*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. Mark my words, it won’t be long until an American soldier is taken hostage on a battlefield. There are a lot of places this might happen, but let’s see how it might play out with one major threat: North Korea.…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. “If another Korean War comes,” he said, “when society collapses in the north, it’ll look like Iraq – members of the regime going to ground, starting an insurgency, setting IEDs.” This week I listened to a senior officer game out…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. Strategy is a “bridge,” so sayeth Colin Gray, “because no other idea so well conveys the core function of strategy” which “connects two distinctive entities or phenomena that otherwise would be divided.” Gray then lays a gauntlet, that this metaphor…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. New Zealand is a small country of giants. My wife and I grew to love “the land of the long white cloud” while living in Wellington for two years, having been sent there for graduate school by the U.S. Army.…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. Why don’t military officers write? I recently suggested that more professional wordsmithing would be a positive development, and found myself derided in response by another officer who dismissed the opinion as “publicationism.” But as professionals holding an arsenal of ideas…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. You’ve seen him before. He’s so common you might not even notice the guy: Always humbly bragging about how full his Inbox is. Always subtly focusing on a Calendar invite. Always meticulously cultivating the next Spreadsheet. The Army supply system…
Details*Note: This essay was published at War on the Rocks on February 11, 2016. It can also be found online here. Something is revealing in Denmark; Hamlet would be proud. In this case, it is the third film from writer/director Tobias Lindholm (English title: A War, Danish: Krigen — Danish with English subtitles). This Academy Award-nominated Best…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. “Killing for Peace is like F**king for Chastity.” I came across this Vietnam War-era anti-war slogan while reading recently. Aside from its obvious shock value, which is considerable (I mean, wow), I wondered about the slogan’s truth. To address this…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. The After Action Review (AAR) is as common in the military as camouflage and crew cuts. The US Army’s FM 6-0 (Ch. 16) defines the AAR as a “guided analysis of an organization’s performance” to be conducted “during and at…
Details*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. Smartphones: the strategist’s most insidious insider threat. Strategists are knowledge workers; attention is their scarce, sparse, spendable resource. Smartphones, and other mobile, ever-present, internet-linked devices, hijack human attention at the speed of “click.” These performance-degrading, digital dealers of info-dopamine consume…
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