The Economics of Victory in Ukraine and Defeat in Iran
The U.S. uses $4 million Patriot interceptors to destroy drones that cost $20,000 to $50,000.
Updated ET
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Six hundred years ago, on a muddy field near Agincourt in northern France, King Henry V’s outnumbered, half-starved English army faced the flower of French chivalry. French knights were expensive, each man-at-arms the product of many years of training, his armor and warhorse a major investment. Henry’s archers carried longbows that cost little, drawn by men trained in every village across the kingdom. When the volleys came, the knights fell by the hundreds. Quantity overwhelmed quality—and the mud helped. France lost the battle, but defeat in the war came not in the dying. It was in the impossibility of replacing what had died.
It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.
Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.
New research sheds light on how mediocre employees help would-be authoritarians maintain power.
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
The nature of war has changed and is changing much faster and more radically than most observers—and most of the world’s militaries—yet understand. Rifles, mortars and tanks appear to be going the way of sword fights and cavalry charges. Evacuating the wounded from the ever-expanding drone-infested “gray zone” that separates opposing armies can take weeks, in some cases up to two months. That’s because teams of drone and unmanned ground vehicle operators must struggle to maneuver coffin-shaped evacuation platforms against swarms of hostile drones on a winding path through the war zone. In a war in which thumbs on joysticks have largely replaced fingers on triggers and more fighting is done on screens and less in the trenches, almost every assumption about what armies are and how they fight is being challenged and reshaped daily.
“If we’re going to lose this radical idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that in its Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government to ensure the debate of ideas — if that’s going to happen, Mr. President, by God, it’s not going to be because I surrendered it.” “I’m voting no.”
From Canada's YouTube reaction its apparent Trump may have declared to Xi to stay away from commercial transactions with his intellectually superior Mark Carney
Trump and Xi Would Need Personality Transplants to Get This Deal Done
Soumaya Keynes and
Ms. Keynes and Dr. Bown are the authors of the forthcoming book “How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy.”
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