Three problems doomed the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk

May 4th, 2025

Big Serge performs an autopsy on the Kursk Operation:

Ukrainian forces achieved the basic prerequisite for success in August: they managed to stage a suitable mechanized package — notably, the forest canopy around Sumy allowed them to assemble assets in relative secrecy, in contrast to the open steppe in the south — and achieve tactical surprise, overrunning Russian border guards at the outset. Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why?

[…]

More specifically, we can enumerate three problems that doomed the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk:

  1. The failure of the AFU to widen their penetration adequately.
  2. The road-poor connectivity of the Ukrainian hub in Sudzha to their bases of support around Sumy.
  3. Persistent Russian ISR-strike overwatch on Ukrainian lines of communication and supply.

We can see, almost naturally, how these elements can feed into each other — the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha — this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

[…]

Fighting in a severe salient is almost always a bad proposition, and is something of a geometrical motif of warfare going back millennia. In the current operating environment, however, it is particularly dangerous, given the potential of FPV drones to saturate supply lines with high explosive. In this case, the effect was particularly synergistic: the cramped salient amplified the effect of Russian strike systems, and this in turn prevented the Ukrainians from assembling and sustaining the force needed to expand the salient and create more space. Confinement bred strangulation, and strangulation bred confinement. Fighting with a caved in flank for months, the Ukrainian grouping was doomed to operational sterility and eventual defeat almost at the outset.

Posted in War | 3 Comments »

Throughout the sixties, their journalism had often gotten them mixed up in furtive arrangements

May 3rd, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillBefore her murder trial, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Susan Atkins somehow ended up telling her story to reporters:

Lawrence Schiller wouldn’t talk to me, either, and Jerry Cohen had died by his own hand, in 1993. Looking into those two men, I found that throughout the sixties, their journalism had often gotten them mixed up in furtive arrangements. In ’67, Schiller had published the first book to attack the conspiracy theorists around John F. Kennedy’s assassination, staunchly supporting the official explanation for JFK’s death. That same year, foreshadowing his feat at Sybil Brand, Schiller wormed his way into the Dallas hospital room of Jack Ruby, who’d killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The reporter emerged with the only recording ever made of Ruby’s confessing to the murder. Schiller released it on vinyl that year. Notably, he’d taped Ruby saying that he hadn’t killed Oswald as part of a conspiracy, thus shoring up the government’s official line.

During a congressional investigation of the CIA’s illegal domestic operations, the agency admitted that it had more than 250 “assets” in the American media in the 1960s. Their identities were never revealed. Mark Lane, who’d written the first book questioning the findings of the Warren Commission—the investigative committee appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, which concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin—believed Schiller was one of those assets, and Jerry Cohen, too. Lane believed they’d been tasked with disrupting investigations of the Kennedy assassination. In testimony before Congress, Lane charged that the CIA had paid Cohen to “smear” him in the press.

I could never prove that, but I did find a trove of documents in the National Archives showing that Schiller had been acting as an informant for the FBI in 1967 and 1968, sharing confidential information with the Bureau about Mark Lane’s sources. His work as an informant continued under the cloak of his “reporting” for Life magazine, which was later named in a 1977 Rolling Stone story as one of the publications that provided CIA employees with cover. Schiller tracked down authorities who were investigating potential malfeasance in the Kennedy assassination, using his press credentials to obtain interviews and then sharing his findings with the FBI. He’d written to J. Edgar Hoover to say that he was “in possession of the names and whereabouts of [the] confidential informant whom Mr. [Mark] Lane refused to identify” in his testimony to the Warren Commission. Schiller dug up information about officials looking into the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. According to memos, the FBI eagerly awaited Schiller’s information. Others had made similar claims about Cohen and Schiller. Pete Noyes, a TV investigative reporter who’d written a book on the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, said that Cohen, a friend, had pressured him to abandon the project. If Noyes dropped the publication of the book, Cohen promised him a plum job at the Los Angeles Times. Noyes declined the offer, but he was disturbed by how much Cohen knew about his unpublished work. A few weeks later, he was fired from his job at CBS News. Cohen was “a strange little guy,” Noyes told me. He wondered why his onetime friend tried to quash his book, and he suspected that Cohen had played a role in his firing, too. Although he could never prove it, Noyes was fairly certain that Cohen was a CIA asset.

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The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support

May 2nd, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenTo operate a Predator-style drone requires ownership in space, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

All unmanned aerial vehicles require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.

[…]

For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world.

[…]

By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.

“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese—unannounced and unexpectedly—shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wicked-problem scenarios in space.

[…]

Seven months later, in February of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the USS Lake Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space where it hit a five-thousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine, to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press. International leaders cried foul, saying the test was designed to show the world that the United States has the technology to take out other nations’ satellites. “China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” declared Liu Jianchao, China’s foreign ministry spokesman—certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union actually considered using space as a launching pad for war. President Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian—a man with so much power that he was not required to tell the truth to Congress—fielded regular suggestions from the Pentagon to develop, in his own words, “satellite bombers, military bases on the moon, and so on.” Killian was the man who spearheaded the first nuclear weapon explosions in space, first in the upper atmosphere (Orange), then near the ozone layer (Teak), and finally in outer space (Argus). But Killian shied away from the idea of weaponizing space not because he saw putting weapons in space as an inherently reckless or existentially bad idea but because Killian believed nuclear weapons would not work well from space.

“A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb,” Killian declared in a public service announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own admission, was not a scientist, explaining to Americans why dropping bombs from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to ‘drop’ a bomb directly down from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades later James Killian would be proven wrong.

Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is located in an Area 51–like facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of one-centimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

So the war did not pay for the war

May 1st, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsWith the signing of Treaty of Pressburg, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the Austrian Emperor lost 2.5 million subjects and one-sixth of his revenues, making a lasting peace unlikely:

When Vivant Denon presented Napoleon with a series of gold medals commemorating Austerlitz, one of which showed the French eagle holding the British lion in its talons, Napoleon threw it ‘with violence to the end of the chamber’, saying: ‘Vile flatterer! How dare you say the French eagle stifles the English lion? I cannot launch upon the sea a single petty fishing boat but she’s captured by the English. In reality it’s the lion that stifles the French eagle. Cast the medal into the foundry, and never bring me another!’

He told Denon to melt down the other Austerlitz medals, too, and come up with a far less grandiose design, which Denon did (it had Francis and Frederick William’s heads on the reverse). There was a modicum of modesty still left in Napoleon in 1805; he also turned down Kellermann’s proposal for a permanent monument to his glory and had David destroy an over-flattering gilt model of him.

[…]

A report from the Grande Armée’s receiver-general in January 1806 showed just how profitable the victory at Austerlitz had been for France.25 Some 18 million francs had been collected from Swabia as well as the 40 million francs demanded from Austria by the Pressburg treaty. British merchandise was seized and sold across all the newly conquered territories. In all, revenue amounted to about 75 million francs, which, after deducting costs and French debts to the German states, left France nearly 50 million francs in profit.

[…]

War must pay for war,’ Napoleon was to write to both Joseph and Soult on July 14, 1810. He used three methods in a bid to achieve this end: straightforward seizure of cash and property from enemies (known as ‘ordinary contributions’); payments from enemy treasuries agreed in peace treaties (‘extraordinary contributions’), and the billeting and maintenance of French troops at foreign or allies’ expense.

[…]

Ordinary and extraordinary contributions produced 35 million francs in the War of the Third Coalition, 253 million francs in the War of the Fourth Coalition, 90 million francs of requisitions in kind from Prussia in 1807, 79 million francs from Austria in 1809, a huge 350 million francs from Spain between 1808 and 1813, 308 million francs from Italy, 10 million francs in goods seized from Holland in 1810 and a special ‘contribution’ from Hamburg of 10 million francs the same year.29 The savings made by the use of allied military contingents (253 million francs) and by despatching French troops to be billeted on satellite states (129 million francs), as well as a total of 807 million francs in ‘ordinary contributions’ and 607 million francs in ‘extraordinary contributions’ over more than a decade brought in a total of nearly 1.8 billion francs.

Yet still it wasn’t enough, because between the breakdown of Amiens and 1814 no less than 3 billion francs was required to finance Napoleon’s campaigns.

[…]

So the war did not pay for the war, but only for 60 per cent of it, with the remaining 40 per cent being picked up by the French people in various other ways. Yet these did not include the imposition of direct taxes on Napoleon’s strongest supporters – French tradesmen, merchants, professionals and the peasantry – except for the discretionary taxes on drinkers and smokers. Nor did it involve any direct taxes on middle- and upper-class incomes, even though Britain levied income tax at 10 per cent on all incomes over £200 per annum, an unheard-of imposition at the time.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The DRC is neither democratic nor a republic

April 30th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall The DRC is an illustration of why the catchall term developing world is far too broad-brush a way to describe countries that are not part of the modern industrialized world, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World):

The DRC is not developing, nor does it show any signs of doing so. The DRC should never have been put together; it has fallen apart and is the most underreported war zone in the world, despite the fact that six million people have died there during wars that have been fought since the late 1990s.

The DRC is neither democratic nor a republic. It is the second-largest country in Africa with a population of approximately 75 million, although due to the situation there it is difficult to find accurate figures. It is bigger than Germany, France, and Spain combined and contains the Congo Rainforest, second only to the Amazon as the largest in the world.

The people are divided into more than two hundred ethnic groups, of which the largest is the Bantu. There are several hundred languages, but the widespread use of French bridges that gap to a degree.

[…]

When the Belgians left in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together.

The civil wars began immediately and were later intensified by a blood-soaked walk-on role in the global Cold War. The government in the capital, Kinshasa, backed the rebel side in Angola’s war, thus bringing itself to the attention of the United States, which was also supporting the rebel movement against the Soviet-backed Angolan government. Each side poured in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms.

When the Cold War ended, both great powers had less interest in what by then was called Zaire, and the country staggered on, kept afloat by its natural resources.

[…]

In 2014, the United Nations’ Human Development Index placed the DRC at number 186 out of 187 countries it measured. The bottom eighteen countries in that list are all in Africa.

[…]

The region is also bordered by nine countries. They have all played a role in the DRC’s agony, which is one reason why the Congo wars are also known as “Africa’s world war.”

[…]

The wars have killed, at a low estimate, tens of thousands of people and have resulted in the deaths of another six million due to disease and malnutrition. The UN estimates that almost 50 percent of the victims have been children under the age of five.

In recent years, the fighting has died down, but the DRC is home to the world’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War and still requires the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission to prevent full-scale war from breaking out again. Now the job is not to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, because the DRC was never whole. It is simply to keep the pieces apart until a way can be found to join them sensibly and peacefully.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

What’s Really Wrong With Standardized Tests

April 29th, 2025

Standardized testing is glorious, Bryan Caplan proclaims, but many standardized tests royally suck:

The worst prominent test is almost surely the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). About 9% of test-takers get a perfect score of 170 on the Quantitative part of the exam. A score of 169 puts you at the 87th percentile, and by 166 you’re already out of the top quarter. Most of the STEM majors taking the exam did the relevant coursework in middle school, so for fields that emphasize math, marginally lower scores largely capture not incomprehension but carelessness.

This is especially ridiculous when you remember that only top programs are highly selective. So when the focal standardized exam bunches all the top students together, the exam delivers near-zero value. At least in STEM fields, the point of the GRE is no longer to pinpoint the stars who deserve admission to top programs. The point is to weed out the manifestly unqualified. So the final cut almost has to be grotesquely “holistic.”

The regular SAT math is, by comparison, vastly better. Something like 1% get a perfect score — roughly one-tenth the share that get a perfect score on GRE math. But in absolute terms, the SAT still sucks. At least for STEM students, the problems are easy, so marginally lower scores again primarily capture carelessness rather than incomprehension. Since about two million students take the SAT, roughly 20,000 have perfect math scores — more than enough to fill all the spots in the Ivy League.

[…]

Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.

Out of all the well-known standardized tests, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) best satisfies these conditions. A perfect score is, bizarrely, 528. The fraction that gets a 528 in a given year is about .02%.

[…]

When your goal is to find the best of the best, the ideal test is so demanding that you get a big clump of scores not at the top of the distribution, but at the bottom.

At least one such standardized test exists: the Putnam Competition. As you’d expect, it’s a test of mathematical prowess. To call the test “hard” is a severe understatement: In 2025, the median score was 2 out of 120. Which is historically high! In many years, the median score is exactly 0 for the roughly 4000 test-takers, who are already highly selected. At the other end of the distribution, only five perfect scores have ever been achieved.

[…]

There are many lines of defense in the War Against Merit. The first is to get rid of standardized tests entirely. The second is to go “test-optional.” But if these approaches are too blatantly corrupt, there is a third option. A stealthy way to pretend applicants are far more equal than they truly are.

Just use lousy top-coded tests.

[…]

Admissions to graduate econ programs could be greatly improved simply by requiring the AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics exams. They’re flawed tests, but if you can’t get 5’s on both, you’re not ready for grad school. Indeed, graduate admissions could probably be sharply improved across the board if programs required 5’s on all subject-relevant APs. Would-be historians should have 5’s on the U.S., European, and world history APs just to apply, and would-be literature professors should have 5’s on English literature and language.

Posted in Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

While most students are not creative, heavy K-12 investment fertilizes society’s creative potential by giving everyone the mental tools to innovate

April 28th, 2025

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanWhen Bryan Caplan started writing The Case Against Education, he expected to confront a massive research literature claiming that education definitely has a massive effect on economic growth:

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that — despite overwhelming pro-education bias — the massive research literature on education and growth hadn’t found much of anything. Contrary to conventional stories about the positive externalities of education, mainstream estimates of education’s national rate of return were consistently below estimates of education’s individual rate of return. Just as the signaling model predicts.

[…]

New ideas are the root of progress. People today live far better than they did in 1800 because people today know far more than they did in 1800. Earth in 1800 contained all the materials required to make an airplane or iPad. But until the right ideas came along, the materials lay fallow. Why did mankind have to wait so long for the right ideas to arrive? Part of the answer is that ideas, once created, are cheap to copy. As a result, innovators glean only a sliver of the value they create.

These truisms lead straight to a stirring sermon on “Education, Foundation of a Dynamic Society.” While most students are not creative, heavy K-12 investment fertilizes society’s creative potential by giving everyone the mental tools to innovate. Heavy investment in colleges and universities, similarly, brings top students up to the research frontier and provides innovation leaders with employment and funding. If consistently investing 10% of national income in education elevates the annual growth rate from 1% to 2% without any further benefits, the social return is a hefty 11%.

Unfortunately, this stirring sermon is wishful thinking.

[…]

While the evidence is messy, education seemingly does less for countries than individuals. At the national level, it’s not clear that education increases living standards at all, much less that education makes countries’ living standards increase at a faster rate. If you can’t tell if your machine moves, you may safely assume it’s not a perpetual motion machine.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 6 Comments »

It failed because it was based on a lie

April 27th, 2025

In 2001, an overwhelming bipartisan majority passed the worst education policy in decades, Tracing Woodgrains says, No Child Left Behind, a bill based on the idea that all children should be expected to learn at the same pace:

It doled out punishments and rewards to schools based on what percent of students could meet arbitrary thresholds, asserting on the basis of nothing but a wish that it could get all schools to the same arbitrary thresholds within 12 years. This both punished educators serving disadvantaged students—blaming them for the students’ slower paces—and encouraged the systematic neglect of above-average ones—who, after all, were already past the thresholds schools were told to care about. Year after year, it failed to meet its targets. It did not fail because of complex implementation issues. It did not fail because people did not try hard enough. It failed because it was based on a lie: that all kids should learn at the same pace.

At the same time, “detracking”—forcing fast and slow students into the same classrooms and expecting teachers to somehow differentiate instruction—has become the common wisdom among groups of educators like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and in school districts around the country. San Francisco waged a years-long battle to prevent any of its eighth grade students from learning algebra. Cities like Seattle and Boston dismantled their gifted programs.

Often, objective measures of performance themselves become targets, as educators find it easier to smash the thermometers than to change the temperature. Universities perennially look for excuses to abolish entrance tests, kicking against their own findings that those tests work before reluctantly slinking back to them. Activists have waged the same wars against high schools with admissions tests, targeting some of the best free schools in the country—from Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to New York’s Stuyvesant, Philadelphia’s Masterman to San Francisco’s Lowell High School. At the same time states weaken these schools, they often ban alternatives altogether, forbidding charter schools from using comparable tests.

[…]

In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned the most expensive education research project in history, comparing elementary school curricula against each other. One program, Direct Instruction, defied all the conventional wisdom: teachers taught in ability-grouped, orderly classrooms, drilling kids via whole class call-and-answer approaches. When Direct Instruction clearly outperformed the rest on preliminary measures, it was a “horrifying surprise” to many of the established education figures funding the study. As a result of lobbying, the study’s final results aggregated all its programs together, obscuring the success of the most effective approaches and producing a headline result that the study had failed. From there, people moved on.

In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.

That same year, a movement to “detrack” schools—removing advanced classes—took off with the release of Jeannie Oakes’s book Keeping Track. Letting stronger students go faster, Oakes alleged, was inequitable, and before long education schools and education policy circles agreed. That the best evidence at the time indicated that ability grouping helped the strongest students and did not harm the weakest ones did not matter. The consensus had been set.

Posted in Education, Policy | 3 Comments »

It was warm and sticky and nice

April 26th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’Neill Ronald Ross, the deputy DA in Santa Monica, was just back from vacation, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), in early September, 1969:

The horrors of the Tate–LaBianca murders, then only a month old, still dominated the news. The killers remained at large, and no one even knew who they were. Ross was struck by reports that they’d left the bloody word “Pig” in conspicuous areas of both the Tate and LaBianca homes. His Hinman murder scene featured such writing, too. He took one look at the case and immediately connected it to the unsolved Tate–LaBianca murders. “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to,” he said.

[…]

In Independence, California, the group of twenty-some bedraggled hippies [from the Manson “family”] sat in the cramped county jail [for auto theft]. LASO detectives Guenther and Whiteley drove 225 miles to the dusty desert town to seek out a possible witness in the Hinman murder.

[…]

Atkins agreed to speak to the detectives without an attorney present. They told her that her fingerprints had been found at the Hinman crime scene and that Beausoleil had already ratted on her—both lies, but they got her talking about the crime. Atkins admitted to having held Hinman while Beausoleil stabbed him, but she claimed she never hurt him. She was booked on a first-degree-murder charge and transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, in downtown Los Angeles.

Atkins’s cellmate was a longtime con artist and call girl who went by Ronnie Howard. The two became fast friends. Almost immediately, Atkins was telling Howard and another inmate, Virginia Graham, all about her role in the Tate–LaBianca murders. She had personally stabbed Sharon Tate to death, she bragged, as Tate begged for the life of her unborn baby. After Tate died, Atkins said she’d tasted the dead actress’s blood; it was “warm and sticky and nice.”

Posted in Crime | No Comments »

But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal

April 25th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenIt was January of 2001, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and the director of the CIA’s Counter­terrorism Center, Cofer Black, had a serious problem:

The CIA had been considering assass­inating Osama bin Laden with the Predator, but until that point, the unmanned aerial vehicle had been used for reconnaissance only, not targeted assassination. Because two technologies needed to be merged—the flying drone and the laser-guided precision missile—engineers and aerodynamicists had concerns. Specifically, they worried that the propulsion from the missile might send the drone astray or the missile off course. And the CIA needed a highly precise weapon with little possibility of collateral damage. The public would perceive killing a terrorist one way, but they would likely perceive killing that terrorist’s neighbors in an altogether different light. This new weaponized drone technology was tested at Area 51; the development program remains classified. After getting decent results, both the CIA and the Air Force were confident that the missiles unleashed from the drone could reach their targets.

[…]

But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal, per President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious examination, State Department lawyers got involved.

There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation, and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination.

[…]

Bin Laden’s compound was called Tarnak Farm, and a number of high-profile Middle Eastern royal family members were known to visit there.

To determine collateral damage, the CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project on the outer reaches of Area 51. They engineered a full-scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan on which to test the results of a drone strike. But while engineers were at work, CIA director George Tenet decided that taking out Osama bin Laden with a Hellfire missile–equipped Predator drone would be a mistake. This was a decision the CIA would come to regret.

[…]

The CIA had sent drones on more than six hundred reconnaissance missions in the Bosnian conflict, beginning in 1995. CIA drones had provided intelligence for NATO forces in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, collecting intelligence, searching for targets, and keeping an eye on Kosovar-Albanian refuge camps. The CIA Predator had helped war planners interpret the chaos of the battlefield there. Now, the Air Force needed the CIA’s help going into Afghanistan with drones.

The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror was flown over Kabul, Afghanistan, just one week after 9/ 11, on September 18, 2001. Three weeks later, the first Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was flown over Kandahar. The rules of aerial warfare had changed overnight. America’s stealth bombers were never going to locate Osama bin Laden and his top commanders hiding out in mountain compounds. Now pilotless drones would be required to seek out and assassinate the most wanted men in the world.

Although drones had been developed and tested at Area 51, Area 52, and Indian Springs for nearly fifty years, the world at large would come to learn about them only in November of 2002, when a drone strike in Yemen made headlines around the world. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was a wanted man. A citizen of Yemen and a senior al-Qaeda operative, al-Harethi had also been behind the planning and bombing of the USS Cole two years before. On the morning of November 2, 2002, al-Harethi and five colleagues drove through the vast desert expanse of Yemen’s northwest province Marib oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by eyes in the skies in the form of a Predator drone flying several miles above them.

The Predator launched its missile at the target and landed a direct hit. The al-Qaeda operatives and the vehicle were instantly reduced to a black heap of burning metal. It was an assassination plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, except that it was so real and so dramatic—the first visual proof that al-Qaeda leaders could be targeted and killed—that Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz began bragging about the Hellfire strike to CNN. The drone attack in Yemen was “a very successful tactical operation,” Wolfowitz said. Except it was supposed to be a quiet, unconfirmed assassination. Wolfowitz’s bravado made Yemen upset. Brigadier General Yahya M. Al Mutawakel, the deputy secretary general for the People’s Congress Party in Yemen, gave an exclusive interview to the Christian Science Monitor explaining that the Pentagon had broken a secrecy agreement between the two nations. “This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,” Al Mutawakel explained. “They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen. In security matters, you don’t want to alert the enemy.”

Yemen pushed back against the United States by outing the secret inner workings of the operation. It was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull, an employee of the State Department, who had masterminded the plot, officials in Yemen explained. Hull had spearheaded the intelligence-gathering efforts, a job more traditionally reserved for the CIA. Hull spoke Arabic. He had roots in the country and knew people who knew local tribesmen in the desert region of Marib. The State Department, Yemen claimed, was the agency that had bribed local tribesmen into handing over information on al-Harethi, which allowed the CIA to know exactly where the terrorist would be driving and when. Revealing Ambassador Hull to be the central organizing player in the drone strike exposed the Department of State as having a hand in not just the espionage game but targeted assassination as well. Surprisingly, little fuss was made about any of this, despite the fact that diplomats are supposed to avoid assassination plots.

In political circles, Ambassador Hull was greatly embarrassed. He refused to comment on his role in what signaled a sea change in U.S. military assets with wings. The 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the first of its kind in the war on terror, but little did the public know that hundreds more drone strikes would soon follow. The next one went down the very next week, when a Predator targeted and killed al-Qaeda’s number-three, Mohammed Atef, in Jalabad, Afghanistan. As the war on terror progressed, some drone strikes would be official while others would go unmentioned. But never again would the CIA or the State Department admit to having a hand in any of them. When Mohammed Atef was killed, initial reports said a traditional bomber aircraft had targeted and destroyed Atef’s home. Only later was the strike revealed as being the work of a Predator drone and a targeted assassination spearheaded by the CIA.

[…]

No longer used only for espionage, the Predator got a new designation. Previously it had been the RQ-1 Predator: R for reconnaissance and Q indicating unmanned. Immediately after the Yemen strike, the Predator became the MQ-1 Predator, with the M now indicating its multirole use.

[…]

A second Predator, originally called the Predator B, was also coming online. Described by Air Force officials as “the Predator’s younger, yet larger and stronger brother,” it too needed a new name. The Reaper fit perfectly: the personification of death. “One of the big differences between the Reaper and the Predator is the Predator can only carry about 200 pounds [of weapons]. The Reaper, however, can carry one and a half tons, and on top of carrying Hellfire missiles, can carry multiple GBU-12 laser-guided bombs,” said Captain Michael Lewis of the Forty-second Wing at Creech Air Force Base. The General Atomics drones were single-handedly changing the relationship between the CIA and the Air Force. The war on terror had the two services working together again, exactly as had happened with the advent of the U-2.

[…]

From 2003 to 2007 the number of drone strikes rose incrementally, little by little, each year. Only in 2008 did the drones really come online. During that year, which included the last three weeks of the Bush administration, there were thirty-six drone strikes in Pakistan, which the Air Force said killed 268 al-Qaeda and Taliban. By 2009 the number of drone strikes would rise to fifty-three.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Although there was a Ruritanian feel to some of these titles, they all came with lands and incomes that were real enough

April 24th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsIn January 1806 Napoleon made his first really significant error of statesmanship, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when he offered his brother Joseph the throne of Naples, saying: ‘It will become, like Italy, Switzerland, Holland and the three kingdoms of Germany, my federal states, or, truly, the French Empire’:

Joseph was crowned king on March 30, and Louis became king of Holland in June. This reversion to the pre-revolutionary system of governance struck at the meritocratic system for which Napoleon had initially stood, installed largely inadequate brothers in key positions and stoked up problems for the future. In December 1805 Napoleon was writing to Joseph of Jérôme: ‘My very positive intention is to let him go to prison for debt if his allowance isn’t enough … It’s inconceivable what this young man costs me for causing nothing but inconvenience, and being useless to my system.’

[…]

Yet within two years he had made the utterly unchanged Jérôme king of Westphalia. There were plenty of local pro-French reformers whom he could have installed in power – Melzi in Italy, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck in Holland, Karl Dalberg in Germany, Prince Poniatowski in Poland, for example, even Crown Prince Ferdinand in Spain – who would have done a far better job than most Frenchmen, let alone squabbling, vain, disloyal and often incompetent members of the Bonaparte family.

[…]

Holland had astonished the world in its heyday, defying Imperial Spain, moving its Stadtholder, William of Orange, to become king of England, founding a global empire, buying Manhattan, inventing capitalism and glorying in the golden age of Grotius, Spinoza, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Yet by the late eighteenth century, Britain had taken over most of Holland’s colonies, often without a fight, her shipping and overseas trading systems were all but destroyed, her cities were declining in population (in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe), and in manufacturing only gin production was doing well.

[…]

One immediate problem was that the Pope refused to recognize Joseph as king of Naples, which together with his designation of Jérôme’s wedding as against canon law began an entirely unnecessary quarrel between Napoleon and Pius VII that was to lead to the seizure of papal lands in June 1809 and Napoleon’s excommunication.

[…]

Murat became the ruling Grand Duke of Berg (roughly the Ruhr valley) in April, Talleyrand became Prince of Benevento in Italy (a former papal principality south-east of Naples), Bernadotte was made Prince of Ponte Corvo (an entirely artificial principality created out of another former papal possession in south Lazio near Naples), Fouché was given the hereditary dukedom of Otranto, and Berthier became Prince of Neuchâtel on the condition that he got married.

[…]

Although there was undoubtedly a Ruritanian feel to some of these titles, and they were duly sniggered at by Bourbon snobs and propagandists, they all came with lands and incomes that were real enough.

[…]

Keen to establish that he wasn’t impotent, Napoleon impregnated Éléonore, who on December 13 gave birth to his illegitimate child, Comte Léon (who was rather unsubtly given the last four letters of his father’s name). The experiment reassured Napoleon that he could found a dynasty if he were to divorce Josephine. It also solved Éléonore’s financial problems, especially once Napoleon found her an army lieutenant to marry and gave her a large dowry.

Ruritanian!

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few as unsuccessful as Africa

April 23rd, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallAfrica has really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbors, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and amazing rivers, which are worthless for actually transporting anything, since every few miles you go over a waterfall:

There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated approximately two hundred thousand years ago. As that most lucid of writers Jared Diamond put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, “It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.” However, the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian landmass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.

[…]

If you look at a world map and mentally glue Alaska onto California, then turn the United States on its head, it appears as if it would roughly fit into Africa with a few gaps here and there. In fact, Africa is three times larger than the United States.

[…]

You could fit the United States, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany, and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe.

[…]

The top third begins on the Mediterranean coastlines of the North African Arabic-speaking countries. The coastal plains quickly become the Sahara, the world’s largest dry desert, which is almost as big as the United States. Directly below the Sahara is the Sahel region, a semiarid, rock-strewn, sandy strip of land measuring more than three thousand miles at its widest points and stretching from Gambia on the Atlantic coast through Niger, Chad, and right across to Eritrea on the Red Sea. The name Sahel comes from the Arabic sahil, which means “coast,” and is how the people living in the region think of it—as the shoreline of the vast sand sea of the Sahara. It is another sort of shore, one where the influence of Islam diminishes. From the Sahel to the Mediterranean the vast majority of people are Muslims.

[…]

Most of the continent’s rivers also pose a problem, as they begin in highland and descend in abrupt drops that thwart navigation. For example, the mighty Zambezi may be Africa’s fourth-longest river, running for 1,700 miles, and may be a stunning tourist attraction with its white-water rapids and the Victoria Falls, but as a trade route it is of little use. It flows through six countries, dropping from 4,900 feet to sea level when it reaches the Indian Ocean at Mozambique. Parts of it are navigable by shallow boats, but these parts do not interconnect, thus limiting the transportation of cargo.

Unlike in Europe, which has the Danube and the Rhine, this drawback has hindered contact and trade between regions—which in turn affects economic development and hinders the formation of large trading regions. The continent’s great rivers—the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi, the Nile, and others—don’t connect, and this disconnection has a human factor. Whereas huge areas of Russia, China, and the United States speak a unifying language, which helps trade, in Africa thousands of languages exist and no one culture emerged to dominate areas of similar size. Europe, on the other hand, was small enough to have a lingua franca through which to communicate, and a landscape that encouraged interaction.

Even if technologically productive nation states had arisen, much of the continent would still have struggled to connect to the rest of the world because the bulk of the landmass is framed by the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and the Sahara Desert.

[…]

When the Europeans finally made it down the west coast in the fifteenth century they found few natural harbors for their ships. Unlike Europe or North America, where the jagged coastlines give rise to deep natural harbors, much of the African coastline is smooth. And once they did make land they struggled to penetrate any farther inland than roughly one hundred miles, due to the difficulty of navigating the rivers as well as the challenges of the climate and disease.

[…]

Slavery existed long before the outside world returned to where it had originated. Traders in the Sahel region used thousands of slaves to transport vast quantities of the region’s then most valuable commodity—salt—but the Arabs began the practice of subcontracting African slave–taking to willing tribal leaders who would deliver them to the coast. By the time of the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans (mostly from the Sudan region) had been taken to Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, and across the Arabian world. The Europeans followed suit, outdoing the Arabs and Turks in their appetite for, and mistreatment of, the people brought to the slave ships anchored off the west coast.

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

This airplane flies in, it lands, it’s your generator

April 22nd, 2025

I recently mentioned Electra’s EL9 Ultra Short hybrid-electric aircraft, which purports to be a fixed-wing airplane that delivers the access of a helicopter with 100 times less noise, 70% lower cost, improved safety, and dramatically reduced emissions. The EL9 has potential for both civil and defense applications:

On the defense side, the EL9 could serve an important role in tactical last leg logistics, because it could carry cargo and then land in austere conditions or on nontraditional runway surfaces. Plus, Allen says, Electra’s aircraft can serve as a power source once on the ground.

“This airplane flies in, it lands, it’s your generator. You can charge drones from it. You can charge your communications gear,” he says. “It’s the Amazon Sprinter van for getting fuel and munitions to distributed operating bases across large ranges where you don’t have access, easy access to runways, to drop in big cargo planes.” (A growing number of Amazon’s vans are now electric, thanks to a partnership with Rivian to bring 100,000 electric delivery vehicles to roads by 2030.)

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

Researchers flipped the position of just two atoms in LSD’s molecular structure

April 21st, 2025

University of California, Davis, researchers have developed a new, neuroplasticity-promoting drug closely related to LSD with reduced hallucinogenic potential:

To design the drug, dubbed JRT, researchers flipped the position of just two atoms in LSD’s molecular structure. The chemical flip reduced JRT’s hallucinogenic potential while maintaining its neurotherapeutic properties, including its ability to spur neuronal growth and repair damaged neuronal connections that are often observed in the brains of those with neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.

[…]

JRT exhibited powerful neuroplastic effects and improved measures in mice relevant to the negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, without exacerbating behaviors and gene expression associated with psychosis.

[…]

Olson said that it took his team nearly five years to complete the 12-step synthesis process to produce JRT. The molecule was named after Jeremy R. Tuck, a former graduate student in Olson’s laboratory, who was the first to synthesize it and is a co-first author of the study along with Lee E. Dunlap, another former graduate student in Olson’s laboratory.

[…]

Key findings included:

  • JRT and LSD have the exact same molecular weight and overall shape, but distinct pharmacological properties.
  • JRT is very potent and highly selective for binding to serotonin receptors, specifically 5-HT2A receptors, the activation of which are key to promoting cortical neuron growth.
  • JRT promoted neuroplasticity, or growth between cellular connections in the brain, leading to a 46% increase in dendritic spine density and an 18% increase in synapse density in the prefrontal cortex.
  • JRT did not produce hallucinogenic-like behaviors that are typically seen when mice are dosed with LSD.
  • JRT did not promote gene expression associated with schizophrenia. Such gene expression is typically amplified with LSD use.
  • JRT produced robust anti-depressant effects, with it being around 100-fold more potent than ketamine, the state-of-the-art fast-acting anti-depressant.
  • JRT promoted cognitive flexibility, successfully addressing deficits in reversal learning that are associated with schizophrenia.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Russia has been able to place Ukrainian troops in untenable positions

April 20th, 2025

By combining ground troops, artillery (and drones), and glide bombs, into an “offensive triangle,” Russia has been able to place Ukrainian troops in untenable positions:

“First, the AFRF [Russian armed forces] continue to pin down Ukrainian ground forces on the line of contact with infantry and mechanized forces,” according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think tank.

“Second, they prevent maneuver and inflict attrition with first-person view (FPV) drones, Lancet drones, and artillery firing both high-explosive shells and scatterable mines.”

“Third, the AFRF has increased its use of UMPK glide bombs against Ukrainian forces who are holding defensive positions,” RUSI said. This “creates a competing dilemma: should the AFU [Ukrainian armed forces] hold and invest in static defensive positions to reduce attrition from FPVs and drone-enabled artillery, or retain mobility to avoid destruction from glide bomb strikes, which have the explosive yield to demolish or bury even well-prepared fortifications?”

[…]

The solution to resurrecting Russian airpower proved simple and lethal: glide bombs. By affixing its own satellite guidance system and wings to its huge Cold War stockpile of unguided “dumb bombs,” Russia created a cheap smart bomb that can dropped from up to 60 miles behind the front line.

This keeps Russian aircraft safely out of range of Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles. While not as accurate as Western counterparts like America’s Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), the Russian munitions are huge — up to 6,000 pounds or close to 3 metric tonnes — so that even a near miss will devastate Ukrainian entrenchments.

While some Western observers dismissed these weapons as a sign that Russia lacked the capacity to manufacture sophisticated smart bombs, no one is laughing now.

[…]

Already, Ukraine claims to have had success in jamming them, leading to a sharp decrease in accuracy. “The golden era of the ‘divine’ UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” lamented a Russian pilot on social media. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Russian advance has slowed in recent months.

Posted in War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

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