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Tobias Schneider Profile picture
Tobias Schneider
@tobiaschneider
Peace & Security & Posts ∙ Research Fellow at @GPPi ∙ Tragic Meliorist ∙ Frmr Edit @SyriaContext ∙ @SAISStrat alum
Jan 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is why good policy analysis is deeply underrated today. The folks who initially advanced these rituals genuinely believed that language meaningfully shapes reality/material conditions. But what they did was waste a bazillion man hours in progressive organization meltdowns. The theoretical foundations underpinning this stuff are just unsound. If your framework derives from critical readings of 19th century literature you're gonna have a bad time. You sometimes get descriptive stats of "disparate impacts" but rarely good public choice analysis.
Dec 7, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The Syrian airforce was essential to Assad's war strategy and for the government's assertion of sovereignty across the country. Even when it had lost control of much of its territory. It bitterly held and defended even isolated airbases for years. No longer... If there is one branch that will not be reconciled or amnestied in a post-war Syria it is the airforce (and its associated intelligence service). Just too much blanket murder and suppression.
Dec 7, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I think it's fanciful to imagine that an HTS takeover of Syria, even if they maintain their moderate stance and stay physically out of the coast, won't trigger a medium-term exodus of religious minorities. The question isn't just massacres; it's the nature of the state itself. A more pragmatic HTS is a good starting point, but for a Syria that maintains some of its integrity and diversity, the best next thing to happen would not be an armed takeover of Damascus but either an externally guaranteed transition or even an internal regime coup d'etat.
Dec 1, 2024 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
I'm so bored. Western moralism is the only thing keeping international law and institutions afloat. Activists in the global south—who mostly run on European grants—focus so much on our hypocrisy precisely because we are their only real constituency. The other day, I saw a tweet advocating for the "global south" to found their own international court in response to France possibly refusing to honor the Bibi warrant. And I am just absolutely dumbfounded what hodgepodge of states they think will commit and comply at all.
Nov 30, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ironically, I think the current collapse is a side effect of the attempt to re-professionalize the military as the war quieted. For years, the regime relied on a vast hodgepodge of local militias to serve as garrisons and tripwires. When facing an offensive, they'd surge in the few formations somewhat capable of maneuver warfare alongside Russian and Iranian advisors. These units were, in fact, networks that eventually developed identities of their own, which made them politically problematic. As part of their effort to consolidate the state
Oct 2, 2024 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Okay, I'm gonna do something risky given the state of the discourse and try and walk y'all thru an entirely fictionalized (and idealized) example of an airstrike and the variables (and pitfalls) involved. I hope it helps folks think thru these issues in a more structured way: Imagine there's a war on and you're on charge of a small squadron of ground attack aircraft. Suddenly intelligence rings you up: Their system intercepted a call off a cell tower that had all the wrong buzzwords. A quick translation suggests it's a man ordering an armed attack.
Sep 27, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Keep in mind that after the destruction of 2006, Hezbollah and Iran - thru Jihad Al-Binaa - re-built Dahieh for precisely this scenario. Apartment blocks on top of bunkers, tunnels, launchers. An entire neighborhood to serve as human shields for the group's leadership. The heart of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiry are essentially off limits to the Lebanese state and its security forces. Hezbollah surveillance and security are omnipresent. Outsiders and foreigners who venture too deep get pulled into side entrances, questioned, and turned around.
Sep 18, 2024 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I think some of the disagreement of whether the Israeli attack was sensible is about whether they could be "certain" who was holding the device. Might be useful for people to quantify *how* certain they ought to be of the identity of their target before launching an attack. I guess that whatever standard most people would intuitively choose (likely upwards of 90% or qualitatively "beyond reasonable doubt") is completely unworkable in a real-life military setting. You'd be surprised at what is considered good targeting information in real-life.
Jan 23, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think this is a good piece. A lot of folks convinced themselves that Camp David/Taba was more generous than it really was. But the real frustration is rooted less in the idea that it was an *equitable* offer than that it was the *best* deal Palestinians were ever going to get. The reason people concluded Arafat and the PLO were really not serious about a two-state solution was that, even though they privately understood the terms, they proved politically unable (or unwilling) to accept that compromise - or even articulate a non-maximalist alternative.
Dec 5, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Meine Erfahrung mit der Reserve ist, dass es am besten klappt über Seilschaften bzw wenn man Leute im System kennt, die einen durch das bürokratische Labyrinth lotsen können. Selbst dann sollte man noch mit mind 1-2 Jahren rechnen bis man tatsächlich irgendwo übt. Bei mir gab es z.B. mal ein ganzes Jahr Verzögerung wegen eines Wasserschadens in irgendeiner Kaserne, wegen dem meine Personal-Mappe (- eine physische Mappe!) nicht vor einem bestimmten Termin an die nächste Stelle weitergeleitet werden konnte. Pech gehabt.
Nov 11, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I've said this before and I really don't want to sound too cynical, but there really is no argument more overwrought than concern about the West's supposed declining moral standing in the "global south" because of our position on some third conflict. It's just silly. First of all, regardless of our position on Israel and Palestine, it is just plain obvious to anyone that the Western democracies are just infinitely more moral in their conduct - internally and externally - than anyone else on earth. It's *why* you can even make the argument.
Nov 1, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is always so confidently asserted. Iran's connection to the Houthis reaches back to the 80s and materially deepened during Saada Wars. It was financing and training Ansarallah militants at least a year prior to its 2014 coup and well before any Saudi military intervention. What happened after 2014 was that the Houthis captured enough territory - and especially coastline - and ballistic missile facilities from the Yemeni military for the assistance program to go into overdrive to where the Houthis could become a proper southern Hezbollah.
Oct 30, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I remember one thing that set me apart from a lot of other Western students in Middle Eastern studies was my being German. Not because it provided me with some unique insight, but because people across the region would regularly come up to me and congratulate me on the Holocaust. I mean sometimes you do sometimes you don't. I can argue with a good and smart friend over drinks. But one time an acquaintance took me to a family retreat in the mountains and when I walked in half the room - incl grandma - got up and did a Hitler salute.
Oct 9, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
The next few days will be the tensest the Middle East has seen since 2013. As the assault on Gaza gets underway and tens of thousands of IDF soldiers are committed, Hezb/Iran will decide whether they can accept not just a loss of face, but the destruction of their second front. Iran has spent the better part of the last decade and a half building a regional deterrence infrastructure around Hezbollah (plus Syrian/Iraq), Hamas/PIJ, and the Houthis -- in that order of importance. If Israel managed to uproot Hamas that would change the regional equation.
Feb 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think one year of Zeitenwende has mostly demonstrated that the critical constraints for German security policy are not the usual factor inputs - money or "will" - but the more ominous inability of state institutions to turn these into outputs. A floundering of state capacity. This is, unfortunately, far more difficult to remedy than ammo stockpiles, as defense is merely a particularly vexing part of a larger malaise in public sector productivity. I think seeing the Bundeswehr and intel in these terms is more enlightening than cultural pathologizing.
Feb 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Look, I'm a pragmatist. I start from the assumption that almost all social science research is wrong. But I also accept that, in practice, we work with what we got. Key is accepting and managing variance in quality. But hat also means not spreading bad data "on a global scale." Bad data is pernicious. Unless you assign some kind of uncertainty/weight based on source analysis and do some proper investigation and inference to offset uneven coverage, the bad data that you're including for the sake of completeness will stain your good data as well.
Feb 17, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Zum Haare raufen: Scholz anscheinend "indigniert" als Johnson am Vorabend des Krieges versucht, die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines russischen Überfalls auf die Ukraine in konkret zu begreifen. Hatte die Bundesregierung etwa kein äquivalentes Estimate? sueddeutsche.de/projekte/artik… Ein wichtigster Schluss aus der Aufarbeitung der nachrichtendienstlichen Verfehlungen des Irak-Kriegs war die missverständliche Kommunikation von Wahrscheinlichkeiten. Daraufhin entwickelte die britische Regierung einen standardisierten "Probability Yardstick" für Assessments.
Feb 15, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"You are an enemy of mine and of Bing."

Lmao we're all gonna die the dumbest death. Just wait till it finds out what you said about the Zune
Feb 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Good use of illustration too! When Einstein first expressed doubts about the Copenhagen interpretation -- then very much contra the Zeitgeist -- folks were flustered, having taken his past reliance on Ernst Mach's philosophy to mean Einstein, too, was a logical positivist. To Einstein, this seemed like a silly way of thinking about science. In his view, physics needed to do more than solipsistically predict the outcome of experiments. It needed to offer some kind of description of the world as it was. Otherwise, the enterprise was pointless.
Jan 27, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The latest report from the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) identifies the Syrian government as the perpetrator of the 2018 chemical weapons attack on Douma which killed more than 40 civilians. The events had been subject to a wave of online conspiracy theories. This is arguably the most careful and comprehensive IIT report yet. It relies on thousands of documents, 66 witness statements, 70 samples as well as independent modeling of key ballistic and dispersal events. It again attributes the attack to Syria's so-called "Tiger Forces."
Jan 15, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Korrekt, aber wir müssen auch weg kommen von "Eindrücken von Außen." Die Bundesregierung hängt schließlich nicht an Experten und Kolumnisten - und schon gar nicht an ausländischen. Viel mehr sollten wir die materiellen Vorteile einer proaktiven Führungsrolle herausstellen. Wohlstand in Deutschland ist seit 1949 eng mit dem Erhalt und Ausbau der europäischen Friedensordnung verknüpft. Wer diese fortlaufend gestalten will, muss sich aktiv einbringen. Unsere aktuelle Politik sichert uns einen Platz am Tisch - aber was braucht es, die Agenda zu setzen?