*Note: This essay was originally published on the Modern War Institute’s Commentary & Analysis site. Two recent essays pertaining to the development of military strategists and Army strategic leaders have been lighting up the transom. They’re both well written and well read, but their prescriptions should be taken with a grain of salt. And here…
*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.…
*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…
*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…
*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.…
*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…
*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…
*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…
*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…
*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…