A tank designed for urban terrain would have radically different design requirements than a main battle tank designed for open warfare

Friday, October 31st, 2025

A tank designed for urban terrain would have radically different design requirements than a main battle tank designed for open warfare:

Main battle tanks rely primarily upon their speed and long-range firepower and are willing to sacrifice extra armor to retain mobility. In urban combat, however, the reverse is true: fights are at much closer ranges, mobility is measured by the ability to navigate sharp turns and tight/narrow streets, and speed can be sacrificed to retain maximum armor protection. Other unique requirements are the ability to shoot in multiple directions at once, shoot around 90-degree corners, increased importance on the ability to shoot at high and negative elevations, and designing the hull to carry cage armor and/or active protection systems.

[…]

The first, most important, hard factor in an urban tank is its armor. Urban tanks will routinely fight at close range, and so every trick in the book will be necessary to ensure safety and survivability. Armor should be uniformly thick on the front, sides, and rear, since attacks from every angle are to be expected. A pentagon-shaped hull can offer the benefits of sloped armor and V-hulls for protection from mines. A slightly more complex alternative is an octagon-shaped hull, which can offer more angles and smaller flat surfaces for increased shot deflection. Additional armor modules, like cage armor and active protection systems, will not replace or reduce the hull armor’s thickness, and the chassis must be designed to carry them all at once without overloading.

The second hard factor, relating directly to the first, is the vehicle’s engine and mobility. Rather than being built for speed, a tank’s engine will instead resemble a bulldozer engine. An urban tank will be a very heavy vehicle, and so a bulldozer-style engine will be capable of both handling the sheer weight of the vehicle and will allow the tank to overpower obstacles.

Obstacle clearing must be an expected, routine occurrence for urban tanks, and the ability to smash through them and other man-made fortifications without requiring a separate armored bulldozer will be advantageous.

The third hard factor is the tank’s guns. An urban tank will use short-barreled guns, since longer barrels are difficult to maneuver in tight spaces and the tank is less likely to engage in long-range shooting. As a bonus, short-barreled guns are quicker to acquire targets. High-elevation and negative-elevation shooting also benefits from this quicker target acquisition.

An urban tank would have a mixture of gun calibers for its main turret and side turrets/sponsons, since it will need to be capable of firing in multiple directions at once. Side turrets and sponsons will not necessarily require large-caliber guns, but they will require rapid-fire guns. These will often be fired around street/building corners and into buildings from the street to provide flanking fire in support of advancing infantry. Urban tanks may also incorporate a flamethrower in front. The flamethrower would be desirable for covering a tank’s underbelly from attackers in spider holes, tunnel entrances such as manholes, and/or basement windows. It can also thwart attempts to drag mines into the tank’s path and reduce ground-level enemy gun positions designed to provide grazing fire.

A major development in modern tank design is the unmanned turret. As mentioned before, urban tanks must expect enemy fire from multiple directions simultaneously, and thus would benefit from having multiple turrets like a 1920s tank or a pre-dreadnought battleship. The 1920s designs were a failure because the turrets needed to be manned.

[…]

Unmanned turrets, however, allow modern side turrets/sponsons to be much smaller and more compact than their 1920s ancestors, and keep the operators at a safe distance in the event of a direct hit and/or ammunition cook-off. Unmanned turrets can also be placed farther forward on the hull than manned turrets, since they weigh less and thus pose less risk of causing balance/center-of-gravity issues. Placing side turrets further forward, in turn, enables urban tanks to fire around 90-degree corners while exposing as little of its hull as possible. The controls for these would ideally be constructed like the A-10 Warthog’s controls, with redundancy and mechanical backups for all automated systems.

A second soft factor design element is the inclusion of escape hatches on all sides and the rear of the tank, a move that necessitates placing the engine and side turrets/sponsons towards the front of the vehicle.

[…]

Classic urban antitank tactics involve firing down onto the tank from above; while this will be less damaging to an urban tank than a main battle tank on account of its uniformly thick armor, limiting urban tankers to exiting via top hatches noticeably reduces their likelihood of escaping safely when bailing out under fire. This survivability need will also affect the design and employment of cage armor; cage armor designs must not block escape routes, and the escape routes must not widen the cage armor profile any more than is necessary. If the tank becomes too wide, then its usefulness in narrow streets declines rapidly.

Posted in War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

Our country would have been much better off in the immediate postwar years if we had had a group of officers who were thoroughly experienced in all the problems of this type of work

Thursday, October 30th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesGeneral Groves believed strongly, as he explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, that in time of war every possible regular officer should be in the combat area:

I was undoubtedly influenced in this belief by my personal knowledge of the disappointment suffered by many regular officers who were kept in this country during World War I, with no chance of combat experience. In my own case, I was already a cadet when the war started, and remained at West Point until a few days before the Armistice. Had my own experience been different, I would quite probably have had a considerable number of regular officers assigned to the project throughout its duration.

As I look back now with a full appreciation of the tremendous import of the development of atomic energy, I think it was a mistake not to have had them. Our country would have been much better off in the immediate postwar years if we had had a group of officers who were thoroughly experienced in all the problems of this type of work — not only in problems of atomic energy but in all the manifold problems involved in technical and scientific developments that have played such an important part in our national defense since 1945.

While I am on the subject of my own mistakes, I perhaps should add that there was another consideration, similar to this, to which I did not give adequate attention. That was the necessity of having replacements available if either Nichols or I died or became disabled. Many serious problems would have arisen if anything had happened to either of us, and it was not proper for me to have placed such great reliance, fortunately not misplaced, upon the physical and mental ability of both of us to stand up under the strain, to say nothing of the possibility of accidental death or injury, particularly since we did so much flying.

This was brought very vividly to my attention in December of 1944, when Mr. Churchill suggested that I should come to London to talk over our problems, and particularly our progress, with him and other members of his government. In discussing his request with Secretary Stimson, I said that while I would like very much to go to England, I was afraid that it might take me away from my work for a considerable period of time, especially if something developed that would make it impossible for Mr. Churchill to receive me immediately on arrival.

Mr. Stimson told me that if I went, I could not go by air, because of the hazards involved. When I said, “Well, I don’t see what difference that would make,” he replied, “You can’t be replaced.” I said, “You do it, and General Marshall does it; why shouldn’t I?” He repeated, “As I said before, you can’t be replaced, and we can.” Harvey Bundy, who was also present, said he had heard that I had previously urged flying when air safety dictated otherwise, and then asked, “Who would take your place if you were killed?” I replied, “That would be your problem, not mine, but I agree that you might have a problem.”

I went on to say that if anything happened to Nichols, I felt that I could continue to operate, though it would mean a very strenuous period for me personally, but that if it were the other way around, while Nichols was thoroughly capable of taking over my position, I thought because he was not so familiar with my responsibilities as I was with his that he could not do both my job and his.

I drew up a list of about six officers who I thought would be satisfactory, keeping in mind that it would be all-important for the man selected to be completely acceptable to Nichols, since success would depend on the utmost co-operation between them. I particularly wanted someone who would not attempt to overrule Nichols in any of his actions or recommendations until he had had time really to understand what the work was all about, and I doubted whether it would be possible for anyone to accumulate the essential background for this before the project was completed.

Having made up my list, I discussed the matter with Nichols. I asked him to look over the names and to strike from the list anyone whom he would prefer not to have in such a position. He struck several names. I always suspected he struck the first one just to see if I really meant what I had said, because it was the name of a man whom I had known for many years, and who was a very close friend. When he struck that name, I did not bat an eye, but merely said, “Well, he’s out.”

After he had crossed off the names of the men he considered unacceptable, I asked him if he had any preference among the remainder. He replied, “You name him and I’ll tell you.” I said that I felt that the best one on the list was Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, and Nichols replied, “He would be my first choice, too.”

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

The whole state college system is genius at making men politically inert

Wednesday, October 29th, 2025

Devin Helton argues that the whole state college system really is genius at making both young 115-IQ, high-T men and wealthy older men politically inert:

I can’t even determine if it is totally degenerate or a great social technology invention for society stability, just currently used by a bad regime.

You break up their hometown networks, send them to state colleges that are in their own little bubbles in the boonies, spoil them relatively cheaply with booze and college football and young coeds.

Then the social networks get broken up again once they are thrown into the job market at age 23 in random cities, away from friends, left scrambling to build a life.

And then the networks get broken up a third time when they have to move from the expensive down-towns where the career-starting jobs are, to the suburbs to raise a family.

And so at 40 their kids start school with fellow stranger parents and the curriculum has been changed from learning about Columbus and Pilgrims to gender-scrambling and race communism but there is no ability for the parents to coordinate and do anything about it.

And, then you reward the super-elites with fellowships and professorships and presidencies at the college, so they get access to the hot young co-eds too. What a brilliant system.

What’s breaking stability now is that the neocon right got stale, but the left is so high on their own supply that they refuse to play ball with the new right/MAGA and offer them even a small share of the university plum jobs and peaches.

Posted in Education, Policy | 7 Comments »

Marines’ latest Pacific strategy highlights logistics, firepower

Tuesday, October 28th, 2025

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith released the Force Design 2030 update, which calls for building out the Corps’ logistics capabilities abroad to better resupply and sustain forces in the Pacific in the event of a major conflict:

Some solutions to the logistics issue include a dozen expeditionary fabrication labs, which can manufacture pieces and parts for in-the-field repairs rather than wait for parts to be shipped out from domestic factories. Other high-tech options include newer uncrewed vehicles, such as the Autonomous Low-Profile Vessel, to transport equipment and supplies with minimal risk to personnel. And then there are some low-tech plans, including one to simply set up more pre-placed stockpiles in the Indo-Pacific so that Marines can more easily access weapons and ammunition.

[…]

The other major focus is on building out the Marine Corps’ firepower. The update noted that the corps has been able to field multiple offensive weapons including the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, that fires ship-killing missiles, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems or HIMARS. It also has started fielding air defense systems including the Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or MADIS, which are meant to counter drones and missiles. Last month, Marines brought the NMESIS and MADIS systems to Japan for a two-week exercise with the Japanese Self-Defense Force that focused on coastal island defense. This coming week III Marine Expeditionary Force is set to test HIMARS near Mount Fuji, according to III Marine Expeditionary Force.

The actual document opens with these words:

The Marine Corps is a naval expeditionary warfighting organization. We exist for one purpose: to fight and win our Nation’s battles. That truth has not changed since 1775, and it remains the measure of our relevance today.

We are modernizing at a time when the character of war is shifting rapidly. Adversaries are fielding advanced weapons and employing new methods designed to erode our warfighting advantages. Drones, long-range precision fires, cyber effects, and electronic warfare are now daily features of conflict. The lessons drawn from contemporary battlefields underscore what Marines have long understood: combat is unforgiving, and victory belongs to the side that adapts faster, fights harder, and endures longer.

Force Design is how we ensure our Corps stays ahead of this change and is driven by a continuous Campaign of Learning tested in wargames, refined in exercises, and proven in real-world operations. We are equipping Marines with the tools to thrive in contested environments: precision fires, unmanned systems, advanced mobility, resilient command and control, and data-driven decision-making. Yet technology alone will never define us. While the character of war evolves, its nature endures, and our ethos remains aligned to that truth. We do not man the equipment, we equip the Marine. Discipline, toughness, and initiative will always remain the decisive factors in battle.

Posted in War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

This blind faith in data files is baked into the academic formula for grants, jobs, influence, and professional success

Monday, October 27th, 2025

After reading Max Bazerman’s Inside an Academic Scandal, Rick Hess came away wondering, What if Social Science is a scam?

I couldn’t help but think his faith is misplaced. To start with, many of the studies he references in the course of the book strike me as unnecessary or simply pointless. A (hugely incomplete) list of the published studies includes those that examine whether counterfeit products make people feel insecure; whether increasing one’s “perceived” height, such as by riding an escalator, leads to more altruistic behavior; whether networking leads people to think of words related to cleanliness; whether messy workplaces are more productive; whether commercials with skinny models are less effective than those with other models; and whether people thinking about death eat more candy. These aren’t studies Bazerman’s spotlighting but rather a sampling of the scholarly research he touches upon in the course of his narrative. It’s telling that he seems to see such studies as unexceptional.

To my jaded eye, such research seems less like “science” and more like “academics amusing themselves in polite company.” Indeed, Bazerman relates an almost too-perfect illustration of this dynamic. A doctoral student whose thesis included an extended critique of Gino’s networking/cleanliness study (which was also later found to be fraudulent) was advised by a member of her dissertation committee to delete the section. Why? Because “academic research is like a conversation at a cocktail party,” and her critique would be seen as rude and inappropriate. However inane we might find the research question, remember that Gino’s study was considered “real” social science, published by an esteemed scholar in a prestigious academic journal. And I haven’t even touched on the faddish, data-free, critical-theory argle-bargle that constitutes such a big chunk of academic publishing.

I’m left wondering how many research studies are just a playground for a privileged caste of credentialed scribblers to amuse themselves and build comfortable careers, all with the aid of hefty public subsidies. Scholars certainly don’t think so. They tell us research is a dynamic endeavor and we have to trust that these explorations are how we surface unexpected, important truths. But should we actually buy that? I’m inclined to think that William Proxmire had a point with his “Golden Fleece” awards, and that we’re way overdue for a serious conversation about the kinds of research that merit public support.

Bazerman laments that even the universities don’t seem to take research outcomes all that seriously. It’s hard to when you prioritize PR and legal considerations over transparency. For instance, when (ethics scholar!) Ariely’s fraud came to light, Duke University’s only response was to quietly have him complete an eight-week professional ethics course. (Of course, Duke itself had recently been fined $112 million for using falsified data to win $200 million in federal funding.)

I know I sound like a broken record, but it’s hard to ignore the opportunity cost of all this. Gino, for instance, published more than 130 papers between 2007 and 2022—of which dozens appeared to be plagued by falsification and misconduct. Meanwhile, Bazerman recounts, “Gino made little time to meet with doctoral students, often failed to show up for meetings, canceled meetings at the last minute, and sometimes called [her colleague] Julia at the last minute to ask Julia to cover her teaching obligations.”

What exactly was this Harvard professor (and fount of falsified research) doing instead of teaching or mentoring? Bazerman explains that the “division of labor” meant that junior members of her team “directed the work and mentored students, while Gino offered occasional input, paid the bills, and used her resources and connections to promote the work.”

Not only does all this raise major questions about the utility of social science research, it also casts serious doubt on its reliability. Bazerman describes another of this century’s more infamous academic scandals, which unfolded a decade ago in the Netherlands when hotshot Tilburg University social psychologist Diederik Stapel churned out scores of papers with doctored or fabricated data. Stapel had a hypothesis: that looking at pictures of an attractive person would affect self-image negatively. (Why this needed to be researched at all, much less by a publicly subsidized scholar rather than a bored marketing intern at Estée Lauder, isn’t clear to me.) In any event, Stapel was sure he was right, “but the actual data didn’t support it.” Consequently, Bazerman relates, “Stapel sat at his kitchen table and began typing numbers into his computer that would produce the intended effect.” His study was published in the prominent Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004. Before being discovered, Stapel committed fraud in at least 55 papers, and his fictional data was used in ten PhD dissertations.

For Bazerman, Stapel’s folly is a terrible abuse of science. I agree. But, even if Stapel’s numbers had supported his hypothesis, I wouldn’t be all that impressed. I wouldn’t have come away convinced that Stapel surfaced some important, fundamental truth about human nature. More likely, I’d have thought it was a silly question and wondered about the soundness of his research design.

Now, I don’t mean this as some kind of anti-research screed. There are, of course, purposeful, comprehensive, data-conscious research enterprises that are attempting to answer questions of pressing social import. (This is the kind of scholarship that we celebrate at EdNext.) But, in Bazerman’s description of Stapel, I couldn’t help but think of all the thousands and thousands of social scientists who spend hours each day hunched over laptops playing with data files that they didn’t collect, don’t fully understand, and frequently take on faith. They don’t know exactly how the data was obtained, the vagaries of the collection, or how sturdy it is. How confident can we be in the results that get spit out, even when they’re “statistically significant”? I’d argue: A lot less than we typically are.

And it’s not like the researchers invested in these projects are scrupulously asking, “Is this true?” Rather, as Bazerman notes, the incentives to pump out papers or make a splash can lead to all manner of shortcuts. He points out that even esteemed scholars rarely review their co-authors’ data, because division of labor is a recipe for speed. They delegate much of the data collection to doctoral students because that helps move things along. This blind faith in data files is baked into the academic formula for grants, jobs, influence, and professional success (whether or not the results can be trusted).

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

Joe Rogan interviews Palmer Luckey

Sunday, October 26th, 2025

This Joe Rogan interview of Palmer Luckey is self-recommending:

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

The Antichrist is a Luddite

Saturday, October 25th, 2025

Peter Thiel recently delivered a series of four lectures on behalf of ACTS 17 Collective — a nonprofit dedicated to Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society (ACTS) — about the Antichrist:

Thiel kicks off the lecture series by identifying himself as two things in his private life: “A small-o orthodox Christian” and a “humble classical liberal.” Thiel claims his fears about the Antichrist are his only “deviation from classical liberal orthodoxy,” and his analogy between the Antichrist and one-worldism, one of the central motifs of his lectures, is unmistakably libertarian.

While the rapid rise in AI and other advanced technologies has led many to believe that the Antichrist will use technology to accomplish his goals — the New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat has even suggested to Thiel that the surveillance technology provided by Palantir could be a tool for the Antichrist — Thiel says in his first lecture that, “in the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.” In his second lecture, Thiel goes on to identify “the legionnaires of the Antichrist [as people] like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, and Greta Thunberg [who] argue for world government to stop science.”

Although Thiel doesn’t explicitly reference Crisis and Leviathan (1987) — the celebrated book by American historian and economist Robert Higgs — he warns that the former precipitates the latter. In his first lecture, Thiel cites Matthew 24:6 to insist that “the Antichrist will come to power by talking about Armageddon non-stop” and 1 Thessalonians 5:3 as evidence that the Antichrist will rise to power by promising “peace and safety.” In his second lecture, Thiel explains how “a new, reformed government called ‘Leviathan,’” as described by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 political treatise, that wields supreme power to cow men into peaceful cooperation, will be ridden by the Antichrist “to take over the world.”

Opposition to totalitarianism aside, not all of Thiel’s comments fit comfortably within the libertarian worldview. Thiel criticizes “zombie liberalism” and “lame libertarian abstractions,” preferring an anti-communist ideology where “you could do some pretty bad stuff because the communists were so much worse.” For example, Thiel praises the CIA of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, for being “sort of this rogue thing outside the State Department,” which he says was full of communists.

Still, Thiel recognizes state power as a double-edged sword, identifying the American empire as simultaneously “the natural candidate for Katechon” — the entity that delays the emergence of the Antichrist — “and Antichrist; ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state.” In his third lecture, Thiel names “tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture” as defining features of the international “Antichrist-like system” of international governance. Thiel explains how “it’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money” in the wake of the Patriot Act, the “extensive” administrative state (the Treasury Department, in particular), and the centralization of payments on the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications system — an international messaging network better known as SWIFT, which banks use to process global payments. All of these factors make it impossible to “escape from global taxation if you’re a U.S. citizen,” he says. Thiel links this erosion of financial freedom to Revelation 13:16-17, which prophesies about a society where an individual’s ability to engage in commerce is contingent upon brandishing the mark of the beast on one’s body.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Sweden designed the jet in the 1980s specifically to survive Soviet strikes on air bases

Friday, October 24th, 2025

The Ukrainian air force may eventually re-equip with Saab Gripen E/F fighters:

The nimble supersonic jets are uniquely suited to the Ukrainian way of war, which requires the air force to spread far and wide across small airfields and even roadway airstrips in order to avoid attack.

This matters because Ukraine’s jets keep flying by avoiding big, vulnerable air bases — dispersing instead to highways and hidden strips across the country. But this survival strategy puts intense pressure on the aircraft. While Ukrainian brigades can coax American F-16s into this nomadic existence, it requires mobile support teams and kid-glove treatment.

The Gripen doesn’t — it’s built for rough-field warfare. Sweden designed the jet in the 1980s specifically to survive Soviet strikes on air bases, operating instead from highway strips scattered across the country.

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

Infrared Sauna vs. Traditional Sauna vs. Hot Tub

Thursday, October 23rd, 2025

Infrared saunas have become incredibly popular, even though they aren’t really saunas:

To the untrained eye, they basically look the same as what you’d expect a sauna to look like—wood paneling, benches, some guy who just had to bring his phone inside—and both actually share a bunch of the same health benefits.

[…]

Infrared saunas give off way less heat, thus making the surrounding area a much more habitable place for those who’d prefer not to partake.

[…]

A true traditional sauna, also called a Finnish sauna, uses a wood fire to heat stones, which in turn heat the air inside the sauna. Nowadays, you can also find electric saunas (these tend to get filed under “traditional”), which also use stones, but the stones are heated by electricity rather than fire. Traditional saunas can maintain temperatures between 150-220 degrees Fahrenheit.

[…]

Unlike traditional saunas, Infrared saunas do not have a central heat source. Instead, they utilize ceramic or metallic panels to emit far-infrared light. “An infrared sauna uses infrared light to directly heat your body, rather than heating the air around you like a traditional sauna,” Dr. Setareh says. Hence, infrared saunas are able to operate at much lower temperatures—between 100–165 degrees—while still giving you a similar, albeit decidedly less intense, sensation to sitting in a traditional sauna.

According to Dr. Setareh, “both types of saunas share common benefits—like improving circulation, promoting relaxation, and encouraging recovery,” and studies have also found both to have positive effects on lowering blood pressure.

[…]

Research, including a landmark 2015 Finnish study that surveyed 2,315 men over the course of two decades, has long associated sauna use with heart health and a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. But it wasn’t until a recent study, published earlier this year in the American Journal of Physiology, that researchers have formally begun weighing the benefits of traditional saunas against their infrared counterparts. (This latest study also compared both types of sauna to a hot tub, which surprisingly emerged as the most beneficial of the three when it came to promoting heart health.)

The hot tub has other benefits:

In addition to a greater increase in heart rate, the researchers also observed higher production of interleukin-6—a critical protein involved in the body’s immune and inflammatory responses—from hot tub exposure compared with sauna use. In fact, the hot tub even appeared to spur production of T cells, helper T cells, and natural killer cells, all of which play an essential role in the body’s immune system—something the study authors saw none of during participants’ stints in the saunas. “If you can acutely raise your inflammatory responses and then drop them back down again,” he says, “it’s a challenge to the system—it activates it and then shuts it back down again—and that’s aligned with better health.”

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

If they ran 100 missions like that, 95 would fail

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025

The average wait for an evacuation from the Ukrainian front is a week, with some taking as long as a month:

Wounded soldiers have died waiting despite being supplied with intravenous fluids and pain relief, he says.

Evacuations are dangerous, and commanders are constantly weighing the risks. In one case, the driver of an M113 armored vehicle sent to rescue a casualty was killed when it was hit by a drone. Six more soldiers were then injured in subsequent missions to rescue the same soldier.

[…]

“We never send people closer than 5km [3 miles] to the front if a robot can do the job,” Eugune says. “We navigate at night using landmarks like trees, towers, and roads. It’s like orienteering.”

[…]

Engineers from the unit have adapted one of its TERMIT ground robots, now known as “Mr. Hook,” to recover marooned UGVs.

“Sometimes it’s simple — an electric cable or debris caught in the tracks, even abandoned village power lines can be a hazard, tangling in the vehicle’s running gear,” Eugene says. “This one’s going to be more difficult, though, the UGV weighs about 120 kilos [265lbs], and with the load it’s carrying, nearly 270 kilos in total.”

[…]

Ruslan uses a Turkish-made Hatsan 12-gauge shotgun for defense against enemy drones.

Once the UGV is on the ground, Vitalik takes control, with Serhii as co-pilot and navigator, and in less than an hour, the robot reaches the frontline, where soldiers quickly emerge from a dugout to retrieve the supplies

[…]

All the hardware and software are built in-house, and it takes about a week to adapt manufacturer-delivered UGVs so they can operate in frontline conditions, Eugene says. GPS often drops out due to Russian jamming, for example, so operators have to navigate visually using the feed from a nearby Mavic drone.

Custom software reduces delays in communication with the vehicles, but there is no standardized national system. Government-issued software is proprietary and slow to obtain, so the unit develops its own to maintain flexibility and adapt quickly to battlefield changes.

Operating UGVs is far more time-consuming than flying First-Person-View (FPV) drones, Eugene says. But while FPV drones can reach their target in minutes, they can only carry light loads.

Baba Yaga drones, for instance, can only carry about 10 kilos and wear out after roughly 100 missions. UGVs move slowly and must navigate terrain obstacles, but can deliver heavy payloads. They cost about $10,000, and Eugune says prices remain high because they are not mass-produced.

“Right now, there are only two viable roads in this sector, which the Russians patrol with drones,” he says. “UGVs are harder to detect because they’re electric and have a low thermal signature.”

The front is no longer a single trench line but, in places, a contested zone up to 15km deep with multiple layers of positions. Eugene says his team can’t cover some forested areas, forcing troops to carry supplies by hand for the last stretch. And the inconsistency of Starlink’s satellite internet connection doesn’t help.

On this mission in the Kharkiv region, the robot is running on a decentralized so-called mesh network rather than solely on Starlink, and the unit sometimes deploys a separate “bicycle penetrator” robot, which carries Starlink or mesh nodes as a forward relay. Typical signal range is about 7km, though a small aircraft carrying a transmitter can extend that to 30km.

On one mission working as a navigator for another unit that relies solely on Starlink, Eugene recalls guiding a UGV carrying a casualty over 1.7km of hostile territory. The trip took two-and-a-half hours because the Starlink connection dropped every five meters, he said.

The route was entirely within the kill zone, where no one could remain in the open, yet the injured soldier had to be moved along a regular road. “It’s just luck the UGV wasn’t destroyed,” Eugene says. “If they ran 100 missions like that, 95 would fail.”

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

Christianity provided this sense of purpose for Europe

Tuesday, October 21st, 2025

Taking Religion Seriously by Charles MurrayPart of Charles Murray’s journey to Taking Religion Seriously came through writing Human Accomplishment:

Any book that attempts to explain the explosion of innovation, wealth, and creative artistry in Europe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries must reckon with the role played by the Christian faith. He argued in the book that such creativity flows most freely when “the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that individuals can act efficaciously to fulfill that purpose.”

Christianity provided this sense of purpose for Europe, and its decline had noticeable effects as well. Murray notes that as the Christian faith faded as a motivator of elite action, technical achievement may have continued, but true art did not. Art that attempts to represent transcendent truth, access the beauty of reality, or point to goodness was elevating. Murray thinks that the replacement of this older ideal of art with one that casts artists as visionaries or rebels has led to art’s degradation as “artists tend to make their work about their personal preferences, and those preferences tend to be banal, or wrongheaded, or both.” He offers this as another clue: anyone who agrees with him that art is not what it once was might consider the connection between art and faith. But at the very least, he suggests that it is interesting that the loss of transcendent purpose in human life is reflected in numerous dark ways in art.

Yet, Murray is keenly aware of how astonishing the leap from any of his clues to considering Christian teachings must seem, and he dedicates considerable attention to explaining this. His own engagement with these questions began after reading C.S. Lewis and considering the apologist’s presentation of natural law alongside Murray’s own deep involvement with evolutionary psychology.

Fully convinced that evolutionary psychology offers “one of social science’s most important tools for understanding human behavior,” Murray nonetheless observed a problem: Even if evolved norms can explain the universality of certain moral rules, what do we make of the instances when our natural instincts conflict with what we know to be right? While psychology can at least model an answer (at least when family or friends are involved), Murray argues that the field seems to have little explanation for “agape: unconditional love, focused on giving rather than receiving, not based on merit or acquaintance with the recipient.” Given the extraordinary focus Christianity places on this sacrificial sense of love, Murray believed he had to decide, finally, what he made of the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

Why start a war with America when you might avoid one?

Monday, October 20th, 2025

In August, experts gathered at Syracuse University to plan China’s invasion of Taiwan:

For two days, academics, policy analysts, and current and former U.S. officials abandoned their typical defensive postures and attempted to inhabit Beijing’s offensive strategic mindset in a wargame. They debated not how America should respond to Chinese aggression, but how China might overcome the obstacles that have so far kept it from attacking the island nation.

This role reversal yielded an uncomfortable insight. The invasion scenarios that dominate U.S. military planning — involving massive amphibious assaults on Taiwan and preemptive strikes on American bases — may fundamentally misread Beijing’s calculus. As the wargame revealed, analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions should pay greater attention to plausible alternative military pathways to reunification that involve far less force and far more political calculation.

[…]

The exercise revealed three scenarios that generated the most debate among participants. First, a limited missile barrage followed by diplomatic ultimatum — essentially, coercion without invasion. Second, a graduated escalation that stops short of attacking U.S. forces. Third, an assault designed to cripple U.S. forces at the outset and present Taipei with a new reality of isolation. Each path reflected different risk tolerances and assumptions about American resolve.

Participants quickly discovered that when confronted with the decision to attack U.S. forces, this seemed to make little strategic sense when they attempted to look at it from Beijing’s perspective. A typical assumption held by many analysts, including most participants prior to the game, and one that features prominently in American wargames, is that China will simply launch a preemptive surprise strike against U.S. forces in a manner somewhat analogous to Pearl Harbor. But why start a war with America when you might avoid one? As the game participants soon found, there is no guarantee of U.S. military involvement, nor Japan’s, nor other countries‘, if China refrains from attacking them in an opening round.

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This logic shaped the exercise’s most plausible hypothetical scenario. China launches precision strikes against Taiwan’s military infrastructure while simultaneously offering generous surrender terms: local autonomy, preservation of democratic institutions, and minimal mainland administrative presence. The message to Taipei is clear: accept reunification on favorable terms or face devastation. The message to Washington and the American public is equally clear: this is a Chinese civil matter, not worth American lives.

The comparison to Hong Kong’s former autonomy arrangements, once seemingly reasonable, now rings hollow given Beijing’s crackdown there. Participants struggled with this credibility gap. Would Taiwan believe any Chinese promises after Hong Kong?

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Despite decades of modernization, the People’s Liberation Army has not fought a major conflict since 1979. It has never conducted an amphibious assault on a major scale. Its logistics remain untested. Its command structure is riddled with political interference. In contrast to most wargames that portray the Chinese military as a competent machine operating at maximum efficiency, the perspective from Beijing is likely more sobering.

These limitations don’t make China weak — they make it cautious.

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If China’s theoretically preferred strategy involves limited strikes and political coercion, Taiwan needs resilience against pressure campaigns, not just beach defenses. This means hardening critical infrastructure, preparing the population psychologically, and maintaining political unity under extreme stress. It also means understanding the dynamics of how China will attempt to lure Taiwan into an early surrender and then taking steps to undermine these.

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If Beijing believes it can achieve reunification through limited force and favorable terms, traditional military deterrence fails. Therefore, arguably more important than Taiwan’s military vulnerabilities are its political vulnerabilities. While Taiwan has so far remained steadfast in maintaining its independence, the combined effects of China finally crossing the military threshold, limited prospects of outside military help, and Beijing offering favorable surrender terms (backed by threats of massive escalation for refusal), might prove sufficient to undermine the will to fight.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

How GDP Hides Industrial Decline

Sunday, October 19th, 2025

Patrick Fitzsimmons has been mulling a paradox:

U.S. GDP keeps going up, yet it seems like we make less stuff and that most of the smart people I know work fake jobs. Growing up in the nineties, most of my toys and clothes had tags saying “Made in Hong Kong” or “Made in Vietnam.” But the high-skill, high-tech goods—the washing machine, the car, my computer—were often made in America. Now? From my e-bike to my laptop, from my refrigerator to my mattress, very few goods I own, high-tech or low-tech, were made in the USA.

[…]

Sometimes there are discrepancies between your real-world observations and the data. But this goes far beyond just being a discrepancy: the data is saying the complete opposite of what we see with our own eyes, hear from our acquaintances in the job market, and deduce logically from our knowledge of demographics, technology, industry, and trade. How is this possible? The answer is actually very simple: the data is completely wrong. But you can only figure this out if you go line-by-line into the hundreds of pages of government GDP calculation methodology documentation. Which is exactly what I did.

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I challenge anyone who believes in these statistics to tell me what in the real world happened so that raw tonnage of steel was down, real gross output of steel was flat, usage of inputs was up, but “real value-added” was also up, and up hugely. Nobody can explain these numbers. The BEA cannot—I have asked them! If the raw data still exists, nobody has access to it because it was confidential.

The basic problem is that real value-added calculations only work if there are no quality adjustments and there hasn’t been any substitutions in the inputs. If those assumptions do not hold, you can get wild and nonsensical results. Since those assumptions do not actually hold in the real world, those nonsensical results are mixed into the overall calculation in ways that are impossible to account for, thus making the entire number bogus.

My guess is that what happened with steel production is that factories have moved from using raw iron ore to scrap metal as an input. The scrap metal is actually closer to a final good and requires much less energy to turn into steel. But GDP calculations do not know that scrap metal is closer to a final good. What the GDP calculations see is that materials have become more expensive and that energy inputs are less, so it seems like the steel factories are maintaining output with much less input, and thus value-added is greater. The reality, though, is that the United States is not producing any more steel out of factories, the United States is not producing a greater percentage of the steel value chain than in 1997, and the 125% increase in real value-added is a spurious result that represents neither making more stuff nor making better stuff.

[…]

This is not just my critique: a former deputy chief at the BEA, Professor Doug Meade, has sharply criticized real value-added as a metric. In a 2010 conference paper, he wrote, “more than 60 years after it was first introduced, there is still no fundamental agreement on the meaning of real value added, or its price. Most who use it for the study of productivity loosely describe it as a measure of ‘real output’ although strictly speaking it is not that.” He continues to argue that comparing real value-added between years only works under the conditions of no quality adjustments, no input substitutions due to price changes, and no changes to the terms of trade. If those conditions do not hold, then, he says diplomatically, “it would be unclear what [real value-added] is measuring” Or as economist Thomas Rymes, observing the same issues, put it more directly: “a fictitious measure of output with no meaning.”

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Since nominal value-added is not adjusted by price indexes, it avoids all the problems we discussed with real value-added.

But, once again, the problem with the nominal value-added comparison is that it is not a comparison of actual things—it is a comparison of sales receipts. Thus a given quantity of products that is produced by a bloated cost structure will count as more “GDP” than the same number of products produced by an efficient factory. This is not just a theoretical problem—we know for a fact that the Chinese company BYD produces an equivalent to the Tesla Model 3 for half the price. Thus, $30,000 of manufacturing value-added in the U.S. might represent one car being produced, while for China it might represent two cars, and thus is actually double the output. In general, the China-U.S. dollar exchange rate is not a market rate and thus the conversion does not reflect in any meaningful sense the value of products.

Worse, many U.S. products are more expensive not because they are higher-end and better quality, but because they are protected from competition by tariffs, patents, regulation or national security requirements. For instance, Purism makes an all-in-the-USA phone for $2,000—the phone is no better than a $500 Chinese or South Korean phone, but sells at a premium for the U.S. security market. Others in procurement tell stories of getting quotes for printed circuit boards that cost $5,000 from China but $50,000 in America, thus only government and regulated industries buy American circuit boards. American-made municipal buses can cost three times the price as those made in China, but cities often face rules requiring them to buy American. For a particularly egregious example, thanks to the protections of the Jones Act, American ships cost an astounding ten times as much to build as their foreign counterparts.

[…]

Which is more “output”—one million drones sold for a total of $2 billion dollars, versus one B2 stealth bomber for the same price? A $2,000 custom-made dress for the Met Gala, or one hundred pairs of denim work pants? Nominal value-added comparisons treat them as equivalent.

Nominal value-added cannot tell the difference between a country like 1790s Spain, a manufacturer of luxury goods with inflated nominal prices thanks to New World gold, and 1790s England, a ruthless manufacturer of inexpensive goods that is on its way to world domination. A comparison between countries that simply looks at sales revenues—not at the actual amount of ships, phones, and things produced for that revenue—is simply not a useful comparison.

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When we read a headline saying GDP data shows “car output has increased,” we think the U.S. has made more cars. We then apply our own views as to whether the quality of the car has changed. When we sneak quality into a measure but still call it “output,” we are double-counting and embedding the subjective in the objective, and we lose track of the hard numbers. We are not making more quantity of cars per person like the data says, we are making fewer cars, but with Bluetooth and crumple zones.

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While the BLS provides general information about the quality adjustment process, the specific methodology and the actual decisions are not documented. At the heart of GDP we find this subjective, bureaucratic black box. When we see that “output” of cars has increased since 1997, it is impossible for any commentator to know how that increase in “output” breaks down between actual number of cars, horsepower boosts, safety features, durability improvements, convenience features, blue tooth, power locks, and on and on.

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The point is not that any of these methods is right or wrong. The point is that if you have a half-dozen plausible ways of adjusting for quality, none of which from first principles is more objective than another, and you rule out one method for giving ludicrously low results, and one method for ludicrously high results, and just choose a middle route that feels reasonable, then the result of this adjustment is not an objective measure of output. All you have done is launder vibes into something that has the appearance of an objective number.

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The point is not that any of these methods is right or wrong. The point is that if you have a half-dozen plausible ways of adjusting for quality, none of which from first principles is more objective than another, and you rule out one method for giving ludicrously low results, and one method for ludicrously high results, and just choose a middle route that feels reasonable, then the result of this adjustment is not an objective measure of output. All you have done is launder vibes into something that has the appearance of an objective number.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

You can’t just compare tax rates

Saturday, October 18th, 2025

Brian Albrecht explains why you can’t just compare tax rates between, say, income taxes and tariffs:

Double a tax rate, and you quadruple the deadweight loss. This is a standard result in public finance, and it suggests we should spread our tax burden across many bases rather than concentrate it in one place.

Here’s the intuition. When you impose a small tax, you only kill off marginal transactions—deals that barely made sense in the first place. The buyer was almost indifferent about purchasing, or the worker was almost indifferent about working that extra hour. These marginal transactions don’t create much surplus, so losing them doesn’t cost much.

But as you increase the tax rate, you start killing off transactions with larger and larger surplus. Beyond eliminating the deals that barely made sense, you’re now eliminating deals where both parties really wanted to trade, where there were substantial gains from the exchange. The surplus lost from these inframarginal transactions is much larger.

This is why deadweight loss grows with the square of the tax rate. Double the tax, and you lose transactions that had twice the surplus. The effect multiplies. A 10% tax might eliminate deals that create $1 of surplus each, but a 20% tax eliminates deals worth $1 and deals worth $2. The total loss is 4x, not 2x.

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If you want to compare across markets, you need another basic idea from taxation: deadweight loss depends on elasticities.

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Some supplies are essentially fixed—you can’t create more of them no matter how high the price goes. Other goods can be produced in unlimited quantities at constant cost. Some demands are highly elastic (people readily substitute to alternatives), while others are inelastic (people need the good regardless of price). These elasticities determine how much distortion a given tax rate creates. The tax rate alone tells you nothing.

More elastic demand or supply curves generate larger deadweight losses. The flipside is the classic Ramsey result: tax less elastic goods more heavily.

[…]

Consider taxing a good with a perfectly inelastic supply—say, land in a specific location. The supply curve is vertical. No matter what price landowners receive, they supply the same amount of land because they can’t create more of it. By definition, there is no deadweight loss. The tax doesn’t change behavior.

What happens when we increase the tax rate on land? The tax raises revenue, but it generates no deadweight loss. Landowners absorb the entire tax through lower prices, but the quantity of land traded doesn’t change. There’s no distortion in the allocation of resources. You could tax land at 100%, and the deadweight loss would still be zero.

This demolishes the idea that you can look at tax rates in isolation. There is no nice connection between tax rate and deadweight loss that transcends the specific good being taxed.

Now compare this to a tariff on imported goods, where supply and demand are both elastic. The tariff creates a wedge between what consumers pay and what producers receive. This wedge distorts both consumption decisions (people buy less than they would otherwise) and production decisions (domestic producers make more than they would in an undistorted market). We get the classic deadweight loss triangle.

And it’s not just that imports aren’t perfectly inelastic. They’re very elastic! Estimates vary but one recent paper puts the long-run elasticity at 14, implying a huge deadweight loss.

The formula that deadweight loss increases with the square of the tax rate applies to both taxes. It tells us doubling tariffs with quadruple the deadweight loss. But it tells us nothing about which tax we should increase and the deadweight loss across the two markets. The land tax, even at a 100% rate, might generate zero distortion. The tariff, even at a 2.5% rate, creates real costs because of the huge elasticities. Elasticities matter. You can’t compare tax rates across different bases without accounting for how responsive behavior is to each tax.

[…]

But tariffs are worse than general consumption taxes because they tax only some goods—and imports are a small share of total consumption.

In the US, imports are roughly 10% of consumption. This means tariffs apply to a base that’s one-tenth of a general consumption tax would. When Lott compares a 2.5% tariff to a 40% income tax, he’s ignoring that these rates apply to completely different denominators.

Think of it this way: if you want to raise $100 from a tax that applies to everyone’s $1,000 of consumption, you need a 10% rate. But if you want to raise that same $100 from a tax that only applies to $100 of imports (10% of consumption), you need a 100% rate. The narrow base means you need a much higher rate to raise equivalent revenue.

This logic applies to any narrow excise tax.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

He never took lessons and never looked back

Friday, October 17th, 2025

Paul Daniel “Ace” Frehley, co-founder and lead guitarist of the legendary rock band Kiss, has died following injuries suffered during a fall last month, Variety reports:

In an era that preceded MTV, their performances were almost overwhelmingly visual and experiential, with explosions, elevators and more. Yet the mystique of Kiss was key: the bandmembers’ faces were not revealed for more than a decade, by which point Frehley and drummer Peter Criss had left the band. Frehley was known as “Space Ace” and cultivated an otherworldly image.

[…]

Paul Daniel Frehley was born to a musical family in the Bronx borough of New York City and received an electric guitar as a Christmas present in 1964. He never took lessons and never looked back: citing Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the Who as his primary influences, he began playing in bands as a teenager and purportedly acquired his nickname from friends based on his ability to score dates with girls.

He dropped out of high school after one of his bands, Cathedral, began earning money, but later returned and got his diploma. He continued playing and by 1971, one of his bands, Molimo, signed with RCA Records and recorded several unreleased songs for the label. But late the following year, a friend spotted an advertisement in the Village Voice that turned out to be for the lead guitar slot in the embryonic Kiss. Famously, Frehley went to the audition in Manhattan wearing one red sneaker and one orange one. Stanley, Simmons and Criss were dismayed by his appearance but sufficiently impressed with his fiery lead guitar work, and he was invited to join a few weeks later. The band, which was preceded by Stanley and Simmons’ previous group Wicked Lester, dubbed themselves Kiss in January 1973 and soon, inspired by the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper, began painting their faces and crafting outrageous costumes for their concerts.

[…]

Frehley’s abuse of drugs and alcohol grew worse, and in May of 1983, he was arrested following a high-speed chase on the Bronx River Parkway in his 1981 DeLorean. He was charged with DUI, reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident after hitting four cars during the incident (luckily with no injuries). He spent two weeks in a hospital detox unit and was required to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

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