Decker Eveleth

The Real Risk After New START Isn’t Arms Racing Without the treaty, nuclear forces will become hard to verify and harder to trust.

My latest in FP, on the risks of New START's demise and the problem with focusing too much on numbers in a new technological era. Gift link:
foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/09/n...

True Promise I and II may go down as the most cataclysmicly counterproductive military operations in history. Shattered threat perception on Iran in to a million tiny pieces.

Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin. Effectively an absurdist parody of Russian imperial nostalgia.

B) Xi Jinping believes the PLA is insufficently loyal to him and his agenda
C) Xi is just really bad at this and purges anyone he thinks isn’t doing a good job, possibly due to an obsession with unrealistic timetables

Three possibilities, possibly overlapping, none of them good for China's ability to fight:
A) the PLA is so ludicrously corrupt that basically everyone above a certain rank is either involved or knows about it and is compromised by it

No, Reddit automatically scrubs that data. And the sub was almost certainly in port at the time.

This is what my other Russian-speaking friends say. I'm aware enough to read a passage and go "ah you're parodying Soviet partytalk" or "I THINK you're parodying Dostoevsky here" and other times I've got no idea what cultural touchstone he's parodying.

Sure dude

Reading a book, originally written in Russian, that uses Chinese words regularly, but A) the Russian author clearly did not speak Chinese and B) there are no tones.

So an already borderline unintelligible experience becomes truely unintelligible.

This is oughtslop. You only like it because its what ought to be.

More Oreshnik Madness Russia has used Oreshnik again, this time against some sort of target outside Lviv.

Some thoughts on the recent Oreshnik madness:
open.substack.com/pub/horsdoeu...

The Latest Russian Missile Is Bad News for NATO Oreshnik is a different beast from its predecessors.

I have written about operational use cases for the Oreshnik and its threat here:
foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/17/r...

"But its not cost-effective" I'll be honest, the more I see people around Washington do cost-effectiveness calculations, the less certain I am that we really have a clear idea of what that means.

"But its not cost-effective" I'll be honest, the more I see people around Washington do cost-effectiveness calculations, the less certain I am that we really have a clear idea of what that means.

One conventional kinetic-only Oreshnik against a small target is not going to do a lot of good, its true. But think about what havoc it could do on the ramps at Ramstein if its packed in a surge scenario.
Now think about an entire Oreshnik RTG firing together. 36x9(?) = 324 sub-munitions.

Theres a lot of talk about Oreshnik being a "psychological weapon." This is, I think, an oversimplification - its true that Oreshnik has some operational limitations. I would argue that those limitations are not all that different than other conventional ballistic missiles.

Seeing potentially credible reports and videos of a new Oreshnik launch against Ukraine tonight.

We have a bad habit of assuming that other countries don't do what the US military does brcauze they choose not to without looking at capabilities. Its why perhaps 75% of normative arguments fall on their face.

The Real Reason China and Russia Won’t Try a Maduro-Style Raid U.S. rivals aren’t deterred by norms so much as by the limits of their own militaries.

My latest in Foriegn Policy, where I pour cold water on normative arguments with the technical reality.
foreignpolicy.com/2026/01/06/v...

Trying to commit to reading 3-4 books a month. Here is January's reading stack.

[black SUVs pull up to a ski chalet in Vermont]
"You're a hard man to find...Mr. Bremer."
"Apparently not hard enough."
"We need you. One last job."

Again, total mischaracterization of both psychology of war and supply. A unit not psychologically prepared for combat thrust into a combat zone is not going to magically turn itself around in 48 hours, and even after 48 hours the goal of the invasion was unclear to russian rank and file.

And here lies the problem with describing military performances of one unit as "black swan" events: there are so many factors at play before during and after battle that no ground battle can be easily predicted in the first place. You could also make the argument that 1st GTRs rout was a black swan.

And they stopped 1st GTR because 1st GTR had no clear orders, ROE, or clear logistical lines. They did not expect the Ukrainians to fight and them men of the regiment didn't expect to be in combat. That is miles more important than any "black swan performance."

If Russia had actually competently planned for a contested invasion perhaps they would have succeeded, but the entire thing was completely unplanned at the tactical level and incompetently executed. That has more to do with the Russian failure than the performance of individual Ukrainian units.

As for your other comments - I did an entire year long study on Ukraine War predictions last year, and you've misdiagnosed why Kofman et al got that wrong too - is not that TDF gave a "black swan performance." Its that Kofman et al assumed Russia would fight like they practice to fight.

The Territorial Defense Forces defending territory is a black swan performance? I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the nature of both the TDF and the psychology of war.

What is a "black swan" military performance? That doesn't make any sense.

putin is already pretty unconstrained in ukraine (the people saying "zelensky is next" seem unaware russia has tried to kill him many times). the bigger danger is it emboldens putin to step up sabotage and hybrid warfare in europe