The Quarterly Review? The Whenever-I-Get-A-Minute Times?

Russia/Ukraine

• I fell off the liveblog wagon once it became clear that Russia was definitely not going to thunder run Kiev¹.
• Vast quantities of NATO ELINT near Russia – Well, I suppose more than just ELINT. JSTARS is out there, too.
• Kremlinology 2.0: who’s in Putin’s inner circle?
• A constant plotline: Russia can’t deal with Ukraine’s drones – Unexpectedly, given how layered Russian air defenses are.
• Bellingcat on Twitter doing some cluster munitions ID
• Iskander missiles have a decoy capability
• Russia’s logistics situation is baaaad – I remarked to parvusimperator that the only part of the next war you can practice in advance is logistics, and that we Americans have a lot of practice with that, what with flying lobster into the sandbox and all.
• Ground-based air defenses are better than MiGs for Ukraine; here’s a mid-March look at the options – Looking specifically at NATO/aligned inventories.
• Hat cam video from one of the Ka-52s shot down on the first day
• Ukrainian innovation: Stinger-ABM – The madlads shot down a Tochka.
• Among the more impressive Ukrainian captures: a command post from a Krasukha-4 mobile EW system – Western analysts salivate.
• Ukraine’s deepest strike (?) to date: Mi-24s hit a Belgorod oil depot
• Black Sea shipping insurance is through the roof – A tanker that cost $750,000 to charter from Novorossiysk to Italy last year costs $3.5 million now, and the insurance premium is $5 million.

Other Defense

• Greek F-16s have twin-JSOW racks – I wonder if you could get two two-packs per wing, for a smokeless, flameless Macross missile spam effect.
• Photo: cross-section of an Aussie Collins – Real skinny.
• UAE’s EDGE shows off swarming suicide drones – Pardon, ‘loitering munitions systems’.
• We’ve shared the ShinMaywa US-2 before, but as parvusimperator notes, flying boats are cool – Also, there’s apparently an amphibious C-130 coming.
• 608 USAF F-16s to get a big upgrade package – Including, but not limited to, a center display/MFD, AESA, new EW, and more.
• BAE eliminated from Big Army’s light tank program – Now it’s just GDLS.
• Why do we keep on trying to gift Iran nukes?
• Germany to buy F-35s to fill the nuclear strike fighter role – F-35 wins again!
• Marines to test Lightning Carrier concept, with 20 F-35s on Tripoli – Larger peacetime air wing than the British carriers. Just saying.
• Big Army reduces fitness standards for women, older soldiers – “People aren’t hitting our standards, so we should reduce our standards.”
• Full steam ahead on NGSW: 30,000 coming in 2023 – Well, full steam by US procurement standards.
• Biden’s 2023 defense budget hands China victory at sea – “Divest to invest” isn’t a bad idea fundamentally, but I don’t think the Navy can pull it off.
• We are at least making cool new Burkes – DDG-125 is the first of the Block IIIs, with an enhanced radar that can do air defense and missile defense at the same time. It’s also about the end of the line for the workhorse class: size, weight, power, and cooling are all at their limits.
• Who wrote this, China? – “The US shouldn’t be seen to meddle in the affairs of Pacific island nations.” High-minded, but wrong-headed.

Big Tech

• Reddit is the most popular search engine; or, Google search is dying – Why? Because Google results are uniformly trash, unless you’re looking for something technical, in which case they’re only mostly trash. “[search term] reddit” is taking over as the way to find out what real people think.
• I recently came across a top-[things]-guide article about the PC game Warframe that had clearly been written by an AI, with zero retouching. It fused some lingo specific to the game with a bunch of nonsense that appears in the genre of ‘articles about game mechanics’. That’s the downside to large language models: the more niche your interest, the more likely it is you’ll get pablum out of an LLM.
• Cloudflare stays in business in Russia, with safeguards – Its Russian datacenters have a sort of dead man’s switch, if I’m reading this right, and they’ve also taken measures to protect their clients’ SSL keys.
• Russia is running out of cloud storage space – Or they were, as of March 15. I haven’t heard an update since.

Guns

• A defensive AR for ordinary people – Parvusimperator-endorsed.

Science and Technology

• Deep reinforcement learning strikes again: tokamak containment – Isn’t this Doc Ock’s origin story?
• Writing a Minecraft server in bash – A classic in the genre of ‘programmer uses wrong tool for job’.
• Deep learning is hitting a wall – A strange thing to post in the wake of DALL-E 2 (the AI that creates pictures based on text descriptions), but I’m pretty much on board with the reasoning.
• Is semiconductor manufacturing a critical national defense issue for America? This Taiwanese think-tanker says no – It might be easier to convince me if the major beneficiary of the US not investing moonshot money in native semiconductor manufacturing wasn’t… Taiwan. Then again, maybe it’s defense-first: “If America can make its own chips, what happens to defense pac— understandings with poor little Taiwan?”

The Economy

• Inflation – I think this was back when people were still trying to call it transitory.
• The power grid is becoming less reliable – Maybe this is the year for solar… On the other hand, Pittsburgh seems to evade regional power outages and gas shortages, because we’re a distribution nexus for both.
• Fertilizer follies: Belarus potash manufacturer declares force majeuer – Fertilizer price charts looking like a Bitcoin history.

Grab Bag

• Catholic priest in Arizona baptizes thousands of people wrong – He said ‘we baptize you’ instead of ‘I baptize you’ in the liturgy. Oops. I will keep any further commentary to myself, in the interest of ecclesiatical diplomacy.
• An inside look at the Sinaloa cartel

I think the Sunday Papers experiment is now definitively a failure, unless I start doing the posts at lunch on Friday.

RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE

• … will be our headline, probably, the next time I do one of these.
• 12/20: US officials return from assessing Ukraine’s air defense needs
• 1/17: British aircraft ferrying anti-tank weapons to Ukraine avoid German airspace – Whose side are they on? (The side of the people whose natural gas prevents elderly Germans from freezing during winter.)
• 1/19: Biden team mulls supplying insurgents in a conquered Ukraine to trap Russia in a bloodbath – I dunno. Russia spent an awfully long time in bloody Afghanistan for substantially less useful territory than Ukraine.
• 2/4: Russian landing ships deploy from the Baltic to Syria – They might have subsequently transited the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, not that that’s ominous or anything.
• 2/10: Russia stands up field hospitals
• 2/11: All three of Russia’s Проект 1164 cruisers are at sea in the Black Sea or Mediterranean
• 2/13: 1st Guards Tank Army redeploys to within 15km of the Ukrainian border
• I kind of waffle on how much the US should do here. The West does obviously have some responsibility for Ukraine’s independence, given that we gave them assurances to that effect in exchange for their ditching their nukes. On the other hand, getting too tied down in Ukraine makes Taiwan look awfully juicy, and an independent Taiwan is more important than an independent Ukraine in global supply chain terms, at least for now. Mostly what I’m saying is, I’m glad I’m not the president.

Defense

• Running rust: not just a modern problem – Here’s New Jersey showing some substantial browning in 1983. Teach the controversy?
• Russian Navy ship under construction in St. Petersburg catches fire – A little early, compared to, say, Big Kuz.
• Venezuela builds an M50 Ontos for the modern day – Luchtburg is unimpressed.
• In spite of the advent of newer weapons systems, FN is still selling M249s
• Rafale to compete against Super Bug for India’s next carrier plane – France hasn’t been doing great on export sales lately, and Super Bug is a tough one to beat.
• China is eating our lunch in new hulls in service
• Vortex wins the sight portion of the NGSW thing – “It integrates a number of advanced technologies, including a variable magnification optic, backup etched reticle, laser rangefinder, ballistic calculator, atmospheric sensor suite, compass, Intra-Soldier Wireless, visible and infrared aiming lasers, and a digital display overlay.” Cool, I say. Parvusimperator’s take is less optimistic: “It looks heavy, with features no one will use.”
• We both agree this one is cool – Microwave weapons for point defense! Masers hitting metal surfaces induce electromagnetic interference in nearby electronics, which is a plot point in my sole published science fiction novella.
• Goggles let Bradley dismounts see with the vehicle’s sensors – I think it just sends the dismounts a feed from the vehicle. If it somehow did augmented reality overlays of the common parts of their lines of sight, it would be even cooler.
• This DDG(X) concept actually looks sensible – Now we just need to build ten or so a year to show China what for.
• For FLRAA, buy the hybrid helo, not the tiltrotor, says V-22 test pilot – Tiltrotors evidently require more separation during landing than equivalently-sized helicopters, among other interesting tidbits.
• Chile buys some surplus E-3Ds – That makes Luchtburg worry a bit.
• Do you like government manuals? Here are 4,792, for free
• Lessons from the cruise missile attacks on Stark and Hanit – A 25-page paper, but a) skimmable, as the missile said to the surface of the sea; and b) a good read.
• SoKor’s K9 howitzer wins again – This time in Egypt.
• F-35 ramp strike – I think this is the one we’re looking for in the South China Sea.
• Chile may have more E-3s to buy soon; USAF issues RFI for a replacement – Parvusimperator thinks the E-7 is the odds-on favorite.
• Argentina buys Robotsystem 70 – South America is tooling up for some reason. Are they expecting trouble?

History

• Tomcat pilot looks back on Kitty Hawk – Soapbox endorsed, worth your time.
• A little-seen feature: pop-out auxiliary thrusters on the Perrys – I think these might have been modeled in Dangerous Waters.
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as seen through amphorae and other archaeological artifacts – The article supports the view that it really sucks to live through the decline and fall of an empire, which seems obvious to me but was evidently not widely accepted even after I was born.

Guns

• Whether NGSW succeeds or is canceled, you can now buy a competitor! – Sig’s entry.
• Correction: two competitors! – Beretta’s entry is a bullpup, and will also be available to civilians.
• The Sig P320’s striker safety system, in excruciating detail – The best kind of detail!
• Additional excruciating detail: how did the P320 change, following its safety upgrade? – It’s more substantial than I would have guessed.

Wu-Flu

• Evidence suggests ‘wu-flu’ is sufficiently fact-based to replace ‘COVID’ as the heading

The Markets (Black and Otherwise)

• Mexican cartels muscling in on US marijuana growers
• How Brazil recovered from rampant inflation – They invented a Unit of Real Value. Prices, wages, and taxes were all listed in URVs, whose value floated relative to the currency of the day, the cruzeiro. That is, a gallon of milk might have been 10 cruzeiros one week, then 20 the next, but either way, it was listed as one URV. Then, once people got used to thinking of prices in term of a stable unit, Brazil declared the URV the real currency¹.
• How on earth do those buy-now-pay-later providers for online purchases make money? – Patrick McKenzie’s blog explains. (He’s a payments nerd, and a Stripe engineer.)
• From the same guy, a deep dive into how mortgages work in the US

The (Cyberpunk/Science Fiction) Future Is Now

• Smartphones dangling from trees: delivery drivers gaming the algorithms – It’s a bit tricky to sum up in a headline. An intermediary hangs phones in a tree near delivery hubs, so those devices (by dint of being close to the hub) get priority for accepting jobs. Drivers sync their phones with the intermediary’s phones, so they can grab jobs even if they aren’t nearby.
• Fully-autonomous vehicles are are worth… almost nothing, compared to mostly-autonomous vehicles – According to this company doing long-haul semi-autonomous trucks, anyway. It’s a lot easier to find someone willing to remote-monitor a truck than it is to find someone willing to tolerate long-haul over-the-road-trucker conditions.
• China is way ahead of us in voice input – Partially because Chinese is so perversely difficult to write, but still.
• Solitary, irritated hacker removes North Korea from the Internet

Grab Bag

• Squaring the circle: nearer now than it’s ever been – Quanta Magazine reports. The problem has, in the strict sense, been solved for some time, but this is the first solution that doesn’t require some voodoo with zero-area sets of points. The author of the paper thinks he can get it down to 22 pieces or fewer, which would be extremely neat to see animated.
• The FBI continues to push junk ballistics science to score convictions

Crowing

It’s still Sunday, and I got this done.

Where do the months go?

Merry Christmas from your Soapbox hosts.

Defense

• Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle itself fired a missile over the Pacific – Financial Times story; use the Paywall Eliminator Firefox plugin.
• Sick burn from CDR Salamander – In response to “SOCOM commander says Taliban aren’t counterterrorism partners in Afghanistan.
• Ukraine’s defense intelligence chief thinks Russia is planning an invasion by January – Time’s running out on that one, but ‘the Christmas Day attack’ has a good ring to it. Good thing the tough-on-Russia adults are running things— No, I can’t keep a straight face.
• Italy thinks the next-gen European combat aircraft programs are going to merge – Two in a row that make me laugh! It would be smart, but I don’t think Europe would actually do it.
• Sal: look at our intellectual priorities, and look at our problems – It’s not a good look.
• Photos of Russian tanks with improvised anti-top-attack armor – It’s quite the look, let me tell you. Perhaps inspired by the recent Azerbaijan-Armenia spat?
• Mahan’s Yardstick – It’s 3500nm circles centered on Guam and Pearl.
• Israel buys the Gucci option, the CH-53K – Parvusimperator didn’t expect them to buy the expensive one.
• Tracking Russian force buildups near Ukraine – Open-source satellite imagery and analysis is wild.
• France Gets One Back: UAE to buy Rafale F4 – That’s the Gripen-E of Rafales.
• Brazil’s nuclear-powered sub project making progress – Luchtburg scrambles to respond.
• Finland picks the F-35 – And here’s why.
• Saudi Arabia running out of Patriot missiles in its conflict with the Houthis – A problem I expect to be a major factor in any future shooting war. I’ve posted about the lack of VLS reloading tools in the Pacific already; this is that problem but with consumables instead of equipment.
• Biden Administration officials have suggested that the U.S. will press Ukraine to formally cede a measure of autonomy within its eastern Donbas region – Uh-huh.
• General Atomics’ rough-field drone struts its stuff – It is not, as the name might suggest, a nuclear-powered drone.
• India tests air-launched BrahMos missile – “Gee, I wonder what ships those are targeted at,” parvusimperator says. I add, “India’s an awfully big, awfully unsinkable aircraft carrier on China’s SLoC to Africa.”
• MQ-25 naval unmanned tanker hits the deck – Trials begin aboard George H.W. Bush.
• Stratolaunch, owners of the world’s largest aircraft, to design and build hypersonic defense test articles – I’m glad we’re doing something with the largest aircraft in the world.
• Australia ditching its locally-built NH90s to be replaced by Black Hawks and variants – This follows Australia’s relatively recent ditching of its Eucoptre Tigres for Apaches.
• Dilapidated, sinking Marine AAVs still look less rusty than US Navy warships – Also, the AAV is getting retired. Sadly. I love the capacity.
• We wrote about a laser installed on USS Portland a while ago – Now it’s in testing!
• How US military planners are supposed to view the world – Given the choice between this and, “Those are people attacking us or our allies; we should fight them,” I think I prefer the latter.
• The taxonomy of narco-subs – H.I. Sutton does not consider the fact that we haven’t caught any of the true submersibles, or the related snorkel ships, evidence of absence. His take is that we know they can build such things, and the fact that we don’t catch any suggests they are building such things.
• Rapid Dragon hits a target

History

• Gun camera footage from British aircraft attacking German ships in Nordgulenfjord – Click it. You won’t be disappointed.
• Tales of the Long Beach from Master Chief Douglas Healey, whose careers are intertwined – Long read, but good read.
• Looking back on Ukraine’s history with the Blackjack – Post-USSR collapse, they briefly had the largest fleet in the world. Eventually, the airframes were scrapped for money reasons, or sold back to Russia for money reasons.

Coronavirus and Related Economic Disruptions

• More evidence in support of the lab leak theory
• The California container ship backup isn’t any shorter, it’s just further offshore and thus not counted as part of the California backup anymore

SPAAACE!

• James Webb Space Telescope Saga: “Oops, we dropped it”
• JWST is part of a hopefully-obsolete model, though – We’re probably a decade or so away from an utter collapse in launch costs. When you can schlep 100 tons into orbit for cheap, why would you bother with one-off special-purpose probes? Or, to quote the article, “For substantially less than current annual SLS development cost, a planetary science-focused Starship launch program could send a fully loaded Starship to every planet at least once per year, except for Mars whose launch windows are less frequent, but which benefits from Starship baseline design and will probably enjoy its own dedicated program.”
• A composite GIF loop of tracking camera footage from a recent Falcon 9 launch – Worth a click.

Christmas Gift Ideas

• The best toaster you’ll ever own – My mom has one.
• Budweiser ad campaign Real Men of Genius, volumes 1-3

Computers

• A zero-click iMessage exploit that uses JBIG2 text compession in Apple’s PDF render to build an entire functioning computer in software – It’s pretty wild.
• Writing a simple 16-bit VM in less than 125 lines of C

Grab Bag

• Powerful Necromancer Revives Long-Dead Forum Thread – “People need to understand that even their really old opinions suck.”
• How accurate is Ocean’s Eleven’s take on casino security? – Not very.
• Bunch of JFK assassination documents released, if you like to speculate about that kind of thing

Defense

• China’s desert mock-ups of US warships – Presumably as practice targets.
• New York semiconductor fab goes out of business, Pentagon scrambles to stock up – Bring supply chains home?
• Roundup on what we know about the alleged Russian ASAT test – Or at least, what we knew on November 15.
• CDR Salamander dances on LCS’s grave
• The Calidus B-250 is what happens when you scale up a Super Tucano by about 150% – Or lock your designers in a room wallpapered with diagrams of the Skyraider.
• USAF to buy Wedgetail to replace Sentry – New AWACSen!
• Big Army buys Britain’s Sentinel radar planes – My dreams of a mercenary JSTARS outfit, crushed.
• Textron now out of the NGSW project – Parvusimperator: “Can this stupid waste of money (the NGSW) die yet?”
• Taiwan’s F-16Vs are now operational – The thing they refer to as the F-16V is broadly similar to the C/D Block 70 planes.

Grab Bag

• Grumman Albatross comes back – Now with turboprops! Maybe this should have gone under the ‘defense’ section…
• The bee dance language, which no one understands, is perfectly described and predicted by complex six-dimensional mathematics, for reasons no one understands
• A national divorce would replace some small problems with larger ones
• Armoring spacecraft is hard – Headline picture: the damage from a 14-gram piece of plastic at 6,700 meters per second.
• Novel idea from a progressive author: what if we stopped giving addicts drug paraphernalia?
• Tesla owners locked out of cars due to an offline server – SpaceX is cool. Tesla… eh.

Defense

• Various unsourced¹ rumblings out of China: fuel rationing, requests for food conservation… supply crunch or prelude to war?
• Zerohedge has more – I’m not sure if Zerohedge makes it more or less credible, though.
• Speaking of Twitter randos, this guy has SAR and optical satellite imagery of the 144th Motor Rifle Division’s new camp at Yelnya – Yelnya’s near Smolensk.
• Speaking of Twitter randos with interesting threads, here’s an index of one of parvusimperator’s favorite Twitter authors, on AFV technology – He says he should get a blog. Maybe we should just publish him here? He is, on the other hand, employed by Janes, so he may be a little out of our league.
• A long and extremely detailed article on how the US Navy isn’t in good shape to tackle the modern diesel sub threat – AncientSubHunter on Twitter, I believe.
• If you didn’t click on that, here’s a tale of a Soviet sub trying to sneak through the Strait of Gibraltar, and the American destroyers chasing it – “Our sonars were so powerful that at night they sometimes caused plankton to phosphoresce as a pulse swept over them, producing expanding green concentric circles of light radiating outward at the speed of sound from our enormous bow-mounted 30-foot sonar domes.” Baller.
• Continuing our ‘US is woefully unprepared to fight a naval war’ series, where are all the tenders? – Big Navy’s maintenance depots are overworked in peacetime. They’re not going to handle a war well.
• The Soapbox Endorses: Japanese seaplane US-2 – A PBY for the modern day! I wonder if it could carry some manner of cruise missile under the wing?
• Big Army press release: AI-enabled ground combat vehicles
• Israel tests radar blimp – It’s technically an aerostat, not a blimp, but the goal is to watch for missile threats.
• Sky News security and defense reporter, quoting HMSQNLZ crew on the difference between scrambling against the Russians while transiting the Eastern Mediterranean and scrambling against the Chinese while transiting the South China Sea – I’m tickled by the HMSQNLZ abbreviation, and will continue to use it. Price of Wales gets the somewhat less evocative HMSPWLS on Twitter. I wonder if we can’t do better here.

Grab Bag

• Astronomers find a star system with two planets in polar orbits around the star and one with a standard, equatorial orbit – Now that is a weird star system. Probably a big gas giant tilting things.
• I have too many expensive hobbies to get into Warhammer, but I enjoy watching hobby YouTubers do the building and the painting – This video was a special treat: my favorite among the YouTube hobbyists, building a massive Ork walker-thingy out of cans, boxes, scrap sprues, and such.
• ‘Skimpflation’: the kind of inflation where goods and services get worse while prices stay the same – I think I had an item about this last time, but now Planet Money has a bit on it, which is quite a bit more mainstream.
• New Jersey truck driver Edward Durr spends $153 on campaign, unseats NJ Senate President Stephen Sweeney – The president of the state senate is widely regarded as New Jersey’s second most powerful politico.

Well, readers, it’s been more than a month since the last one of these, for which you have my apologies.

October was a busy month for me: three USPSA matches, one of which yielded a trophy, and my birthday toward the end. Now that the summer’s winding down, I should be more able to do these regularly.

Defense

• Five B-21s are in final assembly – This story crossed the desk of the Sunday Papers editor on September 21. It has been so long that it’s conceivable they’re done now.
• Inside France’s loss of the Aussie submarine contract – The short version seems to be that the French were all, “We will need ze long cigarette breaks and ze padded budgets,” and the Aussies didn’t care for that attitude.
• Our best look yet at Rapid Dragon – The Drive points out that, while the system is cool, it’s likely that the US airlift fleet would be busy airlifting things during a peer conflict where ‘more missile trucks’ is a requirement. I suppose it might be that it’s easier to shanghai existing manufacturers into building airlift planes that can double as missile trucks than it would be to get them up to speed on bombers.
• Rolls-Royce to re-engine B-52s – Expected service life extended to 2050, which means we’re very likely to see the B-52’s 100th anniversary pass with airframes still in service, in 2055. Mark your calendars!
• USN takes delivery of the first Superbug Block IIIs – What’s in them? Hit this one to find out.
• Successful hypersonic missile test carried out – This is the US scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missile, not the Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle strategic missile.
• British Army shows off future soldier concept – Still using a bullpup!
• The J-20A now has domestic engines – CNN calls it an upgrade, of which I am skeptical, but it’s certainly an upgrade in terms of defense industry independence.
• Know Your Ships: FFG(X) silhouette vs. FREMM – There are some quite substantial differences. Wasn’t the whole point of FFG(X) to buy off the rack?
• Jalopnik wonders why it’s so hard to buy a new USAF tanker – Because all American procurement is dysfunctional. Just ask anyone in the industry about their work at $DEFENSE_CONTRACTOR.
• Following LCS-2’s decommissioning on July 31, LCS-1 is under the axe after a mere 13 years on the job.
• Foreign Policy magazine pushes for a UN peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan – It could prevent civil war, says Foreign Policy, but it seems to me like the civil war is already over.
• How to hide from drones – A 36-minute video that I haven’t had the time to watch yet, but parvusimperator gives it the thumbs up.
• USS Connecticut hit something underwater
• Chinese reactions strongly suggest it was a Chinese submarine
• More hypersonic missile fun: Big Army now has its Dark Eagle system in hand – When did we start naming things with a comic book aesthetic?
• The first AC-130 solid state laser arrives for testing
• American forces have been deploying to Taiwan for at least a year
• The Marines have a vehicle whose armament is a pack of suicide drones
• Some models of OMFV entrants at AUSA
• Army, not content to play second fiddle to Marines, to receive General Dynamics Land Systems tracked vehicle with 50 suicide drones – Take that, Marines!
• Big Army also halts billion-dollar augmented reality goggle project
• German army adopts the ELCAN Specter as its new service optic – 1-4x, which is a good range of magnifications for the average guy on the ground.
• Anti-drone swarm striker Stryker competition heats up – Get it? Because one uses a microwave weapon, and the other two use lasers.
• Bell completes first Bahraini Cobra Viper – Why did Bahrain go with the AH-1 instead of the AH-64? Performance might be one reason. The AH-1 is a substantially more maneuverable platform—it’s a ton or two lighter, and only down 180 shaft horsepower over the Apache.
• The Ukraine-Russia front line looks like something from the Great War
• Press release from Tim Ryan’s office suggests that funding secured for the Lima Joint Systems Manufacturing Center will be used to integrate an unmanned turret into the Abrams

Defense-Adjacent

• More details on that remote-control-machine-gun hit on the Iranian nuclear weapons chief
• The Marines bid farewell to the venerable M9
• A review of Operation Eagle Claw, from shortly after it happened – Parvusimperator says: “Is it news? No. Am I reading it? Yes.” Which made more sense before the Sunday Papers rebranding, but hey, we never claimed to be professionals here.
• Marine F-35s flying from Izumo – The fiction about it not being an aircraft carrier lasted even less long than I expected it to.
• Indian Su-30s to exercise with Japanese fighters later this year – Nice to see all of the countries around China starting to work together.
• Fancy flying at Australia’s Riverfire festival – C-17s between buildings!
• Harrier pilots use a meatball too – I should get back into DCS some, once my gaming computer is running again. (My 10-year-old RAM sure picked a bad time to crap out on me.)
• Army moves to field Iron Fist on Bradleys
• Ecuadorian Navy sailing ship catches narco speedboat – H. I. Sutton has a video explainer on the subject, linked in the article, but it’s impressive no matter how you slice it.
• China’s new maritime patrol ship looks like a cruise liner on the inside
• A nifty AUKUS map – Mainly because of the projection. It’s centered on Guam, so that all lines of azimuth from Guam are accurate. You get a good sense for the shape of the lines of communication between the AUKUS members, as well as the strategic shape of Pacific lines of communication.

Science and Technology

• Starship is still not understood – There’s going to be a massive economic revolution in space in the next decade or so, and NASA is still planning missions like it’s 1994. When you can chuck 100 tons into space for $10 million, suddenly optimizing ruthlessly for mass and building billion-dollar rovers doesn’t seem like such a good use of time.
• E3D, manufacturer of 3D printer accessories, plans to patent its future innovations – Because they can’t survive as a company when they have to compete with near-instant Chinese ripoffs of their products, and then also deal with supporting said ripoffs. The 3D printing community is howling, but honestly, I don’t hate their approach here. They say they won’t enforce their patents against hobbyists and academics, which is to my mind the most egregious part of the patent system.
• Just how big can solar flares get? – And just how likely are they to hammer Earth with a modern-day Carrington Event?
• Speaking of, there’s a geomagnetic storm coming today – If you’re at 50 degrees geomagnetic latitude or points north, you may be able to see auroras tonight. Unless you’re here with us in Pittsburgh, in which case you won’t, because it’s cloudy.
• The double-charm tetraquark: a new piece in the strong force puzzle – Sorry, it’s a little beyond me.
• Starlink satellites stand in for GPS – Satellites with published ephemeris data constantly transmitting accurate timestamps can be used for location? News at 11.
• The dumbest sorting algorithm ever – “The first reaction of someone seeing this algorithm might be ‘this cannot possibly be correct’.”
• Intel slipped up on trying to be both a cutting-edge fab and a chip designer, and now it’s throwing open the doors to its fabs and taking contract manufacturing jobs to survive – That’s a bit of a gloomy way of phrasing it, but broadly accurate.
• Are black holes actually dark energy stars? – Some physicists say yes! Dark energy stars are an interesting idea because they resolve some black hole-related paradoxes.

Finance and Economics

• There are legal obstacles to paying for zoo animals with currency, so zoos have developed an animal-based currency to work around the laws – One of the zoo curators likens it to countries dealing with one another in their own currencies—there are some animals that are ‘reserve currencies’, of a sort, but a lot of times, the exchange rate depends on the details of the trade and the institution with which you’re working.
• Is Evergrande finally going to collapse? – Story from 9/21. As of this writing, no, but it could still happen. I feel like Evergrande collapse stories are kind of like Three Gorges Dam collapse stories, in that they’re tired and predictable up until when they actually happen.
• Shortages: a late 2021 fact of life – We reloaders have been scrounging for a while now, though.
• Evergrande Part II: China asking state-backed firms to buy Evergrande assets – Well, ‘asking’.
• Coca-Cola loading supplies on chartered bulk freighters – Stevedores and longshoremen jumping with joy in the streets.
• China buying Australian coal despite import ban, owing to the power shortage in China
• Youtuber Economics Explained on China’s blackouts – I don’t know the guy’s political leanings, but his economics seem more conservative than the norm for the Youtube explainer set, so.
• Closing in on COVID’s origins – If it circulated in animals and jumped to humans, you’d expect to find it in animals. Except… “Chinese scientists searched for a host in early 2020, testing more than 80,000 animals from 209 species, including wild, domesticated and market animals. As the WHO investigation reported, not a single animal infected with SARS-CoV-2 was found.”
• Shipping pallets are the low-stakes version of container shortages – Well, partially shortages, and partially how there are competing pallet systems. There are the ‘whitewood’ ones you think of when you think of a shipping pallet, and then there are blue-painted ones that are rented by a central company rather than sold as part of the shipment.

Guns

• The Frankford Arsenal FX-10 is an extreme value choice in the world of progressive presses – 10 stations, expected street price of about $1100.
• At the intersection of guns and finance, JP Morgan is upset it’s blocked from underwriting Texas municipal bond sales because of its anti-gun stances – Well, too bad. Nobody is required to do business with you.
• MP7 and P90 vs. 1985-era Soviet body armor – Spoiler: neither the MP7 or the P90, even with armor-piercing ammunition, actually penetrate the Soviet armor.
• Crye Precision with a fascinating patent application: a PDW with a through-the-grip magazine, firing .300 Blackout – The rounds in the magazine have a substantial upward tilt to reduce the front-to-back size of the grip, and level out upon feeding by means of clever feed lip and follower geometry. A belt-holsterable .300 or 5.56 PDW would be pretty darned snazzy.
• I won Revolver division at the Virginia State USPSA championship, and got a nifty belt for my trouble.

Grab Bag

• Why you’re Christian – Philosophically, as a citizen of a Western nation, even if you don’t hold to the religion itself.
• Smith and Wesson ditches Massachusetts – For its headquarters, at least. Some manufacturing will remain in MA. Not a lot of firearms companies left in the historically innovative Northeast. Ruger’s in New Hampshire, which barely even counts as the Northeast, given its commitment to freedom.
• Rule 1 of government: the Government (in the UK sense) does not control the government – This is known, to anyone who’s see the classic British comedy/documentary Yes, Minister.

I swear I’m not trying to turn this into a monthly feature—there’s been a lot going on, and news items (that we read and share in our links channel) have been following a drought or flood pattern.

Projects

• The Glockblaster 3D, which I mentioned way back in… wow, February… is almost done. Expect a series of posts following the build later in the year.

Defense

• Above the fold: Australia ditches France, returns to the Anglosphere for its subs and Pacific security arrangements – The Aussies are going nuclear! It’s a miracle it took as long as it did, because…
• … it was too expensive, and can’t do enough – Ouch.
• The French, ever those masters of grace and forgiveness, recalled their ambassadors from the US and Australia – Not the UK, though, because, to lightly paraphrase an actual official explanation, the French expect perfidy from those English dogs, and don’t think it’s worth any stern measures.
• The new bloc is called Aukus, which is an awful name – At least it doesn’t include New Zealand. Aukusnz? Just doesn’t work. Looks like it should include Poland, with that cluster at the end.
• Boeing rolls out Qatari F-15s – The inspiration, evidently, for the F-15EX.
• Coaxial rotorheads rejoice: Ka-52M gets a contract from Russia – The Ka-50, I’ve always said, is a traditional attack helicopter with two crew, except the two crew are in different airframes. The Ka-52 is a lot less exotic, although there aren’t a lot of serious attack helos with side-by-side seating. Perhaps because the coaxial rotors impose a speed limit already, so optimizing for low drag is less important.
• System tests of Rapid Dragon under way – Turning every cargo plane into a potential missile truck is a nice little force multiplier. I wonder if shanghaied commercial cargo planes could do the job? I don’t know how many of them have tail ramps, though.
• Why the Afghan army fell so quickly before the Taliban – Written by an Afghan general.
• USAF experimenting with antiship JDAMs – Which is quite the trick, considering JDAMs are for hitting a specific coordinate, rather than a specific moving object. Seems like a seeker swap. Possibly some munition networking.
• Military jetpacks now heading to Southeast Asia – It’s actually a different jetpack than the one the Royal Navy tested a while back.
• Team Bullpup crushed: Tavor to be retired – It lasted about ten years.
• Taiwan’s new corvettes have better a better ASuW fit than most major surface combatants – They are creatures of their time and place, I’ll say that.
• SoKor tests sub-launched ballistic missiles – Launched from a diesel boomer. Does South Korea secretly have the bomb, I wonder? We’re not upset, if so; just play nice with Japan.
• Officially retired, F-117s now play stealth aggressor – The Drive reports.
• Losing Small Wars: a boots-on-the-ground officer type reflects on the increasing centralization of Big Army command
• Israel working on stealthy fuel tanks for its F-35s – Israel: world leader in range extension.
• Germany working on Type 212CD: a stealth submarine – It goes like this: passive sonar doesn’t work as well as it used to, because submarines are all so quiet. So, active sonar is on the way back. Active sonar can be defeated by shaping, just like radar. That leads to strangely angular boats.

Science and Technology

• ASML is the most important company you’ve never heard of – Unless you know about microchip manufacturing. It’s a fascinating dive into their history and their cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. (They’re the only ones in the world who can make them.)
• Extremely outdated news: SpaceX standing down from Starlink launches
• Less outdated news: SpaceX launches first satellites with laser interlinks – The laser interlinks dramatically increase the capability of the constellation. It used to be that you had to talk to a satellite that could talk to you and a ground station. Now, traffic can bounce around in space until it gets to a satellite that can relay it to a ground station. A reporter asked Ol’ Musky, “How does transmitting into a country without a local downlink work on the regulatory side?” Musk replied: “They can shake their fist at the sky”. I like it.
• Today, on Techbros Reinvent: the timeshare
• Ig Nobel prize winner: when moving a rhinoceros by helicopter, is it better to carry it right-side up in a sling, or upside down, tied by the legs? – The answer may surprise you.

Guns

• Stop worrying about overpenetration
• Nine years after it was developed, semiauto SCARs finally get the non-reciprocating charging handle
• I took second-place Revolver at a USPSA major match – I’m conflicted about the implied bragging here. There aren’t a lot of matches where a high finish in Revolver is worthy of it. I did lose by a mere 5% to a grandmaster-level shooter at this one, however, and beat a guy who stomped me early this year.
• Does a light trigger increase accuracy? – I mean, obviously, yes, duh, but here’s some data to back it up.

The Rona

• A travelogue with a twist – Which I’ve spoiled, by putting it in this category. Part 2, part 3.
• Australia, penal colony past and future – “People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person.”
• Turns out there were Americans funding the Wuhan bat virus institute after all

The Economy, Stupid

• How I became an inflation crank – Where ‘I’ is the author of the piece. Yours truly has been an inflation crank for a few months already.
• Millennials aren’t poorer than their parents
• Is Chinese construction megacorp Evergrande finally going to collapse? – It hasn’t yet, at least, since this story started popping up a week or two ago.

Grab Bag

• Everyone loves a good museum heist story
• Is conventional wisdom on educational spending wrong? – Freddie de Boer, tax-and-print-and-spender (by his own admission!) says ‘yes’, if you consider throwing money at the problem the conventional wisdom.
• Graf Zeppelin returns to New York in 1929, flying through a celebratory aerial smoke screen – One of the coolest videos I’ve seen in a long time.
• Also in cool videos: helmet cam around Spa-Francorchamps
• This year, two cars split the F1 safety car job: the usual Merc, and now an Aston Martin… – …which sounds way, way better than the actual race cars. Oh, and Zandvoort’s a pretty cool track.

It looks like The Sunday Papers are here to stay.

Defense

• Kongsberg still has a sub-launched NSM in the works – I’m still iffy on the range, or lack thereof.
• What can SEWIP do? A tour of the Navy’s new electronic warfare system, with Northrop Grumman’s Mike Meaney
• Twitter favorite John Hayward points out the ways in which our Afghanistan nation-building program was doomed from the start – A Twitter favorite of mine.
• [Another view of the same problem, from within the boots of someone who spent time on the ground there]
  (https://amplifiedbeing.com/2021/08/15/what-just-happened/)
• The Northern Alliance is asking for weapons again – Everything old is new.
• In Australia, the Boxer has a turret problem – “Overweight and unprotected from missiles”.
• Guest bloggers at CDR Salamander’s talk about an operational model for a China-countering Navy – The short version is, stop robbing Peter to pay Paul in re: up-tempo carrier deployment cycles.
• Big Army’s first laser weapon enters testing – The Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is building a platoon of SHORAD laser Strykers, further cementing the Stryker’s place as the M113 of the 21st century.
• The Beeb does some good work for a change: a deep dive into the Russian mercenary organization Wagner, courtesy of a tablet left behind on a battlefield
• South Koreans now dislike China more than Japan – It’s a generational shift, but nevertheless a good one for the forces of freedom and democracy in the Far East.

Science and Technology

• Google creates time crystals with a quantum computer – I’m not quite up on the science here, but I think a time crystal is a construct that oscillates between two states without any energy input.
• SpaceX stacks Starship and Super Heavy for the first time – History books of the future: Space Age, Information Age, Space Age 2.
• Billionaires team up to strip-mine Greenland for electric car batteries
• Mathematician-comedians David Cox and Steven Zucker met as Princeton grad students, and spent five years rifling through unsolved problems so they could write a joint paper – They created an algorithm they called the Cox-Zucker machine.
• A past story, updated: that insect apocalypse that was in the news some time ago is probably nothing
• Disney now making stuntman robots – That seems bad, from a machine apocalypse perspective.
• In less scary robotics news: farm robots that scoot around fields and zap weeds with lasers – Can I get one for my lawn? … Can I make one for my lawn?
• This guy on Youtube has several hours of videos on the Champlain Towers South collapse, laying out the evidence and discussing possible causes of the disaster – Highly recommended. While I’m usually a ‘give me an article’ guy, he makes excellent use of the medium, with annotated photos in real time.

COVID

• Prepper, libertarian-ish guy, and Ars Technica founder (since departed) Jon Stokes is starting to get worried about COVID again, which is maybe a canary. He’s a fairly clear-eyed dude. We’ll keep you updated.
• Plastic barriers probably don’t help – Ventilation is the COVID-killer, which is why airplanes are quite safe despite what you’d think. Plastic barriers can interfere with ventilation.

History

• The pilot’s training manual for the B-25 – Full of technical detail, but also an interesting segment on how to be the commander of a bomber crew.
• Farewell to Bourgeois Kings – An essay on how the world is changing. Is this the end of managerial-class bureaucracy, in the same way that the 1800s were the death of monarchy?

Grab Bag

• Bacon to disappear from California, thanks to new regulations – Couldn’t happen to a nicer state!
• University of Iowa officials who violated free exercise rights for a campus Christian group will not get qualified immunity
• Second-largest mortgage lender in the US will start accepting Bitcoin later this year – That seems like a good reason to get some crypto into the portfolio somehow…
• Black vultures are less considerate than their red-headed cousins; sometimes eat livestock before it’s dead – Now, Indiana farmers can kill ’em and hang them in effigy, which the article remarks is a successful method to deter future predation.

Oh dear, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?

With the increasing business and attendant busy-ness at work, I’m considering making this week’s tongue-in-cheek change a permanent one. We picked Wednesday for the What We’re Reading back when we had a post from me on some Saturdays and a post from parvusimperator most Tuesdays and Thursdays. It made a lot more sense when Tuesday through Thursday was a solid block of content. Now that that condition no longer holds, I don’t know if I have much reason to carry on trying to carve 45 minutes out of my Wednesdays to whip this up, when Sunday is a whole lot more open.

Projects

• I did buy a new reloading press. It’s a Dillon XL750, and I quite like it.
• The revolver technique content I promised is delayed, because we had a pipe leak and the attendant plumbing and remediation work to contract out and do, respectively.

Defense

• PacFleet commander says he has a duty to prevent seizure of Taiwan – This came shortly after the remarks by a Japanese official that an attack on Taiwan would be a threat to the national security of Japan.
• Outline detection in the ENVG-B – Through the medium of a Blackhawk on the ramp.
• Poland could buy Abrams
• Poland is buying Abrams – Use Google Translate. It looks like they’re getting some of the mothball fleet, upgraded to SEPv3.
• Poland is also buying Patriot – Bit of a spending spree recently. There have been whispers of Russia looking to build permanent bases in Belarus. Perhaps that has Poland looking over its shoulder a bit nervously.
• Evaluating the Dutch CV90 MLU – It has even more of the ‘looks like a tank’ problem than the Bradley does. Parvusimperator remarks that the Aussies ruled out the CV90 Mark IV on cost grounds.
• CDR Salamander: culture is upstream of everything – Is the Navy too risk-intolerant? Are its incentives improperly aligned? Contra Betteridge’s Law, the answer to those questions is ‘yes’.
• Thresher‘s crew may have survived for hours, according to new documents – Bubblehead Twitter was extremely doubtful.
• Drone-defeat system demoed aboard M80 Stiletto
• The XF108: a 50s interceptor with a rotary missile launcher
• US Navy wallpapers over F-35C shortages – “Instead of two squadrons per air wing with 10 tails, the Navy will now field a single squadron with 14 tails.”
• Afghans fleeing Taliban advances seek refuge in Turkey
• Point Blank Enterprises takes an OMFV phase 2 slot – The other entrants: Rheinmetall, BAE, GDLS, and Oshkosh.

Science and Technology

• A Chemical Hunger: why are people so fat these days? – A review of the evidence in favor of chemical contaminants being the cause. Particularly compelling: county-level maps of obesity are very similar to maps of watershed catchment area. A long read: it has at least eight parts at the time of writing.
• Should social media platforms be regulated like common carriers? – Eugene Volokh argues that some kind of common carrier-like regime may be correct. We have a fair bit of editorial independence here, because we’re not beholden to Big Tech, but there are plenty of ways we could still get shut down given a substantial enough pressure campaign.
• China seizes UK’s largest microchip manufacturer – Barely even hyperbole, that headline.
• China also cracks down on its equivalent to US big tech – Content warning: a pundit who is, in my experience, frequently wrong. That said, I think he’s right on this one: China isn’t hitting companies that make tangible things, just its domestic software industry. Which is dumb, given that a domestic software industry helps encourage the development of the software engineers you need to make tangible tech, but central planners never got high marks for making good decisions.
• Big earthquake in Alaska – Right next door to the Cascadia fault, where we should be expecting the next Big One.

Grab Bag

• The Atlantic, without a punching bag in the White House, is in dire straits – I can rouse myself to care about enough to laugh, and to suggest that maybe if they concerned themselves more with speaking truth to power no matter who holds it, rather than being in the tank for one team. We don’t really hide our politics here, but I like to think that we’re equal-opportunity hard on targets in our core area of operation, defense affairs.
• The Beale Ciphers: America’s most famous buried treasure? – And, on balance, likely a hoax.

The ‘Rona

• Much more than you wanted to know about lockdown effectiveness – Courtesy Scott Alexander.

Reloading press update: I’m looking now at a Dillon XL750, which seems to hit the right balance between price, size, and capability.

Projects

• Lots of stuff around the house.
• Parvusimperator remarks that he’s been engaged in planning the plan for a committee to lay out the vision for the forthcoming plan for architecting a future project. $GOVERNMENT_CONTRACTOR life!
• The Glockblaster 3D project I wrote about earlier in the year is nearly done. I need to write a progress update. I’ve been sharing more frequent, less formal updates at a semi-private forum for a collection of centrist and right-leaning tech enthusiasts. It’s a pleasant place, and if you find the tenor of the less politically neutral grab bag pieces agreeable rather than aggravating, you might like it there too.

Defense

• How do you say ‘The Cardinal of the Kremlin’ in Mandarin? – Largely confirmed now, I think?
• James D. Hornfischer, of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, passes away at 55 – That rates a pour one out.
• It has been 76 0 years since American aircraft flew combat missions from a foreign carrier – Smart money on it being a British ship both times.
• China kills Apple Daily – Hong Kong’s generally anti-CCP paper of record, not some Cupertino-focused news outlet.
• RN destroyers to go from 48 VLS cells to 72 – These are for MBDA Sea Ceptors, which frees up the Sylver cells for Aster 30s exclusively. A nice little upgrade for a previously underarmed destroyer.
• Japan’s deputy PM… guarantees Taiwanese independence? – Or at least indicates that the feeling in the Japanese government is that an invasion of Taiwan is sufficient grounds for Japan to call going to war with China self-defense.
• Also, random tech people (not defense news followers) on Twitter are starting to recognize that Japan is pretty clearly turning to a more expeditionary doctrine.

Science and Technology

• Sagitarrius A*: not a black hole after all? – Observations suggest it might be a clump of dark matter. I, of course, am on record as a dark matter skeptic (or rather: dark matter strikes me as an ugly math hack), so I’m doubtful.
• Amazon’s Lumberyard engine is now Open3D, an open-source engine – I hope it doesn’t entirely knock the wind from Godot’s sails.

Guns

• 3D printers have led to all kinds of wacky ideas in firearms design – This one fires from a rigid toroidal belt.
• I have accumulated some Ruger knowledge, which I should lay out in text form. It’s on my Youtube channel, along with this year’s match videos so far, for now.

Grab Bag

• It took three-point shooting an awfully long time to catch on in the NBA – For the same reason, broadly, that it took baseball front offices so long to start actually looking at representative statistics.
• de Blasio prepares to depart the New York mayor’s office, broadly disliked – Of course, the nation still doesn’t know who won, because the New York elections board is perhaps the most incompetent agency of an already all-embracingly incompetent city government.
• Whither the ticker-tape parade? – Maybe not the ticker-tape parade exactly, but the mass celebration of major accomplishments? Somehow, I doubt we’ll see a series of nationwide parades on the return of the first person to walk on Mars, and that’s the phenomenon the article wonders about.
• Japanese zoning laws are simple and sensible – I’m not sure if I consider those Japanese qualities or not.
• Culture wars are long wars – Fought on the scale of generations.