People, ideas, machines XII: Theories of regime change and civil war
Preference falsification and Britain's slide to chaos...
I would rather discover one cause than be king of Persia.
Democritus
At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could anyone have preferred revenge to piety and gain to innocence? But when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.
Thucydides, Book III, 82-84
Great crises constitute the weather that favours Prussia’s growth, provided that it is fearlessly, perhaps even ruthlessly, exploited by us… There is no exact science of politics just as there is none for political economy. Only professors are able to package the sum of the changing needs of cultural man into scientific laws… Politics is neither arithmetic nor mathematics. To be sure, one has to reckon with given and unknown factors, but there are no rules and formulas with which to sum up the results in advance.
Bismarck
[T]he democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants.
Nieztsche
A single spark can start a prairie fire.
Mao, paraphrasing an ancient text
It is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it. Thus the social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.
Only consummate statecraft can enable a King to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule he sets to improving the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated.’
In all periods, even in the Middle Ages, there have been leaders of revolt who, with a view to effecting certain changes in the established order, appealed to the universal laws governing all communities, and championed the natural rights of man against the State. But none of these ventures was successful; the firebrand which set all Europe ablaze in the eighteenth century had been easily extinguished in the fifteenth. For doctrines of this kind to lead to revolutions, certain changes must already have taken place in the living conditions, customs, and mores of a nation and prepared men’s minds for the reception of new ideas…
[T]hough it took the world by surprise, it [1789] was the inevitable outcome of a long period of gestation, the abrupt and violent conclusion of a process in which six generations played an intermittent part.
Tocqueville
All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.
Von Neumann
Comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.
President Xi, 2013.
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
Churchill
Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.
Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.
These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire. When I said in 2020 that, among the general changes to the dysfunctional No10/CO system, the oversight of NSS must change so it became visible and legible again to the PM’s office so we could participate in debates like — what are the actual priorities of the intelligence services vis Putin and Xi — some senior officials tried to pretend that zero political scrutiny of NSS was somehow a constitutional principle. After I left, this system became even more closed and dysfunctional, hence the total lack of true strategic thinking connecting ends-ways-means over Ukraine and all things defence procurement becoming more and more Kafka-esque as the MoD shipped stuff to Ukraine. I repeat: the lack of legibility of the NSS is without historical precedent in the UK for centuries and is related to broader issues of Whitehall’s dysfunction, the disgraceful shambles of the MoD etc.
SW1’s OODA loop has operated for years as a massive denial-of-service-attack on its own perceptions of reality — constant cycles of ephemeral emotional hysteria and Narrative Whiplash while No10 has no capability to execute priorities. A great recent example: Professor Ansell saying that the Zelensky Oval Office interview meant that Farage’s prospects had ‘peaked’ (widely Bluesky’d approvingly!) — an emotional spasm entirely in tune with SW1’s NPC network reflecting OODA-as-DOS-attack. This has, as I’ve argued for years, made it more and more vulnerable to history’s remorseless pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse.
The old parties lost their last chance to fix things in a sort-of normal way when the Trolley and his girlfriend told everyone in 2021 they were going ‘back to normal politics’. SW1 cheered including the Tory MPs who got culled en masse in 2024. Sunak doubled down on optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and lawyers*. After Starmer won, SW1’s NPCs tweeted to each other how they now had ‘serious grownups’ and we’d return to ‘normal government’.
But this was just another cycle of delusional SW1 Narrative Whiplash. The Starmer project blew up on contact with the reality of Whitehall. Now both parties are led by Dead Players. Both old parties are structurally knackered. And the NPCs tweeting ‘hurrah for the grownups, Sue Gray is the Jedi we need’ a few months ago are now Bluesky-ing ‘disgusting rhetoric from Starmer’.
Starmer is speed-running Sunak’s demented combination of a) massively raising the salience of immigration/boats with b) a set of policies that everyone who understands the details knows cannot possibly do what he’s promising.
Why is he doing it? Because, like Sunak, he’s caught between a) political advice that the country is enraged over immigration/boats and wants action, b) the adamantine priority of the dominant faction in Whitehall — i.e the force that actually orients 99% of policy — is maintaining 1) the HRA/ECHR-judicial review system and 2) the cross-party HMT/OBR/university-endorsed immigration/asylum Ponzi. Being a Dead Player optimised to ‘defend the institutions’ at all costs however pathological, Starmer has, aping Sunak, synthesised the political advice of McSweeney and the priority of the officials/lawyers actually running No10/70WH and generated his own version of Sunak’s demented combination.
If you’re not in the meetings, you can’t accurately estimate the relative levels of dishonesty and self-delusion involved. Obviously there are officials and lawyers in the meetings who understand reality and are happy to feed ministerial delusions, as they did with Cameron, May, Boris and Sunak. And there are odd unusual officials who could bluntly tell the truth: PM, so there is no confusion, what you’re announcing cannot possible do what you claim. I know Sunak was super-delusional, not lying, only because I spoke to him in person twice. And of course many politicians develop weird super-position personalities, where they sort-of-know and sort-of-lie to themselves such than an impartial observer can rarely conclude either ‘they’re lying’ or ‘they’re deluded’: it’s a bit of both. It’s how many cope when promoted to jobs far beyond them. And it’s very poorly understood among business elites who always overrate the rationality of political players and underrate the prevalence of this super-position-personality phenomenon which means widespread avoidance of the real issues in meeting after meeting to an extent the median business elite has little experience of outside companies heading for bankruptcy. I suspect there’s more conscious dishonesty with Starmer than Sunak but the result is sure to be the same: political disaster.
I repeat what I predicted about Sunak when in 2023 the old media regurgitated endless nonsense on how No10 plans could stop the boats without dealing with the HRA and judicial review because [hand wave]. The BBC, ITV and SKY have repeated the process with Starmer’s announcements: no explanation, ever, of how and why the HRA works. Just as when Jenrick correctly said that the HRA means that UK SF is droning people instead of arresting them — which I revealed on this blog in 2021 but everyone ignored — the old media span the story as ‘Jenrick accuses SF of murder!’ When the actual story was that the lawyers were instructing it was LAWFUL, the opposite of murder, to drone but NOT lawful to arrest and this was the actual mad story — but the HRA angle had to be distorted then buried. (And NB. this droning-not-arrest driven by ECHR+CO lawyers+Kafka continues.) And the old media did not explain after Rudakubana attacked the prison guards that Britain does not keep even convicted terrorist killers about to be released from jail who are believed to be plotting a new attack under surveillance because legal advice is it is unlawful under the HRA — so a fortiori, Rudakubana can’t be kept under proper surveillance. And there are many hundreds of similar or worse absurdities. Terrorists literally being hunted from cave to cave in Afghanistan by JSOC (US classified special forces) have used satellite phones to procure London barristers to bring legal cases against the MoD for ‘human rights’ abuses and won secret payouts of millions while on the run. Such grotesque cases are classified by the Cabinet Office to stop MPs knowing what the ECHR actually does and close to zero MPs are informed of such lunatic dynamics. (Hence my advice to Sunak to declassify the ECHR/HRA effects on security, take them out of red STRAP files and publish them.)
I went through the boats in great detail in 2020 with both a) the military and b) the best lawyers inside and outside government and the conclusion was absolutely clear: operationally stopping the boats is very simple and could be done in days but CO legal advice endorsed by external experts is that the PM cannot do this simple thing lawfully because the courts will stop him using the HRA/ECHR. (In simple terms if the PM tried to order the Navy to stop the boats in a serious way, the courts would state that the PM’s orders are unlawful under the HRA therefore the Navy cannot execute them and the Cabinet Secretary would tell the PM that he cannot insist on his orders being obeyed as, in extremis, both the PM and officers could be arrested for contempt. The core operational and political problem of ‘stop the boats’ could be solved by simple primary legislation explicitly whacking the HRA though the broader issue of the Strasbourg court and other international law angles requires deeper action. I won’t go into the details of this here.)
You therefore must choose between (A) our priority is the HRA/ECHR over stopping boats, or (B) our priority is stopping the boats therefore the HRA regime (plus some other legal barriers) must be changed in primary legislation. Sunak chose A. So has Starmer. But both have spun the media that the choice does not exist and are pretending they’ve prioritised immigration. And if you rely on BBC or ITV or SKY you will not realise the choice exists because the broadcasters reflect the priority of officials: keep the voters in the dark on the subject.
I told Sunak he was deluding himself and his plans could not work. He said he understood ‘the complex details’ better than me or anybody else. His argument shifted over time to ever more baroque contortions ending in the inevitable humiliating failure — baffling given his intellect unless you grasp the problem of the super-position personality politicians develop to avoid facing reality, and the rarity of people around PMs who will tell them bluntly ‘you are deluding yourself PM’. Starmer will fail just the same whether he’s lying or deluded or in a superposition.
And ironically this farce is generating not a ‘return to normal government’ but the resurrection of SW1’s hate figure, Farage, to champion what voters said in 2016, 2019 and 2024: we hate Westminster and we demand huge changes. Farage hasn’t built a campaign machine and professional team on any scale. Reform remains essentially Farage + iPhone. But he plays a consistent main character in the show while the rest of the cast are writing their roles out of the script. McLuhan said that if it’s on TV it’s a TV show — and we can modify this to if it’s on social media it’s a social media show. The old parties do not understand social media shows. (As I wrote a few months ago, Marshal McLuhan warned that the emergence of new media always generates dynamics that are effectively invisible to almost everybody but a few artists. The old political-media elites now publicly perform Narrative Whiplash via new electronic media but are almost totally unaware of their performance — they memory-hole everything including their own performances. Cf. discussion of this here.)
And on the politics, I repeat again a central argument SW1 en masse cannot absorb but which is crucial to grapple with when considering what comes after the collapse of Labour and Tories…
The Vote Leave strategy for turning the Tories into an essentially new party with a new electoral coalition was much, much more logical and easier to maintain given the big historical forces in play than it is for Labour to cope with the same cultural and electoral dynamics such as educational polarisation and the rapidly changing media.
Starmer has a truly nightmare situation because the issue of what to do about immigration is no longer susceptible to post-1991 SW1 politics-as-usual. Rich graduate London, crucial for what Labour has become, has radicalised itself (like the Democrats) such that it is on principle hostile to border control and treats arguments made by Bill Clinton and Obama as ‘racism’. But keeping them happy enrages most of the country outside London. And Starmer has done a Sunak and enraged everybody! Rich graduate London now rages at Starmer for his ‘appalling rhetoric’ and not-London hates him because it knows his rhetoric is just more lies and delusions and nonsense we’ve seen from SW1 for 25 years and everybody can see the boats keep coming on video every day proving we’re right. He’s said the trajectory has caused ‘incalculable damage’ yet he self-evidently does not even believe his own words given his trivial proposals — a perfect Sunak recipe for infuriating everyone and destroying your electoral coalition. Starmer’s rhetoric, like Sunak’s, could only work politically if you deliver and he’s already made clear delivery is not his priority, the ECHR is.
It was much easier and more logical for Sunak to prioritise voters, ditch the ECHR and actually stop the boats while Starmer sided with Jolyon and the human rights lawyers. Yes they’d have lost Osborne, Grieve et al. Good, more winning! It is much, much harder for Starmer to do the same because most of his MPs and activists and a good chunk of his voters in cities are with Grieve and Jolyon.
The VL strategy was easier to execute given the actual facts of electoral dynamics. But immediately after the 2019 election SW1 ran its denial-of-service-attack against itself and convinced itself that, like in 2016, our victory was a fluke because of ‘extreme circumstances’, ‘Corbyn’ etc and it would be ‘madness’ for the Tories to try to maintain that ‘incoherent’ electoral coalition because it would ‘pull the Party towards extremism’ (i.e doing what most voters want). They then cheered Boris-Truss-Sunak as they machine-gunned the entire coalition with the biggest wave of uncontrolled immigration ever, tax rises, vandalism on a vast scale, then declared ‘see the 2019 coalition could never have lasted’!
Why? Because the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes. Super-popular outside SW1 but a nightmare for SW1.
So both parties cheered by the NPCs have doubled down on a trajectory that is deeply unpopular to almost every constituency — the ‘mainstream’ has alienated everybody except Whitehall and some other London/university characters desperate to prop up the rotten edifice. They’ve revived their bogeyman, Farage. Sunak and Starmer are the last of the old party leaders who’ve clung to the dead scripts of the hollow SW1 simulacrum — hollow ‘leaders’ optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and government lawyers* even when it leads to their own implosion.
While the new government imploded, the Tory Party could not benefit. It has disintegrated in all areas. Its membership has either defected to Reform or retreated in disgust from politics, its donors have gone on strike, its local networks have collapsed, it cannot generate good ideas, it cannot campaign and communicate (its communication is so self-sabotaging they disintegrate faster when they try harder), and networks on which it depended for people and ideas have either themselves died or defected. In the recent elections, councillors got Thanos’d and if Kemi is still there in a year most of what’s left in England, Wales and Scotland will get Thanos’d. Now the party is just a hundred English MPs and a few thousand councillors rattling around in a hollow historical institution. Next May it won’t even be that.
The questions remain:
What if anything does Farage build and who does he recruit in the next few months? Does he want to find people to be Chancellor etc who are better than the old parties? Can he exploit the surging energy for new politics among the young, can he hoist a sail and let that force blow him along to greater victories over his enemies? Or does he blow the chance and let that energy be captured by others?
Do the Tories bin Kemi this year and try to save themselves or leave her and watch the rest of their party get Thanos’d next May? And if a new team takes over this year can they even reverse the slide — or has the Party already crossed the invisible event horizon into oblivion?
What do Labour MPs do when they realise their PM has done a Sunak and machine-gunned both London-Remain and non-London-Leave?
How do parts of Whitehall prepare to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system?
How do other parts of Whitehall, particularly in security and intelligence, respond to the disintegration?
How do voters respond to the meltdown of the old system and creeping chaos?
What new crises accelerate collapse? I said in 2021 — prepare for the grid to collapse and infrastructure everyone relies on to stop working. These trends will continue. The immigration Ponzi is blowing up. The Ponzi scheme of the modern financial system could blow any time.
How fast do violence and no-go areas spread? Do we start seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organisation, as the deep state fears?
I think there will be another SW1 spasm and Kemi will get the heave-ho this year. After this, the social media show changes to either a) the Tories are sunk and closing down and sorting into Labour/LibDem or Reform, or b) ohmygoodness there’s a last gasp at revival, how will Starmer and Farage, neither of which have political machines worth the name, cope?
I explored these dynamics in detail a few months ago HERE.
I explored the general phenomenon of OODA-as-DOS-attack and Narrative Whiplash here.
This blog will look at three books on regime change.
Peter Turchin’s End Times.
Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start.
Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.
They explore fundamental questions of history and politics:
What are the patterns in history versus ‘just one damn thing after another’? What patterns can we see in repeated episodes of disintegration and regime change?
How to ruling elites maintain power?
Why does their grip on power sometimes collapse?
What is the relationship between material forces (e.g spreading urbanisation), ideas (e.g socialism), institutions (e.g the Cabinet Office, NATO), technologies (e.g railroads or drones), alliances (e.g the pre-1914 alliances) and individual choices (e.g an assassin)? When looking at regime change, what can we figure out about the balance between Tolstoy’s historical forces and individual decisions?
Why do some revolts take off while others fizzle out?
How reliable and useful are predictions? How much is inherently unknowable because crises are by definition chaotic and influenced by odd random people acting secretly, assassination etc?
What strategies are there to avoid the bloodshed and horror that always accompany collapse?
How to think about counterfactuals? (Cf. my blog on Bismarck.)
In my 2013 essay and 2014 blogs I explored the history, and possible application to government, of thinking about complex systems with nonlinear interdependencies and emergent properties — also see my blog on ‘systems management’ in ICBMs and Apollo and the need for a sort of ‘systems politics’ (the end of this paper summarises how Whitehall’s management is the opposite of what we know works best).
The subject of ‘complex systems’ emerged from the intersection of biology, economics, the birth of computer science post Gödel-Turing and other subjects after 1945. You can see it in Wiener’s Cybernetics and some of von Neumann’s post-war writing on computers, the brain and self-replicating automata. Out of this emerged things like agent-based models. The Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann, namer of the quark, wrote a fascinating book about what he called complex adaptive systems I highly recommend, The Quark and the Jaguar. He also helped set up the Santa Fe Institute to develop inter-disciplinary ideas about complex systems. The biologist E.O.Wilson described in Consilience ‘the Ionian Enchantment’ — the belief in the unity of nature, the search for the principles that explain it, the unification of knowledge as the foundation for modern science. Wilson argues that the Ionian attachment provides an ‘Ariadne’s Thread’ of explanation from bio-chemistry to genetics to quantitative models of the brain to culture. (For further reading on the history of maths and computing that preceded the breakthroughs of Turing et al, cf. here. Also cf. Nobel winner Phil Anderson’s More is Different.)
At the same time as the subject emerged in the 1940s, Asimov gave it the most famous fictional treatment in the Foundation series in which mathematicians develop ‘psycho-history’ to predict — then intervene in — the rise and fall of regimes. These ideas have been fascinating to generations and now there are ways to build tools that in limited ways touch on Asimov’s ideas.
Twelve years after writing that essay I believe even more strongly that a sort of systems politics is necessary — a mix of new people, new ideas, new institutions and new training including ideas from the heyday of systems management developed in projects like Apollo.
Applying some of these ideas was central to our success in 2016 and 2019 and to how we started changing how No10 worked in 2020. But I must admit that I have totally failed to persuade Insiders of the need for systems thinking. Even worse, I think that if I polled Insiders, it would reveal that they have persuaded themselves that — to the extremely limited extent to which Insiders have any idea what systems thinking means — I oppose it, even though I’ve published a few hundred thousand words on the subject.
I increasingly feel as if I somehow contributed to making systems politics a sort of anti-meme among Insiders— ‘an idea with self-censoring properties, an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it’ (cf. this interesting sci-fi story I was alerted to by Anthropic’s Jack Clark). I’m thinking about how to reverse this anti-meme property among Insiders. It won’t come from me writing or talking more since if I’ve helped anti-meme it, I cannot directly reverse it. Something else is needed. (See here for myths and reality on No10.)
Turchin is from this intellectual tradition of complex systems. He is trying to identify patterns in the cycle of integration and disintegration we see in regimes across time and space.
NB. I want to collect statements, speeches, memos etc reflecting elite blindness before the revolt/revolution comes, before 1789, 1848, 1914, 1917, 1933, 1989/91 etc — and examples of the rare person who did see it coming but was ignored.
E.g Frustratingly, in the excellent biography of Metternich I blogged on last year the author writes that one can trace Metternich’s thoughts almost day-by-day in early 1848 as revolution spread across Europe up to his own balcony, but he then skips over them and gives a short summary. I’d love to see the day-by-day account of how Europe’s statesman with the best developed intelligence network for political news, who had seen the historical forces building for years, tracked the spread of revolution up to the moment the crowds outside forced him to flee in disguise.
I am also going to build a dashboard to track data relevant to the spread of chaos and violence in the UK. If you know of relevant data sources please link in comments. E.g arrests at public gatherings has data back to 18th Century.
I’m giving a speech in Oxford on 11 June — What Is To Be Done? — tickets here… Assume some combination of Kemi and Starmer imploding and some new force emerging: how should it be oriented when it walks into No10?
Special Forces. Three weeks ago the BBC reflected the Cabinet Office campaign against the SAS by airing an attempted hit job. But the most interesting thing about it was the BBC showed video with the SAS squadron having a tally over 6 months of killing a dozen or so while arresting hundreds. The BBC portrayed this as evidence of psychopaths on the rampage. But the truth is, obviously, the opposite — they killed a tiny fraction and arrested the vast majority, the exact opposite of what you’d see if the most famous special forces on earth were actually on a killing spree. So the official Cabinet Office/BBC claim is our most highly trained soldiers were … actually incapable of killing more than a tiny fraction of unarmed often ‘sleeping’ civilians… And this nonsensical drivel was repeated by NPCs. Obviously, the BBC ran this as ‘news’ and the government did its usual bullshit ‘we can’t talk about the inquiry’ while its officials brief the BBC anonymously…
Also it was reported that the MoD is investigating serving soldiers for voicing support for the public campaign to stop lawfare against soldiers. Logical!
As I blogged a month or so ago, this issue is now very live among serving soldiers and is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place. This issue is bubbling out of control for Whitehall as serving soldiers start speaking out.
Read this excellent piece by Richard Williams, former commanding officer of SAS, on this subject. As he points out, the Regiment — past and present — are watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defence.
Please spend 60 seconds to click and sign this petition and help force the MPs to debate in Parliament the Cabinet Office’s lawfare against our own Special Forces. Support the SAS and SBS, our last line of defence... And follow this substack for updates on the issue. If you know who the specific officials are driving this in the CO, please let me know, the CO has their lists, I’m starting a list too…
Previous in this series:
XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy
X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.
VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.
VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.
VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.
V: Colin Gray and defence planning
IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.
III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.
II: Thinking about nuclear weapons
I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.
Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]
On rationalism and politics (2022).
And some other related stuff pre-No10…
On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)
On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019
On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)
On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)
And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.
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