Latest from Perun…
Another interesting bit of analysis by Perun
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May 24th, 2026 | 2 comments
 May 18th, 2026 | 6 comments
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 May 10th, 2026 | 22 comments
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. May 4th, 2026 | 27 comments
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. May 1st, 2026 | 15 comments
The Iranian Islamic Republic’s strategy is obvious: simply remain in power by gunning down or hanging any internal opposition, and inflict as much global economic damage as possible to increase pressure on the USA and Israel until Trump lives up to his TACO nickname. The USA strategy is rather less obvious as pretty much any result that leave Iran as a hostile Islamic Republic is an Iranian political win even if their military capabilities are degraded. April 21st, 2026 | 38 comments
I know I keep droning on about drones, but this really is a paradigm shift happening in real-time. TL’DR… 100km from the FEBA is now a persistent danger zone due to the omnipresent threat of drones. Some were sceptical in an post earlier when drones were credited with 70% of battlefield casualties. Well, the number claimed now, based on video confirmation, is 90%. April 7th, 2026 | 24 comments
April 6th, 2026 | 8 comments
The other day the Triggernometry boys sat down with a Professor Robert Pape to discuss the Iran War. Here are his main points along with my commentary:
There was something else that bugged me. It was his general tone: defeatism mixed with smugness. *Of course, this interview does no such thing. It seems to me that Obama’s guiding principle was the destruction of American liberties and their replacement with a communist tyranny. The Papes of this world just provided suitable intellectual cover. April 1st, 2026 | 19 comments
The Telegraph reports,
Other than seeing Iran free, I don’t even know what I want to be going on. March 23rd, 2026 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is easy to underestimate how radical a change in strategy this is. It simply would not have been possible in previous wars. Airpower capable of striking significantly behind the front lines did not exist until World War 2. Since then, command and control structures have been too widely dispersed and hardened to make broad attacks on them even theoretically possible until now. Yes, countries sometimes try to kill each other’s top leaders. But assassinations are less common than civilians realize. Leaders generally do not target each other directly in wars — maybe hoping for a similar courtesy from the other side, or maybe because killing the other side’s leaders can make negotiating peace more difficult. In any case, what Israel and the United States are trying is not a singular assassination but continuous attacks on a national command structure while at the same time sparing civilians to the extent possible. (Yes, the United States appears to have killed almost 200 girls in a Tomahawk attack. But the strike was clearly a mistake, not a strategic choice. It has not been repeated, and the United States is not trying to defend it.) The American-Israeli goal is very clear: to convince the people at the top of the Iranian regime that they, and their replacements, and their replacements’ replacements, will die, and die very soon, unless they capitulate. Can this strategy work? I don’t know. Since it’s never been tried before, I’m not sure anyone does. March 21st, 2026 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have hesitated to post much about Ukraine lately as reliable information is hard to come by. However, the Telegram channels I have long watched on both sides, and personal contacts I have, are awash with similar reports from their own sources. Make of this what you will. March 16th, 2026 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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