The third major shift in the machine tool industry was the rise of foreign producers, especially Japan. Japan’s machine tool industry had been devastated by the war and the immediate aftermath (when many of Japan’s machine tools were shipped to China and the Philippines as war reparations), and by 1955 Japanese tools were just 0.5% of world exports. But Japan was eager to become a major producer of machine tools, and its manufacturers quickly became more capable. Between 1955 and 1960 Japanese machine tool production rose by a factor of 15, and in 1960 American Machinist magazine noted that “Japanese machines for the first time appear to merit recognition and to be competitive with machines of the most advanced industrial nations.” By the end of the 1960s, imports remained a small fraction of the US market (around 10%), but were gaining momentum: between 1964 and 1967, Japanese machine tool exports to the US rose over 1200%.

Dean claimed to have noticed a significant deterioration in Spirit’s workforce after Spirit went through several rounds of mass layoffs in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the huge influx in government funding they received. According to court documents, Dean said that “Spirit laid off or voluntarily retired a large number of senior engineers and mechanics, leaving a disproportionate number of new and less experienced personnel.”

The French were initially gung-ho in support of the Whites against the Bolsheviks, but cooled off after a debacle in Odessa, which they briefly occupied early in 1919 with White allies who were ‘more of a hindrance than a help’.

Within interwar Britain, none were more influential than Ralph Hawtrey, who laid much of the intellectual foundations for the infamous “Treasury View” of the interwar period. From his theorization of the unrelenting tendency toward inflation in credit-based market economies, to his justification of the necessity of “independent” central banks—a proposal which Keynes notably endorsed—Hawtrey’s influence in fashioning the deflationary approach of the British state throughout the 1920s was unrivaled.

In particular, the share of domestic consumption contributing to economic growth declined throughout the 2000s.  In the mid-2010s, the share of private consumption was less than 50 percent of GDP, significantly lower than that of other advanced countries. This growth pattern was associated with rising income inequality and wage depression. The Gini coefficient of disposable income rose, and the wage share of workers fell significantly in the 2000s, though there was some improvement after 2010. Notably, the relative poverty rate reached 17.6 percent, and the share of low-wage workers receiving less than two thirds of the median wage stood at 23.5 percent in 2016. By contrast, the rich fared well, with the top 10 percent income share at about 43 percent of GDP in 2016, second only to the US.

Almost overnight Balcerowicz pushed through legislation to liberalize the economy, remove price controls, make the Polish currency convertible, and eliminate the fiscal deficit by reducing substantially government subsidies to state enterprises. In order to deal with inflation, partial indexation of wages and incomes was introduced. Faced with the reduction in subsidies, state enterprises reduced production and raised their prices. Hyperinflation took hold and, along with it, mass unemployment. In the government, economists advised that this inflation was necessary to bring down real wages and eliminate the money balances built up during the last decade of Communist rule, as shortages of consumer goods left households with incomes but little on which to spend.

The move was hailed as a “historic moment” last week by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who said during a news conference that it marks the first time the country will permanently station forces outside its borders.

We have a whole word here at Gawker, "writering," to describe the tribe of writers whose principal writerly concern is being writerly, and who spend all their time congratulating one another on their writing and promulgating correct rules for writing

What exactly are his credentials? 35,550 tweets? How does he essentially differ from the cranks who, before the Internet, had to vent their spleen by writing letters in green ink? (Elsewhere in the same post, he wrote that his critics had breached their duty to "exchange ideas in a humble and respectful manner.")

He said the country had already made great progress on this path: its debt-to-GDP ratio had fallen to 64 per cent, from 69 per cent when Lindner entered government in 2021. And that, he added, must continue.“For that reason and unless there’s a real need, we can’t just take on more debt than is allowed,” he said.

“The terrorists had a distinct tactical advantage in firepower,” said Yair Ansbacher, 40, a reservist in a counterterrorism unit who fought on Oct. 7. He and his colleagues mainly used pistols, assault rifles and sometimes sniper rifles, he said.

Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and obtained a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service.He was the top U.S. diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilization program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks.

Se pusieron en contacto conmigo algunos ex montoneros, especialmente los que habían intentado rebelarse contra la conducción nacional, Miguel Bonasso, por ejemplo, y varios miembros totalmente desconocidos que habían pasado algún tiempo en la cárcel y me escribieron para decir que el libro les había ayudado a entender lo ocurrido en sus vidas. Para mí, esas cartas, escritas por jóvenes que empezaban a valorar su actuación pasada y la experiencia montonera con un espíritu de autocrítica, tenían más valor que cualquier reseña del libro.

Además, no tenía mucha confianza en las instancias judiciales argentinas durante aquel período. Por lo general, habían sido muy pasivas durante la guerra sucia y ahora, de la noche a la mañana, parecían descubrir los derechos humanos cuando las peores violaciones y las juntas militares ya habían pasado.

-¿Por qué sobrevivieron más montoneros que miembros de otros grupos guerrilleros como el ERP? -Por varias razones. Contaban con más efectivos y simpatizantes que los otros grupos, estaban más metidos en las estructuras políticas y sociales del país, se relacionaron mejor con las tradiciones históricas argentinas, fueron más pragmáticos en algunos sentidos y también sacaron a muchos de sus dirigentes del país a tiempo al endurecerse la guerra sucia. También, hay que recordar que tenían mucho más dinero que los demás, dinero producto de los secuestros.

Soon after the Mitterrand experiment began, however, it started to unravel. As a reaction to the Socialists’ ambitious plan for economic reform, capital started to flee France almost immediately. Despite the imposition of draconian capital controls, the government was unable to halt the flight.

Segunda hipótesis: los relatos de los “sobrevivientes” sobre la vida cotidiana en los centros de detención clandestina vulneran, corroen, contradicen, quebrantan abiertamente, la representación mítica del “detenido-desaparecido” como un “héroe” y “mártir”, como un sujeto no contaminado por la eficacia destructiva de la represión. Tercera: las estrategias de “sobrevivencia” frente al poder concentracionario son sospechadas como “traición”, pues violentan el mandato sacrificial asociado a la figura del “detenido-desaparecido”. Cuarta: la condición política actual del “sobreviviente” es resistida, difícilmente asimilada por las organizaciones de derechos humanos y de izquierda, pues su pasaje por la experiencia concentracionaria es reconocido como expresivo de ciertas formas de negociación con los “represores” que, aún cuando puedan y merezcan interpretarse como silenciosas resistencias de los oprimidos, no han dejado de ser sospechadas como actitudes “colaboracionistas”. Finalmente, la quinta hipótesis sostiene que el “sobreviviente” es visualizado no sólo como un símbolo del “horror” del terrorismo de Estado, sino de la contundente “derrota del proyecto revolucionario”; esto es, como un exponente viviente de dos experiencias sociales negativamente significadas.

De hecho, para Astiz la ESMA no parece haber sido tan solo un infierno, sino un purgatorio, ya que algunos compañeros tuvieron que colaborar con la dictadura en tareas de inteligencia «aún sin haber traicionado».

En 1978, la dictadura militar conducida por Jorge Rafael Videla empezó a mostrar sus primeras resquebrajaduras, debido al aumento de la conflictividad sindical y las huelgas obreras. La Conducción Nacional de Montoneros decidió entonces que era hora de pasar de la «defensiva estratégica» a una Contraofensiva popular. La previsión de los dirigentes montoneros era que, en un ambiente caldeado por las movilizaciones obreras, una serie de acciones militares de propaganda armada iban a colocar a la guerrilla peronista a la cabeza de la movilización, recuperando presencia en las calles y acelerando la descomposición del régimen militar. En última instancia, si tenemos en cuenta las categorías nativas de los propios actores, era el método que les había dado tan buenos resultados entre 1970 y 1973, cuando el asesinato del general Aramburu les otorgó un capital político suficiente como para conducir un movimiento de masas y convertirse en un actor político de peso.

la segunda mitad de los años90, el incremento de las luchas sociales coincidió con un avance de las organizaciones de derechos humanos. Los movimientos sociales que aglutinaban a trabajadores desocupados, familiares de desaparecidos y asambleístas barriales tendieron un puente simbólico hacia los 70, explicando la parábola histórica del neoliberalismo como resultado del golpe militar de 1976. Las organizaciones de Derechos Humanos reivindicaron al militante político que había detrás de cada víctima del terrorismo de Estado, desplazamiento que contribuyó a volver más inteligible al objeto de la guerrilla. En ese sentido, la publicación de La Voluntad en 1997, de Eduardo Anguita y Martín Caparrós, reflejó el intento de sistematizar los testimonios de la experiencia militante y de repolitizar a las víctimas, como una forma de resistencia frente a la cultura neoliberal

Yet Bonasso barely writes. Like many others – including the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, led by Hebe de Bonafini – Bonasso is confident about the new political cycle represented by Kirchnerismo. Like other cultural and political actors in Argentina today, Bonasso's confidence seems to rely primarily on Kircherismo's human rights politics, which has so far been marked by the reopening of trials of the military after the annulments of the so-called ‘Leyes del Perdón’. Perhaps more fundamentally, Bonasso seems confident about the probability of constructing a new ‘we’ for the remains of the Peronist Left. A ‘we’, this time, articulated from within an actual political process. This ‘we’ probably has read Bonasso's books and learnt of a political culture configured around powerful tropes and images of loyalty, betrayal, the Peronist People and its secret archives.

Most fundamentally, Bonasso builds up an interpretation of December 2001 that links it to the 1970s. Those who repressed and those who resisted, Bonasso argues, were linked to the 1970s scene. Rodolfo Walsh's assassin was not in the Plaza de Mayo, but his son was there, and Bonasso accuses him of being involved in the murder of one of the five killed. The thousands of disappeared were not in Plaza de Mayo, but their mothers and children were there, to fight what Bonasso deems ‘secular combat’ (Bonasso, Citation2002: 197).

Bonasso's ability to articulate these tropes appeals to strong, emotive identifications. Perhaps readers also sought to find, at least in narrations, an intensity of the political that had seemed to be definitively lost in the 1980s and 1990s: a symbolic recovery of some postcards of intensity, of years in which the People went to the streets and ‘gave their best sons’.

To that political generation, dispersed throughout the political field, Bonasso offers powerful images of a shared past without obliging it to rethink collective responsibilities. In this sense, the reading of Bonasso's testimonial novels, as Beatriz Sarlo argues, probably entails a tranquillizing effect, a nostalgic one

In so far as the ‘market’ – in this case, accessed via the publisher – does not pursue charitable endeavours, the question that remains is: into which ‘market’ does Bonasso's narrative fit? Who, to put it another way, reads Bonasso? The question of readership and the meanings it generates is a difficult one to track. Nevertheless, the narrative itself – its style, its main tropes – provides us with important clues. Even though the construction of an intergenerational bridge is a key ‘authorial intention’ – as the figuration of ‘the generational reserve’ in La memoria en donde ardía clearly illustrates – Bonasso speaks to his generational peers. It is a generation defined not only by age but also, and fundamentally, by politics. This generation is able to decode shared signs and does not need further explanations of contexts, situations or names.

In other words: Bonasso's narrative articulates a Peronist Left's political culture by activating, in the 1980s and 1990s, central images and tropes encoded in a 1970s tone (Williams, Citation1977: 122). As in other products of the same cultural formation, such as Fernando Solanas's Tango (1985) or even Sur (1987), Bonasso's writing constructs a militant memory and, in so doing, configures a residuality.

With the electoral defeat of Peronism in 1983, the demobilization that followed, and the ensuing spread of ex-militants throughout the various political alternatives – Peronist or not – no room remained for the reconstruction of the Peronist Left in the 1980

The core of Bonasso's project of rescuing hidden voices and secret archives in the 1980s and 1990s is to locate the Peronist People, its ‘best sons’, and its main traitors and enemies. In so doing, Bonasso's narrative attempts to reconstruct an intergenerational bridge, to secure the transmission of a militant memory which otherwise would be lost or diminished by the ‘discourse of the renegades’. Bonasso's militant memory, whose basic premise is not to discuss the politics of the 1970s Peronist Left directly, is nonetheless a memory of defeat, and it is loaded with bitterness. This memory is an attempt to provide a re-created political culture with its values, symbols and traditions.

An archive of ‘the People’ and its resistance is not complete without an archive of both the powerful and the treacherous. The memory of the People's politics is impossible without the archive of the anti-People, because they are both terms of the ‘central contradiction’. Bordenave's archive, homemade and depressing, metaphorically points to the reinscription of memory and history by a son of the People. To a degree, Bordenave's archive works, in the narration, as a counterpoint to the recovery of the hidden voices of the rank-and-file militants, the People's ‘sons’.

Recuerdo de la muerte begins the search for hidden voices. Dri's testimony concerning the experience of the dictatorship's concentration camps, in this case, alternates with a series of five chapters called ‘Lejanías’. Interrupting the fluidity of the narrative, these chapters evoke, also from Dri's perspective, the story of his militant formation from September 1955, when his father was an eyewitness to the bombings of Plaza de Mayo, to his increasing involvement in the Peronist Left. It is noteworthy that Bonasso basically represents Dri, a middle-class young man whose political formation took place in the province of Chaco, during his ‘rank-and-file’ experience. Bonasso removes Dri from Buenos Aires – and the ‘modernist’ 1960s – as well as from the 1970s Montoneros' leadership, to which Dri ultimately belonged.

The division of labour within that friendship condenses what was most promising of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. According to Bonasso, the Peronist feeling and tradition paradigmatically embodied in Dardo Cabo might guarantee ‘real interchange’ with an ideologically radicalized middle class and, thereby, the construction of a wider popular alliance. Yet that friendship was unique: the inclusion of the term ‘real’ reinforces the sense of failure of such a relationship on a more general level. The emphasis on that friendship throughout Bonasso's narrative points to the fact that not all of the ‘popular camp’ was willing to abandon its conservative stance and even less of the radicalized middle class sought an authentic approach to the Peronist People.

It is this ‘end of the historical Peronist identity’ that entails the inability to define the frontiers between the loyalist and the traitor

Bonasso, first reorganizes the dichotomy, he then links it to the context of the 1970s and, finally, he translates it into the 1980s and 1990s political and cultural landscape. Along with the re-enactment of this set of values, Bonasso's writings also emphasize one of the central symbols of the Peronist political culture: ‘the Peopl

Bonasso, according to Sarlo, cannot overcome the logics of immediacy, which would demand a shift away from the position of witness-narrator in order to understand that past rather than romanticize it (Sarlo, Citation1997, Citation2005). In a similar fashion, Hugo Vezzetti (Citation2002) expresses concerns over the construction of a heroic Montoneros past and the almost ontological impossibility of rethinking the 1970s in Bonasso's narrative. Sarlo and Vezzetti emphasize one of the key purposes that underlie Bonasso's narrative: to construct a militant memory of the 1970s. Equally important, they also identify a central drawback: his reconstruction of the 1970s, which almost entirely relies on his own condition as ‘witness’, does not expand our historical knowledge of that period.

Many critics have highlighted Bonasso's apparent inability to move beyond a 1970s perspective, and have interpreted this inability more generally as a symptom of the difficulties the Peronist Left has in both comprehending its own political responsibilities for the tragic finale of the revolutionary experiences of the 1970s, and of discussing post-dictatorship issues related to mourning and the memory of state repression.

“We know what was announced but we do not know what exactly was signed with the suppliers,” he said. “We will not announce that we will be cutting all the contracts that were signed, even if we were also surprised to see Poland buying everything from Americans and Koreans, and not from our European partners.”

Some European defence executives are also concerned about the impact of South Korea’s state-backed push on the region’s plans to shore up industrial sovereignty in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. “State subsidised companies coming into Europe, setting up factories and pushing for volume production is not a concern in the short-term and is helpful to Ukraine,” said one executive. “But in the long term, there is a risk these companies could outcompete domestic players with less strong balance sheets.”

Korean exporters are also assisted by the government, including its willingness to step in and place orders so as to keep production lines “hot” in the absence of orders from abroad.

Because South Korea produces armaments at a larger scale than many of its western competitors, it can offer better value for money on assets such as tanks and howitzers and lower-end fighter jets.

Hanwha Aerospace recorded the biggest rise in new orders, with its backlog soaring from $2.4bn in 2020 to $15.2bn at the end of 2022, according to the FT analysis. The company, the country’s biggest arms producer, which makes the K-9 self-propelled howitzer tank, has benefited significantly from Ukraine-related orders, in particular from Poland. South Korea has catapulted up the ranks of arms sellers over the past two years because of significant export orders, particularly from eastern European countries. It was the world’s ninth-largest seller of arms in 2022, up from 31st place in 2000, according to Sipri.

Svyrydenko said Ukraine would prioritise defence and debt servicing which meant “there’s a huge risk of underfunding of certain social sectors”. Kyiv might have to delay paying wages for 500,000 civil servants and 1.4mn teachers and benefits for 10mn pensioners if foreign aid did not come through, she said.

En 2019, Villarruel acompañó a Javier Ortega Smith, el secretario general del ultraderechista Vox, en una presentación en el Círculo Militar. “Me atrevo a vaticinar que puede haber un 30 por ciento de los argentinos que estén buscando a alguien que realmente los represente”, dijo el segundo de Santiago Abascal durante su estadía porteña.Villarruel es la presidenta honoraria de la Fundación Oíd Mortales, que firmó la Carta de Madrid, el documento fundacional de una alianza de agrupaciones que orbitan alrededor de Vox en España e Hispanoamérica. Allí denuncian que parte de la región está “secuestrada” por regímenes totalitarios de inspiración comunista

Según Mercado, Villarruel comenzó su activismo en la Asociación Argentinos por la Memoria Completa, que cayó en desgracia después de que una investigación periodística expuso que su máxima dirigente, Karina Mujica, ejercía la prostitución en Mar del Plata.

. In recent months the rouble has actually appreciated, in part because officials introduced capital controls.

MDA: The Fernández government had no epic narrative. Milei could establish a political horizon because Peronism lacked one. Peronists tried to maintain their classic bastions, but those bastions were void of content. When, for example, schools couldn’t open during the pandemic, they offered no narrative argument for that decision. Kids, mothers, and teachers alike suffered a lot, and we failed to explain the reasons for closing the schools. We lost the banner of education during that time.

Since democracy’s return, Argentina has emerged as an international human rights standard-bearer, holding military leadership accountable in its justice system and pursuing policies that center historical remembrance. That made Buenos Aires somewhat of a regional outlier: Nearby Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were also shaken by repressive military rule, but those countries’ reckonings with the past have been much more limited.

He pointed to 1989, when protests over hyperinflation brought down the government of Raul Alfonsin, who presided over Argentina’s transition into a democracy and the 1985 trial of the dictatorship’s military leaders.

In 1998, Japan announced another stimulus package of 16 trillion yen; however, actual spendingand tax measures were only 12 trillion at best (this number also included 1.5 trillion of publicworks spending the central government requested of local governments without providing thefunding) (Posen 1998, 51). It amounted to merely 1.1 percent to 1.6 percent of GDP “dependingon local government participation” (Posen 1998, 53). Posen (1998, 44) estimates that the actualstimulative portion of the stimulus packages of the 1990s amounted to “23 trillion yen, or 4.5percent of a year’s GDP

Today's report by the Russian Ministry of Defense lists 445 Ukrainian casualties in the Donetzk direction, mostly around Bakhmut, and only 100 casualties on the Zaporozhye front in the south. Yesterday's report had 305 versus 35. Last week's summary listed 1,455 Ukrainian troops killed and wounded around Bakhmut and 515 in the southern direction. There was no discernible progress in either direction.

One senior officer invoked the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Scott Swift, as wanting to use the region as a “testing grounds” for the Navy.Reached by phone, Swift said he was a “believer in the LCS” and acknowledged that he had encouraged the Navy to test new weapons systems in the Pacific. But he emphasized that it was not an order to deploy ships at any cost.“We made it clear if you want to take them off line, take them off line, but I am not surprised that people further down the chain didn’t feel they had that option,” he said. “The offer could have been perceived as an order, or taken advantage of by those that wanted to push harder to get a win out of LCS.”

Contrary to what Clark observed in Denmark, the various weapons systems would not be easy to swap out. The Navy hadn’t factored in the weeks it could take for all the contractors, sailors and others who were needed to fly in from around the world to help outfit the vessels for different missions.

Even the commanding officer, Michael Atwell, had “few opportunities to gain valuable at sea experience” before his deployment, according to a later Navy investigation.

In fact, the LCS was on its way to becoming one of the Navy’s worst nightmares — and Mabus was its biggest cheerleader.Better known for his political acumen than his military experience, Mabus served three years in the Navy in the early ’70s, including time at sea as a lieutenant junior grade on board the USS Little Rock.

But they have their own nasty surprises to worry about. A tank platoon commander named Vladyslav recalls how the first time a Ukrainian tried to use a tank radio, the Russians immediately zeroed in on it and buried it in artillery. Since then, they learned never to use communications devices more powerful than a hand-held. Enemy troops are too-well positioned to punish any slip-ups.

The positions themselves were ruins, with few places to hide. It's dangerous to stick a limb out from what cover remained, let alone go to the bathroom. Because the Russians in this area are relatively sharp, with professional troops and special forces in addition to conscripts from prisons or the general population. They’re well-screened and show little signs of fear.

Furthermore, the translators that are used often lack a military background and fail to convey accurate commands or responses between instructors and trainees, Zgurets added.

Like most units, the 32nd is starved for vehicles and artillery ammo. Most of the good equipment is deployed to the counteroffensive on the Zaporizhzhia front.

Soldiers from the 32nd are open about how in over their heads they often feel. The infantrymen talk about being outmatched by the competent and seemingly fearless Russian troops they saw on this axis of attack.

Before January, the 32nd didn't exist, and the vast majority of its soldiers were civilians who had never shot anyone. Many did not want to be in the army.

Ihor's company is part of the 32nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, one of the new brigades that Ukraine began staffing at the start of the year. It's also one of the few brigades that are set to hold the northeastern front, while the majority of troops and equipment is stationed on the southern front where Ukraine's slowly pushing forward.

The attack was well-prepared. The Russian troops scouted out the position with their seemingly limitless drones. When they struck, their mortars zeroed in on what cover remained. A shell dropped into the living room of the house Ihor and a fellow soldier were occupying. They survived because they happened to be in the hall.

The annual flow of investment spending is relatively straightforward to measure, but the same cannot be said of depreciation. In the United States, the ugly truth is that all official capital stock measures have, for years, been based on a single set of estimates of asset depreciation rates produced by two academics, Frank C. Wykoff and Charles R. Hulten, more than forty years ago.

Russsia’s new fx reserves, held particularly in Hong Kong and the UAE, provide it with huge purchasing power with which to break the import sanctions regime. As far as imports critical to the Russian war effort are concerned the figures are dramatic.

“This facility is a laboratory for creative thinking . . . It’s not a building, we do not build buildings at our university, we build ideas and turn them into reality.”

You might get a good sense of the kind of university Gordon Gee wants to build by taking a university-run publicity tour of Reynolds Hall, as state lawmakers did in May 2022. The construction of the building cost $100 million, $10 million of which was donated by Robert Reynolds, an alumnus with a seat on the Board of Governors. To obtain the rest of the capital for construction and other facilities repairs, WVU issued two series of bonds. Together, the outstanding balance on those bonds totals $127,940,000 at an interest rate of just over 3 percent.

Kyiv is eager for more combined arms training that involves exercises with tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, infantry and drones to more closely replicate conditions that exist on the battlefield, but such exercises can be risky. He said that western nations understandably had low tolerance for accidents but that their approach “doesn’t mesh well with [Kyiv’s] requirements for trainees”.

A similar problem has reared its head in Denmark, where about eight Ukrainian pilots and dozens of support staff are being trained to fly F-16 fighters at Skrydstrup air base.

But they also said that the age and ability of the soldiers they are sent varies wildly, as Ukrainian commanders on the front line are often unwilling to spare their best men. One volunteer who turned up in Germany was 71 years old.

By the end of the year, 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers will have received training in Germany, part of a broader western drive to equip the Ukrainian armed forces with tanks, artillery and air defence systems that has seen 63,000 recruits dispatched by Kyiv to attend training camps in Europe and the US.

Teaching inexperienced soldiers how to operate a tank on the front line in just six weeks was never going to be easy.

the murder of John Lennon outside the Dakota (just a few blocks away from the Sullivanians) provided Newton with grounds for renewed panic. Proclaiming that he, too, was in danger of assassination, he had a security desk installed at the ‘Kremlin’ (as the older children were now privately calling the main building), and ordered a bodyguard detail to protect him and Harvey whenever they went downtown to the theatre, where a one-way mirror was installed so that the audience could be scanned for potential assassins. Harvey began work on a film about the nuclear arms race, and soon became convinced that the CIA was after her. A steel-walled, bazooka-proof bunker was built for her in the Catskills, with a trapdoor to an underground passageway leading to a permanently stationed getaway car.

Most corporations just house different lines of business, and are focused on their customers, investors, and workers. Monopolists, however, are politically oriented. And this makes sense, monopolists don’t have to think about rivals, they instead worry about government. According to one study, the consequence of mergers that consolidate industries is that lobbying spending skyrockets. Illumina does do medical technology, but deSouza clearly spent his time running a political operation to protect the firm’s franchise. The firm is the fourth largest spender on lobbying among biotech firms, outgunned only by much larger giants Pfizer, Roche, and Amgen.

Reddit has, to date, raised $1.3 billion in venture capital funding, almost all of which came after the company sold to Conde Nast for $10 million in 2006, before being spun off into its own independent enterprise in 2011. It would go on to raise $200 million in 2017 at a $1.8 billion valuation, with a ballooning headcount of 300 people. Between 2019 and 2021 it would raise a further $1.1 billion, growing to around 2000 people, always dancing with the concept of — but never quite reaching — profitability.

If they saw something they liked, they assumed it was theirs for the taking. Logan Pearsall Smith remembered Bradley and Cooper visiting his sister’s home and admiring a picture by Charles Condor hanging on a wall. Since they thought the work ‘expressed in a way they felt unique the inspiration of their life’, they swiftly concluded that it ‘belonged to them; and when they left the cottage they took it with them and hung it in their Richmond home. They perpetrated this appropriation in pious obedience to that law of possession, which, inscribed in Heaven, if not on earth, decrees that objects of beauty belong to those who love them most.’

Only the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn complained, in a letter to Klaus Mann: “Do you think history is particularly active in French seaside resorts?”. This is an odd question, because it sounds as if Benn had really had too much of Marxist-inclined German writers occupying the moral high ground. But it does have some critical force, helping to pinpoint two European ways of being culturally modern – a New Man, a New Woman – in the early twentieth century. You could be a ruthless communist theoretician. Or you could be a sun-worshipping, god-building, car-driving, sex-crazed, drug-addled individualist.

The head of Army Sustainment Command explained, in response to the report, that the service’s funding level for APS maintenance in Kuwait was 30% of the validated requirements in fiscal 2023 — about $27.8 million of the $91.3 million requirement.

By contrast, Indonesia is strategically using its nickel reserves to move up the value chain of clean energy technologies. President Joko Widodo banned export of unprocessed nickel in 2020 and began offering incentives for production of EV batteries on domestic soil. In response, Korean companies Hyundai and LG onshored a battery facility, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) now has a processing plant, and Ford and Volkswagen also have plans. Jokowi now wants to go further and produce electric cars in Indonesia. His government is persuading Elon Musk to onshore Tesla, instead of their current $5 billion deal to import battery nickel.

The Finance Ministry on Monday hired five banks to help sell its first dollar-denominated bonds in six years.

The search will focus on countries where funding is prospectively plentiful, such as the Middle East and Norway, the person said. It will also maintain benchmark bond sales denominated in euros and US dollars -- as well as discuss vendor financing with South Korea and the US for defense spending, according to the person.

The commission also advises Poland to “ensure the sustainability of the pension system by taking measures to increase the effective retirement age and reforming preferential pension schemes”. The current government lowered the retirement age when it came to power, reversing the previous government’s reforms.

In a set of policy recommendations, the EU’s executive also called for Poland to limit future spending growth, fulfil the milestones agreed with Brussels to unlock frozen funds, increase investment in energy transition, improve the efficiency of social spending by targeting the poorest households, and raise the retirement age.

After high yields forced Poland to scrap a bond sale in October, former defence minister and opposition politician Tomasz Siemoniak wrote on Twitter that “the defence ministry is buying without a plan and apparently without money”.

During the Weimar hyperinflation the rise in German prices far exceeded the relative increase in the number of paper marks in circulation. After the currency stabilization of November 1923, which restricted future note issuance and put Germany’s finances on a more stable footing, inflation dropped like a stone, even as the amount of money in circulation rose. Only the dramatic collapse in the public’s inflation expectations can explain this outcome.

But I realize now that I have a second job, which is evaluation, or gatekeeping, or, most specifically, point-guarding. I’m supposed to award "points" based on what students do in my class. Students try to acquire as many points as they can, and I try to stop them from obtaining points too easily. My employers expect me to ensure that, at the end of the semester, some students have more points than other students. At Columbia Business School, this was explicit: only half of students were supposed to receive an “H,” the highest grade.

Some readers may be disconcerted by the lack of context, given that the vast majority of the desaparecidos were murdered in their own countries, not as part of Plan Condor.

But even without the entitlement of a superiority complex, it can feel easy to unload on a stranger whose training says they essentially have to listen to you. For Caitlin and the cable-company employee, “it felt like there was nothing to lose for me by absolutely going nuclear”, she says. “There’s no social credit in the relationship. I feel guilty about this, but it was a situation in which I could unload a whole bunch of frustration onto someone.”

But outbursts at service workers specifically don’t generally happen just because that person is simply in front of you, says Morrison. “People that are working those jobs often do not have a lot of power,” she says, “and so they become easier targets”.

In Narrow Rooms (1978), after committing an unspeakable but consensual act of violence on him

Muppets in Moscow: The unexpected crazy true story of making ‘Sesame Street’ in Russia, places us smack in the middle of the turbulent 1990s, but views them from an intriguing angle: the campaign to bring Sesame Street to Russian audiences. The television producer and film-maker Natasha Lance Rogoff writes with infectious enthusiasm, at times veering towards a caricature of the can-do American personality. We are on her side as she lobbies the Sesame Street establishment in New York and the new media powerbrokers in Moscow; we root for her as she tries to win over Russian TV professionals who are sceptical, at best, about the suitability of American-style television for Russian children. We cheer her on as she falls in love with and eventually marries Ken, a mensch and a Princeton economist.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told a House panel March 29 that a key tool to righting the Navy’s shipbuilding woes is “increasing legal immigration.”

Pentagon bottom line: the engine has to run twice as hot as designed. That wears it out more quicky, which requires more maintenance. That’s a big reason why only 29.3% of the Pentagon’s 564 already-delivered F-35s were able to fly all their missions in February. For the math-challenged among us, that means barely one in four F-35s is fully ready to fly and fight. To combat this, the F-35 program has launched what it is calling its “War on Readiness” (PDF). Technically speaking, of course, it’s already winning that war. What it should be launching is a War on Unreadiness.

But it’s not just haphazardly formatted messages and borderline digital harassment (one Mothership client emailed me upwards of eleven times a day in the lead-up to Election Day 2020) that distinguish the Mothership formula—their work occasionally drifts into outright deceit. Their emails often use the “From” to dupe the recipient: one message from Stop Republicans PAC, an organization I’d never even heard of, sent an email with a “From” line labeled as “⚑ Flight Confirmed,” while the subject line included my email address followed by “Your flight confirmation-ZWCLXT 20NOV.” Of course, the email had nothing to do with a flight I was taking; it was a reference to Mike Pence flying to Atlanta to rally for Republicans in the 2020 Georgia Senate run-offs.

Prodded by military industry lobbyists — and the hundreds of retired high-ranking military officers they have hired to their sales and marketing teams — the government has instead mostly focused on buying new ships, planes and other extremely high-priced pieces of equipment, where the major contractors make most of their money.

t was a ten-hour drive to the town where Doc’s team was based, not far from Pavlivka, a frontline village about fifty miles north of Mariupol.

Among the more sobering realizations facing the French military is that Russian forces in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine at times fired as many heavy artillery shells in a week as French manufacturer Nexter says its Caesar 155mm field guns used in 13 years of training and deployments to Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali and Iraq.

In another nondescript suburb of the capital, UA Dynamics, a small company started by a group who served in the Donbas after 2014, is producing an attack drone called the Punisher. It can fly for just 1.5 hours and 45 km, but its electric motor is silent and gives off no thermal signal, according to Maxim Subbotin, a co-founder. The drone doesn’t need to stream traceable live images back to base because target coordinates are programmed into the drone before takeoff.

With only a 3 meter wingspan and a tiny engine, Skyeton’s drone has a radar print the size of a bird’s, making it hard to detect; it has suffered fewer than 10 losses among the three dozen vehicles in use since the start of the war, according to the company. About half were bought by the Defense Ministry, and half via private crowdfunding, said a senior executive, who asked not to be named.

Raybirds are built by former light aircraft producer Skyeton. In 2014, as government forces battled a Russia-supported insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, it turned to making UAVs for the military and emergency services.

Still more sophisticated is the Raybird-3, a reconnaissance drone system that costs between $1 million and $2 million and sits near the top of the food chain in the nation’s burgeoning Unmanned Aerial Vehicle industry.

Some of the equipment is essential to survival on the battlefield and needs constant replacement because it is quickly destroyed, the officer said, singling out surveillance drones and the pickup trucks that allow force maneuvers and medical evacuation.

The rest of his book investigates how trucking companies use various subsidies and grant programs to train new drivers, more often than not at their own in-house schools, or as my fellow professionals refer to them, “CDL mills.” When not getting money from local and state governments, or Uncle Sam, many trucking fleets operate their own credit companies, which loan potential drivers the money, often before they clear the barest of background or skills checks. These loans come with all of the predictable strings attached, including 25 percent or higher interest rates, and various penalties for failure to pay, or exclusivity contracts which require drivers to work long enough for the lending company to balance this particularly insidious set of scales. The striking reality of becoming a trucker in America today is that even before a newly minted trucker gets to enjoy the “freedom of the open road,” many a driver is made, in effect, an indentured servant to the company that employs him.

El general Onganía, en presencia de los otros dos comandantes en Jefe, preguntó a Lanusse qué repercusión habían tenido sus palabras ante el generalato. La respuesta fue cauta pero sincera: “Las conclusiones que sacaron los generales fueron, por supuesto, variadas, pero puedo ubicar, dentro de la amplia gama de puntos de vista, a dos sectores: el sector de los generales que no entendieron lo que usted quiso decir y el sector de los generales que están en total desacuerdo con lo que usted dijo.”

El último mes del gobierno de Illia comenzó con una mala noticia para el peronismo: el jueves 2 de junio, La Nación publicó que “al justicialismo le fue revocada la personería jurídica”. La Cámara Electoral, en consonancia con la Corte Suprema de la Nación, sostuvo que “no es posible admitir en la vida democrática partidos que no incorporen a sus propias estructuras los mismos principios representativos que públicamente defienden” y que “hacer lo contrario sería invitar a los enemigos del sistema a gozar de sus beneficios para destruirlos desde adentro”.

El viernes 1º de julio (1966), a las 8 de la mañana, Buenos Aires reiteraba su imagen de todos los días… A las 11, los comunicados fueron reemplazados por una proclama: Frente a la ineficacia de un gobierno que, luego de estancar el país, lo había llevado a la más grave crisis económica y financiera de su historia, promoviendo el caos social y quebrando la solidaridad nacional, las fuerzas armadas se habían hecho cargo del poder para asegurar la existencia misma de la Nación. Finalmente, a las dos de la tarde, se informaba escuetamente que un prestigioso jefe, retirado desde hace unos meses del servicio activo, había sido invitado por las autoridades militares a ocupar la jefatura del Estado. Los hechos, en realidad, podrán tener algunas variantes de detalle, pero una historia similar a ésa puede cortar en dos a 1966”. El semanario erró por tres días. Como veremos, Arturo Illia fue derrocado el 28 de junio de 1966.

A fines de julio el gobierno radical reincorpora a personal militar “derrotado” por los azules en los enfrentamientos de 1962 y 1963. Entre otros el coronel Luis Perlinger, que pasaría a la historia por el destrato que le infligió al presidente Arturo Illia la noche de su derrocamiento y a su supuesta relación con el PRT-ERP, según fuentes castrenses de la época (estuvo preso entre 1976 y 1983

El viernes 21, es asesinado el dirigente Teodoro Ponce de la UOM de Rosario y Secretario Adjunto de la CGT. El 22 -siempre Montoneros-ataca con granadas el Batallón 3 de Infantería de Marina en Ensenada, Buenos Aires. En esas horas también eran atacados a balazos los dirigentes de petroleros Adolfo Cavalli (falleció) y el sindicalista portuario (SUPA), Eustaquio Tolosa. Ambos militaban en la ortodoxia peronista. El miércoles 26 de febrero, fue secuestrado en General Belgrano, el Cónsul de los Estados Unidos en la provincia de Córdoba, John Patrick Egan. Su cuerpo fue encontrado 48 horas más tarde en un baldío por una comisión policial. El cadáver se encontraba con las manos atadas y mostraba un tiro en su ojo derecho. La organización Montoneros se adjudicó el hecho en un “Parte de Guerra”, en el que informa que lo realizado la “Columna Emilio Maza” (uno de los fundadores de la organización y asesino de Pedro E. Aramburu). El texto del Parte de Guerra sostiene: “Con esta acción contribuimos a fortalecer la consigna ‘liberación o dependencia’, continuadora de aquélla, en momentos en que un gobierno que se dice peronista profundizó la dependencia, sometiendo al pueblo a la explotación económica y a la represión con la policía y el ejército, mientras entrega a nuestra Patria a los yanquis”.

Más tarde, equivocadamente, se sostuvo que ese comando pertenecía al ERP 22 de agosto. En realidad había sido Montoneros y el asesinato era un elemento de presión más sobre los ejecutivos de Bunge y Born para que pagaran los 60 millones de dólares que exigían de rescate para liberar a los hermanos Juan y Jorge Born. Los mismos mensajes mafiosos que les hicieron perder la vida al sindicalista José Ignacio Rucci y el ex Ministro Arturo Mor Roig. En esas mismas horas Montoneros secuestró en el gran Buenos Aires a Carlos Gagey, un ejecutivo de la empresa REHEM SAIAR.

Paradójicamente, la guerra de Malvinas no sólo abortó la posible salida argentina del NOAL. Obligó a un régimen tan ortodoxamente occidentalista como el de Galtieri a recurrir a ese foro multilateral con el objetivo de encontrar aliados en su disputa con Gran Bretaña

The Biden administration has long asserted that American-made M1 Abrams tanks — with their needs for specific fuel, frequent maintenance and spare parts, transport and training — are ill-suited to battle in eastern Ukraine, where supply lines could easily be cut off.A Pentagon spokeswoman, Sabrina Singh, told reporters on Thursday that “it just doesn’t make sense” to provide Ukraine with Abrams tanks “at this moment” because they use jet fuel and are difficult to maintain. She said the Germans must make up their own minds about the Leopard 2s.

Experts believe there are an estimated 2,000 German-made Leopard 2 tanks in use by at least 13 European militaries.

The debate over whether either country will allow their tanks onto Ukraine’s battlefields has been brewing for months. But after British officials gave word last week that they would send a platoon of Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine, demands have amped up for Berlin and Washington to quickly follow suit.

The output cuts agreed by the OPEC+ group of oil producers in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic appear to have resulted in permanent losses of production capacity for the two west African giants. Neither has been able to restore the output that was shut between April and June 2020, even as their targets began to rise in early 2021.

We’ve recently done some research on the trucking industry in Brazil and China, in which we found that services like route planning and automated pricing are far more widespread in middle income countries than advanced ones. Just yesterday, I read an interview with the CEO of Uber Freight in which he said that they account for 2 percent of all freight moved in the US market. Why have these digital disruptors made such quicker strides in poorer economies? 

I do not know any ‘absolutely reliable’ source for the number of UAVs, UCAVs and loitering PGMs manufactured by Iran and pressed into service. Think to have read somewhere that about 50 each of Mohajer-4, Mohajer-6, and Shahed-129s were manufactured, but their series production is going on at least since 2016, and — at least in part — dependable on availability of engines made by Rotax of Austria. Thus, I doubt anybody except Tehran knows exactly.

The rechazo campaign also made ruthless and effective use of misinformation about the draft constitution’s content. Voters were repeatedly told that it would permit abortions up to the last minute – evangelical churches played a key role in spreading this falsehood – and that it would remove the right to home-ownership, force everyone to use the public healthcare system and deprive workers of control over their pensions. The draft constitution’s historic recognition of Chile’s Indigenous groups also touched some deep nationalist, and racist, nerves. It wasn’t only the right that was troubled: even centre-left figures such as the former president Ricardo Lagos depicted the concept of ‘plurinationality’ as a threat to national unity (‘We’ve had one flag and one national anthem for some time,’ he told a radio host in April). The polarisation around Indigenous issues helps explain why the rechazo side secured some of its highest votes in Araucanía, where the Chilean security services have been called in to tamp down Mapuche resistance to logging companies.

The actions, stemming from an executive order signed by President Joe Biden on Monday, are the latest and perhaps most aggressive attempt by the U.S. to hold the former Sandinista guerrilla leader accountable for his continued attacks on human rights and democracy in the Central American country as well his continued security cooperation with Russia.Previous rounds of sanctions have focused on Ortega, his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, and members of their family and inner circle. But none of those moves have managed to loosen Ortega’s grip on power The latest target by Ortega’s government: the Roman Catholic Church. In August, security raided the residence of a bishop, detaining him and several other clergy.

Oil and gas are not Russia’s only exports, of course. There are other raw materials: grain, coal, nickel, aluminium and other metals. In each of these areas, Russia recovered from the economic disarray of the 1990s to become a significant player in the global market in the 2000s and 2010s – in the case of agriculture thanks in large part to targeted state support

the mating behaviour of great crested grebes,

the us offered Japanese companies access to a seemingly infinite external market

In mid-October, they begin to issue demi-season and winter uniforms, but only worn ones and there are no sizes, I refuse to receive worn uniforms that are not in size, because of which relations with the command begin to worsen, they don’t like rebels here. After swearing with the company commander, I go and buy myself a pea coat. The company commander begins to take revenge by shoving into the outfits in a day. At the beginning of November, everyone is sent on forced leave, because. the president announced “non-working days”, despite the fact that I am still on probation and I am not entitled to the main vacation. I am going on vacation for 15 days, but I’m not going anywhere. jumps are promised every few days, but I need to make a program. Salary 27t.r. it is almost impossible to arrange a sub-lease, so far no one has carried out the delivery of physio for newly arrived contractors, if I still don’t have time to make four jumps, then the whole next year z.p. will be 27 tr.

Contractors most often simply ignore orders to do some kind of cleaning, which is why conscripts are forced to mow grass or carry something uselessly somewhere. Therefore, the conscripts look even more filthy, and given that they are given a uniform that is already worn and even tattered ... it does not at all look like 56DShP of the 1993-2003 model.

The next day we go to shooting, we get up at five in the morning, we line up for three hours and wait for the Kamaz, we finally eat, we arrive at 12:00, we line up, we stand, the command at the training ground does not like how some piece of paper is filled out, the major tears the sheet and throws at our young deputy politician in front of the formation, with some hysterical cries yells that there will be no shooting because of this, the whole formation stands and contemptuously looks at the hysterical major with sympathy for the young starley, who is repulsed by any sensible initiative and desire to tie his life with the army. As a result, after another hour, the shooting starts, the time is 13:00, the heat is 50+, there is no water, we initially drove before lunch, now it turns out that we are here for the whole day, plus night shooting, we eat back at one in the morning, dehydrated and having eaten one dry ration for 3-4 men. Just do not, I need to fill in about the fact that it tempers and makes us stronger. The health of more than one person has not been beneficially affected by the lack of normal sleep, food and water. All this only takes away health, the health of people whose charter says that they are obliged to monitor their health, on whose health the country's defense depends. This is not a hardening of the body, this is nothing more than sabotage of one's own army.

Finally, our young Deputy Polit of the company, on his own initiative, conducts a lesson in tactics for us, despite the fact that the command tried to send everyone to another useless job, on the principle of just pretending to be puzzled.

Being present at the morning formation, finally in shape, thinking that now everything will be more interesting, I begin to be horrified by the fact that all this is fucking understand what it looks like, two torn flags of the Russian Federation and the Airborne Forces are developing on the parade ground, the anthem is sadly playing from the column, and half of the military does not sing it. From 2007 to 2010, I served a contract in the 46th Armed Forces in Chechnya, until the age of 15 I lived in the 56th Airborne Division, constantly traveled with my father to the training ground, but what I saw now looked like just a crowd of people in military uniform. After the divorce, at which my company commander finally appeared, he takes us newcomers with him to sort out some garbage in a container under lock and key, these were some spare parts and rags that he did not have enough, and soon there should be a check and he had to count it all and he took about 10 of us with him, without even getting to know the new arrivals, there were five of us. As a result, for several hours at 10 we shift some kind of garbage from one place to another, I remember that even picking up it was disgusting. I thought, well, it probably won't be like that later. After all, back in 2007, on an urgent basis, in training, we had daily classes from morning to afternoon, theory, tactics, physio. So many years and reforms have passed, for sure now everything has become better. A few days later, in which there is nothing to remember, the company commander, after a divorce at 18:00, decided to get acquainted all the same indicatively. The fact is that on that day I expressed dissatisfaction about the indifference of the commander and one spy told him that the new contractors were dissatisfied with the commander. The company commander introduced himself demonstratively before the formation and began to approach us one by one, we called the rank, surname, marital status and our city. When it was my turn and I said that from Kamyshin, I stand and think about the fact that I don’t have to swear with my superiors, so I try to laugh it off. I looked at him, we are the same age for 33 years, but he looks much older than me, with sly eyes, coupled with being overweight.

I get acquainted with comrades in misfortune who, like me, came here having signed a contract, and now they are left to their own devices.

Moreover, a policy that simply pushes logistics without any “pull” or supervision to ensure distribution according to prioritization of need simply does not work. A handful of US contractors in country could have made a world of difference in this regard—and it is hard to imagine that the deployment of a few personnel tasked with coordinating distribution would constitute a red line triggering World War III. Instead, the Territorial Defense Forces, the Ukrainian reserves in the west of the country, are often well-equipped while units on the front line go short of everything. Is this corruption? Perhaps—but from what I have seen it is simply a case of commanders trying to take care of their own, not realizing that there is only a limited amount of US largesse to go around.

The need for long-range precision fires is one example. The United States has made little attempt to meet this requirement, beyond the much-heralded M777 howitzer, which is in fact obsolete. The M777 is outranged by Russian rocket artillery, which has a proven ability to respond with counterbattery fires within five minutes—less time than it takes a battery of M777s to displace.  There has been no serious discussion of providing the Ukrainians with the Multiple Launch Rocket System or long-range strike drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper or even its older cousin the MQ-1 Predator, perhaps because both these platforms cost considerably more than the TB-2—the unit cost of an MQ-9 is over $30 million.

Troops in more specialized units have been issued U.S.-supplied encrypted radios and can speak to one another unhindered, one soldier said, but the radio’s high output means the Russians can find the locations they are broadcasting from.“This is why we stopped communicating and only communicated the necessary minimum, such as if an evacuation was needed or an urgent help,” the soldier, who goes by the name Raccoon, added. Only about a quarter of the secure radios that Ukraine needs have been sent by the United States and other allies, a Western adviser in Ukraine said, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive military details.Soldiers say the most reliable equipment they’ve received, though in small quantities, has been Starlink satellite internet, enabled by a small square-like antenna that can be connected to act much like any Wi-Fi network.

This breakdown between troops and units, where a shared understanding of what’s happening on the battlefield is difficult for any standing military, has been exacerbated by Russia’s technologically superior military. Not only can Moscow’s troops unleash far more artillery fire, but they also have proven effective at jamming communications.The General said that his two off-the-shelf radios were jammed constantly.

The General radioed the commander of the Ukrainian army unit he was attached to and asked if he could call the artillery battery. But the artillery battery needed the tanks’ coordinates.The General did not have proper maps, so he asked the platoon that had requested the artillery fire to fly a drone to get the coordinates. That didn’t go so well either.“As I was finding out if it was possible to call artillery support, the drone ran out of power,” the General said. “Then the generator broke, so they could not charge it, and we ran out of time, I don’t really remember now. And the tank was driving around as before, pounding us.”

A Ukrainian platoon needed artillery to fire on the tanks but could not reach the commander, either because their radios were jammed or they didn’t have a relationship with the commander, so they called the General.

The grinding war in the east has slowly bled the Ukrainian military of manpower, with officials estimating there are up to 200 casualties a day. As a result, the front lines are increasingly defended by a constant rotation of units composed of less well-trained troops. Those forces, often from the National Guard and Territorial Defense, are placed into the larger brigades, and are quickly told to dig in and defend.

At the meeting of CEOs earlier this month, industry executives voiced reservations about increasing weapons production. One chief executive said that when the Ukraine war winds down, they do not want to be stuck with warehouses full of unsellable inventory without a guaranteed buyer, three people familiar with the discussion said.

nlike List, Carey was not enamored of Britain’s achievements: he spent a great deal of time describing the terrible conditions of the working classes in the United Kingdom that resulted from their global financiers’ monopolization. Free trade was leading to “barbarism,” he argued, because it tended to erode the social institutions that fulfilled human’s “greatest need,” their desire and ability for “association” with other humans. Like Tocqueville, Carey valorized the rich civil society of the early republic; unlike Tocqueville, he worried about disintermediation of the social sphere in commercial societies without tariffs. The “increasing dependence of the laborer, and making of her that mere instrument to be used by trade” was fueling class conflict in the form of riots and strikes, ultimately threatening political stability even in the UK.

There is a popular folk history that draws a straight line from Hamilton to List, and from there to Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, which industrialized behind Listian tariffs. From there the Listian idea is supposed to have spread to Japan, which took Germany as the model political economy for successful catch-up growth, and from there to the East Asian developmental states of the postwar period. (The most readable and popular version of this story can be found in Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works (2014), otherwise a compelling book.) Helleiner’s book makes clear what this version of history gets wrong. Not only were Legalist and kokueki discourses already widely available in the East, but to the extent that Western ideas were popular in Germany and Japan, they came more from Carey’s influence, not List’s. A good deal of space in The Neomercantilists is dedicated to documenting and debunking these myths in detail.

During the period 2001 to 2012 First Army's priority of effort had been planning, resourcing, and conducting post-mobilization training for up to 90,000 Soldiers per year in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom and other contingency operations

For example, activating additional manpower may generate requirements for additional facilities, equipment, training base capacity, and transportation. Sources of facilities include all the installations (forts, camps, posts, and centers) where troops are received, trained, equipped, and prepare to deploy.  Mobilization Force Generation Installations (MFGIs) are key installations for any army mobilization.  MFGIs are designated to provide mobilization support to both known rotational demands and also contingency operations.  In 2008 the Army operated ten MFGIs to support operations that were mostly focused in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now only Fort Hood and Fort Bliss operate as a MFGI, which is optimized for steady-state rotational demands.  However, these mobilization platforms are too few and woefully inadequate to support the volume and speed needed for a major theater of war contingency.

Further, these newer artillery systems are fully digitized and integrated with precision equipment based on internal, gyroscopic, self-locating devices supplemented by GPS updating. They also have modular components that can be swapped out, thus simplifying repairs. This is important because Ukraine currently lacks the ability to produce munitions and repair parts, especially as Russian forces bombard Ukrainian industrial facilities. Most newer systems require a relatively brief period of training on individual weapon systems and munitions. They are easy to use and employ for artillerymen already trained in basic field craft.

The Ukrainian army has made good use of its legacy equipment over the past eight years of combat in the Donbas and during the first seven weeks of the Russian invasion, but that equipment is largely destroyed, run-down, ineffective, or outdated. As the campaign goes on, this legacy equipment will continue to breakdown and be destroyed in combat. Logistics and maintenance for this equipment will become ever more difficult as Ukraine’s supply of lethal munitions for equipment on hand dries up. The Ukrainian army lacks sufficient counter rocket, artillery, and mortar capabilities, which is particularly critical in defending its own counter-fire radar systems. Perhaps the most effective capabilities the Ukrainians do have in their inventory are Russian air-defense systems. The S-300, gifted to Ukraine by Slovakia, is an effective long-range system, but even with outside help provided thus far, Ukraine does not have the right systems and missile magazine depth for this to be a viable long-term option.

It’s almost as if these two abstract entities “efficiency” and “equality” were two products an economy could produce. Oh, wait …. It’s exactly like that. This is the same diagram you’d get to illustrate your choice of how many apples or oranges you want to produce — or consume. Like so many things in neoclassical economics, a particular way of thinking — legitimate enough in its domain — is then totalized. The result is a discipline that’s rendered strangely incurious and emptied of empirical content.

The first instructors at the former French base in Timbuktu were engaged in personnel training. But at the same time, western estimates of the number of Russians vary greatly. Out of apprehension their number has been exaggerated to 500 people. More restrained estimates are claiming the number is between 200 and 300 people. It all started with four instructors. Their photos were actively published by the French media.

Amis, for instance, devotes one of the most powerful sections of the book to an investigation into Larkin’s relationship with his fascist father, Sydney. Hitchens, he alerts us, simply did not know enough when he mistakenly wrote that Larkin detested Sydney. In fact, as Amis shows, Larkin loved him dearly. On literary ground, Amis seems to be saying, however subliminally, it is he, not Hitchens, who will always have the final word.

It was important that every means possible be taken to persuade people to hold these funds rather than attempt to spend them, for such an attempt on a large scale would have meant inflation. Direct controls on production, wages, prices, etc. operated on one front to dam up these funds but the Treasury had to operate on another front to see that the funds remained saved. The best way to accomplish this was to get as much as possible of these funds into Government securities (Treasury 1946, 83).

Government expenditures have been enormous by all previous standards and they have been financed in large part by methods which did not curtail private spending to offset the increase in public spending. The pattern is that made familiar in previous wars—expansion of currency and sale of bonds to banks as an offset to new deposits created by public expenditures. War loan accounts were made free of reserve requirements, and as the funds were spent and reappeared in private pocketbooks and bank accounts, new currency and new bank reserves were made freely available by expansion of Federal Reserve credit. Thus the total volume of currency and credit rose without putting any pressure on the banks to restrict private credits. Since the end of 1939 demand deposits...have much more than doubled in volume...Practically all the new money came into existence through Government borrowing.

For all the stress he puts on merciless geopolitical competition, in other words, in Kotkin’s account Stalin’s ussr exists in a geostrategic void. If Khlevniuk’s concerns over the revived appeal of authoritarianism are obviously addressed to a present dominated by Putin, Kotkin’s treatment of geopolitics may be the aspect of his biography that has the most contemporary resonance: a seemingly hard-nosed attitude to the realities of inter-state competition conceals a disregard for the actual pressures being applied by one group of states to another. It is a pitiless competition minus at least half the competitors. In that sense, his too is very much a Stalin for our times.

The book’s style partly reflects Kotkin’s ambition to capture a broad audience and claim a more prominent public role—recall the project’s origins in the mind of his agent.

Kotkin writes in a more pugnacious idiom, larded with Beltway-speak and incongruous platitudes (‘difficult neighbourhood’, referring to Russia’s geopolitical situation; Stalin ‘was, for all his moodiness, a people person’; ‘Eurasia needs to be understood geographically’)

But by far the most tendentious element in Kotkin’s account is its treatment of Lenin’s last writings and the growing tensions between him and Stalin in his final months. The document that came to be known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, dictated in December 1922, delivered a famously scathing verdict on Stalin who, as Lenin put it, ‘having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution.’ An addendum from early January 1923 went still further, describing Stalin as ‘too rude’, a defect ‘intolerable in a Secretary-General’, and suggesting that ‘the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post’. Kotkin contests the authenticity of not only the ‘Testament’ and the addendum, but also the ‘Notes on the Question of Nationalities’, in which Lenin criticized ‘Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration’. All of these items, Kotkin claims, were forgeries, produced in February–March 1923 but backdated; he holds that ‘the existing evidence strongly points to a manoeuvre by Krupskaya, and the staff in Lenin’s secretariat, to forge what they interpreted as Lenin’s will’. What is the evidentiary basis for this argument, and why is Kotkin making it? Founded on gaps in the stenographic records kept by Lenin’s office and the apparent absence of the original manuscripts, the case is at best ‘circumstantial’, as Kotkin at one stage admits—though this doesn’t prevent him from labelling the documents flat-out forgeries. More extraordinary is Kotkin’s reliance, in making his case, on a single piece of scholarship, Valentin Sakharov’s ‘Politicheskoe zaveshchanie’ Lenina (2003). Kotkin salutes Sakharov’s ‘trenchant challenge to the conventional wisdom’ on Lenin’s last writings; what he does not mention is that Sakharov’s 700-page book is an unabashedly Stalinist text, decrying the dominance of Trotskyist, ‘anti-Bolshevik’ interpretations and their ‘infiltration’—interesting word choice—into historiography worldwide. Sakharov has been equally plain about his sympathies elsewhere: in a 2007 article he referred to Khrushchev’s ‘unbridled defamatory campaign against Stalin’, and in 2010 wrote a screed denying the ussr’s responsibility for the Katyn´ massacre.

urge to exonerate Stalin while incriminating the Bolsheviks is also apparent in Kotkin’s treatment of the Soviet–Polish War. He claims Stalin was initially sceptical about launching an offensive, and defends the failed push to take Lvov—again in direct contravention of orders—on the grounds that not taking the city ‘seemed idiotic’. In the war’s aftermath, Kotkin protests, Stalin was ‘scapegoated for insubordination’ while others hid the faults of their own that had really caused the disaster.

Herbert Giersch, Karl-Heinz Paqué and Holger Schmieding of the Kiel Institute, just before Fratzscher left to pursue his career in the Anglosphere. In their 1992 analysis The Fading Miracle, a major cause of Germany’s relative decline was the arrival of ‘new competitors’ on the world market: Japan from the late 1950s and the newly industrialized countries of East Asia in the 1970s and 80s, followed of course by China in the 90s. If the Agenda 2010 policy has worked for German capital, in response to the low-wage challenge diagnosed by Giersch and his colleagues, it is—as Fratzscher concedes—precisely because it has come at the expense of labour. But the other side of Schröder’s reforms was the decisive turn away from the demand management undertaken from the 1970s in the frg. Fratzscher’s Panglossian study does not consider the possibility that German investment has been allocated perfectly rationally. A low investment rate in high-risk assets abroad is not the effect of a large ‘gap’ (in Germany or elsewhere), but rather a sign of a lack of profitable investment channels. This is not unique to Germany. The high savings rate in Germany is only the mirror-image of foreign-direct investment in low-risk German bonds. Germany can carry on with this model so long as profit can be sustained by wage repression, so long as the euro is undervalued there, and so long as there is adequate demand abroad. In the periphery, the opposite situation prevails—of an overvalued euro—and the results are plain for all to see.

This means increasing military cooperation in the short term, and united navies and air forces in the medium term.

Die Deutschland Illusion calls for Germany to get over its qualms on the use of private equity and proposes a ‘round table’ on the subject that would include politicians and financiers. He suggests the use of high-risk financial products like subordinated debt to help attract capital. Indeed the investment commission Fratzscher chairs has advocated just such dubious public–private partnerships, including a scheme to privatize pensions. He has also bitterly opposed a recent cdu–spd compromise policy lowering the retirement age, as well as the Mütterrente, which compensates household and maternity work in the form of a pension in old age. This is no return to a Keynesian mixed economy, but rather the investment side of Agenda 2010.

of his break with Lloyd George in 1921, when he joined what Arthur Henderson in 1917 called the long and interesting list of former ministers waiting to tell the truth about Lloyd George (Addison waited less long than Henderson

In 1939 only one in three thousand British adults was a member of the Spiritualists’ National Union, but this might understate its influence. Even greater numbers of people took part in ‘home circles’ – do-it-yourself séances – tens of thousands of which occurred up and down the country, supported by an organisation called The Link.

while the book is clearly written, its voice is often obstreperous. This is, I take it, deliberate. In a way reminiscent of early punk, Finlayson’s writing appears designed to demonstrate an ‘in-your-face’ attitude, a militant refusal to give a damn about niceties of social (here, philosophical) etiquette.

In his book Nationalism, Elie Kedourie incisively critiqued this attitude and its consequences, as it emerged in a soft form in Immanuel Kant’s Project for Perpetual Peace and in a very hard form in the external policies of the French Revolution.2828 See Immanuel Kant, Project for Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010 [1976]).View all notes In eighteenth-century Europe, Kedourie wrote, the ‘balance of power’ system which limited wars and created a space for common European cultural development rested on the mutual recognition of the legitimacy of states with different religions and political systems, as this had emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the great religious wars:[The] assumption was that the title of any government to rule did not depend on the origins of its power. Thus the society of European states admitted all kinds of republics, of hereditary and elective monarchies, of constitutional and despotic regimes. But on the principle advocated by the revolutionaries, the title of all governments then existing was put into question; since they did not derive their sovereignty from the nation, they were usurpers with whom no agreement need be binding, and to whom subjects owed no allegiance.

there is a cost to focusing so intently on his own experience. He mentions only in passing that Tulsa was not the only city to experience a ‘race riot’ in the years during and immediately following the First World War – among other places, there were violent racial confrontations in East St Louis, Chicago and Washington. These years also witnessed radical uprisings inspired in part by the Russian Revolution – the Seattle general strike of 1919, for example – and an ensuing Red Scare, when the full force of the federal government was brought to bear on the IWW, Socialist Party and other groups deemed ‘un-American’. Repression and lack of respect for judicial processes were part of the zeitgeist.

Pundits often argue that a certain rate of inflation dooms incumbent politicians in electoral campaigns. A journalistic rule of thumb dating from the 1970s argues that this occurs when the price level rises at an annual rate above 4 percent. Historians share much of the blame for this perspective. Princeton Historian Meg Jacobs, for example, has argued that inflation had always been the “Achilles heel” of the “redistributive ideology” of the New Deal order, while older economic historians such as Alan Matusow or Alan Metzler never seriously considered the reasons for the failure of strategies for combating inflation beyond having the Federal Reserve deliberately instigate a depression. These arguments have continued to trickle down to the present. As Janet Yellen argued in the 1990s and the 2010s, so Larry Summers argues today: it is time to raise interest rates, depress spending, and slow down price increases.

“Mr. Ahmady”, of the Afghan central bank told the WSJ, “that bank officials began reducing the amount of cash, including U.S. dollars, held at bank branches in provincial centers earlier this month amid concerns over the Taliban’s advance. By the time the first major provincial capital fell to the Taliban nearly two weeks ago, nearly all U.S. dollars had been repatriated, he said. “During this entire period, no dollars fell into the hands of Taliban before Kabul fell,” Mr. Ahmady said. “All of it was secured.”

The war proved to be a particularly powerful version of the Falklands facto

There are now uncertainties in Syria that Bashar’s father wouldn’t have countenanced. Divisions between the old guard and the reformers have paralysed the system. For example, when the US invaded Iraq, state television, in common with the rest of the Arab world, concentrated on the Iraqi dead. Until 8 April, newsreaders were comparing Baghdad’s heroic resistance to Stalingrad’s. Then, when Baghdad was falling, Syrian television stopped showing news. For four days, nothing but drama, sport, archaeology, weather and soap operas. Young technicians and journalists said that the station’s director and Adnan Omran, the Minister of Information – an old-guard politician and a former Ambassador to Britain – simply went home without issuing instructions. The journalists dared not transmit anything for which they might be called to account later. At another crucial juncture – when the US proposed the UN resolution legalising its occupation of Iraq – the Syrian Ambassador did not attend the Security Council. There were rumours that Syria would vote against the resolution, but it didn’t vote at all. Government sources in Damascus said that the hardliners, notably the Vice-President, Abdel Halim Khaddam, and the Foreign Minister, Farouq al-Sharaa, were demanding that Syria vote against the measure. By the time the President had sided with the ‘yes’ faction, the votes had been counted in New York. A few days later, Syria quietly cast its vote in favour of the resolution. The effect was to antagonise the United States by not voting immediately, while showing the Syrian public that the Government would not honour the pan-Arab principles on which the Baath Party bases its legitimacy. Something else happened afterwards that would never have taken place under Hafez Assad. A former Minister of Information, Mohammed Salman, admitted on Lebanese television that the Government’s delay over the UN vote was a mistake. In the old days, there were no mistakes.

The Ministry of Information was notorious, and still is, for lazy, unco-operative officials. A friend of mine called them slurpers, because their only job appeared to be slurping tea and coffee. It was far easier for them to answer requests with a ‘no’ than to risk criticism from above by saying ‘yes’. Censors said no to the publications of books they did not understand, no to visas for journalists they did not know, no to requests for interviews with senior officials and no to anything else a visitor might ask.

Anderson makes the case that the CIA’s obsession with covert operations, which when successful (as in Iran and Guatemala) garnered both kudos and bigger budgets, coincided with the neglect of intelligence-gathering. The CIA failed to foresee the Soviet atom bomb in 1949, North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, China’s crossing of the Yalu River later that year, the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, popular support in Cuba for Fidel Castro on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968, Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran, Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990. This is not to mention the 9/11 attacks, which had the perverse effect of revitalising the CIA while it was floundering without a credible enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

OSS disappointed him by posting him to San Francisco, where he carried out extensive research on guerrilla warfare and cultivated Asian Americans.

the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1940

‘In Berlin in October 1945,’ Anderson writes, ‘Sichel stood at the very epicentre of history, the roving ground where the future arrangement of the postwar world, of whether the United States and the Soviet Union were to remain allies or become foes, was likely to be revealed.’

Eleftherios Venizelos was a “western” Greek leader, true; but much of the population were and are not. It is perhaps indicative that the terms “Byzantium” or “Byzantine” hardly appear in the book.

Foot also suffered from caricature in a hostile press. Foot was presentationally shambolic. His first television interview as leader was conducted in a wheelchair because two days after being elected Labour leader, he fell down the stairs and broke his ankle. Most infamously, he was condemned for wearing a ‘donkey jacket’, a tartan tie, and brown shoes at the Cenotaph at the 1981 Remembrance Sunday commemorations. One newspaper also claimed that Foot dropped his wreath ‘as if putting out the rubbish’. The reality was that the coat had been bought by his wife Jill from Harrods and it had won the admiration of the Queen Mother who said, ‘Oh hello, Michael. That’s a smart, sensible coat for a day like this.’

Part of the reason there has been no place for Russia inside the Euro-Atlantic order is that, despite its weakness in the post-Soviet period, it nonetheless remained too large to be absorbed comfortably – especially in a system that revolved around a single, superordinate power. The paradox of Russia’s recent resurgence is that, for all its refusals to fall into line with Washington’s priorities, it is still in no position to mount a frontal challenge to the West

lready on Washington’s agenda even before the fall of the USSR, the expansion of Nato was treated as a given from 1994 onwards, the only question being how to make the Kremlin swallow it – to ‘get the Russians to eat their spinach’, as Victoria Nuland, then chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, put it. (Digestive metaphors seem to be a feature of the Foggy Bottom mentalité: Madeleine Albright later referred to the need to ‘minimise Russian heartburn’.) The Yeltsin government several times floated the idea of joining Nato, but Russian membership was never seriously considered. The ‘Partnership for Peace’ launched in 1994, the Permanent Joint Council set up in 1997 and the Nato-Russia Council that replaced it in 2002 seemed to provide avenues for cooperation between Moscow and the alliance. But as the Russians quickly realised, they were alternatives to membership rather than stepping stones to it. When Putin asked Clinton at a 2000 summit how he would respond to Russia’s joining the alliance, Clinton apparently looked desperately to the advisers flanking him: Albright ‘pretended that she was looking at a fly on the wall’, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger ‘did not react at all’, so Clinton was reduced to saying he would ‘personally’ – a word he repeated three times, to be on the safe side – support it. All of these facts are in Conradi’s account but, strangely, he arrives at the opposite conclusion to the one his narrative suggests: ‘successive US presidents from Clinton through to George W. Bush to Obama,’ he writes, ‘had made a point of trying to integrate Russia into the Western world.’ Given Conradi’s attempt to be fair-minded overall, this reversion to standard ideological assumptions seems especially unfortunate.

on January 3rd, after Trump had flown back from his Christmas vacation at Mar-a-Lago, he convened the Oval Office meeting on Iran, asking his advisers about recent reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear activities. Both Mike Pompeo and the national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien, told Trump that it was not possible to do anything militarily at that point. Their attitude was that it was “too late to hit them.” After Milley walked through the potential costs and consequences, Trump agreed. And that was that: after months of anxiety and uncertainty, the Iran fight was over.

There are also political (and in lesser measure military) considerations that dictate the presence in both Wales and Northern Ireland of regional brigade HQs and of at least a battalion.

A very honest and in depth look must be given to the other 2-star commands in Army 2020: are a 2-star London District and a 2-star UK Support Command actually needed on top of the 2 divisions plus JRRF? Can’t the London District and UK Support Command be combined into a single non-deployable Division HQ? I think it is more doable and less damaging than other cuts we have seen. The resulting Divisional HQ could control a couple of non-deployable brigades: Guards Bde, for the Public Duty units in London, and 11 Infantry Bde as administrator for the units posted to Brunei, Cyprus and for the Falklands Infantry Company. 

This makes the Adaptable Force very virtual indeed, with a realistic output which is a small fraction of what would be expected by reading a list of 7 brigade HQs, 3 cavalry regiments (+ 3 Reserve) and some 15 infantry battalions (+ 13 of the Reserve; 1st SCOTS and the Royal Gurkha Rifles don’t even have a paired reserve unit).

The 561-strong Light Role Battalion should be uplifted to as many as 750 men for deployment, a value better in line with what is found in other NATO armies, the Army says. This in theory requires almost 200 men from the reserve unit, which is a 50% output from regiments which are established for 400. Can it be done? Ideally, yes. In practice, it seems very, very likely that the regular regiments of the Adaptable Force will be raided far and wide to piece together something that can be deployed.

Finally, the infantry battalions: the Army was denied the chance to cut more of those, with a firm ceiling put at 5, to prevent the loss of capbadges, notoriously a politically sensible subject. However, the battalions remaining are simply tiny: Light Role battalions have now an establishment of a mere 561 men, all ranks, all trades. This is very, very little indeed, and has been achieved by, among the rest, cutting all companies down from 3 to 2 platoons. A

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  The Maneuver Support Company is valid in its current form? In Afghanistan it is very often broken down into Fire Support Groups, made up of sections of HMG, MG Sustained Fire, Javelin Anti-Tank, Mortar, Sniper. These sections are organized on the lines of a Platoon and assigned directly to the Rifle Company, giving it the firepower it needs to . Normally the FSG will use the 60 mm Light Mortar, and the 81 mm mortars will be kept at Battalion level. In some cases, the Maneuver Support Company remains, albeit in a different form, including the RECCE element, a Fire Support Group and a Fire Support Team (the latter being the 6-man team for the direction of Joint Fires, be it mortar, artillery, rocket or an air attack). A Fire Support Team is assigned at Company level on deployment. Are these “ad hoc” structures indicative of long-term trends? What and how should be made permanent in the force structure?

It’s not a new observation that those in power in Britain have become more culturally militarist as the UK has been shorn of actual global military influence. It’s harder to explain the persistence of imperial lackeydom after Iraq

was convinced, with some justification, that banks were already involved in ‘passive resistance’ to government borrowing.

Another test, devised by the young psychologist Daniel Kahneman – the future Nobel laureate in economics, who was participating in the officer candidate academic studies program at the time – included an interview in which the psychotechnical diagnosticians assessed certain character traits. The examiners also gave a grade for the general impression they got from the draftee, according to three categories they were taught in their training course: the “good” soldier, the “intermediate” soldier and the “failed” soldier.

a professional corps of officers and noncommissioned officers has barely emerged, in part because wages are low, risks high and many commanders dishonest.“Only the sons of poor people are here to show off that we have forces in the district,” army Maj. Abdul Nasir Haqmal said this winter from his hilltop post in Kandahar. “The salary of the rest of the soldiers is going to the pocket of corps commanders and people in the ministry of defense.”Where government and Taliban territory meet, police outposts are often battered nightly, frequently by fighters with night-vision gear. Regular Afghan soldiers and police, lacking the same capability, have resorted to buying their own or sometimes even lighting debris or brush on fire to interfere with the Taliban’s devices. The Pentagon tried to equip certain units with night vision, but stopped after so much of the gear was lost, stolen or sold.

“There’s a problem of awareness. The senior ranks aren’t counting on the ground forces. The message to the young commanders, not stated out loud, is that it’s possible to conclude a war with good intelligence and a good air force. This influences the spirit of the commanders. This is the reason for the fear of sending ground troops into enemy territory. When it happens, in a wide-scale war, it will be traumatic for the public. The Yom Kippur War will be a picnic in comparison,” the senior officer said.“After the Second Lebanon War and Protective Edge [the 2014 Gaza war], the IDF didn’t conduct in-depth inquiries, and conclusions weren’t drawn. The subliminal message sent downward is: The IDF is the air force. This is a disastrous concept. As a result, the resolve  of the young command is crumbling,” he added.“There’s the lowest standard in the ground forces; without aspiration for excellence or discipline. The air force alone can’t stop the firing of missiles and rockets on the home front. In Protective Edge, the air force fired hundreds of precision munitions without achieving very much. Everything was done to relieve frustrations.”

“This is the worst crisis I’ve seen since I was drafted for compulsory service in 1965. The Manpower Directorate shows presentations and says that on  average among the units, the situation is okay. They remind me of the joke about the man who drowns in a pool whose average depth is 40 centimeters [16 inches]. The IDF has good brigade commanders and battalion commanders, but among the company commanders and the officers in combat support roles, many are fleeing because they don’t want to stay in an army they see as mediocre,” Brik says.“There’s a mix of factors here, which is related to the new model for the career army, under which only a few officers know with certainty that they’ll be promoted and continue in service until they retire. Also, if it’s necessary to compromise on carrying out missions because there aren’t enough resources and people, and you don’t admit it because you don’t want to damage the army’s image, there are officers who say: I prefer to leave instead of them silencing me when I say what’s really going on,” Brik adds.“I hear these things all the time in meetings with young officers. The army has a serious problem at the ranks of captain and major with high-quality officers who want to leave. Within a year or two we may well reach the point of no return.”

Brik ascribed much of the blame for the high attrition rate among qualified career officers to the uncertainty caused by a new promotion structure, under which any officer who is not promoted to lieutenant colonel after 14 years must leave. Many officers fear being discharged booted out at this juncture, when they are too old to easily enter the civilian job market but too young to retire.- Advertisment -“The new career army model leads officers to leave the army after serving as company commanders,” Brik said. “Surveys within the army show that 50 percent of officers don’t advise their relatives to sign on for long stints in the career army.”

The fact is, under Keir Starmer’s leadership the party has lost more than 100,000 members. It has waged a war on party democracy, shut down internal debate, and suspended not just activists but CLP chairs and secretaries en masse. It has closed Labour’s Community Organising Unit and sacked its community organisers. And it has landed Labour in a funding crisis which hamstrung campaigns across the country by driving away the army of small donors which sustained it in recent years, alienating the historic funding base in the trade unions, and failing to win over the new corporate donors Starmer has been courting. (In case you missed it: there’s already a very successful party of capital in Britain today and the rich are doing quite nicely, thank you.)