Balloons: Identify Payload, Source, and Best Practices
The payload of an atmospheric balloon, at whatever elevation, is usually what the balloon is carrying beneath it. We should also consider whether what is inside the balloon itself may be part of the payload. If not done already we should figure out how to discern all payload information before…
Russia’s Military Movements on Ukraine
Strategically it is best to see Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine in the context of his intelligence apparatus’s 20-year gray war of psychological, emotional, and political influence against targeted populations in the West. Among strategic objectives leading-up to the invasion of Ukraine Putin pursued a range of combined objectives…
China’s Ukraine Issues
Xi Jinping’s China has a problem in Russia’s past recognition of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty under the Yeltsin Administration, and in Russia’s Putin-era abrogation of the Budapest Memorandum. It was the Yeltsin Administration foreign policy that initially joined Russia to the core treaty of the Shanghai Five in 1996, later…
The “Pravitel” Prerogative
Putin’s chosen prerogative as the presumed “pravitel” (правитель) over Russia trends in extinguishing the lives of generations of young and middle aged Russian and Ukrainian men on the outdated delusion that the prize of expansive imperial buffer territory is worth all the lives he can spend. I have heard arguments from academics…
The U.S. Military Industrial Complex Did Not Attack Ukraine
Russian, Chinese, and proxy troll networks have been falsely blaming the U.S. military industrial complex (MIC) for Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and to divert attention from Xi Jinping’s transformation of China into something of a divine emperor cult. These dictators act as if World War 2 and the holocaust…
Multilateral Supply Suppression in Support of Ukraine
Argument The “Ukraine Defense Contact Support Group” (DCG) and others supporting Ukraine should take collective action to suppress international supply lines of bombs and weapons to the Russian Federation for use against Ukraine and Ukrainian civilian targets under the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings,(CSTB) despite near certain anticipated…
A Piece of Winter Strategy
For the remainder of Winter and beyond, Ukraine needs the means to continue to make Russian borderland roads and railways impassable and prohibitive to repair that would supply and enable Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. This, in occupied Ukraine and on roads and railways on the border inside Russia…
SOCMINT Sample: Putin’s Strategic Disinformation
Putin regime proxy profiles (paid, voluntary, or unwitting) are alleging Russian active measures talking points that the Putin dictatorship’s attacking Ukraine is only doing what John F. Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis and or the Bay of Pigs invasion. This narrative is false in a number of…
Strategic Factors: Constitutional or Utopian, Progress or Restraint?
The value of being conservative or progressive depends on the merit and persuasive gravity of the objectives that progressive or conservative goals would achieve at home and in U.S. foreign policy. If the achievement of progress or restraint morphs into provocative, anti-constitutional, one-party, identity-tribal, or single branch government ideology at…
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…