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Shashank Joshi Profile picture
@shashj
Oct 2, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
The essay by @KofmanMichael in this volume is the single most interesting thing I've read on NATO-Russia military questions for a long time. "While in the abstract NATO may appear superior ... in reality Excel spreadsheets don’t fight"
frivarld.se/wp-content/upl…
"The Russian General Staff would not expect the decisive phase of conflict to last beyond 2-3 weeks, at which time most precision-guided munitions would be expended and the war liable to escalate to nuclear employment." frivarld.se/wp-content/upl…
"From a Russian perspective, the initial period of war will be decided by the contest between aerospace assault and aerospace defense, and the ability of the two sides to destroy each other’s critical infrastructure. Ground forces matter little" frivarld.se/wp-content/upl… Image
"While Moscow expects any war with a coalition to constitute a regional war, there is a perplexing notion in the West that conflict can be localized to the Baltics ... a conflagration in the Baltics is a low probability event" frivarld.se/wp-content/upl… Image
"Those familiar with the last several decades of US combat operations would recognize that A2/AD as a strategy against US airpower is not especially viable, which is why Russian literature on the subject clearly indicates that they consider defense to be cost prohibitive"
"Russian operational-level thinking has leaned more towards the offensive ... far too much attention is paid in the West to the problem of getting forces into the theater, not enough time is spent on question of attrition in the initial period of warfare" frivarld.se/wp-content/upl…
On Russian options for escalation management. "These include deterrence by intimidation, the use of single or grouped strikes with conventional precision weapons, nuclear demonstration, and selective nuclear strikes in follow-on phases of conflict" frivarld.se/wp-content/upl… Image
"Whether NATO collectively responds to aggression is immaterial as long as the US commits and is afforded opportunity to do so by necessary allies .. without the US, even if all of NATO responds its chances of success in the initial period of war are slim" frivarld.se/wp-content/upl…
"deterrence remains a common place slogan for policies that are about anything except deterrence. Meanwhile, there is no strategy for dealing with Russia beyond sanctions, spending on military capability in Europe" frivarld.se/wp-content/upl… Image

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More from @shashj

Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Dec 5
Trump's national security strategy is out and some of the Europe sections are shocking. "...the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed
gives cause for great optimism." whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…Image
Trump national security strategy: Make Europe White Again.

"Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades ...certain NATO members will become majority non-European"

"the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure"

whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…Image
As far as I can see, this nat sec strategy is far harsher on Europe than on Russia. There is no mention of a threat from Russia or of deterrence, only that "re-establishing strategic stability" is a priority. Europe is cast as a major threat to freedom.
Read 8 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Nov 21
The proposal is nothing short of a very bad joke. I mean, read this:

"$100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine;
-- The US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture."
There is a lot in the proposal that US & Ukr could agree without Europe. That is not true of this clause, which will never be agreed—like, ever.

"NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future."

google.com/amp/s/abcnews.…
The fact that this absurd and unworkable clause is in there is itself a suggestion that the proposal is the basis for further negotiation and not a "take it or leave it"
Read 6 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Oct 1
"military assessments seen by the FT show that Yantar was one of several Russian naval vessels that congregated in UK waters for 13 months of sustained surveillance around nodes of critical infrastructure starting in the autumn of 2023." ft.com/content/0b3510…
"adversaries could interfere with the timing signals in underwater communication cables by altering the frequency of pulses passing through them — causing severe disruption in time-sensitive industries such as high-frequency trading." ft.com/content/0b3510…
AIS/radar analysis "suggests that this vessel [Yantar] was stationary for several hours in a small stretch of sea containing three major cables — the CeltixConnect-2, Geo-Eirgrid and Rockabill—all of which are data connections linking Ireland with the UK." ft.com/content/0b3510…
Read 4 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Aug 30
Some defence stories in this week’s @TheEconomist. First, we looked at Ukraine’s new cruise missile. ‘Production…at least partially carried out abroad, but “over 90%”, the company says, of final assembly is in secret sites dispersed throughout Ukraine’
economist.com/europe/2025/08…
We reported on the Wagner group’s meltdown in Mali. “Murdering ordinary Malians, it turns out, is a bad way to win over ordinary Malians. Informants have dried up.” economist.com/middle-east-an…
We examined the US naval buildup in the Caribbean & whether it’s really for counter-narcotic purposes. ‘This “looks just right to scare the daylights out of Maduro’s supporters”, says Evan Ellis of the US Army War College.’ economist.com/the-americas/2…
Read 8 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Jul 22
🧵 I've been writing something on the intelligence & national-security applications of frontier AI models. This is an experiment in seeing what one of them, OpenAI's o3-pro model, might be able to do in an area relevant to national security.
I fed the model this chart, explaining that it was the manoeuvre history of a satellite (though not sure I even needed to do that). Could it identify the satellite? Yes, after reasoning for 22 minutes and 23 seconds, it could indeed. Image
o3-pro identified the two large east-west & minimal north-south movements as distinctive signatures of Russia's Luch-5X satellite. It reasoned by elimination: "No other GEO spacecraft executed delta‑V’s of that magnitude (tens of m s‑¹) in exactly those two windows." Image
Read 12 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Jul 7
Good account of a KGB "dangle" to the CIA in the cold war. "GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans & Cubans—badly burned the agency." cia.gov/resources/csi/…
"The ‘85–86 losses [due to Ames], as they became colloquially known within CIA, also signaled the need for a major KGB undertaking to deceive CIA as to the real reason for these losses. A multichannel KGB disinformation campaign, which operated from at least 1986, was launched" cia.gov/resources/csi/…Image
"Within the KGB, the Soviet preoccupation with secrecy fostered an institutional bias against release of the sort of valid feed typically required to establish the credibility of a deception channel." cia.gov/resources/csi/…Image
Image
Read 5 tweets

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