The calendar says spring is here, but beautiful Western Pennsylvania is still in winter trim. Ten degrees colder this March than last.

Short roundup this week.

Many Words New Releases

• At Many Words Main, I’m serializing a new science fiction story – It runs from now until the beginning of May.
• I released Gearheads, a motoring adventure micro-RPG – Don’t have the budget for Top Gear-esque travel? Neither do I! That’s why this is only $1.

Defense

• Trump’s visit to the Lima plant
• On the Navy’s routine purchase of defective ships – ‘Defective’ is the article’s word, not mine, but makes me wonder: given a war following a long period of peacetime defense budget, would I rather have 50 hulls that work perfectly, or 100 hulls we can pack full of new equipment? I think it’s the latter—it seems to me that shipyard room is likely to be the bottleneck for the US.
• Trump backs NATO, OECD membership for Brazil – I’m opposed to neither, except that it’s a further debasement of the name ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’. It’s easy for me to forget how huge Brazil is, too.
• Japan’s carriers are defensive weapons – … argues USNI Proceedings, on the grounds that sea control is defense for an island nation.
• USAF’s unfunded priorities list includes more F-35As, KC-46s – You can never have too many tankers.
• Pentagon indicates that the F-15EX purchase stems from a desire to keep two fighter manufacturers in business – You heard it here first.
• Redesigning ship bridges for better collision avoidance – Also possibly helpful: restoring a sense of pride, manning ships well enough to permit on-the-job training…
• Saab makes a maritime patrol aircraft? – Based on the Bombardier Global 6000.
• The enduring case for American naval power – Because almost everything interesting in the world is at least one ocean away.
• A modular tank name for M1A2 SEP v4 – Who’s in charge of naming tank variants nowadays, and where can I write to complain to him?
• Refuel the Truman—it’s the law – As regular reader Chris Bradshaw pointed out a few weeks ago.

Science and Technology

• Stadia: Google’s game-streaming service – Game streaming is a fool’s errand for latency reasons. If it’s noticeable from my computer to my TV with Steam streaming, how is it going to work from the greater Internet?
• Nvidia develops AI tool which turns MS Paint-style sketches into photorealistic landscapes – I’m waiting for the public release.
• Apple insults buyers of the refreshed iMac with a 5400rpm spinny platter disk – That’s just hilariously bad.
• A pilot riding along in the jump seat saved the Lion Air 737 Max which crashed on the subsequent flight – I’m reserving judgment until I can read an accident report for myself, because I can’t render it without knowing whether the 737’s trim wheels were spinning when MCAS was engaging incorrectly. If so, there’s a checklist for that, as the ridealong pilot seems to have realized.
• Blue Origin spokesperson writes an op-ed on the Air Force’s latest launch purchase plans – A big block buy last time around ended up getting smacked down in court, because SpaceX came in and undercut all the traditional providers the Air Force went with. This time, they’re offering a 60-40 split for launches between now and the mid-2020s, which seems like dubious stewardship of public resources (again), given how much the launch landscape is likely to change between now and 2025.
• Buried in a report about a new Bitcoin ETF, a gem on Bitcoin itself – Most of the volume reported by Bitcoin exchanges is fake, or with the most charitable interpretation possible, misleading.

Guns

• Baseless lawsuit against Remington accurately described as baseless by judge

Early post today, because I have lots to do and can’t afford the typical leisurely lunch. Late-breaking news will break next week instead.

Defense

• The Chinese dragon is a hydra – On China and state-sponsored espionage.
• F-22 rapid reaction force, able to deploy anywhere in the world in 24 hours? – Fishbreath’s verdict: silly idea. Four F-22s won’t do anything against a peer threat, and are overkill against a non-peer threat. Four Strike Eagles or modern F-16s would be a better idea.
• More on the Navy’s carrier-building strategy
• Big Army running into recruiting shortfalls – Maybe that’s one of the reasons behind the push for autoloaders lately? If you can automate some thousands of loaders out of a job, suddenly you can do more fighting with fewer men.
• Singapore’s F-35 plans detailed – One of the big issues is interoperability, of which there is currently very little between a) F-35s and b) the aircraft operated by Singapore’s likely allies. Still, I wish them all the best, especially given the option they have to operate F-35s off of an aviation ship. (It may be the problem child of the bunch, but the F-35B represents the largest paradigm shift in defense affairs—if the US likes you, getting an aircraft carrier with a capable, modern air wing into service is the easiest it’s ever been.)
• Deploy or Get Out burns the Army’s candle at the other end – That said, though, I agree in full with the underlying idea that most of a country’s military should be deployable.
• The Bradley and How It Got That Way – Parvusimperator has been reading this book, and said it should be mentioned. Not only is it packed with good information, it’s also not a doorstopper and hence easily digested.
• Russia claims military superiority in the Arctic – I’m not as sure as some that the trend of reduced Arctic sea ice is a permanent thing, and evidently, neither is Russia—their plans include more icebreakers. That’s burying the lede a bit, however. The real headline is that Russian now claims sovereign rights over the entire Northern Sea Route.
• A science fiction reading list for strategists – This article is about short stories, but includes a link to a novel reading list. I would put forward one of my own stories for consideration, but as yet, none of the ones I’ve published have been very strategy-heavy.
• American diplomacy helped stave off a shooting war between India and Pakistan – Reuters’ reporters surely gritting their teeth having to report that.
• Germany finds building, equipping Pumas is taking longer than planned – Germany? Readiness problems?
• Big Army is still interested in the Puma, though!
• New Air Force One will be expensive
• US Navy looking to retire the Ticonderogas – On the one hand, we lose a bunch of good ship names. On the other hand, I see no real reason to keep them around longer than planned, given that we’re still making Burkes, and Burkes are plenty capable.
• While some European countries struggle to scrape together a handful of Eurofighters, most of the USAF inventory is trending toward 80% readiness

Sub-Defense: F-35 vs. F-15(E)X

• Lockheed’s not happy about it
• Bloomberg reports that the 2020 F-35 buy is down 6 airframes from 84 to 78 – So at least LockMart isn’t unhappy for no reason.
• Pricing data for the F-15EX

Pictures

• A Charlie Hornet in aggressor colors

Science and Technology

• Restarting a national power grid is hard – If Factorio has taught me one thing… Speaking of, I think I’ll probably have a Factorio/Satisfactory review to post in the next week or two.
• World record short landing: 9 feet, 6 inches
• MySpace loses 12 years of music and video – Yes, it’s still around. No, people didn’t really notice. (The data loss happened some months ago, and it only hit the news now.) Yes, all data is similarly at risk¹.
• Related news: the Internet Archive is scrambling to preserve public Google+ data – A college friend of mine runs a Saturday afternoon teatime, planned as a Google+ event, which has run into trouble owing to the pending Google+ shutdown. This is perhaps the first real-world effect of that event.
• Cross-file under History: R/V Petrel finds the USS Wasp – I love that Paul Allen’s billionaire gig was finding old warship wrecks. It would be easy to make a crack about uselessness vis-a-vis, say, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and space, but the modern world pays too little mind to history², and I will instead say that it’s refreshing that Mr. Allen dedicated a good bit of his fortune to shining a spotlight on it.
• Is Huawei a security threat? – It looks to me like four of the seven experts interviewed by the Verge say yes.
• SpaceX may begin testing the Starship this week – That’s simple up-and-down hop tests like Blue Origin has been doing, not orbital testing. (Quite a bit of work to do before orbit is in the picture.) Also, anonymous sources report that the next Falcon Heavy launch could be as early as April 7th.
• Toyota’s Takaoka #2 factory is pretty nifty – Rather than bolt all the robots and whatnot down, they instead put everything on movable platforms, so they can expand and contract the line’s capacity almost at will and without dramatically changing the cost per car.

Sub-S&T: 737MAX MCAS

• The Air Current with a good overview of the issue
• Boeing self-certified much of the 737MAX’s safety – … reports Ars Technica, whose comment section is, charitably, not as good as Slate Star Codex’s.

Guns

• Hudson files for bankruptcy – Chapter 7, too. They plan to liquidate everything and pack it in. Doing my part for journalism, I used some of my free PACER credit to nab the relevant filings. Their list of creditors is not particularly pretty. They claim to have $50,000 in assets and between $10 million and $50 million in liabilities. On the plus side, apparently you can buy H9s for cheap as part of the liquidation sale, if that’s the sort of thing that interests you.

Grab Bag

• A parvusimperator annual favorite: the 2018-ish hater’s guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog – Really, though, I don’t begrudge rich people the choice to throw their money around. It’s one of the reasons people chase wealth, after all.

I just realized last weekend’s post was dated March 27th, because I changed the month but forgot to change the day. Rest assured that, if we were to guess at news from the future, we would try a little harder than two or three weeks out.

Apologies for the lateness of the post. It’s Mrs. Breath’s birthday today¹.

Defense

• A human interest story to start off – The chief of staff of the Air Force was shot down over Serbia. He recently met with the pararescueman who got him out.
• It’s approximately the beginning of a month, so there’s a new issue of Defence Technology Review for your perusal – It’s one of parvusimperator’s regular reads, so it’s worth putting here. Also, there’s a great deal of potential humor in a notional Defence Technology Revue.
• An old story, but a good one: China’s plans to sell Pakistan an aircraft carrier and integrate militarily – Given Pakistan’s F-16s and AMRAAMs, that would make it a fascinating case of a nation buying from two great powers at once.
• More on that Truman early-retirement scheme
• Taiwan mulls F-16V purchase – If, like me, you hadn’t heard ‘F-16V’ before, here’s the LockMart store page.
• Germany concerned with readiness of submarines and aircraft – You don’t say!
• On the Zumwalts, ASW, and defeating hypersonic cruise missiles – The article suggests using the Zumwalts as linebackers to the Burkes’ safeties, given that (the article claims) their green-water ASW is better than the Burkes’. I see two problems with this: 1. The submarines just attack the Zumwalts then; 2. The Zumwalts are so expensive and there are so few of them that it seems silly to send them in-shore like that.
• The Drive’s The War Zone gets angry about the MiG-21/F-16 reportage – Mr. Rogoway writes up just about everything we know and what we can reasonably conclude.
• From The Drive’s related pages, some cool aggressor F-5 pictures – Aggressors get the best paint jobs.

(Mad) Science and Technology

• “We designed ocular injectable photoreceptor-binding upconversion nanoparticles” – In English, some nano-gubbins which, when squirted in the eyes, grant near IR vision sufficient to differentiate complex shapes, fully compatible with ordinary daylight vision. Where do I sign up?
• SpaceX launch manifest includes some Falcon Heavy, some Starlink – The next Falcon Heavy launch is slated for early April. You can bet I’ll be watching.
• Another ancient US-flagged container ship in bad shape – In which the Jones Act fails to overcome market forces. If we were to let foreign-built ships into the coastal trade space, we’d see an extraordinary expansion in US-flagged vessels, which is an unalloyed good. Building non-warships in the US has been an economic nonstarter for a long time.
• Some in-depth analysis of Land 400 and the tactical considerations developing therefrom

History

• A 1949 chart showing strike range into Asia from aircraft carriers – It lists a 700-mile combat radius under ‘short-range aircraft’. Also, Jerry Hendrix is a good Twitter navalist to follow.
• Dazzle camouflage in action – I guess it does work.
• Nobody can explain the dominance of cavalry
• Counterpoint: yes we can
• Sidebar: is linking to another blog’s comment section a new low for this segment? – I argue no, given that the commenters at SlateStarCodex are frequently better at writing and arguing than we official bloggers are.

Guns

• Beretta makes a steel-frame 92 for competition – Parvusimperator provides this picture, which I can’t find anywhere else on the Internet. I don’t know how he does it.
• Armed civilian in Venezuela fights back – Just saying.

Grab Bag

• A wargame about carrier damage control in WW2 – Thrill, as you play out the narrative of Shattered Sword!
• Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail – If it’s as good as Ultimate General: Civil War at capturing the feel of its era, I am altogether in.

In which I repeatedly type single quotation marks backtick-text-quote instead of quote-text-quote, thanks to a LaTeX project.

Defense

• Wingman drone sounds like a real bro
• On the Truman‘s early retirement – I think you could make an argument for e.g. fewer carriers and more cruise missile submarines, but that isn’t what’s happening here.
• On the Indian MiG-21 downing an F-16 – Gee. Almost like short-range air-to-air kills are still going to happen. Most fascinating to me was that the Pakistani AMRAAM was a -120C-5, which is a pretty recent missile to be selling to Pakistan.
• The Marine Corps’ Amphibious Combat Vehicle is an example of sane procurement – “They’re practically the Navy anyway,” said Fishbreath, reinforcing his point from last week’s roundup while angering any Marines and Navy men reading.
• Russia’s latest diesel-electric boat is ready to enter testing – Lada is not an inspiring name for a submarine class, given its history in Russia.
• Feeders at the Congressional trough prepared to protest F-15X
• Another argument in favor of dropping the F-15X – Parvusimperator and I cautiously disagree with an F-35-only solution, for two reasons. One, the F-35 is a cool recipe, but still in the oven. Two, the F-15X project will keep Boeing’s fighter plants operating, which is important from a national defense sustainability reason. I wouldn’t be happy having just one company running all of my country’s major fighter projects, if only for scaling reasons come the next war.
• The F-35 ballistic missile defense plan sounds more and more cockamamie the more I read about it – “All we have to do is station F-35s on a continual basis directly adjacent to North Korean missile sites!”
• Weekly conspiracy mongering: are North Korea’s ‘weather satellites’ EMP bombs? – Makes sense based on their shape and lack of any visible sensors, at least.
• Draft RFP for FFG(X) – Worth special mention is the expected equipment list.
• If other countries are going to flout treaties and develop IRBMs, then so should we – It’s a law if everyone adheres to it. It’s a handicap if only you do.
• Germany bears some responsibility for NATO’s decline
• SpaceX/ULA spat, part one million and three – This time, it’s over national security launches.
• USN to buy more Poseidons – Can’t go wrong with more maritime patrol aircraft.
• Apparently some people argue that Clausewitz is irrelevant? – Here’s the correct reaction.

Photos of the Week: Bombers

• Entry #1: Lancer
• Entry #2: Vulcan

Science and Technology

• Chinese surveillance data found in a no-password, web-public database – Oops.
• SpaceX’s successful Crew Dragon launch represents an American return to manned spaceflight – The big problem for SpaceX going forward is going to be finding new sources for revenue (like their Starlink Internet plan) if they want to keep on funding the BFR. As it stands, they’ve pretty much cornered the worldwide market on non-natsec launches. There’s only so much profit to squeeze out of that. Blue Origin has an edge on large rocket development in my book, because it’s a billionaire’s passion project.
• University of California system cancels all its Elsevier journal subscriptions – Elsevier is a watchword in academia for ‘money-grubbing useless middlemen’, known for paywalling a bunch of journals so that universities have little choice but to maintain subscriptions for their own academics. Not that academia is without its flaws, but the least I can do is praise them for doing something so obviously right.
• Another Intel speculative execution bug – This one lets you figure out memory mappings efficiently, which lets you do the Rowhammer attack from 2015 in Javascript in a browser.
• The attention economy is saturated – That is, there’s too much entertainment for humans to consume all of it, so we’re into an age of prioritization. You’ve probably noticed this yourself. It also plays into the difficulty in getting off the ground as an independent creator of content—there’s more entertainment than ever before, but it’s still delivered through a small number of outlets. There are only so many screens at the local cinema, and only so many production houses which can afford to bribe their ways into your local theater. See also Amazon and books.

Money Matters

• China’s super-rich worried about the country’s future – Any country could turn into the next Venezuela, but China doesn’t seem likely to in the near term. Then again, five years ago, neither did Venezuela.
• Eyeglasses: a field just begging for some trustbusting
• A list of all US retail locations closing this year – I’m part of the problem. I have two separate Amazon packages arriving this week.
• QuadrigaCX update: most of the $150 million allegedly in cold wallets isn’t there – We reported on this a few weeks ago, but now more official sources are picking it up.
• …including the Beeb – Who have the story from start to finish, if you’re lost.

Special Report: Blacklisting and Politics in Publishing

• Indie pulp sci-fi authors wind up the SFWA – Publishing, and particularly the ivory tower comprising the major trade organizations and awards, has lately been a very, very progressive field.
• Journalist Jesse Singal has been writing about ‘YA [young adult literature] Twitter’ for some time now… – … documenting how dysfunctional it is.
• It’s pretty terrible. – Not only is it a war zone for people with none of the victimhoods of progressive orthodoxy…
• It’s also full of white editors telling non-white authors to stay in their lanes – “You can only reliably write about your own personal experiences, but also you should have a diverse cast.”

Singal’s doing good work on that subject generally, although it’s amusing to note that he himself is an identitarian progressive, just a milder breed who hasn’t yet fully internalized that all revolutions eventually devour their children.

This is the 20th Edition of Wednesday What We’re Reading. It’s been a fun feature so far, and well-received to boot, so with a little luck, the next time I make mention of anniversaries in the introduction is when we’ve been doing them for a year.

Defense

• India and Pakistan have a go? – The lead story, obviously. With artillery fire exchanged across the Line of Control, and Indian airstrikes falling in Pakistani territory, things are heating up a bit on the subcontinent. On the other hand: North Indian civilian airports are still open, and there hasn’t been escalation as of press time. On the gripping hand: there’s an election in India in two weeks, and a few Twitterers who found their way to my timeline are saying that public opinion slants very much in the direction of, “Let’s teach them a lesson.”
• The case for the F-15X – I was interested last week. I’m still interested this week. It’s really hard to argue that: a) any war against even a near-peer force is going to involve stealthy aircraft only, and b) in a war which involves non-stealthy opponents, carrying nearly two dozen AMRAAMs is somehow a bad thing.
• India bails out of joint-with-Russia stealth fighter project – The Drive says it’s no surprise. We agree.
• India to buy unfinished MiG-29s to fill its fighter shortage – If they finish them to -K standards (or some other recent variant), not a bad move. Otherwise, maybe a bit questionable.
• F-35s as a nuclear defense weapon? – The headline is misleading. They mean using F-35s to attack launch sites or missiles during their initial climb, both of which seem to require more clairvoyance than I credit to the US intelligence apparatus.
• Big Army’s battlefield nuclear reactor project is a bad idea… – …says the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which means I’m cautiously in favor of it.
• STRATCOM chief says US military needs to learn how to ‘go fast’ again – In procurement terms, mainly. We agree here, but I think everyone agrees. The difficulty isn’t in identifying the problem, but rather in solving it.
• On South Korea’s blue water navy aspirations – Fine by me, if by ‘blue water’ they mean ‘the blue waters to the east and west of the Korean peninsula’.
• The US Merchant Marine is tragically, criminally small – Yes, yes it is.
• British boomers have great names – Talking about HMS Warspite, of the Dreadnought class. Granted, they’re recycling names, but they’re good names.
• Columbia SSBNs are a key element to the nuclear defense triad – Obviously.
• Speaking of, the Columbias are actually on schedule – Is… is that a thing? Come to think of it, the two best-run American procurement programs of the post-Cold War era have been Navy: the Virginias and the Super Hornet. Maybe they have a secret.

History, Photos, Paintings

• The countermeasure washdown system is a key part of aircraft carrier NBC defense – Also on-deck firefighting. Here’s a video, too..
• HMS Agamemnon and friends
• French frigate Bellerophon and an unidentified FREMM – Provence, parvusimperator informs me.
• The consequences of the Battle of the Caudine Forks – A half-defeated enemy is the same as an undefeated enemy.
• Nighthawks are flying around the Southwestern deserts, and people are taking pictures

Science and Technology

• Chipmaker TSMC lost $550 million in revenue due to a manufacturing error – Oops.
• Grand Canyon museum left buckets of uranium ore sitting next to a visitor exhibit – Discovered only because somebody’s kid was a Geiger counter enthusiast. Weird hobby, sure, but if one of my future children picks it up, I won’t be mad.

Other

• On wage stagnation – Slate Star Codex is tops on my list of blogs whose authors I would disagree with on nearly every matter of substance, because the guy who writes it is so sharp. Also, the commentariat there is in the same club as ours—good ones.