Businesses in the Persian Gulf have lost access to their networks after Iranian drones damaged Amazon data centers. And they can’t reach company reps to get key materials they have stored on Amazon’s cloud. “It’s been a black box.” www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/t...
Shameless plug. My @warontherocks.bsky.social debut is a rebuttal to Cynical Publius’ war college opinion piece. warontherocks.com/2026/03/mili...
The Dardanelles are open for transit, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill said. "The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is the Ottomans shooting at the fleet," he said. "It is open for transit should the Ottomans not do that."
Strategic planning often focuses on what is likely. The more unsettling question is what could go terribly wrong.
How could the NSC staff miss this, the CT Directorate is led by counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka, PhD?
Surely he’s thought about how Iran would manage local, regional, and international force projection for most of his career.
5.
If you happen to teach in any capacity please introduce your students to reference management software like Endnotes or Zotero if you have the opportunity and interest.
Using Zotero has saved me so much pain over the years.
If we could just raise sea levels by 150 meters we get a backup Strait of Hormuz
Everything is bad, but at least I can focus on my dissertation chapter about how the British in 1915 didn’t have the navy to force a strait when it needed to because it spent the previous decades funding their army’s misadventures in unimportant areas that turned into expensive quagmires.
Renowned war photographer Sir Don McCullin has been talking to Euronews Culture in Athens about his remarkable life behind the lens at the exhibition based on his book "Life, Death and Everything in Between."
➡️ https://l.euronews.com/dy2v
Today is the tenth anniversary of what I still think is one of the best essays I’ve ever read about gender, savage in its anger and gorgeous in its love.
medium.com/@jencoates/i...
Percentage of the moment: 37%
(That's the percentage of all global web traffic generated by "malicious bots.")
www.statista.com/chart/35950/...
In 1914 the British laid 2 small minefields in the Channel and North Sea, and then issued a proclamation saying that the entire area was at risk.
Asquith, the PM, explicitly said that they wanted to blow up one neutral vessel as it would stop all the rest.
Infrastructure that is vulnerable, hard to rebuild, and not easy to disperse but critically vulnerable to the belligerent, chat, I sense an oil plan
Time to get Labyrinth back out!
If you’ve never heard of Operation Earnest Will
Now would be a good time👇
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operati...
Honestly, not sure I want to know what these numbers are going to look like in a few weeks.
Realistic possibility this is our lowest snowpack peak/earliest melt on record (38 years), based on the outlook for the rest of March.
Still early to talk about summer, but obviously this isn't good.
Indeed, assuming this represents current policy, it is an open admission that the regime change effort has failed, de-nuclearization is likewise impossible or impractical and the only objective that remains is to extricate from a costly failure.
And viciously hard to end them
Wrote up some thoughts on the current war with Iran. You can't have a strategy if you don't even have a policy.
open.substack.com/pub/bafriedm...
I’m Internet Fanous!
(These are my favorite social media interactions, lol)
You go through a lot of chili crisp in your house. 🔥
School work
I really want to try these. Cross-cultural food influence! Mexican in Japan 💚.
A long read from me today, about the delicate task of designing respectful historical board games. Massive thanks to @amabel.bsky.social and @colewehrle.bsky.social for talking to me about their design approaches. www.wargamer.com/board-games/...
Great to see this at CSU. I recognize one Computer Science student.
Dr Pigeon gets a selfie with CSU's Game Dev Club
Gave a talk yesterday on the psychology of gameplay for Colorado State University's Game Dev Club. 😁
#gamedev #games #ttrpg
I think Borthwick might be cooked. This is too talented a squad to be fighting to avoid the wooden spoon.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/09fa5c20-2c8f-4f41-9d91-c78476eaac20 Drone strikes on Amazon Web Services facilities this week in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain highlight the vulnerability of cloud facilities — prominent symbols of US tech power in the region and hard to defend against air attack. Fars News Agency, an outlet affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Thursday that Iran targeted Amazon and Microsoft facilities in recent drone strikes. Experts say Amazon’s facilities were likely targeted by Iran. Microsoft said it had not experienced any outages in the region. The strikes mark what is believed to be the world’s first military attack against the US “hyperscalers” that dominate the global cloud computing market. That could create a chilling effect on the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s plans to spend billions of dollars on local AI infrastructure in the coming years, a crucial plank of the oil-rich states’ efforts to diversify their economies. “The Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,” said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank.
Iran acknowledges they are targeting AWS and Azure data centres. "The Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,” said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The whole reason I bought this sweet reproduction of a 18th century map of Taiwan at the National Palace Museum is bc it's almost a ship's eye view. It's huge too, like 9ft/3m when fully unfolded.
POV: You're in a landing craft trying to figure out where you can land and not be immediately killed.
