We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
The recent news about a Ukrainian counteroffensive liberating several hundred square kilometres of territory around Lyman in eastern Ukraine has come as a pleasant surprise in the midst of the ongoing Russian missile barrages against Ukrainian cities, and the appalling spectacle of American negotiators discussing good memories with the Russian president in Moscow. The Ukrainian gains have been documented by a variety of sources, including drone videos, soldier accounts and media organisations that have held off reporting the operation. The Institute for the Study of War has stated in its latest update that “ISW’s mapping methodology is likely underestimating the extent of Ukrainian gains in the ongoing counterattacks in the Lyman direction.”
[…]
Thus, over the space of two months, Ukraine has executed two quiet yet successful counteroffensive operations in different parts of the country. Not only does this challenge the popular (and lazy) narrative of a stalemate along the frontline, but it also means that the Ukrainians have been investing in the hard intellectual work of finding new methods of conducting successful offensive action at the tactical and operational levels.
Regarding the “appalling spectacle of American negotiators” remark… having businessmen do diplomacy is a bit like having a heart surgeon fix your roof. Even if he is a great surgeon, he is going to fuck up your roof.
“In the current Russian leadership’s rather 19th — though increasingly 21st — century view of how the world works, lesser powers must defer to great ones or pay the price. The UK, a country in a category all of its own when it comes to Kremlin resentments, has just been warned that it’s inline for such a punishmentand I’m not sure that’s being taken seriously enough.”
Markets are discovery mechanisms. In war adaptation and discovery are a matter of survival.
Ukraine began the war with a traditional military procurement system. Large, standardised orders from suppliers chosen by the defence ministry with no room for adjustment to individual circumstances. Ukraine’s key innovation was to decentralise military acquisition, placing the funding and decision-making power in the hands of military commanders on the front lines.
Enabled by their earlier implementation of a public electronic procurement system Prozorro, groundbreaking in its own right by allowing greater price competition and transparency, Ukraine launched DOT-Chain Defence in July 2025. Perhaps best described as an ‘Amazon’ for weapons systems, Military units independently select, order, and reserve the necessary equipment, see delivery timelines, leave feedback, and receive quick responses. The system is designed to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and allow frontline brigades to order in exactly the resources they need at any given time with minimal delay. If a product is low-quality individual units will cease to order it as soon as battlefield conditions expose its flaws, providing rapid feedback to manufacturers to improve their products.
The e-points system is another recent deployment. A unit carries out a combat mission and uploads video proof of its achievements, targets destroyed etc., to the DELTA combat and control system. The unit is then awarded e-points at the end of the month, a virtual currency which it can use to purchase the weapons systems of its choice.
By introducing clear incentives at every step of the process, combat units are motivated to provide results, manufacturers to improve quality and the Ukrainian military machine becomes ever more effective.
No end to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government, no end to Iran’s missile programme, no handover of enriched uranium, yes to ending US sanctions and thus forgoing any political leverage, yes to accepting Iranian (and Omani, for what it’s worth) control over Hormuz, no end to the IRGC proxy forces in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon… and, er, an Iranian promise to be nice in the future and not make nukes?
But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defence spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defence spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.
In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.
– Jonny Ball writing What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong
I often do not agree with Peter Zeihan, to put it mildly, but he might be more or less right about this, given the Atlantic alliance effectively ended in January 2025, at least de facto if not de jure. It pains me to write that as someone who has been a pro-US Atlanticist my entire life.
Many years ago, I was chatting with the grandmother of a family friend, whose name was Hannelore. She grew up in Germany on a family farm in Schleswig-Holstein, not far from Hamburg, and candidly admitted that as landowning farmers, they all feared the communists and so were broadly supportive of the NSDAP during the 1930s. Indeed, when the war started, any misgivings they had evaporated when Poland swiftly fell in 1939, and then France collapsed in a month and a half campaign in 1940. The family even attended some pro-government rallies to celebrate these victories.
By 1943, Hannelore said it was clear it was not going to be a short war, as Allied bombers were now a constant presence in the skies above. It was also very hard to find farm labourers as the war effort was consuming more and more resources by then. Yet even so, the family remained broadly optimistic about the war ending with German victory.
But then in late July for an entire week, the RAF and USAAF filled the sky over Hamburg by day and by night. And although Hannelore did not know it at the time, it was called Operation Gomorrah. She told me that on one night in particular, her father called the whole family outside. It was bright as day, the entire skyline to the south a line of incandescent light. By morning, white dust entirely covered their home and farmland, with a constant rain of ash still falling from the sky. 40,000 people had burned to death in a firestorm in a single day in Hamburg. And only then, our friend’s grandmother said, did they finally realise everything was not going to be alright and the war had been a catastrophic mistake. Only then, and from then onwards, did everything they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio ring hollow.
I was in my late teens sitting in an old farmhouse in Scotland when Hannelore told me that story from her youth.
So, on this portentous Beltane as I watched a series of videos from Tuapse in Russia, I had something of a flashback to that story told me several decades ago.
In the early days of the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine in 2022, there was a series of rallies in Tuapse in support of Putin’s government. I wonder if perspectives have started shift now that the reality of this war is coming home to Russia in earnest.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
