From Saxe to Silicon: What Four Dead Frenchmen Can Teach the Pentagon: DeMarco Banter

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 …

The Lost Generation Then and Now: Disillusionment, Culture, and the Search for Meaning in America: DeMarco Banter

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 …

Checkers in a Go Tournament: Notes Toward a Theory of 21st Century War: DeMarco Banter

I've been reading Robinson's The Blind Strategist (a book I disagree with more than I agree with), and one line in it sent me down a rabbit hole that has nothing to do with Boyd and everything to do with a feeling I can't quite shake. Something has changed in the nature of war over the last …