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Giled Pallaeon

@giledpallaeon.bsky.social
1.5K followers 601 following 3.4K posts

Military & International Affairs nerd. Defense professional. Mostly naval subjects, but all aspects of defense and natsec welcome. Oh, & plastic spaceships, that too. All opinions on all subjects my own #WeAreNAFO

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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 34m
Question: the professional wargaming community is rapidly slewing to the threats posed by AI to the discipline. The lesser challenge is maintaining traceability of events. The greater challenge is that many functions AI can easily replace are critical stepping stones to developing future designers.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 40m
I’m completely certain I can pull together a team out of MilSky people and some personal friends who can make better recommendations than this clown show, and might even pull off some analysis instead of ghost writing a bunch of papers no one will read.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 13h
*slams repost button*
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 14h
Well that was fucking fascinating. I apparently also missed or memory-holed @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social’s Highway Theory, which is also annoyingly compelling.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 14h
Well this is a fascinating discussion of a completely different meta-way of war.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 23h
Is Project Meridian a bad idea that will end up risking billions in embezzlement and bad-faith contracts? Yes. Is Musk (along with Luckey and Gingrich(????)) in charge of the future of war? lol no
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Two reasons. You ID’d one in the next post. The other is you’re a dumbass. Defense id very hard, so the bar for dumbass is quite high, but this is run-of-the-mill scale stupid.
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
drones are the future vs just integrate them into combined arms and do the basics, dipshit
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I clearly thought “How could this get dumber” too loudly. My b.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Entirely correct on all counts. “The kill chain is a group project” is an all-time banger.
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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep 🇺🇸 @midlifesuezcrisis.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
If you want a post-Trump glide path to more non-US responsibilities, fine, but I think this idea that b/c MAGA (+Israel, Russia, the non-response to Russia, etc) broke the Pax Americana we have license to let affairs decline further is backwards.
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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep 🇺🇸 @midlifesuezcrisis.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
U.S. capabilities underpin the security orders which >a billion people live in including most of the liberal democracies. The time scale in which we can (further) break those orders by clipping our own wings in re capabilities is a lot shorter than the time scale in which non-US states can backfill.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This is the opening offer for a U.S. interested in a sustainable force posture capable of protecting its allies and partners around the world.
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
i think the quite literal million-dollar question is "what sort of force do you think DoD needs for the next decade?"
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This is unlikely to actually survive contact with Congress, but a CCMD with Service-like spending authority is a **terrible** idea. If you don’t believe me, look at the one that already exists (SOCOM).
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I promise the Hawaiian shirts do not give you the slightest idea how completely nuts this guy is, and how being a billionaire from misleading FB melted what was left of his brain.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Can we stop fucking with requirements creation and program definition *for five minutes*?
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Curious Witness @curiouswitness.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This often metastasizes into an online vigilantism that makes them confrontational and prosecutorial toward anyone who hasn't made the same self-flagellating pact they have. They become insufferable, unreasonable assholes for the sake of the oppressed, often without consulting the oppressed.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
No, this is horrific, but it is also completely typical of industrial age urban combat where at least one side is not interested in collateral damage mitigation. Westerners not involved in the defense business just tend to memory hole this. See Stalingrad, Grozny, Aleppo, and most Ukrainian battles.
Destruction at the Battle of Stalingrad. Image from Radio Free Europe https://www.rferl.org/amp/stalingrad-photo-gallery/24691866.htmlDestruction in Grozny, Chechnya, after Russian bombing. Practically the entire city was rebuilt after the 1990s. Image courtesy of BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60631433Destruction in Aleppo c 2016. Photo taken from Atlantic Council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/breaking-aleppo/Severodonetsk, in only June of 2022. Courtesy of BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61811161
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 26/09/2026
like I suspect many of you on This Website, I think a core reason why I find Eliezer Yudkowsky and his rationalist and effective altruist satellites so intensely annoying is because I had a VERY similar “being a super weird, pretentious, hyper-literate kid” experience - I just, you know, grew up.
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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
WHERE THE FUCK ARE “LOWER DECKS” AND “SHE-RA”
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I would like to file a complaint about every time a piece of music becomes an earworm but only a piece of it. At the moment it’s the last fifty-five seconds of Drag Racer off the Ace Combat 7 soundtrack.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
static.klipy.com
Tom Ellis as Lucifer: That's Literally Impossible
ALT: Tom Ellis as Lucifer: That's Literally Impossible
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
As a professional analytic wargamer, my reaction is best summarized as:
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It’s not even a truly meaningful dent. Less than 20% of CY25 US health spending would have been offset by the FY25 NDAA. Can this myth die please? www.aha.org/news/headlin...
aha.org
CMS projects national health spending grew to $5.7 trillion in 2025 | AHA News
National health spending is projected to have reached $5.7 trillion in 2025, up 7.3% from 2024, according to an analysis by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published June 24 by Health Aff...
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This is not an especially great article imo. It spends half of its ink grinding the author’s political axe, and while on paper the suggestions are sensible on their face, the author makes a category error in his assessment of the state of naval warfare.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Tiberium Wars is the one that comes to mind though really it shares the title with KOTOR
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This site has an interesting tendency for folks to make normative moral statements about what they wish was the case, which is fine on its own, then dogpile anyone who uses their expertise to explain why things are that way. And frankly it’s rather disappointing.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
[trots out rant about how we didn’t invent precision weapons to reduce harm, we invented them to improve effectiveness]
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The inability of the Discourse to understand multi-point agency is going to make this site insufferable during a U.S.-China contingency
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Shuffle @shuffleosint.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Also the little caveat at the bottom is golden. "Company Targets"
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Your regularly scheduled reminder that the Cult of the Gizmo and their financiers, in this case a16z, are lying by omission *at least* to you. Sure an Anthem costs less than a Tomahawk. It’s 40% of the payload, and with what murderous cost to P-arrival?
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Both U-123 and Hardegen were aces; under her three commanders U-123 was the fifth highest scoring U-boat of the war, and one of only three of the top ten to survive the war (all three were scuttled by war’s end; only U-123 was raised and returned to service.)
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Your regularly scheduled reminder that an unknowable but significant number of these sinkings were the direct fault of ADM King’s decision to not implement a convoy system in American waters “due to lack of escorts”, against British advice.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
TBH I have questions about practicality, because a lot of the advantages a SSN has don’t apply to Japan or only do in more limited ways than they do for us or the Aussies.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The good news is that this is quite unlikely, albeit not impossible. This is significantly more likely in a China scenario and how that plays out in the information domain is likely to have an outsize impact on the conduct of the war and US will to fight.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I like my current pinned post too much to replace it but I figure this will get used a good bit. If you think in the scheme of evils perpetrated by the U.S. in the 20th century (of which there is much) that Desert Storm, Allied Force, or Korea should be on the list, you are not a serious person.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I’m in no rush to actually get rid of it, but Terraforming Mars is now fired as a default board game
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
U.S. policy had non-proliferation as somewhere between a top policy priority and The Top policy priority since World War II for a goddamn reason, and the end of the Cold War only *elevated* its relative importance.
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Ginn, Qui-Gon, and Juice @quigonginnandjuice.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Live counterproliferation reaction
Is four a lot?
Depends on the context.
Billion dollars? No.
New nuclear states? Yes.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Peer warfare is the art of creating logistics supply lines to where you want to be, and blowing up whatever would impede that. (This is a riff on someone else, @sodrock.bsky.social I think)
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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 08/09/2026
freedom is worth fighting for.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
A close relative of “You don’t win wars by dying for your country. You win by making the other guy die for theirs.” As efficiently as possible is a bonus.
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Hellscape Navigator @hellscapenavigator.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"lets win this thing and go home" is the strongest fighting ethos known to mankind and will crush a martial death cult every single time
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Wake up, babe. New automatic loss-of-vote association dropped. I’m dead serious, anti-vax is a permanent loss of my vote until serious and emphatic public contrition. The only exception is if the opponent also is.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Everything that can be made can be unmade. The question is if it’s worth the hassle. There are bunkers in the Cape Canaveral complex built to take effectively direct hits from potential failed Saturn V launches. They’re abandoned today because in the 10-12’ of steel and concrete is asbestos.
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Gerald C Brown @geraldcbrown.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Honestly we don't really need wild guesses here, I think the answer is pretty simple--the mass firings of senior officers on charges of corruption is because... there is rampant corruption in the PLA. The degree and scale of corruption in the PLA has long been known to PLA watchers. Occam's razor.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Just for sense of scale, current U.S. Navy op tempo would be properly supported by a fleet of somewhere between fifteen and eighteen supercarriers. The fleet has eleven. “Ridden hard and put away wet” doesn’t begin to cover it.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I see the arrival of LINCOLN in Thailand has kicked off a very predictable round of pearl-clutching at the exterior state of the ship. I want to be very clear. If your contention is that the ship’s company should never have endured over nine months at sea without a port call, carry on.
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Giled Pallaeon @giledpallaeon.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
No. Russian naval equipment looks like this because it hasn’t been maintained. LINCOLN looks like this because she was at sea for 200 days straight and she was only doing functional maintenance, not pretty maintenance.
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