Flat Circle War Room - 4/21/26
What I’m reading, listening to and watching this week, as well as updates about next episodes.
While researching for episode 23 and 24 (involving ground combat in Taiwan), I found this article:
The Thunder Run
https://www.latimes.com/la-120703zucchino-story.html
It is an absolutely riveting tale about the US’s 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division and their dash into Baghdad in 2003. Reading it, my thought went to Blackhawk Down, only this is something exponentially more. My second thought was, ‘this should be a movie!’, and apparently several years ago it was in the planning stage for just that. But like many movie ideas, it remains on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be made.
Further research regarding near-future ground combat, took me here:
The Killer Robots Are Coming. The Battlefield Will Never Look the Same.
(note, the NY Times link is a gifted link and is only active for 14 days)
Details how Ukraine is tactically using UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) in coordination with aerial drones, for combat operations. Of particular interest was a look inside how Ukraine used the combined capabilities of drones to assault a building held by Russian troops.
Which led me to this article from the Atlantic Council:
The Coming Compute War In Ukraine
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/the-big-story/the-coming-compute-war-in-ukraine/
Tells of warfare’s insatiable appetite for data and bandwidth and the vulnerabilities therein.
Next, I tumbled down a separate rabbit hole watching this video, put out by the Georgetown University Wargaming Society
Wargaming Lessons for Intelligence Analysts & What I’ve Learned Playing Red
A very interesting interview about effectively ‘red teaming’ for wargames, put on by Ian Sullivan, Director of Intelligence, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 for the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command (T2COM G-2).
This led me to their website:
A ton of great resources there. The most timely was this one:
T2COM OE Threat Assessment 1-1, How China Fights in Large-Scale Combat Operations
Next Episode Update
Today I finished the voice-over narration for episode 22. Also, one of the new tools I’m using is Google Earth Studio, which is very cool in improving map graphics. I also downloaded KMZ files for country borders and am playing with polygon usage to better display held territory and unit movements.
Meanwhile, Lew is working on the Unreal Engine scenes for ep22 which feature character close-ups.
I also purchased a uniform and kit package for Unreal Engine (thanks to your contributions both here and on Patreon) to be used both for episode 22 and will definitely be used for many episodes to come.
Still working on pretty significant script refinements for episode 23 and 24. Michael Hilliard of The Redline Podcast had great insight that required me to make changes to improve the story and plausibility. All good things.
More soon!
John