West Point cadets departing for a two month-long trip to study European Great War battlefields in the summer of 1919. Note: We’re revisiting some of our most popular material from the past 10 months for our newer readers; this was originally posted June 4, 2014. Enjoy! My last essay – on a representative list of…
Image courtesy of Flikr user United States Marine Corps. Note: We’re revisiting some of our most popular material from the past 10 months for our newer readers; this was originally posted May 30, 2014. Enjoy! At West Point, we often address cadets as “scholar warriors” or “warrior scholars.” This phrasing suggests that our objective is…
Image of massive tunnel bomb exploding at Syrian army base; courtesy of Reuters (Credit: Khalil Ashawi). Note: We’re revisiting some of our most popular material from the past 10 months for our newer readers; this was originally posted May 21, 2014. Enjoy! The other day I had a valuable email back-and-forth with a professional acquaintance on…
Image of Camp Funston, Kansas (USA), US Army base, 1918 provided courtesy of Wikipedia. There are three conclusions for the military profession to be drawn from the present Ebola outbreak: the threat is enormous, but ultimately manageable; the desired ends are currently vastly under resourced; and the profession’s lack of intellectual focus on the…
Image courtesy of Flikr user UK Ministry of Defence. Note: Last week (on October 7, 2014) I had the privilege of speaking at the West Point Philosophy Forum on the subject of “Killer Machines” (aka drones). A representative version of my remarks follows: First, you will note that I use the term “drones” instead…
Image courtesy of Flikr user US Army. It’s been a bit of a crazy past few days here; my wife and I just had our second daughter on Friday evening. So this will be a bit of a short post – but brief concepts can also be valuable ones (isn’t brevity the soul of wit?).…
Image courtesy of the New York Times. In his famous 1998 set of BBC Radio Reith lectures, military historian Sir John Keegan described war as a “protean activity” that “changes form, often unpredictably” like a “disease” that “exhibits the capacity to mutate and mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it.”…
Image courtesy of Wikipedia. This past week, while reading and thinking about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), two figures jumped out at me. The first comes from an interview with the head of (Iraqi) Kurdish intelligence, who said he believes that ISIS “generates something equivalent to $6 million a day by…
Image courtesy of Wikipedia. On a research trip to London this past spring, while in the British Museum I came across a pretty neat story about the Rosetta Stone and its important connection with landpower. I was dawdling in the bookshop, picking up random books that I never would have considered had I been any…
French soldier, circa 1915. Rare color photograph from World War I. Image courtesy of Time magazine. Instead of writing about the “white flag” of surrender – feats of heroism make for a more enjoyable and standard military affairs subject. That way we avoid the necessary slog through cowardice; who wants to read about people running away?