Technology and Warfare, Strategist, Army Veteran. Opinions (and bad jokes) my own.
Washington, DC
Joined July 2021
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Long, long overdue.
The Pentagon ordered 30 universities to review their ties with foreign institutions or risk losing their federal funding. militarytimes.com/news/penta…
I still maintain that a mini-series or an epic-length film (a la A Bridge Too Far) about the opening campaign of WWI on the Western Front would be awesome.
Imagine if Don Draper had stayed in the Army after Korea...dude would have killed it with access to Cold War budgets and all those new buzzwords.
🤖 Made with AI
The same people who are mightily upset about Haines Point have virtually nothing to say about the vagrancy, truancy, and other lawlessness that makes other parts of DC ugly and dangerous. Voting for the latter while only really caring about the former because you think DC needs unlimited bicycling options just shows you're a fundamentally unserious person.
This is precisely why some of us have been ringing alarm bells over the past year despite all the rhetoric and marketing that has gone on.
We continue to be pretty sluggish while also neglecting basics and "easy" items because they aren't as exciting or likely to garner media and industry accolades.
I specifically brought up fiber-optic FPVs with a very senior Army official last year, and he flat out told me no adversary is ever going to effectively challenge us in the electromagnetic domain so our stuff just won't have to worry about jamming. Setting aside the fact he completely ignored the adversarial capabilities here, and instead focused on us not needing them, the attitude that we're the only "innovators", and that innovation has to be exquisite in nature, is pervasive.
China is learning from Ukraine without bleeding. We should be alarmed at how fast.
CSIS tracked it. PLA analysts are writing about new battlefield techniques within about 4 months. Fiber-optic FPVs went from Russia's front line to Chinese unit training in about a year. After Spider's Web, a PLA brigade was training against a drone infiltration within 4.5 months.
Russia now strikes a detected target in 3 to 5 minutes.
One PLA trial participant put it plainly: "The errors we make in trials are detours the troops will not have to take."
That's our pacing threat, adapting right now. Great power competition isn't coming. It's here.
Now be honest about us. How long does a hard lesson from a CTC rotation take to work its way through doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities? Years. We don't have years. We don't have the luxury of traditional DOTMLPF timelines.
CSIS also names the PLA's weakness: a military built on centralized approval cannot create decentralized improvisation by command.
That's our edge, if we use it. True mission command. Strike authority pushed down with clear intent and predetermined high-payoff target lists. Junior leaders trusted to adapt before the next approval comes back.
An edge only exists if it's trained. That takes an OPFOR that fights like the PLA and the Russians, learns as fast as they do, and makes Blue pay for every slow decision.
My proposal: using the Agincourt requirements for a realistic OPFOR as the incubator. Make it joint and honest, a place where new tech and tactics get proven against a thinking enemy in months, not program cycles.
The question isn't whether we can see the lessons. China sees them in 4 months.
The question is this: can we think and adapt faster to win, or will we keep reacting to others?
@SecArmy @DeptofWar #USArmy
Seems like cutting our watercraft fleet in half less than a decade ago was a bad idea...
Army Lays Out New Plan for Prolonged Fight in First Island Chain — USNI News
news.usni.org/2026/10/16/arm…
$114 million...
IO is hard, risky, and it's not necessarily something you can do a think tank junket on or quickly convert into a board seat at a defense prime. SES and GOs want to get quick wins and be able to market themselves, so that's where they place their priorities.
It seems the PSYOP “Ghost Army” logo, and the PSYOP brand, have become one of the most recognizable brands in the world in recent years. You hear mention of PSYOP in many conversations through the day. Most everyone believes they are part of a PSYOP, or that a PSYOP is being done to them. Everybody universally agrees that influence and the powers of persuasion are being used on them on a daily basis. You see PSYOP PFPs all across social media. Clearly, people are aware of the power of influence…
Which is why I find it so strange that our military continues to degrade the PSYOP Branch and our National capabilities, at the very time that our people, both government and civilian, almost unanimously believe we must do more to combat adversarial international influence conducted against our nation.
@TheIOGuy
It isn't just fiction either, even history has ceded a ton of territory to woke, Marxist criticism and revisionism more interested in plastering over history with current political sensitivities. I have struggled at times to find good analysis on topics that doesn't include either a current Leftist slant or an attempt to shoe-horn gender and race theory into a topic.
There was an entire culture of “literary men” as recently as the 2010s. Like there was a genre of hipster white guy who wouldn’t stop talking about David Foster Wallace. For some reason, the publishing industry got incredibly hostile to white guys and now literary culture doesn’t exist anymore. They thought they could take it away and have it for themselves, but all they could do was ruin it.
They give Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards almost exclusively to books about race by black authors now, and nobody reads the books or pays any attention to the awards. Literature is dead and the big publishers are supported almost entirely by romance slop for white wine moms.
"Her parents illegally brought her across the U.S. border from Mexico when she was 6 years old. Now 35, she and Gutierrez have been together since they were 17 and have carefully kept her immigration status a secret."
NEW: ICE is trying to deport a mother of 4 while her husband is at Fort Benning in Army basic training. When she went to pick up the family's military IDs, Navy personnel turned her over to ICE. She's been in the US since age six. Story with @nancyayoussef theatlantic.com/politics/202…
It's incredible they chose to name this the Cheyenne II when it is starting to look increasingly like it will suffer the same fate as the first Cheyenne. This is a classic case of trying to do too much with one platform while also working backwards from relevance to the Indo-Pacific instead of the real-world scenarios it is likely to have to function within.
The Army's MV-75 Cheyenne II is expected to bring increased capability through its speed, range and modular open systems approach. armytimes.com/industry/techw…
Hopefully part of that will be invested in hardening the facility against drones.
Lockheed is investing $300 million to expand its Grand Prairie, Texas, plant, which supports all programs within its Missiles and Fire Control business. militarytimes.com/industry/t…
The alternative headline here, and the one we'd get if we had honest journalists, is that the CSA admitted that a) the Army's rhetoric about being able to fight a two-front war, and even the subsequent one-plus framework, has been a bluff for quite some time and therefore b) the CSA is tacitly admitting the Army has been very badly managing its priorities and budget for missiles for decades while blowing money on things like light tanks and tilt rotors.
New from @CBSNews - In Dec. 2025, two months before the U.S. war with Iran began, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George wrote an assessment into the DoD's Global Force Management Allocation Plan that they would be critically short on missile defense munitions until 2030. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ousted George in April, as the Iran war was underway. cbsnews.com/news/randy-georg…
I'm concerned that these lukewarm defenses of the status quo are going to continue to not only threaten but quietly undermine the real reforms we need. It begins from a broad assumption that we're currently doing a fine job selecting leaders and proceeds from there. A GO's ability to manage bureaucracy and "broaden their understanding of the Army-as-institution" should not be weighted as heavily as their competence as a warfighter. Whether intentional or not, this essay is mostly a defense of the status quo, risk-averse, patronage network approach to generalship.
Oh, and the guy who wrote this butchers the etymology of "General." Captains General were broad in their authority in terms of span of control, not in terms of their skill sets.
"General officers are supposed to be generalists.... Sure, they command large formations in warfighting, but they also run institutions, develop capabilities, work with allies and partners, and advise civilian policymakers across the interagency." mwi.westpoint.edu/how-do-you…
I think the clash between how Soldiering traditionally worked and our obsession with layering modern corporate bureaucracy over it is probably a root cause of many of our current problems.
“Chow halls operated on decades-old schedules that clashed with modern soldier work shifts,” one U.S. Army official said. armytimes.com/news/your-mili…
Periodic reminder to challenge anyone you hear making smartass remarks about the testosterone testing.
One-time testosterone testing of troops found that 100,691 active-duty soldiers had morning screening levels below the medical threshold. armytimes.com/news/your-mili…
