Credible Defense

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An unofficial counterpart to the subreddit r/CredibleDefense, intended to be a supplementary resource and potential fallback point. If you are an active moderator over there, please don't hesitate to contact me to be given a moderation position.

Wiki Glossary of Common Terms and Abbreviations. (Request an addition)

General Rules

Strive to be informative, professional, gracious, and encouraging in your communications with other members here. Imagine writing to a superior in the Armed Forces, or a colleague in a think tank or major investigative journal.

This is not at all intended to be US-centric; posts relating to other countries are highly encouraged.

No blind partisanship. We aim to study defense, not wage wars behind keyboards. Defense views from or about all countries are welcome so long as they are credible.

If you have experience in relevant fields, understand your limitations. Just because you work in the defense arena does not mean you are always correct.

Please refrain from linking the sub outside of here and a small number of other subs (LCD, NCD, War College, IR_Studies, NCDiplomacy, AskHistorians). This helps control site growth (especially limiting surges) and filters people toward those with a stronger interest.

No denial of war crimes or genocide.

Comments

Should be substantive and contribute to discussion.

No image macros, GIFs, emojis or memes.

No AI-generated content.

Don’t be abrasive/insulting.

No one-liners, jokes, insults, shorthand, etc. Avoid excessive sarcasm or snark.

Sources are highly encouraged, but please do not link to low-quality sources such as RT, New York Post, The National Interest, CGTN, etc. unless they serve a useful purpose.

Be polite and informative to others here, and remember that we should be able to disagree without being disagreeable.

Do not accuse or personally challenge others, rather ask them for sources and why they have their opinions.

Do not ask others about their background as it is rude and not encouraging of others to have an open discussion.

Please do no not make irrelevant jokes, offtopic pun threads, use sarcasm, respond to a title of a piece without reading it, or in general make comments that add nothing to the discussion. Please refrain from top-level jokes. Humor is appreciated, but it should be infrequent and safe for a professional environment.

Please do not blindly advocate for a side in a conflict or a country in general. Surely there are many patriots here, but this is not the arena to fight those battles.

Asking questions in the comment section of a submission, or in a megathread, is a great way to start a conversation and learn.

Submissions

Posts should include a substantial text component. This does not mean links are banned, instead, they should be submitted as part of the text post. Posts should not be quick updates or short-term. They should hold up and be readable over time, so you will be glad that you read them months or years from now.

Links should go to credible, high-quality sources (academia, government, think tanks), and the body should be a brief summary plus some comments on what makes it good or insightful.

Essays/Effortposts are encouraged. Essays/Effortposts are text posts you make that have an underlying thesis or attempt to synthesize information. They should cite sources, be well-written, and be relatively long. An example of an excellent effort post is this.

Please use the original title of the work (or a descriptive title; de-editorializing/de-clickbaiting is acceptable), and possibly a sub-headline.

Refrain from submissions that are quick updates in title form, troop movements, ship deployments, terrorist attacks, announcements, or the crisis du jour.

Discussions of opinion pieces by distinguished authors, historical research, and research on warfare relating to national security issues are encouraged.

We are primarily a reading forum, so please no image macros, gifs, emojis, or memes.

~~Moderators will manually approve all posts.~~ Posting is unrestricted for the moment, but posts without a submission statement or that do not meet the standards above will be removed.

No Leaked Material

Please do not submit or otherwise link to classified material. And please take discussions of classified material to a more secure location.

In general, avoid any information that will endanger anyone.

#Please report items that violate these rules. We don’t know about it unless you point it out.

We maintain lists of sources so that anyone can help to find interesting open-source material to share. As outlets wax and wane in quality, please help us keep the list updated:

https://reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/wiki/credibleoutlets

founded 1 year ago

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Credible Defense Megathread 7/14/23 + Feedback Thread (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Well, its been two weeks, which I think is a decent amount of time for a quick check-in for feedback. Is this space helping people? Is there anything I could do to make it more useful or engaging? I was considering migrating this thread to a second subreddit with lower posting standards, a la r/lesscredibledefense. That way, maybe people who feel intimidated/uncomfortable with the submission standards can still share content. Would love to hear your thoughts.

I’m trying this out on a purely experimental basis. Please strive to keep your discussions focused, courteous, and credible. Links to combat footage without significant further analysis will be removed. That sort of footage should be posted to [email protected].

Also, please report things which break the rules! It’s unlikely I’ll see everything that happens in a thread, so reporting is the best way to remove content that doesn’t fit our standards.

The megathread is for asking questions and posting submissions that would not fit the criteria of our post submissions. As such, submissions are less stringently moderated, but we still do keep an elevated guideline for comments. Comment guidelines: Please do:

Be curious not judgmental,
Be polite and civil,
Use the original title of the work you are linking to,
Use capitalization,
Link to the article or source of information that you are referring to,
Make it clear what is your opinion and from what the source actually says. Please minimize editorializing, please make your opinions clearly distinct from the content of the article or source, please do not cherry pick facts to support a preferred narrative,
Read the articles before you comment, and comment on the content of the articles,
Post only credible information
Contribute to the forum by finding and submitting your own credible articles, Please do not:
Use memes, emojis or swears excessively,
Use foul imagery,
Use acronyms like LOL, LMAO, WTF, /s, etc. excessively,
Start fights with other commenters,
Make it personal,
Try to out someone,
Try to push narratives, or fight for a cause in the comment section, or try to 'win the war,'
Engage in baseless speculation, fear mongering, or anxiety posting. Question asking is welcome and encouraged, but questions should focus on tangible issues and not groundless hypothetical scenarios. Before asking a question ask yourself 'How likely is this thing to occur.' Questions, like other kinds of comments, should be supported by evidence and must maintain the burden of credibility. Please read our in depth rules https://reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/wiki/rules. Also please use the report feature if you want a comment to be reviewed faster. Don't abuse it though! If something is not obviously against the rules but you still feel that it should be reviewed, leave a short but descriptive comment while filing the report.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

US close to providing Ukraine with long-range cluster missiles

The Biden administration is close to deciding it will provide Ukraine with a version of ATACMS long-range missiles armed with cluster bomblets rather than a single warhead, according to several people familiar with the ongoing deliberations.

Biden moved during the summer from a firm and long-standing “no” to saying the issue was “still in play.” Although the administration backed away from initial concerns that Kyiv would use the long-range weapons to strike inside Russian territory, the Pentagon still worried that drawing down enough ATACMS from relatively small military stockpiles to make a difference on the Ukraine battlefield would undercut the readiness of U.S. forces for other possible conflicts.

But the cluster-armed version of ATACMS are more plentiful than those topped with a single — or “unitary” — warhead and are no longer considered a front-line U.S. weapon. From an estimated original production of 2,500, some from the early 1990s, an unknown number were later refitted with unitary warheads, according to a fiscal year 2018 Defense Department publication. But many of the cluster variant remain in stockpiles. Consideration of the cluster warhead ATACMS was first reported by Reuters.