Armies, What Are They Good For? Real-Time Assessment of Peacetime Militaries, Part I: Service Length and the Generals' Job Guarantee Assessing military quality in real time is difficult because variables that appear self-explanatory in history books yield ambiguous or even misleading results when we try to use them in the present. Will the conscript army you read about in the newspapers flounder like Galtieri's freezing colimbas in the
All On the Shop Window: A Note on Russian Enlisted Reserves As of mid-April in 2022, the front line in Ukraine appears to have stabilized. Russian forces have withdrawn from many of their positions in the north, abandoning any attempt to encircle Kiev or push south on the West bank of the Dnieper. Setting aside propaganda claims and counter-claims, it is
Notes on Real-Time War-Watching I need first to apologize to my subscribers for the delay in publishing. I was one of the many people caught by surprise by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and this quite upended my plan to open the newsletter with an in-depth post about the importance of terms of service
A Dead General, A Bombed Technocrat, and 6-0 Against Peru: The 1978 World Cup and the Argentine Elite Peru's brief passage through the 2018 World Cup reminded me of the one fútbol anecdote I know about in detail: the Peruvian team's loss to its Argentine hosts in the 1978 World Cup forty years ago today, a match widely considered to have been fixed by
