MY LATEST COLUMN: Turkey Chooses Dictatorship, to the Detriment of the Free World. Erdogan won the May 28 run-off.

Related: Column from May 3, prior to the May 14 election. Why Turkey’s May 14 Election Really Matters.

THE LATEST STRATEGYTALK: F-16s For Ukraine. Jim Dunnigan and I discuss the belated decision by the Biden Administration to supply Ukraine with F-16s. I think it should have happened a year ago. If you like the podcast, please subscribe. MP3 download available here.

NATION DIVIDED? Memorial Day In Contemporary America. My latest column.

THE LATEST STRATEGYTALK: China versus Taiwan.

THE LATEST STRATEGYTALK: Near-Peer Wars. StrategyPage Editor Jim Dunnigan and I discuss armed conflict between nations that have roughly comparable military power — I stress roughly. Geography, demography and economic power matter. Will –as in will to resist and persist — that really matters. There’s also an MP3 download of the discussion. If you like the podcast, please subscribe.

VERY RELATED: I should have added a link to my initial post. It’s a Jim Dunnigan How To Make War “Attrition” update that directly relates to my comment on demography. Attrition: Putin Seeks More Russians.

MY LATEST COLUMN: Time For The Taiwan Porcupine To Bristle Taiwan must become a very hard target.

Aircraft and missiles alone won’t defeat a CCP invasion. Stopping Beijing will require a bitter ground battle against invading ground forces – amphibious and airborne.

In January the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a study titled “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.”

Well conducted wargames are serious exercises in possible futures, with the goal of gleaning insights that help the gamers positively shape the future. I know something about high-level games. From 1989-1993 I was a special adviser in strategic wargaming in the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The CSIS game is seriously flawed. My criticism is technical. The game is built around “3.5 day” turns – each turn represents 84 hours. Study classic amphibious operations like Gallipoli and D-Day and you’ll know the first three to four hours of the invasion are critical.

However, the game’s output has several points Taiwan, the U.S., and all U.S. allies must consider.

A bit more: “The island has elements of a porcupine defense. In 2002 I got a tour of Taiwanese bunkers on the west side and a look at an airbase on the east coast whose hangars were in a mountain.”

Read the column for some of the CSIS game team’s recommendations and my comments.

RELATED: Photo of an F-16V (“Viper”) — an updated model of the F-16. Taiwan has about 140 F-16s. Around 70 have been upgraded and there are plans to upgrade more. Taiwan also has at least 66 F-16V aircraft on order. They are fine airplanes. But to defeat a Chinese communist invasion the island must become a fortress.

THE TANK ISN’T DEAD IN AN ARMY THAT KNOWS HOW TO USE THEM: Ukraine’s Combined Arms Warfare Edge

…successfully conducting an armored attack’s violent ballet of tanks, infantry, air and artillery fire takes intensive training. The Russian soldiers in the BTGs, if they ever got that message, never got the training.

Last year the usual ignorant media briefly claimed “the tank is dead.” Fortunately, those claims disappeared. One reason: video of Ukrainians using tanks in successful counterattacks. Real experts pointed out the Ukrainians understood combined arms warfare.

My latest column.

RELATED: Close Air Support Training. An A-10, of course. And an M1A2 tank’s Tank Urban Survival Kit.

(Bumped, by Glenn.)

TRAINING IN ICELAND: More winter war training, this time conducted by the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. The GIUK gap — that’s a Cold War era echo.

RELATED, IN SEVERAL WAYS: USN ice diving in Minnesota. Snow Crab Exercise 23-1.

MY LATEST CREATORS SYNDICATE COLUMN: Weaponizing Everything, Including Lawyers and Balloons: China’s 1999 Manual for Defeating America

The balloon wasn’t just blowing in the wind. Its calculated military itinerary tells reasonable Americans and Canadians — reasonable being a qualifier that excludes media influencers and politicians bribed or blackmailed by communist China — that the balloon was spying on critical North American defense installations.

Which means it had a War Mission. Note I did not write “pre-War”; I wrote “War.”

Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsu and a recent European lawsuit against Beijing help me prove the charge.

MY LATEST CREATORS SYNDICATE COLUMN: Watching Ukraine, Japan and South Korea Consider Nuclear Weapons

…from Russia’s February 2014 attack on Crimea to this very minute’s nuclear weapons have been the Ukraine war’s deep global issue.

When Russia invaded Crimea, it violated a multilateral diplomatic agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The agreement traded Ukrainian nuclear weapons for mutual security guarantees. At the time Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, some 5,000 weapons.

The U.S. and Britain backed it. Bill Clinton signed it. The memorandum was part of a larger post-Cold War diplomatic framework forwarding disarmament, economic development, constructive cooperation and democratic development in former Iron Curtain countries.

The Clinton administration, Ukraine and Britain thought they had solved the problem of ex-Soviet nukes and Ukrainian territorial sovereignty.

Obviously, they didn’t. Now Ukraine confronts invasion and nuclear blackmail.

Trading nukes for paper security guarantees — the so called Western “anti-war” no nukes crowd of the Cold war era was all for it.

Related (From Ed): US Conducts Nuclear Missile Test Launch. “The U.S. launched an unarmed but nuclear-capable Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Thursday night in what the Pentagon characterized as a display of the U.S.’ effective nuclear deterrent against hostile foreign powers.”

(Updated and bumped.)

HOW TO MAKE WAR ARTILLERY UPDATE: The longer range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System arrives in Ukraine. A Jim Dunnigan update. Here’s a photo of a British MLRS launcher firing a single guided rocket — a sniper round. A 2nd Infantry Division launcher fires a rocket in Rocket Valley, South Korea.

KOREA UPDATE: China gets a reality check.

THE UNEXPECTED NEAR-PEER WAR: Ukraine’s Nation In Arms.

Eleven months of combat and suffering demonstrate that on the battlefield Ukraine can defeat a Russian invasion then launch limited but sustained (and thus effective) local counter-offensives.

As Month 12 begins, satellites photograph trenches and shell holes, wire services report artillery slugfests and cable TV experts speculate on new attacks when the Russians get more soldiers, when the Ukrainians deploy Leopard 2 tanks.

In other words, the war has become a bloody stalemate between two armies that refuse to lose.

Read the whole thing.

NAVAL MINES IN THE BLACK SEA: A Jim Dunnigan “How to Make War” WEAPONS update. The post also discusses Iranian mines in the Red Sea. Apparently they’ve sunk several Yemeni fishing boats.

TRAINING FOR WINTER WAR: Someone in Michigan likes the chilling effects of black and white photography. Soldiers from the Wisconsin Army National Guard fire a M119 105mm howitzer while training at Camp Grayling, Michigan. Photo taken Jan. 23, 2023. HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR FIGHTING IN THE SNOW: Heavy anti-aircraft gun position during the Battle of the Bulge.

WAR MATERIAL STOCKPILES: They’re vital.

No matter the outcome on the battlefield, the Ukraine War already has a clear winner: that small band of long-range planners, logisticians and military analysts who have insisted “cutting corners in maintaining war reserve stocks was a false economy…”

Read the entire essay.

TANKS FOR UKRAINE: Editor Jim Dunnigan’s latest How To Make War “ARMOR” update. Just published today, so Jim’s shooting at a moving news target. The post goes into the relevant background, technically and historically. The post discusses U.S. reluctance to provide the M1A2 Abrams and German reluctance to provide the Leopard 2. Scroll down for a look at German defense policy since 1991. Summary: “German defense policy since the end of the Cold War in 1991 has been an inexplicable mess.” I disagree slightly. The Germans needed money to rebuild Communism-devastated East Germany. But since 2005 they’ve been slackers. On the tech side Dunnigan devotes several grafs to two German infantry fighting vehicles, the admirable Marder and the Puma. I got my first look at a Marder in August 1975 about three kilometers from the old East German border (near Highway 19). Panzer grenadiers from 12th Panzer Division drove their very shiny new Marder past my tank platoon’s forest-edge position. The smiling guy riding on top of the Marder waved. Then the Marder crew executed a tight left into the woods, heading somewhere north and west. Given the date, I saw a Marder 1. Big vehicle with a lot of protection. I later read that the (West) Germans claimed the Marder 1 had a protection level similar to a Leopard 1 tank. Anyway, check out the post. (Query: where was KGB officer Vlad Putin in 1975? Was he devastating East Germany while I was trying to protect Western civilization?)

RELATED: A photo of a Swedish Leopard 2 tank variant (2017). Photo of a Puma (pre-production since the photo is 2007). ALSO RELATED: More on the Puma’s costly teething problems. The Ukrainians need proven vehicles that work.

UPDATE: Various media report the U.S. will send (“is poised to provide”) Abrams tanks to Ukraine– a battalion or so. Wall St Journal, Fox, even the NY Times. A Biden Administration policy reversal. Will German Leopards follow?

STRATEGYPAGE HOW TO MAKE WAR “PROCUREMENT” UPDATE: Replacing What Was Sent To Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022 it never expected to run out of ammunition. The war was not over in a few months and because of that Russia did run out of artillery munitions while Ukraine was supplied with massive amounts, much more than Russia had access to. After nearly a year of fighting, Russia has to limit the number of shells, rockets and missiles they can fire because they could not replace all that was fired while Western aid meant Ukrainians could. This caused a problem for NATO countries supplying all this ammunition because they eventually ran through most of what they had available. The United States supplied most of the munitions and now has to replace its war reserves stockpiled for a major war. While European NATO nations don’t have to worry about their major threat, Russia, while they rebuild their war reserves, the Americans have to plan for potential conflicts elsewhere, like China, North Korea and Iran…

This is a thoughtful and detailed post. War reserves are absolutely vital.

RELATED: The update mentions several types of tube and rocket artillery munitions. Here’s a photo of a U.S. Army M109A6 Paladin 155 mm howitzer firing a shell. Photo 2 shows a U.S. Marine High Mobility Rocket System (HIMARS) launching a GMLRS guided rocket.

VERY RELATED: Deep background on the war reserves issue — from April 2022. During the first two months of combat anti-tank guided missile reserves were rapidly depleted.

HOW TO MAKE WAR “WINNING” UPDATE: Keeping Russia Russian.

One little-discussed reason for Putin’s obsession with conquering Ukraine is his desperate need to acquire more ethnic Russians to keep Russia Russian. The 2020 Russian census showed that the percentage of ethnic Russians had declined from 77.78 percent to 71.7 percent since 2010, even though it defined the two million Ukrainians (many ethnic Russians or Tatars) in Crimea as Russians because Putin had unilaterally declared that occupied (since 2014) Crimea was now part of Russia. International law, the UN and most of the world disagreed.

The decline in ethnic Russians is largely because of a low birth rate and a growing number of ethnic Russians leaving Putin’s Russia. Over seven million ethnic Russians have left Russia since Putin took power in 1999…

RELATED: From 2004– Putin’s RUBK dream.

AN APACHE IN SNOW: Based on a quick survey of the comments, yesterday’s snow/winter training photos brought back chilling memories for many vets. Yes, Germany’s cold, Alaska’s cold but so is Korea. Here’s a 17th Cav AH-64 Apache after a Korean snow storm. Maintenance must go on. Here’s a 9th Air Force P-38 being prepped for action on a snow-covered airfield during the Battle of the Bulge. I’ve no idea where the airfield was located.

ATTRITION UPDATE: Expanding The Shrinking Russian Army. Vlad’s in another bind.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON FALSE DEBT LIMIT REPORTING: “The Democrats say the sky is falling…” He’s right– it’s political show. That said, Big Debt is the biggest self-inflicted threat the U.S. faces.

TRAINING FOR WINTER WAR: Special Ops airmen in the snow at Camp Mad Bull, Alaska. I still shiver when I recall freezing in (West) German snow, 1975-77. But you have to learn to live in it. This Army training photo was snapped in Finland in November 2022 during an exercise with the Finnish Army.

I recall a senior NCO saying in, oh, December 1975 (?) that anyone who griped about cold weather training was historically ignorant. He was referring to all of the cold weather casualties the Army suffered during the Battle of the Bulge. Here’s a good Bulge photo from January 1945. Yes, the senior sergeant in 1975 was referring to a winter battle that had taken place in his lifetime.

HOW TO MAKE WAR SUPPORT UPDATE: NATO Nations Train Ukraine

Illustrative graf:

Britain has used a thousand trainers to train nearly 10,000 Ukrainian troops in the last six months. Britain will train another 20,000 Ukrainian troops in Britain this year. Other nations have also contributed trainers to this effort. The Ukrainians appreciate this training effort and it makes a difference on the battlefield. This is especially true because Russia is sending more troops to Ukraine who have had little or no training. That means the Russians suffer higher casualties and the Ukrainian lose far fewer men.

That last sentence makes a bottom line point.

Related: NATO is providing specialized training on numerous weapons systems. Here are photos of three mentioned in the post. An M2 Bradley — photo snapped in South Korea. A critical defense system: the Patriot PAC-3 (anti-missile missile). Training on the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system has already proved its worth.