With the Armored Brigade review now posted, I can ask a question I’ve been waiting to ask: for Winter Wargaming this year, what’s the commentariat’s feeling on Armored Brigade vs. Rule the Waves 2?

Defense

• Russian schoolchildren taught how to assemble AKs in class – I guess it’s a sort of shop class, and also makes it really easy to change the placard from ‘Primary School 3357’ to ‘Small Arms Factory 3357’ in case of war.
• Correction alert: last week’s Challenger 2 photo did actually have a Brimstone launcher on the turret – A two-missile box on top of the turret. We aren’t sure if it has any capacity for reloads, but it’s quite a large missile and not likely to be easily manhandled within the confines of a tank. We did a little further digging, and could find no information whatsoever on ground-launch range, and only turned up the very vaguest information on penetration, but it’s definitely better than the gun.
• What happens if China gets old before it gets rich? – CDR Salamander¹ ponders.
• USAF ponders arsenal plane options – A B-52 for the modern age?
• A puff piece on the Navy’s next-generation jammer – Still, it points out how it’s better than the old one, which is better than nothing.
• A bog-standard concerned-about-A2AD-missiles article with an interesting metaphor at its heart – Namely, that such weapons systems take us back to the Age of Sail relationship between ship and fort.
• Navy cuts next batch of Virginias from 11 to 9
• Laser-guided Carl Gustaf munition gets a test – Coool.
• Small fleets of aircraft have a big impact on USAF budgets – There are high fixed costs to operating a type of aircraft, of course, and the Air Force operates a lot of types.
• How can we build force structures to be resilient in the face of battlefield surprise?
• LockMart cuts F-35 prices
• Deploy the Ford, shock test a later ship – No reason to delay it any further, and shock testing the first ship in the class has been the exception rather than the norm ever since the requirement went into place.

History

• The US rushed an MG42-to-.30-06 conversion through following the war – Here’s the report on the trials.
• Petrel finds USS Johnston (probably) – Or something else from the same class. Either way, it’s the deepest shipwreck ever located, at 24,000 feet down.

Science and Technology

• Modern open source is largely corporate philanthropy – That is, the bazaar mostly comprises people being paid by the cathedral, to revive an old metaphor.
• What is quantum supremacy, and why is it important that Google demonstrated it? – This guy is evidently one of the better commentators on the subject.
• Super-optimized dirt keeps racehorses safe – Unfortunately, it’s a story that looks like it’s going somewhere and stops before it does.
• Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space – Scientists are fascinated by the sharpness of the heliopause.

Hong Kong

• Xi Jinping still backing Carrie Lam

Grab Bag

• New York City homeless services are too expensive, so NYC rents apartments for its homeless population in different cities – … without telling the different cities.
• Whatever happened to Internet atheism? – Not the quiet sort where atheists use the Internet like the rest of us, but the loud, argumentative sort prone to blaming organized religion for all the evils of the age. Scott Alexander at SSC speculates that, ironically, it was a competitor to become the civic religion of left-leaning culture, and lost to the social justice movement.
• Why is California on fire? – Well, power lines, primarily. Witness these aerial photographs from similar altitudes, one over our native Western Pennsylvania and one in California. Here, we clearcut around power lines. There, they do not. (Granted, in California there’s typically a lot of dry brush on the ground, and here there isn’t, but still.)
• Taran Tactical range burns down – Speaking of.
• Whose fault is Eastern European nationalism? – I don’t think I quite agree with the premise of this article, but I share it nevertheless.
• What happened to Toys R Us? – The ‘leveraged buyout’ answer is accurate but, evidently, incomplete.