Has air power alone ever achieved a strategic result?
A new podcast:
🎧: podfollow.com/dan-snows-history-hit
10.03.2026 15:03
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Has air power alone ever achieved a strategic result?
A new podcast:
🎧: podfollow.com/dan-snows-history-hit
I think we need to get real about the possibility that, for millennia, twisted assumptions about leadership have put us at the mercy of psychopaths.
Absolutely insupportable. Labour have a massive majority. It’s a hugely popular issue. To fail to act would be a dereliction of historic proportions, and utterly inexplicable.
The siege of Quebec was grinding on, 250 yrs ago, through the winter of 1776. Smallpox ravaged the American army outside the city & it was said that sex workers known to have smallpox were sent out by the British garrison to spread disease.
If true it makes it an early example of biological warfare
Any country with “a strong control by police and military authorities [would sufficiently] preserve the national fighting power unimpaired.”
In fact, air attacks would likely see “the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled.”
Well, we’re not dealing with Churchill either:
It is “not reasonable to speak of an air offensive as if it were going to finish the war by itself.” It was “improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by an air attack would compel the Government …. to surrender”
Meanwhile.
Today in 1948 the last British troops left India. They marched onto their ship through the Gateway of India in Bombay, built in the 1920s as a magnificent monument to an empire that had just 20 years left.
The army seized power in England in the 1640s. The Mamlukes. The Praetorian. The Janissaries. The list in endless.
It’s not science fiction that makes us nervous about of autonomous weapons platforms breaking free of human command- it’s history.
Control of warriors has been an unending struggle.
The founding myth of the English is of mercenaries who topple a kingdom.
Why would Lady Jane Grey’s kid have made a bad ruler?
Because they would have been a dud
Just imagine who’s in there.
Dawn in The Forest
Aristocrats going down like they’re in Guards at Waterloo.
Here’s the podcast, about William and many of his justice-involved relatives.
🎧: podfollow.com/dan-snows-hi...
The last time a British Royal Prince was taken into custody:
The future William IV, Jan 1780.
(Pocock, Sailor King)
My expert analysis is that if Canada beats the USA in the hockey it will be a major geostrategic moment but if we lose then it will be an irrelevant footnote.
Really appreciate it. Thank you.
After 24hrs frantic reading I can say with confidence that the last British royal to be arrested was….
William IV
As a young man he got in a drunken brawl in Gibraltar, he was locked up, revealed his identity & was released.
This & other parallels on the pod now:
podfollow.com/dan-snows-hi...
Princes in the tower
😅
In terms of the brother of a living king, I think (despite the heroically dysfunctional Georgians who came close) it was George, Duke of Clarence, sent to the Tower by Edward IV in the 1470s.
I reckon the last time the son of a sovereign was taken into custody in Britain was the Duke of Monmouth in 1685.
I cannot stress enough how enjoyable it is to deprive that withered old cunt of your money. Waterstones, Argos, Boots - it is so easy to get whatever you need, and it feels kinda fun, like taking a holiday in 90s Britain
The poetic justice of the USA Olympic hockey team getting smoked by Canada on the ice of all places is going to be so sweet.
A migrant speaks.
The Beaker People catching strays
Thanks for the kind words! The whole team appreciates it.
It is the singular mark of the intemperate Nationalist to hate that which actually represents the reality of national life, and to love a much narrower, uglier, and altogether more unpleasant Nation that lives only in imagination.
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