Legendary Tactics
Published 18 Dec 2025Remember the golden age of wargaming? This is THE definitive history of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), one of the most influential publishers in tabletop gaming. From its groundbreaking magazine Strategy & Tactics to iconic titles like War in the East, StarForce, and Terrible Swift Sword, SPI reshaped what board wargames could be — and built a passionate community along the way.
This is Part 1, where we delve into the origins of SPI and Strategy & Tactics Magazine, and the people and games that were part of it.
(more…)
May 11, 2026
The History of SPI: Part 1 / Simulations Publications Inc. / Wargaming History
Comments Off on The History of SPI: Part 1 / Simulations Publications Inc. / Wargaming History
May 9, 2026
Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer
I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:
Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.
The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?
Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.
While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.
A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.
The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.
Comments Off on Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer
May 8, 2026
QotD: North Vietnamese intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive
Finally, a real intelligence failure on the NVA‘s part contributed to the US failure. The main reason US analysts were sure the North Vietnamese lacked the forces was because the NVA did, in fact, lack the forces. They called Tet the “general uprising”, and they were counting on widespread popular support — including, it seems, entire ARVN units defecting. That’s the only way they’d have sufficient force to knock ARVN out of the war …
… and it didn’t happen, because they, the North Vietnamese, had faulty intel.
The Americans suffered from the “intel to order” problem too, of course, which we in the civilian world call “telling the boss what he wants to hear”. But the NVA had it much worse, since that’s a much greater structural problem among Commies. Indeed, the Americans got at least one high-level defector during Tet — a lieutenant colonel I think — who only defected because the units he was supposed to command in the “general uprising” didn’t exist. They were purely paper fantasies, straight out of some commissar’s head.
And that’s what made [US Army military analyst Joseph] Hovey’s report so easy to dismiss. Hovey himself said it — it looks like they’re planning to do X, Y, and Z, but that would only make sense if they’re making a big mistake about the balance of forces. The US had pretty good intel on the ARVN and the political mood of South Vietnam. But they for some reason assumed that the NVA had basically the same information, so all of the NVA’s calls for a general uprising — which the NVA absolutely meant, and indeed were counting on — were easy for US analysts to dismiss as mere propaganda.
Severian, “Book Rec: Tet, Intelligence Failure”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
Comments Off on QotD: North Vietnamese intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive
May 7, 2026
Tu-144 Concordeski – Speed, Spies and Failure
HardThrasher
Published 4 May 2026In great secrecy, in 1963 the USSR set about making aviation history with the world’s first Supersonic Transport (SST). In 1968, five months before Concorde, the Tu-144 became the first passenger jet to break the sound barrier. But it was a white elephant that crashed on multiple occasions, killed hundreds and flew for just a matter of months after over a decade of development. It was, perhaps the first of a string of failures that brought down the Soviet Union.
00:00 – 11:06 – Introduction and Background
11:07 – 23:10 – The Decision is made to build
23:10 – 35:31 – And then it got worse — how everything fell apart
35:32 – 39:10 – The En Crashening — From First Flight to Constant Crashes
39:11 – 48:49 – Enter the KGB — What role did spies play
49:22 – End – Like, Subscribe, Join the Patreon
(more…)
April 24, 2026
Defending Heinlein and his most controversial novel – Farnham’s Freehold
Grammaticus Books
Published 21 Nov 2025An indepth review of Robert A. Heinlein’s most controversial novel. A novel sometimes referred to as Science Fiction’s most controversial novel, Farnham’s Freehold.
00:00 Intro
02:30 Why I Read Farnham’s Freehold
04:33 The Plot (Spoilers)
12:48 The Critics’ Complaints
21:40 Is it A Fun Read?My Video on Time Enough for Love:
• Heinlein’s MOST CONTROVERSIAL Novel – Time…
Update, 25 April: 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.
April 1, 2026
Generation Jones and the Temple of Boom(ers)
Wee Nips
Published 19 Sept 2025Generation Jones and the Temple of Boom(ers) explores the fascinating differences — and surprising overlaps — between Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the often-overlooked Generation Jones.
Were you too young for Woodstock but too old for grunge? Stuck between disco and Nirvana? You might just be a Joneser.
In this video, we’ll compare:
🎵 The cultural touchstones of Boomers, Gen X, and Jonesers
📉 The low points in history that shaped each generation’s outlook
💰 The economic conditions that defined their opportunities
🧠 The attitudes and stereotypes that still stick today
Generation Jones isn’t just a footnote — they’re the missing link between the optimism of the Boomers and the skepticism of Gen X.
0:00 Introduction
1:38 Definitions
2:42 Cultural Touchstones
3:38 Low Points in History
4:53 Economic Conditions
5:42 Social and Attitude Differences
6:38 Humorous Stereotypes
7:09 Overlaps and Connections
8:02 Closing
(more…)
Comments Off on Generation Jones and the Temple of Boom(ers)
March 25, 2026
Apache Arms Carbine: A Saga of Compliance and Crappy Manufacture
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2025The Apache Arms carbine was a Thompson SMG lookalike that was made in small numbers in the late 1960s. It was the successor to the Spitfire carbine made by the same people, after the Spitfire was deemed a machine gun by the IRS. The Apache used M3 Grease Gun magazines and was chambered for .45 ACP. It uses a square receiver tube and many of the same cast parts as the Spitfire. It is a very interesting look at how the design was adapted to be legally considered semiautomatic.
(more…)
Comments Off on Apache Arms Carbine: A Saga of Compliance and Crappy Manufacture
March 6, 2026
How Not to Build a Plane – TSR2 vs F-111
HardThrasher
Published 5 Mar 2026In the late Cold War, Britain and the United States tried to build the ultimate low-level supersonic strike aircraft. The result was two of the most ambitious aviation programmes ever attempted: the BAC TSR-2 and the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark. Both aircraft were designed to solve the same terrifying problem. Soviet surface-to-air missiles had made high-altitude bombing almost suicidal. The next generation of bombers would have to fly low and fast, automatically following the terrain, navigating using primitive onboard computers, and delivering nuclear or conventional weapons deep inside enemy territory. In theory, these aircraft would be revolutionary.
In practice … things went wrong.
The TSR2 programme became one of the most controversial cancellations in British aviation history. Plagued by spiralling costs, technical ambition far beyond the computers of the era, and a labyrinth of government bureaucracy, the aircraft was cancelled in 1965 after only a handful of test flights. Meanwhile the American F-111 survived the same technological challenges and political battles — but only just. Development disasters, crashes, exploding engines, and staggering cost overruns nearly killed the programme multiple times before the aircraft finally entered service.
In this video we explore:
• Why the TSR-2 was so technologically ambitious
• How terrain-following radar and early flight computers nearly broke both projects
• The political battles inside Whitehall and Washington
• Why the F-111 Aardvark survived when TSR2 did not
• And what these aircraft reveal about Cold War military technology and procurement
The TSR2 and F-111 weren’t just aircraft. They were early attempts at something closer to a flying computer, built decades before modern electronics made such systems reliable. And that ambition nearly destroyed both programmes.
(more…)
Comments Off on How Not to Build a Plane – TSR2 vs F-111
March 5, 2026
“Britain’s ‘Scrap Iron Armada'” | Tonight (1962)
BBC Archive
Published 10 Nov 2025“A ship that’s built to withstand shell fire is no pushover in the breaker’s yard.”
Alan Whicker reports on the fate of obsolete naval warships, which are lying in bays around the country waiting to be scrapped or sold. Among this “scrap iron armada” is the Leviathan (R97) — a mammoth £6 million aircraft carrier — that has never sailed. It was abandoned, approximately 80 percent complete, in 1946 after the war ended.
Clip taken from Tonight, originally broadcast on BBC Television, 19 March, 1962.
Comments Off on “Britain’s ‘Scrap Iron Armada'” | Tonight (1962)
February 11, 2026
The rise and fall of the “Western” on TV and in movies
Ted Gioia reconsiders his childhood loathing of the TV western (because of massive over-exposure to the genre):
I hated cowboys when I was a youngster. Not real cowboys — I never met a single gunslinger, cowpoke, or desperado in in my urban neighborhood. My loathing was reserved for cowboys on TV.
And they were everywhere.
At one point, eight of the top ten shows on the flickering tube were westerns. And it got worse from there — Hollywood kept churning out more and more cowboy movies and TV series. I tried to avoid them, as did many of my buddies, but it was like dodging bullets in Dodge. There was nowhere to hide.
That’s because our parents loved these simple stories of frontier justice. They couldn’t get enough of them. And when they weren’t watching them on TV, they dragged us off to movie theaters to see The Magnificent Seven (128 minutes), The Alamo (138 minutes) or How the West Was Won (an excruciating 164 minutes).
In 1959, Warner Bros posed some of their TV cowboy stars in a single photo (Source)
[…]
Many aspects of these films still put me off. I struggle with the clichés and tired formulas. But I’ve gradually acquired an affection for the genre — or maybe an affection for the audiences of an earlier day who could put such trust and faith in a sheriff or US marshal or gunslinger for hire.
Do any of us have that kind of faith in any authority figure nowadays? I doubt it. But I wish we could. And that’s impressed powerfully on my mind when I see Gary Cooper take on outlaws in the deserted western street of High Noon. Or James Stewart confront the dangerous Liberty Valance. Or John Wayne battle with a gang of desperadoes in Rio Bravo.
So forget all the shootouts and cattle drives and fancy roping. The real foundation of the western genre was moral authority. And Hollywood never let you forget it — that’s why heroes wore white hats and villains dressed in black.
The audience didn’t even have to think about it.
[…]Because that’s exactly what happened to the western. Just consider the unsettling film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — which came out around the time the western genre died. Despite the movie’s title, it’s hard to identify any character in this film as good — instead they merely differ in their degrees of badness and ugliness.
And the same is true of The Wild Bunch or Once Upon a Time in the West and so many other films from that era. There are no heroes on display here, only various pathways into nihilism.
So long John Wayne. Hello Friedrich Nietzsche.
But this made perfect sense. The entire US of A was traumatized by the Vietnam War, and then Watergate — along with assassinations, riots, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. The moral sureness of the Eisenhower years, along with the complacent righteousness of so much of the public started to erode. At first it happened slowly, and then rapidly.
The classic western could not survive this.
Comments Off on The rise and fall of the “Western” on TV and in movies
February 9, 2026
Keeping Up with the Pattons
The Tank Museum
Published 10 Oct 2025M46, M47, M48 and M60. They saw action in Korea, Vietnam, The Gulf and held the line in the Cold War. For almost 40 years the US produced a succession of good tanks — but they never seemed to be good enough for the top brass.
Time after time, designers sought a perfection that seemed to lay out of reach until the arrival of the step-changing M1 Abrams.
Up till then, you have what can be called “The Patton” family: a series of closely related tanks that are only intended to be temporary until the next big thing arrived …
This is the story of the “Patton” family of tanks; tanks that the US tried and failed to replace time after time, yet which despite this ended up becoming the armoured backbone of the Free World during the Cold War.
In this film, Tank Museum Historian, James Donaldson, walks us through the progression of US tanks from the M26 Pershing right up to the M1 Abrams. Commonly known as The Patton Family, this group of tanks were good… but never quite good enough. Always meant to be a stopgap, the Pattons persisted where their prospective replacements failed, leading them to become the vehicles that endured the Cold War around the globe.
00:00 | Introduction
00:58 | From Pershing to Patton
03:50 | Replacing the M46
06:25 | A Third Patton
10:01 | Yet Another Stopgap
12:44 | Irreplaceable?
(more…)
Comments Off on Keeping Up with the Pattons
January 26, 2026
How Al Stewart struck gold, the folk boom and a flat-share with Paul Simon
Word In Your Ear
Published 20 Dec 2024The 17 year-old Al Stewart played electric guitar in a dance band in Bournemouth in 1963. When he borrowed an acoustic and sang “Masters Of War” in the break, he heard the sweet sound of applause. The next night he played three Dylan songs and sensed which way the wind was blowing. He talks here about moving to London, playing at Bunjies and becoming the compere at Les Cousins as his now 60-year career began to lift off. And about his Farewell Tour which kicks off in the UK in October 2025, a combination of songs and story-telling coloured by two great heroes, Peter Ustinov and Alistair Cooke.
This cracking exchange steers by way of Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Helen of Troy, Stalin, Hitler and the Battle of Moscow, the Weeley Festival of 1971, the three songs he always plays, the young Cat Stevens and what he told Paul Simon he should do with the just-composed “Homeward Bound”.
Comments Off on How Al Stewart struck gold, the folk boom and a flat-share with Paul Simon
January 23, 2026
The Rise and Fall of Watneys – human-created video versus AI slop
YouTuber Tweedy Misc released what he believed was the first attempt to discuss Watneys Red Barrel, the infamous British beer that triggered the founding of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). His video didn’t show up in my YouTube recommendations, but a later AI slop video that clearly used Tweedy’s video as fodder did get recommended and I even scheduled it for a later 2am post because it seemed to be the only one on the topic. I’m not a fan of clanker-generated content, but I was interested enough to set my prejudices aside for a treatment of something I found interesting. Tweedy’s reaction video, on the other hand, did appear in my recommendations a few weeks later, and I felt it deserved to take precedence over the slop:
And here’s the AI slop video if you’re interested:
Dear Old Blighty
Published Dec 20, 2025Discover how Watneys Red Barrel went from Britain’s biggest-selling beer to its most hated pint in just a few short years. This video explores how corporate brewing, keg beer, and ruthless pub control nearly destroyed traditional British ale, sparked a nationwide consumer revolt, and gave birth to CAMRA. From Monty Python mockery to boycotts in local pubs, Watneys became a national punchline and a cautionary tale in business failure. Learn how one terrible beer accidentally saved British brewing culture, revived real ale, and reshaped how Britain drinks forever.
#Watneys #BritishBeer #UKNostalgia #RealAle #CAMRA #BritishPubs #RetroBritain #LostBrands #BeerHistory #DearOldBlighty
Comments Off on The Rise and Fall of Watneys – human-created video versus AI slop
January 16, 2026
QotD: Another unintended consequence of conscription
The big social revolution started in the mid-1960s and had really taken root by 1980. I don’t mean drugs and shagging around I mean a proper social revolution. The British working classes no longer took what they were being told by the poshoes as being true. Questions, as we might put it, were being asked.
My theory, backed up by reality and all the obvious facts of the case, is that as all young men had spent two years being run by the poshoes up front and directly therefore no one believed the poshoes any more. Actual experience, see?
National Service led to the downfall of the posh classes. Simply because direct exposure to said posh was always going to do that.
This is not just a jeu d’esprit. I really do insist that Britain’s social revolution was driven by conscription. Being told to jump by some chinless 6 months out of Eton is going to do that.
Tim Worstall, “National Service Led To The Uppity Proles Of the 1960s”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2025-10-14.
Update, 17 January: 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.
December 10, 2025
QotD: The “rules” of Gonzo journalism
- The story behind the story is the real story.
- The writer is now the hero of each episode.
- All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.
Why couldn’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson.
But it grows tired and predictable in the hands of today’s imitators — and the Gonzo King never invited either of those modifiers. Yes, blogs and Substacks are part of his legacy, formats that blur the line between diary, confession, and journalism. But he did it before all the rest, not as a desktop publisher — instead putting his life at risk on the road with total fear and loathing.
So if Substack is the grandchild of Hunter Thompson and New Journalism, it is a tame, well-behaved descendant — and nothing like its brave forebear, who kept going full speed without a helmet until the end.
Even the reader has to run to keep up.
Ted Gioia, “The Rise and Fall of Hunter Thompson (Part 2 of 3)”, The Honest Broker, 2025-09-08.
Comments Off on QotD: The “rules” of Gonzo journalism
