THREAD:

On the perils of distributed military social media campaigns.
Dustin raises good questions.

Mission Command and social media are a potent combination that could easily exaggerate violence and produce counter productive outcomes.
The flip side is stringent publication protocols & editorial tramlines that slow down engagement.

Most importantly it all depends on a degree of cultural understanding that is hard enough to do in a an information ecosystem you have a sense of but much harder when you don’t.
This is the challenge of participative war (read #radicalwar) and the armed forces are no way ready for it!

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More from @warmatters

Sep 25
You'll be blown away when you realise that all it takes is silk under garments...
As I peer-reviewed some of this stuff from the Royal Armouries, I figure I should give it a push here...

theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…
See also silk underwear... one of the better and quicker to see service military innovations to come out of the UK since possibly the Second World War...

aka pelvic protection😀

collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc…
Read 4 tweets
Sep 25
A reminder:

We don’t know the balance of forces in Ukraine for either 🇷🇺 or 🇺🇦 so we have to estimate.

We can do that based on actual intelligence feeds OR we can apply statistical methods…

This is also known as the German tank Problem.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ta…
This has bearing on the mobilisation-tank gap that appears to be dominating my TL today.

If you take a look at that wiki page you'll see that the statistical analysis was complex & open to much debate and discussion.

My suggestion then is that we need to be careful when it comes to interpreting these mobilisation threads I keep seeing.

Read 6 tweets
Sep 24
Ok I’m going to stick my neck out. The state of one AK does not tell us anything about anything.

🙄
Rusty guns for tyre nuts…
We need this war to stop just so we don’t have to endure these insights anymore.

Ditto Mosin Nagant hottakes 😬😬😬
Read 5 tweets
Sep 24
Advancing the case for OSINT.

This is worth a listen over your third coffee.

sites.libsyn.com/420071/working…
Second podcast of the day...

This time @RoryStewartUK adds some reality to the theory of war and battle.

Instead the focus is on the politics of war.

Picks up some themes from @WarRadical which is all about why some wars get attention!

h/t @MDRBrown

sites.libsyn.com/420071/war-and…
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the politics of war is more interesting than discussing the theory of war.
Read 10 tweets
Sep 11
If I just reply to your thread @jwmeiser then my point will get lost.

it just isn't manoeuvre warfare. And I don't care how many people assert that it is. It isn't. you just have to look closely.
So I can come back to this now.

The reason I think we need to be careful about this is because all we see are the external indicators. And we end up confirming theoretical presumptions rather than testing them.

That means collecting more evidence.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 11
Social media is a perfect way to turn defeat into collapse.

That’s the fight now being had on Telegram. Disinfo/misinfo everything and anything to get people to run away.

Makes the lives of OSINT analysts that bit harder!
Amplify the impending collapse. Like Islamic State in 2014. Watch the enemy run before a firefight even starts.

Yet again the smartphone becomes a vector for war - even conventional and highly kinetic wars like that in Ukraine.

#radicalwar
Just reflect on @LawDavF tweet for a mo.

"The attrition story"

Typically the armed forces portray this as just another example of "information war".

But if you think about how EVERYONE is engaging with this war (by smartphone) the dynamics have changed.
Read 5 tweets

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