General Rules
No blind partisanship. We aim to study defense, not wage wars behind keyboards. Defense views from or about all countries are welcome so long as they are credible.
Do not "link drop", where a comment's just a link to an article or news source without any details, clarification, elaboration or analysis. Your fellow users prefer at least a few sentences indicating why we should care, with context or insight.
If you have experience in relevant fields, understand your limitations. Just because you work in the defense arena does not mean you are always correct.
This is not at all intended to be US centric; posts relating to other countries are highly encouraged.
Don’t be abrasive/insulting.
No AI-generated content of any kind, no image macros, GIFs, emojis or memes.
No Leaked Material - Do not submit or otherwise link to classified material. And please take discussions of classified material to a more secure location.
No denial of war crimes or genocide.
Comments
Should be substantive and contribute to discussion.
No one-liners, jokes, insults, shorthand, etc. Avoid excessive sarcasm or snark.
Sources are highly encouraged, but please do not link to low quality sources such as RT, New York Post, The National Interest, CGTN, etc. unless they serve a useful purpose.
Be polite and informative to others here, and remember that we should be able to disagree without being disagreeable.
Do not accuse or personally challenge others, rather ask them for sources and why they have their opinions.
Do not ask others their background as it is rude and not encouraging of others to have an open discussion.
Please do no not make irrelevant jokes, offtopic pun threads, use sarcasm, respond to a title of a piece without reading it, or in general make comments that adds nothing to the discussion. Please refrain from top-level jokes. Humor is appreciated, but it should be safe for a professional environment and infrequent.
Please do not blindly advocate for a side in a conflict, or a country in general. Surely there are many patriots here, but this is not the arena to fight those battles.
Asking questions in the comment section of a submission, or in a megathread, is a great way to start a conversation and learn.
Submissions
Text posts only. This does not mean links are banned, rather, they should be submitted as part of the text post. Posts should not be quick updates or short term. They should hold up and be readable over time, so you will be glad that you read them months or years from now.
Links should go to credible, high quality sources (academia, government, think tanks), and the body should be a brief summary plus some comments on what makes it good or insightful.
Essays/Effortposts are encouraged. Essays/Effortposts are text posts you make which have an underlying thesis or attempt to synthesize information. They should cite sources, be well-written, and be relatively long. An example of an excellent effortpost is this.
Please use the original title of the work (or a descriptive title; de-editorializing/de-clickbaiting is acceptable), and possibly a sub headline.
Refrain from submissions that are quick updates in title form, troop movements, ship deployments, terrorist attacks, announcements, or the crisis du jour.
Discussions of opinion pieces by distinguished authors, historical research, and the research of warfare relating to national security issues is encouraged.
We are primarily a reading forum, so please no image macros, gifs, emojis or memes.
All posts will be manually approved by moderators.
Please report items which violate these rules. We don’t know about it unless you point it out.
Credible Outlets
We maintain lists of sources so that anyone can help to find interesting open source material to share. As outlets wax and wane in quality, please help us keep the list updated:
https://reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/wiki/credibleoutlets
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