Michael Woodson
Our Political Premises: Knowing Self
Fundamental to both freedom and security is how well a population, its leaders, and its government know themselves and each other. Militarily, this is half of the classic Sun Tzu victory rule. One way leaders try to know this is by polling data, yet polling results also trickle into the presses and public awareness, offering…
If Russia Cannot Hold Ukraine What Does Victory Mean?
Nine months ago, CSIS’s Seth Jones wrote at WaPo that Russia could defeat Ukraine but could not hold the territory. Today it is not even certain that Russia can “defeat Ukraine” much less hold it. To give it a serious try, Moscow would need to dilute its defenses along borders on its vast frontier. Moscow…
Governing Incompetence of the Siloviki
The Russian intelligence service veterans termed “Siloviki” who became self-dealing oligarchs, or “Silovarchs,”1 have all but destroyed the KGB-FSB-SVR-GRU brands with their incompetence. A metaphorical meme for Putin’s war on Ukraine could be Tom Clancy’s “Hunt for the Red October” scene in which the Lithuanian-born (today he could be Ukrainian) Captain Marko Ramius of the…
Might Russia have Hacked, Hijacked, and or Spoofed Ukraine’s S-300 Air Defense?
Purpose: This brief dispatch is to point out a possible, not certain, past reference raising the issue of whether (1) Russian network attack capability and/or (2) cyberattack using backdoors could have had a hand in the errant flight this past week of what evidence so far suggests are two Ukrainian (yet Russian designed and made)…
Deterring Supply Chain Aggression by China
Set-Up: President Biden meets with President Xi Jinping before the G20 Summit on November 14th. Chinese leadership knows Taiwan is a vital manufacturing, trading, and freedom partner for the United States in the Far East. Hence, if China assaults Taiwan it knowingly attacks a U.S. vital economic national interest in its supply chain. Recent saber rattling…
Partisan Views on U.S. Military Readiness
The Big One is coming and the “U.S. military is not ready” says a story and narrative distributed with verbatim titling among many above-pictured, commonly aligned partisan news outlets. These sources morphed warnings from STRATCOM’s Navy Admiral Charles A. Richard’s deadly serious warnings that the U.S. ability to deter China is slowly eroding into the message that the…
Putin Like Hitler Invokes Christ for War of Aggression
A Russian military officer, trying to religiously motivate his troops to join the war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine, many in Ukraine also being slavs and Orthodox Christians, had this to say according to a source cited by Yahoo News: “I promise that we will win this holy war…Who is fighting against us? People who…
Utilize Russians Fleeing Draft to Write Russians at Home
There is a mass exodus of Russians avoiding Putin’s war observed by media in and outside of Russia, with up to 700,000 Russian men according to unnamed Russian official sources cited by Forbes, Russia. Reuters has been using the words “tens of thousands.” Russian exiles have native literacy, fluency, and knowledge to write colloquially and credibly…
Target Logic: Shahed-136 Drones
The Russians are aiming Shahed-136 drones at Ukrainian energy nodes, buildings, and other infrastructure items, such as communications. The Shahed-136 suicide drone uses commercially available GPS as a guidance system, making it susceptible to jamming devices. In December 2021, Israel’s Jerusalem Post published a well-informed advance warning of the capabilities of Iran’s Shahed-136 including longer range,…
Appease Putin and Lose Freedom
Putin kindled then started wars against Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine seeking one thing: Imperialist control over two continents. His nationalists have told us so, and Putin has embraced their warmongering extremism and called it patriotism. And Putin has embraced something much deeper than that: Chinese imperial interest and interference in Russia’s fundamental economic survival. That…