Dominick Donald

Geopolitical risk analysis by day, fictional mayhem by night. Advisor to marine war risk market since 2004. Ex-lots of things, some of them useful.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@PaulSuttonKing The officer is from the Leinsters (Prince of Wales's, hence the feathers). The ORs seem less clear; they're not Leinsters, but the Sgt is wearing jodhpurs, which would have been unheard of in an SNCO in an infantry unit on home service, and his badge cd be KRI Hussars...

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

Suspect this is exactly the reaction Zelensky was aiming for.

He's cutting off Putin's ability to get an end-state on 🇷🇺's terms.

On the battlefield, by sawing away at 🇷🇺's hold on occupied 🇺🇦.

Politically & diplomatically, by destroying the narrative of 🇷🇺's useful idiots.

[Ruth Deyermond @ruth_deyermond]

In case anyone was inclined to think negotiations with Russia were a serious prospect, Zelensky's letter has goaded Putin into making it clear they're not. This event is supposed be a platform for Putin the global statesman but looks like they got Putin the angry old man instead.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

I'd distract myself during my awful Historical Philosophy module @magdalenoxford by fine-tuning a historical philosophy 1st XV.
Hobbes -destructive loosehead. Grotius - grumpy hooker. Hegel - fulcrum @ 9. Polymath Aristotle - fly half. Plato - all-seeing @ 15.
Rousseau; ref...

[Adaubam Pires @adaubam]

Que partida memorável. O lindo gol de Sócrates, Hegel e Kant correndo para refutar, Confúcio impassível na arbitragem, o júbilo final dos clássicos e pré-socráticos.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@IAPonomarenko Even more important: By cutting off aid to 🇺🇦, he has also removed all 🇺🇸 leverage over 🇺🇦. So 🇺🇦 can do what it deems in its own strategic interest.

🇺🇦's campaign of long- and medium-range strike is inconceivable if 🇺🇸 retained any real leverage.

And it will win the war.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@rcolvile My mother knew her father was a spook, b/c she was clever & u/stood that the jobs he asked her to do weren't what a normal diplomat wd ask. She only learned her mother had served in a Bletchley station in India in the war from the condolence letters after her death in 1975.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

Beg to differ with @DalrympleWill here - my experience of successful intelligence officers is that they are *all* intensely moral; one needs to have a strong moral compass to make sure the nature of the job, and the people one has to strike deals with, don't lead you astray.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Alex Younger, with whom used to play toy soldiers with as a boy growing up in the Borders half a century ago, was an intensely moral man, perhaps unusually for a successful intelligence officer. Privately he was forthright in his criticism of those, such as Netanyahu, who were happy to slaughter the innocents among their enemies. This line in his obituary rang very true to the man I knew: "He was acutely aware of the corrupting powers of espionage and of the compromises it requires, but decried the “pernicious myth that, somehow, intelligence services are moral equivalents; that the end justifies the means, whatever the cost”. MI6 was not the same as the services of authoritarian states. “If we undermine the values we defend, even in the name of defending them, then we have lost.”"

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@fleetstreetfox R Sigs or maybe RAMC

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

Which by geography and tradition has always had to defend itself and its interests with an army overseas

[cdrsalamander @cdrsalamander]

The UK, like the rest of the Five Eyes, is by geography and tradition a maritime and aerospace power.

If you must make hard choices, then the place where you preserve power in where your comparative advantage lies: your navy and your air force.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@samuelfeckwit @ChrisO_wiki Same. Big change was early March (from a typical 0.2% of the value of the hull to up to 5%, as some in the market panicked - tho' not sure there were many takers at 5%). It then seemed to settle pretty quickly at the 1-1.5% range, where it is now.
It's a market, so big ranges.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@andrewpconnell A distant cousin lost a hand & an eye in 2 incidents in NI & had an Xmas shopping trip @Harrods interrupted by a bomb.
When he briefed his company for another op in NI, & asked if there were any questions, a Sgt asked:
Excuse me sir - you mind if I don't come with you on this 1?

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@robert_lyman Chap I knew was doing his Russian year abroad when the Sharpe producers came scouting. They hired him as Sean Bean's terp.
Bean liked him, took him on as his assistant, & got him on screen when the series was made.
So he's e/thing - a Brit, a Frog, a Spanish partisan, a monk...

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@OTregub Neutrality is real until it is tested, at which point the neutral will bend in the direction desired by whichever dominant force is applying pressure.

(Did my PhD on neutrality & impartiality in relation to peacekeeping - this article sums up basic idea https://t.co/3Xfi8Apbf0)

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@RALee85 100%.

Tho' it leads to the big question of whether they will get it right first time (because if they get it wrong, it may take a while before they get another opportunity).

[Rob Lee @RALee85]

And this is why I think the arguments that drones have made maneuver impossible are wrong. Cheap ISR and strike drones right now are enabling an interdiction campaign at operational depths without air superiority that Ukraine could not achieve with ATACMS/HIMARS in 2023. Along with destruction and effective suppression of UAS positions, Ukraine can set conditions for employing armor again.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@AlanEyre1 @BrettErickson28 I tend to frame his approach to war as a series of one-night stands, with this being the first occasion on which the woman has got his phone number, and four months down the line is ringing him with uncomfortable news...

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

Bit tricky as a) the Luftwaffe was coming from the other direction, b) the nearest point in the Free State to mainland UK was 27 miles away, too far for any light to reach.

[pamela chapter THREE @pamelas01846949]

Weren't the Irish good at lighting the way for the Luftwaffe to see British targets at night in WW2?🤬🤬🤬 🤬🤬🤬🤬

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

I count at least 27 corpses over perhaps 200-300 metres...

[Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 @bayraktar_1love]

🔞A Russian infantryman films a route to his frontline position in a tree line. From the beginning of the path to the very end, the trail is littered with the bodies of his former comrades.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@TheAgentPhil @RoyalAirForce You'll have about 40 to dig into!
If you haven't read, wd recommend: Covenant w Death (superb 1 July 1916 novel), The Sea Shall Not Have Them (WW2 air-sea rescue), North Strike (Norway 1940), Army of Shadows (Resistance), Swordpoint (Italy 44), Light Cavalry Action (1919 Russia)

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

The siege of Habbaniyah is one of the great stories of WW2 & ripe for a David & Goliath retelling. Can't think of any other battle in WW2 where @RoyalAirForce trainers & student pilots bore the brunt.

John Harris' The 30 Days War gave it the popular fiction treatment in the 80s.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

On this day in 1941, the British Empire saved its oil supply with a force smaller than a London police precinct.

Almost nobody remembers it.

Two months earlier, a pro-Nazi colonel named Rashid Ali had seized power in Baghdad in a four-man military coup. He immediately offered Iraq's oil fields, airfields and railways to Hitler in exchange for German support against the British, who had controlled Iraq under treaty since the 1930s.

Hitler said yes. Luftwaffe squadrons were dispatched to Mosul. A handful of Heinkels and Messerschmitts painted in Iraqi colors were already on the ground.

If Iraq fell, Britain lost its main wartime oil supply, the route to India through Basra, and any chance of holding the Middle East against Rommel pushing east and the Germans driving south through the Caucasus.

Britain had almost nothing in Iraq to stop it.

What it had was RAF Habbaniya. A flight training school on a desert plateau 50 miles west of Baghdad. The aircraft were obsolete biplane trainers: Hawker Audaxes, Airspeed Oxfords, a handful of Gloster Gladiators meant for student pilots. The garrison was 1,200 men: airmen, mechanics, flight instructors, six companies of Assyrian Christian Levies, and a few hundred student pilots who had never seen combat.

On May 2, an Iraqi army of 9,000 men with field artillery surrounded the plateau on the surrounding cliffs and ordered them to surrender.

They didn't.

For five days the obsolete trainers flew 647 sorties against the Iraqi positions, instructors leading their own students into combat over the wire. They lost a third of their aircraft. They lost 13 men. They broke the siege and chased the Iraqi army back toward Baghdad.

Meanwhile a scratch relief column called Habforce had set out across 500 miles of open desert from Transjordan with no maps and almost no water. At its head rode a column of Arab Legion soldiers led by an Englishman who had gone native, John Bagot Glubb, whose Bedouin troops called him Abu Hunaik, "father of the little jaw," after a wound he had taken in the trenches in 1917.

Glubb's men reached the outskirts of Baghdad on May 30.

The coup leaders fled to Iran in the night. The Mufti of Jerusalem went with them. Rashid Ali eventually made it to Berlin and spent the rest of the war as Hitler's guest.

Iraq's oil kept flowing west for the next four years.

Hitler had been hours from controlling the Persian Gulf and never knew it.

[Dominick Donald @DominickGDonald]

@TheAgentPhil @RoyalAirForce Everything he wrote was hugely readable, even if he pinched stuff (was shocked to see material in one book which I'd just read in Colin Mitchell's Having Been a Soldier). And he had an eye for interesting byways. Worth looking out for in charity shops or online.