Archive for January, 2008
I’ve said before, several times, that satellite reconnaissance is probably as important and more useful than the nuclear deterrent, and that technical change means that it’s feasible. Here’s an example: Canada just launched its own independent radar satellite, with the object of monitoring the vast spaces of the Arctic. Even smaller economies than the UK [...]
Ken Livingstone is surely unelectable now, sez one of the sinister faceless committee/gaggle of sockpuppets attached to Daniel Davies that is Aaronovitch Watch. Jesus, I hope not; the prospect of Boris Johnson being put in charge of London is too much to contemplate. Consider this; Ken brought a load of old hard-left mates with him [...]
You think things were bad in Pakistan? Think again; if Dawn’s sources are worth anything, it’s now the policy of the British government, in the person of David Miliband, to get behind Nawaz Sharif and the Saudi lobby in Pakistani politics. We warned you; it looks like they’re heading for a kind of negative excellence [...]
Under-reported story of the week; reported, of course, by Ackerman.
I think this is going to be very significant indeed. Roll back, if we may, to the winter of 2006; it had just become authorised knowledge that things in Iraq were unpeachy, Rumsfeld had just been thrown off the sleigh, and the Baker-Hamilton commission was about [...]
How did a set of medical techniques and institutional styles with absolutely no therapeutic value survive for 2,500 years from ancient Greece to the early 20th century - even though the scientific knowledge required to demolish them had been available since the 1600s? This is the question David Wootton’s “Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since [...]
This just keeps getting worse: The Times reports that the Government has rejected 300 out of 700 Iraqi employees who applied for resettlement, mostly under the 12 month rule. That’s a rejection rate of just under half. Curiously, the Foreign Office’s own scheme has turned down 38 out of 180; this seems to suggest that [...]
This PPRuNE thread reminds me of something from the archives.
During a meeting we had not long ago, the increasing sophistication and cost of the Unpersonned Aircraft was raised - because by becoming too sophisticated and HVAA in nature, they were in some danger of becoming too valuable to risk in certain scenarios. Rather defeating their [...]
It hasn’t been in the papers much since the summer, but did you know that the Russian air force has been around the North Sea a hell of a lot lately? Between October and December, I’m aware of at least five visits to the UK or Norwegian ADIZ (Air Defence Identification Zone). Not just that, [...]
The naval incident in the Strait of Hormuz has rapidly been blogged into next week; I think there may still be some angular momentum to be had, though. It now looks like the USN is backing off from the claim that the voice taunting them on an open radio channel was someone aboard one of [...]
It’s been said, I think by Alanbrooke, that strategy consists in the proper handling of reserves. Looking at the situation with this framework, what can we say about Iraq? It’s now been a year since the announcement of “The Surge”, the deployment of the US Army’s strategic reserve in Iraq. And what’s happened?
First, it helps [...]
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