How this works
This site writes down military podcasts. Every article says which show it came from, which episode, and the date the words were spoken, so you can go and hear the original for yourself.
لم تترجم هذه الوثيقة بعد. تنشر بالإنجليزية ريثما تستقر صياغتها.
What this is
A long defense podcast runs for two or three hours. Most people who want one answer out of it will never listen to the whole thing. An article here is the substance of one episode written down: what was said, in ordinary English, with the terms explained as they come up.
It is written for someone with no military background who arrived from a search result with a single question. That is why the pieces are short, why the jargon is explained on the page rather than assumed, and why the source is at the top instead of buried at the bottom.
What this is not
This is the part worth reading before you rely on anything here.
- There are no reporters. Nobody working on this site talks to sources, travels to a front line, reads a document or sees a photograph that has not already been broadcast.
- Nothing here is first-hand. Every claim on this site is an account of something somebody said on a broadcast. That is true of the confident claims as well as the hedged ones.
- Nothing is independently verified. This site has no way to check whether a thing said on an episode is true, so it does not claim to have checked it. What it can do is tell you exactly who said it and when, which is a different and smaller promise.
- There is no house view. The site does not analyse a live conflict in its own voice, does not predict what happens next, and does not take a side. Where a show's host offers analysis, the article reports it as that host's analysis rather than as an established fact.
- Disagreements are not settled here. When two shows say different things, this site does not decide which is right. It says who said what, on what date, and leaves the judgement with you.
What an article has to carry
Nothing has been published on this site yet. The five points below are the rule a piece has to meet before it can be, not a description of a production line that is already running.
One episode, named
An article is written from a specific episode of a specific show. Not from a summary of it, not from several episodes blended together, and not from what the internet says the episode contained.
What was said, written down
The article reports what the people on that episode said. Where they are guessing, it says they are guessing. Where they disagree with each other, it says so rather than picking the version that reads better.
The credit travels with it
The show, the episode title, the date it was recorded and a link back are recorded with the article and printed above the headline, before the first sentence of the piece.
The vocabulary is explained on the page
A term a general reader is unlikely to know is marked where it is used and defined in place, not linked away to be read later. Every term also lives on one page, so it cannot be defined two different ways.
What is missing is printed too
If the show, the episode or the date is not recorded, the article says so in plain words at the top and at the bottom. It does not quietly shrink into an ordinary byline.
The stamp above the headline
Every article carries a block of four fields before the headline: who said it, in which episode, on what date, and when this site wrote it up. It is above the headline on purpose. A headline read before its source is read as this site's own assertion, and this site does not assert things about live wars.
The block is drawn one of three ways, and the difference is a line weight and a dash pattern as well as a colour, so it survives a greyscale screen, colour blindness and sunlight.
مكتوب من عدة حلقات
The article was written from more than one recording, and the show, the episode and the date are recorded for each. This says how many recordings went in. It does not say that any of them is right.
مكتوب من حلقة واحدة
The article was written from one recording, and the show, the episode and the date it was said are all recorded. This is what almost every article here is. The same mark appears as a dotted line down the left edge of the article, so it is still visible after the stamp has scrolled away.
المصدر غير مسجل
The show, the episode or the date is missing, so there is no way to trace the article back to a recording. There is no magenta anywhere on the stamp, because a claim with no source has nothing to draw itself with.
What to do with an unsourced claim
Do not pass it on as fact. An article whose stamp says the source is not recorded is telling you that this site cannot show you where the claim came from. That is a gap in the record here; it is not evidence that the claim is false, and it is not evidence that it is true.
If the claim matters to you, find the broadcast it came from or a second account of the same events before you rely on it. The same advice applies to every article here, whatever its stamp: one show saying a thing once is one show saying a thing once, and this site checks none of it.
Today every article on this site would carry the unsourced stamp, because this site has published nothing at all.
Why the dates are everywhere
Coverage of a live conflict is true as of the day it was said and not after it. A front moves, a weapon arrives, a claim is withdrawn. So this site prints two dates on every article and keeps them apart: the date the words were spoken on the broadcast, and the date this site wrote them down. When an article is changed afterwards, the date of the change is printed as well and the piece appears on the latest sheet.
A term you do not recognise is explained where it appears, and every term this site explains is collected on one page of jargon.
Who publishes this
The first field is unresolved and is rendered exactly as it is stored, rather than filled in with something plausible: the legal entity behind the site has not been decided, and a fictitious company name in a liability clause would be worse than an obvious gap. It is recorded asbrand.editorialName in site.config.ts. The address is decided and is on this site's own domain, but the mailbox has still to be created, so nothing here should be read as promising a reply yet.
If something on this site is wrong, that address is where a correction should go. Corrections to a machine-produced edition have their own address, printed in the edition block at the foot of every page and in the section below. Corrections are published with a date, in the same place as everything else.
كيف أنتجت هذه الطبعة
الصفحة التي تقرأها أنتجتها آلة. تُرجمت المقالة عن المقالة الإنجليزية الجاهزة، وتُرجمت الواجهة من حولها عن الواجهة الإنجليزية، ولم يقرأ أيًّا منهما قبل النشر أي شخص يتحدث هذه اللغة. ويترتب على ذلك أمران. قد يوجد هنا خطأ لا وجود له في الطبعة الإنجليزية، والطبعة الإنجليزية هي المرجع: فحين تختلف الطبعتان، الإنجليزية هي التي يقف خلفها هذا الموقع.
أي خطأ في أي طبعة يرسل إلى corrections@plainwar.com، مع ذكر اللغة التي كنت تقرأ بها.