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Twitter thread from Bret Devereaux with some critique of this piece. https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898?s=20 https://twitter.com/Bret

Twitter thread from Bret Devereaux with some critique of this piece. https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898?s=20 https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898...

rapnie 4y ago
Guy has a blog. Rather sends 26 tweets for sake of convenience. Or is that for max exposure?
- gerikson 4y ago
  Probably because his blog is for more planned essays. Twitter is good for one-off observations. I've personally started a "microblog" for that kind of stuff.
- nomilk 4y ago
  Personally, I'm new to twitter, and I much prefer these long chains of tweets rather than long form blog posts or articles. These long chains of tweets allow one to give support, comment on, disagree with, share or like a particular sentence or idea, rather than the entire collection, thus allowing more nuance. Other advantages: - Quickly understand which tweets/sentences matter by scanning the likes - Debate can stem from any tweet, so discussion is immediately less conflated and more focussed on specific parts or ideas
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    Thank you. Lots of folks complain about twitter threads, few actually articulate any positives even when they find there to be some.
fintechjock 4y ago
I also thought of u/Sir_Budington's comment when this article was posted to r/CredibleDefense: > The thing is that things like anti tank and ship missiles are primarily defensive weapons, not offensive ones. Sure, a Javelin can wreck a tank, but it’s not going to break through a front line. Sure, a harpoon can sink a ship, but it’s not going to project power halfway across the world. A Patriot missile can shoot down a plane, but it’s not going to target moving targets 100 miles behind enemy lines, or provide CAS. > Does this mean that in recent years that the power balance has swung in favour of defenders? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean you get rid of offensive capabilities.
- ckozlowski 4y ago
  Well said. To build on that, it also brings to mind a few of the more expert commentary on YouTube on "why the tank is not dead". Military History Visualized has a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY (There's others as well, and he references them) My overall take away from the Atlantic piece is that they've fallen into the same trap as much of the rest of the internet. Large platforms have not been rendered obsolete because of the advent of these weapons, just as they weren't during the 70s with the first large battles involving Anti-tank and Anti-Ship missiles. (The former has a number of well-cited examples, but for the latter, I call attention to the Battle of Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia ) It's worth nothing as well that the Neptune AShM isn't really a revolutionary weapon, and is marginally improved over classes of AShMs developed in the 80s. It's notary comes from the fact that Ukraine essentially was able redevelop the capability of the old Kh-35, with modest improvements. It's not a next-gen missile such as a LRASM. Similarly, the Javelin, while effective and having gone through incremental upgrades, is not a wildly new weapon. It's been around for decades, and as we're finding along with the Stinger, the U.S. needs to reactivate the manufacturing to build them from scratch which has been dormant for decades. I draw attention to the fact that these are older weapons. Drones are giving troops in the field better ability to target than ever before, but the fundamentals haven't changed and the same difficulties apply. WaPo had an exclusive stating that it was U.S. Intelligence that gave the Ukrainians the necessary info to find and target the Moskava with their missiles. The weapons themselves are just one part in long chain of capabilities. So that's where I think this piece misses much, because it's ignorant of some of the other elements of how all this comes together. The U.S. has been aware of China's long range precision fires for quite some time, and while they're worrysome, they're not terrified. To paraphrase a quote I heard, "a long kill chain provides plenty of opportunities to disrupt it along the way." And that's where the Russians have failed. Not because they're being surprised for the first time by these weapons (they invented many of the earliest examples themselves!) but because they're not fighting effectively. As some commentators have noted, the supporting elements that would defend against these weapons are not in place, the systems designed to counter them are not active/maintained (which was probably the case of the Moskava), and the intelligence/reconnaissance that would have identified and monitored these threats are not in place. All of this contributes to failure. The Russians are not getting wrecked by guided missiles because they're so high tech, they're getting wrecked because they're inept.
dmurray 4y ago
Threadreader link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html
- dncornholio 4y ago
  God I hate twitter. Why they still hang on to their silly limited functionality, I don't know. Is it fear of change? Threadreader is even worse, with all those ads!
  - sgc 4y ago
    Try nitter.net
Spooky23 4y ago
It’s pretty weak critique. For my entire time on earth, the threat of missiles like Exocet is a material threat that is only countered by marginally reliable SAMs and point defense. Missiles and drones only get smarter, and defense challenges get more challenging. Even speedboats with rockets or explosives strapped to them are a threat to warships, who were mostly protected by obscurity - finding ships at sea is hard. Drones negate a lot of that. People will wave away the obvious by saying “The Russians are idiots”, “The ship was old”, etc, but the reality is a defender only has to fuck up once. The Russians should have (and may have in other scenarios) shot down that drone, but obviously failed. Even the mighty US Navy has trouble teaching sailors to steer ships. Operationally the US Navy is exponentially more capable than the Russians… but remember, you only need to screw up once. Fundamentally, the current operating model of big navies is on a path to irrelevance. Nerds can argue if the early ironclad battles were truly relevant, but the fact remains that whether that moment was key or not, the end result was the same.

Twitter thread from Bret Devereaux with some critique of this piece. https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898?s=20 https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898...

rapnie 4y ago

Guy has a blog. Rather sends 26 tweets for sake of convenience. Or is that for max exposure?

gerikson 4y ago
Probably because his blog is for more planned essays. Twitter is good for one-off observations. I've personally started a "microblog" for that kind of stuff.
nomilk 4y ago
Personally, I'm new to twitter, and I much prefer these long chains of tweets rather than long form blog posts or articles. These long chains of tweets allow one to give support, comment on, disagree with, share or like a particular sentence or idea, rather than the entire collection, thus allowing more nuance. Other advantages: - Quickly understand which tweets/sentences matter by scanning the likes - Debate can stem from any tweet, so discussion is immediately less conflated and more focussed on specific parts or ideas
- h2odragon 4y ago
  Thank you. Lots of folks complain about twitter threads, few actually articulate any positives even when they find there to be some.

fintechjock 4y ago

I also thought of u/Sir_Budington's comment when this article was posted to r/CredibleDefense: > The thing is that things like anti tank and ship missiles are primarily defensive weapons, not offensive ones. Sure, a Javelin can wreck a tank, but it’s not going to break through a front line. Sure, a harpoon can sink a ship, but it’s not going to project power halfway across the world. A Patriot missile can shoot down a plane, but it’s not going to target moving targets 100 miles behind enemy lines, or provide CAS. > Does this mean that in recent years that the power balance has swung in favour of defenders? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean you get rid of offensive capabilities.

ckozlowski 4y ago
Well said. To build on that, it also brings to mind a few of the more expert commentary on YouTube on "why the tank is not dead". Military History Visualized has a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY (There's others as well, and he references them) My overall take away from the Atlantic piece is that they've fallen into the same trap as much of the rest of the internet. Large platforms have not been rendered obsolete because of the advent of these weapons, just as they weren't during the 70s with the first large battles involving Anti-tank and Anti-Ship missiles. (The former has a number of well-cited examples, but for the latter, I call attention to the Battle of Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia ) It's worth nothing as well that the Neptune AShM isn't really a revolutionary weapon, and is marginally improved over classes of AShMs developed in the 80s. It's notary comes from the fact that Ukraine essentially was able redevelop the capability of the old Kh-35, with modest improvements. It's not a next-gen missile such as a LRASM. Similarly, the Javelin, while effective and having gone through incremental upgrades, is not a wildly new weapon. It's been around for decades, and as we're finding along with the Stinger, the U.S. needs to reactivate the manufacturing to build them from scratch which has been dormant for decades. I draw attention to the fact that these are older weapons. Drones are giving troops in the field better ability to target than ever before, but the fundamentals haven't changed and the same difficulties apply. WaPo had an exclusive stating that it was U.S. Intelligence that gave the Ukrainians the necessary info to find and target the Moskava with their missiles. The weapons themselves are just one part in long chain of capabilities. So that's where I think this piece misses much, because it's ignorant of some of the other elements of how all this comes together. The U.S. has been aware of China's long range precision fires for quite some time, and while they're worrysome, they're not terrified. To paraphrase a quote I heard, "a long kill chain provides plenty of opportunities to disrupt it along the way." And that's where the Russians have failed. Not because they're being surprised for the first time by these weapons (they invented many of the earliest examples themselves!) but because they're not fighting effectively. As some commentators have noted, the supporting elements that would defend against these weapons are not in place, the systems designed to counter them are not active/maintained (which was probably the case of the Moskava), and the intelligence/reconnaissance that would have identified and monitored these threats are not in place. All of this contributes to failure. The Russians are not getting wrecked by guided missiles because they're so high tech, they're getting wrecked because they're inept.

dmurray 4y ago

Threadreader link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html

dncornholio 4y ago
God I hate twitter. Why they still hang on to their silly limited functionality, I don't know. Is it fear of change? Threadreader is even worse, with all those ads!
- sgc 4y ago
  Try nitter.net

Spooky23 4y ago

It’s pretty weak critique. For my entire time on earth, the threat of missiles like Exocet is a material threat that is only countered by marginally reliable SAMs and point defense. Missiles and drones only get smarter, and defense challenges get more challenging. Even speedboats with rockets or explosives strapped to them are a threat to warships, who were mostly protected by obscurity - finding ships at sea is hard. Drones negate a lot of that. People will wave away the obvious by saying “The Russians are idiots”, “The ship was old”, etc, but the reality is a defender only has to fuck up once. The Russians should have (and may have in other scenarios) shot down that drone, but obviously failed. Even the mighty US Navy has trouble teaching sailors to steer ships. Operationally the US Navy is exponentially more capable than the Russians… but remember, you only need to screw up once. Fundamentally, the current operating model of big navies is on a path to irrelevance. Nerds can argue if the early ironclad battles were truly relevant, but the fact remains that whether that moment was key or not, the end result was the same.