Alex Almeida
@AlexAlmeida2020
Regional security analyst @horizonengage. Focused on Iraq/KRI, Yemen, and the Gulf states. PhD candidate @warstudies. Views very much my own.
The one place where Britain managed to push through sweeping planning reforms
Dresden. Every building pictured dates from the last twenty years, the result of a 2002 municipal referendum in which the city decisively voted in favour of reconstructing its historic centre.
It's a very interesting & well-written article. But I think it focuses too heavily on the inputs of the campaign & not enough on the campaigns outcome (which despite all the tech, integration and synchronisation may end up being disappointing and limited). warontherocks.com/2025/07/lesson…
horsdoeuvresofbattle.blog/2025/07/22/the… I may have written 12K words on the war, Iran's missile performance, and where we go from here. I hope it is illuminating.
Video footage of an Iranian arms shipment recently seized by the Yemeni National Resistance Forces clearly shows 6 QW/Misagh pattern MANPADS launch tubes. This is the first publicly documented seizure of MANPADS from a Yemen-bound Iranian maritime shipment since 2013
I’ve said this before but maintaining TFR in 21st century conditions will require regimes of social discipline on the level of the Spartan agoge, which means that human social organization & population structures two centuries from now are probably going to look very different.
In the long term it seems Israel will not remain an exception when it comes to replacement fertility. Low fertility and then mass immigration seem to be in its political future. timesofisrael.com/israeli-popula…
Somebody snagged a Rwanda Defense Force helmet?
Islamic State wilayat Mozambique advertises its da'wa activities in several Cabo Delgado villages. This IS affiliate in recent years has been particularly active in making locals understand its methodology. Note the equipment the jihadists posses. #Mozambique
LLMs are fine for following up on research threads or general, top-level literature reviews, but if your outsource any serious high-stakes thinking to these things you’re not gonna make it, sorry.
This goes for pretty much anything. Like I’m sorry but you are *not* going to get the same out of reading a Chat-GPT digest of a bunch of research papers as you would reading & taking them apart “manually”. You won’t fully internalize it, and you’ll retain far less.
This goes for pretty much anything. Like I’m sorry but you are *not* going to get the same out of reading a Chat-GPT digest of a bunch of research papers as you would reading & taking them apart “manually”. You won’t fully internalize it, and you’ll retain far less.
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
Stauffenberg is one of the more interesting characters in 20th century history - quite possible he would have emerged as a sort of German de Gaulle if he'd survived.
#OTD 1944 the Stauffenberg bomb plot against Hitler. Stauffenberg was a German officer who received terrible injuries in an air attack whilst serving here, in Tunisia. Sound on. #TunisianCampaign
The suicide drones that targeted oil fields in the Kurdistan Region last week flew from Dibis, Kirkuk. #Iraq
"We need to examine the entire Popular Mobilization Forces institution"
🚨 BESSENT ON POWELL: WE NEED TO EXAMINE THE ENTIRE FEDERAL RESERVE INSTITUTION
Final Four 389th FS F-15E Jets Return From Combat Tour With Nose Art And Weapon Markings Let’s take a look at the JASSM and APKWS markings on the final four Strike Eagles of the “Thunderbolts” as they return from their ME deployment. Story: theaviationist.com/2025/07/20/fin…
Reasons for footnotes: 1) Referencing 2) Additional clarifying information 3) I worked on this paragraph for 45 hours and simply refuse to delete it entirely 4) I want to be mean about an author but not, like, main text mean.
See our @WashInstitute Militia Spotlight piece on the near-miss with a major factional clash as Iran-backed militias start to spar with Moqtada - really nice piece by Ameer al-K. Game On: Moqtada al-Sadr and the Muqawama Clash on Arms Outside the State washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysi…
Handy graphic here by our team at @horizonengage on the recent militia rocket & drone attacks in the KRI. The most intense sequence of militia attacks we've seen in 10+ years, even more than the post-Soleimani & Oct 2023 strikes on US points of presence. linkedin.com/posts/horizone…
For a sec I thought this was a burning oil facility in Iraqi Kurdistan. Need to logg off.
BREAKING: Tomorrowland main stage completely destroyed by fire just two days before festival kickoff
The Kurdistan Region has lost nearly 200,000 barrels of oil production after a spate of drone attacks by criminal militias on the Iraqi government payroll. Five oil fields have been hit — including two operated by U.S. companies. This production keeps the lights on and the…
U.S. State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce: "These kinds of attacks in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, are unacceptable. We've expressed our dismay and our problem with them, and's what I can report to you at this point."
Some comments by me here in this very timely piece by @pauliddon on the state of the KRI's air defenses forbes.com/sites/pauliddo…