Real expertise versus bogus expertise

April 30th, 2026

Dominic Cummings contrasts fields dominated by real expertise (like fighting and physics) and fields dominated by bogus expertise (like macroeconomic forecasting, politics/punditry, active fund management):

Fundamental to real expertise is 1) whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it’s possible to make good predictions and 2) does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction. Physics and fighting: Yes. Predicting recessions, forex trading and politics: not so much. I’ll look at studies comparing expert performance in different fields and the superior performance of relatively very simple models over human experts in many fields.

This is useful background to consider a question I spend a lot of time thinking about: how to integrate a) ancient insights and modern case studies about high performance with b) new technology and tools in order to improve the quality of individual, team, and institutional decision-making in politics and government.

I think that fixing the deepest problems of politics and government requires a more general and abstract approach to principles of effective action than is usually considered in political discussion and such an approach could see solutions to specific problems almost magically appear, just as you see happen in a very small number of organisations — e.g Mueller’s Apollo program (man on the moon), PARC (interactive computing), Berkshire Hathaway (most successful investors in history), all of which have delivered what seems almost magical performance because they embody a few simple, powerful, but largely unrecognised principles. There is no ‘solution’ to the fundamental human problem of decision-making amid extreme complexity and uncertainty but we know a) there are ways to do things much better and b) governments mostly ignore them, so there is extremely valuable low-hanging fruit if, but it’s a big if, we can partially overcome the huge meta-problem that governments tend to resist the institutional changes needed to become a learning system.

[…]

The faster the feedback cycle, the more likely you are to develop a qualitative improvement in speed that destroys an opponent’s decision-making cycle. If you can reorient yourself faster to the ever-changing environment than your opponent, then you operate inside their ‘OODA loop’ (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) and the opponent’s performance can quickly degrade and collapse.

This lesson is vital in politics. You can read it in Sun Tzu and see it with Alexander the Great. Everybody can read such lessons and most people will nod along. But it is very hard to apply because most political/government organisations are programmed by their incentives to prioritise seniority, process and prestige over high performance and this slows and degrades decisions. Most organisations don’t do it. Further, political organisations tend to make too slowly those decisions that should be fast and too quickly those decisions that should be slow — they are simultaneously both too sluggish and too impetuous, which closes off favourable branching histories of the future.

[…]

Our culture treats expertise/high performance in fields like sport and music very differently to maths/science education and politics/government. As Alan Kay observes, music and sport expertise is embedded in the broader culture. Millions of children spend large amounts of time practising hard skills. Attacks on them as ‘elitist’ don’t get the same damaging purchase as in other fields and the public don’t mind about elite selection for sports teams or orchestras.

[…]

Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence — i.e adapt to feedback. The ‘rationalist community’ — people like Scott Alexander who wrote this fantastic essay (Moloch) about why so much goes wrong, or the recent essays by Eliezer Yudkowsky — are ignored at the apex of power.

[…]

Instead of training people like Cameron and Adonis to bluff with PPE, we need courses that combine rational thinking with practical training in managing complex projects. We need people who practice really hard making predictions in ways we know work well (cf. Tetlock) then update in response to errors.

[…]

Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena. For example, the media briefly blasts headlines about Carillion’s collapse or our comical aircraft carriers but there is almost no consideration of the deep reasons for such failures and therefore nothing tends to happen — the media caravan moves on and the officials and ministers keep failing in the same ways. This is why, for example, the predicted abject failure of the traditional Westminster machinery to cope with Brexit negotiations has not led to self-examination and learning but, instead, mostly to a visible determination across both sides of the Brexit divide in SW1 to double down on long-held delusions.

Progress requires attacking the ‘system of systems’ problem at the right ‘level’. Attacking the problems directly — let’s improve policy X and Y, let’s swap ‘incompetent’ A for ‘competent’ B — cannot touch the core problems, particularly the hardest meta-problem that government systems bitterly fight improvement. Solving the explicit surface problems of politics and government is best approached by a more general focus on applying abstract principles of effective action. We need to surround relatively specific problems with a more general approach. Attack at the right level will see specific solutions automatically ‘pop out’ of the system. One of the most powerful simplicities in all conflict (almost always unrecognised) is: ‘winning without fighting is the highest form of war’. If we approach the problem of government performance at the right level of generality then we have a chance to solve specific problems ‘without fighting’ — or, rather, without fighting nearly so much and the fighting will be more fruitful.

This is not a theoretical argument. If you look carefully at ancient texts and modern case studies, you see that applying a small number of very simple, powerful, but largely unrecognised principles (that are very hard for organisations to operationalise) can produce extremely surprising results.

Posted in Education, Martial Arts, Policy | No Comments »

China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen — or bust

April 29th, 2026

T. Greer argues that the Chinese system has a new telos:

In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen — or bust.

[…]

Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and — voila! — you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.

How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?

And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead — but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

[…]

China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because — depending on the exact year you do the counting — between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.

Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths

April 28th, 2026

Devils by Fyodor DostoevskyThe 20th Century created the system we have come to call totalitarianism:

Invented by Lenin, and then imitated by Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, and others, it came to dominate some 40 percent of humanity. It also captivated intellectuals in traditionally free societies — not in spite of, but because of, its unprecedented violence. When Stalin was succeeded by the much milder Khrushchev and Brezhnev, intellectuals lost interest in the USSR and idolized Mao instead.

Before the 20th century, the Spanish Inquisition was the Western exemplar of political repression, but the 30,000 or so who died at its hands in its 300-year history was exceeded approximately every two weeks in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The collectivization of agriculture alone took well over 10 million lives. In the opening paragraph of his classic 426-page study of this episode, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest observed that “in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

Only one major thinker foresaw this turn of events: Fyodor Dostoevsky. He not only predicted that oppression would grow, he also outlined in detail what forms it would take. These predictions occur in a book usually considered the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed — more accurately translated as The Devils. After Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s murders (some of them, anyway) in 1956, the prominent literary scholar Yuri Karyakin, who had once been a true believer, experienced the revelations as “an earthquake,” saying, “We read The Devils and the notebooks [Dostoevsky kept while writing] the novel…and did not believe our eyes…. We read and interrupted each other almost on every page: ‘It can’t be. How could he have known all this?’”

How indeed? The short answer is that Dostoevsky was not only a keen observer of the revolutionary movement but had been a revolutionary himself. Arguably the greatest psychologist who ever lived, he probed, partly by introspection, the revolutionary mind-set and recognized with horror that, in the right circumstances, he, too, could have participated in revolutionary killings.

The Devils, published in 1873, is a fictionalized account of a sensational murder committed three years earlier by the terrorist Sergei Nechaev—a fanatic committed to the idea that literally anything was justified to promote “the cause.” Lenin, who greatly admired Nechaev, agreed.

[…]

“I want to speak out as passionately as I can,” he wrote to one friend. “All the Nihilists and Westernizers will cry out that I am retrograde. To hell with them. I will speak my mind to the very last word.”

Like Nechaev, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the novel’s central character, has convinced everyone in the provincial town where the novel is set that he represents a vast revolutionary organization, with its central committee in Switzerland and countless followers throughout Russia. Also like his model, Pyotr Stepanovich masterfully spreads exciting myths about himself. Young men looking for a romantic hero are flattered by his attention.

Pyotr Stepanovich organizes his followers into “quintets,” groups of five whose only contact with other quintets is through Pyotr Stepanovich himself, a structure supposedly insuring that even if the members of one quintet are arrested, they cannot betray any others. It is actually designed to maximize Pyotr Stepanovich’s power to spread disinformation.

[…]

And indeed, that is how it always is with modern revolutionary movements: The promise of absolute liberty leads to the worst possible slavery, just as the call for fraternity leads to the guillotine, and the ideal of equality to the domination of the few over the many.

Reading this passage, Dostoevsky’s contemporaries would surely have thought of the example of the Jacobins who brutalized the French a few years after their revolution in 1789. But Shigalyov advocates a much more ambitious tyranny closely resembling modern totalitarianism. His admirer, “the lame teacher,” explains: “He suggests as a final solution of the [social] question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden.” As Dostoevsky well knew, intellectuals naturally favor governments where educated “experts” (themselves) wield power. The Soviets called such an arrangement “true” democracy, much as today’s elites embrace undemocratic means to “preserve democracy.”

One radical objects to Shigalyov’s paradise: “If I didn’t know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind,” he explains, “I’d take them and blow them up into the air instead of putting them in paradise. I’d only leave a handful of educated people, who would live happily ever afterwards on scientific principles.” To be sure, this solution would entail “cutting off a hundred million heads.” But the real-world version of Shigalyov’s vision eventually devoured even more than that. Mao used this very argument when advocating nuclear war. A hundred million heads: As several commentators have pointed out, that is the number that appears in The Black Book of Communism, a painstaking 1997 effort to document the destruction of humanity in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as the bare minimum of Communist killings.

[…]

It is telling that Dostoevsky directs his most savage attacks in The Devils not at the radicals but at the liberals who fawn on them. Here, too, he proved prophetic. In the years leading to the Bolshevik takeover, the liberal party known as the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) refused to condemn terrorism and other violence completely at odds with their own professed values as long as the barbarities came from parties to their left. They became the Bolsheviks’ first victims.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

Grade levels never worked

April 27th, 2026

When Pamela Hobart started discovering how broken age-based grade levels were, she assumed something must have gone wrong:

An astounding 1909 book by Leonard Ayres for the Russell Sage Foundation tells all: Laggards In Our Schools: A Study of Retardation and Elimination In City School Systems.

At this time, teachers were not pressured to “socially promote” students who had not learned that year’s material. Instead, they faced classes with huge age disparities that often resolved by the “overaged” students dropping out (“elimination”) rather than ever catching up to grade level expectations.

For instance, consider New York City in 1906, where “of every 100 children entering the first grade, only 24 are found in the eighth grade at the end of eight years. The remainder have either dropped out or are still repeating the lower grades.”

This state of affairs was typical for the time. Across Boston, Philadelphia, Camden, Kansas City, plus New York, “one-fourth to one-half of the pupils are repeating their work, and that the proportion varies little from city to city.” In other words, we’re talking about 30-50% of students being at least one year older than expected for their grade.

Despite the magnitude of the problem, there appears to have been no real mechanism for catching anyone up once they’d fallen behind. As a result, these cities had 7-26% of students lingering 2 or more years behind age level in their work (and as many as 13% of students 3 years behind!)

Grade level reorganization, then, never really delivered efficiency.

Posted in Education | 3 Comments »

Scientists remove “zombie” cells and reverse liver damage in mice

April 26th, 2026

UCLA scientists have uncovered a harmful group of immune cells that quietly builds up in aging tissues and in the livers of people with fatty liver disease:

When these cells were removed in mice, inflammation dropped sharply and liver damage was reversed, even though the animals continued eating an unhealthy diet.

[…]

They found that the combination of two proteins, p21 and TREM2, reliably marks macrophages that are truly senescent and no longer functioning properly, while still driving inflammation in nearby tissue.

Using this marker, the researchers observed a dramatic shift with age. In young mice, only about 5% of liver macrophages were senescent. In older mice, that number rose to between 60 and 80%, closely matching the increase in chronic liver inflammation seen with aging.

Aging is not the only factor behind this buildup. The researchers discovered that excess cholesterol can also push macrophages into a senescent state. When healthy macrophages were exposed to high levels of LDL cholesterol in the lab, they stopped dividing, began releasing inflammatory proteins and displayed the same p21-TREM2 signature.

“Physiologically, macrophages can handle cholesterol metabolism,” said Ivan Salladay-Perez, first author of the new study and a graduate student in the Covarrubias lab. “But in a chronic state, it’s pathological. And when you look at fatty liver disease, which is driven by overnutrition and too much cholesterol in the blood, that excess cholesterol appears to be a major driver of the senescent macrophage population.”

[…]

To test whether removing these cells could improve health, the team treated mice with ABT-263, a drug designed to selectively eliminate senescent cells. The effects were dramatic. In mice fed a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet, liver size dropped from about 7% of body weight to a healthier 4-5% percent. Body weight also fell by about 25%, decreasing from roughly 40 grams to around 30 grams.

The treated livers appeared smaller and healthier, with a normal red color, compared to the enlarged, yellowish livers seen in untreated animals.

[…]

Although ABT-263 worked in mice, it is too toxic for widespread use in humans.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Political research is amazingly underrated as a force which can change history

April 25th, 2026

A weird fact about the world, Dominic Cummings notes, is that political research is amazingly underrated as a force which can change history:

Put another billion or ten into a normal company, little really changes in terms of world history. But just thousands wisely deployed on political research can change history. I’ve explained this at length (e.g here) and won’t rehash. Politics does not focus on the most high value tokens. People repeatedly communicate without figuring out if what they’re doing is counterproductive. They fail to do the most basic research on opponents. People fight entire election campaigns without understanding what dominates the thinking of crucial voters. People with money rarely understand politics well and don’t realise politics does not focus on the most high value tokens. So vast amounts of money is wasted on ‘campaigns’ and ‘think tanks’ while the search for the most high value tokens is unfunded. The models will affect politics partly because they will radically reduce the cost of finding high value tokens, so people with little cash won’t have to find 500k plus to do a project. The potential leverage of political teams with a very small number of able relentless people will grow enormously. This isn’t speculation, I can see it on projects I’m working on / helping with.

A conclusion from my experiments: you’re better off having the paid versions of Opus or GPT work for you than ~99% of MPs.

Posted in Policy, Technology | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

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.

Posted in War | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

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.”

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Science | 7 Comments »

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