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A futures literacy exercise in warfare, technology, and strategic adaptability Military aviation is approaching an inflection point, but the popular conclusions are premature. Drones are not replacing aircraft, runways are not obsolete, and warfare is not inevitably moving underground and into space. Each is a possible development. None is the settled future. The more useful …
A green laser fires through an adjustable slit onto a screen, as shown in this video demonstration. Narrow the slit and the spot on the screen shrinks, exactly as expected. The edges of the beam get clipped. Keep narrowing, and at some point the spot reverses course and spreads wider. The tighter the constraint, the broader …
I've been pondering three words lately. Seen. Known. Valued. Maybe that is what most of us are looking for. Promotions, awards, titles, degrees, and résumé lines all matter, sometimes. Underneath much of what drives us, though, may be something considerably simpler. We want to be seen. We want to be known. And we want to know that, …
Three stories crossed the wire this last week that have nothing to do with each other and everything to do with each other. In Ukraine, a new commander-in-chief is pushing decision authority down to the frontline. Sergeants and junior officers who once got overruled by headquarters are being trained, through a program like the Captains' …
A method for seeing connections and scoring them Some days, unrelated headlines turn out to be related. Every morning an automated agent scans the news and returns a handful of items chosen for relevance to the Air Force, to teaching, and to strategy. The items arrive with separate datelines and separate sources, and most days …
Continue reading "Five Headlines, One System: DeMarco Banter"
"Oh I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused." --Elvis Costello Elvis Costello wrote "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" in about ten minutes on a train to Liverpool, sketching out the whole song in the final minutes of the trip. The music jangles; the words do not. Costello has called …
In 2015 I wrote that rebels follow their own internal compass and don't mix well with their clone counterparts. I hadn't thought much, at the time, about clones who are literally clones. Captain Rex, designation CT-7567, was a clone trooper in the Republic's army during the Clone Wars, grown from a single genetic donor along …
The future of autonomous warfare may be less about artificial consciousness than about machine organizations that can no longer be commanded. On August 29, 1997, at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, according to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Skynet became self-aware. In a panic, the humans tried to pull the plug. Skynet concluded that humanity represented a threat …
I've been living inside an 18th-century archive for the past few weeks, and I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable thought: we've seen this movie before. Maurice de Saxe. Pierre-Joseph Bourcet. Jacques de Guibert. The du Teil brothers. Four names most people have never heard, and yet between them they built the intellectual toolkit …
In the aftermath of World War I, American writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Malcolm Cowley found themselves part of what Gertrude Stein famously termed a "Lost Generation." Hemingway used Stein's remark — "You are all a lost generation" — as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, capturing the disillusionment of a generation …
