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Phillips P. OBrien Profile picture
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Feb 25 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Please be careful not to read what is going on in Ukraine as an argument for the U.K. to start spending lots on tanks, that’s not the case for 2 reasons.
1) the Ukrainians are fighting with almost no air support. Britain would hope to have air supremacy with fixed wind aircraft and helicopters. The situations are not analogous
2) actually the Ukrainians seems to be doing a lot of damage with anti tank systems. These are far cheaper than armour. Let’s actually see what happens first: might be that Russian armour was very vulnerable:
I’m no fan of this government, but the move away from tanks is not being undermined by Ukraine in the way that this implies.

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More from @PhillipsPOBrien

Phillips P. OBrien Profile picture
Feb 27
A short tweet thread on the most interesting comparisons to Putin's strategic disaster in Ukraine. It has two parallels worth discussing. 1) Stalin's decision to attack Finland in 1939 and 2) Mussolini's decision to invade Greece in 1940. ImageImage
Both have interesting parallels to what Putin has done. In both cases Stalin and Mussolini created echo chambers where their advisers told them only what they wanted to believe, and in each case it was that the Finns and Greeks would be a walkover. ImageImage
Both Stalin and Mussolini were convinced they would overrun their targets in a few days, maybe two weeks. They talked themselves into believing that their enemies were divided and weak, and actually would almost welcome their conquerors.
Read 11 tweets
Phillips P. OBrien Profile picture
Feb 27
I don’t think in modern economic history we’ve ever seen a state impoverish itself by its own actions in a matter of days in the manner of Putin’s Russia. It’s historic, devastating and such a profound waste of resources that could have helped the Russian people.
1) the great cash mountain that all the Russia is really strong crowd talked about: will be cut in half or maybe more. at least (in terms of accessible funds). A loss of $400 billion in a blink of the eye
The remaining accessible reserves, those in Russia, in gold, in China, will have their purchasing power denuded. The cost of everything Russia buys, considering it’s been blocked from the most efficient purchasing markets in the world, will be much higher.
Read 7 tweets
Phillips P. OBrien Profile picture
Feb 25
This is a great question and I think it works this way. The Alba wing of Scottish nationalism is deep Carlson-Corbyn (CC). The Dear Leader’s show on RT is a pretty strong giveaway. As for the larger element of the movement..
The element that speaks about Scottish nationalism as somehow representing a form of moral or ethical purity are CC. These are those who somehow argue that you could order nukes out of the Clyde instantly or could stay out of NATO. That’s deceptive destructiveness.
I look at these as the equivalent of the hard Brexiteer wing of nationalists, because they would rather sabotage the new country in a quest for their vision of purity.
Read 6 tweets
Phillips P. OBrien Profile picture
Feb 25
I have no idea where Russian troops will end up in the short term, or whether/when they will occupy Kiev. That’s armchair general stuff. However it does seem increasingly like, whatever happens on the battlefield in the short term, Putin is losing this war.
Ukrainian identity and resistance is clearly much stronger than he expected. The performance of his army is mixed, and there is obvious disquiet amongst a significant section of the Russian population.
If he did have a decapitation strategy, that seems to have failed in the first instance. And this has meant Ukrainian resistance will probably be even fiercer in the next few days, as they lose some of their fear about the all powerful Russian invaders.
Read 4 tweets
Phillips P. OBrien Profile picture
Aug 2, 2021
A thread on ethical choices and the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My two cents as it seems to be an endlessly debated subject on twitter.
One of the tricky questions is that the debate is based around hypotheticals. Pro-Bomb people believe that Japan would not have surrendered without the bomb unless invaded. Anti-Bomb believe the Japanese would have surrendered regardless of the bomb
Starting with the Pro-Bomb. Certainly if the bomb had not been used and the US chosen to invade Kyushu, the results would have been very bloody. Though some like to argue casualty rates would have been less, I would argue the evidence is that the opposite is far more likely.
Read 15 tweets
Phillips P. OBrien Profile picture
Jul 11, 2021
Been doing a small amount of collecting of historical documents from WWII--mostly stuff related to the US administration and JCS (coming out of the Leahy biography). Wont spend more than $100 for a letter. Received an announcement of this item coming up for sale.
Its a very odd piece. It was a marshal's baton made up by the Vichy France government for William Leahy in 1942. It has a date both Petain and Leahy's name, and is rather ornate in its decoration.
My guess is that is was never actually given to Leahy as he headed back to Washington to work with FDR in the Spring of 1942. He never records having it in his diary and I saw no mention of it. Indeed pretty sure Leahy would have been embarrassed by it.
Read 4 tweets

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