Alex Levine > Recent Status Updates

Certainly true that by late 1942, the Wehrmacht was facing “fundamental and systemic” challenges, although I think his analysis would be better served in a David Stahel-esque focus on supply problems. I don’t buy the claim that the Case Blue/1942 campaigns were qualitatively different from a command perspective than anything that came before in modern German history.

Steve Coll, you’ve done it again!

Factually wrong on a somewhat regular basis and on easily verifiable things. Irkutsk is not in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, nor even close.

Pretty interesting.

Giuliano you are absolutely brilliant!

Incredibly patronizing writing, she sounds like she’s talking to a toddler.

A lot of her “analysis” is just saying “isn’t that crazy” and not asking why or how something (like non-integrated control of nuclear weapons between the arms for forces) was decided. Poor scholarship, quite disappointing.

Really funny that Carlos the Jackal was intermittently so fat it was problematic. When he arrived in Aden in the mid-70s, his Palestinian interlocutors had to provide him two chairs because he was too heavy; later in Baghdad, one of his girlfriends drowned because he was so out of shape he couldn’t swim to help her.

Riveting.

Iranian nuclear project as built, at least in part, on the knowledge brought by disaffected Iraqi nuclear scientists left unemployed and recruited after the 2003 invasion.