Category: Arrian

Arrias: Cold War Redux

In case you’ve missed most of the last 2 years, there have been several excellent examples of Western Technology on display that really must leave the rest of the world both a little bit in awe and at the same time wanting to buy some. I’m speaking of the capabilities of some of our radars […]

Arrias: Ground Truth

The French Frigate Alsace is on its way home today; she is out of missiles. It would almost seem a modern version of a Pyrrhic victory. Plutarch relates that Pyrrhus was a descendant of fleet-footed Achilles, king of the Molossians, later king of Epirus, then Macedonia, and after that, tyrant of Syracuse. He was above […]

Arrias: Will

Author’s Note: Everyone else is writing about what is going to happen, thought I’d throw in my two cents… – Arrias Will Clausewitz summed it up nicely: “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Will is the only real “coin” in war. Everything else is a tool […]

Arrias and His Muse: Good Morning and Weather

Rain is Falling Rain is falling, a constant tapping, A flash of lightning splits the dark, Thunder rumbles, shakes our house, The dogs uneasy, answer with a single bark. Holy Thursday in the Dismal Swamp, A good friend and true under the knife, Bypass surgery never routine, A prayer – Dear God, safeguard his life. […]

Arrias and his Muse: My Muse is in a dark mood…

We See Money for your missiles, A billion for another floating beauty, Billions for bombers and AI, But none for corporals on duty. Politicians take their pictures With some PFC who lost an arm, Spread that picture around, The voters for to charm. But the PFC still has no arm, And his buddies are still […]

Arrias: Evacuation Day

The story really begins yesterday, on June 17th, 1775. But my real grasp of it began nearly 200 years later, on an early March day, while I was in high school. My mom was having a big party as a fund raiser for the hospital where my dad worked. We had a large, mostly unused […]

Arrias and His Muse: Pi Day (Or Pie Day?)

My Muse poked me again this morning, but light-hearted… Archimedes wasn’t the very first, But he did get pretty near, And Ptolemy was very handy In addressing a sphere. The Chinese also chipped in, And Liu Hui shaved it even closer, Though to the average schoolboy It is still a poser. Aryabhata of Pataliputra, A […]

Arrias: Marshall, Ike and Ukraine

On January 25th, 1942, USS Sargo (SS-186 (under the command of LtCmdr Tyrell Jacobs)) pulled into Surabaya, Indonesia after finishing a short war patrol, offloaded her remaining torpedoes, loaded 1 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, and headed to Mindanao, the Philippines to provide some ammunition to the US and the Philippine Armies. She then picked […]

Arrias: A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was a truly great nation, a nation that tried to bring peace around the world, that tried to improve everyone’s life, that worked very hard as a nation, and the people become fabulously rich. But there were those inside the country who didn’t like things this way, they wanted more […]

Arrias: Putin, Xi, and the Pirate King

In the news this week, Alexei Navalny, the dissident Russian politician who was serving 30 years in an Arctic Gulag, died. Navalny was a longtime rival of Tsar Vlad, had campaigned against corruption – Putin’s corruption – and after returning to Russia in 2021, had been found guilty of “extremism” and “fraud” – what were […]