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A distorted mirror, an Axios article, and the battle for orientation I read an Axios article the other morning that stuck with me longer than I expected. Not because it was particularly dramatic, but because it triggered a simple question: if what the article suggests is true, do people actually realize what they are looking at? …
Continue reading "What Cognitive Warfare Actually Looks Like: DeMarco Banter"
Modern strategy is increasingly about thresholds rather than targets. In Chinese video-game culture, the kill line refers to a simple mechanic: the point at which a character’s remaining health is so low that any additional hit—no matter how small—results in elimination. Above the line, mistakes are survivable. Below it, they are terminal. Recovery is no longer possible. …
Continue reading "The Kill Line: Strategy in an Age of Thresholds: DeMarco Banter"
Great powers do not run one war at a time. They run a portfolio of risk. The binding constraints are not courage or rhetoric; they are magazine depth, industrial replenishment speed, alliance cohesion, and senior-leader attention. A U.S. campaign against Iran therefore cannot be evaluated in isolation. It must be assessed against the broader risk …
Leadership requires confidence. It does not require believing we are magnificent. In fact, I’d be worried about any leader who genuinely thought they were. There’s a line in the song Holocene by Bon Iver that captures a truth most leaders eventually confront: “I was not magnificent.” That line isn’t self-criticism. It’s scale awareness. There are moments in leadership when …
Continue reading "When You Are Not Magnificent, Do Not Perform Magnificence: DeMarco Banter"
On Dec. 29, 2025, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense reported one of the most intense single-day episodes of Chinese military activity in recent years. Over 100 Chinese aircraft were detected operating around the island, not merely signaling but actively compressing Taiwan’s defensive space. Of these, 90 aircraft crossed the median line, effectively erasing a boundary that had …
I listen to a lot of Bob Dylan--I totally understand, it's old, but it's enduring. There is a through-line that runs through several songs from All Along the Watchtower through No Time to Think, Political World, and Everything Is Broken, and arrives—quietly, defensively, and almost against its own will—at Most of the Time. Or maybe it's the whiskey.... It is really …
Elizabeth Economy’s warning in How China Wins the Future is not fundamentally about military inferiority. It is about strategic displacement—the slow erosion of American influence in the arenas where the rules of future power are being written. When she argues that the United States must “rebuild its capabilities and reclaim its reputation as a responsible global leader,” she …
Thanks to West Point for picking up this piece: READ MORE HERE For the better part of a century, the grand strategy of the United States has been predicated on a deeply entrenched, almost subconscious mental model: the belief that political order is the natural, baseline condition of human societies, and that chaos is an …
“Fighting the good fight is mostly a series of humiliations.” — Unknown congresswoman, Fallout, Season 2 I don’t know how many are watching Amazon Prime’s Fallout—call it a guilty pleasure—but one throwaway moment lands harder than most prestige television monologues. As an unnamed congresswoman is physically ejected from a New Vegas casino, stripped of status and relevance in …
In a hardened shelter at a forward operating location in the Indo-Pacific, a B-21 Raider crew runs through final pre-flight checks. The mission is straightforward by contemporary standards: penetrate contested airspace and neutralize a critical node in an adversary’s anti-access network. The aircraft—stealthy, networked, and exquisitely lethal—represents the apex of American airpower. The mission is …
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