Armas Weekend Reader

9-10 April 2022

President Richard Nixon at Opening Day, 7 April 1969. RFK Stadium, Washington, D.C. The New York Yankees defeated the Washington Senators 8-4.

This week: Russian war crimes in Ukraine, bad American defense strategy, the 1950 Census, and Nixon on the Mets. Let’s go —

1) “I’ve had seven years in combat zones fighting ISIS, fighting the Taliban, and what the Russians did to civilians is insane. They killed everyone — not just men, like the media is reporting right now. They killed women, too. It is something I am never going to forget. When you go into some of the villages, you see civilians dead with their hands tied behind their backs.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/kill-fury-ukraine-russia-troop-barbarity/ 

2) “With brains, courage, persistence and leadership we have no doubt that America can right its own ship. But for now, the decline is unmistakeable. Eventually, it smacks you right in the face. But what is the best way to realize that America is sliding into the abyss? Two people here at Revolver have differing views on that question. One believes that traveling through an American airport is the best way to see the country’s decay, while the other proposes a different method: A trip to one of America’s many theme parks. There is a reason that President Donald Trump singled out ‘third-world’ airports as especially emblematic of American decline.”

https://www.revolver.news/2021/07/disgusting-american-airports-national-decline/ 

3) “If you wanted a textbook example of how not to run a campaign, David Perdue has provided one. From the very first lesson of not letting Democrats bait you into making your announcement to the final lesson of not attacking giving taxpayers back their own money, Perdue has done just about everything wrong.”

The Worst Played Hand in American Politics Right Now

4) “In firsthand accounts, Afghan civilians and U.S. Marines describe the desperate struggle to flee through the Kabul airport’s last open entrance. U.S. officials knew an attack was coming.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/hell-at-abbey-gate-chaos-confusion-and-death-in-the-final-days-of-the-war-in-afghanistan 

5) “As I continue to digest the fallout from the FY23 Defense Budget (especially the shipbuilding goals and ship decommissioning plan) , the publicly released statements on the classified National Defense Strategy, and the broad outlines of the Biden Administration’s grand strategy/National Security Strategy, it becomes clear that to an extent rarely seen, the Biden team has created a tight and coherent coupling of strategy to resources. The problem is that the strategy is bad.”

When (Bad) Strategy Drives Resources