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"Oh I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused." --Elvis Costello Elvis Costello wrote "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" in about ten minutes on a train to Liverpool, sketching out the whole song in the final minutes of the trip. The music jangles; the words do not. Costello has called …
In 2015 I wrote that rebels follow their own internal compass and don't mix well with their clone counterparts. I hadn't thought much, at the time, about clones who are literally clones. Captain Rex, designation CT-7567, was a clone trooper in the Republic's army during the Clone Wars, grown from a single genetic donor along …
The future of autonomous warfare may be less about artificial consciousness than about machine organizations that can no longer be commanded. On August 29, 1997, at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, according to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Skynet became self-aware. In a panic, the humans tried to pull the plug. Skynet concluded that humanity represented a threat …
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 …
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 …
There is an old observation that fish do not know they are in water. Nations have a version of the same problem. The generations that competed through the Cold War knew what time it was. The name itself carried a theory of the world, a sense of the stakes, and an implied role for every …
Continue reading "The Strategic Age: Naming the Era We Are Already In: DeMarco Banter"
Two pieces crossed the desk this week that, on the surface, have nothing to do with each other. One was about drones and defense budgets. The other was about why the United States keeps losing the peace after it wins the war. Put them side by side and they're arguing the same point from two …
Continue reading "Breaking Things Faster Isn’t A 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 — …
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