Wednesday NatSec Roundup

Arms control’s gotta be a little bit painful; otherwise, why do you do it?

• It’s unclear how rapidly the Air Force really wants to retire its stocks of legacy airframes; as with the Navy and the USS Harry Truman, it may simply be a play for more money.
• Fucking landmines, man. What are they good for? A few things in all honesty, but the utility isn’t worth the long-term humanitarian cost.
• There’s a new book out on military strategy and Game of Thrones (is that actually a thing that happened?), but fortunately or no it does not include the final season.
• Putting a low yield nuke on a Trident submarine is incomparably dumb but this is the age we live in.
• The P-8 Poseidon is being asked to do a lot more than it has in the past, including substantially increased capabilities to use munitions against surface targets.
• Krepon on NATO expansion and arms control. My own views of NATO expansion are complicated; it certainly did increase tensions, but the countries brought into NATO had long-standing and legitimate concerns about Russia. Altogether bad for arms control, although for the most part the US has been worse on arms control than the Russians…