war

Operational Risk Management (or lack of it) in Ukraine

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The Ukraine war is the single most baffling thing I’ve ever seen in my life, even more baffling than the pandemic. “We have to help Ukraine against Russia” is a reasonable and defensible statement, but virtually every pro-Ukraine person I have encountered is irrational. I could go on at length about how every NATO talking point is absurd, but I’ve already done that many times before. Today I’m going to talk focus specifically on operational risk management.

How Much Manpower Does Ukraine Have Left?

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It’s a tough question that takes some work to frame properly. First off, none of the stated conditions for Ukrainian victory as defined by both Ukraine and their NATO sponsors had any chance of happening. –Restore Ukraine to its 1991 border. There was no chance of this happening, none at all. Ironically, restoring the 2014 border was absolutely … Read more

Apocalypse Now is an Awful Movie, and Made (Almost) Every Other War Movie After It Awful Too

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I recently tried watching the 2019 film 1917 on the plane, and couldn’t finish it. The movie was a boring play-by-play montage of “horrors of war” tropes. 1917’s self-imposed artistic trick of showing every frame of the film as if it was recorded in one continuous shot didn’t help either, the “one shot” effect actually made it worse. I literally felt like I was watching someone else play a video game. Video games are fun to play, but boring to watch as a spectator. I realized 1917 is just like Saving Private Ryan, it starts with a contrived excuse for the main character to wander around the battlefield and see various bad things, some of which are statistically unlikely to happen to one guy, especially all within a few hours of each other. It’s video game logic that’s tedious and immersion breaking in a movie. After further thought, I realized 1917 is the extreme but logical conclusion of war movie tropes going back decades. At this point, we might as well fire everybody in Hollywood and just watch movies generated by AI. The tropes are so routine even a computer can string them together just as competently as a person. I have decided this particular war movie trend started with the 1976 movie Apocalypse Now, and will explain why.