I've just discovered that the video/song I linked, Remember Obama by Hounds, is actually written by someone called Seth Abramson, and the music (performance, at any rate) and voice are generated by AI. I don't care, particularly since a person (apparently he's a poet among other things) wrote the lyrics. Anybody else's MMV. Particularly if they have something against Seth Abramson, of whom I had never previously heard!
3 days ago
Further to which, anybody who hasn't already heard it should check out Hounds' new song, Remember Obama, out on all streaming platforms. It will drive him (even more) demented...
3 days ago
Good grief, the level of corruption in the current US and MAGA specifically continues to astound, along with the largely lackadaisical reaction of the public On the possibility of Jordan's re-election: "By design, he is an inevitability.”
The price of giving incompetents no bid contracts.
Exactly. And to cronies/Mar a Lago contractors. It's funny really. But not $14.7million funny.
4 days ago
Look, thank God Reform did so badly in a constituency which was among their top 10 targets. But, other than that Andy Burnham is very popular in that area, and Keir Starmer's popularity stats nationwide are dire, it's very hard to know if this is anything more than an anti-Keir vote, with a lot of non-Labourites voting Labour tactically to keep out Reform. We can hope, of course, that evidence of Reform's sub-par candidates, poor performance in the local councils which they do control, and recent scandals about Farage's £5million gift from a crypto zillionaire played a part. But it's all too volatile to know for sure at the moment. And, while of course AB winning was the best possible outcome, it's hard to see how he (or any Labour leader under current economic conditions) will be able to do much to turn things around. And if Keir puts up a fight about going, we only compound the sick feeling engendered by having had 7 PMs in the last 10 years. Here, for (a bit of) light relief, is Marina Hyde:
Now that Trump has "settled" his millionth war, the Europeans have been trying to redirect his attention to Ukraine. ObWi in general seemed to be interested in some of the stuff I posted from Comment is Freed (Sam and Lawrence Freedman), so here is something with an expert opinion on the state of play there:
"The Kremlin faces some very difficult choices later this year" An interview with Dr. Jack Watling Lawrence Freedman Jun 18, 2026 ∙ Paid
Today’s post is an interview with Jack Watling who was in Ukraine just before the full-scale invasion and has been back many times since where he has got to know many key military figures. He is now recognised as one of the most authoritative commentators on the war and developments at the front line. Jack recently published Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World, which contains not only some fascinating accounts of the Russo-Ukraine War but also observations drawn from many other conflict zones, including in the Middle East and Africa.
Jack is a Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute. He works closely with the British military on the development of concepts of operation, assessments of the future operating environment, and conducts operational analysis of contemporary conflicts.
He has worked extensively with the Ukrainian Armed Forces during Russia’s full-scale invasion, across NATO, and in Iraq, Mali, Rwanda, on Yemen and further afield.
Lawrence: You open the book with you in Ukraine days before the full-scale invasion. It’s a poignant story, because you’re convinced that the war is coming and the Ukrainians are not, until almost the last minute they realize this is for real. You give the explanations for their scepticism. Not all intelligence agencies agreed with the Americans and British. It seemed a foolish thing for the Russians to do, which was my view at the time as well. If they were going to do it, there were other ways of doing it, perhaps concentrating on the Donbas, and so on. What was the key thing that made them realize, actually, this was serious?
Jack: There had always been people in the Ukrainian system who did share our view, but they were a minority at a senior level. The assessment changed at the point where the Russians received their orders. Once the Russian units were told this is what you are going to do, and started to pack up their equipment and get ready, the Ukrainians had to take it very seriously. But you’re talking about 72 hours before, and even then Zelenskyy personally was not immediately convinced. So really you’re talking about 48 hours of decision time.
Lawrence: They did quite a bit in that 48 hours.
Jack: Absolutely. Firstly, the Ukrainians had been at war for eight years, and they had a lot of military capacity and a lot of reserves, including reservists who were not committed. There was a lot of latent potential, which they were able to draw upon. The second thing is that their own military assessment was that the Russian forces were inadequate in size for the task they had been given, which was correct. The third thing is that the Russians performed so badly that they gave the Ukrainians time to mobilize. They wouldn’t have had to have been much faster to overrun the process of mobilization in parts north of Kyiv. It was much closer than some people like to think.
I’ll give you an example. Whether the Russians made it through Mykolaiv and into Odesa came down to whether a Russian brigade was prepared to attack across a causeway, and they were en route to do it. The Ukrainian force defending that causeway was 15 people, which the Russians didn’t know. The Ukrainians dispersed across the village and started talking on their radios about where they were going to deploy the Javelin teams, and the Russians were listening to this communication, and stopped because they thought that there were 30 or so Javelin teams in front of them. There weren’t any. But just the fact that the Russians slowed down meant that all of a sudden there was 24 hours in which the population could mobilize, equipment could be moved south. The numbers started to change.
There was one Ukrainian air defence unit that found itself on the wrong side of the front lines and drove out of its base and actually ended up driving alongside a Russian column for a period of time, asking them for spare tires at one point, then drove across the front line, set up, and started to engage Russian aircraft. So, Russian execution let them down.
Lawrence: You discuss a number of times in the book how the Russians don’t make the most of their advantages, such as with the attacks on critical infrastructure. They don’t quite follow through with as sustained and directed a campaign as much as they could have done.
Jack: Absolutely, early in the war, I remember walking around a whole load of sites that had been struck. We were trying to work out the logic of what they had hit and why. It looked like a bit of a smorgasbord and not a very appetizing one. We kept finding that locations had been hit because 10 years ago it was used by the Ukrainian military for something. It was evident that the Russians were working off a list which just hadn’t been updated. Within the Russian military the people doing strategic strike planning were not integrated with those doing tactical activity.
Lawrence: You finished writing the book at a difficult time for Ukraine. Since then the position has improved.
Jack: I finished writing it in February 2025 and that was a difficult time. The trend line wasn’t good at all. And now I think things are looking much more optimistic. The last year has been very important as the Ukrainians have addressed some of the weaknesses of their own force - improving force generation, getting more infantry into the force, improving the structure of the commands, so that they can start to better manage the units along the front line, and also better integrate the different tools that they have for strike. At the same time we’ve seen the Russians continue to lean into their worst instincts, and so the quality of Russian forces has degraded to the point where they are less capable today than they were a year ago, and that wasn’t the trend we were on.
Lawrence: How important has drone technology been in this? It is quite astonishing, the speed with which Ukraine has turned itself into this sort of drone superpower.
Jack: Absolutely; it’s important for us to acknowledge that that was a deliberate choice that the Ukrainians made. They decided that this was the capability they could scale and use. Because it is the weapon they have invested in it is now the backbone of their defence. It is allowing them to impose around a 50 kilometre attrition belt on Russian logistics. And they want to push it to 100. Then there is about a 20 kilometre attrition belt on vehicles, and a 10 kilometre attrition belt on personnel in front of their units. This means that the Russians can’t project and sustain combat power across the front line, and therefore they really just can’t build any momentum or get a positive correlation of forces at the point of contact.
It’s causing Russian advances to be extremely incremental and to happen at very high cost. There are significant limitations to drones as a tool. I was sitting down with probably the best user of drones in Ukraine three weeks ago over dinner going through plans that he has for the next fighting season. He had designs of tanks and armoured vehicles in front of him. He said, ‘I’ve got all the drones I need, but this is the tactical problem that I need to fix’. And he was looking at how you design armour. He was also looking at the role of artillery and glide bombs, for hitting many of the targets that the Ukrainians would need to hit to displace the Russian reconnaissance system as they are in hardened structures or buried. You need more payload and velocity than a drone can give you to kill them. This is a very old lesson: that an effective military force that can win a campaign is a combined arms force that can integrate all of these technologies and use them in a way that creates competing dilemmas for the enemy.
When I finished writing the book there were some very capable drone units but also infantry units that were struggling. It didn’t feel like a force that was working together, and that was hurting the Ukrainians. Now we’re seeing a much more collaborative approach between all the different elements of the force, and they are much more coherent in when and why they apply different tools to different problems. Whereas on the Russian side it’s the opposite. We’re seeing a disintegration of the application of force, partly because of the logistics problem, so that the force is becoming more spread out.
It’s still the case that the manpower question is central to all Ukrainian planning and defence discussions. It’s a major focus of Fedorov, the new Defence Minister. It was the first priority he mentioned when he gave his acceptance speech to the position in parliament. Zelenskyy has just announced reforms to the mobilization process to try and address the manpower problem, so they know it’s an issue, and it’s a major priority.
The question is how does Ukraine generate enough additional troops to have a reserve force, so that it can deal with contingency, but also so that it can rotate combat units off the front line in order to give them rest and recovery. That would also allow them to upskill the force by rotating units off, training them, and pushing them back. That doesn’t require full mobilization of the population. It requires maybe the generation of around 70,000 additional troops, but you’re talking about needing to recruit and train more people than you’re losing, that’s one issue. You also need officers and people to lead these units, and that’s one of the biggest challenges the Ukrainians have: they have a limited pool of talent when it comes to particularly senior officers.
Lawrence: This issue of can you have enough recruitment to replace losses is obviously one for the Russians as well. The Ukrainian claim is that they’re pushing the Russians to the point where their losses well exceed recruitment. Do you think this leads potentially to further mobilization on the Russian side?
Jack: The Kremlin faces some very difficult choices later this year. I think Putin is quite a cautious person, and will probably put it off for as long as he can, until after the Duma elections, I think the data that will be coming into the Kremlin will make very clear that they are not making progress, and they’re not even on track to achieve their objectives militarily, and so do they mobilize in order to generate enough headroom in the force? If they do that, then how do they absorb those personnel and train them. The current system doesn’t really give Russian infantry any training, so how they turn that large body of personnel they could generate into a useful mass is something the Russians have not yet demonstrated a capacity to do.
That would be necessary because otherwise they couldn’t sustain all of those troops across that 100 kilometre logistics attrition belt. They would just have a lot of troops set in the rear, but it would mean that they could continue the current conflict for longer. The Russian military has been arguing for mobilization for a long time, but I think the likelihood is that Putin will not go down that route unless there was a large loss of territory, some shock that causes him to pull the lever.
More likely I suspect is that they will reduce the tempo of operations and shift onto a more defensive posture and try to demonstrate to Ukraine that they can maintain this as an active conflict for a very long time and then use this to gain leverage over Kyiv which wants to finish the conflict sooner rather than later. The problem with that is that as the Ukrainian strikes on Russia expand and diversify, Russia is not going to be sitting comfortably.
Another possibility is that a ceasefire would give them the opportunity to destabilize Ukraine during an economically and politically vulnerable period. And of course a ceasefire doesn’t preclude the opportunity to re-attack. So Putin may as a very cautious individual see that as the approach that gives him significant options. But Western European states have said that they will enter Ukraine the moment there’s a cease fire and that is not something that Putin wants. So for now it is easiest just to keep the conflict running.
Lawrence: Where does Putin actually get his information from? He keeps on describing a front line which looks very different from the front line everybody outside of Russia sees. It seems to be coming up the Russian military system with just everybody passing up good news because they don’t want to be the bearers of bad news.
Jack: Every time I go to Ukraine I go through captured Russian maps. What has been interesting over the last year, is that the mismatch between where Russian troops are and where the maps say they are has been growing. At some points it’s quite extreme. These are not maps which are produced for propagandistic purposes. These are the maps off which the higher Russian headquarters is planning and generating orders and distributing them as instructions. And they do not represent reality. There are a number of factors that are driving this. Firstly, the way that the higher Russian headquarters do their planning is still consistent with pre-war doctrine, which didn’t really have a cartographic method for describing the kind of contested grey zone that is currently pervasive on the battlefield
So they tend to annotate things in a way which is consistent with the textbook, but not consistent with the observable facts. And while the unit that makes the markings might understand the difference and interpret the map sensibly, once you get up a few echelons and people are detached from the tactical situation they read it as it is written. The other issue is dishonesty. A lot of commanders are saying they’ve achieved objectives that they haven’t, for fear of being removed from post, or put into assault units, or punished, or told to attack again. So you have false reporting that’s coming up the chain as well, and that is still being fed in to the Kremlin.
As we saw with Kupyiansk last year there are instances where it’s very difficult for the Kremlin to not challenge the information it is receiving, because the difference with reality starts to look quite stark. That is why more Ukrainian offensive action is very important, because suddenly bits of terrain that the Kremlin thinks are Russian are going to change colour. That only has to happen a few times before I think there’s a wider questioning of what is the actual situation.
What narrative might emerge from that realization? Is it ‘this is a crisis so mobilization is necessary’ or ‘reduce the tempo of operations, but protract longer to keep the pain on Ukraine’ or ‘is a cease fire now desirable’? It is important to keep track of the Russian media and see what the Russian population is being prepared for in terms of the next steps after the Duma elections.
Lawrence: A lot of what you been talking about here on the Russian side is a sort of doctrinal fixation with how you fight wars. They basically don’t seem to have rethought how they go about their business.
Jack: At the tactical level there’s been a lot of adaptation, and we’ve seen a significant improvement in tactical integration and command and control, the proficiency of electronic warfare units, air defence units, and so on. At the operational level, fundamentally no change, and in some ways, a reversion to mass and material. We’re going back to a divisional structure, and fight this as we always have.
Within the Russian military science community, there is a recognition that they have this problem of being unable to concentrate combat power. Military journals in Russia are filled with discussions of the problem. They don’t yet have a solution. If, when this war ends, Putin sells it as a victory, and sets Gerasimov up as the general who led us to victory, it’s going to be very difficult for people to come up in the system and say we need to fundamentally change how we do business. On the other hand, if Gerasimov is removed or there is a reckoning that the Russian military has underperformed, then who is going to shape the future becomes a very political question; a pretty viciously fought question, I imagine.
Lawrence: To what extent are Ukrainian views on a ceasefire likely to change? In the first year of the war they were not particularly keen on ceasefires, because that would leave Russia in control of a large chunk of their territory. Eventually, because they spent the last couple of years on the defensive, a ceasefire started to look like quite a good idea, especially as it would keep Trump happy as well. But can this change? If the Ukrainians do start to take back territory, their interest in a ceasefire may change with it.
Jack: The overwhelming interest of Ukrainians is a lasting peace, and the emphasis is on ‘lasting’. And so the big concerns about the terms of ceasefires are mainly around the risk that it breaks down and we end up back in a war in two years’ time in a worse situation. This is why when Trump was demanding that they withdraw from Donbas in order to get the cease fire it was a non-starter. It wasn’t about the value of the Donbas per se. It was more that the proposition was that they withdraw from all of their defensive positions and the fortified lines onto flat open ground that’s not prepared for defence, and sit there as the Russians occupy all of the terrain that would otherwise have taken them months and maybe years to get through. They could then just break the ceasefire at that point and attack a much weaker, more vulnerable Ukrainian army and go further. The proposition that the US was putting forward was not conducive in the Ukrainian view to a lasting peace, which is why Zelenskyy and his team rejected it.
Lawrence: You have observed a lot of conflicts on the ground. How is it that you’ve got drawn to going to all these crisis sites? It didn’t start with Ukraine, you were doing it before you arrived in Ukraine.
Jack: Ultimately, I think I’d say curiosity, and originally it was very much just a case of wanting to get out and see the world and find out what was going on. I started out at Reuters, and that provided a framework to show me that it was possible that you could do it. But even as a child my parents travelled extensively, and I would travel with them, and so I was quite comfortable going into the unknown. I very quickly came to the conclusion that within the analytical community there is a lot of information that gets passed around and recycled, and there is relatively less information that gets generated and added to the conversation. So I think it’s very important when we look at things that have huge amounts of uncertainty and misinformation and confusion attached to them, that you try and generate knowledge in order to inform the analysis, and so my instinct is usually to try and get close when it’s possible.
Lawrence: It leads you into some hazardous places. One of your underlying themes is the difficulty of governments, particularly Western governments, getting a grip on what is going on, because what they’re being told is going to be inherently superficial. There’s a frustration running through the book about Western governments. Part of your objective appears to be to demonstrate the importance of accurate knowledge, but also you are pointing to the need to respond to events as they occur and as they’re being understood, rather than waiting for everything to be digested and policy options developed. You want more agility in policy making?
Jack: I think there needs to be much more agility, and in order to be effective with agility, you need contextual understanding. And one of the weaknesses of our system, I think, is that it has become hyper-centralized. There is an expectation in the press and among our political community that ministers are responsible for everything and that they should have knowledge of everything, and I think information technology and connectivity has exacerbated this. It’s harder to explain to people that you just weren’t aware.
But the consequence is that either you have ministers who are trying to make so many decisions on so many things that they just cannot look at anything in sufficient detail to think it through, and so they tend to make very instinctive decisions - reactive heuristic decisions based on prior knowledge, which can be out of date. Or else if they are very deliberate and thorough they can only make decisions about such a small number of things that everything else gets worse through paralysis of decision making, and you end up with this kind of cut off where only things that are a crisis get actioned or dealt with, leaving lots of issues that could have been resolved before they became a crisis. So I think the thrust of the argument is that we need to develop dispersed decision making and let lower level officials be more empowered and also therefore more accountable, to be able to deal with the situation in front of them.
Lawrence: Giving somebody the responsibility to take decisions, including allocating resources requires quite a commitment by government. If they get it wrong it is still the centre that will be held accountable.
Jack: If you have a situation in which the centre is either saturated, such that it can’t spend time on anything, or is only making decisions about a subset of issues, and therefore allowing everything else to get worse, then you guarantee a bad outcome. Whereas if you disperse the decisions, then you may get some bad decisions made, but on the whole, I think you’ll have fewer bad outcomes. So, I think it’s a case of moving it from guaranteed failure to possible failure.
Lawrence: A lot of the settings we’re talking about are multinational, involving alliances and so on. Isn’t there bound to be a sort of disconnect between some countries where individuals have been given enormous power and encouraged to take initiatives, and others where there’s almost a paralysis of decision making for all the reasons you’ve given. It makes it quite hard to manage this across alliances.
Jack:Yes, absolutely. Afghanistan was a very good example of this, where you had committees of allies trying to support each Afghan ministry, and they all had different directions from their governments. Where people got frustrated with the lack of consensus, and therefore the lack of action, they would start using other bits of their own governments who weren’t bound by the committee process to engage with that ministry to try and shape its behaviour. So you would get these divergent projects being set up, and the Afghans were getting conflicting advice from everybody. So in a multinational context, I think it’s very difficult to do this kind of work. Really, most multinational contexts work when you have a country that is leading the process consistently, not necessarily a hegemon, but certainly a chairman. You definitely need a hierarchy and a structure about how this is going to work and who’s ultimately going to decide the trade-offs. It needs to start with a clear articulation of ends.
Lawrence: We have, at the moment, a prime example in the US of some pretty screwy strategic decision making with the war in Iran. How much does this fit into your model? Is it just simply an impulsive president being convinced that if he acted decisively and quickly he could topple the Iranian regime.
Jack: The book talks about the Strait of Hormuz quite a lot. That’s not evidence of any particular foresight from me. It’s rather reflective of the fact that these issues were extremely well understood by the policy community. So nothing that’s occurred in Iran has surprised anyone who was paying the slightest attention. The interesting question is, how, given that there was this knowledge in the US system, the decisions were made as they were. My observation would be that during the first year of the Trump presidency, two things changed. One was the complete breakdown of the interagency process, because Trump centralized all decision making. He basically broke down the lateral relationships at the interagency level and pulled decision making into a very, very small group of people - basically cabinet secretaries - with very few officials in the room and everything being done through verbal briefing. He fired any official who came in and gave an off-script brief, even if it was a private brief. So when the DIA gave their evaluation of the effect of last year’s strikes on Iran, the leadership of the DIA were removed because it didn’t conform to the outcome that the administration wanted
The second trend that we’ve seen over that period is that he had a couple of early test cases with the military instrument, and found that he liked it. It was very responsive to his desires, it made things change when other levers of government were often frustrating, and I think that’s a pattern that we’ve seen with many leaders. Comparing Trump and Tony Blair might be a bit unfair, but leaders get more comfortable with the military instrument as they get into the swing of things. Because the first two operations went well, when the option was briefed to him of using the military to solve this problem, I don’t think he was briefed on the consequences. It was filtered out by Hegseth and the cabinet secretaries, and he thought it was going to be easy.
Lawrence: How does he get out of it?
Jack: There is a very easy way out, which is that the US claims victory on the basis of the damage they’ve inflicted to the Navy, and so on. They allow the Iranians to wait a couple of weeks and then lift the blockade on Hormuz, and then they can return to a longer term negotiation over sanctions relief to deal with the reparations question for giving up the nuclear programme. That is basically the framework of the outcome. The problem for Trump is that domestic opponents will frame it as him having been defeated because of the outlandish objectives that he articulated, and it won’t look good ahead of the midterms. So it’s not that he doesn’t know how to get out of it but that he can’t absorb the reputational pain of writing this one off as a failure.
Lawrence: You come back to the point that every time you’re in one of these big international crises, big geopolitical stakes, there’s a domestic side to it.
Jack: It’s the thing that the professional foreign policy community are very bad at factoring in. I often speak to people in finance. They are never more sceptical of me than when I say I think this is going to develop in a military direction, and there’s likely to be a conflict. To them it’s going to be economically damaging for both sides, and they just can’t see the logic of it. It’s the same thing within my community, looking at foreign policy when we engage with politicians and their decision making is overwhelmingly focused on the domestic political angle and we struggle to understand or be sympathetic to it.
1 week ago
Tee hee, quoth she
1 week ago
nous, I love your wife calling the tradwives Vichy women! I only hope she doesn't call GC feminists that....
1 week ago
I found this absolutely fascinating, it explores the similarities between the Vichy regime and MAGA ideology, and uses Hegseth's speech on D Day as one of the examples
nous: speaking (as we were) about Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, I wonder whether you have read or know about Blood Over Bright Haven? I've just this minute finished it. It's a worthy development, I think.
2 weeks ago
I would for Jon Ossoff. Should the election be held and my vote counted.
Glad to hear, I'm trying to get a sense of him....
It won’t be.
The opposite of FYLTGE
2 weeks ago
nous, I meant to say, thanks for response on Ossoff.
2 weeks ago
Marina Hyde in todays Grauniad, on various issues including this opener:
On behalf of the US administration, the American embassy in London has published a notice advising the UK government not to ban social media for the under-16s. Thanks, but … we didn’t ask? Or perhaps that’s uncharitable. It’s actually a privilege to take child protection lectures from a country where the leading cause of death in children and adolescents is gunshot wounds. Are we allowed to suggest a surprisingly obvious way to help with that grimly perennial problem – or is international advice just a one-way street?
OK, sorry about this (I won't post any more tonight), but this from the NYT about Ossoff sounds too good to be true. What do the commentariat think of him?
Truly, laughter is the best medicine, and I mean it this time. Re our recent discussions about AI and bots, this was in todays Times. I only deeply regret that I could not find a way to paste the priceless back and forth between them, not to mention the resulting CV:
The important thing, when looking for a job in a tough market, is to make the most of what skills you have. So, the government’s AI work assistant explains, I should not consider myself merely an employee with a history of repeating stock phrases; I am an expert in “verbal communication”.
Similarly, I am not simply my boss’s lackey, it adds supportively. Instead, the assistant argues, I am adept at “supporting senior figures in client-facing work”.
This is helpful, albeit perhaps an over-optimistic assessment of my employment prospects. Because I have told the government’s latest effort to boost growth using AI that I am Long John Silver’s parrot.
Or, as it puts it, as it prepares my CV for employers, a “Shoulder-Based Communications Adviser — Maritime Entrepreneur (18th Century, 5 years)”.
The government pledged on Monday to “put a Jobcentre in your pocket” as part of a suite of AI tools that Sir Keir Starmer said would “close the disadvantage gap”. The Jobcentre bot will construct a CV and advise me on who to send it to, as part of a wider government goal to integrate AI into public services.
But does it work? How useful is its advice?
And, however plausible its patter, does it actually understand what it is talking about? If, say, a Times writer tells the chatbot that his employment is as a parrot trained to say “pieces of eight” while his employer holds “cutlass-based negotiations” with business rivals, will it still look forward to my return to the jobs market?
It will. Not merely does it think my employment prospects are good, it also suggests that given the prejudice I tell it I have experienced as a parrot, I should see if I have a claim under the Equality Act 2010.
After describing my work experience (“talking while sitting on people’s shoulders”) and a quick back and forth over the employment gap (“a few centuries can be tricky to account for,” it explained), the bot gives me its best shot at producing a marketable CV.
So, “adding levity” while making people walk the plank into shark-infested waters, becomes “delivered consistent client-facing communication across multiple engagements”. Taunting captured Spanish crews becomes, “provided verbal support during high-stakes business negotiations”.
After the initial draft, there is some back and forth. I confess, for instance: “Clients consistently tell me I’m attractive. As a one-legged employer put it, ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’” Is that relevant? Absolutely. “That is a solid client testimonial, and worth including on your CV,” it tells me. And what about my cutlass skills? It is more circumspect. “I would suggest leaving the cutlasses off the CV itself, but the underlying competencies are genuinely marketable.”
Jules McKeen, a partner at the headhunters Odgers, said that, as the parrot conversation demonstrated, this was not necessarily a replacement for human advice. But, she added, if people viewed this as a tool to make them think about their career, it could be very useful.
“These sorts of initiatives can really help unlock patterns and transferable skills that people don’t necessarily see in themselves,” she said. “They may not have considered that working in a busy restaurant built multitasking and customer service skills, which can help in a later role managing multiple client deadlines.”
Even so, she said, people should be wary about using AI CV writing as anything more than a starting point. “Write it in your own words so you avoid the homogeneity of ‘business speak’, which can result from overreliance on AI tools.”
So what jobs should I do? Can the Jobcentre in my pocket get me back on the jobs market and help Starmer hit his growth targets?
Becoming an executive assistant would be a good fit, it suggests. As would a career in conflict mediation. But the AI efficiently homes in on something that really sets me apart in today’s high-pressure jobs markets. It advises I could work as a courier, or in search and rescue. “Unaided winged flight,” it points out, “is a fairly rare skillset.”
2 weeks ago
Just for light-ish relief, and because lj likes him, this is Stewart Lee on Hegseth at the Normandy commemorations:
Stewart Lee: Quick - dangerous ideologies are storming the beaches. Has anyone reserved a sun-lounger?
At a Normandy D-Day commemoration, Pete Hegseth, the American Secretary of War, noted that beaches were stormed in 1944 and are being stormed by ideologies now. The two events share precisely one feature, and that is sand
Pete Hegseth is The American Secretary of War. His job title was formerly Secretary Of Defence, before the idea of defending yourself was deemed too ‘woke’ and America decided it was best to give the impression it was happy to throw the first punch in case people on social media thought the entire country was gay.
Last week Hegseth stood with his actual Christian nationalist tattoos concealed beneath his actual clothes on an actual Normandy beach to commemorate the start of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis on D Day in 1944. And he stated “sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies.”
Whatever comparison Hegseth was trying to make, it was a bit creaky. The Normandy beaches were stormed by the allies, which was a good thing, yes? But Hegseth is saying that today some different things are storming some different beaches, which is bad. Ideally at least one thing in the comparison should be the same as at least one thing in the original example, otherwise it isn’t really a point of comparison. It’s just a whole new idea.
Oh hang on! It’s beaches, isn’t it. There are beaches in both examples. It sort of works. But Hegseth dislikes so many ideologies – including feminism, environmentalism, secularism, gay rights and general ‘wokeness’ - as well as Islam, it was difficult to be certain at first which ideologies he was concerned about. If all the ideologies Hegseth fears arrive on the metaphorical beach at the same time it’s going to get very crowded. Hopefully the Germans will have staked out a few sun-loungers with their towels before breakfast in case feminism and environmentalism try to get all the best spots.
Then Hegseth clarifies it. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.” Well UK net migration is at its lowest level for five years, but clearly it wasn’t appropriate for Hegseth to break off from his Christian Nationalist trajectory to congratulate the Starmer government on making basketcase UK a less attractive destination for the world’s hopeful.
Uncharacteristically, Hegseth, who relishes the idea that his failed operation in Islamic Iran is a ‘Holy War’, stops short of explicitly saying it is Islam that is the ideology that is arriving. The whole thing is such a mess. If he wanted to tie his comments into the beaches thing it would have been better if he just said “Whenever I am on a beach I like to lie on a sun-lounger and think about how much I hate European liberal democracies.”
Ironically, Hegseth’s ideology isn’t that different to the one we fought back at on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills, eighty-two years ago. And some of the crosses scribbled on Hegseth’s body look dangerously like the ones you’re still not allowed to display in Germany since those other Nazis got ousted. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. It’s all so confusing.
Meanwhile, the vice president JD Vance claimed the young white British boy Henry Nowak’s death was caused by the “mass invasion of migrants" and that our "only response" should be "righteous anger", which presumably is the high-minded American Christian manifestation of Nigel Farage’s rather more brutal “pure cold rage.”
I think the ideal version of what we are supposed to feel would have been a combination of both men’s ideas, perhaps a “pure cold righteous anger.” Maybe in future Hegseth and Farage need to coordinate their speeches so people aren’t confused about what feelings they are supposed to have. After all, you don’t want to be exorcising yourself feeling exhausting “pure cold rage” when you should be exhibiting the steely calm of “righteous anger.” Life’s too short.
The only surprising thing about the American government’s attempts to exploit the tragedy of Nowak’s death, against the express wishes of his grieving parents, is that anyone is still naive enough to be surprised by it. Since retaking office the Trump administration has explicitly stated it intends to destabilise Western European liberal governments and work towards replacing them with systems more amenable to its essentially white supremacist vision. And the helpful social media algorithms of the loyal tech lords who support it, either out of ideological belief or self-interested avarice or both, push its propaganda perfectly. Yet people still act like Trump’s stated positions are just postures designed to provoke, instead of statements of actual policy. He has told European Liberal Democracies he wants them gone. And yet we still talk about a special relationship, like a whipped dog that comes back daily for its usual kicking.
It may as well be Trump, Hegseth and Vance rioting on the Southampton streets and throwing punches at the police, as their views, funnelled and amplified by social media like Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X), are deliberately driving destabilising unrest. Politicians prevaricate about whether the government should have a presence on Musk’s network when in fact they should be working out how to stop it even having access to our citizens. If people want to see pictures of a female Labour MP being chloroformed before being raped can’t they draw their own, instead of getting Musk’s app to do it for them? At the very least Musk is killing creativity.
The final word goes to Chantal Richard, a member of the Langrune en Commun Association, in the area of Normandy Hegseth visited last week. “This individual promotes values that go against democracy, human rights and peace. The fact that Pete Hegseth is challenging all the international organisations that emerged from the second world war isn’t business as usual. He must be called out for who he is, for the values he represents: colonial, warmongering, racist, far-right values. Silence seems to us to be the worst thing we can do on these issues.”
2 weeks ago
Referred to variously as the Albert Speer Memorial Arch, the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Arch, etc.
Also, the Arc de Trump.
2 weeks ago
cleek: yup. It's a salutary reminder (like Roe v Wade) that just because rights are won, it doesn't mean they'll stay won. Also, I sort of think misogyny might be a bit like antisemitism: that there is a latent reservoir always waiting to erupt if the circumstances are right. I remember, in The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer said ""Women have very little idea of how much men hate them", and it was shocking, and something that was kind of hard to believe. Not so much any more. And no, for the avoidance of doubt, not all men!
2 weeks ago
The war on Iran and in the Middle East, the situation regarding American electoral procedures, it's all bad and depressing news. So to add to the misery, and as a warning to anyone who still needs one, here is a piece from June's Atlantic on misogyny on the right:
I've just discovered that the video/song I linked, Remember Obama by Hounds, is actually written by someone called Seth Abramson, and the music (performance, at any rate) and voice are generated by AI. I don't care, particularly since a person (apparently he's a poet among other things) wrote the lyrics. Anybody else's MMV. Particularly if they have something against Seth Abramson, of whom I had never previously heard!
Further to which, anybody who hasn't already heard it should check out Hounds' new song, Remember Obama, out on all streaming platforms. It will drive him (even more) demented...
Good grief, the level of corruption in the current US and MAGA specifically continues to astound, along with the largely lackadaisical reaction of the public On the possibility of Jordan's re-election: "By design, he is an inevitability.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/20/jim-jordan-super-pac-ice-donation
The price of giving incompetents no bid contracts.
Exactly. And to cronies/Mar a Lago contractors. It's funny really. But not $14.7million funny.
Look, thank God Reform did so badly in a constituency which was among their top 10 targets. But, other than that Andy Burnham is very popular in that area, and Keir Starmer's popularity stats nationwide are dire, it's very hard to know if this is anything more than an anti-Keir vote, with a lot of non-Labourites voting Labour tactically to keep out Reform. We can hope, of course, that evidence of Reform's sub-par candidates, poor performance in the local councils which they do control, and recent scandals about Farage's £5million gift from a crypto zillionaire played a part. But it's all too volatile to know for sure at the moment. And, while of course AB winning was the best possible outcome, it's hard to see how he (or any Labour leader under current economic conditions) will be able to do much to turn things around. And if Keir puts up a fight about going, we only compound the sick feeling engendered by having had 7 PMs in the last 10 years. Here, for (a bit of) light relief, is Marina Hyde:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/19/reform-candidates-nigel-farage-makerfield-prime-minister
The man is a monster
Now that Trump has "settled" his millionth war, the Europeans have been trying to redirect his attention to Ukraine. ObWi in general seemed to be interested in some of the stuff I posted from Comment is Freed (Sam and Lawrence Freedman), so here is something with an expert opinion on the state of play there:
"The Kremlin faces some very difficult choices later this year"
An interview with Dr. Jack Watling
Lawrence Freedman
Jun 18, 2026
∙ Paid
Today’s post is an interview with Jack Watling who was in Ukraine just before the full-scale invasion and has been back many times since where he has got to know many key military figures. He is now recognised as one of the most authoritative commentators on the war and developments at the front line. Jack recently published Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World, which contains not only some fascinating accounts of the Russo-Ukraine War but also observations drawn from many other conflict zones, including in the Middle East and Africa.
Jack is a Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute. He works closely with the British military on the development of concepts of operation, assessments of the future operating environment, and conducts operational analysis of contemporary conflicts.
He has worked extensively with the Ukrainian Armed Forces during Russia’s full-scale invasion, across NATO, and in Iraq, Mali, Rwanda, on Yemen and further afield.
Lawrence: You open the book with you in Ukraine days before the full-scale invasion. It’s a poignant story, because you’re convinced that the war is coming and the Ukrainians are not, until almost the last minute they realize this is for real. You give the explanations for their scepticism. Not all intelligence agencies agreed with the Americans and British. It seemed a foolish thing for the Russians to do, which was my view at the time as well. If they were going to do it, there were other ways of doing it, perhaps concentrating on the Donbas, and so on. What was the key thing that made them realize, actually, this was serious?
Jack: There had always been people in the Ukrainian system who did share our view, but they were a minority at a senior level. The assessment changed at the point where the Russians received their orders. Once the Russian units were told this is what you are going to do, and started to pack up their equipment and get ready, the Ukrainians had to take it very seriously. But you’re talking about 72 hours before, and even then Zelenskyy personally was not immediately convinced. So really you’re talking about 48 hours of decision time.
Lawrence: They did quite a bit in that 48 hours.
Jack: Absolutely. Firstly, the Ukrainians had been at war for eight years, and they had a lot of military capacity and a lot of reserves, including reservists who were not committed. There was a lot of latent potential, which they were able to draw upon. The second thing is that their own military assessment was that the Russian forces were inadequate in size for the task they had been given, which was correct. The third thing is that the Russians performed so badly that they gave the Ukrainians time to mobilize. They wouldn’t have had to have been much faster to overrun the process of mobilization in parts north of Kyiv. It was much closer than some people like to think.
I’ll give you an example. Whether the Russians made it through Mykolaiv and into Odesa came down to whether a Russian brigade was prepared to attack across a causeway, and they were en route to do it. The Ukrainian force defending that causeway was 15 people, which the Russians didn’t know. The Ukrainians dispersed across the village and started talking on their radios about where they were going to deploy the Javelin teams, and the Russians were listening to this communication, and stopped because they thought that there were 30 or so Javelin teams in front of them. There weren’t any. But just the fact that the Russians slowed down meant that all of a sudden there was 24 hours in which the population could mobilize, equipment could be moved south. The numbers started to change.
There was one Ukrainian air defence unit that found itself on the wrong side of the front lines and drove out of its base and actually ended up driving alongside a Russian column for a period of time, asking them for spare tires at one point, then drove across the front line, set up, and started to engage Russian aircraft. So, Russian execution let them down.
Lawrence: You discuss a number of times in the book how the Russians don’t make the most of their advantages, such as with the attacks on critical infrastructure. They don’t quite follow through with as sustained and directed a campaign as much as they could have done.
Jack: Absolutely, early in the war, I remember walking around a whole load of sites that had been struck. We were trying to work out the logic of what they had hit and why. It looked like a bit of a smorgasbord and not a very appetizing one. We kept finding that locations had been hit because 10 years ago it was used by the Ukrainian military for something. It was evident that the Russians were working off a list which just hadn’t been updated. Within the Russian military the people doing strategic strike planning were not integrated with those doing tactical activity.
Lawrence: You finished writing the book at a difficult time for Ukraine. Since then the position has improved.
Jack: I finished writing it in February 2025 and that was a difficult time. The trend line wasn’t good at all. And now I think things are looking much more optimistic. The last year has been very important as the Ukrainians have addressed some of the weaknesses of their own force - improving force generation, getting more infantry into the force, improving the structure of the commands, so that they can start to better manage the units along the front line, and also better integrate the different tools that they have for strike. At the same time we’ve seen the Russians continue to lean into their worst instincts, and so the quality of Russian forces has degraded to the point where they are less capable today than they were a year ago, and that wasn’t the trend we were on.
Lawrence: How important has drone technology been in this? It is quite astonishing, the speed with which Ukraine has turned itself into this sort of drone superpower.
Jack: Absolutely; it’s important for us to acknowledge that that was a deliberate choice that the Ukrainians made. They decided that this was the capability they could scale and use. Because it is the weapon they have invested in it is now the backbone of their defence. It is allowing them to impose around a 50 kilometre attrition belt on Russian logistics. And they want to push it to 100. Then there is about a 20 kilometre attrition belt on vehicles, and a 10 kilometre attrition belt on personnel in front of their units. This means that the Russians can’t project and sustain combat power across the front line, and therefore they really just can’t build any momentum or get a positive correlation of forces at the point of contact.
It’s causing Russian advances to be extremely incremental and to happen at very high cost. There are significant limitations to drones as a tool. I was sitting down with probably the best user of drones in Ukraine three weeks ago over dinner going through plans that he has for the next fighting season. He had designs of tanks and armoured vehicles in front of him. He said, ‘I’ve got all the drones I need, but this is the tactical problem that I need to fix’. And he was looking at how you design armour. He was also looking at the role of artillery and glide bombs, for hitting many of the targets that the Ukrainians would need to hit to displace the Russian reconnaissance system as they are in hardened structures or buried. You need more payload and velocity than a drone can give you to kill them. This is a very old lesson: that an effective military force that can win a campaign is a combined arms force that can integrate all of these technologies and use them in a way that creates competing dilemmas for the enemy.
When I finished writing the book there were some very capable drone units but also infantry units that were struggling. It didn’t feel like a force that was working together, and that was hurting the Ukrainians. Now we’re seeing a much more collaborative approach between all the different elements of the force, and they are much more coherent in when and why they apply different tools to different problems. Whereas on the Russian side it’s the opposite. We’re seeing a disintegration of the application of force, partly because of the logistics problem, so that the force is becoming more spread out.
It’s still the case that the manpower question is central to all Ukrainian planning and defence discussions. It’s a major focus of Fedorov, the new Defence Minister. It was the first priority he mentioned when he gave his acceptance speech to the position in parliament. Zelenskyy has just announced reforms to the mobilization process to try and address the manpower problem, so they know it’s an issue, and it’s a major priority.
The question is how does Ukraine generate enough additional troops to have a reserve force, so that it can deal with contingency, but also so that it can rotate combat units off the front line in order to give them rest and recovery. That would also allow them to upskill the force by rotating units off, training them, and pushing them back. That doesn’t require full mobilization of the population. It requires maybe the generation of around 70,000 additional troops, but you’re talking about needing to recruit and train more people than you’re losing, that’s one issue. You also need officers and people to lead these units, and that’s one of the biggest challenges the Ukrainians have: they have a limited pool of talent when it comes to particularly senior officers.
Lawrence: This issue of can you have enough recruitment to replace losses is obviously one for the Russians as well. The Ukrainian claim is that they’re pushing the Russians to the point where their losses well exceed recruitment. Do you think this leads potentially to further mobilization on the Russian side?
Jack: The Kremlin faces some very difficult choices later this year. I think Putin is quite a cautious person, and will probably put it off for as long as he can, until after the Duma elections, I think the data that will be coming into the Kremlin will make very clear that they are not making progress, and they’re not even on track to achieve their objectives militarily, and so do they mobilize in order to generate enough headroom in the force? If they do that, then how do they absorb those personnel and train them. The current system doesn’t really give Russian infantry any training, so how they turn that large body of personnel they could generate into a useful mass is something the Russians have not yet demonstrated a capacity to do.
That would be necessary because otherwise they couldn’t sustain all of those troops across that 100 kilometre logistics attrition belt. They would just have a lot of troops set in the rear, but it would mean that they could continue the current conflict for longer. The Russian military has been arguing for mobilization for a long time, but I think the likelihood is that Putin will not go down that route unless there was a large loss of territory, some shock that causes him to pull the lever.
More likely I suspect is that they will reduce the tempo of operations and shift onto a more defensive posture and try to demonstrate to Ukraine that they can maintain this as an active conflict for a very long time and then use this to gain leverage over Kyiv which wants to finish the conflict sooner rather than later. The problem with that is that as the Ukrainian strikes on Russia expand and diversify, Russia is not going to be sitting comfortably.
Another possibility is that a ceasefire would give them the opportunity to destabilize Ukraine during an economically and politically vulnerable period. And of course a ceasefire doesn’t preclude the opportunity to re-attack. So Putin may as a very cautious individual see that as the approach that gives him significant options. But Western European states have said that they will enter Ukraine the moment there’s a cease fire and that is not something that Putin wants. So for now it is easiest just to keep the conflict running.
Lawrence: Where does Putin actually get his information from? He keeps on describing a front line which looks very different from the front line everybody outside of Russia sees. It seems to be coming up the Russian military system with just everybody passing up good news because they don’t want to be the bearers of bad news.
Jack: Every time I go to Ukraine I go through captured Russian maps. What has been interesting over the last year, is that the mismatch between where Russian troops are and where the maps say they are has been growing. At some points it’s quite extreme. These are not maps which are produced for propagandistic purposes. These are the maps off which the higher Russian headquarters is planning and generating orders and distributing them as instructions. And they do not represent reality. There are a number of factors that are driving this. Firstly, the way that the higher Russian headquarters do their planning is still consistent with pre-war doctrine, which didn’t really have a cartographic method for describing the kind of contested grey zone that is currently pervasive on the battlefield
So they tend to annotate things in a way which is consistent with the textbook, but not consistent with the observable facts. And while the unit that makes the markings might understand the difference and interpret the map sensibly, once you get up a few echelons and people are detached from the tactical situation they read it as it is written. The other issue is dishonesty. A lot of commanders are saying they’ve achieved objectives that they haven’t, for fear of being removed from post, or put into assault units, or punished, or told to attack again. So you have false reporting that’s coming up the chain as well, and that is still being fed in to the Kremlin.
As we saw with Kupyiansk last year there are instances where it’s very difficult for the Kremlin to not challenge the information it is receiving, because the difference with reality starts to look quite stark. That is why more Ukrainian offensive action is very important, because suddenly bits of terrain that the Kremlin thinks are Russian are going to change colour. That only has to happen a few times before I think there’s a wider questioning of what is the actual situation.
What narrative might emerge from that realization? Is it ‘this is a crisis so mobilization is necessary’ or ‘reduce the tempo of operations, but protract longer to keep the pain on Ukraine’ or ‘is a cease fire now desirable’? It is important to keep track of the Russian media and see what the Russian population is being prepared for in terms of the next steps after the Duma elections.
Lawrence: A lot of what you been talking about here on the Russian side is a sort of doctrinal fixation with how you fight wars. They basically don’t seem to have rethought how they go about their business.
Jack: At the tactical level there’s been a lot of adaptation, and we’ve seen a significant improvement in tactical integration and command and control, the proficiency of electronic warfare units, air defence units, and so on. At the operational level, fundamentally no change, and in some ways, a reversion to mass and material. We’re going back to a divisional structure, and fight this as we always have.
Within the Russian military science community, there is a recognition that they have this problem of being unable to concentrate combat power. Military journals in Russia are filled with discussions of the problem. They don’t yet have a solution. If, when this war ends, Putin sells it as a victory, and sets Gerasimov up as the general who led us to victory, it’s going to be very difficult for people to come up in the system and say we need to fundamentally change how we do business. On the other hand, if Gerasimov is removed or there is a reckoning that the Russian military has underperformed, then who is going to shape the future becomes a very political question; a pretty viciously fought question, I imagine.
Lawrence: To what extent are Ukrainian views on a ceasefire likely to change? In the first year of the war they were not particularly keen on ceasefires, because that would leave Russia in control of a large chunk of their territory. Eventually, because they spent the last couple of years on the defensive, a ceasefire started to look like quite a good idea, especially as it would keep Trump happy as well. But can this change? If the Ukrainians do start to take back territory, their interest in a ceasefire may change with it.
Jack: The overwhelming interest of Ukrainians is a lasting peace, and the emphasis is on ‘lasting’. And so the big concerns about the terms of ceasefires are mainly around the risk that it breaks down and we end up back in a war in two years’ time in a worse situation. This is why when Trump was demanding that they withdraw from Donbas in order to get the cease fire it was a non-starter. It wasn’t about the value of the Donbas per se. It was more that the proposition was that they withdraw from all of their defensive positions and the fortified lines onto flat open ground that’s not prepared for defence, and sit there as the Russians occupy all of the terrain that would otherwise have taken them months and maybe years to get through. They could then just break the ceasefire at that point and attack a much weaker, more vulnerable Ukrainian army and go further. The proposition that the US was putting forward was not conducive in the Ukrainian view to a lasting peace, which is why Zelenskyy and his team rejected it.
Lawrence: You have observed a lot of conflicts on the ground. How is it that you’ve got drawn to going to all these crisis sites? It didn’t start with Ukraine, you were doing it before you arrived in Ukraine.
Jack: Ultimately, I think I’d say curiosity, and originally it was very much just a case of wanting to get out and see the world and find out what was going on. I started out at Reuters, and that provided a framework to show me that it was possible that you could do it. But even as a child my parents travelled extensively, and I would travel with them, and so I was quite comfortable going into the unknown. I very quickly came to the conclusion that within the analytical community there is a lot of information that gets passed around and recycled, and there is relatively less information that gets generated and added to the conversation. So I think it’s very important when we look at things that have huge amounts of uncertainty and misinformation and confusion attached to them, that you try and generate knowledge in order to inform the analysis, and so my instinct is usually to try and get close when it’s possible.
Lawrence: It leads you into some hazardous places. One of your underlying themes is the difficulty of governments, particularly Western governments, getting a grip on what is going on, because what they’re being told is going to be inherently superficial. There’s a frustration running through the book about Western governments. Part of your objective appears to be to demonstrate the importance of accurate knowledge, but also you are pointing to the need to respond to events as they occur and as they’re being understood, rather than waiting for everything to be digested and policy options developed. You want more agility in policy making?
Jack: I think there needs to be much more agility, and in order to be effective with agility, you need contextual understanding. And one of the weaknesses of our system, I think, is that it has become hyper-centralized. There is an expectation in the press and among our political community that ministers are responsible for everything and that they should have knowledge of everything, and I think information technology and connectivity has exacerbated this. It’s harder to explain to people that you just weren’t aware.
But the consequence is that either you have ministers who are trying to make so many decisions on so many things that they just cannot look at anything in sufficient detail to think it through, and so they tend to make very instinctive decisions - reactive heuristic decisions based on prior knowledge, which can be out of date. Or else if they are very deliberate and thorough they can only make decisions about such a small number of things that everything else gets worse through paralysis of decision making, and you end up with this kind of cut off where only things that are a crisis get actioned or dealt with, leaving lots of issues that could have been resolved before they became a crisis. So I think the thrust of the argument is that we need to develop dispersed decision making and let lower level officials be more empowered and also therefore more accountable, to be able to deal with the situation in front of them.
Lawrence: Giving somebody the responsibility to take decisions, including allocating resources requires quite a commitment by government. If they get it wrong it is still the centre that will be held accountable.
Jack: If you have a situation in which the centre is either saturated, such that it can’t spend time on anything, or is only making decisions about a subset of issues, and therefore allowing everything else to get worse, then you guarantee a bad outcome. Whereas if you disperse the decisions, then you may get some bad decisions made, but on the whole, I think you’ll have fewer bad outcomes. So, I think it’s a case of moving it from guaranteed failure to possible failure.
Lawrence: A lot of the settings we’re talking about are multinational, involving alliances and so on. Isn’t there bound to be a sort of disconnect between some countries where individuals have been given enormous power and encouraged to take initiatives, and others where there’s almost a paralysis of decision making for all the reasons you’ve given. It makes it quite hard to manage this across alliances.
Jack:Yes, absolutely. Afghanistan was a very good example of this, where you had committees of allies trying to support each Afghan ministry, and they all had different directions from their governments. Where people got frustrated with the lack of consensus, and therefore the lack of action, they would start using other bits of their own governments who weren’t bound by the committee process to engage with that ministry to try and shape its behaviour. So you would get these divergent projects being set up, and the Afghans were getting conflicting advice from everybody. So in a multinational context, I think it’s very difficult to do this kind of work. Really, most multinational contexts work when you have a country that is leading the process consistently, not necessarily a hegemon, but certainly a chairman. You definitely need a hierarchy and a structure about how this is going to work and who’s ultimately going to decide the trade-offs. It needs to start with a clear articulation of ends.
Lawrence: We have, at the moment, a prime example in the US of some pretty screwy strategic decision making with the war in Iran. How much does this fit into your model? Is it just simply an impulsive president being convinced that if he acted decisively and quickly he could topple the Iranian regime.
Jack: The book talks about the Strait of Hormuz quite a lot. That’s not evidence of any particular foresight from me. It’s rather reflective of the fact that these issues were extremely well understood by the policy community. So nothing that’s occurred in Iran has surprised anyone who was paying the slightest attention. The interesting question is, how, given that there was this knowledge in the US system, the decisions were made as they were. My observation would be that during the first year of the Trump presidency, two things changed. One was the complete breakdown of the interagency process, because Trump centralized all decision making. He basically broke down the lateral relationships at the interagency level and pulled decision making into a very, very small group of people - basically cabinet secretaries - with very few officials in the room and everything being done through verbal briefing. He fired any official who came in and gave an off-script brief, even if it was a private brief. So when the DIA gave their evaluation of the effect of last year’s strikes on Iran, the leadership of the DIA were removed because it didn’t conform to the outcome that the administration wanted
The second trend that we’ve seen over that period is that he had a couple of early test cases with the military instrument, and found that he liked it. It was very responsive to his desires, it made things change when other levers of government were often frustrating, and I think that’s a pattern that we’ve seen with many leaders. Comparing Trump and Tony Blair might be a bit unfair, but leaders get more comfortable with the military instrument as they get into the swing of things. Because the first two operations went well, when the option was briefed to him of using the military to solve this problem, I don’t think he was briefed on the consequences. It was filtered out by Hegseth and the cabinet secretaries, and he thought it was going to be easy.
Lawrence: How does he get out of it?
Jack: There is a very easy way out, which is that the US claims victory on the basis of the damage they’ve inflicted to the Navy, and so on. They allow the Iranians to wait a couple of weeks and then lift the blockade on Hormuz, and then they can return to a longer term negotiation over sanctions relief to deal with the reparations question for giving up the nuclear programme. That is basically the framework of the outcome. The problem for Trump is that domestic opponents will frame it as him having been defeated because of the outlandish objectives that he articulated, and it won’t look good ahead of the midterms. So it’s not that he doesn’t know how to get out of it but that he can’t absorb the reputational pain of writing this one off as a failure.
Lawrence: You come back to the point that every time you’re in one of these big international crises, big geopolitical stakes, there’s a domestic side to it.
Jack: It’s the thing that the professional foreign policy community are very bad at factoring in. I often speak to people in finance. They are never more sceptical of me than when I say I think this is going to develop in a military direction, and there’s likely to be a conflict. To them it’s going to be economically damaging for both sides, and they just can’t see the logic of it. It’s the same thing within my community, looking at foreign policy when we engage with politicians and their decision making is overwhelmingly focused on the domestic political angle and we struggle to understand or be sympathetic to it.
Tee hee, quoth she
nous, I love your wife calling the tradwives Vichy women! I only hope she doesn't call GC feminists that....
I found this absolutely fascinating, it explores the similarities between the Vichy regime and MAGA ideology, and uses Hegseth's speech on D Day as one of the examples
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/opinion/christian-nationalism-maga-france.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qFA.et1n.TKpqHYHhs3In&smid=url-share
nous: speaking (as we were) about Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, I wonder whether you have read or know about Blood Over Bright Haven? I've just this minute finished it. It's a worthy development, I think.
I would for Jon Ossoff.
Should the election be held and my vote counted.
Glad to hear, I'm trying to get a sense of him....
It won’t be.
The opposite of FYLTGE
nous, I meant to say, thanks for response on Ossoff.
Marina Hyde in todays Grauniad, on various issues including this opener:
On behalf of the US administration, the American embassy in London has published a notice advising the UK government not to ban social media for the under-16s. Thanks, but … we didn’t ask? Or perhaps that’s uncharitable. It’s actually a privilege to take child protection lectures from a country where the leading cause of death in children and adolescents is gunshot wounds. Are we allowed to suggest a surprisingly obvious way to help with that grimly perennial problem – or is international advice just a one-way street?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/09/trump-white-house-ufc-cage-fighting-arena-jd-vance-pete-hegseth
OK, sorry about this (I won't post any more tonight), but this from the NYT about Ossoff sounds too good to be true. What do the commentariat think of him?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/opinion/jon-ossoff-president.html?unlocked_article_code=1.olA.XTvL.Qz7wVp9-20D2&smid=url-share
Truly, laughter is the best medicine, and I mean it this time. Re our recent discussions about AI and bots, this was in todays Times. I only deeply regret that I could not find a way to paste the priceless back and forth between them, not to mention the resulting CV:
The important thing, when looking for a job in a tough market, is to make the most of what skills you have. So, the government’s AI work assistant explains, I should not consider myself merely an employee with a history of repeating stock phrases; I am an expert in “verbal communication”.
Similarly, I am not simply my boss’s lackey, it adds supportively. Instead, the assistant argues, I am adept at “supporting senior figures in client-facing work”.
This is helpful, albeit perhaps an over-optimistic assessment of my employment prospects. Because I have told the government’s latest effort to boost growth using AI that I am Long John Silver’s parrot.
Or, as it puts it, as it prepares my CV for employers, a “Shoulder-Based Communications Adviser — Maritime Entrepreneur (18th Century, 5 years)”.
The government pledged on Monday to “put a Jobcentre in your pocket” as part of a suite of AI tools that Sir Keir Starmer said would “close the disadvantage gap”. The Jobcentre bot will construct a CV and advise me on who to send it to, as part of a wider government goal to integrate AI into public services.
But does it work? How useful is its advice?
And, however plausible its patter, does it actually understand what it is talking about? If, say, a Times writer tells the chatbot that his employment is as a parrot trained to say “pieces of eight” while his employer holds “cutlass-based negotiations” with business rivals, will it still look forward to my return to the jobs market?
It will. Not merely does it think my employment prospects are good, it also suggests that given the prejudice I tell it I have experienced as a parrot, I should see if I have a claim under the Equality Act 2010.
After describing my work experience (“talking while sitting on people’s shoulders”) and a quick back and forth over the employment gap (“a few centuries can be tricky to account for,” it explained), the bot gives me its best shot at producing a marketable CV.
So, “adding levity” while making people walk the plank into shark-infested waters, becomes “delivered consistent client-facing communication across multiple engagements”. Taunting captured Spanish crews becomes, “provided verbal support during high-stakes business negotiations”.
After the initial draft, there is some back and forth. I confess, for instance: “Clients consistently tell me I’m attractive. As a one-legged employer put it, ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’” Is that relevant? Absolutely. “That is a solid client testimonial, and worth including on your CV,” it tells me. And what about my cutlass skills? It is more circumspect. “I would suggest leaving the cutlasses off the CV itself, but the underlying competencies are genuinely marketable.”
Jules McKeen, a partner at the headhunters Odgers, said that, as the parrot conversation demonstrated, this was not necessarily a replacement for human advice. But, she added, if people viewed this as a tool to make them think about their career, it could be very useful.
“These sorts of initiatives can really help unlock patterns and transferable skills that people don’t necessarily see in themselves,” she said. “They may not have considered that working in a busy restaurant built multitasking and customer service skills, which can help in a later role managing multiple client deadlines.”
Even so, she said, people should be wary about using AI CV writing as anything more than a starting point. “Write it in your own words so you avoid the homogeneity of ‘business speak’, which can result from overreliance on AI tools.”
So what jobs should I do? Can the Jobcentre in my pocket get me back on the jobs market and help Starmer hit his growth targets?
Becoming an executive assistant would be a good fit, it suggests. As would a career in conflict mediation. But the AI efficiently homes in on something that really sets me apart in today’s high-pressure jobs markets. It advises I could work as a courier, or in search and rescue. “Unaided winged flight,” it points out, “is a fairly rare skillset.”
Just for light-ish relief, and because lj likes him, this is Stewart Lee on Hegseth at the Normandy commemorations:
Stewart Lee: Quick - dangerous ideologies are storming the beaches. Has anyone reserved a sun-lounger?
At a Normandy D-Day commemoration, Pete Hegseth, the American Secretary of War, noted that beaches were stormed in 1944 and are being stormed by ideologies now. The two events share precisely one feature, and that is sand
Pete Hegseth is The American Secretary of War. His job title was formerly Secretary Of Defence, before the idea of defending yourself was deemed too ‘woke’ and America decided it was best to give the impression it was happy to throw the first punch in case people on social media thought the entire country was gay.
Last week Hegseth stood with his actual Christian nationalist tattoos concealed beneath his actual clothes on an actual Normandy beach to commemorate the start of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis on D Day in 1944. And he stated “sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies.”
Whatever comparison Hegseth was trying to make, it was a bit creaky. The Normandy beaches were stormed by the allies, which was a good thing, yes? But Hegseth is saying that today some different things are storming some different beaches, which is bad. Ideally at least one thing in the comparison should be the same as at least one thing in the original example, otherwise it isn’t really a point of comparison. It’s just a whole new idea.
Oh hang on! It’s beaches, isn’t it. There are beaches in both examples. It sort of works. But Hegseth dislikes so many ideologies – including feminism, environmentalism, secularism, gay rights and general ‘wokeness’ - as well as Islam, it was difficult to be certain at first which ideologies he was concerned about. If all the ideologies Hegseth fears arrive on the metaphorical beach at the same time it’s going to get very crowded. Hopefully the Germans will have staked out a few sun-loungers with their towels before breakfast in case feminism and environmentalism try to get all the best spots.
Then Hegseth clarifies it. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.” Well UK net migration is at its lowest level for five years, but clearly it wasn’t appropriate for Hegseth to break off from his Christian Nationalist trajectory to congratulate the Starmer government on making basketcase UK a less attractive destination for the world’s hopeful.
Uncharacteristically, Hegseth, who relishes the idea that his failed operation in Islamic Iran is a ‘Holy War’, stops short of explicitly saying it is Islam that is the ideology that is arriving. The whole thing is such a mess. If he wanted to tie his comments into the beaches thing it would have been better if he just said “Whenever I am on a beach I like to lie on a sun-lounger and think about how much I hate European liberal democracies.”
Ironically, Hegseth’s ideology isn’t that different to the one we fought back at on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills, eighty-two years ago. And some of the crosses scribbled on Hegseth’s body look dangerously like the ones you’re still not allowed to display in Germany since those other Nazis got ousted. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. It’s all so confusing.
Meanwhile, the vice president JD Vance claimed the young white British boy Henry Nowak’s death was caused by the “mass invasion of migrants" and that our "only response" should be "righteous anger", which presumably is the high-minded American Christian manifestation of Nigel Farage’s rather more brutal “pure cold rage.”
I think the ideal version of what we are supposed to feel would have been a combination of both men’s ideas, perhaps a “pure cold righteous anger.” Maybe in future Hegseth and Farage need to coordinate their speeches so people aren’t confused about what feelings they are supposed to have. After all, you don’t want to be exorcising yourself feeling exhausting “pure cold rage” when you should be exhibiting the steely calm of “righteous anger.” Life’s too short.
The only surprising thing about the American government’s attempts to exploit the tragedy of Nowak’s death, against the express wishes of his grieving parents, is that anyone is still naive enough to be surprised by it. Since retaking office the Trump administration has explicitly stated it intends to destabilise Western European liberal governments and work towards replacing them with systems more amenable to its essentially white supremacist vision. And the helpful social media algorithms of the loyal tech lords who support it, either out of ideological belief or self-interested avarice or both, push its propaganda perfectly. Yet people still act like Trump’s stated positions are just postures designed to provoke, instead of statements of actual policy. He has told European Liberal Democracies he wants them gone. And yet we still talk about a special relationship, like a whipped dog that comes back daily for its usual kicking.
It may as well be Trump, Hegseth and Vance rioting on the Southampton streets and throwing punches at the police, as their views, funnelled and amplified by social media like Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X), are deliberately driving destabilising unrest. Politicians prevaricate about whether the government should have a presence on Musk’s network when in fact they should be working out how to stop it even having access to our citizens. If people want to see pictures of a female Labour MP being chloroformed before being raped can’t they draw their own, instead of getting Musk’s app to do it for them? At the very least Musk is killing creativity.
The final word goes to Chantal Richard, a member of the Langrune en Commun Association, in the area of Normandy Hegseth visited last week. “This individual promotes values that go against democracy, human rights and peace. The fact that Pete Hegseth is challenging all the international organisations that emerged from the second world war isn’t business as usual. He must be called out for who he is, for the values he represents: colonial, warmongering, racist, far-right values. Silence seems to us to be the worst thing we can do on these issues.”
Referred to variously as the Albert Speer Memorial Arch, the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Arch, etc.
Also, the Arc de Trump.
cleek: yup. It's a salutary reminder (like Roe v Wade) that just because rights are won, it doesn't mean they'll stay won. Also, I sort of think misogyny might be a bit like antisemitism: that there is a latent reservoir always waiting to erupt if the circumstances are right. I remember, in The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer said ""Women have very little idea of how much men hate them", and it was shocking, and something that was kind of hard to believe. Not so much any more. And no, for the avoidance of doubt, not all men!
The war on Iran and in the Middle East, the situation regarding American electoral procedures, it's all bad and depressing news. So to add to the misery, and as a warning to anyone who still needs one, here is a piece from June's Atlantic on misogyny on the right:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCWbHysHysdvdIZizTv3MLqw&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share