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I have been an unapologetic Star Wars fan since 1977. My St Charles grammar school friends will confirm this, probably with more detail than I would prefer. What started as a kid mesmerized by an opening crawl has, over the decades, become something more useful: a recognition that science fiction is often where strategists rehearse …
Continue reading "The Cloaked Asteroid and the Strait: Strategic Paralysis as a Theory of Victory"
Empires do not fall because they expect to. They fall because they misread the direction they are moving until the range of available choices narrows beyond recovery. This is not a story of sudden collapse. It is a story of gradual imbalance—of systems that once integrated power effectively beginning to rely too heavily on a …
One of the things I enjoy is putting on a song, really listening to it, and then taking it apart — turning it over, getting into what the artist was after, what's hiding underneath the melody, what it means beyond what it says. Sometimes a song rewards that kind of attention in ways that surprise …
Recent public statements about targeting national infrastructure—power grids, bridges, and even water systems—have revived an old and uncomfortable question: when does war against an adversary’s capacity become war against the society itself? The distinction is not academic. It sits at the center of how modern conflict is constrained, justified, and ultimately judged.¹ States have always …
I. The Foundational Split: Two Incompatible Visions of War The most important thing to understand about Clausewitz and Sun Tzu is that they are not simply different tacticians — they inhabit fundamentally different universes of what war is. Clausewitz Clausewitz defines war as an act of violence intended to compel the opponent to fulfill one's will.1 His framework …
On the American inability to distinguish the imminent from the existential An old bit of frontier wisdom says to prioritize the alligator nearest the boat. That advice works when the alligators are of roughly equal size. It fails catastrophically when the small alligator in front of the boat is a distraction from the much larger …
Continue reading "The Nearest Alligator Is Not the Biggest: DeMarco Banter"
Drafted 4 May 2025 Shadow Strategy: The Enduring Challenge of Gray War: Implications for Air and Space Power Thankful for National Defense University's Prism Journal for publishing this article. Here is the original piece prior to edits The contemporary global security environment is increasingly characterized by competition and conflict that falls short of traditional armed …
The Strategic Paradigm of Modern Systemic Warfare (Piece written on 5 April, prior to the 7 April "cease fire" will be interesting to see how this shapes up.) The initiation of Operation Epic Fury at 1:15 a.m. ET on February 28, 2026, marked a definitive shift in the application of Western airpower and economic statecraft …
There are moments when a technology does not simply add capability—it rewrites the logic of competition. The airplane did that. Radar did that. Precision guidance did that. Autonomy is doing it now. The character of conflict is being reshaped by three converging forces: mass, miniaturization, and minds. Mass in the form of affordable, attritable, and disposable systems. Miniaturization …
There is a tendency, particularly within military and strategic communities, to locate failure externally. We point to adversaries, to resource constraints, to political incoherence, or to the friction inherent in complex systems. These are all real. But they are not sufficient. The more dangerous failure—the one that precedes operational collapse—is internal. It is cognitive, psychological, …
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