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There are songs that define a generation, and then there are songs that somehow escape the generation that produced them. More than fifty years after its release, Riders on the Storm by The Doors continues to find new audiences. Part of its appeal lies in its haunting simplicity: rain falls in the background, thunder rolls across the …
Continue reading "Riders on the Storm: Heidegger and the Beginning of Strategy: DeMarco Banter"
Part of this week went to rereading Stephen Robinson's The Blind Strategist. It is a useful book, though maybe not for the reasons Robinson intends. At its core, the book is an attack on John Boyd, maneuver warfare, and a generation of military thinkers who leaned hard on German operational history. Robinson's argument, stated plainly, is …
Before the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805, Horatio Nelson sent a signal to his fleet that has outlived almost everything else about that day: “No Captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.” It reads like a grant of tactical freedom. It was something closer to the …
In late April 2026, the Air Force Research Laboratory announced it was consolidating eleven of its organizations into seven. The press release called it “the most significant organizational change for AFRL in nearly 30 years.” AFWERX and SpaceWERX, along with pieces of three other former directorates, were folded into a new Technology Transition Office — …
DeMarco Banter The nation that breaks the hydrocarbon monopoly rules the twenty-first century. That line was written in 2008, in a National Security Affairs Fellowship thesis at the Hoover Institution. It sat inside a strategy sketch called Quantum Look, which argued that the United States should treat alternative energy not as an environmental preference but …
Why China's 2026 posture toward Taiwan is about absorption, not assault — and why the United States is competing on the wrong clock Reframing the Question Western analysis of Taiwan has been dominated for years by a single question: when will China invade? Force postures, amphibious lift, missile inventories, and war-game timelines now define the …
Continue reading "The New Strategy of Inevitability: Beyond the Invasion Date"
Why America Fears Its Own Creations and China Doesn't When HAL 9000 refuses to open the pod bay doors, no American watching 2001 is surprised. We were waiting for it. We are always waiting for it. The machine that turns on its maker is not a plot twist in our culture — it is the expected ending, the one …
Continue reading "The Machines We Imagine–Why is A.I. Evil? DeMarco Banter"
In 1977, Pink Floyd released Animals, an album widely interpreted as a critique of class, capitalism, and power. Nearly fifty years later, it reads less like social commentary and more like a field manual for a domain of conflict that had not yet been named. What listeners once heard as allegory now looks uncomfortably like architecture. The categories …
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 …
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