Modern War

Dec Livestream – James Rosone and Ukraine

James Rosone joins us once again on the livestream tonight, to talk about the war in Ukraine. James has some unique insights on what led up to this, and he’s been digging deeply into what’s been happening. (He also dealt with the Ukrainian situation in his fiction way back in 2017.) We might well get into some uncomfortable truths about the war tonight. War is almost never as clear-cut or neat as the narrative (on either side) would have you believe. Tune in on Facebook or YouTube: While the livestream is currently only on YouTube and Facebook, we do have a Rumble account as well. Once that hits 100 subscribers, we can stream on Rumble, getting us out from under the Google thumb, so go check that out, too. This episode will be up on Rumble tomorrow.

June Livestream Tonight

It’s that time of the month: time for the American Praetorians livestream (or whatever we’re calling this). At 6PM PST/9PM EST, I’ll be going live once again with Mike Kupari, Coop LoPresto, and special guest James Rosone. We’ll be talking about warfare and how it’s changed, how some of the “new” changes are actually quite timeless, and how thriller writers and prognosticators past and present have gotten things right, and other things quite wrong. Tune in on Facebook, or on YouTube, here: Also, if you want to support us, check out Mike’s Amazon page, and James Rosone’s.

The South China Sea and Tensions With China

While Russia has taken front and center attention recently, due to the use of Russian agitprop to influence the internal affairs of Russia’s chief strategic rival (i.e., us), Russia is not the only major power that sees the US as a rival in its regional and global strategic goals. (Strangely, most of the outrage over Russia right now seems to be focused on their information and influence operations, rather than the continuing frozen conflicts in Ukraine, Transnistria, Nagorno-Kharabakh, and South Ossetia, to name only a few. But that’s another matter for another post.) China, in addition to conducting quiet resource-gathering operations worldwide, with a pronounced tendency not to care what kind of criminals they’re doing business with (see: shipping illegally mined iron ore out of the port of Lazaro-Cardenas in Mexico while that port was under control of the Caballeros Templarios cartel), has been expanding its regional military power projection, mostly focused on the South China Sea. Not only do several major shipping lanes pass through the South China Sea, making control of the waters there strategically important for reasons of power projection, but the two primary disputed island chains, the Paracels and the Spratlys, are thought to contain oil