets a day just isn't there. And it won't be for decades.
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Stable. Door. Horse. Bolted.
.
@BorisJohnson
wants a coordinated international response to the Taliban’s coup “in the coming months”. Which is all but official confirmation of the Taliban takeover
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To be clear, I don’t know all the circumstances. I’m sure everyone was working as well as they could given the prevailing challenges. We have to wait on the Coroner’s report.
I feel it could have been avoided but also I’m no expert.
So we wait.
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Another must see film
Kirk Douglas is 102 years old today. Here he is as Colonel Dax in Kubrick's 'Paths of Glory' (1957).
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So Mercer has abused his ministerial position to access military records for political purposes?
‘Mercer stood by his claims, however, suggesting that he knew from his role as veterans minister that Thomas had never been in “combat” even if he had been in “conflict zones”…’
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A thread outlining my thoughts on Second World War tactics.
For me tactics only makes sense when looked at as a socio-technical system. This thread reflects that way of thinking.
Again I'll be using British examples but there are some US crossovers later on.
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@irgarner
Hypothesis for you:
They can be defeated in Ukraine and still not be defeated.
So they withdraw from Ukraine but maintain an ongoing bombardment on Ukraine and economic war with the West while in the Russian borders.
When they’re ready they invade again or not as they choose.
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I think we tend to forget how war can be used to consolidate power and cement political positions.
I’m not a Russia specialist but I understand how political violence creates a new politics that defies what we might ordinarily understand as rational.
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US intelligence. Everyone seems to forgot US intelligence capability & how it is being used in support of Ukraine.
The most astonishing feature of this conflict is Ukraine's ability to threaten the Russian high command . If this story stands up, not only did they injure Gerasimov yesterday but killed or injured 20 senior officers.
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I’m loving this story
Brexit UK could unite with Canada and Australia to create ‘world’s third BIGGEST military'
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My article
"The Epistemology of Lethality: bullets, knowledge trajectories, kinetic effects"
Has just been published in
@EJIntSec
.
It should be free to view only via this link:
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First thing to understand is that intelligence work is divided into 3 levels:
Acquisition - the collection of information
Analysis - its evaluation
Acceptance - the readiness to make use of that intelligence for forming policy
This forms an intelligence cycle.
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Do you think everyone has forgotten what war actually is.
I'm beginning to think that might be the case.
When was the last time anyone tried to move 190k troops into a hostile country.
#iexpecthistorianswilltellme
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“Russian scouts move forward to probe Ukrainian positions, then call in large-scale artillery strikes when they make contact. The artillery is followed by masses of armor supported by infantry. It’s classic “combined arms” warfare…”
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If you're interested in military innovation, connectivity and changing patterns of participation in war then maybe give my Open Access article in
@IAJournal_CH
a go.
"From innovation to participation: connectivity and the conduct of contemporary warfare"
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When rubber bullets aren't less that lethal.
This BMJ article summarising the evidence on these weapons might be of interest to American friends
"Death, injury and disability from kinetic impact projectiles in crowd-control settings: a systematic review"
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Sometimes academics behave badly. A senior colleague sought to prevent the publication of a book.
Professionally speaking IMV that was wrong. And yet some in the UK appear to be quite willing to give that person a pass.
I’m willing to be pragmatic on things but there are limits
Academic feuds are funny because it's one mean footnote every three years between two people who almost entirely agree
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Looks like the situation has changed.
Reporting dynamics have changed too.
And now we're looking an encirclement at the Dnipro, catching the Ukrainian Army in the Donbas and locking up the south east and south west of Ukraine.
The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is continuing.
The map below is the latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 01 March 2022
Find out more about the the UK Government's response:
🇺🇦
#StandWithUkraine
🇺🇦
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