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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, …
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 …
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