In 1901, a military analyst declared history useless for soldiers, then used Civil War lessons to make his sharpest predictions and his worst ones. His case against the past offers a warning for today's push to trade strategy and history for technical training on AI and drones.
— via War on the Rocks, Michael P. Ferguson
AI already drives target selection in real combat, the author argues, and the debate over human oversight is aimed at the wrong moment. The real risk isn't the final strike decision: it's the algorithmic mediation happening earlier in the targeting cycle, before commanders ever see a recommendation.
— via Small Wars Journal, Jesse R. Crifasi
Pete Hegseth is reportedly planning a repeat of last year's mass gathering of military brass, an event that doubles as an unscripted test of whether the armed forces can stay nonpartisan under Trump. The real story won't be what Hegseth says. It'll be whether generals and admirals cheer, boo, or sit silent.
— via War on the Rocks, Peter Feaver
Choking off an adversary's supply lines before a shot is fired, not after: a doctrine called preemptive supply denial reframes sanctions as prevention rather than punishment. It leans on intelligence agencies, export controls and allied cooperation, and its backers say the 2025 National Security Strategy already points this way.
— via Small Wars Journal, Stephen P. Ferris
The Inflation Reduction Act poured over $1 trillion into energy but less than 0.3 percent into the grid, and Princeton researchers found that gap could erase more than 80 percent of its promised emissions cuts by 2030. The fix isn't just more money, it's paying landowners above market rates for rights-of-way to actually get lines built.
— via Atlantic Council, Joseph Webster
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has finally put a name to America's economic statecraft strategy, five principles built on Hamiltonian self-reliance. The catch: those principles contradict each other, and nobody's written the playbook for making them work.
— via War on the Rocks, Tim Welter
Militaries chasing drone swarms with jammers and interceptors are hitting a wall these countermeasures can't fix: every drone still runs on metal circuitry vulnerable to microwave pulses. High Powered Microwave weapons exploit that with a beam that barely runs out and hardening tricks like Faraday cages can't fully stop.
— via Small Wars Journal, Tin Pak
Military law tells officers exactly when to refuse an unlawful order. It has no rule for a lawful one that quietly wears away the Constitution, which is why one framework proposes a middle path: write it down, flag it to an inspector general, and let the order stand.
— via War on the Rocks, Kurt Shulkitas
Cost estimates for Golden Dome swing from $252 billion to $3.6 trillion, and the Pentagon's own architecture is too secret for the CBO to price. The last time the military bet everything on a tightly coupled system like this, the Army burned $18 billion in six years without fielding one vehicle.
— via War on the Rocks, Andrew Tenbusch
Cartels have quietly built their own drone defenses: improvised "cope cages" on trucks, Chinese-made RF drone guns, and backpack jammers that jam signals mid-battle. The shift began in early 2023 after years of one-sided cartel drone bombings, and almost no one's been tracking it until now.
— via Small Wars Journal, Robert Bunker
A sci-fi one-liner from Liu Cixin becomes a lens on PLA doctrine: political commissars aren't just party watchdogs, they're the military's chaplain-equivalent, built to keep soldiers willing to fight. The paper's payoff for planners: crack the PLA's faith in its chain of command and the CCP, and its will to fight goes with it.
— via Small Wars Journal, Reed Bauer
Crimea fell in four weeks because unmarked soldiers and a simple denial were enough to freeze Western decision-making. Generative AI could make that trick far more powerful, and the piece argues democracies need new doctrine and rapid authentication tools before the next ambiguous land grab starts.
— via Small Wars Journal, Jared Martin
A former Air Force cryptologic linguist writing as Aurelius Vale builds a three-tier framework, Bronze, Silver, Gold, for how humans and institutions can keep genuine judgment intact as AI expands. His pitch: no algorithm can substitute for human qualia, and the book is deliberately structured so readers can enter through whichever doorway fits their own experience.
— via Small Wars Journal, Catherine Marie Abbott
The Pentagon is dropping "Havana Syndrome" for a new label: "directed energy biological effects." Dr. James Giordano argues the rename signals the military now treats such attacks as real, deployable weapons, not mystery ailments, and he's pushing for a joint center to build sensors, shielding and standardized care.
— via Small Wars Journal, SWJ Staff
Arizona landed $314 billion in semiconductor deals and the world's only Apache helicopter production line, yet 10.4 percent of Maricopa County residents live in poverty. Eighty focus-group participants explain why global trade feels like a local kitchen-table problem.
— via CFR (Council on Foreign Relations)
Sloviansk and Kramatorsk aren't just towns on a map: their fortifications, built up over years, could hand an adversary a battlefield edge no offensive could match. The piece traces that logic through Gettysburg, Normandy, and Iwo Jima to argue why this ground still decides who controls the war, and who gets citizenship if it falls.
— via Small Wars Journal, SWJ Staff
Officers handed modeling clay to sculpt a lesson balked at the exercise, exposing a discomfort with ambiguity that a growing chorus of Army leaders says is throttling real innovation. The problem isn't a shortage of ideas but a bottleneck in testing, sharing and scaling them fast enough to matter.
— via Small Wars Journal, Howard C. Romans III
An emergency manager summarizing hurricane filings and a kid generating cartoon fistfights get the same spot in line for AI compute. The fix, borrowed from wartime supply law: a "strategic token reserve" that lets critical uses jump the queue when demand spikes.
— via Small Wars Journal, Terence Check
Cutting red tape won't fix the real bottleneck slowing weapons reviews: AI systems change faster than testing can verify them. The fix isn't fewer rules but embedded legal advisers working inside defense firms throughout development, not just at the finish line.
— via War on the Rocks, Nathan Wood
