Ukraine is a continuous military learning cycle: Observe the battlefield. Identify a problem. Develop an adaptation. Employ it. Observe the enemy response. Adapt again. Technology accelerates the cycle. Organizations determine whether battlefield learning becomes combat power. 📖Read "The Ukraine Laboratory: How a Full-Spectrum War Is Rewriting Modern Warfighting," a #SWJEssay 👤By Dr. Tahir Azad

JUST IN: There’s reports circulating that one or two women are currently in BUD/S at Coronado, training alongside the usual classes of male candidates for a shot at the SEAL Trident. There are also reports of Admirals observing training early in Class 379, and they may be pushing for the women to move past 1st Phase. Since combat roles opened to women in 2016, a small number of female candidates have entered the pipeline or related screening, but none have ever completed BUD/S plus SEAL Qualification Training and earned the Trident. Every known attempt has ended in voluntary withdrawal, medical issues, or performance based attrition under the same uncompromising standards applied to everyone. BUD/S remains one of the highest attrition courses in the military, with typically 70%+ of all starters gone before graduation. So if the reports are accurate, these candidates are facing the identical physical and mental demands that have stopped every woman who has tried so far, with no public confirmation yet from Naval Special Warfare.

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The most consequential scarcity in future military operations will be human cognitive capacity. * near future

A Modest Proposal for Project Agincourt – Non-Resetting Opposition Force Key phrase: unbroken evolutionary pressure Battlefield adaptation in autonomous systems, electronic warfare, and low-cost munitions now occurs in weeks. The American military is adapting aggressively, but its training, acquisition, and force-development systems still operate through distinct cycles. Combat training centers expose units to demanding opposition, experimentation organizations develop and evaluate new technologies, and acquisition programs move successful designs toward operational use. Each performs an essential function. Project Agincourt creates an opportunity to bring those functions into a continuous contest in which the adversary never stops evolving. Preparedness and readiness are related but different conditions. Preparedness describes a force manned, equipped, and trained against established requirements. Readiness must also include the ability to generate effective capability when those requirements no longer describe the threat. The National Training Center and Joint Readiness Training Center have become increasingly sophisticated in their use of autonomous systems, electronic warfare, and adaptive opposing forces. Their rotational structure, however, necessarily returns the training environment to prepared conditions. The opposition retains institutional knowledge, but its accumulated technical and tactical adaptations do not necessarily confront the next unit. The exercise ends, the scenario is restored, and the next formation enters a problem whose boundaries have been established in advance. The September 30, 2026, Project Agincourt memorandum directs the creation of a pathway to an Autonomous Warfare Command and calls for equipment and force designs to be tested "with realistic opposition in demanding exercises and rugged environments, modify rapidly, and field what works." Its larger ambition is a repeatable acquisition system whose principal output is the ability to adapt in combat rather than any particular unmanned platform. Meeting that requirement demands more than shortening procurement timelines or increasing the frequency of exercises. It requires unbroken evolutionary pressure, sustained competition in which each adaptation changes the conditions confronting the next force, and the process of developing and fielding effective counters becomes inseparable from operations. A permanent, non-resetting opposition force would provide that pressure. Its defining characteristic would be the retention of operational and technical state between engagements. Equipment modifications, software updates, electronic-warfare configurations, tactics, and the results of previous encounters would remain in effect when the next unit arrived. An effective counter developed by one formation would force the opposition to change; the succeeding formation would confront that change rather than a restored version of the original threat. Over successive engagements, the adversary would become the accumulated product of the units that had fought it. The competition would continue across training audiences, with each unit entering a fight already in progress. Located on the edge of a large military reservation with access to suitable ground, air, and even relevant maritime operating areas, the opposition force would combine a standing combat organization with engineers, software developers, and technical specialists capable of rapidly modifying and re-fielding systems. Its two standing tasks would be to: 1) develop an increasingly capable adversary and 2) oppose operational units moving through their pre-deployment preparation. A unit might defeat an unmanned reconnaissance system through electronic attack, only to find that subsequent versions employ altered navigation logic, communications behavior, or tactics. The opposition would face the same obligation to respond to successful counters. Neither side could assume that a solution effective in one engagement would remain effective in the next. This structure would create two important conditions for adaptation. First, it would continually expand the range of responses both sides must develop as successful tactics and technologies lose their advantage. Second, it would compress the interval between recognizing a problem and fielding a response, because modifications would occur within the continuing contest rather than await the design of another exercise. Engineers and operators would work together against immediate operational demands, testing changes through employment and refining them in response to observed performance. Evaluation would shift toward the speed and effectiveness of adaptation under opposition. The resulting record of successes, failures, and subsequent modifications would support decisions about which systems and methods deserve wider adoption. The opposition force should also develop future commanders. Leadership assignments should be filled by officers preparing for subsequent operational command, giving them sustained responsibility for building an adversary that learns, searches for vulnerabilities, and changes its methods as the competition develops. They would gain experience thinking through an enemy's decisions rather than merely responding to a prescribed threat. That experience would return to the warfighting force when those officers assumed their next commands. The arrangement would also preserve the proper institutional relationship. The opposition needs freedom to develop an uncompromising adversary, but it exists to serve the warfighting commands by producing better prepared units, more capable systems, and leaders who understand how an enemy thinks and evolves. For that competition to produce capability beyond the training area, the organization would require authorities that permit rapid modification and re-fielding, access to representative contested-spectrum conditions, and a direct path for successful adaptations to reach operational units. Project Agincourt anticipates much of this requirement by directing operators, innovators, and manufacturers to work together while pushing decisions and resources toward operational forces. The opposition force would give that arrangement a persistent operational setting. Its measures of effectiveness should include the time between identifying a vulnerability and fielding a counter, the performance of that counter against subsequent adaptations, and the rate at which useful results enter Service formations. An evolutionary process confined to the reservation would be an incomplete success; the capabilities it produces must reach the forces responsible for fighting. The concept would require substantial technical support, dedicated resources, and carefully established authorities governing safety, spectrum use, classification, and experimentation. They are matters of organizational design rather than reasons to interrupt the evolutionary process. Nor would a permanent opposition force replace existing combat training centers or their responsibility to evaluate units against established operational requirements. It would add a different function to the enterprise: a persistent adversarial environment in which training, experimentation, acquisition, and operational adaptation become parts of the same process. Units would still demonstrate proficiency in known tasks, but they would also confront the need to develop new capabilities when familiar methods no longer worked. Project Agincourt offers the organizational opportunity to make this form of competition permanent. The Autonomous Warfare Command would have a standing environment in which systems and force designs could be tested, modified, and returned to the fight under conditions shaped by earlier engagements. The warfighting commands would receive not only the resulting technologies and tactics but also officers who had spent time directing an adaptive adversary. The enterprise would gain a mechanism for making continuous adaptation part of force generation rather than an activity conducted between periods of operational employment. Unbroken evolutionary pressure is the mechanism that keeps a force adapting when the battlefield changes in weeks. A permanent opposition force that never resets is the organizational form that sustains it. Together, they would turn Project Agincourt's mandate to modify rapidly and field what works into a continuous operational practice, making the capacity to generate new capability under opposition a defining measure of military readiness.