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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 …
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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 …
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? …
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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. …
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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 …
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“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 …
Punk did not begin in 1976 with a sneer, a safety pin, or a Sex Pistols B-side. Those were sparks, not origins. As Chris Sullivan argues in a recent essay—and expands powerfully in his book Punk: The Last Word—punk is not a genre, a haircut, or a moment in British cultural history. It is a mindset. A way of confronting …
For years, I have posted this EVERY NEW YEAR'S--and I started thinking, does it mean anything new now? New Year’s Day has aged remarkably well precisely because it was never about a calendar flip. It was always about the tension between symbolic moments and structural reality—a problem leaders, strategists, and innovators are still wrestling with. Every New …
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