In New York social circles, he was known as the “Jewish James Bond”

April 24th, 2026

The Last Spy looks at 102-year-old CIA spymaster Peter Sichel, who passed away last year:

In New York social circles, he was known as the “Jewish James Bond”: a refugee from Nazi Germany whose gratitude to his American hosts was such that he volunteered to join the US army and became the CIA’s first station chief in Berlin as a mere twentysomething, filing early warnings about Soviet activity that have been credited with ringing in the cold war.

Like 007, Peter Sichel also appreciated a fine tipple, and after leaving the US foreign intelligence service it was he who briefly turned a sweet German white, Blue Nun, into one of the best-selling wines in the world.

A film released in UK cinemas a year after his death aged 102, however, shows Sichel as something more akin to a Jewish Jason Bourne: a former agent who grew increasingly disillusioned with CIA meddling and turned a trenchant critic from beyond his grave of US foreign policy – especially in Iran.

[…]

Born in 1922 in Mainz, into a well-off family of wine merchants whose clients included the Ritz in Paris, Sichel’s early upbringing included a stint at a public school in Buckinghamshire.

But after the introduction of the Nuremberg race laws in 1935 the Sichels escaped first to Bordeaux and then to New York, where the young man volunteered to join the US army the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Sichel’s language skills and affable manner drew the attention of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor organisation to the CIA, and he was recruited to extract intelligence from German prisoners of war.

Even then, a firm belief in the value of carefully amassed information over head-first action put him on a confrontation course with the military. “He’s considered a hero, but he was a bad general,” Sichel said of George S Patton, often hailed as one of the most brilliant US generals of the second world war. “He was a very stupid man.”

After the allied victory over Nazi Germany, the OSS director, Allen Dulles, asked the 23-year-old “wunderkind” to stay in Berlin and run the intelligence agency’s activities in US-occupied territory.

Sichel took over the handling of key informants and laid a spy network across the eastern zone, infiltrating the KGB headquarters in Karlshorst with a honey trap — a woman who had an affair with the KGB head’s chauffeur — and managing to recruit two members in the SED (Socialist Unity party) Central Committee and the DWK (German Economic Commission) as US agents.

After being moved back to Washington in 1954 to head the CIA’s German and eastern European desk, he was involved in US propaganda efforts such as the establishment of Radio Free Europe, and oversaw “Operation Gold”, the digging of a 450-metre (1,400ft) tunnel from West to East Berlin to tap Soviet-controlled underground telephone cables.

[…]

“People in high places have an idea of what the picture should be, and if the intelligence doesn’t fit, they don’t believe the intelligence,” Sichel says in The Last Spy.

It’s a mindset that Sichel argues led the US to view any nationalist leader elected around the globe who defied American hegemony to be a Soviet puppet-in-waiting, and justified taking covert action to unseat leaders such as Iran’s Mossadegh, Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and Sukarno in Indonesia.

Sichel was involved in some of these operations, sending a female agent disguised as an air hostess to retrieve a stool sample after Sukarno had visited an onboard toilet, to investigate a (false) rumour that the nationalist Indonesian president was suffering from ill health.

But inside the CIA the German-born spy chief was now a vocal critic, leading to him being investigated by the FBI under suspicion of harbouring communist sympathies in the late 50s. Disillusioned, he retired from the intelligence agency in 1960 and took over his family wine business, which he ran from New York.

The phenomenal commercial success of his brand of sweet-tasting liebfraumilch wine, named Blue Nun to make it more easily pronounceable to customers in the US and the UK, meant Sichel did not look back on his career with bitterness when he died in February 2025

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The Sun is much hotter than a compost heap

April 23rd, 2026

Atomic Adventures by James MahaffeyNuclear fusion is generally presented as the sci-fi energy source of the future, providing unlimited, clean energy, but, while listening to the audiobook version Atomic Adventures by James Mahaffey, I was reminded that the astronomical output of the sun comes from its astronomical mass:

At the center of the Sun, fusion power is estimated by models to be about 276.5 watts/m3. Despite its intense temperature, the peak power generating density of the core overall is similar to an active compost heap, and is lower than the power density produced by the metabolism of an adult human. The Sun is much hotter than a compost heap due to the Sun’s enormous volume and limited thermal conductivity.

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Most aircraft losses happen not in the air but on the ground

April 22nd, 2026

Wargame after wargame exploring a Taiwan scenario has reached the same conclusion:

Most aircraft losses happen not in the air but on the ground. Airbases across the Western Pacific sit within range of PLA missiles. Active air and missile defenses at forward bases cannot reliably defeat salvos at the scales China can generate, and passive defenses — hardened shelters, dispersed parking, rapid runway repair, and decoys — remain inadequate across most of the theater. High-value aircraft parked on exposed ramps at predictable locations are among the easiest targets an adversary can service.

And the vulnerability is not limited to aircraft on the ground. On March 19th, an Air Force F-35A made an emergency landing after a combat mission over Iran, with the pilot reported in stable condition. Unconfirmed footage suggested the jet may have been engaged by a passive, road-mobile air defense system. Iran’s fixed air defense systems had already been heavily degraded by that point. If mobile systems in a diminished network can still put an F-35 on the ground, the threat from China’s intact, layered, and far denser air defenses is of a different order entirely.

This problem compounds because of the F-35’s heavy ground footprint. The jet depends on maintenance facilities, diagnostic systems, spare parts inventories, fuel and munitions stores, and the skilled maintainers who keep the fleet flyable. A runway crater can be filled. A destroyed parts depot or logistics server cannot be easily replaced in theater. Destroy any piece of that support infrastructure, and you degrade sortie generation as effectively as destroying the aircraft themselves. The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site.

The natural response to base vulnerability is dispersal — spreading aircraft across more locations to complicate targeting. But dispersal pushes fighters in exactly the wrong direction. It stretches supply lines that are already thin, fragments maintenance capacity across more sites, and moves aircraft farther from their targets. Distance should then be compensated for, either with standoff weapons or with tankers, and both are brittle. Standoff munitions like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile are expensive, produced in limited quantities, and have not been procured at scales intended to sustain a weeks-long campaign against a peer adversary. Every mile of additional standoff the operational geometry demands draws down a stockpile that cannot be replenished in wartime.

Tankers are the alternative, but they are large, slow, non-stealthy aircraft that, against China, would orbit within the engagement envelopes of fighters and sensors designed specifically to kill high-value airborne targets. China’s dense, layered, and mobile integrated air defense network pushes those tanker orbits ever farther from the fight. Against Iran, tanker tracks could be established in relatively permissive airspace with minimal risk. Against China, those tankers would be priority targets. Losing them does not just reduce range, but it also collapses the operational architecture, because the fighters cannot reach the fight without them. Every step backward to survive trades away the ability to fight, and every workaround for distance depends on something fragile.

Posted in War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The Great Pacific War

April 21st, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsStanding apart from fiction, with its checkered history, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, are forecasts, which omit the conversations and streams of consciousness of a novel’s cast of characters:

The best is Hector C. Bywater’s The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931–1933. Bywater was a journalist and military commentator and a well-informed, insightful observer. Writing in 1925, he described the imagined events of a short, sharp conflict between the United States and Japan—a book that he said was designed to caution Japan against arousing the sleepy American giant, which had not yet begun to modernize the fleet left over after the Washington Disarmament Treaty of 1921.

The power of Bywater’s argument rested entirely on the acuity of his story. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that in this single book, written sixteen years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bywater assembled most of the lessons that it took Naval War College gamers twenty years to deduce. He predicted that Japan would launch a surprise attack before it declared war—on the Panama Canal rather than Pearl Harbor. The book describes how closing the canal eliminates the entire Atlantic Fleet for the first two months of hostilities. Bywater foresees Japan’s swift invasion of the Philippines in a landing at Lingayen Gulf, which takes place at the same time that it seizes Guam. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet is crushed at war’s onset, while the Pacific Fleet, with neither cruising radius nor logistic ships, must fume in frustration. As the war proceeds, the United States masses Marine Corps and Army troops—and transports to carry them—at Pearl Harbor while Japan stages attacks on the Aleutian Islands and along the Oregon-California coast as a distraction. Both sides attempt ambushes and both suffer from lack of scouting. Already search aircraft are a precious resource in short supply.

Great Pacific War by Hector C. Bywater

As the war proceeds, the United States masses Marine Corps and Army troops—and transports to carry them—at Pearl Harbor while Japan stages attacks on the Aleutian Islands and along the Oregon-California coast as a distraction. Both sides attempt ambushes and both suffer from lack of scouting. Already search aircraft are a precious resource in short supply. In a temporizing move that presages the operations that the United States would conduct later at Guadalcanal, the U.S. Navy blocks a Japanese thrust to take American Samoa. Japanese invade China, and the troops become bogged down in its vastness. The American fleet, now reinforced, begins its irresistible sweep through the Central Pacific, seizing Truk atoll, which in Bywater’s book is not yet the bastion that it actually would become by 1944. The climactic fleet action is in the vicinity of Yap Island. The narrative is a sort of early compression of the two great naval battles in 1944, off the Marianas in June and around Leyte Gulf in October. The Japanese in Bywater’s novel, not faced with President Roosevelt’s proclaimed policy of unconditional surrender, immediately sue for a negotiated, albeit humbling peace.

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Some have also shown behaviors suggesting attempts to avoid detection

April 20th, 2026

CNN and environmental news outlet Mongabay tracked eight Chinese research vessels that have undertaken deep-sea mining exploratory missions over the past five years:

During that period, the ships spent only around 6% of their total open water time in areas reserved for exploration by Chinese companies, according to an analysis of data from MarineTraffic, a ship tracking and maritime intelligence provider, and the platform Deep Sea Mining Watch.

[…]

Some have also shown behaviors suggesting attempts to avoid detection, including hundreds of instances of “going dark” by disabling the mandatory Automatic Identification System (AIS), a vessel’s self-reporting system that broadcasts its identity and position.

[…]

Experts say Chinese research vessels may very well be prospecting for minerals beyond their assigned exploration zones: In December 2025 and January 2026, the Shi Yan 6, or “Experiment 6,” appeared to operate within India and Germany’s exploration area in the Indian Ocean; in November, the Chinese vessel Shen Hai Yi Hao, or “Deep Sea No. 1,” appeared to operate within South Korea’s exploration area, also in the Indian Ocean. Throughout 2024, it repeatedly seemed to be operating in other nations’ contracted areas too, including those of Poland, France and Russia.

The South Korean, Polish and French licensees told CNN and Mongabay that China had alerted them in advance to the visits and that research in such areas is permissible under UNCLOS. Germany said it was unaware of the Shi Yan 6’s visit and India and Russia declined to comment.

Experts say the pattern of Chinese activity could reflect a broader strategy to lead in deep-sea mining once commercial extraction begins.

[…]

One of the eight vessels tracked by CNN, the Hai Yang Di Zhi Liu Hao, or “Marine Geology No. 6,” traveled towards a Chinese license area in the Northwest Pacific Ocean in September 2025, but instead appeared to survey an area just outside of it.

On its return, in October, it transited through the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth that serves as a vital military hub, before loitering up and down its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and that of Guam, a US territory.

“That’s on the route that US submarines might transit from Guam to places west,” explained Tom Shugart, a former US Navy submarine warfare officer and maritime expert focusing on the Indo-Pacific. Asked about its choice of path, Shugart said it’s “certainly possible” that the Chinese vessel could be leaving behind sensors at 4,600 meters (15,000 feet) below to record a submarine’s unique sound signature.

A month later, in November, the Hai Yang Di Zhi Liu Hao took a week-long journey through Micronesia, an island nation that includes the state of Yap, where the US Air Force is investing $400 million to extend the island’s international airport runway to support American military operations. Guam and Micronesia are considered part of the “Second Island Chain,” a US line of defense against potential Chinese military aggression and a component of US Indo-Pacific strategy under Trump.

[…]

In May 2024, shortly before its visit to a Chinese ISA area, the Xiang Yang Hong 06 (Facing the Red Sun 6), scanned the seabed just west of Guam, a 210-square-mile island in the Pacific Ocean and home to Andersen Air Force Base — a key deployment base for US Air Force bombers and home port to US nuclear attack submarines that could be vital in any defense of Taiwan.

[…]

Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council Minister said in January that 41 Chinese research vessels had been detected by the Taiwanese coast guard in waters around Taiwan over the past three years. “They have trampled on our waters, and likely know the ins and outs of waters surrounding us,” Kuan Bi-ling said.

[…]

For example, in November 2023, the Xiang Yang Hong 03 (Facing the Red Sun 03) spent 48 hours doing survey work over a known trans-Pacific cable, covering around 400 square nautical miles — an area smaller than other surveys the vessel conducted, possibly indicating a more targeted investigation to pinpoint objects of interest.

The vessel “made a fairly direct line straight to one particular part of the ocean,” where undersea cables had been laid three years prior, said Mark Douglas, a Starboard analyst. It then continued to do what appeared to be “a very focused little bit of survey work over the course of a couple of days over (the) top of the cable,” before it left the area. Douglas called the vessel’s movements “a smoking gun,” that points to likely dual-use operations.

[…]

In August 2024, the deep sea vessel Ke Xue (Science) transited Alaska’s Aleutian Islands — within the US EEZ — three times before returning to Qingdao, a strategic naval port and the headquarters of the Chinese navy’s North Sea Fleet.

The Xiang Yang Hong 01 made a similar journey. Shortly after operating in its deep sea mining license areas in the Northwest Pacific, the vessel entered the Bering Sea in August 2024 and operated for several days inside Russia’s EEZ, a move described by Ryan D. Martinson of the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute as “very rare, maybe unprecedented.” During this visit, the Xiang Yang Hong 01 gained access to Avacha Bay, a key hub for Russia’s Pacific Fleet and submarine forces.

Then, in August 2025, five Chinese research and icebreaking vessels — including the deep sea vessel Tan Suo San Hao (Exploration No. 3) — drew significant attention from the US Coast Guard, after two vessels from the fleet entered the American Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) in Arctic waters west of Alaska.

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Fiction writers who have attempted to predict future wars and their consequences have a checkered history

April 19th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsFiction writers who have attempted to predict future wars and their consequences, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations notes, have a checkered history:

Some have amounted to blatant propaganda. A famous example was Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Published in England in 1903, it was republished by the Naval Institute Press in 1991 and made into a movie. Childers creates the story of two Englishmen on holiday who sail their yacht among the islands and tidewaters along the North Sea coast of Germany. They discover a fleet of barges moored in Imperial Germany’s coastal estuaries in preparation for a surprise invasion of England. Childers was obsessed with the prospect of an unexpected landing on the English coast, which he feared could overcome the feeble British army. His vivid novel drew the attention of the press, the public, and the admiralty, which was his purpose. The Riddle of the Sands lives on in Oxford and Cambridge student culture as mythology more attuned to modern ears than Beowulf or The Iliad. It is the best of its time. But, as Eric Grove writes in his introduction to the recent republication, “His book was far from being the only exercise in literary scaremongering at the time.” Grove lists half a dozen others, including The Great War in England in 1897, by William Le Queux.

Similar in impact to Childers’ work but intended as entertainment, is Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising. Published in 1986, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it describes the “real” war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and includes some campaign moves and countermoves by the opposing sides that broke through the then-rigid boundaries of conventional Pentagon gaming and analysis. By the time the book went on sale, U.S. naval planning had become relatively stereotyped. Clancy’s imaginative ideas were treated with respect and examined closely. Such works of fiction involve the thoughts and actions of the imagined participant in vivid detail. Unlike the body of science-fiction tracing from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, some of them are relevant enough to be taken seriously by war-planners.

A recent book, Ghost Fleet, by Peter Singer and August Cole, rivals Red Storm Rising for thought-provoking insights that draw attention to creative steps that a first-class enemy could take to defeat the U.S. Navy today. The story is about a twenty-first-century attack on Oahu by China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. Instead of bombing and neutralizing the U.S. Pacific Fleet as the Japanese did on 7 December, China conducts a surprise invasion. Aided by worms planted in the combat systems of American warships to incapacitate their sensors and missile systems, Chinese warships, aircraft, and missiles are able to neutralize the U.S. warships that would have defended Hawaii. Unmanned Chinese aerial vehicles, flying from innocent-looking commercial ships, then destroy American ground defenses. Their manned and unmanned ground vehicles complete the invasion and occupation.

One might question Ghost Fleet’s logic of China’s commencing a war this way, but the surprise attack is no more a strategic folly than was Tom Clancy’s initiation of a fictional World War III with a surprise Soviet attack on NATO. The thrust of the Singer and Cole book is to create a strategic setting in which they can describe modern information warfare. They identify a host of potential vulnerabilities in the American armed forces that in real life should not be ignored. They back up their descriptions of the Chinese technologies used in the book with extraordinary technological detail, validated by more than 400 endnotes supporting each of the crippling cyber, robotic, and malware attacks. On the American side the Navy initially descends into a thick fog of operational helplessness, the defenders of Hawaii are baffled and blinded, and chaos reigns throughout the United States as the Chinese shut down utilities and power systems fail from coast to coast—until Singer and Cole imaginatively describe how the United States achieves a comeback to defeat the Chinese attackers.

I have mentioned Red Storm Rising before, if only briefly,

Ghost Fleet, on the other hand, has come up multiple times:

Posted in War | 4 Comments »

It works just as well as the most expensive, high-tech catalysts

April 18th, 2026

Researchers at Kyushu University in Japan were seeking complex, expensive methods to extract hydrogen from methanol:

“In what can only be considered incredible serendipity, we found in one of our control experiments mixing methanol, iron ions, and sodium hydroxide, and then irradiating it with UV light, generated a considerable amount of hydrogen gas,” [Takahiro Matsumoto, lead author and Associate Professor at Kyushu University‘s Faculty of Engineering] added.

[…]

The simple iron mixture produced 921 mmol of hydrogen per hour per gram of catalyst. That is a technical way of saying it works just as well as the most expensive, high-tech catalysts.

The process, known as alcohol dehydrogenation, releases the hydrogen stored in compounds such as alcohols, such as methanol.

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The evolution of firepower warrants deep reflection

April 17th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsThe evolution of firepower warrants deep reflection, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains:

The development of the torpedo at the beginning of the twentieth century enabled an inferior force to defeat a superior one because the new weapons delivered a highly effective pulse of firepower that could be delivered from many small torpedo boats or from an undetected submarine. The effect of this on tactics in World War I was astonishing.

In World War II, aircraft became the means of delivering fatal “salvoes” because an air wing could reach out 200 nautical miles or more, and the effect on tactics was even more stunning.

In the modern missile age, this salvo threat has achieved new status. When the “pulsed power” is a missile salvo, a weaker side that is outnumbered by as much as two to one can win—if it employs better scouting and command-and-control that enable it to “attack effectively first.”

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Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia

April 16th, 2026

Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia, Nature acknowledges:

Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history, but its potential to reveal as much about human evolutionary biology has not been realized because of limited sample sizes and the difficulty of distinguishing sustained rises in allele frequency increasing fitness — directional selection — from shifts due to migrations, population structure, or non-adaptive purifying or stabilizing selection. Here we present a method for detecting directional selection in ancient DNA time-series data that tests for consistent trends in allele frequency change over time, and apply it to 15,836 West Eurasians (10,016 with new data). Previous work has shown that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.

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There is no compelling rationale for sending large, expensive, and highly capable warships into contested coastal waters

April 15th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsFleet Tactics and Naval Operations looks at modern tactics and operations:

If Trident submarines could be targeted, they would go down with many warheads—more than the number of nuclear weapons that would be expended to sink them. These huge submarines seem to have been designed on a cost-effective basis—that is, economies of scale drove the concentration of twenty-four missiles in each vessel, each missile armed with eight multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle warheads (MIRVs), without regard for the possibility that the submarines might be detectable someday. Had the designers factored even the remote possibility that these boats might be tracked at sea or else attacked in port or at dispersed harbors they would have distributed Trident missiles on more submarines, even though that would have been less expedient.

The most striking illustration of the concentration of warheads in the modern nuclear arsenal was the MX missile, which carried about ten. A natural but unforeseen consequence of the first strategic arms limitation treaty, or SALT I, which counted missile launchers rather than warheads, is that the land-based MX system was considered destabilizing because it offered the enemy an opportunity to destroy many warheads with one in a first strike.

[…]

The most recent ASCM attacks from warships or aircraft were in the Falklands War in 1982 and in the extended Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. This should be no reason for complacency. First, new missiles have become hotter and harder to defend against. Second, although there have been no recent sea-launched missile attacks on ships, there have been a great many attacks from the sea, using land-attack missiles. On land it is much harder to assess the number of hits achieved, the effects on the different conflicts, or the recovery time needed to restore an airfield, replace a missile launch site, or reopen a factory. Partly as a result of land-attack missiles from the sea, both states and insurgents have increased the numbers and ranges of missiles to counter them. Third, attacking ships by missiles is less costly than defending against them with hard-kill systems, especially with surface-to-air defensive missiles. Fourth, saturation attacks, in which many missiles arrive on a target simultaneously, have not yet occurred, but such tactics seem likely to be used in the future.

[…]

It is a reminder that the decision to mass or disperse depends on defensive considerations, not offensive ones, and it has done so since World War II, when aircraft carrier battle tactics were developed. In cases when defenses are likely to be stronger when the ships are concentrated, the fleet should be massed the way the U.S. carrier fleets were concentrated in 1944. If defenses are weak, however, as they were against attack from the air in 1942, then a dispersed force is more effective and the need to out-scout the enemy and attack effectively first will be more urgent.

[…]

The principle abides: a fleet that cannot reliably attack first must mass for effective defense. If its defense cannot be made effective, then it must fight dispersed and win by out-scouting the enemy so as to avoid all attacks.

[…]

There is no compelling rationale for sending large, expensive, and highly capable warships into contested coastal waters unless they are able to take several hits and continue fighting without missing a beat. It is better to fight fire with fire, using expendable, missile-carrying aircraft or small surface craft. In fact, ever since the introduction of numerous torpedo boats, coastal submarines, and minefields early in this century, contested coastal waters have been taboo for capital ships, and have become the almost exclusive province of flotillas of small, swift, lethal fast-attack craft.

[…]

A warcraft with great offensive firepower and little means of defense is extremely vulnerable and creates a highly unstable tactical situation. To perform effectively, it depends on a first strike, a stealthy attack, or a better combination of scouting and weapon ranges. A warcraft with such a mix of attributes is an anomaly. Why is such a “mistake” built? Ostensibly, because designers believe that in cases when the measure of effectiveness is simple firepower, ? or ?, it is cost-effective to put many good shots in each craft. But that ignores the force-on-force nature of battle. A better measure of effectiveness is how much deliverable firepower it can muster over its combat life, which is a combination of offensive firepower and counterforce.

[…]

A major consequence of massing for defense is the guarantee that the enemy will be aware of the fleet and its general location. In such cases, electronic-warfare tactics should be designed not to mask the presence of the fleet, which is impossible, but to complicate the enemy’s efforts to track and target the key units that constitute its striking power.

[…]

Some countries will use fishing boats and small vessels that resemble innocent coastal traffic to detect and report enemy presence.

[…]

In cluttered, confined waters the normal advantage of longer-range weapons aided by targeting with satellites and over-the-horizon radar is muted or lost. The cost of individual missiles is also more important in coastal combat because more warships and UAVs likely will be engaged, and running out of ordnance is an important consideration.

[…]

Remotely controlled surface vessels can remain on-station for long periods of time and carry relatively large payloads—both valuable for deterrence. The growing potential for autonomous undersea surveillance and for attack in shallow or confined seas will increase the threat to high-value nuclear submarines and other capital assets, making less expensive manned and unmanned nonnuclear submersibles all the more useful in waters such as the Yellow, Arabian, and Baltic Seas.

The fact that precise homing enables tacticians to equip smaller platforms with offensive capability has led to two recent advancements in missile warfare. One is a system called Club K, developed by the Russian armed forces, in which box launchers are carried on trucks, where they can be at least partially concealed, and can be dispersed widely. The vehicle mobility gives an attacker both maneuverability and survivability at low cost. The mobile launchers also can be used to replace or expand offensive power at sea quickly in cases where larger warships are damaged and cannot be repaired immediately; the launchers can be installed on a wide variety of vessels of varying sizes.

[…]

A disadvantage of the concept is its very invisibility. Influence requires that in edge-of-war scenarios and crises, the deterring force must present the threatening enemy with a visible threat—a task that usually requires the presence of clearly identifiable warships.

[…]

Cares’ analysis is both startling and compelling, showing how, by forcing the enemy to spread his attention among many separate units, a force of ships carrying unmanned attackers and defenders can defeat similar numbers of enemy ships. Cares demonstrates mathematically that because of the power of a numerical advantage, adding only one unmanned surface vehicle in each LCS dramatically increases combat effectiveness.

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Ignoffo found no evidence supporting the idea that Sarah Winchester communed with spirits

April 14th, 2026

Captive of the Labyrinth by Mary Jo IgnoffoThe lore that Sarah Winchester built her mansion to house ghosts killed by Winchester rifles is likely just gossip and marketing, Drew Breunig says, citing a piece that summarizes Captive of the Labyrinth:

Ignoffo found no evidence supporting the idea that Sarah Winchester communed with spirits. She believes that what drove Sarah Winchester to build was her desire to be an architect.

Sarah Winchester lived at a time when it was highly unusual for women to be architects. She wasn’t licensed, so her own home was the perfect place—and the only place—where she could practice architecture.

Whatever her motivations were, Sarah Winchester built a house with more than 150 rooms, 2000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens, three elevators, two basements, and one shower. She spent nearly all of her life being an architect.

We aren’t as rich as Sarah Winchester, Drew Breunig says, but when AI-generated code is cheap, we don’t need to be:

After Opus 4.5 and recent work enabling Agent Teams, the average net lines added by Claude per commit is now smooth and steady at 1,000 lines of code per commit.

1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.

If you search for human benchmarks, you’ll find many citing Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month while claiming a good engineer might write 10 cumulative lines of code per day. If you further explore, you’ll find numbers higher than 10 cited, but generally less than 100.

[…]

Unfortunately, everything else remains roughly the same cost and roughly the same speed. Feedback hasn’t gotten cheaper; the “eyeballs” that guided the software developed by the bazaar haven’t caught up to AI.

There is only one source of feedback that moves at the speed of AI-generated code: yourself. You’re there to prompt, you’re there to review. You don’t need to recruit testers, run surveys, or manage design partners. You just build what you want, and use what you build.

And that’s what many developers are doing with cheap code: building idiosyncratic tools for ourselves, guided by our passions, taste, and needs.

(Hat tip to Gaikokumaniakku.)

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Soldiers are more cautious when excessive boldness results in death rather than embarrassment

April 13th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsOne of our most realistic ways to teach ground tactics, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations notes, is on instrumented ranges that substitute lasers for deadly bullets and shells:

English tactical analyst David Rowland, however, discovered the troubling fact that in infantry battles the difference between casualty rates inflicted in actual combat and those estimated on an instrumented range was less by a factor of seven. Soldiers are more cautious when excessive boldness results in death rather than embarrassment.

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Former member of US Army’s elite Delta Force unit arrested for leaking secrets to reporter

April 12th, 2026

Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth HarpIt seems a stretch to call her “a former member of the US Army’s elite Delta Force,” but she has been arrested for leaking classified secrets:

Courtney Williams, 40, was arrested Wednesday in connection with her alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist.

While the affidavit doesn’t name the journalist, Williams is cited heavily in Seth Harp’s book ‘The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces‘ and was featured in a Politico profile by Harp, both published last year.

The article, titled ‘My Life Became a Living Hell: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit‘ detailed her time as a ‘signature reduction specialist.’

Court documents claim that between 2022 and 2025, Williams spoke via phone and text to Harp about her time working with the elite unit, which required her to sign a Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement when she was hired and fired.

In the affidavit, Special Agent Jocelyn Fox cited a text between the two she said occurred on or about the day the book and article were published.

‘Other than a few factual errors, I would definitely have been concerned with the amount of classified information being disclosed,’ Williams’ text read.

‘I thought things I was telling you so you could have a better general understanding of how the (SMU) was set up or operated would not be published and it feels like an entire TTP (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) was sent out in my name giving them a chance to legally persecute me.’

[…]

When Williams was fired, she filed an EEOC complaint and eventually settled for an amount she claimed was ‘sufficient to buy a small house in North Carolina.’

[…]

Harp wrote that Williams’ job meant she managed ‘valid but fictious passports’ and other identification for special forces operators on overseas missions.

His story also details accusations of what Harp described as gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

One incident mentioned Williams being forced to bend over for a supervisor ‘to assess whether her underwear could be seen through the fabric.’

[…]

On the day both the profile and the book were released, Williams admitted to Harp in a text message she was ‘concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.’

She sent someone else a message writing: ‘I might actually get arrested . . . for disclosing classified information.’

In another message, she admitted she was ‘probably going to jail for life.’

When she was asked if she knew there could be legal consequences, she responded: ‘I have known my entire career, they tell you everyday . . . 100 times a day.’

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

Some clues will not reach the enemy decision-maker

April 11th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsHarvard professor Barton Whaley’s study of strategic deception, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, led him to make certain recommend­ations:

Most deception in the twentieth century was supported by commun­ications and other electronic media. Only 23 of the 115 deceptions that Whaley investigated from 1914 to 1968 involved naval operations, such as Pearl Harbor and Midway, and most of those dealt with amphibious assaults, such as the Normandy invasion.

Nevertheless, many of Whaley’s general conclusions regarding successful deception are robust for fleet tactics and campaigns as well. His prescriptions include

  • Reinforcing preconceptions or expectations of the enemy commander; then do something different.
  • Using deception, which he says is a low-risk endeavor, whether it works or not.
  • Using multiple false clues—say up to six—because some clues will not reach the enemy decision-maker, and using more than one clue adds credibility to the ploy.
  • Employing strategic deception does not cost much in forces or dollars, but it involves some devoted thinking by the deceiver and his staff. It is not certain that tactical deception will be similarly inexpensive in terms of the number of forces that are needed to achieve it.

Posted in War | No Comments »

They stopped asking Bill to fill out the form

April 10th, 2026

I somehow missed Andy Hertzfeld’s –2,000 Lines Of Code back in the day:

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw’s region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

(Hat tip to Gaikokumaniakku.)

Posted in Business, Technology | 2 Comments »

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