Valery Shiryaev, an ex-Russian Army & FSB Officer, reveals when Ukraine’s war will end, exposes North Korean troops’ failures in Kursk, and breaks down the flaws of Western tanks in Ukraine, in an interview dubbed using AI voice cloning:
Russian Army and FSB Veteran on the Ukraine War
Monday, February 17th, 2025Dangerous top secret tests can be conducted there without much scrutiny or oversight
Friday, February 14th, 2025
The idea behind a facility like Area 51, Annie Jacobsen reminds us (in Area 51), is that dangerous top secret tests can be conducted there without much scrutiny or oversight:
To this end, there is no shortage of death woven into the uncensored history of Area 51. One of the most dangerous tests ever performed there was Project 57, the dirty bomb test that took place five miles northwest of Groom Lake, in a subparcel called Area 13. And yet what might have been the one defensible, positive outcome in this otherwise shockingly outrageous test — namely, lessons gleaned from its cleanup — was ignored until it was too late.
Unlike the spy plane projects at Groom Lake, where operations tend to have clear-cut beginnings and ceremonious endings, Project 57 was abandoned midstream. If the point of setting off a dirty bomb in secret was to see what would happen if an airplane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into the earth near where people lived, it follows that serious efforts would then be undertaken by the Atomic Energy Commission to learn how to clean up such a nightmare scenario after the catastrophe occurs. No such efforts were initially made.
Instead, about a year after setting off the dirty bomb, the Atomic Energy Commission put a barbed-wire fence around the Area 51 subparcel, marked it with HAZARD/ DO NOT ENTER/ NUCLEAR MATERIAL signs, and moved on to the next weapons test. The bustling CIA facility five miles downwind would be relatively safe, the nuclear scientists and the weapons planners surmised. Alpha particles are heavy and would rest on the topsoil after the original dust cloud settled down. Furthermore, almost no one knew about the supersecret project, certainly not the public, so who would protest? The closest inhabitants were the rank and file at the CIA’s Groom Lake facility next door, and they also knew nothing of Project 57. The men there followed strict need-to-know protocols, and as far as the commission was concerned, all anyone at Area 51 needed to know was to not venture near the barbed-wire fence marking off Area 13.
And yet the information gleaned from a cleanup effort would have been terribly useful, as was revealed eight years and eight months after Project 57 unfurled. On the morning of January 17, 1966, a real-life dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs — with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons — collided midair with a refueling tanker over the Spanish countryside.
On the morning of the accident, an Air Force pilot and his six-man crew were participating in an exercise that was part of Operation Chrome Dome, something that had begun in the late 1950s as part of Strategic Air Command.
[…]
That morning, the bomber lined up with the tanker and had just begun refueling when, in the words of pilot Larry Messinger, “all of a sudden, all hell seemed to break loose” and the two aircraft collided. There was a massive explosion and the men in the fuel tanker were instantly incinerated. Somehow Messinger, his copilot, the instructor pilot, and the navigator managed to eject from the airplane carrying the bombs. Their parachutes deployed, and the men floated down, landing in the sea. The four nuclear bombs — individually powerful enough to destroy Manhattan — also had parachutes, two of which did not deploy. One parachuted bomb landed gently in a dry riverbed and was later recovered relatively intact. But when the two bombs without parachutes hit the earth, their explosive charges detonated, breaking open the nuclear cores. Nuclear material was released at Palomares in the form of aerosolized plutonium, which then spread out across 650 acres of Spanish farmland — consistent with dispersal patterns from the Project 57 dirty bomb test. The fourth bomb landed in the sea and became lost. Palomares was then a small fishing village and farming community located on the Mediterranean Sea. As fortune would have it, January 17 was the Festival of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of Palomares, which meant most people in the village were at church that day and not out working in the fields.
[…]
The daily brief said nothing about widespread plutonium dispersal or about the lost thermonuclear bomb. Only that the “16th Nuclear Disaster Team had been dispatched to the area.” The “16th Nuclear Disaster Team” sounded official enough, but if fifteen nuclear disaster teams had preceded this one or existed concurrently, no record of any of them exists in the searchable Department of Energy archives. In reality, the group was ad hoc, meaning it was put together for the specific purpose of dealing with the Palomares incident. An official nuclear disaster response team did not exist in 1966 and would not be created for another nine years, until 1975, when retired Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, then the manager of the Nevada Test Site, put together the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST.
In 1966, the conditions in Palomares, Spain, were strikingly similar to the conditions at the Nevada Test Site in terms of geology. Both were dry, hilly landscapes with soil, sand, and wind shear as significant factors to deal with. But considering, with inconceivable lack of foresight, the Atomic Energy Commission had never attempted to clean up the dirty bomb that it had set off at Area 13 nine years before, the 16th Nuclear Disaster Team was, essentially, working in the dark.
Eight hundred individuals with no hands-on expertise were sent to Palomares to assist in the cleanup efforts there. The teams improvised. One group secured the contaminated area and prepared the land to remove contaminated soil. A second group worked to locate the lost thermonuclear bomb, called a broken arrow in Defense Department terms. The group cleaning up the dispersed plutonium included “specialists and scientists” from the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, Raytheon, and EG&G. It was terribly ironic. The very same companies who had engineered the nuclear weapons and whose employees had wired, armed, and fired them were now the companies being paid to clean up the deadly mess. This was the military-industrial complex in full swing.
For the next three months, workers labored around the clock to decontaminate the site of deadly plutonium. By the time the cleanup was over, more than fourteen hundred tons of radioactive soil and plant life were excavated and shipped to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina for disposal. The majority of the plutonium dispersed on the ground was accounted for, but the Defense Nuclear Agency eventually conceded that the extent of the plutonium particles scattered by wind, carried as dust, and ingested by earthworms and excreted somewhere else “will never be known.”
As for the missing hydrogen bomb, for forty-four days the Pentagon refused to admit it was lost despite the fact that it was widely reported as being missing. “I don’t know of any missing bomb,” one Pentagon official told the Associated Press. Only after the bomb was recovered from the ocean floor did the Pentagon admit that it had in fact been lost.
The nuclear accidents did not stop there. Two years and four days later there was another airplane crash involving a Strategic Air Command bomber and four nuclear bombs. On January 21, 1968, an uncontrollable fire started on board a B-52G bomber during a secret mission over Greenland. Six of the seven crew members bailed out of the burning airplane, which crested over the rooftops of the American air base at Thule and slammed into the frozen surface of North Star Bay. The impact detonated the high explosives in at least three of the four thermonuclear bombs — similar to exploding multiple dirty bombs — spreading radioactive plutonium, uranium, and tritium over a large swath of ice. A second fire started at the crash site, consuming bomb debris, wreckage from the airplane, and fuel. After the inferno burned for twenty minutes the ice began to melt. One of the bombs fell into the bay and disappeared beneath the frozen sea. In November of 2008, a BBC News investigation found that the Pentagon ultimately abandoned that fourth nuclear weapon after it became lost.
Once again, an ad hoc emergency group was put together; there was still no permanent disaster cleanup group. This time five hundred people were involved. The conditions were almost as dangerous as the nuclear material. Temperatures fell to –70 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds blew at ninety miles per hour. Equipment froze. In a secret SAC document, made public by a Freedom of Information Act request in 1989, the Air Force declared their efforts would be nominal, “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures,” with officials anticipating the removal of radioactive debris “to equal not less than 50%” of the total of what was there. For eight months, a crew calling themselves the Dr. Freezelove Team worked around the clock. When they were done, 10,500 tons of radioactive ice, snow, and crash debris was airlifted out of Greenland and flown to South Carolina for disposal.
[…]
After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, testing had moved underground, but often these underground tests “vented,” releasing huge plumes of radiation from fissures in the earth.
The only items taken were police uniforms
Wednesday, February 12th, 2025Greg Ellifritz warns of terrorists in uniform:
Most recently, we saw terrorists wearing uniforms during the October 2023 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Several groups of terrorists wore green fatigue uniforms similar to those worn by the Israeli Defense Forces.
That wasn’t the first time. Here is a brief list of worldwide terrorist and active killer attacks where the perpetrator(s) wore uniforms of some type.
- In 2003, at least 76 Al-Qaeda operatives conducted a series of suicide bombing attacks in Istanbul, Turkey. Some were dressed as police officers.
- In 2004, some of the terrorists involved in the Beslan school attack wore police and military uniforms during their assault on the school.
- In 2008, some of the terrorists involved in the Mumbai, India attacks wore Indian security forces uniforms.
- In 2011, the killer/bomber in Oslo, Norway wore a home made police uniform to facilitate his attack.
- In 2013 a US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey was attacked by a suicide bomber. How did the bomber get past security? He was dressed as a mailman and was carrying an envelope.
- In 2014, Iraqi suicide bombers dressed as the police.
- In 2015, A terrorist cell was apprehended in Belgium. They had Belgian police uniforms, explosives, and rifles. The terrorists were going to dress as cops, bomb police stations, and shoot citizens in the street.
- In 2015, kidnappers attempted to abduct a woman in South Africa while wearing police uniforms.
- In 2020, the Texas Walmart active killer was wearing a uniform shirt with a badge.
Why uniforms? In a crisis, people wearing uniforms aren’t generally questioned. If a bomb goes off or a terrorist starts shooting, every cop and fireman for miles around will be responding. No one will be looking at what type of uniform someone is wearing as long as he appears like he is helping out.
The uniform gives people access to areas into which they would be denied entrance if they were dressed in normal clothing. Think about terrorists wanting to detonate a secondary device to kill a large number of police and fire personnel at a bomb scene. Would any cops on the perimeter of a bombing incident stop a person in a paramedic uniform running up to the scene with a large first aid bag?
Nope. And that bag might be filled with C-4 and nails instead of bandages. I can’t think of a better way to kill a lot of cops and firemen.
How do terrorists get police uniforms? It’s easy. They steal them.
I have a friend who worked on an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in one of the largest cities in the USA. His unit investigated regular burglaries of dry cleaning businesses for years. In these burglaries, the only items taken were police uniforms that officers had dropped off for cleaning. This has been happening for almost 20 years and you don’t hear a thing about it in the media. We’re ripe for an attack of this nature.
Superman doesn’t use menus
Tuesday, February 11th, 2025Anduril Industries is taking the reins of the United States Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, and for Palmer Luckey this announcement is deeply personal:
Since my pre-Oculus days as a teenager who had the opportunity to do a tiny bit of work on the Army’s BRAVEMIND project, I’ve believed there would be a headset on every soldier long before there is a headset on every civilian. Given that America loses more troops in training than combat, the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer (SiVT) side of IVAS alone has the potential to save more lives than practically anything else we can imagine building.
Tactical heads-up-displays that turn warfighters into technomancers and pair us with weaponized robotics were one of the products in the original Anduril pitch deck for a reason. The past eight years we have spent building Lattice have put Anduril in a position to make this type of thing actually useful in the way military strategists and technologists have long dreamed of, ever since Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers. Not just day and night and thermal and ultraviolet, but peering into an idealized interactive real-time composite of past, present, and future that will quickly surpass traditional senses like vision and touch. Put another way, Superman doesn’t use menus — he just sees and does.
His announcement includes a paragraph of redacted text, before getting back to his main point:
Everything I’ve done in my career — building Oculus out of a camper trailer, shipping VR to millions of consumers, getting run out of Silicon Valley by backstabbing snakes, betting that Anduril could tear people out of the bigtech megacorp matrix and put them to work on our nation’s most important problems — has led to this moment.
These perch-and-wait ambushes are interesting for what they do not show as much as for what they do
Sunday, February 9th, 2025David Hambling points to a number of videos released by Ukrainian forces that show FPV lurk-and-strike ambush tactics in action:
The technique is used behind Russian lines to strike vehicles travelling on supply routes and seems to be used as a way to interdict logistics – and also for targeted assassinations.
This technique may have been adopted as a way to get around the short flight time of FPVs, which typically fly for 20 minutes or less and cannot wait for targets.
[…]
What is clear from this is that all three FPVs were in the ambush area, and the operators found it worthwhile to expend three on a low-value target which was not carrying passengers or cargo. In Russia the Desertcross costs around $23,000; the FPVs are around $500 each but availability rather than cost would likely be the deciding factor. Nobody wastes ammo when it is scarce, however cheap it might be.
[…]
These perch-and-wait ambushes are interesting for what they do not show as much as for what they do.
There is no indication how the drones reached their ambush spots. Battery life is the big issue; the drones might have flown there under their own power and counted on having enough juice left for the waiting period and the ambush. But they may have been delivered by drone. Wild Hornets Queen Hornet has been shown delivering FPVs and acting as a flying relay station to increase control range. And when British PM Keir Starmer visited Ukraine recently, he was shown two FPV carriers, one a fixed-wing drone, the other a large multicopter.
Ukrainian forces are increasingly using drones to lay anti-tank mines on roads behind Russian lines. Mines are relatively easy to remove; drones which may be some distance from the road and can be relocated (or target anyone attempting to remove them) may be more challenging.
It’s unclear what airframe the Unmanned Systems Forces uses as basis for the far-flying, multi-use drone
Saturday, February 8th, 2025Ukraine’s latest unmanned aerial vehicle can fly 1,200 miles, drop a 550-pound bomb and return to base, David Axe reports, making it potentially the most powerful reusable drone in the Russia-Ukraine war:
It’s unclear what airframe the Unmanned Systems Forces uses as basis for the far-flying, multi-use drone, but the scant photographic evidence points to a modified civilian sport plane. Ukrainian drone regiments have long operated propeller-driven Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes fitted with remote controls and an underbelly bomb rack.
But the A-22s have only ever been caught on video conducting one-way missions, slamming into their targets like slow cruise missiles. The new Ukrainian drone can drop its bomb and then fly back to base, meaning it can fly a few or many missions until it wears out, crashes or gets shot down.
In making its longest-range drones reusable, the drone branch could multiply the number and pace of deep strikes it conducts against targets inside Russia, which have lately included bomber bases and oil facilities. The strikes have raised the cost of Russian bomber sorties targeting Ukrainian cities, and depressed oil production in a country that utterly relies on energy exports for state revenue.
[…]
Controlling a drone in mid air, usually through a combination of pre-set GPS-based navigation and direct human control via satellite radio, is fairly straightforward. Landing a drone is hard, however. Smaller models can cut their engines, pop a parachute and float down to the ground. Bigger models must be eased onto a runway.
We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver
Friday, February 7th, 2025One scorching-hot morning in August of 1966, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), an Iraqi Air Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad:
Redfa then made a sudden turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified Redfa that he was off course.
“Turn back immediately,” he was told. Instead, Redfa began flying in a zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey, then toward the Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There, one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.
Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.
[…]
For years, Mossad searched for a possible candidate for defection. Finally, in early 1966, they found a man who fit the profile in Munir Redfa, a Syrian Christian who had previously expressed feelings of persecution as a religious minority in a squadron of Muslims. Mossad dispatched a beautiful female intelligence agent to Baghdad on a mission. The agent worked the romance angle first, luring Redfa to Paris with the promise of sex. There, she told Redfa the truth about what she was after. In return for an Iraqi air force MiG, Redfa would be paid a million dollars and given a new identity and a safe haven for himself and his family. Redfa agreed.
[…]
What Israel learned from Munir Redfa’s MiG ultimately allowed them to overpower the combined air forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan during the Six-Day War.
[…]
Israel was playing the weak card in the hope of winning American military support. Helms also said that he’d recently met with a senior Israeli official whose visit he saw as “a clear portent that war might come at any time.” Coupled with Angleton’s assessment, Helms said this meant most likely in a matter of days. When Israel launched an attack three days later, Helms’s status with President Johnson went through the roof. “The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in the Johnson White House,” wrote a CIA historian.
The story of Redfa’s defection made international headlines when it happened, in 1966. But what didn’t make the news was what happened once Israel finished with the MiG: the Soviet-made fighter was shipped to Area 51.
[…]
Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil.
“We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio… everything. Then we put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation equipment.”
[…]
“Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn fast,” Barnes says.
[…]
“We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains.
[…]
“Since no spare parts were available, ground crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”
[…]
“The fact that we had a MiG at Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five minutes.”
[…]
“We were pinned down,” says Barnes. For weeks on end, the Special Projects Group couldn’t turn on a single radar system; the Russians were monitoring the area that intensely. Barnes and his group passed the time by playing mind games with the Soviets. They painted strange shapes on the tarmac, “funny-looking impossible aircraft,” which they then heated up with portable heaters to confuse the Soviets who were shooting infrared satellite pictures of the work going on there. “We got a kick out of imagining what the Russians thought of our new airplanes,” Barnes says.
[…]
The ultrasecret MiG program at Area 51 gave birth to the Top Gun fighter-pilot school, a fact that would remain secret for decades. Officially called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, the program was established a year after the first MiG arrived, in March of 1969, and based out of Miramar, California. Instructor pilots who had fought mock air battles over Groom Lake against Munir Redfa’s MiG began training Navy pilots for sorties against Russian MiGs over Vietnam. When these Top Gun–trained Navy pilots resumed flying in Southeast Asia, the results were radically different than the deadly nine-to-one ratio from before. The scales had tipped. Now, American pilots would begin shooting down North Vietnamese pilots at a ratio of thirteen to one. The captured Soviet-made MiG-21 Fishbed proved to be an aerial warfare coup for the United States. And what followed was a quid pro quo. To thank the Israelis for supplying the United States with the most prized and unknowable aircraft in the arsenal of its archnemesis, America began to supply Israel with jet fighters to assist Israel in keeping its rivals at bay.
There were sound logistical reasons why England hadn’t been successfully invaded since the fifteenth century
Thursday, February 6th, 2025
Napoleon ordered Decrès to construct a prototype of a flat-bottomed boat, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), which could carry one cannon and one hundred men across the English Channel, and to contact Cambacérès, Lebrun, and Talleyrand to find individuals who would privately sponsor the building of these transports, which would be named after them.:
The flat bottoms of many of the boats, whose maximum draft was 6 feet fully loaded, meant that they could be run up on a beach, but although most were ready by the spring of 1804 they tended to ship water and sailed very badly unless the wind was dead astern, and south-eastern winds are rare in the English Channel. The pinnaces also needed to be rowed if they were not going dead ahead, which over 22 miles of sea would have been exhausting for the troops. Although a night attack was intended, a full eight hours of darkness came only in the autumn and winter, when the weather was too bad to risk a crossing in flat-bottomed boats. The Channel made up for its narrowness by its notorious unpredictability; there were sound logistical reasons why England hadn’t been successfully invaded since the fifteenth century (when she had been by land from Wales). By the early nineteenth she had the largest, best-trained and best-led navy in the world.
Napoleon was undeterred. On July 30, 1804 he told General Brune, we ‘only await a favourable wind in order to plant the imperial eagle on the Tower of London. Time and fate alone know what will happen.’
[…]
All the leading French admirals – Ganteaume, Eustache Bruix, Laurent Truguet, Pierre de Villeneuve, as well as Decrès – opposed the English expedition as far as they reasonably could, chastened by the two Channel squadrons of over thirty British ships-of-the-line on permanent station.
[…]
Napoleon and his senior advisors recognized that it would be impossible to send large numbers of men over on a single tide, and a surprise crossing in fog was also deemed too dangerous.
[…]
The best strategy that could be devised on any of these occasions was the ruse of luring the Royal Navy away from the English south coast for long enough to cross the Channel. Yet the idea that the Admiralty Board in London could be induced to leave the narrows of the Channel under-guarded for even one tide was always utterly fanciful.
Napoleon wrote to Ganteaume on November 23, 1803 about the flotilla of 300 armed longboats (chaloupes cannonières), 500 gunboats (bateaux cannoniers) and 500 barges he hoped soon to have ready. ‘Do you think it will take us to the shores of Albion? It can carry 100,000 men. Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe.’
[…]
Yet even if Napoleon had succeeded in getting ashore in Britain, Nelson’s return would have cut him off from resupply and reinforcement, and 100,000 men was not a large enough force with which to conquer 17 million waiting Britons, many of them under (admittedly makeshift) arms. Britain had undertaken intense preparations to repel an invasion from 1803 onwards: southern towns were garrisoned, fire beacons prepared; provisions stockpiled in depots located at places such as Fulham, Brentford and Staines, and every landing place was itemized from Cornwall to Scotland. Seventy-three small ‘Martello’ beacon towers were built along the south coast between 1805 and 1808, defensive breastworks were dug around south London, and some 600,000 men (between 11 and 14 per cent of the adult male population) were enlisted in the British army and Royal Navy by the end of 1804, with a further 85,000 in the militia.
Marines using cheap commercial tech to hide command posts in plain sight
Monday, February 3rd, 2025Marines deploying to Asia for recent exercises learned to hide their command posts, whose tell-tale radio emissions could give away their position to an enemy, by using cheap commercial tech to hide in plain sight:
Using host nation WiFi allowed the Marines to blend “right into the environment,” Siverts said. Marines took cellphones on the deployment and accessed the mobile network with local SIM cards so their network wouldn’t stand out. “We’re not able to be detected,” he said.
Communicating that way requires encryption and small form factor communications, he added, referring to communications platforms that are much physically smaller than the platforms they typically use.
Another tool in the Marine Corps’ arsenal is commercial radars that are indistinguishable from commercial fishing vessels, Siverts said.
[…]
Among the Army’s top goals is improving command posts’ ability to avoid enemy fire. That includes making command posts smaller and easier to relocate, as well as reducing their electro-magnetic profiles.
“If we slog around the battlefield with massive operations centers, which are difficult to set up and often contractor-supported, we will get pounded,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said in October at the annual Association of the United States Army meeting.
“The Russians are learning this lesson several times a day [in Ukraine]. And we will not learn the hard way.”
Sarah Paine on How Mao Conquered China
Friday, January 31st, 2025Dwarkesh Patel interviews Sarah Paine again, this time on how Mao conquered China:
Napoleon got his money, and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal
Thursday, January 30th, 2025At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he decided to ignore:
On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.
[…]
‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’ Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.
[…]
The financing was arranged via the Anglo-Dutch merchant banks Barings Brothers and Hopes, which in effect bought Louisiana from France and sold it on to the United States for $11.25 million of 6 per cent American bonds, meaning that the American government did not have to provide the capital immediately. As a result, Barings were paying Napoleon 2 million francs a month even when Britain was at war with France. When the prime minister, Henry Addington, asked the bank to cease the remittances Barings agreed, but Hopes, based on the continent, continued to pay and were backed by Barings – so Napoleon got his money and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal.
Ukraine’s all-drone, multi-domain attack could be a ‘seminal’ moment in warfare
Monday, January 27th, 2025Ukraine successfully pulled off an all-drone, multi-domain attack on Russian positions near Kharkiv in December:
UGVs conducted the full spectrum of mission sets including surveillance, mine clearance and direct fire, supported by uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), the official stated before explaining how the “tactical air-land operation” represented the first instance of an “uncrewed battle fought by one side” in the ongoing war.
Reflecting on the attack, which appeared at the time as merely a “footnote in daily reporting,” the official went on to describe it as a “seminal moment in the changing character of conflict.”
Warning “Ukraine faces today what [NATO] could face tomorrow,” the speaker went onto describe how Ukraine’s military continues to place a premium on attritable technologies to create combat mass,” before adding: “Ukraine has made the most of turning industrial disadvantage into a furnace of innovation.”
Sarah Paine on Why Japan Lost
Saturday, January 25th, 2025Dwarkesh Patel interviews Sarah Paine again, this time about why Japan lost:
For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a foreign nation
Thursday, January 23rd, 2025On the foggy morning of January 23, 1968, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the U.S. Navy ship USS Pueblo sailed into icy waters off the coast of North Korea and dropped anchor:
The Pueblo’s cover story was that it was conducting scientific research; really, it was on an espionage mission, a joint NSA-Navy operation with the goal of gathering signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In addition to the regular crew, there were twenty-eight signals intelligence specialists working behind locked doors in a separate and restricted part of the vessel. Parked 15.8 miles off North Korea’s Ung-do Island, technically the Pueblo was floating in international waters.
North Korea’s Communist regime did not see it that way. The ship was close enough to be eavesdropping on Wonson harbor, which made it an open target for the North Korean People’s Army, the KPA. After one of the Pueblo’s crew members picked up on radar that a KPA ship was approaching fast, Pueblo’s captain, Lloyd M. Bucher, went up to the bridge to have a look around. Through his binoculars, Bucher saw not just a military ship but one with its rocket launchers aimed directly at the Pueblo. Bucher ordered certain flags to be raised, ones that indicated the USS Pueblo was on a surveying mission, something the North Koreans obviously already did not buy. Within minutes, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Lacy spotted several small vessels on the horizon: torpedo boats coming from Wonson. Next, two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene.
Captain Bucher now had a national security nightmare on his hands. His boat was filled with thousands of classified papers, cryptographic manuals, and encryption machines. Most significantly, the Pueblo carried a KW-7 cipher machine, which was the veritable Rosetta stone of naval encryption. The captain considered sinking his ship, which would take forty-seven minutes, but later explained that he knew if he had done so a gun battle was certain to ensue. Most of the Pueblo’s life rafts would be shot at and destroyed. Without life rafts, the men would die in the icy waters in a matter of minutes, Bucher was certain. He made the decision to flee.
The North Korean ship raised a flag that signaled “Heave to or I will open fire on you.” Captain Bucher raised a signal flag in response: “Thank you for your consideration. I am departing the area.” But the North Koreans opened fire. Bucher himself was hit, taking shrapnel in his foot and backside. As the Pueblo took off, the North Koreans continued to fire, killing a U.S. sailor named Duane Hodges. Meanwhile, behind the secret door, SIGINT specialists smashed cipher equipment with axes and shoved documents into a small incinerator there. Despite the speed at which the analysts worked to burn the secret papers, 90 percent of the documents survived. Sixty-one minutes after being shot, Captain Bucher was no longer in control of his ship. The North Korean People’s Army stormed the Pueblo and took the captain and his eighty-two crew members hostage. For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a foreign nation. The timing could not have been worse. America was already losing one war.
President Johnson was outraged. Within hours of the Pueblo’s capture, the Pentagon began secretly preparing for war against North Korea. The following day, McNamara summoned the war council to lay out plans for a ground attack. “Our primary objective is to get the men of the Pueblo back,” McNamara said, emphasizing just how secret his plan was to remain: “No word of the discussion in this meeting should go beyond this room.” A stunning air attack over North Korea was laid out. An estimated fifteen thousand tons of bombs would be dropped from the air to complement the ground assault. Given the huge numbers of soldiers and airmen fighting in Vietnam, the war with North Korea would require a call-up of the reserves. A massive U.S. strategic airlift was set in motion, designated Operation Combat Fox. That the North Vietnamese were just six days from launching the sneak attack called the Tet Offensive was not yet known. A war with North Korea over the USS Pueblo would have been a war America could ill afford.
Richard Helms suggested an Oxcart be dispatched from nearby Kadena to photograph North Korea’s coast and try to locate the USS Pueblo before anyone even considered making a next move. As it stood, immediately after the Pueblo’s capture, there was no intelligence indicating exactly where the sailors were or where the ship was being held. Richard Helms counseled the president that if the goal was to get the eighty-two American sailors back, a ground attack or air attack couldn’t possibly achieve that end if no one knew where the USS Pueblo was. A reconnaissance mission would also enable the Pentagon to see if Pyongyang was mobilizing its troops for war over the event. Most important of all, it would give the crisis a necessary diplomatic pause.
Three days after the Pueblo’s capture, on January 26, Oxcart pilot Jack Weeks was dispatched on a sortie from Kadena to locate the missing ship. From the photographs Weeks took on that overflight, the United States pinpointed the Pueblo’s exact location as it floated in the dark-watered harbor in Changjahwan Bay. Before completing his mission but after taking the necessary photographs, Jack Weeks experienced aircraft problems. When he got back to base, he told his fellow pilots about the problems he’d had on the flight but not about his photographic success; detailed information regarding the USS Pueblo was so highly classified, very few individuals had any idea that Weeks’s mission had delivered photographs that had prevented war with North Korea.
“The [Oxcart] quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson harbor,” President Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow revealed in 1994. “So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower. All that would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people including our own. But the [Oxcart’s] photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held. The Koreans couldn’t lie about that.” The Pentagon’s secret war plan against North Korea was called off. Instead, negotiations for the sailors’ return began. But the ever-suspicious administration, now deeply embroiled in political fallout from the Tet Offensive, worried the Pueblo incident could very well be another Communist double cross. What if North Korea was secretly mobilizing its troops for war? Three and a half weeks later, on February 19, 1968, Frank Murray was assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea. Murray’s photographs indicated that North Korea’s army was still not mobilizing for battle. But by then, the Pueblo was on its way to Pyongyang, where it remains today—the only American naval vessel held in captivity by a foreign power. Captain Bucher and his men were prisoners of North Korea for eleven months, tortured, put through mock executions, and made to confess espionage before finally being released. In 2008, a U.S. federal judge determined that North Korea should pay sixty-five million dollars in damages to several of the Pueblo’s crew, but North Korea has yet to respond.
Sarah Paine on The War For India
Friday, January 17th, 2025Dwarkesh Patel interviews Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College:
In this first episode, Prof Paine talks about key decisions by Khrushchev, Mao, Nehru, Bhutto, & Lyndon Johnson that shaped the whole dynamic of South Asia today.