Quote Of The Day

If this kingdom is led by the corrupt, it will be doomed to fall.

- The Frontier Lord Begins With Zero Subjects (2026) (Episode 7).

Another Quote

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

- Frank Herbert (author of "Dune," 1965).

Another view, which is that "acting" and "deception" are part of the skill set of a politician.

Quote Of The Day

I'll pray that every time that landlord goes out somewhere, he accidentally steps in dog poop. 

- Victoria of Many Faces, Episode 1 (after "that landlord" refused to rent a place to her because she recently adopted a child).

The Levite And His Concubine

The Biblical story of the Levite and his concubine, which is Chapter 19 of the of book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, is an odd and shocking story. (It isn't, however, part of the Torah, and is instead part of the collection of stories that make up the remainder of what Christians call  the Old Testament, after its initial five books).

Why the Hebrews, hundreds of years later, chose to preserve this piece of legendary history, when they assembled the Hebrew Bible isn't entirely clear. It may be because it has strong parallels in the story of Lot in the book of Genesis, another case where a bunch of random men come to a house and demand the the householder surrender someone for them to rape and the household complies. Or, it may be intended to demonstrate how lawless the Levant was for the Jews in the age of judges, before they established their own proper kingdom there, as Judges 19:30 suggests.

The story of the Levite and his concubine is also cryptic. It belabors seemingly unimportant details at length, while omitting context that help the story make more sense and explain why these people acted the way that they did. Three thousand or so years removed from the setting of the story, we are left to fill in the blanks by inferring what we can from what it does say.

The story

A Levite and his concubine (whom he acquired in Bethlehemjudah, apparently from her father) visit his concubine's father, where they stay for four months and five days and were urged by her father to stay longer. But the Levite insisted on leaving for his home, together with his two donkeys, his servant and his concubine. Judges 19:1-10. His next stop was to "the house of the Lord" (presumably, his home as the Levites are the priestly class of the Hebrews). Judges 19:18.

The Levite and his party consider staying overnight in Jerusalem, but decide to go to the Jewish town of Gibeah that was part of the tribe of Benjamin, instead, because at this time (before there was a Jewish King in Israel) there were no Jews in Jerusalem. But the Levite can't find a place to stay in Gibeah. Judges 19:11-15. However, a local farmer they meet agrees to take the Levite and his party in for the night, provides them with a meal, and stables the Levite's donkeys for the night, so that the Levite and his party don't have to sleep on the streets that night. Judges 19:16-21.

Some men from the area come to the farmer's house saying that they want to rape the visiting Levite. But the farmer refuses because the Levite was under the farmer's hospitality and protection, and instead offers the hostile crowd of men his own virgin daughter, or the Levite's concubine, instead. Judges 19: 22-24. 

It isn't clear if they want to rape the Levite because they are craving gay sex, because the Levite is a stranger in the town, or because they have animosity towards the Hebrew people's priestly class.

The implication is that if the crowd of men wasn't placated with a girl or woman to rape, that they would have taken the Levite and raped him by force.

The men ultimately accept the Levite's concubine instead of the Levite himself and gang rape her all night until dawn, after which the Levite's concubine collapses on the farmer's doorstep. Judges 19:25-27. But the concubine was unable to speak when the Levite asked her to get ready to go (perhaps because she is unconscious and dying as a result of the brutal gang rape), so he put her on a donkey, finishes his trip, and when he arrives there, cuts her body into twelve pieces, and sends one piece to each of the twelve tribes of Israel (presumably to express his outrage at the situation and to protest the mistreatment of the Levite priesthood). Judges 19:28-30.

Frogs For The Win

 

Labor Day Musings

* The state of labor in one chart:

The failure of businesses to share productivity increases with their workers starting in the early 1970s is the root cause of a lot of the current political reality in the United States. In my view, the decline of private sector union membership is more a product of declining worker economic power than a cause of this shift, but that's an open question in economics.

* The number of immigrants in the U.S. labor force has fallen by 1.2 million since Trump started his second term. According to the Wall Street Journal: "With zero net immigration, Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok estimates, the U.S. economy would be able to sustainably add only about 24,000 nonfarm jobs a month, compared with an average 155,000 from 2015 through 2024."

Agriculture (overwhelmingly in "red America") in the U.S. is particularly suffering both due to tariffs and due to the immigration crackdown that is cutting into the agricultural labor workforce. Nebraska and Iowa saw their state GDPs fall at an annualized rate of 6.1% in the first quarter of 2025.  Those tariffs were found to be mostly illegal by the U.S. Court of International Trade in a ruling affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a 7-4 ruling. The effect of the ruling is on hold until mid-October pending a petition for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court which has consistently ruled in favor of Trump despite his weak legal arguments.

The anti-immigrant fervor is driven by two main factors: (1) the economic stagnation of working age men without any college education who native born white men attribute to immigrants, international trade, and civil rights for women and minorities, and (2) the fear of white protestants in places with few immigrants that their culture will cease to be dominant.

* Courts in India are very slow.

[I]n one recent example a Delhi court concluded a property dispute after 66 years. Both the original litigants were dead. Still, the lawyer for one of the warring parties cautioned that the conclusion was in fact not the end, as the ruling would be appealed.

Three years ago, after pondering a dispute for 16 years, the supreme court sent back a 60-year-old land case for fresh adjudication to a lower court, which had already taken over 30 years to give its judgment in 2006.

A 2021 study of Mumbai real estate found that more than a quarter of the projects under planning or construction and 43 per cent of all “built-up spaces” in the city were under some litigation. My apartment block was one of them.

…One of the reasons for this accumulation is human resources. India has around 16 judges per million people, compared to over 150 for the US. In 2016, the issue brought the country’s chief justice, TS Thakur, to tears during a speech as he requested that the government hire more judges to wade through the “avalanche” of backlog.

For what it is worth, there are far fewer judges per capita in the U.S. than in Europe, even though the total number of legally trained professionals in the U.S. and in Europe per capita are similar.

The lack of state capacity in the area of courts means that property and contract rights and other forms of private law are weaker, which is bad for the economy.

* Adults in the U.S. are having sex less often (the decline is at least as great among high school students). It is basically a coincidence, but my children were conceived right around "peak sex" in the recent history of the United states.

* Wildfires are at record high in Europe due to climate change.

* The U.S. housing market is starting to favor smaller single family homes again after a peak in roughly 2014. Single family houses in the U.S. are still, on average, much larger than they were 30 years ago.

* A mere 6.0 magnitude earthquake in Afghanistan, shortly before midnight on August 31, 2025, was enough to cause at least 800 deaths and 2500 injuries.

* "Flukewarm": That feeling when you're reluctant to make a recipe, because the last time you made it, it came out perfectly. But it was a fluke, you're not sure what you did right, and you're worried you won't be able to repeat your past success.

* Last Saturday, I went to a store to buy a blind spot warning system for my car. They weren't available in 2015 when I bought it. But, I couldn't. Tariffs have delays shipments of cars parts like that one by more than a month and have greatly increased the price of those parts.

* As our country devolves into a civil war, ICE agents in unmarked cars wearing masks and not displaying their badges are unlawful combatants, and are thus they are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Instead, they are terrorists who are not entitled to the protections of legitimate combatants under the laws of war. They also aren't entitled to the peacetime protections and privileges of law enforcement officers.

* Rhode Island has the lowest state murder rate in the United States. Louisiana has the highest (or very nearly so) and has about ten times as many murders per capita.

* The lion's share of the counties in the U.S. with life expectancies lower than North Korea are (1) in the South and majority black or nearly so, (2) include Indian Reservations (or the Alaskan equivalent), or (3) are in Appalachia. The outliers are still in the South.

* Non-U.S. central banks are substituting gold for U.S. Treasury Bonds.

* The U.K. electrical wall plug design is safer than the U.S. design.

* People are dying on overloaded boats trying to emigrate from Gambia (in West Africa) to Europe. "More Than 130 People Are Feared Dead in West Africa Boat Tragedy: Around 150 people boarded a boat in Gambia that was thought to have been headed for Europe. The boat capsized after traveling about 380 miles."

* A judge ordered Alligator Alcatraz in Florida closed on the petition of an Indian tribe with an interest in the land, because an environmental impact statement wasn't done. The debacle cost $250 million. All detainees at the location which was inhuman and defective have been moved to other detention centers in Florida.

* Finland (which is the source of about half of my genetic ancestry) is a genetic outlier in Europe (for reasons that are well understood and closely related to the fact that it is also a linguistic outlier). 23andme was able to correctly pinpoint the place of origin of my Finnish ancestors to a region about the size of a U.S. county. The other half of my ancestry (which I know to some detail due to genealogy) is basically a European mutt that can't be localized from genetics much at all.

Other places with significant Uralic populations, Basque country, historically Celtic areas (despite the putative cultural origin of the Celts in the vicinity of Czechia which is being used as a baseline in the chart above), and places with significant Islamic migration since the 700s CE, also stand out in  this map. Sardinia is the closest modern match to the genetics of Europe prior to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.

* It doesn't take a history genius to understand why South America, in general, and Argentina, in particular, has so much Italian ancestry (to a significant extent, because a lot of Italian Nazis fled there after World War II).

* The Holocaust has an immense effect:

* New Mexico is, by a variety of measures like education and poverty, much more like red states than blue states. But it has stayed blue because the GOP has historically made its Hispanic and Native American residents feel unwelcome and tried to persecute them. 

Utah is, by a variety of measures like education and poverty, much more like blue states than red states. But, its predominantly Mormon religion's conservative tenets have kept it out of the Democratic party fold.

* The cost of living is about 30% greater in the highest cost of living states in the U.S. than in the lowest cost of living state (Arkansas). Most of the difference is due to real estate prices.

* A plausible observation:

* Louisiana still hasn't recovered from Hurricane Katrina twenty years ago. It permanently reduced the population of the state, and of New Orleans, in particular (predominantly due to migration away from it, not due to the fatalities themselves).

* Almost every country in Western Europe has supplied Ukraine with military equipment. So have quite a few other countries (mostly in what could be called the Western European diaspora).

* Most of North America was once home to Buffalo, although the size of the herds may have been exceptionally large because the Native American populations that hunted them were decimated by European diseases not long before European migrants first documented them.

* Almost all of the land on Earth was connected about 200 million years ago.

* Republicans in Congress have grown less likely to have attended elite universities (while Democrats have grown more likely to have done so), mirroring the shift in college educated people towards the Democratic party.

* Data centers v. office building construction.

* Soil quality in Europe.

* Firefighting employment in Europe.

The U.S. figure is 0.2% (there are about 1.019 million firefighters out of 163.3 million employees, but two-thirds of them, who are not included in the 0.2%, are volunteers). This is similar to the European average.

* The twenty years from 1807 to 1827 did a lot to shape the political map of the Americas.

* Squirrels v. people.

* Women didn't start wearing underwear (i.e. panties and bras) in Europe until the 19th century, for the most part.

* Modern musical notation was invented by a Benedictine monk, Guido of Arezzo in 1025 CE and he also invented the Do-Re-Me system. Recognizable modern musical notation is older than Middle English.

* Billionaires have lower effective tax rates than the upper middle class and even less than for the average person.

We estimate income and taxes for the wealthiest group of US households by matching Forbes 400 data to the individual, business, estate, and gift tax returns of the corresponding group in 2010–2020. In our benchmark estimate, the total effective tax rate—all taxes paid relative to economic income—of the top 0.0002% (approximately the “top 400”) averaged 24% in 2018–2020 compared with 30% for the full population and 45% for top labor income earners. 

This lower total effective tax rate on the wealthiest is substantially driven by low taxable individual income relative to economic income. First, the C-corporations owned by the wealthiest distributed relatively little in dividends, limiting their individual income tax unless they sell their stocks. Second, top-owned passthrough businesses reported negative taxable income on average in spite of positive book income, further limiting their individual income tax. The top-400 effective tax rate fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 24% in 2018–2020, explained both by a smaller share of business income being taxed and by that income being subject to lower tax rates. 

Estate and gift taxes contributed relatively little to their effective tax rate. Top-400 decedents paid 0.8% of their wealth in estate tax when married and 7% when single. Annual charitable contributions equalled 0.6% of wealth and 11% of economic income in 2018–20.

* Japan has the lowest housing prices in its major metropolitan areas of any comparable cities in the world. It isn't clear to me how much of this is due to lax land use laws arising from handling that function at a regional level rather than locally, and how much of this is due to its low birthrates and modest immigration rates.

Quote Of The Day

It's honestly a little inspiring to realize that it's always possible to screw up in an entirely new way.

- xkcd

American Suburbs Are Still Stupid

 

Buddhism And The State

China and Korea, at least, do not have a tradition of separation of church and state when it comes to Buddhism (which, notably arrived in this region long after Confucianism became a defining and state sponsored ideology). The Buddhist reliance on state support also helps to explain its fall in these places.

Again, as was also the case in so many Buddhist countries, the success of Buddhism relied heavily on its connections to the court. In Korea, the tradition of “state protection Buddhism” was inherited from China. Here, monarchs would build and support monasteries and temples, where monks would perform rituals and chant sutras intended to both secure the well-being of the royal family, in this life and the next, and protect the kingdom from danger, especially foreign invasion.

…As in China, the Korean sangha remained under the control of the state; offerings to monasteries could only be made with the approval of the throne; men could only become monks on “ordination platforms” approved by the throne; and an examination system was established that placed monks in the state bureaucracy. As in other Buddhist lands, monks were not those who had renounced the world but were vassals of the king, with monks sometimes dispatched to China by royal decree. With strong royal patronage, Buddhism continued to thrive through the Koryo period (935-1392), with monasteries being granted their own lands and serfs, accumulating great wealth in the process.

From Donald S. Lopez, Jr., "Buddhism: A Journey through History" (2025).

Quote Of The Day

Q: Any speculations upon what may have inspired the Papal Name Leo XIV?

A: He was born in early August, which means his sign is Leo. (Also why he became an Augustinian.)

He chose XIV after Super Bowl XIV where his Chicago Bears (NFC) faced the Pittsburgh Steelers (AFC). It is a curious choice, because Pittsburgh won 31-19 and Steeler's QB Terry Bradshaw won MVP.

From Aaron Silverstein on Facebook. 

Envy v Jealousy

 From Quantum Entanglement (Episode 11).

More Random Thoughts

* What if the Younger Dryas extra-terrestrial impact didn't happen? 

Pleistocene megafauna might have survived. The Clovis culture would have lasted longer. Native American cultures in North America might have been more patriarchal. Göbekli Tepe might not have been built at all, or might have been very different. The Neolithic Revolution might have arrived 4,000 years earlier. The genetics of European hunter-gatherers might have been more diverse.

* There is more than one scenario by which brain evolution could be next level. 

One is exemplified by the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica who have essentially the three main layers of the human brain plus a new one on top of that - dolphins come close to that. Another is exemplified by octopi who have a completely different brain structure with is decentralized with many sub-brains throughout their bodies. Yet another would be the cyborg approach (perhaps exemplified by Ghost in the Machine) where brains would be part human and part computer (perhaps the most likely as it has already been done at a very limited level).

* “Eternity is two people and a ham." - Irma Rombauer in The Joy of Cooking. But the price is right. You can get so much red meat for so little money when there are holiday ham sales.

* I visited the Colorado History Museum today and saw, among other things, the 90s exhibit. It is actually fairly stunning how little fashion, music, and movies have changed in the last 35 years, even though technology has changed dramatically. There was a much smaller generation gap between me and my children, culturally, than there was between me and my parents (or my wife and her parents).

* I still don't really understand why the dust bowl of the 1930s happened, or what the risk of it recurring is.

* My son is in Mexico City with his (serious, long term) girlfriend. He is almost exactly the same age that I was when I went there on my honeymoon.

* The U.S. Navy has been quietly developing unmanned surface and undersea ships that are just about ready for "prime time" as important components of our overall naval fleet. Here are some recent examples:

For example, the Australian Eureka unmanned or minimally manned ship has a 1,150 mile range, a 44 ton payload, can travel at 50 knots (60 mph a.k.a. 100 km/hr), and can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and anti-ship Naval Strike Missiles (NSM). But is fairly small at 36 meters in length.

The Lionfish UUV (i.e. drone submarine) is about to enter service.

Lionfish is designed to address critical undersea warfare needs, including mine countermeasures, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), anti-submarine warfare, and electronic warfare.

The REMUS UUV family delivers critical advantages across modern naval operations and the autonomous systems have been proven to operate independently or in conjunction with crewed platforms — such as Virginia-class nuclear submarines — to extend mission range, reduce detection risk, and limit personnel exposure.

The U.S. Navy has a 100 foot long, 100 ton, unmanned surface vessel (USV) in the works (confusingly the same article seems to describe it as a 180 foot, 240 ton USV). It would have a range of thousands of miles.

The vessel is envisaged to be multi-role, capable of transporting logistics payloads, conducting ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) missions, or supporting naval munitions delivery without human oversight.

* My wife is currently watching White Lotus. One of the striking parts of the show is how aptly it captures the ways that men and women completely misunderstand each other because they have very different communications styles. To oversimplify, men are much more direct. Men rely far less on implied meanings and expecting people to "take a hint" than women. Women, in turn, overthink what men say, trying to look for hidden meanings in what men say that aren't there. Women, meanwhile, underestimate how much men can be hurt when they take what women say literally, when what women really mean is different, and is supposed to be implied from context. It also puts the lie to the notion that women are better communicators. Both are men and women are bad at communicating with members of the opposite sex. This mirrors differences in national communications styles. Germans, for example, are much more direct than Americans, while the Japanese, for example, have a much more indirect communication systle.

Some Favorite Aphorisms

Salad kills!

Saudi Arabia is not our friend.

People who think that demons are real are dangerous.

Dogs are for soup.

Christianity is what Christians believe and do.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

The best is the enemy of the good.

There is always sky above the sky.

Light a candle, don't curse the darkness.

We have the Microsoft of constitutions.

Religion thrives when it is tied to a threatened culture.

The smaller the government, the more incompetent it is.

Men in suits are more dangerous than muggers.

AbramsX Proposal Improved But Is The Tank Concept Itself Obsolete?

Why would anyone use tanks anymore in this drone-era? It's like hunting on a turtle.

- A random comment on Facebook

Background

The U.S. Army's main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, currently in version M1A2 SEPv.3 is the heaviest tank in currently service, at 73.6 tons, 12 feet wide, and 8 feet high. The current version costs $24 million each. (An SEPv.4 upgrade has been cancelled by the Army).

The heaviest tank that was ever mass produced beyond a few prototypes was Nazi Germany's 79 short ton Jagdtiger. Only Israel's 65 ton Merkava tank (which is also more advanced, mostly due to its Trophy active protection system) is more heavily armored. 

The M1 Abrams has a 120 mm main gun and carries 42 tank rounds (of several types) that have a range of about 2.5 miles. It has advanced sights with night vision features and friend or foe identifiers to prevent friendly fire. It also has a 0.50 caliber machine gun and two 7.62 caliber machine guns, which are now remotely operated. It has a crew of four and is manually reloaded. 

Its 504.4 gallon fuel tank gives this tracked vehicle with an impressive ability to handle off road obstacles a range of 265 miles on road, where it has a peak speed of 42 miles per hour, and a range of 93-124 miles off road, where it has a peak speed of 25 miles per hour. It can also ferry itself (very slowly for fairly short distances) across water from an amphibious warship ship or landing craft to shore, or across rivers. 

Due to its size, only one can be carried on a C-17 and only two can be carried on a C-5. Mostly, it is deployed by ship and train. But it is too heavy for many European rail bridges, and for many road bridges in much of the world. Its width, weight, and the limited range of motion of its main gun have made it unattractive in old cities with narrow streets and in places with tight mountain passes. 

The original version of it, introduced in 1980, was 60 tons and cost $4.3 million each ($10.7 million in 2023 dollars), had a 105mm main gun and carried 55 tank rounds, and had machine guns operated by semi-exposed personnel. It represented a state of the art improvement over its World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War era predecessors, with its fresh design, in multiple respects, like its powerful 1500 horsepower turbine engine.

About 10,300 of them have been built, both for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps (8,100 delivered), and nine U.S. allies. Currently, it is in service with:

* the U.S. Army (2,640 - 40 M1A1 SA; 1,500 M1A2 SEPv2; 600 M1A2 SEPv3 with another 2000 in the boneyard); the U.S. Marine Corps has transferred its 450 M1s to the U.S. Army, 

* Australia (59), 

* Egypt (1,130), 

* Iraq (101 including one in its Popular Mobilization Force militia), 

* Kuwait (218), 

* Morocco (222), 

* Poland (116), 

* Saudi Arabia (575), 

* Taiwan (40), and 

* Ukraine (12 with another 19 lost in the current war). 

Bahrain and Romania have ordered but not yet received them. In addition the Islamic State managed to acquire 9 of them and Hezbollah has 1 of them.

The M1 has also been used as a starting point for several specialized variants including an armored recovery vehicle (basically a tow truck for tanks), a couple versions of land mine clearing vehicles, and a couple of versions of vehicles to deploy assault bridges over trenches and rivers. Other variants such as a bulldozer variant, a battle command post version, an air defense version, and one with an oversized main gun, never made it out of prototype stage.

Beyond the M1 Abrams

A lot has happened in 45 years, and we've learned at lot from using it in combat from the Persian Gulf War to the Ukraine War. So, the U.S. Army has been looking for a replacement and successor to it.

The U.S. Army has already introduced the tank that the Army insists is not a tank, called the M10 Booker Mobile Protected Firepower, a 42-46 ton medium tank with a 105mm main gain, in addition to a 0.50 caliber and a 7.62 caliber machine gun intended for infantry support rather than for use as a full fledged main battle tank, with armor lighter than the M1 Abrams, but heavier than any other armored vehicle in U.S. military service. But this is not a successor to the M1.

The move to replace the M1 has had several false starts over the last decade or two, and one of the most advanced proposals is the Abrams X, which is still in the design phase. This project recently had a major conceptual change to its design, mostly in response to recent developments in armored warfare in Israel and in Ukraine. 

The original Abrams X introduced in 2022 already had an autoloader for its main gun, reducing the crew from four to three, and repositioned the crew to keep them further away from the main gun turret which is the tank's most vulnerable point. It also has a lighter 120mm main gun. It also has a 30mm remotely operated cannon (based upon the AH-64 attack helicopter's cannon) in lieu of machine guns. And, it had hybrid power that allows it to operate in silent mode on battery packs for short periods of time (primarily in a stationary "silent watch" state) which reduces fuel consumption by 50%. And, it would have 360º thermal sights, addressing the limited visibility in the existing M1 Abrams that can allow infantry to sneak up on it and attack it. The total Abrams X weight is supposed to be 60 tons.

AbramsX. Image Credit: Screenshot.

There have also been other changes in the current version:

* The 30mm cannon has advanced smart rounds that can better penetrate medium weight armor, detonate over trenches that can't be struck directly, and explode in the proximity of drones that aren't directly hit.

* It has the Israeli Merkava tank's Trophy active protection system that detects and intercepts incoming anti-tank rockets, missiles, and suicide drones with a small kinetic energy projectile that detonates them before they hits the tank.

* It has four Switchblade 300 loitering suicide drones, which are remotely operated from the tank, have a range of six miles or fifteen minutes, and "an explosive payload derived from the Javelin missile warhead." This allows it to strike targets previously beyond the 2.5 mile range of its main gun, such as anti-tank missile positions and mortar positions.

Ideally, an Abrams X would also be upgraded to have an ISR spy drone in its unit (or better yet, integrally to the tank itself, with an optional jamming proof fiber optic cord) that could transmit images to it that would warn it of threats that its thermal sensors and sights can't see, a bit like a periscope.

Analysis

The reconceptualized Abrams X is a significant improvement over the M1 Abrams, or the earlier versions of this proposal. 

But it still isn't clear that its great weight and size, slow speed because it is tracked, and other inherent problems with the tank concept, justify this upgrade, in lieu of a more fundamental departure from the tank concept, in light of the stunning failure of tanks in the Ukraine War, and other issues with the tank concept that have been revealed in almost every conflict in which the M1 Abrams has been deployed or considered since then. 

The U.S. Marine Corps has made the bolder move to abandon tanks entirely.

Even With Improvements Tanks Are Problematic

What problems remain?

1. Any tracked vehicle is much slower on road than a wheeled vehicle. Yet, since the Humvee was introduced in 1985, it has been clear that it is possible to make wheeled vehicles that can go anywhere that a tracked vehicle can go (which was the design requirement for the Humvee). Wheeled vehicles are a bit slower off road than a tracked vehicle, but 45 years of experience in the field has demonstrated that tracked vehicles are actually used off road, when employed in wars, quite infrequently. Tracked vehicles also still struggle in mud. And, tracked vehicles can be more easily disabled by disabling a single track than a 6x6 or 8x8 vehicle can be, since that requires disabling multiple wheels.

2. Tracked vehicles are much less fuel efficient than wheeled vehicles, even with hybrid power (which at least helps). Reduced fuel efficiency needs more insecure logistics support, to provide fuel. Fuel tankers generally aren't armored, which is a dire problem in an era when battlefields often no longer have "front lines" behind which unarmored vehicles are safe. Fuel tanks also aren't tracked or equipped for difficult off-road terrain, which means that the entire unit including its logistics support can't cross terrain that only tracked vehicles can cross. (An alternative to deal with the fuel logistics problem would be to look into so called "nuclear batteries", which are powered with radioactive decay of non-uranium, non-plutonium isotopes like thorium.)

3. Slow speed means that a unit with tracked vehicles have to be transported long distances by ship or rail or a flatbed transport, unless absolutely necessary. And, again, those tracked vehicle transports are unarmored and vulnerable, in an era where battlefields don't have safe spaces behind the front lines, and the transports can't go to all of the places that the tracked vehicles themselves can go. It is also much easier to disrupt a rail line or a port big enough to off load tracked vehicles than to disrupt a road in a way that an armored vehicle can't easily go around. This limitation isn't a big concern is you are a geographically small country like Israel or Taiwan or Kuwait planning to employ your tanks domestically against foreign invaders or insurgents. But it is a huge issue for a country like the United States which would almost always be fighting wars in which tanks might be used on an expeditionary basis.

4. Slow speeds mean that in a "fight or flight" situation, the tank can't flee. It has to fight, which is a huge problem if your opposition has greater range anti-tank weapons than the range of your offensive weapons. Conversely, faster opponents with wheeled vehicles can quickly flee from you to beyond the range of your main gun or direct fire cannon, if they are near the edge of your range when they notice your tank. Carrying armed drones helps, but isn't a perfect solution. Any military should be embarrassed to have major offensive systems that can be outrun by a Smart car or a trail motorcycle.

5. Wide vehicles like the M1 Abrams and Abrams X still struggle in the narrow streets of historic cities and villages, on narrow mountain passes, and on narrow roads in dense forests and jungles. Creating barriers that narrower civilian vehicles and narrower military vehicles can pass through, but a wide tank can't, is fairly easy to do if you are preparing to defend against a tank assault.

6. Even at 60 tons, the Abrams X is still very heavy. You can still only transport one in a C-17, or two in a C-5 that requires a more improved airfield. This is still too heavy for most bridges over canyons and rivers in most of the world that are designed to only handle traffic as heavy as commercial tractor-trailers and their loads. This is still too heavy for trains transporting them to the theater of battle to carry them over rail bridges in much of the world. This still limits how many of them can be carried on a landing craft from an amphibious ship. For example, a U.S. Marine Corps Landing Craft Air Cushioned (LCAC), which entered service in 1986, can carry only 60 tons at regular weight and only up to 75 tons if deliberately overloaded in a way that degrades their performance. Just ordinarily driving one over ordinary civilian roads will often damage the road if it isn't built up to the most modern and robust standards, harming good will with the local population. Delivering tanks to an emerging conflict by ship, rail, and flat bed truck, rather than medium or heavy airlift, can take many weeks by which time the armor may be too little, too late. And, medium or heavy airlift capacity is scarce and still requires at least a fairly decent sized improvised air field.

The U.S. 45 "Brookport bridge" over the Ohio River.

7. Its great weight also makes it easy to make traps for them by basically building a covered basement or trench that other vehicles can drive over, but that would collapse under a tank's weight, leaving it in a pit. Driving such a heavy tank into the first floor of a building with lower floors presents the same problem.

8. The Abrams X, like the M1 Abrams and the vast majority of other modern tanks, can only aim their main guns so many degrees up or down. This means that the main guns can't be used against adversaries on high ground such as the higher stories of a tall building in urban combat, or the top of a canyon when the tank is driving on a road through the bottom of the canyon (which is a common road design in places where have canyons). It also limits the use of the main gun against drones, helicopters, and close air support aircraft, in an improvised anti-air role. The armed drones of the Abrams X and its 30 mm cannon help deal with this, but are an imperfect solution. The 53 ton Russian Terminator armored vehicle was designed to address the heavy losses that Russian tanks took from these kinds of tactics fighting insurgents in the Caucuses:

This vehicle was designed for supporting tanks and other AFVs in urban areas. The BMPT is unofficially named the "Terminator" by the manufacturers. It is heavily armed and armored to survive in urban combat. The AFV is armed with four 9M120 Ataka missile launchers, two 30 mm 2A42 autocannons, two AG-17D grenade launchers, and one coaxial 7.62 mm PKTM machine gun. The BMPT is built on the chassis of the widely used T-72 main battle tank. . . . 

Combat experience during the lengthy war [with Russia in Afghanistan] revealed that infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) like the BMP-1 and BMP-2 cannot fully deal with infantry, despite the BMP-2's high gun elevation. Although main battle tanks (MBTs) possessed a high amount of firepower, the limited elevation and depression angles of the main gun made them easy targets in mountainous and urban terrain. It was evident that a new vehicle concept was needed. . . . The main requirements for this new machine were to possess large firepower, high angles of elevation and depression, and protection equivalent to that of an MBT. An additional requirement that was meant to supplement the latter was enhanced protection from close-range hand-held RPGs.

The need for such a vehicle became even more evident during the First Chechen War. When using conventional armor during urban engagements, Russian forces suffered heavy losses in manpower and equipment, including the destruction of an entire mechanized brigade during the First Battle of Grozny. While these losses cannot be entirely blamed on technology, it became clear that a dedicated anti-personnel fighting vehicle would provide valuable assistance in an urban environment. Self-propelled anti-aircraft guns were used as a temporary solution in Chechnya. However, these vehicles were not well-armored and did not possess the obstacle-clearing capabilities of an MBT.

9. The main gun of a tank, conceptually, is primarily for accurately striking other tanks at relatively close range. In practice, however, less than 5% of tanks are destroyed by other tanks in modern warfare. These days, a tank's main gun is basically a solution looking for a problem. Tactically, tanks are no longer the main kind of anti-tank weapon, several other options are higher up the list including anti-tank missiles and rockets (from dismounted infantry, Humvees, helicopters, drones, or close air support aircraft), close air support cannons, anti-tank mines and IEDs, and artillery. Anti-tank missiles are just as good at destroying an enemy tank, have longer range, and even with their launching systems are much lighter than a tank's main gun and shell. Anti-tank missiles cost more than a tank shell, and one would typically carry fewer of them than the 42 shells that an M1 Abrams does, but given the pretty modest number of tank on tank engagements, the cost difference isn't huge and is balanced by not having to spend immense amounts of money on a heavy armored vehicle to carry the main gun. 

10. The main gun of a tank has also been justified as a way to penetrate fortifications like bunkers in support of infantry. But, bunker busting recoilless rifles (i.e. bazookas), or anti-tank missiles used against a bunker, are likewise much less heavy than a tank's main gun and are comparably effective against all but the heaviest bunkers, which can be dealt with using heavier missiles and bombs, delivered by helicopters, drones, aircraft, or just long range cruise missiles launched from land batteries or naval ships. There isn't a great demonstrated need for bunker busting that a 120mm main gun can address, but an 84mm recoilless rifle, or suicide drone, cannot, in actual combat situations. A 120mm tank round can bust through 8-12 inches of reinforced concrete (see also here) with three tank shells, a 105mm tank round can probably penetrate a little bit less. A 30 mm cannon round can break through four inches of steel (and concrete and steel are roughly comparable in the difficulty of penetrating them). An 84mm recoilless rifle can penetrate up to 16 inches of armor or concrete at ranges of 500 yards or more, but requires far less weight and bulk and the main gun of a tank, and the full 2.5 mile range of a tank's main gun is rarely necessary for bunker busting.

11. The M1 Abrams, the Abrams X, and almost all other modern tanks lack any kind of air defense capability, although the Abrams X will at least have Trophy active self-defenses which can intercept income shells and suicide drones. This means that they have to rely mostly on other air defense capabilities in their unit to respond to helicopters, close air support aircraft, and drones. Relying on dismounted infantry with MANPADs or specialized anti-aircraft vehicles in the unit is a workable response to attacks from a small number of armed helicopters, close air support aircraft, or large drones pretending to be helicopters or CAS aircraft. But, it is a less workable solution to attacks by large swarms of small armed drones and suicide drones.

12. It isn't clear that either the M1 Abrams or the Abrams X have the v-shaped hulls that help minimize damage from anti-tank land mines and IEDs, unlike most modern armored wheeled vehicles.

Filling The Tank Gap

There is a place for some level of armor protection in modern warfare. Armor much less robust than an M1 Abrams tank is entirely adequate to make a vehicle and its occupants almost completely impervious to small arms fire up to about 0.50 caliber (12.7 mm) rounds and indirect hits from shrapnel (including the remnants in income shells defeated by active defense systems like Trophy). It might even make sense in some "high end" applications to seek armor that can defend against 20mm-40mm cannon rounds and grenades.

Likewise, MRAPs were found to be desirable, because some form a mine resistance, at least against basic IEDs, is necessary even in "low end" counterinsurgency conflicts. 

The Iraq War clearly demonstrated the problem with using unarmored, flat bottomed Humvees in places where its occupants were likely to be exposed to small arms fire and IEDs from insurgents.

But it has also been clear continuously from the Gulf War, and even more emphatically in the Ukraine War, that no amount of passive armor on a tank can protect it from anti-tank missiles, or a direct hit from an anti-tank shell from another tank, or a direct hit from an artillery round or a drone delivering one (although the armor can increase that odds that the crew survives while the tank is lost).

The weight to offensive power ratio heavily favors weapons like the Javelin anti-tank missile and the 84mm recoilless rifle over a main tank gun for tasks like destroying armored vehicles and busting bunkers. These need to replace the main guns of tanks.

Armor has its place, but only to a point. If an adversary has military grade anti-tank weapons and/or air power from close air support aircraft, guided bombs, armed helicopters, or armed drones, tanks are highly vulnerable targets at a severe disadvantage.

Not every adversary has those capabilities, and when the adversary does not, armored vehicles have a place. But armor beyond what is necessary to defeat small arms and shrapnel is mostly a waste, and attempting to have enough armor to defeat a direct hit from a tank shell or artillery shell is futile.

Likewise, there is virtually no situation where tracks rather than wheels make sense for military vehicles, and even if there is, it is a very niche situation best dealt with using a small number of specialized vehicles made this for particular purpose, and spread across every kind of vehicle in a given military unit, since the least capable vehicle in the unit governs what the unit can do.

At some point, lasers might address the air defense, drone defense, and active defense shortcomings of tanks, and we're close to that point, but it isn't clear that we are there quite yet.

It is possible to use weapons lighter than a main tank gun, armor only sufficient for the circumstances where it can't be defeated anyway, and wheels (basically with moderately armored wheeled missile tanks), to greatly reduce the weight (and size) of ground combat vehicles used instead of tanks, and the logistics of deploying them and then fueling them in the field makes reducing weight highly desirable.

The Sweet Spots For Weight and Size

Making armored vehicles less wide than the 12 feet of an Abrams tank, probably down to the 8.5 feet of a semi-truck makes sense, because that is what roads, bridges, and tunnels all over the world are designed to manage, for missions like urban warfare and deployment in mountainous and heavily forested areas.

There are basically some sweet spots with regard to weight for military planners. 

Vehicles 19 tons or less, like the Stryker and the HIMARs system (and historically the 17 ton M551 Sheridan light tank), can be delivered by a C-130 (and if its is even lighter, by military heavy lift helicopters, Ospreys, or future transport drones), with four of them per C-17 airlift load, eight per C-5 airlift load, and two on an intermediate size European Airbus 400M Atlas airlift transport. This is also approximately the weight of a standard tractor-trailer or shipping container with its load.

At 15 tons or less, like the 11 ton joint light tactical vehicle (JLTV), you can carry five in a C-17 airlift load and ten in a C-5 airlift load. The heaviest airlift possible for a heavy lift helicopter is 16 tons for the heaviest lift helicopters (a CH-53 Stallion), 8 tons for the next heaviest lift helicopter (a CH-47 Chinook), and 10 tons for an Osprey tilt rotor aircraft.

For systems of 20-25 tons, you can't use a C-130 or helicopter, but can fit carry three in a C-17 or six in a C-5, or one on an intermediate size European Airbus 400M Atlas airlift transport.

Two vehicles more than 25 tons but 38 tons or less (like the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle) can be delivered per C-17 airlift load or LCAC load (and four of  them can be delivered per C-5 airlift load), and one of them can be delivered some intermediate sized European Airbus 400M Atlas made airlift aircraft, which are between a C-130 and C-17 in size. 

Getting even the heaviest military vehicles at least down to 38 tons each, and getting many military vehicles lighter than that, if at all possible, is imperative to an expeditionary military force like that of the United States. Historical and present examples of military vehicles in this size class are recapped in this post.

A Footnote On Howitzers and Mobile Mortar Systems

While traditional howitzers (cannon artillery) were important in the early days of the Ukraine War and are still receiving fairly heavy use there, it still makes sense to replace them with guided missiles and drones.

Their range is quite limited (rarely more than 24 miles without basically guided missile rounds). Their accuracy is poor (which undermines the benefits of the low cost of artillery shells relative to missiles, and isn't that cost competitive with the FPV suicide drones used in Ukraine). And, the self-propelled artillery launchers are expensive, heavy and slow. Howitzers have been destroyed at rates comparable to tanks in the Ukraine war.

Artillery missiles and suicide drones just make more sense.

Mobile mortar systems make even less sense, even though they are much more sophisticated than they used to be. They pack less of a punch, they can't be used as close as direct fire main tank guns can, and their range and accuracy is much more poor than that of conventional howitzers, let alone missiles or drones. Yet, these systems are expensive and heavy relative to the firepower that they deliver. There are small niches where they can be competitive with traditional canon artillery, and mortar shells can be cheap, but they aren't competitive with suicide drones in cost or weight. 

Perhaps small infantry mortars have a limited place as a simple and light stopgap, but otherwise, a full transition makes more sense if you are starting from scratch. 

Quote Of The Day

Why would anyone use tanks anymore in this drone-era? 

It's like hunting on a turtle.

From a random FB comment. 

Goodbye Democracy?

America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse.

Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we’re lucky, it won’t be violent. If we’re very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we’re less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.

From a prescient article from October 8, 2015 entitled "American democracy is doomed" by pundit by Matthew Yglesias.

In a nutshell Yglesias argues that:

1. Democracies with strong Presidents have a natural tendency to slip into dictatorships, which is why post-WWII democracies in Europe avoided them, to a great extent, because these systems are prone to unresolved gridlock, since "within a presidential system, gridlock leads to a constitutional trainwreck with no resolution."

He offers the politics of Honduras in 2009, when gridlock and litigation between the President and Congress over constitutional reforms there led to a coup, when the option to use a ballot issue not constitutionally provided for to resolve the dispute is ruled out by their Supreme Court.

2. The U.S. has returned to a historical norm of strong partisan polarization driven by racial issues involving divisions over principles rather than spoils, money, and jobs, much like it was on the eve of the U.S. Civil War that reflects genuine partisan divisions at the grass roots.

3. The U.S. is seeing a rise of "constitutional hardball" tactics that while they are not strictly speaking, violate strong political norms. He sees this as having a structural cause. Politicians and the grass roots are increasingly ideological and elected officials are insistent of carrying out their party's will as much as possible, and principle based politics leaves less room for compromise. In particular, this makes the stakes in Presidential elections very high because the President can have an edge in tipping the balance during periods of gridlock.

He concludes as follows:

The idea that America’s constitutional system might be fundamentally flawed cuts deeply against the grain of our political culture. But the reality is that despite its durability, it has rarely functioned well by the standards of a modern democracy. The party system of the Gilded Age operated through systematic corruption. The less polarized era that followed was built on the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The newer system of more ideological politics has solved those problems and seems in many ways more attractive. But over the past 25 years, it’s set America on a course of paralysis and crisis — government shutdowns, impeachment, debt ceiling crises, and constitutional hardball. Voters, understandably, are increasingly dissatisfied with the results and confidence in American institutions has been generally low and falling. But rather than leading to change, the dissatisfaction has tended to yield wild electoral swings that exacerbate the sense of permanent crisis. . . . 

As dysfunctional as American government may seem today, we’ve actually been lucky. No other presidential system has gone as long as ours without a major breakdown of the constitutional order. But the factors underlying that stability — first non-ideological parties and then non-disciplined ones — are gone. And it’s worth considering the possibility that with them, so too has gone the American exception to the rule of presidential breakdown. If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis, it’s because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. The breakdown may not be next year or even in the next five years, but over the next 20 or 30 years, will we really be able to resolve every one of these high-stakes showdowns without making any major mistakes? Do you really trust Congress that much?

Trump has already run us through multiple constitutional crises, and there are surely more to come.

Scott Sumner's February 17, 2025 blog piece entitled "A simple model of authoritarian nationalism" references the earlier article by Yglesias and riffs further on it.

Sumner focuses on efforts by Trump and other authoritarian nationalists, such as Victor Orban in Hungary, Putin, and even to some extent FDR, to different degrees as he doesn't see it as an all or nothing matter, to "systematically eliminate any aspect of the . . . government that might potentially check his power, or expose corruption." He also argues for looking a foreign and historical examples because Americans are so close to it that it is hard for them to see what is going on. He explains that:

Authoritarianism has such a bad connotation that its supporters generally justify it as a necessary evil to fight a deeper form of authoritarianism, the stranglehold on power of the so-called deep state. Trump’s fans implicitly buy into a sort of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington framing. Ordinary democracy is a cesspool of corruption, and we need an honest outsider to come in and shake things up, someone like Elon Musk. Move fast and break things. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a myth, not reality. Washington cannot be fixed by sending authoritarian leaders there to shake things up, just as the French chaos of 1795 was not fixed by sending in Napoleon. The only way to fix Washington is to make our culture more rational, more honest, and less selfish.

The common thread in most authoritarian nationalists is an unwillingness to be constrained by rules. Thus Trump refuses to adhere to international trade agreements such as Nafta. Of course a president has a legitimate right to renegotiate a trade agreement that he believes is not in the national interest. But even after negotiating a new version of Nafta, a version that he insisted was a great treaty, Trump still refuses to adhere to its provisions.

To achieve the sort of lawless society envisioned by hardcore nationalists, you need to weaken your opponents, strengthen your supporters, and co-opt anyone who can be bribed or intimidated. . . . 

This post was easy to write—any rational person can see what’s going on. To his credit, Matt Yglesias predicted the coming authoritarianism way back in 2015, even before Trump appeared on the scene. His entire Vox article is worth reading, but this paragraph caught my eye:

Those who like these actions on their merits comfort themselves with the thought that these uses of executive power are pretty clearly allowed by the terms of the existing laws. This is true as far as it goes. But it’s also the case that Obama (or some future president) could have his political opponents murdered on the streets of Washington and then issue pardons to the perpetrators. This would be considerably more legal than a Zelaya-style effort to use a plebiscite to circumvent congressional obstruction — just a lot more morally outrageous. In either case, however, the practical issue would be not so much what is legal, but what people, including the people with guns, would actually tolerate.

Replace “political opponents murdered on the streets of Washington” with “send a violent mob to the Capitol to try to intimidate Congress into overturning a presidential election”, and you’ve described what happened 6 years after Yglesias used that seemingly “far-fetched” example, including the pardons. And I doubt that even Yglesias expected the assassination hypothetical to be discussed in the Supreme Court just a few years later.

In the end, our Constitution won’t protect us, there are too many loopholes. What matters is how much authoritarian nationalism the public is willing to stomach. I’m an optimist by nature and still expect Trump’s project to fail. My bigger concern is that the trajectory that Yglesias so presciently described in 2015 is likely to continue for many more years. Future presidents will become even more authoritarian that Trump.

To summarize, here’s how I think about the authoritarian nationalist’s credo:

* We don’t need no stinking election monitors. We decide who won the election.

* We don’t need no stinking trade rules. We set the rules.

* We don’t need no stinking refugees, except Afrikaners who’d vote MAGA.

* We don’t need no stinking international criminal court. We decide what’s torture.

* We don’t need no stinking Nato.

* We don’t need no stinking IRS audits of our supporters.

* We don’t need no stinking press critics.

* We don’t need no stinking United Nations

* We don’t need no stinking federal court oversight

* We don’t need no stinking European Union rules

* We’ll do whatever the hell we want to, and who’s going to stop us?

I hope it doesn’t take another global war for the world to come to its senses.

The state of the nation in the early days of the second Trump administration certainly send chills down my spine. 

The Economist democracy index defines four degrees by which democracy may be present in a country:

• Full democracies are countries where civil liberties and fundamental political freedoms are not only respected but also reinforced by a political culture conducive to the thriving of democratic principles. These nations have a valid system of governmental checks and balances, an independent judiciary whose decisions are enforced, governments that function adequately, and diverse and independent media. These nations have only limited problems in democratic functioning.
• Flawed democracies are countries where elections are fair and free and basic civil liberties are honoured but may have issues (e.g. media freedom infringement and minor suppression of political opposition and critics). These countries can have significant faults in other democratic aspects, including underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.
• Hybrid regimes are countries with regular electoral frauds, preventing them from being fair and free democracies. These countries commonly have governments that apply pressure on political opposition, non-independent judiciaries, widespread corruption, harassment and pressure placed on the media, anaemic rule of law, and more pronounced faults than flawed democracies in the realms of underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.
• Authoritarian regimes are countries where political pluralism is nonexistent or severely limited. These nations are often absolute monarchies or dictatorships, may have some conventional institutions of democracy but with meagre significance, infringements and abuses of civil liberties are commonplace, elections (if they take place) are not fair or free (including sham elections), the media is often state-owned or controlled by groups associated with the ruling regime, the judiciary is not independent, and censorship and suppression of governmental criticism are commonplace.

The U.S. may still be a democracy, but any fair minded observer would have to downgrade us, at least, to a flawed democracy (the U.S. is currently rated by the Economist at the high end of the flawed democracy range and will probably fall to at least the low end of it in the next round of evaluation), and is on the path to being even worse, at this point. The next level is where Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Kazakhstan sit, and we could be there soon.

We may not plummet all of the way to the full on authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan just yet. 

But we have lots of room to fall further, and it is increasingly plausible that we will. We are in the worst case scenario, and if the rearguard action to protect democracy and the rule of law doesn't prevail now, it can only get worse.