JD Work

Never leaving this app. An account LARPing as a wheelie Eurobox tried to argue with me over (not so) clandestine commercial infil. Just imagine trying to explain that to the OG Del Mar crew.

If none of those European services could have generated useful options, after forty plus years staring at the threat, this is indeed a bad joke. However I would like to have strong and competent allies, and am therefore willing to believe they could have met (or will still yet meet) the challenge. And moreover that they should be able to staff two things at once, especially when one was very obviously merely a matter of dealmaking rhetoric to illustrate the exact weakness so proudly demonstrated in the feeble “response”.

Don't know which version of the story you read but it didn't remotely claim, as you seem to suggest, that Danish and allied actions deterred the US from acting. That isn't in the reporting anywhere. Also bemused by the idea that Danish planners might have done something useful regarding Iran protests & that dealing with US threats diverted from this endeavour. Sad to see the total lack of concern with outrageousness of US threats to seize allied territory, not least one who shed blood in US wars.

The pure fiction being peddled as national security discourse at the moment will never cease to amaze. The version of a story in which a heroic European deterrent effort stopped some sort of US fait accompli, characterizing a supposedly extensive mobilization that consisted in the real world of a few fighter flights, a small detachment flown commercially, and an apparent single tanker support asset. About what one expects as the usual contribution to a wargame and field exercise. But the tale frames a counterargument to current sharp critiques of lack of readiness and non deployment to protect the Continent’s interest, although one carefully anchored in the non provable cognitive effect of “raising costs” and demonstrating decisive action. Yet the whole scale of the thing, which to the garrison and bureaucratic mind no doubt seemed to describe a major undertaking, is so pitifully inadequate for any real mission TO&E as to immediately undermine the fabrication. However, more staff work may well have been spent in Holmens and Balardgon on this briefing room fantasy, than on the real problem of the mass murder of Iranian protestors (to say nothing of nuclear breakout), and the likely higher order events to which the alleged “northern” European coalition would face from IRGC aggression.

The only real test of theories of war is in operational practice. It follows then that when so many seek despite all other reasons to avoid acknowledgment of live cases, the theory in question cannot be sustained. But they are just hoping you won’t notice, and that events will remain opaque for long enough to bury what would otherwise be very public failure.

“Execute past the price you pay for it” is a rather commendable admonition for offensive cyber operations capabilities arsenal management approaches.

It is amusing to see how quickly the narrative of capabilities “mismatch” (dare one say overmatch?) has arisen in the Iran conflict. Before the 12 Day War, almost no one would have believed in the possibility of the kind of military success demonstrated across both offensive and defensive axes, against the most modern adversary systems. This is now being explained away as mere “tactical” victory. But these outcomes do not arise solely from the tactical level; but rather the kinds of operational art and strategic focus that are entirely outside the scope of most current academic and policy analysis.

When the first response to the idea of breaking adversary systems used in destructive and disruptive cyber attack is to hope for a rush to lawfare, so as to constrain how USG capability is generated and brought to bear; perhaps the normative burden being articulated is not the one folks think it is. Asserting state sovereign monopoly on (virtual) force, whilst effectively leaving unchecked every example in the breach, is to perpetuate a status quo that will not favour soon to be forgotten arguments over a world that should have been, had anyone but the will to protect it.

@ShaneHuntley If you are going to RSAC, are you really even still in the security industry? Or have you transitioned to some adjacent marketing and finance space that uses the industry as a skin suit?

I used to live 45 mins from RSA conference and never went. Now I'm flying 14 hours to attend. I predicted years ago if I ever went it would cause me to leave the security industry for good. Always good to test predictions...

With ever further detail of the IRGC, LEF, and Basiji, murders of civilian protestors coming to light, it seems R2P advocates remain noticeably silent. There seems no defensible argument in theory to exclude the current case. One further doubts that every proponent has abandoned their beliefs here.

A morning in which supposed defense media discovers the existence of the conventional shaped charge. As if this was some unique adversary innovation in munitions design. Which begs the question what they thought preceding weeks reference to US KIA caused by EFP IEDs were.

One does not expect default, given what remains a contested budget process that recognizes the consequences of such outcomes. If we were to talk about debt instruments, however: an apportioned clawback of EU member state holdings set at the figure where each did not meet NATO defense commitment each year, as base percentage minus where operational capabilities were not in readiness (with interest), would be one means of settling accounts. (We shall leave aside Marshall Plan matters). If strategic autonomy really meant something other than another assertion to avoid burden sharing. But when even formally raising the idea or anything like it (under whatever formula one would offer), remains unthinkable then yes, it is a free rider problem.

@HostileSpectrum I don't disagree with what you're writing, but I think the term "freeriding" is only freeriding if we assume the US won't default on it's debt. If it will, it won't have been freeriding :-)

I do not point out the catastrophic weakness of the EU military posture to flex on the poors, as the kids these days are wont to say. Rather it is because this is the last chance for blunt honesty, where long deferred hard choices will either be made, or the world becomes a very different place. Because a regulatory superpower determined to exert extraterritorial influence over the most competitive economic sectors is not going to mean anything at all after the wars to come, if they cannot even handle their own commerce escort, air defense, & cyber missions. But it is only their critical energy, chemical, manufacturing, and transportation industries that will cease functioning (tech industries there remaining essentially negligible, with rare exceptions now being rebuilt in Texas). Because the American decisionmaker and public are long past tolerating endless free riders and reflexive opposition, in every crisis and for every capability mix.

Chinese netizen military commentators calling into question air superiority designs, and even nuclear warhead engineering, in the wake of corruption arrests following public IADS radar failures in two conflicts is likely as corrosive to decisionmaker confidence as anything in PLA memory. Potentially changes much in the Pacific calculus.

The past day has illustrated the cardinal sin of the present Iran war in the minds of the Brussels and London blob: the supposed lack of consultation. Nevermind the nearly decade that the current principals spent have those conversations, or the two plus decades staff did; around nuclear, ballistic missile, advanced conventional weapons, and terrorist threats including assassination plots. When the adversary made all else untenable, and surprise was required, the time for another round of endless meetings was long past. Even as one is rather certain that the final history will show more than a few rejected overtures, after which it was taken as read that various players had dealt themselves out from the table. And mindlessly chanting the pottery barn slogan does not move the needle: this is explicitly a theory of power that has been rejected, in the precedent of the “EU led” intervention in Libya (which never seems to have been fixed after being broken. Largely in the end with US military power, but one remembers endless consultations to disguise that reality). But overlook again for a moment the absolute shortcomings of EU states operational capability. Many on the continent certainly wish to. It is the insult to perceived self image as diplomatic power brokers that has sparked such an aggressive response among self styled elites. Because nothing is more fatal to the European illusion than recognition that they have traded real power for the fey gold of economic and normative / discourse power, that vanishes at the first touch of cold iron.

Red planners’ GHOST FLEET moment when realizing that the USAF would never outside of fiction refurb airframes in the boneyards to serve as Loyal Wingman platforms, but there is that whole flight line of obsolete J-6 / Temu MiG-19 FARMER that would give legacy maintainers out in the middle of nowhere something to do, before feeding attritable weapons sinks to the T-Dome.

The challenge of jagged frontiers is the likelihood of an adversary optimizing investment fit against a moving curve faster than intel warning of the trade space even in play… especially within what increasingly appear to the outsider to be 90 day model and tooling evolution cycles.

You can spend tokens for a model to reason through a program's state space, or use a fraction of those tokens having it generate a tool such as a fuzzer that brute forces the same state space on a CPU at significantly lower cost. This tradeoff is what the Agentic Sufficiency Curve formalizes. You need precise inference up front but only cheap CPU to drive the long tail: secure.dev/gpu_cpu_suffic… For certain kinds of vulnerability research I think this was the right approach, at least up until Fall 2025. But frontier models have continued to consume that capability and now I'm not so sure the cost tradeoff is worth it. Other domains are likely still under the curve and benefit more from models generating deterministic automation that runs on cheap CPU, than just spending more tokens. Just another anecdotal data point that the frontier will continue to remain jagged.

Everyone near Cleveland missing the opportunity for house of dynamite posting, as the Beltway would.

@james_acton32 But you do not carry responsibility if your risk calculus was wrong. Those that do weighed matters very differently. Especially in the moment of most acute breakout crisis. The die was cast, necessitated by adversary action. What comes next is all that remains.

FWIW, I do not rule out the use of force for nonproliferation. It needs to be assessed case by case. For example, Israel's attack on the Syrian reactor in 2007 was sensible. Conversely, I concluded that the risks of attacking Iran's nuclear program outweighed the benefits. (1/n)

China defense contractor Jingan Technology claiming some new AI enabled breakthrough in radio intercept against strategic bomber flights during major operations is either marketing exaggeration, or burning something that would seem rather exquisite for nothing more than a bullet point in some central planner’s list of accomplishments for the year. Either way one expects some PLA DIB executives are going to be invited for an unpleasant cup of tea. Wild to see series A problems with Chinese characteristics.

I will not castigate Wx forecasters for a warning failure or warning fatigue over today’s storms. Things were indeed pretty spicy, just not fastest rotation. For which I am grateful. And the stakes in the capitol region are so high because the insane fragility of infrastructure, coupled with intense inflexibility in schedules and demands made on peoples lives.