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Thucydides Traplord Profile picture
Thucydides Traplord
@spawnofKahn
Laconic Strategist; Principal at @analyticacamil1 — The Serious Person’s Unserious Person; First-Rate Buffoon
Jun 19, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
I thought we’d already established that the Russian Army does in fact have a functioning logistics network that’s visibly more robust than that of most Western militaries.

You don’t place like a million acres of mines, and hundreds of kilometers of concrete defensive works… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image The problem with the Russian Army’s logistics system isn’t that it doesn’t exist, it’s that (as @KofmanMichael has variously pointed out), it’s ‘push-based’ rather than ‘pull-based.’

Say, a Russian Brigade expects that it will expend 2k artillery shells over the course of a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Jun 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Watching Kandahar (2023), and was totally not expecting it to be as accurate as it is with respect to properly depicting the current political dynamics of broader AfPak as well as recent history (though it has more than a few inaccuracies that I'm presuming had to be finagled for… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image One major "plot point" is the 1979 Herat uprising: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Hera…
May 26, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
*Takes a long cigar drag*

Most of the gabbering about AI revolutionizing the future of warfare is essentially vaporware, but there’s precisely one “white whale” that could potentially lend a sufficiently technologically advanced great power a decisive advantage — that’s an AI… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image In land warfare, that’s essentially impossible — there’s too much data to process, people are functioning individually or in small teams, and slight differences in terrain can portend wildly different tactical (and indeed operational) outcomes.
May 26, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
@CommandDevTeam and @AceMorphine brought it to my attention that this is not in fact a screenshot from Command: Modern Operations, it is in fact a PLA clone of Command Modern Operations produced by Huashu Defense.

hs-defense.com/nd.jsp?id=1 Image It was released in 2021, and I'm not sure precisely how it compares to CMANO since Slitherine retains its own proprietary database of platforms and systems.
May 25, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Oh no 💀 , they actually used Command: Modern Operations for their test run.

I have no fucking idea how they arrived at their conclusions only using 24 hypersonic missiles — did they mean launchers? Batteries?

How’d they arrive at a 4 DDG, 1 CVN, 1 CG carrier strike group… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image A quick addendum @niccijsmith, it's a simulation instead of a wargame. I'm still looking for the specific journal article (am I crazy, or has the 2023 series just not been uploaded? chinamtt.cn/Industry/Indus…), but this looks like researchers/academics publishing what's essentially… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
May 23, 2023 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
You know, for the life of me since I was a teenager, I could never figure out why “high-track” individuals are consistently funneled into working visibly bullshit jobs that are effectively meaningless but earn lots of “coupons” (read cash $$$), that don’t actually garner them… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image A few hours ago, the answer hit me like a lightning-bolt, two first names: ‘William’, ‘Walker.’

Most Westerners won’t recognize that combination of names, but I’m sure plenty of our Central American friends will recoil at his mention.
May 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I… uhhh… yeah… Image I know the IDF was considering operations into Lebanon, but that perhaps might not be the best idea…
May 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Honestly, it’s a bit wild that people are still trotting out the “wealthy man’s war, poor man’s death” line in the 21st Century.

This is Robert Mueller III, his father was an executive at DuPont Chemicals, he attended Princeton Day School, then Princeton University, and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image This is Bob Mueller, a Marine lieutenant who attended Ranger School, and as a platoon commander would be wounded while leading his unit into action against a Viet Cong or PAVN element in Quảng Trị, for which he’d receive a bronze star and a purple heart. Image
May 5, 2023 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Innnn other news, I thought this was pretty settled history, but it's come to my attention that @martyrmade is still shilling bullshit about who started the war in Ukraine.

In one of his tweets (I have neither the time nor the interest to find which one it was), he referenced… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… ImageImageImageImage The OSCE, or Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe is an international entity consisting of basically all of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact countries, everyone provides their own observers and it's very much a collaborative enterprise - that is to say, it's usually… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Apr 4, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
You guys know what’s a weird phenomenon? The American far-right/conservative trying to align itself with Russia, even before the Russian government’s 2016 election interference.

Baffling enough from a historical perspective, the Russian imperial/Soviet/nouveau-imperial… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… In the run up to the American Revolution, the Russian Empire shot the British Empire a middle-finger and supported the American colonists.

theworld.org/stories/2017-0…
Apr 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
👀

So… uhhh… we have a weee bit of a problem.

Routledge and these two other Brits are being held by Siraj Haqqani.

As I’ve stated before, Siraj slipped a bunch of his hitters into the US and Europe during the evacuation from Afghanistan… … and as someone else already publicly noted, about 50 of them were flagged by DoD as having manufactured IEDs — so they’re currently sitting in Federal prisons awaiting arraignments and trials.
Apr 2, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A quick reminder, the Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was (profoundly) alexithymic, and the @FBI is still (bafflingly) confused about this.

He wanted to shoot up a large crowd of people because he wanted to shoot up a large crowd of people — usually there’s some motivation or… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Speaking bluntly, he probably thought this was a funny thing to do (and this impacted his choice of target — he specifically shot up a musical performance of a genre closely affiliated with American gun culture).
Apr 1, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
No… they’re not. Alliances aren’t the stuff of academics’ imagination, they’re physical entities.

The Russian and Chinese governments don’t coordinate anything, and the Russians have quite literally had to ‘beg’ Russia for ‘civilian’ industrial assistance. Their command structures are separate/not at all integrated, China’s not providing manpower for Putin’s war in Ukraine (even in an offhanded fashion — honestly, there are probably more Americans fighting with the Russian army than Chinese citizens right now).
Apr 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I’ll grant that Routledge being held by the GDI is incredibly funny (though the QTs here are less so — advocating for the execution of shitposters is pretty clearly not a great look), but it’s worth pointing out that Siraj Haqqani’s guys picked them up for a reason. They released two Polish artists a few weeks ago, but the fact that they’re holding onto to these three Brits (one of whom has a boisterous public persona) suggests that the Haqqanis clearly want “something.”
Apr 1, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
It’s come to my attention that not everyone was a five year old who grew up skimming medical school textbooks on anatomy and infancy.

When people — be they the LGBTQ+ or medical community — state that “gender is a social construct”, they mean that there’s no biological basis… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… ImageImage “Gender” isn’t real, we made it up — just like the fickle concepts of “morality” and “justice.”

Specifically for gender, humanity historically arrived at that conception as a heuristic to aid in divisions of labour, which we clearly bastardized into a hierarchy based on power… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Apr 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
@InezFeltscher no?

Caesar crossed the Rubicon because he wanted to subjugate Rome — that’s why he brought ‘his’ army with him. The Roman Senate was in no position to prosecute anything, he was fucking half of their wives and he’d just gotten finished prosecuting the most… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… And LATAM ‘dictators’ didn’t give up power because state capture is a thing, that exists — most of them would never have been prosecuted (looking at you Fidel), but half of them were paranoid about ceding control over ‘their’ armies (which could kill them).

The American… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Mar 26, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Ok, what the fuck @DeptofDefense, why are you selling fucking EOD robots on US government Ebay instead of just sending them to Ukraine?

govplanet.com/for-sale/Tacti… @DeptofDefense What the fuck is this horseshit? @michaelgwaltz

govplanet.com/jsp/s/item/812…
Mar 26, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I… uhhh… probably shouldn’t say this cuz it might depress everyone, but as of right now, the odds of the US shooting down a genuine solid-fuel ICBM launched from Iran are essentially zero. Well… not essentially, they are zero. First, let's get the definition of "ICBM" out of the way. Technically, ICBMs are classified as ballistic missiles capable of flying more than 5500km - that sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. The diameter of the earth is like 12000km+
Mar 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The Newspaper of Record, asking why America’s defense industrial base is in such shoddy shape. Brought to you by the same Newspaper of Record that brought hit articles like this to the fore

nytimes.com/2021/04/07/opi…
Mar 23, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
So uhhhh, yeah. When I said “Siraj Haqqani slipped a bunch of his hitters into the US and Europe”, I might’ve been understating the problem a bit. And by “some”, the the FBI means basically all of them.

Europe’s in an even worse predicament since interdicting ye old smuggling routes is functionally impossible.
Mar 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
My senate confirmation hearing’s gonna be wild.

“Mr. Traplord, did you tweet ‘he just like me for real’ under a post by a jihadist stating ‘Mondays will be destroyed when we establish our global khilafah’?” Naturally, this will be my response