I worked in Russia in the ’90s, so I have some experiences there which inform my writing about recent events. Here’s an index to the stories — The Ukraine War Has Already Influenced Chinese Military Thinking AI-enabled assassination drones are just the startmedium.com Ukraine: What’s the Balance of Heavy Artillery Weapons? The battle for Eastern Ukraine is being fought on a wide front, with long range artillery and NATO quality pitched…medium.com

‘Nature Astronomy’ reports the discovery of a radio-emitting neutron star with an abnormally long spin period — Some neutron star basics Neutron stars have a radius on the order of 10 kilometres with a mass of about 1.4 solar masses. They result from the supernova explosion of a massive star, combined with gravitational collapse. The huge gravitational collapse the core past white dwarf star density (~10⁶ g/cm³, or 1 tonne per…

Military strategy has moved on a bit since Sun Tzu, but will the US adoption of the concept expose it to risk? — I came across this approach to warfare when I was researching the OODA Loop. It looked interesting so I thought I’d explore it in more detail. I’m not a military person and I’ve looked at this with the eyes and brain of an amateur and tried to make sense of…

There were some classic ironical statements in his speech to the BRICS Forum — In a week where my personal Global Threat Index shot up, I read a report of the keynote speech Chinese President Xi Jinping made to the BRICS Forum this week. Oh, the irony. BRICS? In case you didn’t know, BRICS is the acronym coined to associate five major emerging economies…

Yes, they could create your voice with AI. Deepfaking could go further, maybe even into the charts — What happens if a computer system copies your voice? Do you have any legal protection? It may not be an issue for me, but, if say you’re Tom Jones or Beyonce then you might object to a song being released with an artificially generated voice that sound exactly like you. …

Eight more recent stories have pushed my index up towards 67 and still going… — There are quite a few recent stories that are of concern, with widening geographic friction areas since I last wrote about this two weeks ago on June 10. The number of stories is climbing and that’s also a matter of interest, suggesting that the ripples —nay, waves — of the…

Developed by a US fighter pilot, this activity cycle is used in business, the military, litigation and learning processes, but what is it? — I hope you got this far! Complicated diagrams often put me off, you never know whether it’s worth studying them. I’ll try to make it simple as we explore this fascinating topic. Many years ago I did an MBA and never learned about the OODA loop. Given what I know…

Do they help with curation? Takeaway anyone? — Why I wrote it I wrote the sentence because I was compiling a list of those of my Medium stories which had been curated — you know, picked out by a bot and ‘selected for further distribution’. As I set up the subtitle I had one of those very rare creative flashes (I’ve had…

No, it’s nothing like the Heimlich manoeuvre. It’s not intended to expel something stuck in your throat, although it could well be vomit-inducing for some — If you love planes, as I do, then you might find this story interesting. It was over ten years ago when I was researching a NATO/China aerial battle set in my action novel ‘Gate of Tears’ that I first heard of the Kulbit. …