Something’s been going on in Syria for a while now. I’ve already written about the Deraa protests as an example of the big role guerrilla funerals play in irregular war, but it’s time to look at the more general prospects in Syria.
It’s easy to fit Syria into the notion of a wave of protests spreading out from Cairo after the shock victory the demonstrators there had against Mubarak, but I’m not sure that’s exactly what’s going on.
Posted: April 29th, 2011
Years ago I got an angry email from somebody claiming to be in one of the Baltic militaries. Whoever he was, he wrote in grammatically perfect English so he just had to be from Northern Europe. We can’t talk English so good as what them Germans and Swedes can, not nohow. I don’t know whether he really was a military man, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. (more…)
Posted: April 28th, 2011
Before I confess how wrong I was about a big issue, I’ll give myself a little pat on the head for being right about a much smaller deal, the Afghan jailbreak I talked about two days ago. (more…)
Posted: April 27th, 2011
There are times when you look back and wish you’d had the courage to say what you were thinking. With me it’s a spotty record: Sometimes I do, but more often I wimp out. I wish now I’d said the first thing that came into my head when I started hearing about Al Qaeda, which was, “No, it can’t be. Violates every rule of guerrilla organization.” (more…)
Posted: April 26th, 2011
You can’t keep a good Talib down. Or in jail, apparently. (more…)
Posted: April 25th, 2011
Last Sunday I was grumbling about how there are so many great books about war and not that many great war movies. That got a lot of readers lobbing in their suggestions for good war movies. One reminded me that I’d already mentioned a really great movie about 20th-c. war: Tae Guk Gi, The Brotherhood of War, a great, great Korean movie about two brothers who get dragged onto a troop train at the start of the Korean War. One of them makes it through, but you’ll have to watch the movie to see which one. (more…)
Posted: April 24th, 2011
Today’s Civil War Caturday (by the way, that’s pronounced “Kivil War Katurday”), right in the middle of Easter. Got me thinking about my religion, if I have one now, and I realized I do, kind of: The Monitor and the Merrimack.
Posted: April 23rd, 2011
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
Today the action moves south, off the Libyan beaches and into the rain forest of the Ivory Coast, where rebel forces have just taken the big city, Abidjan.
Libya is such a pitiful mess that it should keep the scriptwriters going for years. For the dummies, you’ve got a good and evil story, with Qaddafi as the bad guy.
The funniest story to come out of the Libya video game yet is the news that Qaddafi’s son, Khamis has outraged the LA engineering firm called AECOM that hired him by going home and shooting down heroic rebels.
How much would you pay for this dead reb?
It’s a rinkydink little toy plane with no ordnance capacity or range, so it can’t do much to kill the enemy. But it sure has killed a lot of pilots.
Sunday, the day the Lord appointed for revenge. And who better to practice on than the Luzer who reviewed my book back in 2008?
My first Saturday blog. I promised seven days a week and I’ll deliver. To be honest “giving up my weekend” is not as much of a sacrifice as people seem to think.
