The Russian Recession
The Russian economy this last year shrunk 3.7% according to their own figures (the Ukrainian economy is also not doing very well). Just to put this in context, in 2009, during the worst economic year in the United States since…
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
The Russian economy this last year shrunk 3.7% according to their own figures (the Ukrainian economy is also not doing very well). Just to put this in context, in 2009, during the worst economic year in the United States since…
An article in the Bloomberg View caught my attention called “Russia and Ukraine Finally Break Up”. It is at: As everyone is pretty aware, Ukraine and Russia have been closely integrated throughout their history. The word for the Russians,…
I still have a half dozen blog posts to make on airpower and insurgencies, but I am going to shift directions for a little bit to discuss affairs in Eastern Europe. In 1919 a young man from Liverpool ended up…
See General David Petraeus’s article: And for a response: By the way, it appears that the responder is tapping some of the same statistics used in the Micah Zenko blog that we previously posted:
I just wanted to do a little ‘back of the envelope” comparison between these two air campaigns. In the case of Kosovo, if you believe the casualty figures provided virtue of Wikipedia (which are not always incorrect), they flew 38,004…
A lot of time could and should be spent examining this campaign. It was example of trying to change of countries’ policy by an extended air campaign. It is such an odd case that I left it out of my…
Dr. Woodford states: Hossack [Dstl] (2007), Blaho & Kaiser [CAA] (2009), and Lawrence [TDI] (2015) found no statistically meaningful relationship between troop density and insurgency outcome. Just to clarify, I went only far enough to prepare the following table: This…
The most meaningful quote I know of about the value of historical study is “The lessons of history are that nobody learns the lessons of history.” Some may write this off as just cynicism, but unfortunately, “history repeats itself,” and…
The previously quoted Air University Review article discussing air power and the Mad Mullah clearly overplayed the impact of air power on that campaign and rather significantly downplayed the importance of the 3,600 ground troops involved. Oddly enough, various Wikipedia…
The Dupuy Institute’s work on insurgencies was all based upon post-WWII cases. This was a marketing decision, because it is hard to sell history to some people, and the older the history, the less relevant it appears to them. But,…