Quotulatiousness

September 20, 2026

There are wedding gifts and there are wedding gifts

Filed under: Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Gift-giving has been a thing since caveman days, they say, but sometimes gifts carry strings along with them that are impossible to ignore, or as The Grim Historian puts it, “never let a mobster pay for your wedding”:

Nothing says “just a wedding gift” like the benefactor whose role stayed secret until ProPublica had to put an arrow over his head.
Photo: Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; annotation/source: ProPublica.

My Grandma Ella had a rule about gifts, usually delivered while waving a wooden spoon over a white apron so stippled with tomato sauce it could have been entered into evidence.

She would say, “Never accept gifts. That’s how a rich man turns you into a beggar.”

That may sound cynical, but no Italian survives a lifetime of weddings, funerals, Sunday dinners, and relatives saying “forget about it” without learning that generosity has a very long memory.

A gift creates an imbalance. You give me something. Now I am indebted to you. Sure, you may insist it is “just a gift.” But I have seen enough crisp white envelopes exchange hands to know there are gifts, and then there are … gifts.

Say I give you a hundred dollars and tomorrow you hand me a hundred dollars back, congratulations…we have invented banking. Or say you sign up for my breathtakingly grim history newsletter. I have provided you a service in exchange for your 5 ducats, but we are all clear on the bargain.

But suppose I give you something you can’t return. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now the books stay open. And a man who keeps your books open is not your friend. He owns a piece of you.

Which brings us to Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding and who owns him.

ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski reported this week that Umar Kremlev — a Russian businessman closely associated with Vladimir Putin — gifted Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump quite the wedding shindig in the Bahamas.

According to records and interviews ProPublica reviewed, Kremlev paid to rent a private island, covered an elaborate fireworks show, and had his team help organize the festivities. There were helicopters, seaplanes, oceanfront villas, and a five-tier funfetti cake flown in from Florida. So not exactly the crystal punch bowl from Aunt Linda.

Fortunately, after ProPublica published its story, the newlyweds fessed up. Yes, Don Jr. and Bettina Trump have a wealthy Russian benefactor (sorry, “friend”) granting party favors. Then they made a statement that would have my Italian grandmother shaking her mano fica.

“Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.”

Just a gift.

September 17, 2026

You don’t hate the relic media nearly as much as they deserve

Filed under: History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The relic media in Canada has — thanks to generous government subsidies — become a maple-flavoured version of the North Korean news media, but even in the United States where there’s still a somewhat competitive market, most media outlets are delighted to act as unpaid propagandists … and have been that way for generations:

Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for lying about Stalin’s Ukraine famine while millions starved. His employer, the New York Times, never returned that prize. The institutional rot ran deeper than one reporter.

In 1936, Times Moscow correspondent Harold Denny watched the first of Stalin’s Great Purge trials and reported the proceedings as credible. The defendants, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev among them, confessed to plotting murder and sabotage. Denny saw no obvious coercion and wrote accordingly. The NKVD had spent weeks breaking these men through sleep deprivation, threats against their families, and relentless psychological torture until they would say anything in open court.

Every confession was fabricated. Every defendant was executed anyway. Stalin murdered roughly 750,000 people during the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938, and the Times gave the operation a veneer of legitimacy at its most critical moment.

Central planners require a monopoly on information to survive. When the newspaper of record in the most powerful capitalist country on earth launders your show trials as fair proceedings, you buy yourself years of Western political goodwill. Stalin purchased that goodwill with useful idiots who confused proximity to power with insight.

You pay for this dynamic today every time an institution that failed catastrophically keeps its credentials, its prizes, and its authority to declare what counts as credible journalism.

Duranty would have been proud of Time magazine had he been alive today.

September 13, 2026

Velvet Glove and Sparrow II missiles: A Guide To Early Cold War Bomber Interception Tactics

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus
Published 6 Apr 2026

The Velvet Glove was a semi-active guided missile system developed by the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment. Its successor, the Sparrow II was developed by Canadair in association with the US Air Force. This is the story of the development of the missiles in the context of their contemporary weapons systems.

0:00 Introduction
1:00 NORAD and continental defense
3:21 Gun approach
5:32 Rocket pod approach
7:54 Nuclear option
8:35 Interception Tactics
11:56 Guided missile approach
14:38 Velvet Glove missile development
19:30 Sparrow missile development
22:03 Arming Canada’s future fighters
25:08 Conclusion

September 8, 2026

Why The Soviet Union Lost In Afghanistan

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 3 Apr 2026

In February 1989, the last Soviet combat troops leave Afghanistan after almost a decade of war. Despite military superiority, the superpower was not able to establish a stable Moscow-friendly regime in the country. Yet, the mujahedeen are also deeply divided and influenced by outside forces such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Osama Bin Laden.
(more…)

September 1, 2026

“Under Communism, everyone has a job”

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sandy Petersen responds to the “Under Communism, everyone has a job” claim that has been circulating recently thanks to the rising popularity of useful idiots:

“Under Communism, everyone has a job”. This is absolutely true.

Here’s what else was true.

1) You were ASSIGNED your job AND the region for that job by the state (i.e., a bureaucrat). You were required to stay in your job at least 3 years.

2) After 3 years, if you wanted to switch jobs, you needed the approval of both your labor board AND your employer. If you switched too often (for example: every 3 years), there were legal penalties, up to imprisonment.

3) Promotions were based on party membership, loyalty, and sucking up. I’ve talked to a lot of former Soviet citizens, and zero of them thought merit was of use. Also many nice jobs were only for party members.

4) Wages were pretty even across the board. A factory worker, engineer, and factory manager had similar salaries, so it was indeed egalitarian, but didn’t have a lot of incentive. The higher-rank workers did get perks to make up for it. They might get a vacation dacha on the Black Sea. Or a “company” car with a chauffeur. That sort of thing. The higher-ups had better stuff.

5) You needed a passport to travel inside your own country. You couldn’t just move to Leningrad and look for work. Or even go on vacation without permission.

6) You had a union. It was state-controlled. You could not go on strike. If you criticized your factory manager, you would be arrested. Yay unions.

If you look at the above, they are an evil capitalist’s wet dream. Think of a movie with a foul imaginary super-corporation so beloved of science fiction movies — they would support every one of those initiatives.

Because that’s what the Soviet Union was — the biggest, most evil corporation that ever existed.

August 24, 2026

“Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I nearly skipped this post by Celina, as it started off appearing to be pretty much of interest only to Australians, but that was just the opening sections:

The Bolsheviks were the first governing power of the modern era to write the suppression of “national enmity” into a systematic criminal code. The RSFSR Criminal Code of 1922 penalised agitation and propaganda arousing national enmity or dissension, its successor, the 1926 Code, carried the provision forward as Article 59-7, under the chapter dealing with especially dangerous crimes against the order of administration, punishing “propaganda or agitation directed towards arousing national or religious enmity or discord”, with sharply escalated penalties, up to and including death, where the offence occurred in wartime or amid mass disturbances. From the earliest years of the Soviet state, in other words, speech about nationality was not a civil-society problem to be argued out, but a category of state crime sometimes punishable by death.

To understand why, it is necessary to understand something about communism that conservatives and libertarians have largely obscured. If you ask the average conservative what communism is, he will most likely start discussing government ownership, five-year plans, bread queues etc.

Communism, from this point of view, is essentially capitalism with the economic settings reversed. The government “does and owns everything“. This is why so much conservative analysis eventually degenerates into horseshoe theory: fascists liked government intervention and communists liked government intervention, therefore fascism and communism were basically versions of the same thing.

But that completely misses the ideological conflict which defined twentieth-century Europe. Communism was not just some economic theory about who should own what. It was an internationalist theory about who you are.

Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations. Literally.

Marxism insisted that the fundamental political division of mankind was class. The worker was not ultimately supposed to understand himself principally as English, German, Italian, French or Russian. He belonged to the proletariat. His historical interests were shared with workers beyond the borders of his own country, while his supposed national solidarity with his own bourgeoisie concealed the class relationship upon which capitalism depended. Hence the language that runs through the entire communist tradition: Workers of the world, unite; The proletariat has no fatherland; No war but class war. You’re not Italian, you’re not German, you’re the proletariat, and all you have to lose is your chains.

The political logic here is blatantly obvious. Nationality competes with class consciousness, patriotism competes with proletarian internationalism. The nation tells a German worker that he shares something profound with another German who happens to own a factory. Marxism tells him that this solidarity is false and his real political brother is the French, Russian or Italian worker standing on the other side of the border.

That is why the nation became one of the great obstacles confronting revolutionary socialism. The theory said workers possessed common international class interests. Yet, history repeatedly demonstrated that workers continued to behave like members of nations.

In 1914, the workers of Europe did not unite against their governments and refuse the coming war. They rallied overwhelmingly to their respective countries. Socialist parties fractured along national lines. Men who Marxists expected to understand themselves as an international proletariat marched into battle as Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Austrians and Britons. And the same problem returned after the Bolshevik Revolution.

That is why the great twentieth-century conflict between communism and nationalism was not accidental. It was ideological. Communism was internationalist not in the banal sense that communists in different countries cooperated with one another, but in its conception of history itself. The nation was something history would ultimately transcend. Lenin said this openly: socialism aimed not simply to bring nations closer together, but eventually to “merge them“. Elsewhere he described the centralised state as a historical step towards the future “socialist unity of the whole world“.

Stalin, grasping this principle, forged civic nationalism as the indispensable stepping-stone toward that communist universalism. Inside the borders of the revolutionary state the old nationalities were to be liquidated into a single Soviet identity: you are not Ukrainian, you are not Russian, you are not Jewish, you are not Georgian, you are a Soviet patriot, loyal only to the revolution. That state, once purged of national loyalties, would then project its universalist ideology outward, seeking global hegemony by liquidating, in turn, every nation that still dared to resist it.

Update, 25 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 22, 2026

The Entire Second World War in 20 Minutes

Filed under: Britain, China, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 21 August, 2026

This is the whole of WW2 in less than 20 minutes, because why not. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Eastern Front, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and a truly unimaginable quantity of human misery in less time than it takes to eat a sandwich at your desk.

If you’re a normal human being, who knows there was a war, but really doesn’t know how it all fits together, this is the video for you.

As with all these things it was messy, so some people claim the war really started in 1937 with Japan’s war of imperial conquest in China, and that’s where we begin, but formally it all kicked off on 1st September 1939 with war between the UK, France and Poland and Germany on the other. Italy quickly piled in and really it went to rat shit from there. If you want to know more including all the fun of the fair that was the Nazi mind, the Japanese madness and the death and destruction they cause, then you’ll find it all here.

I cannot promise that I’ve covered your favourite campaign, in fact I know I won’t have, but there will, however, be some swearing.

I saved at least 5 seconds by cutting the entire USAAF effort in Europe out, somewhat ironically given the detail I’ve gone to elsewhere. So, to those who want to know about Market Garden, the Battle of the Coral Sea, Taranto, Malta, Burma, the fall of Singapore, Operation Bagration or a hundred other topics then this video is of no use to you whatsoever. And I’m not even sorry. But, if you watch this and enjoy it, and your curiosity is peaked, well then, those names and many more besides await you in the hallways of The Afflicted, and there is a seat there reserved especially for you.

00:00 The Entire Second World War in 20 Minutes
00:35 Before 1st September 1939 – Asia
01:53 Before 1st September 1939 – Hitler, Nazi Germany & Appeasement
03:45 Poland Invaded – World War II Begins
04:32 France Falls & Dunkirk
05:30 Battle of Britain & The Blitz
06:01 Britain Bombs Back
06:42 Lend-Lease & The Battle of the Atlantic
07:47 Mussolini Has A Go – North Africa
08:34 Hitler and Halder’s Eastern Adventure – Operation Barbarossa & The Eastern Front
12:22 The Rolled Up Newspaper – Pearl Harbor & Japan’s Gamble
14:19 The Holocaust
15:39 The Boys Are Back IN Town – D-Day & The Destruction of Nazi Germany
16:45 The Pacific – Midway & The Defeat of Japan
18:50 Closing Thoughts

August 20, 2026

QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s role as Stalin’s useful idiot

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

George Bernard Shaw stood in Stalin’s USSR in 1931, watching millions starve to death, and declared there was no famine at all. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright didn’t just stay silent about the horror unfolding around him. He actively promoted the lie that would help Stalin cover up one of history’s greatest atrocities.

Shaw toured Ukraine during the height of the Holodomor, when Soviet grain requisitions had stripped peasants of every scrap of food. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 3.5 million Ukrainians. Shaw saw the empty villages, the skeletal survivors, the mass graves. Then he signed a public letter praising Stalin’s “remarkable progress” and told Western journalists that reports of famine were capitalist propaganda.

Why would an intelligent man become Stalin’s useful idiot? Shaw believed in central planning with religious fervor. He thought brilliant intellectuals like himself could design society better than millions of individuals making their own choices. When confronted with central planning’s inevitable result (mass death), he chose to lie rather than admit his ideology killed people. Shaw preferred beautiful theory to ugly facts.

Shaw deliberately used his celebrity status to give Stalin cover while Ukrainian children died of starvation. He returned to Britain and spent years defending Soviet policies, even as refugee testimonies and photographic evidence exposed the genocide. The man who wrote about moral awakening in Pygmalion had abandoned his own moral compass entirely.

Free market economists warned that socialist calculation was impossible, that without prices and property rights, economies would collapse into chaos and death. Shaw dismissed these warnings as bourgeois nonsense while standing ankle-deep in their vindication.

Handre, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-13.

Update, 21 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 12, 2026

“Hitler’s socialism wasn’t just an internal economic policy – it was the cause of the war”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Government, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski explains why socialism — of the left (the Soviet Union) and the right (Nazi Germany) — was the economic driver that pushed Europe into war in 1939. German socialism (in one state) could only continue to grow by annexing resources and manufacturing capabilities from neighbouring states, and by August 1939 it was Poland’s turn:

Socialism was at the origin of the war. Not as a coincidence. As a necessity. The socialist economic model generates contradictions it cannot resolve internally – the calculation problem, the misallocation, the stagnation, the mounting failure. War is the exit. It provides the external enemy that explains the internal failure. It justifies the total mobilization the system always wanted. It consumes the surplus population the economy cannot employ. It redirects the resentment outward.

Does this remind you of anything?

The evidence is not subtle. The NSDAP program of 1920 reads like a standard socialist manifesto. The economic reality confirmed it – price controls, industrial planning, state allocation of raw materials, entrepreneurs reduced to government functionaries. Private property in name only. Mises called it Zwangswirtschaft – coercive economy. Hayek dedicated a chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the socialist roots of Nazism. Both writing from observation, not retrospect.

After 1945 the Soviet victors imposed their version and attached the capitalist label to every rival. Western textbooks followed. The lie became the curriculum.

The real divide has never been left versus right. It is collective control versus individual freedom. Once you place National Socialism correctly within the family of collectivisms, the political spectrum becomes legible – and the war becomes explicable.

When the system fails — and it always fails — it needs an enemy. The bigger the failure, the bigger the enemy required.

Imagine being Poland. Squeezed between two socialist systems, both searching for their enemy.

We were it.

August 9, 2026

How To Launch the Apocalypse – Death of Democracy 27 – Q3 1939

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 8 Aug 2026

This is Step 27 in the Death of Democracy: LAUNCH A WORLD WAR — the moment when the collapse of democracy, diplomacy, and collective security culminated in an attack that would engulf the world.

In July and August 1939, Adolf Hitler turned the destruction of German democracy into the instrument for launching a European war.

While Nazi Germany armed Danzig, mobilized reservists, prepared its U-boats, introduced civilian rationing, and manufactured stories of Polish aggression, Britain, France, Poland, the United States, and the Soviet Union made a final series of increasingly desperate attempts to prevent catastrophe.

At the center of the crisis was the failed effort to construct an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance against Nazi aggression. Negotiations foundered on delay, mutual suspicion, the Baltic states, and the Soviet demand for military passage through Poland. Stalin then chose an agreement with Hitler: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and prepared the way for the destruction of Poland.

Inside Germany, there was little repetition of the supposed national enthusiasm of August 1914. Nazi leaders and Wehrmacht commanders ranged from confidence and opportunism to anxiety and fatalism, while many ordinary Germans feared that Hitler had finally pushed Europe beyond the point of no return. Yet propaganda, repression, and six years of dictatorship had stripped the population of any effective means of preventing the war.

The next episode will conclude the series with an epilogue examining what the destruction of the Weimar Republic teaches us about defending democracy today.

July 29, 2026

QotD: Asymmetric warfare

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Asymmetric Warfare is a term used to describe warfare between two belligerents with either starkly different amounts of resources or different warfare styles or systems. It is crucial to note this term denotes something about the relationship between two belligerents, not something essential to one of them; an army or a state is not asymmetric except in relations to another (the mistake here is often to set the modern western industrialized form of warfare as the “norm” against which all other forms are somehow asymmetric). While this term has been used to describe the war in Ukraine, it is ill-suited for it: both Ukraine and Russia are attempting to make use of a similar set of equipment (including the use of artillery and airstrikes) using a uniformed soldiery; they are both, to borrow one of my earlier definitions, attempting to operate within the “third system of war“. Ukrainian efforts to have uniformed soldiers use maneuver and surprise to engage Russian logistics and rear echelon units are not “asymmetric”, but rather a standard part of both Russian and Ukrainian warfighting, albeit one that Ukraine appears more skilled at in the present moment. Likewise, both sides are attempting a parallel “political struggle” of demonstrations and information warfare; Ukrainian success here too does not make their methods asymmetric.

Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.

July 28, 2026

Adventures in Surplus! Type 38 Arisaka Carbine in World War One

Filed under: Britain, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Mar 2026

In the fall of 1914 it became apparent that the minor fracas in Serbia was going to stretch a lot longer than anyone had expected, and governments began scrambling to secure weapons production. Japan was one source of small arms for the Entente powers, and Britain purchased about 150,000 Arisaka rifles and carbines from the Japanese in late 1914 and early 1915. These were used to equip Royal Navy crews and Army raining and reserve units, but by late 1915 Enfield production had caught up and the guns were no longer needed.

In the fall of 1915, the British sent most of their Arisakas (about 128,000) to Russia, which had also been purchasing large numbers from Japan. There they were again used to arm second-line units, including troops occupying the Grand Duchy of Finland. When Finland declared its independence in December 1917, most of the Russian soldiers went home and left their weapons in Finland. As a result, the Arisaka was the second most common type of rifle available at Finland’s independence, and was used by the Civil Guard until about 1927.

This particular Type 38 Carbine was made at the Tokyo Army Arsenal in 1910, then sold to the British where it was given a set of unit marks on the stock. It was subsequently transferred to Russia, where a metal clip was added to prevent accidental magazine release. It stayed in Finland through the Finnish Civil War and afterwards, only being imported into the US recently by Postrock of Garden City, Kansas.
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July 23, 2026

QotD: The development of the Main Battle Tank (MBT) and Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV)

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As we get into the Cold War era, one thing becomes simpler: the distinction between different kinds of tanks (heavy, medium, light, cruiser, infantry, etc) largely drops away. Improved engines, suspension and lighter but more effective composite armor meant that the slightly different roles of the different weights of tank could increasingly be accomplished by a single platform evolving out of late-war medium tanks. You could now fit a heavy tank’s gun and armor on a chassis with a medium tank’s speed and maneuverability. The first of these “universal” tanks was the British Centurion (first deployed in 1945 [but did not see WW2 combat]) and other countries followed suit.

The result is the modern “main battle tank” (MBT), typically between 45 and 75 tons, with a single powerful direct-fire cannon as its primary armament. That’s not to say design differences between militaries drop away; there are still decisions to be made: the level of emphasis between speed, armor and firepower for instance. Another major decision is whether a tank is designed with a three-person turret (one of whom is a dedicated loader) or a two-person turret with an autoloader (that is, a machine that does the loading for you). It used to be that now I’d have to go on about why going autoloaders aren’t simply obviously the best but given the live demonstrations of some of the drawbacks of Soviet/Russian carousel autoloaders going on right now [in Ukraine] I’ll just say that both options have advantages and drawbacks and move on. So there is variety within the idea of an MBT, but by and large most countries field just one type of MBT (or one family of MBTs for countries which can’t afford to retire older systems) and that covers their tank needs.

But of course nothing could easy so just as tanks were getting easier to keep track of, APCs get much more complicated. Even before they were fully enclosed, APCs had generally carried some kind of defensive weapon (usually a heavy machine gun), but you weren’t supposed to fight with it if you could avoid it. Beginning in the 1950s, designers – first in West Germany – began experimenting with the idea that an APC could be armed to not merely deliver the infantry (“dismounts”) but to actually fight when they got there. The thing is, there are a lot of situations where an infantry formation might want more firepower but where a tank would be overkill: armored vehicles lighter than tanks, or enemies with lighter fortifications, for instance. West Germany pioneered the idea by putting a 20mm autocannon on their APC, the Schützenpanzer Lang HS.30, enabling it to put out some meaningful firepower, albeit much less than a tank.

The USSR cottoned on to the idea and liked it, resulting in the Soviet BMP-1 and the subsequent BMP family of what we call “infantry fighting vehicles” (IFV). Initially resistant to the idea (American doctrine was that APCs move troops and should not fight if they could help it), the United States, noticing the effectiveness of these sorts of platforms, got into the act with the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (these days the M2 Bradley). And IFVs, especially the Bradley, look like tanks. And indeed, they are sometimes called on to do the kind of armored reconnaissance and infantry support jobs that in a previous era would have gone to a light tank.

But they are also notably not tanks in several key ways. The primary job of an IFV is to move infantry and support them against lighter targets; some IFVs do maintain some kind of anti-tank capability, but it tends to be more limited (e.g. the Bradley’s pair of TOW AT missiles). The requirement that an IFV needs to be fairly fast but also needs to fit a bunch of dismounts means they can’t carry the firepower or the armor of a tank, often using lighter aluminum armor rather than steel or heavy composites. Finally, the tendency is for IFVs to mount lighter primarily armaments – again, space and weight concerns – like the Bradley’s 25mm M242 Bushmaster chain gun. The BMP-3 is probably the most heavily armed IFV out there with a low-velocity 100mm rifled gun and a 30mm autocannon, which is still a far cry from the firepower of the high-velocity 125mm main gun of a contemporary T-80 or the 120mm high velocity gun of a M1A1 Abrams. Instead, most IFVs would rely on anti-tank missile systems to engage tanks (although IFV autocannons can cause a tank serious problems if they can engage the rear or side armor, which is thinner).

Note that the IFV did not mean the end of the APC just as the APC didn’t bring the end of soft-skinned troop transports. In the US military, the Bradley serves alongside lighter-but-still-IFV Strykers, the venerable M113 APC along with soft-skinned HMMWV (Humvees; to be in theory replaced with the Oshkosh L-ATV) and trucks of various kinds and uses. Likewise, the Russian army has its BMPs (which are IFVs), and BTRs (which are APCs) as well as soft-skinned vehicles – or at least it did until, I am now being told, they were all towed away by Ukrainian farmers. The real Iron Harvest.

The final category worth noting here are variations on the concept of the MRAP (Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected): infantry transport vehicles designed to resist the sort of dangers one encounters in counter-insurgency operations, mostly mines, IEDs and small-arms ambushes. In essence, these vehicles are a purpose-built version of the up-armored Humvees designed to operate in a very particular combat environment (insurgencies and particularly urban insurgencies). These sort of vehicles have gotten more visibility in the United States because many of them have been shifted into the hands of law enforcement, where their utility is questionable, to say the least.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.

July 20, 2026

Eight Great Powers Invade China: the Boxer Uprising 1900-1901

Filed under: Britain, China, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Religion, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 20 Feb 2026

After the defeat in the 1st Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Dynasty is under pressure: Some are calling for domestic reforms and ousting Western influence, while the Great Powers want to further open up China for their businesses. Violence erupts when the so called Boxer movement kills several Westerners.
(more…)

July 18, 2026

The current state of play in the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022

Filed under: Europe, Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I don’t make a habit of sharing reports from the ongoing fighting in Ukraine, as the war has ground on (how do you say “short, victorious war” in Russian?). It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s that trustworthy sources are vanishingly thin, and most coverage is either hyper-pro Ukraine or hyper-pro Russia … so assessing events is somewhere between difficult and impossible for those of us without our own satellite and espionage networks. kulak, on the other hand, has been paying attention and does have some insights that are worth considering:

One could be forgiven for thinking that there is something deeply wrong with the Russian State and Vladimir Putin in particular.

Every 1 to 3 months some new unprecedented Ukrainian asymmetric attack hits Russia’s homeland in ways almost tailor designed to provoke an escalation, outrage the populace, and leave the Russian Government humiliated at the loss of face.

The “Crocus City Hall” (it’s a civilian music venue not an actual city hall) attack in Moscow was killed 151 and injured 600+ Civilian music fans in an “ISIS” terrorist attack … That everyone knows was funded, coordinated, and enabled by Ukraine (and the CIA). Right down to the assailants passing through Ukraine, and being on camera collecting their discarded firearm magazines (presumably because the manufacturer stamps would tie them to their backers) …

This was huge Russian News, and the specific band whose audience was targeted is also significant.

Piknik is a massive hit Russian 80s band. Now, Students of history will note that Russia was still communist in the 80s. They’ve been around forever, and are generally inoffensive and middle of the road (they were mainstream under the USSR)… They’re kind of a weird gothic slavic prog-rock blend of Phil Collins and the Tragically Hip. And they’re huge … Individual videos with 10s of millions of views on Youtube … As big as any hit western 80s band and lots of cultural fondness in the Russian imagination.

(Presumably it hits harder if you can appreciate Russian)

This matters because their core demographic are Russian boomers who are Nostalgic for their Soviet Childhoods, but are also established and content in Modern Russia … Ie. Putin’s Core demographic.

This would be like if you attacked a Hamilton performance or a Bono concert in the west. That’s the regime’s core supporters right there. That’s a knowledgeable and incisive cut that actual Muslim foreigners wouldn’t know or care to hit … But that Slavic Ukrainians and calculating CIA planners trying to apply pressure or destabilize Russia into escalation would know and salivate at.

Likewise Ukraine explicitly attacked Russia’s Nuclear Strategic Bomber fleet in Operation Spider Web, assets that were not used in the Ukraine war, and indeed were basically irrelevant to the conflict … But are core to Russia’s nuclear triad and the stability of the global nuclear balance of power … Again basically begging for a massive escalation and almost certainly making Russian Generals and Strategic planners break out in a cold sweat until they assessed the damage.

Beyond this there have been prominent assassinations of Russian Generals … In Moscow. And assassination attempts on Putin himself …

In addition to the destabilizing Ukrainian counter-invasion of Russia, and escalating strikes on Moscow itself.

The thing to understand is that none of these have been conventionally advantageous for Ukraine. The Invasion of Russia stretched their forces, the Assassinations if anything probably cycled in younger, more competent, hungrier generals, attacking Moscow Boomer civilians probably gave a massive morale spike to the outraged Russian populace … These strikes on Russia have infuriated Russians and made them call for blood.

This is in many respects THE OPPOSITE of what you’d normally want to do as a smaller country fighting a larger that hasn’t fully mobilized. Usually you want to exhaust a larger force that’s half committed or politically divided, without getting them to up their commitment or causing them to unify. Think of Vietnam … The Vietnamese wanted Americans to get tired of fighting them and get demoralized at the idea of ever “winning”, fight amongst themselves, then wind down and withdraw. If in 1972 Vietnamese terrorists had attacked the Superbowl and killed hundreds of American civilians on US soil … that’s actually one of the few things that could have united American in 1972 or gotten America to commit to another 5 years in Vietnam at that point.

It would have greatly damaged American prestige … Moscow or China might have liked that … But from Vietnam’s perspective where they want America to wander elsewhere, it’d lock in years of misery.

So that’s weird … but weirder has been Putin’s Reaction: Nothing. Basically no counter-escalation. Certainly nothing that’s made Zelensky sweat and hesitate at sending more drones at Moscow.

Indeed many sympathetic commentators both in Russia and the West have been screaming their frustration at Putin that he hasn’t suitably punished these insults to Russian Honor or restored Russian deterrence … Or merely enforced baseline international norms around targeting heads of state, civilians, and Strategic nuclear assets in a non-nuclear conventional war.

Russia has hundreds of these Tornado systems.

It’s not as if Russia lacks conventional options. Kiev is RIGHT THERE. Hell, If the Russians really wanted the Tornado MLRS (Multiple Launcher Rocket System) has a range of 200km, fires thermobaric warheads or White Phosphorus rounds, and could hit Kiev from Russian Ally Belarus …

Without even debating the extent of air-cover, and to what extent Ukrainian Air Defense is intact (or to what extent the US can supply them with interceptors) … Putin has the capacity to firebomb Kiev on the scale of Dresden if he wanted to, from the ground. He’s not lacking in conventional, nuclear, and every other kind of escalatory option.

And yet he’s not escalated … And his retaliations have been as close as possible to the bare minimum he could get away with to not be overthrown for treason.

So what the hell is wrong with Putin?

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