Short Dog Shirt Tonight

I'm tired.

Good Evening:

A reminder that for the rest of the year, all subscriptions to #DogShirtDaily are half off, and half of gross annualized revenues from new subscriptions will go to charity.

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Today on #DogShirtTV, I opened the floor to our Collegium to discuss a crucial issue: should you let a robot give you a massage?

I’m going to give it a try. I will report back.

The estimable Antti Ruokonen and the estimable Laura Donna dropped by to share their thoughts on the issue.

The Collegium’s enthusiasm for robot massages was not as infinite as my own, however, so the estimable Richard Wattenbarger eventually dragged us off on the far less interesting and important issue of Polish liberal democracy. Then the estimable John Hawkinson wanted to talk about a new missile defense system and its geopolitical significance, and we never did get back to the robot massages.

Alas.

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Today on Lawfare

The Situation: Chris Wray Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Kash Patel

In my The Situation column today, I rip FBI Director Christopher Wray a new asshole for his announcement that he will be resigning before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. I suggest that—especially when contrasted with the decisions of James Comey in the first Trump term—Wray’s voluntary resignation to avoid firing and humiliation are pretty cowardly:

To be fair, Wray faced no good option here. He could stay and be fired—and humiliated—by way of making the point that as long as there are “investigations to supervise, to conduct and to protect” and as long as there “are all those people in the [FBI’s] cafeteria, in the halls, in the file rooms and in the field offices who . . . need [that] firm layer of insulation from what was coming,” he would be that layer of insulation until kicked out of the building.

Or he could preemptively obey, spare himself the embarrassment, roll out the red carpet for Kash Patel, and make what Trump is doing look orderly and not quite so much like a purge of professionals from the chief federal government outfit entitled to bear arms against American citizens.

To Bomb One’s People

Stefan Bakumenko reflects on the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Grozny, which began the First Chechen War. Bakumenko discusses the battle’s stakes, deadly combat, aftermath—which saw the burning of villages and massacres of hundreds of civilians—enduring legacy, urban warfare:

On the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Grozny, this article explores the military adventurism that sabotaged Chechen dreams of autonomy and Russian dreams of humane governance. It presents an operation where unpreparedness and indifference led to tens of thousands of deaths and leveled a city. Tragically, the disproportionate, indiscriminate, and unnecessary bombardment of this dense urban environment was only an indication of where modern warfare was headed.

Dear Congress: If You Value National Security, Do Not Sanction the ICC

Lindsay Freeman urges Congress to not pass sanctions in response to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Freeman argues that the ICC’s critical role in global security—the product of its jurisdiction over transnational crimes against humanity, the threat of non-state actors, and its independence—would make sanctions against it an unwise and deeply ineffective course of action:

The ICC is an imperfect institution that has yet to live up to its promised potential. However, the sanctions against the ICC being considered by Congress will do absolutely nothing to change the actions taken by the Prosecutor or judiciary. The ICC is an independent institution with independent judges, who will not and cannot alter their legal opinions in response to arbitrary punishment. The arrest warrants have been issued and will not be revoked in response to sanctions from the U.S. If anything, the proposed sanctions will only stiffen the resolve within the ICC to resist this attempted bullying by outside parties.

Podcasts

On today’s Lawfare Daily podcast, Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Halyna Yanchenko to discuss the Ukrainian ban on arms exports, the growing pains of the country’s defense industry after Russia’s invasion, and why exporting weapons will benefit Ukrainian and global security:

On Chatter, David Priess talks to Ben Tallis about the challenges of German grand strategy since 1945, the country's musical culture in the 1950s and 1960s, the origins and evolution of Kraftwerk and its members' effort to reconceptualize German identity, how Germany became the most respected country in the world by 2020, and German rearmament since 2022:

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the banded linsang, a Southeast Asian tree-dwelling carnivore with retractable claws. It does not earn its title today for its hunting prowess, however. The banded linsang is today’s Beast because it is the very embodiment of the word “scrunch.” Images from otiksimr:

Look at it scrunching!

It is a visual onomatopoeia. What a Beast!