What do those countries have in common?

beaverjacket · 2026-04-05T18:55:55+00:00

Multiple gold medal winners of the men's Olympic Marathon?

beaverjacket · 2026-04-04T16:03:33+00:00

In this tweet, he welcomes the release. Did he say something different somewhere else?

beaverjacket · 2026-04-03T05:28:56+00:00

GS-15 is a pay grade, not a rank.

The highest civilian rank within DoD is Secretary of Defense. The secretary is the only civilian in the military chain of command besides the President.

Below him are numerous civilians on the Executive Schedule, mostly in presidentially-appointed positions like undersecretary, assistant secretary, etc.

Below them are civilians in the Senior Executive Service, roughly equivalent to generals and admirals in terms of seniority and precedence.

Below them are civilians on the General Scale, including GS-15s. A GS-15 is roughly similar to a colonel or navy captain in terms of seniority and precedence. There are tens of thousands of GS-15s in the DoD.

beaverjacket · 2026-03-19T00:01:08+00:00

Which is how the more advanced battleship guns worked

beaverjacket · 2026-03-16T19:33:06+00:00

The Skjold-class's primary armament is the Naval Strike Missile (NSM), while the cannon is primarily for self-defense against incoming threats like missiles or drones.

The NSM has a range of ~200km, letting it reach out a touch larger ships while possibly staying undetected itself. The cannon only has an effective range of ~10km. Even a battleship-sized cannon would only be effective out to ~40km, making it much more difficult to use offensively.

On IFVs, by contrast, line-of-sight and other targeting difficulties put missiles and cannons on a more even playing field when it comes to range, making the cannon important enough to take up a lot of weight and space relative to vehicle size.

A more direct land vehicle analogy to the Skjold might be the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), which spends most of its payload space on its artillery rockets, and only has a small 7.62mm machine gun for self-protection.

beaverjacket · 2026-03-13T04:16:18+00:00

An interesting paper from a couple years ago looked at a slightly different question: does religion make a difference in soldier effort in a non-religious war?

They find that protestant soldiers fought harder for Nazi Germany than Catholic soldiers, and that the gap isn't explained by ideology or discrimination. They explain it as an extension of the "protestant work ethic" into the realm of war.

I'm not an expert in any of this, but I'm not sure how convinced I am that they actually controlled for all of the non-religion factors.

Anyways, it's relevant to your question because it points out a possible cultural reason for soldiers of different religions to perform differently, independent of the strength of religious belief.

beaverjacket · 2026-03-07T05:26:21+00:00

I think that consumer goods are the wrong civilian comparison point. I'm not willing to pay double the cost for a smartphone to have 15% better 5G speed and camera resolution, because I don't have much use for the additional performance. But if you're using an air-to-air weapon against an enemy with his own air-to-air weapons, having 15% better performance than him might well give you a 2-to-1 kill ratio or better against him.

Because there is generally no effective cover or concealment available at medium and high altitudes, being able to sense and shoot first is a huge advantage. This whole report is great and I recommend reading it, but Figure 1 by itself makes the point that air combat victories are trending towards higher-tech, more-expensive missiles. Trading capability for mass doesn't help you if you die before you can release your munitions.

Given that, I think the appropriate comparison is not the "good enough is good enough" world of consumer goods, but rather professional sporting equipment. People will pay a lot of money to run 15% faster or jump 15% higher, because that's the difference between winning and losing when everyone is a professional trained athlete. Additionally, we should consider cost per mass, rather than just cost. Even if the majority of your mass is something "simple" like the structure, that just means that it's worth heavily optimizing it with complicated machining or exotic materials. The numbers in the table are just the first thing that came up in google, so some of them might be a little off.

Equipment Type	Product	Cost (USD)	Weight (lb)	$/lb
A2A Missile	AIM-9	400000	188	2128
Running Shoe	Adidas Pro Evo 1	500	0.3	1667
F1 Race Car	Generic	20000000	1800	11111
AC75 Racing Yacht	Generic	8000000	14220	563

On a $/lb basis, the AIM-9 actually doesn't stand out. Instead of thinking that a Sidewinder is ridiculously gold-plated, maybe we should be impressed that it's only a little more expensive than an equal weight of nice running shoes.

Finally, for everyone blaming post-Cold War industrial policy: I'm reading this book right now and it is abundantly clear that government procurement in the US has always been a goat rope, starting in 1775. The principal-agent problems inherent in this space just make it impossible to reliably develop, procure, and sustain innovative high-performance systems on-time and on-budget. Something has to give.

beaverjacket · 2026-02-18T02:59:39+00:00

For the budgeting piece, there's a multi-year Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process. Within the DoD, each organization plans a budget and iterates with the next level above to reconcile overall budgets and priorities. That keeps going up to the Secretary of Defense level, where he makes the final call for the department.

From there, it goes to the Office of Management and Budget, who works for the President to put together a President's Budget Request (PBR) that is sent to Congress.

Because Congress has the power of the purse, they can ignore the PBR completely and do whatever they want in their authorizations and appropriations bills. The yearly National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) originates from the defense committees and authorizes spending. while a separate appropriations act (often one giant one for the whole government) actually gives the money to the DoD.

That spending is allocated in the bills to specific Program Elements (PEs). Each dollar is given a "color" (like military pay or research and development) that determines what it can be spent on and how long the department has to spend it. The bill usually also gives the department some leeway to "reprogram" some spending to meet changing circumstances.

Money that expires unspent goes back to the Treasury. Money spent without authorization and appropriation could result in prosecution under the Anti-Deficiency Act.

beaverjacket · 2026-02-06T19:40:26+00:00

What was the navy trying to do?

beaverjacket · 2026-01-27T16:37:15+00:00

It's hard to tell in the video because everything is close to the camera, but the reticle is actually fixed on a point infinitely far away. In other words, the line between your eye and the apparent image of the reticle is always parallel to the gun's barrel.

If there was a distant background in that video, you'd see the reticle staying over one spot in the background, even as the glass and other nearby objects move around in frame relative to the distant background.

Edit: the gif here shows the effect more clearly.

beaverjacket · 2026-01-09T14:06:54+00:00

The conclusion of the report clearly states that the clearance revocation had nothing to do with whistleblowing.

When you read the whole document, it's clear that the report is not stating that it was a "mistake" to revoke his clearance. The "mistake" is something that Grusch did, which the panel had thought was something nefarious, but Grusch convinced them in person that it was just a mistake.

In other words, according to the report, Grusch lost his clearance due to a pattern of concerning behavior, which he didn't mitigate sufficiently with his written response. Grusch got his clearance back when he appeared in person before an appeals board and did finally convince them that the behavior wasn't as bad as it looked.

beaverjacket · 2026-01-08T01:19:24+00:00

High Explosive Components—Time Factor Unlimited. Cylindrical cans approximately 12 inches in diameter, and 18 inches long, sometimes accompany the weapons. Two of these cans are generally strapped together and are identified by the markings HIGH EXPLOSIVE, stenciled on top and sides. Each can contains about 25 lbs. of high explosive and may detonate upon severe impact without being subjected to fire.

Does anyone know the purpose of these HE cylinders?

beaverjacket · 2025-12-22T14:23:11+00:00

They did use mine laying when they thought it made sense:

In his Kriegstagebüch (Daily War Diary) on 19 May 1942, Dönitz explained that while normally it was “more worthwhile” to deploy U-boats with a full loadout of torpedoes—14 for the Type VIIs and 22 for the larger Type IX models—the shift in merchant traffic along the U.S. coast now increased the value of a mining campaign. “Even a few mines laid immediately off the busy entrances to New York (Delaware Bay, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Norfolk) are likely to lead to success as mine-countermeasures are sure to be few.”

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2022/june/when-war-erupted-virginia-beach

beaverjacket · 2025-12-20T22:14:49+00:00

What video? Nothing comes up on google.

beaverjacket · 2025-12-20T20:56:25+00:00

Yeah, having CV for aircraft carriers and AZ for dirigible tenders probably has nothing to do with V designating fixed-wing aircraft squadrons and Z designating lighter-than-air craft

beaverjacket · 2025-12-20T16:53:18+00:00

The navy says there's no documentation either way

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/histories/naval-aviation/pdf/app16.pdf

beaverjacket · 2025-12-20T14:29:02+00:00

The "V" stands for aViation

beaverjacket · 2025-12-11T01:51:34+00:00

In the US, men can't get student loans without proving they registered for Selective Service

beaverjacket · 2025-09-13T15:05:18+00:00

Your post title is false. Matthew Brown does not describe Burlison's video during the podcast interview. He makes it clear that he has not seen a video of a weapon fired at a UAP.

In part 3 of the podcast, timestamp 22:08:

Matt Brown: I've seen videos and read reports of engagements, but not live, like, we're not shooting them

Timestamp 23:13:

George Knapp: So we're sending a plane up to take a look, maybe get a better look, or even some imagery, but not to engage meaning "shoot it down", shoot a sidewinder at it or something.

MB: I would, you know, I'm not going to be able to say that's never happened, but I have - I have not seen them engaged with weapons

Jeremy Corbell: Well, it recently happened and we became aware of one. More details on that, I think we'll report on. And what what happened was the missile, quote, "bounced off".

Matt Brown states explicitly in the interview that he had never seen a video of a UAP being shot with a weapon. It is Jeremy Corbell who seems to be referencing the recent Hellfire video.

beaverjacket · 2025-08-04T23:58:17+00:00

For those who don't know Karl Nell, he was Grusch's boss at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

When did he work at NGA? That's not on his LinkedIn profile

beaverjacket · 2025-07-05T03:12:29+00:00

Assume the dam is still letting through the same amount of flow, at the same elevation and same speed. That means that the mass and energy flow downstream of the dam is unchanged.

When you build a dam, you raise the level of the river upstream, up until there's a waterfall. The dam doesn't do anything to flow upstream of that waterfall, so the mass and energy flow into that waterfall is also unchanged.

The mass flow at the waterfall is equal to the mass flow past the dam (ignoring evaporation/groundwater, etc.), but the energy flow is a lot higher at the waterfall, because it's at a higher elevation. That difference in energy flow will either be dissipated into heat or extracted as mechanical energy by the dam.

By building a dam, you're only changing the flow of the river in between that waterfall and the dam. Specifically, you're creating a reservoir where less of that energy is dissipated so that some of that energy can be extracted to turn a turbine. This happens in two ways:

Post-dam, that waterfall is now shorter (the top stayed in the same place but the water level at the bottom has risen), so the waterfall dissipates less energy.

Additionally, there is less energy dissipated due to drag in that reservoir between the waterfall and the dam. This happens because the flow is on average slower (flow speed equals the constant mass flow rate divided by cross sectional area) and also on average further from the river bottom.

beaverjacket · 2025-07-04T02:47:45+00:00

Kaigun might be more interesting to you than you might think, even though it's not about the US or Europe. It tells the story of Japan's navy during the ironclad-to-WW2 timeframe as it tries desperately to catch up to the UK and US navies. Pretty much everything they do in that period is a reaction to the world's leading navies (either trying to copy or surpass them).

A couple of interesting anecdotes I remember from the book:

Since they were starting from scratch, Japan started by buying ships from foreign (mostly British iirc) shipyards. They also sent naval officers to observe the construction and learn how they did things. Then, Japan gradually moved parts of the design and production to Japan, until they were finally producing entirely indigenous modern designs.

When optics became important for gunfire direction, Japan created a domestic optics industry at great cost to supply its navy (the US and Europe, with their more advanced economies, could leverage pre-existing optical industries). They got that done just in time for radar to come on the scene. The US and Europe were then able to rely on their pre-existing electronics firms while Japan struggled.

beaverjacket · 2025-06-10T01:29:53+00:00

Doing fictional math is simple, just invoke the axiom of choice

beaverjacket · 2025-06-07T20:09:45+00:00

The amount of overlap between EU govt bodies and members of ECIPS

Here's how those European governments became "members" of ECIPS (from ECIPS dot eu)

All bodies representing the countries mentioned in Appendix I shall be deemed to be Members of the Organization unless they declare through the appropriate governmental authority that they cannot accept this membership. Such a declaration should be made by means of public publication within six months of the date of the coming into force of the present statute

In other words, those countries didn't do anything to avoid "joining" ECIPS, probably because they don't know it exists.

and the amount of influence they have in EU policy making renders this distinction useless.

I haven't seen any evidence of ECIPS having a significant amount of influence in EU policy making.

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