That you didn’t bother to learn from any of the other wars.

I’ve always found the obsession with the Iran threat to be an insult to people’s intelligence. It’s not that I care for the regime, I’m quite glad the Ayatollah is dead. The regime was (and still is) evil. But it was also quite clear that with the death of Soleimani years ago, Israeli campaigns against Hezbollah, and the punch of COVID-19, Iranian power has been on the decline for some time. Despite this decline, Iran continued to be an obsession for a lot of DC, partially because of GWOT but also before, for a long time. In fact, it was a blind spot among many China hawks who would clearly recognize the PRC threat but who were unable to decouple that reality with the reality of a middling Iran they once fought against in Iraq. Now that we’re weeks into a war that has seen us touch a load-bearing wall of the global economy and burned through out weapons stockpiles, I’ve got some scores to settle. So let’s start with a little myth-busting.

Shattering Realities

Let’s review some talking points first to remind you of the sense of scale between the Iran and PRC threat:

1. The Iranian navy was an existential threat with a few dozen rusted ships (mostly amphibs and small boats)? The PLAN will soon have 400 and they’re a lot more capable.

2. The IRGC was a threat with a few hundred long-range missiles? The PLA has tens of thousands.

3. Iranian asymmetric warfare was a globe-spanning threat? Try PRC influence operations, dual-use infrastructure, and commercial ships loaded with containerized fires.

4. Iran might get a nuke? The PRC has embarked on the fastest and largest nuclear arsenal expansion in decades.

5. Oh the Iranian military industry was building conventional weapons? *Gestures at PRC industrial capacity*

6. We didn’t know the Iranian drone threat was so serious and confounding for our air defenses? The Ukrainians have been swatting Shaheds like flies for years now. Hell, we proudly reverse-engineered that very drone into LUCAS. WHICH WE THEN USED ON IRAN.

7. CUAS and Ukraine. Oh, we don’t need Ukraine’s help fighting drones? Because we keep burning exquisite assets on Shaheds and are running out of ammo. Maybe shot doctrine and cheap CUAS matters. The Ukrainians offered their help and we said no. Absolute malpractice.

8. SLOCs are hard. Yeah turns out that tightly contested littoral spaces are super hard. Maybe we should develop forces to control those. Sure hope CENTCOM advocates haven’t spent years trying to fight that sort of force development…oh wait. That is exactly what they were doing as the Marine Corps focused on Force Design 2030 and the creation of Marine Littoral Regiments.

9. Bombing to win, doesn’t. The Air Force keeps trying but it’s not working. Surely it’ll be different this time. Almost like all of history says ground forces are needed to seize and control territory in order to effect political change (ie war is politics) to meet strategic objectives.

10. This doesn’t guarantee the end of a regime friendly to the PRC. And the PRC only has friends to gain and we only have allies to lose. We haven’t yet identified a valid successor regime that would in fact be opposed to PRC influence. We’re costing out allies a lot of money and the PRC’s strategic efforts to protect themselves from these sorts of shocks sure look smart right about now.

On Lessons Unlearned

A common refrain in PLA military studies for American students is “the PLA is a learning organization” I always thought that was a dumb, patronizing comment. Of course the PLA is a learning organization, so is the US military. One only need look at all the PLA self-reflections on their shortcomings and their analysis of previous US wars to see that they are not mindless automatons. They are more like us than most care to admit. And as technologies proliferate and other militaries learn lessons from the wars of the world, we should be prepared for everyone to evolve. Thus, lessons are not confined to a particular theater when even middling powers can produce massed attritable systems and long-range missiles.

And I suppose that’s why I find myself staring in dumbstruck awe at CENTCOM’s (and thereby the US military’s) apparent inability to live beyond the year 2003. I have some questions. I’ve written more than a few articles here on lessons learned from Ukraine and elsewhere for the US military. There are plenty of US military publications on lessons learned and highlight reel upon highlight reel of open-source analysis. We have entire think tanks, journals, and internal knowledge repositories to share battlefield lessons learned and to understand the enemy. But it seems the rumors about those lessons being confined to small corners or hubristically ignored by leaders seem to be affirmed. It’s not that we’re taking mass casualties from the Iranians the way we would from the PRC, it’s that the way we are losing equipment is embarrassing because we know already how to mitigate these losses. We are making conscious choices to be stupid. I know there’s a lot of government scandals these days, but these are the kind that will get a lot of people killed.

On lessons from Ukraine

Back in checks notes 2023, I wrote an article on lessons learned from Ukraine for the Taiwan fight. Let’s review them:

1. There Will be Blood: “Public tolerance for casualties is higher when the threat is existential. But that tolerance comes at a price: the expectation of enemy bloodletting and counteroffensives.” In other words, you had better get results if you start a war. In this case the casualties aren’t just in bodies, but in money. Losing control of the Strait of Hormuz, losing access to production (and in some case losing production facilities) of vast quantities of hydrocarbons, fertilizer, and precious Helium is quite the price for a war nobody asked for. Given the apparent lack of expectation of resistance and these sorts of casualties (or folks just didn’t care), I’d say we certainly didn’t learn those costs from Ukraine. It’s not like the world didn’t panic over the potential loss of Ukrainian grain and the potential for famine.

2. Attrition comes for everyone: “Attriting a large, committed force, especially one backed by a powerful nationalist narrative takes a lot of time even for the best militaries.” Well, the war’s still on and this was supposed to be our version of a special military operation so….no we did not learn this lesson.

3. Your pre-war stockpile is never enough: Nope, we definitely didn’t learn that one given all the recent reports about us nearly going Winchester a couple weeks into the war with Iran.

4. Sanctions are slow: “Just like body count, they come at a cost of expected results. The longer sanctions take to take effect, the more pressure the sanctioning government will feel from third parties who suffer the costs.” As I pointed out above, we clearly were not prepared for the economic shockwaves here. We’ve been sanctioning Iran for decades, but the physical sanction of a shut down Strait of Hormuz is causing real pain to countries around the world.

5. Unity is fleeting: “You should never assume that the enemy’s morale will collapse at first sight of trouble, particularly when the populace is under heavy surveillance and nationalist propaganda manipulation. Nor should you assume that Americans will always support your war.” The Iranians are still fighting, the people are suppressed because we let the regime murder thousands of protesters and dissidents, and we keep killing the people who can negotiate with us.

6. Escalation and Deterrence Aren’t Dictated by Mathematical Formulas: “reality demands we understand that people are prone to hysteria, paranoia, and ill-informed decision-making.” Hitting 10,000 targets as the DOD claims doesn’t seem to have deterred Iranian strikes or the Houthis from entering the war. And clearly this war wasn’t thought through on our side…

7. Offensives aren’t Linear: “First-mover advantage matters, but it isn’t all-powerful.” We struck first, hard, and the Iranians are not only still fighting but now we have to open the Strait or the world goes into global recession. Great job everyone.

8. Defense Requires Depth: The lessons in this section more specifically applied to Taiwan, but given we keep having refuelers and other aircraft hit on the ground in Saudi…I don’t think we’ve quite mastered this. Certainly we didn’t learn how important layered air defenses are against a high-low mix of missiles and cheap drones.

9. Ingenuity is Tactical: “Innovation is only as good as the window in which the enemy is caught off guard. If the enemy is allowed to survive long enough to either adapt or out innovate your technology and tactics, then the cycle begins anew.” Our AI-enabled targeting and LUCAS drones did not magically win the war. Yes, they’re another useful tool in the toolbox but they only provided new opportunities for us to exploit and it seems we have not adequately seized upon them. And so, we’ve allowed the enemy time to adapt and survive. Technical innovation is only as good as the effective application of said technology. Since this admin loves video games so much, let me put it in terms everyone will understand. As General Shepherd once said: “Learning to use the tools of modern warfare is the difference between the prospering of your people, and utter destruction... Sure it matters who's got the biggest stick, but it matters a helluva lot more who's swinging it.”

10. More than meets the eye: “the visibility of the conflict has created a sense of transparency to conflict and operations that simply isn’t based in reality.” The highlight reels and AI-generated content is really proving we won the war…the obsession with comms over physical effects is mind-numbing. Body counts and killcams are not measures of effectiveness, they are bloody pageantry.

Clearly we’re not learning, or at least the learning is not evenly distributed. It’s embarrassing.

Some additional thoughts updated for 2026

Russian Revenge: We’ve helped kill countless Russians in our aid of Ukraine (this is a good thing), but were we really so politically blinded that we didn’t think the Russians wouldn’t seize this opportunity to help the Iranians hurt us? C’mon. That is great power politics 101.

Regime Change: So what’s the plan here? The regime doesn’t seem any more interested in being friends and while the old Ayatollah may be gone, this doesn’t really solve the larger problem of regional competition or radicalism. How does this end? Because we can’t just walk away or else we will come back to this same problem every 6-18 months and we don’t have that kind of ammo. Did we really learn from Iraq that the problem was thunder running to Baghdad and not the fact that we created a power vacuum with a bunch of munitions in the hands of various radical factions?

Force exhaustion: Boy, if you thought these deployments to CENTCOM were burning Navy assets, can you imagine how much hurt a Pacific fight will put on our forces?…And that’s before we even start talking enemy action and the PLA’s ability to bring the hurt upon us. Whatever damage we recovered from from the exhaustion and maintenance shortages of the 2010s, we just brought back into being. Great work.

Hall of Mirrors: We simultaneously overhyped the Iranian threat and underestimated them and we are now realizing that we took a sledgehammer to a load bearing wall of the global economy that we cannot easily repair. The economic shockwaves are only beginning and it’s likely we won’t see the full effects for sometime as global agriculture, industrial production, and semiconductor manufacturing are all impacted by a choked Hormuz Strait and decimated Gulf industrial sector.

Maybe it actually matters to have actual professionals as decisionmakers and staff. Maybe there’s actual a real world where understanding how and why the world functions as it does matters. Maybe what happens over there actually matters for the Homefront. Maybe we can’t just run away from global responsibility and smash things as we please in our retreat. Maybe there are metrics to success other than body counts, online engagement, and television ratings. Who knew?

We didn’t learn a damn thing.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the challenges of modern war, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

"25” by The Pretty Reckless

Taylor Momsen, the modern queen of rock and roll, contemplates if and how she’ll make it past 27 and survive the rock star’s curse of self-destruction in her darkest hours on “25”. The accompanying album, Death by Rock and Roll, is about despair, death, and revival after the death of Chris Cornell. I think a lot about that album whenever I have a moment to collect my thoughts. Here we are at the twilight of 2025, watching the clock tick down on the Davidson Window’s final years and I can’t help but hum the lyrics to the Bond theme-esque ballad by The Pretty Reckless. Are we doomed by our own rockstar’s curse? Have we dragged ourselves so far down into the pit we cannot escape? Do we still control our collective destiny as Americans?

I won’t bullshit you: the world’s on fire and the USG is barely holding itself together. So some days I can’t help but feel like Taylor Momsen staring down our dark, collective destiny. How are we supposed to be ready to fight the PLA in the title fight when we can’t get our act together? We’re building ships for ego instead for force design, gutting our cyber defenses, and championing the kind of corruption in our own government that the CIA exploited against the CCP years before. We’re denying the science of vaccines but accepting the cult of personality. We’ve decided grift, rather than grit, is an American value. I’m not the first to say we’ve become numb to the insanity, but this insanity has real consequences whether we feel them right now or not. We’ve known for years what the CCP and the PLA are preparing for: to take Taiwan and unify China, one way or another. We know what the strengths and weaknesses of the CCP are, and we know what we need to do to get the job done.

And instead we caught a once in a millennia case of brain worms.

It’s not like the China fight both during peace and war is some mystery. The policy solutions are real. I’ve been working on and writing about them for years and plenty of others have as well. 4.5 years ago the outgoing commander of INDOPACOM got on television in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and told them war was coming and we needed to get our act together. 4.5 years later and I gotta be honest I’m not feeling great about it. The CCP may have its issues but it’s still modernizing at a rapid pace. Taiwan is struggling internally, and our friends don’t have the greatest confidence that we’ll come to the rescue. This is no longer some obscure policy issue; a hypothetical to debate in the pages of Foreign Affairs or the policy schools. Two of the most powerful militaries in the history of humanity are spinning up for war. A war which if we lose most certainly ensures permanent decline for the United States and global democracy.

I know what you’re thinking, “Tony, didn’t you infamously declare the death of the Davidson Window?” Yes, yes I did. But as I explained back in 2023, my problem was never with the threat but the public’s fixation on a hard go/no-go date. At the end of the article, I declared that the window was dead but the spirit of the Davidson Window; the sense of urgency it inspired, needed to live on. Since then, I’ve come to explain 2027 as the start of the real marathon between the US and the CCP. When, if the PLA achieves Xi’s modernization goals and our ability to win the fight is in question, the threat to Taiwan and to security in the Indo-Pacific goes from a growing possibility to “we need to watch the Fulda Gap every second of every day.”

2027 marks the transition from “we have time to prepare” to “we need to be ready, tonight.” The time we have to play parlor tricks with defense policies and toy with the defense budget is fading. It is almost 2026, the PLA is only growing stronger, and instead we’ve decided to stage our forces off of Venezuela and threaten…Greenland (again)? All the while saying we’re on good terms with Beijing and clamping down on the USG talking about what the CCP is up to around the world. (Where is the 2025 China Military Power Report?)

World War III knocks at our door, the very balance of power of the world rests on deterrence in the First Island Chain, and we’re….kicking sand castles as the Tsunami builds off the coast.

Since ADM. Davidson’s off the cuff announcement to SASC almost 5 years ago, we’ve had a few wins. Despite the accompanying LinkedIn and conference circuit grift, the defense industrial base has expanded and become flush with cash and motivation. We are building new war machines and technologies in great quantity. We are augmenting our exquisite systems with attritable mass. We are reforming force structure, training, and doctrine for the Pacific fight. We are finally coming around to acquisitions reform. Our allies are waking up to the threat of the PLA, and our relationships with both Manila and Tokyo are quite strong. And yet I fear we have done more harm than good in that same time.

Ideologically, the country failed to consistently connect the Ukrainian fight against the Russians with the fight against the CCP. As I wrote last year, no matter the flavor of authoritarianism it’s all the same virus. You can’t fight one strain and ignore the others. I’ve yet to see a coherent foreign policy from anyone that addresses that. We’ve thrown tariffs and tantrums at allies while playing nice with the bad guys. The most prolific China hawk was run out of Congress and branded a traitor by his own party. The National Security Strategy is uh…one of the documents of all time (to put it nicely). The Congress that spent so much of the early 2020s shaping China policy and pushing the envelope is gone. The new Congress has all but abandoned its role in shaping policy and overseeing the executive branch. When we wrote restrictions on critical technologies we carved out loopholes or let the lobbyists help write them. We’re still inconsistent on demands for industry to produce munitions despite the shouts and screams from the Pentagon and combatant commanders.

Outside of some portions of the DoD, there are few corners of government where fighting the PRC is the priority (something else I warned about a couple of years ago). We’re more concerned with culture wars than the people who actually wish to make war upon us. I was on a panel recently where I told the audience that the best place to do China policy work and fight the PLA was in the defense industry, not government. We need smart people to shape the weapons and CONOPs we’ll use tomorrow. Two years ago, I would’ve been deemed insane for even saying that and yet today it’s the unfortunate truth. The good ones still hanging on and working the problem in government I do not envy.

And despite all that, I believe there’s still hope. Do not let the nihilism consume you. Nihilism is the weapon of the authoritarian. The war is not yet lost, the world has not yet crumbled. Getting ready requires holding the USG accountable and demanding the security of a nation befitting our status and history. It means championing the fight against global tyranny as a ballot box issue, picking candidates who understand that and echo it. It means having a clear strategic vision and executing it. It means doing our jobs, even on the days it feels like all hope has died. It means training, building, and inventing; working with, instead of against, our fellow Americans and friends around the world.

In 2022, I founded Breaking Beijing to get after the hardest problems we faced in the Indo-Pacific. To overcome the bland recommendations and analysis that the think tanks felt comfortable churning out in the latter years of the GWOT. I wanted to shape and advocate for the policies that would ensure victory and democratic prosperity. In that time I’ve covered everything from Pacific logistics and economic foreign policy to battlefield autonomy. These are whole of government, hell these are whole of society problems, and yet we’ve decided to let government crumble and society devolve. We’re short of ships and ammo, we’re short of personnel, we’re short of missiles, coherent strategy, and reliable direction. But the fight’s not decided yet. There are still systems we can build, munitions we can buy, and bases we can build in that time. We don’t need to go out like Hendrix or Cobain. The only way the Davidson Window and our subsequent demise becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy is by our own hand.

So get your guns up, 2027’s just a year away.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the challenges of modern war, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

Every now and then, though, the warfighting world gets a little weird and starts to rally around a singular concept that concretely highlights the challenges posed by the evolving character of warfare. It starts to sounds like fiction until you realize that the future is already here and the warbot is real. For followers of Combined Minds Warfare, the world is waking up to the realization that even autonomous systems need a home base. Enter the Mothership.

The Warbot Mothership is exactly what it sounds like: a large platform capable of deploying, arming, maintaining, and when necessary acting as a C2 element for the autonomous formation. As far as I can tell, the Chinese have the most prolific formal references to the mothership concept. (I should emphasize here the PLA does not currently possess such a system but their apparent drone carrier is undergoing sea trials.) When I first read about it in a CASI report earlier this year, a lightbulb went off for me and I’ve spent the better part of six months thinking about what the American Mothership looks like. At the time, I’d been having some related conversations with folks about how developing support networks for autonomous systems was the next step in American force design. Mothership was catchier than whatever the hell I told people. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is not one specific, exquisite American Mothership but rather a family of systems shaped by cost, simplicity, and mission to reduce the drag on warbot force design and employment. Consider the following my Rules for the Warbot Mothership:

1. In all domains, the mothership must reduce the need for the warbot to travel on its own to the battlefield, thereby shaping logistical and maintenance decisions in planning and system design. This likely requires an emphasis on commercial, rather military, efficiencies in design.

2. These motherships must be cheap, they cannot be replicants of the billion dollar oiler program the navy is currently paying for. They’re not quite expendable, but they cannot be too big to fail. They need not be autonomous themselves, but they must be crew-minimal in order to focus resources towards supporting the warbot formation. A warbot cannot change its own oil (yet).

3. The mothership cannot completely replace fixed support sites, but it must deemphasize them in favor of mobile support nodes. Where it cannot live on its own, it must be able to keep up with the front line force.

4. We cannot conduct expeditionary warfare in a sensor and warbot-saturated battlefield without motherships. Access and basing is not guaranteed, and the point of the warbot is lost if they only slow down their manned counterparts.

Segregated vs Integrated Warbot Formations

To PLA military writers, “mothership warfare” is something to aspire to as they develop their own autonomous systems; a critical operational center of gravity for autonomous force design. We have a similar concept: arsenal ships, although that concept was more focused on enabling mass fires and fell off in popularity because commanders were uncomfortable with so many exquisite platforms sitting on a single platform waiting to get rocked by a salvo of PLA missiles before it could do any good.

There’s a key difference in how the US military and the PLA think about autonomous systems: the PLA are currently emphasizing the development of wholly autonomous formations (namely aerial swarms but others are in development) while the US is focused on more heterogenous formations between manned and unmanned systems. I’ve argued before that the American approach here is correct: that manned-unmanned teaming (MUMT) is a far more effective, if more complex, use of the advantages of humans and warbots on the battlefield than segregating formations between silicon and blood.

Hosts vs Motherships

Warbots can currently ride along with manned platforms across all domains but are fairly limited in number and capability. I refer to these manned systems as “hosts” because they can only carry limited UxS and their bodies were hijacked from their original mission and purpose. Most warbots cannot return (or cannot return easily) to their hosts because the hosts were not designed for such a mission and therefore their design specs limit the designs of the warbot. The limiting factors here obviously depend upon size and mission set for both the host and the warbot and those requirements are rapidly changing as the technology matures. Motherships need to be purpose built (or retrofitted) for the mission of enabling the warbot on the battlefield. Mind you, the first American aircraft carrier (USS Langley) was built atop a retrofitted bulk carrier.

Technically speaking, an aircraft carrier is a mothership for manned systems (aircraft) and it is certainly the most mature concept we have for what one would look like in the future. We also spent decades building our force around the ability to project power via aircraft carrier, to protect those carriers, and for the carriers to enable American expeditionary warfare. By geography alone, our need to train for expeditionary conflict dictates that as we integrate the warbot into our formations, we will need to develop the platforms (motherships) necessary to support the expeditionary warbot in the future.

Spoiler: The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed across the combat formation.

From Scrap, then Scratch

Today, we can start building motherships first by converting existing platforms like commercial vessels, tracked vehicles like the M113, and even legacy commercial aircraft as test beds to understand what works and what doesn’t. Using that data, we can build new platforms in parallel to be purpose-built Motherships. This will take longer, but it means we can build the Mothership to the mission(s), rather than confining the mission to the Mothership. As we are principally focused on attritable systems for the time being, this buys us time but the future approaches fast. As the selection of warbots grows and their capabilities (and sheer numbers) expand, the need for the mothership goes from optional to operational necessity rather quickly.

Warbots need Humans, too.

Of course, the warbot already exists in all domains and aircraft carriers are most efficiently designed to support manned aircraft with human enablers. So while the concept can carry over, we will need new Motherships that are purpose built for how we want to fight and how we are limited in that fight by the basic needs of man and machine: food, fuel, ammo, rest, maintenance, and medical. Developing a fully autonomous system of systems that can carry, launch, recover, and maintain the warbot is possible, but it is also going to take years (if not decades) worth of work to develop new systems, processes, and machinery to support such the tempo and operate in hazards of modern warfare. And even then, you’ll always want a human or set of humans to be there to monitor and act as a redundancy.

We need humans to take care of warbots. It’s a matter of efficiencies. Most components don’t fix themselves, and humans are designed for tinkering with the machines they build. So long as we need human maintainers and enablers, we will have to take life support systems into account and that means finding new efficiencies to reduce the tail of warbot formations. You won’t get 100% efficiency up front, and that’s ok. If the heaviest logistical burden you have for a mission is the life support for a few dozen maintainers and Class III and V for the warbot, that is light years ahead of the requirements for a 5000 person manned vessel for manned missions.

Does this means we get rid of manned motherships?

No. What did I just say about the efficiencies generated from blood and silicon? The aircraft carrier or armored vehicle isn’t going away just because we can yeet a few warbots at the enemy with minimal tail. Now instead of trying to balance the mission demands for warbot and manned systems from a singular node, you can distribute them. UGVs become force multipliers for armored formations when they’re kicked out the back of a Bradley or 113 into the breach, CCAs complicate enemy defensive measures against an air raid, and any commercial vessel becomes a potential asset to the fleet as we rebuild our shipbuilding industry. You are going to need humans for maintenance and management for a very long time, but as time goes on, you will need fewer per mission.

If it sits, the missile fits.

When a human gets wounded in combat they’re treated on site, en route, and then at higher echelons further from the front depending upon the severity of the wound and availability of care. You can’t always get the soldier bleeding from their neck back to the rear in time for the brigade surgeon and in today’s war, there’s probably two dozen others with identical wounds. Triaging warbot damage in the field so as to not bog down Mothership operations will be critical and require a new set of skills for those on the battlefield.

We’ve also taken great pains to learn how to distribute operations and basing so we don’t provide too much of a juicy target in any single location (see: Arsenal ships). This means that not only is the mothership not the sole solution to enabling warbots in combat, they will inevitably become juicy targets themselves. As such, you may very well need depot-level maintenance that demands a fixed base, but in order to not repeat the lessons of the arsenal ship, you will have to find balance between the efficiencies of large motherships and fixed bases for autonomous systems vs the harsh realities of survival on the modern battlefield through mobility and signature reduction. The need to survive long enough to get smaller warbots to the fight may very well dictate the need for smaller Motherships vs their aircraft carrier equivalents.

Conclusion

Whether you’re building one-way attack UAS, long-endurance UUVs, or unmanned breaching vehicles, maintenance comes for everyone whether they be blood or silicon. The Mothership is the missing keystone for the combined minds formation. We can and should start building Motherships today, not least because they’re going to take time to get right. Some will be rather cheap and simply, like retrofitting LMTV trucks to carry UAS launchers. Others will be more complicated as they battle the elements to refit and maintain unmanned naval systems. Just as the aircraft carrier was for the 20th century, the Warbot Mothership will become the center of power projection and expeditionary warfare for the 21st. The Mothership will get your warbot to the fight and keep you in the fight. We just have to build it.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict and warbots in combat, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and the sequel “DUALITY” is coming out in 2026! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

Hopefully these reform proposals ignite discussion among the 2026 candidates about how to channel their efforts into model governance upon entering office. When the Tea Party candidates took office after the 2010 wave, few knew anything about the levers of government which they’d promised to pull. Today much of the discourse around governmental reform comes in the form of expanding the power of the executive or reducing the power of SCOTUS, not reinforcing the balance of powers between the branches and ensuring the American peoples’ voices are heard and acted upon through good policy work in Congress. Congress is (supposed to be) the megaphone of the people. The House the fiery heartbeat of the people with elections every two years from 435 congressional districts and the Senate the “greatest deliberative body in the world” with 100 members supposedly less responsive to the whimsies of opinion polls through their six-year election cycle and statewide elections. In Romantic terms, the House and Senate are supposed to balance each other and work towards compromise between the brain and the heart of the American people and ensure the Executive does not act unilaterally and against the voice of the people. The Executive branch serves to execute the laws and policies delivered by the Congress on behalf of the American people at home and abroad. SCOTUS the referee between policy objectives and legal interpretations of the Constitution.

Governing’s hard, but it’s a lot harder if you’re bad at your job or are quite simply apathetic to good governance. Therefore, any reforms must drive cultural changes, first. Hyper-partisanship won’t disappear overnight, nor will the tendency to kick the can down the road in perpetuity so Congress can make their flights home. You can’t just show up to the Hill and expect leadership to do your job for you if you want to make real change.

Gallagher’s Three Proposals

1. Change the congressional calendar: This seems simple enough. Change the calendar to better work for both members and the people. The calendar itself varies year to year and as Gallagher points out, members are constantly flying in and out on tight schedules with little room to really sit down and work with your colleagues. His proposal for a 3 weeks on, 1 week off schedule is still a viable change reformers can embrace. I would add one additional suggestion: change the rules to require Congress to stay in session if a budget has not yet been passed by the end of the fiscal year.

2. Empower Committees: Back in the day, the standard committees and their chairs had a lot more influence. As Gallagher states, power was consolidated with House leadership over the decades. Enabling the rank and file to vote for committee leadership instead of by appointment also remains a viable path for reform. No notes here, this overhaul would be a big one and would require a reformist-minded Speaker willing to buck the party and give up power.

3. Streamline Committee Jurisdictions: The BLUF here is aligning committees to the departments they fund thereby reducing jurisdictional overlap and combining the appropriations and policy committees. Anyone who’s worked the NDAA is familiar with the nightmare where the Armed Services committees authorize funding to a specific amount and then the Appropriations committees decide they have their own (uninformed) ideas. Getting rid of the appropriations committees probably requires more juice than any reformer has, but I have some thoughts on that below.

Tony’s Thoughts on Congressional Reform in the New Era:

1. Appropriations and Policy Reconciliation:

   As I said, it’s probably too much of an ask to get rid of the Appropriations committees. There’s too much money and power associated with those roles that no one would give them up voluntarily even with a reformist minded leadership. Instead, we can change the appropriations process. Split the NDAA process into policy and appropriations (imagine a similar process for other committees). The “clean” policy bill (without funding authorizations) can go to the floor by itself (and the appropriations committees will no longer be able to insert policy into their own bills). Each committee will retain their voice in funding levels. But before a funding bill can come to the floor, it should require a joint vote of approval between the two authorizing and appropriating committees. If the vote does not pass, or is not expected to pass, then the committees enter their own mini-reconciliation until a deal is reached. This might sound messy, but it will enable better cross-talk between the policy-minded members and the appropriators. It will also get rid of the member habit of bragging about authorizations instead of appropriations (thereby scoring the political points without doing the real work).

2. Term limits or age limits?

   Term and age limits come up a lot in both the general public’s and DC’s discourse. The members are too old and their staff keep them around far beyond the point of humane treatment. But are term limits and age limits both politically viable and effective? Well, let’s start with term limits. I’m actually opposed because it’s an artificial impasse to expertise on the Hill when voters already have the ability to vote them out every cycle. It can take a decade just to get a good handle on the system. Why kick someone out just when they’re making headway? As for age limits, they’re very much needed. Older members rely on control of the party system and name recognition to dodge retirement even when it’s clear they’re no longer helpful. The retired population is still a voting population and deserves representation in Congress, though. I’d therefore propose age limits of 70 for the House. Thus each gets five years beyond the current US retirement age of 65. According to Pew, at the start of 2025 there were 117 Members of Congress above the age of 70. That means at least 1 in 5 Members of Congress were beyond the US retirement age, 137 Members of Congress were in the 60-69 age group. 254 Members of Congress, nearly half of all members, are either in the retirement age range or approaching it rapidly. In 2024, the Democratic Party in particular had a reckoning with its gerontocracy. You can’t expect the gerontocracy to solve the problem of the gerontocracy.

3. No Leaving Til the Job is Done:

   Like I mentioned earlier, the House and Senate should not be allowed to go into recess at the end of the fiscal year until they pass funding bills for the entire USG. It’s as easy as writing that into the rules of that Congress. I actually think this is the easiest change to make for a reformist-minded wave because it doesn’t threaten anyone’s power and is solid messaging. On the other hand, Congress really likes flying home instead of doing their job.

4. Incentivizing Committee Attendance:

   In our efforts to give power back to committee leadership and the rank and file, a reformist minded movement would use either a party funding or Congressional rule to tie committee hearing attendance to eligibility for committee assignments and leadership roles. There’s not a particular number I have in mind here but requiring a member to have attended say….80% of a committee’s hearings in the previous year (there are legitimate conflicts sometimes) to their eligibility to campaign for a committee leadership assignment would bring some rigor to a Congress that also loves dipping on meetings for fundraising or literally anything else. I recall once a fellow staffer asked me (they were new) how they could help their boss contribute to defense policy, I politely told them they could start by showing up. I didn’t hear from that staffer again.

On Expanding the legislative body

I’ve seen some commentary out there from folks who don’t know the Hill well and think that the solution is to make the House and/or Senate even larger. Now, I will say that it is rather arbitrary to be capped at 435 members of the House. However, I don’t know if you’ve seen the talent pool out there but the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough backbenchers in the House. Watering the House voting blocs even further will only make the system even worse. We have to focus on improving what we already have.

On Paying Congressional Staff

Congressional staff put up with a lot, and if you want to attract more decent talent to put up with the chaos, then they have to be paid well (this includes interns). No, you’ll never be able to match a lobbyist’s salary but you’ll have a steady stream of people with good ideas and youthful energy. With the exception of being a committee staffer (PSM), most staff roles in the House and Senate belong to the youth and the knowledge and networks they gain (in the right hands) can go a long way to improving the whole of government. If you pay the bottom of the barrel, that’s what you’ll get.

In the end, fixing Congress is an attritional fight. You won’t fix it magically overnight and it takes passionate and knowledgeable staff and members to work together for long hours, days, and years. But you can start by shaping the culture of the Congress through these reforms. In coming weeks and months, I’ll have more articles on reforming the various departments and oversight of the Executive branch. I’ll also be talking about this and other topics on our new podcast: Second Breakfast, it’s all about defense policy, tech, and teaching staffers and others things they’d never otherwise get to learn about the natsec world.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the challenges of modern war and policymaking, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

In We Were Soldiers there is an iconic scene of US Army helicopters first landing in the Ia Drang Valley. This is the first combat mission of the 1st Cavalry under Army legend LTC Hal Moore. Immediately upon hitting the landing zone, 2nd Lt. Henry Herrick sees a NVA scout and gives chase, calling his men up behind him. The scout runs them right into a waiting ambush line. Herrick, in his blind search for glory, dragged his men to their deaths. It’s cinematic. The story is real and left a lasting impression on Hal Moore in his memoirs. It’s also stupid. Blind courage and bravado, while seemingly righteous, is a dereliction of Herrick’s actual duties, to complete his mission, with his men. It is not bravado that wins wars. In training, it is not aping the warriors of antiquity that matters. Lethality and warrior branding mean nothing if you’re dead because you forgot how to mount a tripod, charged into an obvious ambush, or broke communications discipline to micromanage your subordinates. Counter to the prevailing narrative, it is the unsexy aspects of combat training that keep you alive and bring victory. It is the preparation, sequencing, and the boring repetitions of training that turn people from liabilities into soldiers.

Aggression without sequencing isn’t courage; it’s malpractice. It is a story that goes back to the Iliad and Odyssey. Achilles’ rage, in battle and out, broke armies, led to atrocities, dishonorable behavior, and at the end cost the Acheans more than it gained. The cure to the individual warrior mentality is progressive training that turns baseline skills into unit-level habits, then combines arms under a shared plan, timeline, and picture of the terrain.

Professional vs Performative

The way some envision training and military operations is through the lens of individual capabilities, or worse: showmanship and pomp. Emphasis is placed on outward displays and form. This is ego. When combined with novelty and adrenaline, it mixes into a lethal dose of stupid. The wherewithal necessary to execute; to plan and win firefights and wars dies in the battle for oxygen with ego. This is why the majority of Ranger School and Small Units Tactics focuses so much time on planning and the ability to implement troop leading procedures under extreme stress. War is exhausting. Training for ego, instead of exhaustion, will kill you faster. The ability to execute basic procedures to excellence even when you are tired, hungry, cold, and just want to stop carrying a rucksack is what makes a professional. The alternative to the professional is the eponymous Leeroy Jenkins.

There are three ways that bad leaders incentivize Leeroy Jenkins’ behavior.

1. Leaders praise speed over sequencing. “Move fast and break things” sounds good in the Valley, the things that break in military operations are people or the things carrying the people. Planning, risk analysis, and allocation of resources in time and space are key.

2. Leaders provide vague intent and/or conflicting guidance. Without clear direction, staff and lower echelons cannot plan, train, and resource appropriately. Everyone has to work to the same end state or the mission falls apart.

3. Leaders emphasize bravado and performative training over the harder, less sexy requirements. When under stress, people fall back on their training. If their training is to do dumb shit, they will do dumb shit.

Together, the Leeroy Jenkins Leadership style emphasizes the showmanship of training as the goal itself, instead of training as a means to an end for victory. You wear camouflage paint on your face because that’s what Warriors do (even though you haven’t left your tank in six days). You jump through flaming hoops because that looks cool, not because the PLA has invented new flaming hoop obstacles. You make everyone train on drill and ceremony because a crisp column left appeals to a leader’s ego, not because pike squares are suddenly an effective defense against FPV drones. In battle, showmanship translates only to death and defeat.

On Training to Failure

Training to failure is something that has to be approached very carefully. In some weightlifting methods, the idea of training to failure or as close to it as possible is vital to inciting maximum physical adaptation. This is also true in military training, training to or near failure is how units and individuals learn their limits and start to push them. However, just as in fitness, you do not start with going to failure. No one walks into the gym on their first day and power cleans 315 to exhaustion. You crawl, walk, then run. First you learn proper form, then you build up strength and confidence, then you test that strength and push yourself harder. For combat units, this means training on individual skills, then battle drills, and so on. Building up in complexity by perfecting the smaller things first. Where popular discourse, including from senior leaders, gets stuck is in the first phase of crawl-walk-run, creating an obsession over the sexy individual skills instead of the excellence of the team.

Waging war is about decision making under uncertainty. Training, good training, is about progressively building people’s ability to make those good decisions. There are four major stages for effectively training up a military force.

Stage 1: Individual Training

In the Army, these are akin to the Infantry Skill Level 1 tasks. Shoot, move, communicate. Every Infantry soldier is expected to be able to communicate. They need to be able to report their location, situation, and enemy with brevity. They can move. This is not just about running fast in PT shorts. Move means using individual movement techniques, using cover and concealment (and knowing the difference between the two), how to read a map, and how to move at night. They shoot and sustain. This means they know how to use their assigned weapons and maintain them, they can do basic tasks like throw a grenade, and they know how to perform basic combat casualty care.

These are not “Warrior Tasks” and we should stop calling them that. There’s nothing mystical about clearing a rifle stoppage, reading a contour line, or pushing a nine-line. These are seatbelt skills. You master them so you don’t die from dumb. These are the Basic Soldier Tasks, the minimums that transform a human from a liability to a contributor. Once someone can perform basic tasks they can be trusted to shoot, move, and communicate as part of a team. The name matters because culture follows language. “Warrior” invites cosplay. “Basic” invites accountability (and Starbucks.)

What that accountability does not look like is aping MMA fighters. Consider why soldiers are taught hand-to-hand fighting (hint: it’s not because they’re Spartans). The whole point of combatives is not to make someone a fighter but a survivor. The last thing you want is to be in that kind of fight. You want to create space and get your gun up, if that fails, you want to hold out long enough for a buddy with a gun to show up. That is who wins fist fights in combat, the ones whose buddies show up first and stay up til the fighting’s done. You cannot punch your way out of a gunfight, even Steve Rogers had his shield. No amount of glamorizing the fighting styles of old will change that. Map reading wins more battles than MMA skills.

Special Forces selection basically breaks on two events. Event two is team week: it’s about pain and the ability to tolerate it while contributing to a team. But the first event that breaks most people is land navigation. Why? Because, individual land navigation is a decision-making gym. It forces you to form a plan, commit to it, detect when you have made an error, and recover. You do all of this alone, with 55-65 lbs on your back. In January. After crossing the same river twice. It makes you doubt yourself, doubt gives way to fear, and fear is the mind killer. This, more than any individual capability, is why land navigation is important. As a skill it scales across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. At the tactical level, people that can read a map can see lines of drift and likely enemy approaches. They can pick advantageous fighting positions and know where to make assaults from. At the operational level, it enables units to choose routes that preserve tempo and surprise. It also lets good planners account for terrain when they plan supply to align with maneuver. Lastly, at the strategic level, commanders and staff that know how to read the map can anticipate how terrain compresses and expands decision windows. More than any other individual skill, map reading bridges the knowledge and competency gap between the individual and the small unit.

Stage 2: Small Unit Training and Tactics

This is where soldiers learn and practice the troop leading procedures (TLPs). They learn and rehearse battle drills to make some reactions automatic. This is key. The point of battle drills is to emphasize effective automatic reactions over heroics. Every member of the team or squad knows their job and knows what the other person is going to do. That frees them to concentrate on the enemy and not on each other. Battle drills are as much confidence building exercises as they are exercises in individual competencies. Examples of small unit training modules include: react to contact, squad attack, and hasty ambushes.

Small unit tactics drill actions until they are boring, then they drill it some more. The average machine gun team in an infantry weapons squad will place an M240 machine gun on a tripod hundreds of times without shooting. They will do that in the rain, at night, when fresh and when tired. The best teams will do it so often that it is second nature. Small unit training is also where discipline is truly developed. This is not the discipline to get your haircut or show up on time, that is assumed. It is the discipline to care for your equipment, keep rattling down, check yourself for noise, resist the urge to eat when you need to be silent, carry your loads, and conserve everything you can.

Stage 3: Large Unit Training

Large unit training introduces greater complexity and coordination, while building on the skills and capabilities of the small unit. This is where training passes from individual strain to collective pressure cooker. Young leaders are now integrating with more senior leaders. These operations cannot rely on individual repetition and scripts alone: forward planning, smart thinking, and communication across formations becomes requisite. Consider the seemingly simple “passage of lines” action. Friendly forces at or near the forward line of troops have to either allow another unit to pass through them or they must pass through someone else. This is a dangerous proposition. To dumb it down: you’re trying to walk through a line of armed soldiers, likely at night, without getting shot by your own people. Throw in armored vehicles, sleep deprivation, and enemy fire and this becomes harrowing. This is a complex maneuver, only growing more complex with the increase in jamming and EW on the battlefield making coordination and deconfliction difficult and slow. Planning underpins this but so too does decision making. As formation size grows, the communications delay (not unlike the speed of light delay between probe and ground station in space) grows as distance and people put space between the frontline and leader. During these training events leaders should look to push down as many decisions to lower levels as possible. This stress tests the more junior leaders and offers them a safe place to learn and very importantly, fail. For more senior leaders, it builds confidence in their ability to rely on their subordinates to execute without micromanagement.

Individual skills and small unit tactics are how units learn to crawl. These units should be running short, frequent, coached iterations of lanes (tactical tasks) for their mission types. This means if you are in the infantry, doing recon and ambush lanes. Mortarmen should be setting in and simulating fire missions with large shifts. These are done to focus on the unit’s actions. Once they can crawl then they are ready to walk.

Large unit training is where units learn to walk. It is not enough for a squad or platoon to work on ambushes and react to contact drills, now they have to think about movement and control, they need to plan resupply, and they need to scale up the complexity to better test decision making. Leaders, already versed in small unit tactics individually, now must be tested on their ability to manage span of control and communications between formations and on their ability to work together with their peers and superiors, not just subordinates under their direct command. These exercises should be built to test a unit’s ability to develop and affect commander’s critical intelligence requirements, develop and act on decision points, and present problems that challenge commanders’ decision space. This type of training must be force on force against a capable peer (not three bored dudes hanging out on the objective). And the rate of failure per iteration should go up, not down. We should not be in the business of affirming the beliefs or egos of leadership. Bullets and artillery shells don’t care about those things. When a unit validates their ability to perform under these conditions, they move onto stage 4: combined arms maneuver.

Stage 4: Combined Arms Maneuver

Combined Arms (and joint) maneuver is the orchestra of operations. Various instruments and sections combined into one performance to make music. For the leader, the built-in assumption is that the individual, squad, platoon, company, etc. can all do their jobs in a vacuum. Now they have to all get along, with various equipment and systems ranging from tanks and aircraft to communications relays in order to take the fight to the enemy. If executed well, training can become overwhelming for the incompetent command and staff. Even for a competent commander and staff, combined arms training should be challenging and even painful. The point of combined arms training is for units to show they can plan, prioritize effects (bombs, electromagnetic waves, bullets, cyberattacks, things that disrupt the enemy) and resources, and deliver those effects in time and space to shape and form the battlespace in their favor against a thinking enemy. Modern commanders have to be able to synchronize these effects over time and space, often blind and/or deaf to what their peers are up to as the enemy does its damnedest to the same.

By building and training for each of the four stages, we build a force capable of fighting under the harshest conditions. It all kinda sounds like it sucks, right? That’s because it does, but it sucks for a purpose. Plenty of leaders will tell you that soldiers learn two ways: pain and repetition. But both pain and repetition must come with a purpose in order to be effective. Pain and repetition just for the sake of it solve nothing and that’s where we begin to trade performance for the performative.

The core theme in each of these levels of training, individual to combined arms, is decision making. The ability to decide when to pull the trigger or which path to navigate, the ability to decide whether to flank left or right against a machine gun nest, the ability to decide how best to maneuver and position your forces over many kilometers against a peer, and the ability to deconflict and coordinate a heterogeneous mix of assets, egos, and threats on the modern battlefield. Decision quality is directly tied to the number of quality reps leaders get.

If you could boil it all down to an equation it would look something like:

(quality reps x support) - (ego x fog and friction) = Quality of Decision

This surely seems deceivingly easy. Just eliminate the ego right? Pulling ego out of the equation is damn near impossible. And, we are never going to reduce the fog and friction. The best option we are left with is to make people do enough quality reps, and give them the proper support, so there is a positive number left at the end.

Troop leading procedures, priorities of work, battle drills, and the military decision making process all exist to preserve decision time under fire. The battle drills and priorities of work exist to make certain reactions nearly automatic. This allows for pattern building and predictability that enables better coordination and confidence with your fellow soldiers. It also guards against the type of unpredictable behavior that gets people killed, like running after a lone NVA scout into an ambush. Running fast is not the hallmark of courage, being able to decide and act quickly can be, as long as the decision making muscles are developed. You should be unpredictable to the enemy, you absolutely do not want to be unpredictable and therefore unreliable to your friends.

Soldiers are not trained to be fearless. Lethality is not about breaking bricks against your head. Don’t trust anyone that says they had their life on their line and were not scared. Soldiers are trained to be useful even when they are scared. That training is often boring. It’s maps and maintenance, rehearsals and recocks, threat assessments and vehicle identification. The boring stuff, a deep foxhole, a clean rifle, knowing where you are, these are things that matter. They are also the things that keep people from sprinting off after the illusion of glory. You can’t be lethal if you’re dead from stupid.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the challenges of modern war, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

This week, OpenAI launched Sora 2, their latest video generation model. It’s a simple tool: write a prompt and make custom, AI-generated video content. Critically, OpenAI paired the release of their new model with the launch of a new social media app called “Sora” which one might describe as TikTok but for generative AI. Absolutely no one should be surprised that this immediately resulted in the production of video content crafted for digital outrage. Society now has an app explicitly designed to invent the strawman your drunk uncle wants to rant about at Thanksgiving Dinner. Or for those of you who’ve been online too long, we now have a Rule 34 machine.

It’s impossible to avoid generative AI plug-ins, assistants, and viral content these days. When I opened my PDF copy of Ex Supra to pull opening quote, Adobe recommended using a generative AI summary because it was a “long document.” When I open any social media app, every other video is some sort of AI-generated content. There’s an irony that so much of corporate AI marketing focuses on saving you time and yet because of AI marketing I have to spend extra time trying to decide if the boutique clothing store, news story, or viral video has been AI generated or manipulated. No longer is fake content the exception to our feeds; it’s the default. Humanity has taken up residency inside the uncanny valley.

When I made the hardcover edition of Ex Supra, I used (at the time) novel AI-generated images for chapters and an AI-distorted version of the cover art I’d originally made myself by hand. I thought it was an interesting way to portray a book all about the dangers of AI disinformation by distorting perspectives of the very stories I was telling. In 2025, LLMs are used every day in every sector and I don’t think we’re going to ever turn back, even if your coworkers hate you for your AI workslop. (It’s me, I’m coworkers.) But it’s become clear that I was right, unfortunately, about how much society would love crafting our own realities. Why live in the real world where facts push back against your feelings when you can have the instant gratification of custom, AI-generated narratives? The algorithms of the past 10-15 years that guided us to our own safe spaces of hate, fake news, and dopamine boosts have led to this moment. The machines that reinforced the worst in us are now crafting realities today that validate the lies the algorithm told you yesterday.

The thing about crafting new realities is that they have a tendency to take on a life of their own. Any writer knows their readers can interpret a million meanings from a novel. Any artist or photographer knows a single picture speaks a thousand words and can inspire just as many emotions. Humanity has always had to deal with disinformation and bullshit, but there’s a distinct difference between the singular propaganda poster or editorial and the flood of modern digital disinformation. Legacy media and critical analysis may as well be cavalry charging across no man’s land into a hail of bullets. There’s no easy fix to this, either. Enhanced digital privacy rights and data restrictions can slow the algorithm down, but it won’t kill it.

If you want a beloved celebrity attacked by an angry mob of [insert affiliation] just press a few buttons and toss it to the masses like a grenade in an ammo shack. If you want the people to be mad today; craft the reality that’ll make their blood boil. Show them your handmade reality over lunch. Get them pissed, make them argue, drive them to create their own content to prove their point or grab some bullshit off the shelf (BOTS) from a social media site to shove in the face of their debaters. All the while a profit is made from third party data sales and AI-generated slop advertisements.

Surely the bad guys won’t abuse this, right? Well…in the last few years, researchers at Rand have verified what I predicated in Ex Supra: that, among others, the CCP is actively investigating ways to use AI-generated content to precisely target users in disinformation campaigns in peacetime and war. So yes, this isn’t just some hysteria about the evolution of technology or “kids today.” Weaponized, targeted disinformation only becomes more lethal as the disinformation becomes more convincing and we become more and more dependent as a society on Chatbots and AI to handle the first steps of critical thinking for us. If you think the opening moves of the next war or the next influence campaign by an authoritarian regime doesn’t involve flooding the zone with AI-generated bullshit, you haven’t been paying attention.

By becoming addicted to crafting our own realities rather than learning to share, we are turning ourselves into weapons to be triggered by the slightest shift in algorithmic cocoon. How confident are you that the algorithm isn’t guided to cause you harm? How confident are you that the realities you craft today aren’t tomorrow’s weapons turned against you? Do you really think you’ll be safe when reality bends back?

PS: I’ve got a new podcast: Second Breakfast w/ Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Eric Robinson. It’s all about defense tech, policy, and warfare.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, weaponized disinformation, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

Every day, there’s new articles and pitches on how to bring autonomy to bear on the battlefield, specifically on how to deter and defeat an invasion of Taiwan. We’ve spent the better part of the last decade focused on deterrence and the early hours and days of World War III in the 1st Island Chain. These days, however, I find myself more and more obsessed with solving the problem of autonomous mass on the battlefield when a conflict with the PRC inevitably turns to attrition.

What is attrition?

Attrition at its simplest means wearing down your enemy until they’ve exhausted their resources and their ability or will to fight has collapsed. This strategy stands in contrast to maneuver warfare where the goal is to defeat your opponent through rapid action thereby breaking their cohesion and organization. Despite its difficulty, rarely does the military commander win praise for victory through attrition as brilliant. No one likes to plan for attrition. In the romantic view of warfare, maneuver is sexy whereas attrition is ugly and gluttonous. Wars, particularly long wars, are rarely just maneuver or attrition. War shifts between phases of attrition and maneuver as geography, logistics, mass, stupidity, and other contributing factors impact the battle lines. Very rarely does the enemy consent to your brilliant pre-war plan of masterful maneuver and an early knockout blow.

In the early 2020s, some of us made a bet: that deterrence by denial wasn’t enough. There wasn’t a fancy enough weapon or battle plan that could deter and win against a PLA invasion in a single swoop. We could not sink the PLAN in 72 hours as some claimed, we were not building systems and munitions at the rate we’d need to sustain even an effective opening salvo nor were we creating the supply and logistics chains necessary to enable such a plan. Ukraine reminded us that whatever our math for our missile magazines was; it wasn’t enough. Denial wasn’t enough: you’d have to exhaust the PLA. The conquest of Taiwan is an existential political problem for the CCP. Therefore, the sprint to 2027 or whatever target date you wanted to throw your darts at required duct tape and the kitchen sink. But that was just to buy us time, what you really needed was a whole of government approach that invested in a strategy of attrition. The PLA wanted the invasion to go as fast as possible (the fait accompli) so we had to slow it down and keep our foot on the gas. Building more missiles solved part of that problem: you build enough platforms and keep them distributed, you confound PLA targeting and slow down and limit their ability to wipe us out. But eventually we’d run out of missiles or our targeting would be disrupted by the PLA, and the PLA could build faster than we could…so all they’d need to do is wait us out and send a few boats across the Strait to the smoldering island of Taiwan. We needed mass, but the old measures of combat power couldn’t be generated fast enough. The only way to win was to change the rules.

Enter the warbot.

Why do we need autonomous mass?

In the Pacific, the US is outmatched in battlefield numbers, geography, production, and in some cases firepower. We sit at the edge of war with an enemy that can produce more missiles, ships, and people than we can ever hope. By producing relatively cheap, punchy autonomous systems which we put forward and pair with our existing exquisite capabilities we offset many of the advantages of the PRC. In other words, our approach has become “let the machines eat the first bullet.” For the last 5+ years, eating the first proverbial bullet has been the primary concern of a Taiwan fight: (how do we survive day 1 and bludgeon the enemy enough to make it to day 2?). You may know this better as “defeating a fait accompli against Taiwan.” Of course this solves one problem but leaves us poorly positioned to solve the next: what happens when the PLA doesn’t give up quickly?

Until recently, autonomous mass was a theoretical concept. The warbot a thing of science fiction and glossy PowerPoint slide decks (and for some, still is.) The remotely-piloted Predator Drone and similar systems of the GWOT were hardly a fit for a high end fight in the Pacific. We are building a new arsenal of all shapes and sizes to accompany the human half of the Joint Force. But simply owning and building these systems isn’t enough; you need to be able to deploy them, sustain them, and use them correctly. (You can read all of my works on combined minds doctrine and warbot development in these links.)

Where does autonomous mass fit in the attrition fight?

Not all autonomous mass is attritable, nor should it be. Sometimes autonomous systems are in fact exquisite and that’s ok. Something people often get wrong is assuming all warbots are attritable and that is a gross misunderstanding of both their battlefield application and the technology itself. When we talk about the warbot that can be everything from a major combat system like a ship or tank to a breadbox-sized drone. These all deliver different effects, with different quality of equipment, for different missions. You can’t just dump a fully autonomous formation in front of the enemy, let them eat the bullets, and assume that was the most effective use of millions of dollars of hardware. Sure, it’s better if the bot eats the bullet, but how that happens matters too. If the bot can survive and live to fight another day, even better. And while we’ve rapidly advanced in the last couple of years, the underlying technologies still face a lot of limitations. Warbots aren’t magic.

A bunch of quadrotor drones aren’t saving Taiwan by themselves, and the USS Iowa battleship can’t be turned into a robot tomorrow. The bigger the system, the more complex the compute and more capable the firepower (but also the longer the production line). As I’ve said before, this is a combined arms problem: you have to figure out how to mix and match your warbots to generate the best effects while being cognizant of the logistical tail behind you.

Similarly, this is roughly how the PLA talks about the warbot: smaller bots work from, with, and on behalf of larger bots (motherships).

For the US, autonomous mass in an attrition fight means reducing the risks posed by our current force structure (all volunteer force and smaller population, long-dev but high quality big ticket systems, and a lag in traditional defense production). If you can generate a lot of autonomous systems that can fight and harass the PLA every day without risk of catastrophic loss at a much lower cost, you can thereby lprioritze the exquisite systems for the big battles and critical moments (ie, enabling us to generate the mass we couldn’t otherwise in the face of PLA firepower.) This can be thought of in four principles:

1. When possible, the warbot should enter the kill box first.

2. When possible, the warbots should eat the bullet first.

3. The warbot should never be the single point of failure.

4. Maintenance for a warbot should never be more complex than its manned equivalent.

What are the tradeoffs and limitations of autonomous mass?

Like I said, warbots aren’t magic. War is a political endeavor and so the presence of people on the ground is the manifestation of the forcibly changed political reality, not a warbot. The war isn’t fought for the warbots, it’s fought for the people. So there is a difference between a couple hundred warbots stationed on an island vs a battalion of soldiers or Marines on the same island. Where the warbot matters most in the attritional battle is in contesting ground and forcing the enemy to expend additional resources. It takes time, resources, and a considerable amount of risk to put capital assets into battle, burn exquisite fires, and train and deploy people. The warbot buys down that risk when you’re talking about casualty numbers like we see in Ukraine or will see in the Pacific. But for all the bots you buy and deploy, you still have to host, feed, and maintain them. If you buy a lot of small, cheap systems then you get to have a lot of them and they can be easily replaced without much concern…but they also likely aren’t as reliable and possess limited capabilities in the categories of range, firepower, sensors, and compute. If you invest in super exquisite autonomy, that supply chain and cost likely comes at a big price (and commanders will be less willing to employ them for risk of losing them). For autonomous mass to work for the Joint Force, you have to find that balance between capability and numerical superiority. And let’s not forget: you have to get all of this to the fight, so how are you valuing the expense of precious logistics assets between the various classes of autonomous systems *and* between autonomous and manned systems.

What happens when the PRC scales autonomous mass?

In our pursuit of autonomous mass, we must understand that the advantage we gain will be forever fleeting. Welcome to the real arms race. It’s not about AGI, missiles, or ships. The real arms race of the Second Cold War is all about the warbot.

We don’t have a good picture into what the Chinese equivalent of the defense tech reformation looks like. There are things we can infer from clips of new drones emerging over the skies of a Chinese city or from public discussions around their doctrinal concept of “mothership warfare” but when and how they turn on the spigot of warbot production from their vast reservoir of industrial capacity is unclear. Doctrine and talking points are only as good as the war-ready combat formations to which they attach themselves. The thing that keeps me up at night (other than the nightmares) is what happens when the PRC goes all in on autonomous mass. (Yet another reason to choke their chip supply, btw.) The PRC’s industrial capacity and flexibility resembles ours in the leadup to WWII and they are far better postured to “turn on” their warbot assembly line than we are in a war of attrition.

How do we win?

When they finally decide to turn on the autonomous assembly lines for real, we have to be ready to out-iterate them. It’s not just about who gets version 1.0 to the field first, it’s about who can get every hardware and software update to the field first, every time. This may sound simply, but I assure you it’s not. There are three key factors to winning a war of autonomous attrition:

1. Software and hardware iteration: The ability to update sensors and code quickly and thoroughly without being dragged down by long lead times. Iterations of new technologies in Ukraine can measure in days.

2. Physical deployment: If we cannot get the gear to the field, then we cannot fight with the gear. Logistics, logistics, logistics.

3. Formation Integration: Again, autonomous attrition is not just about smashing our cheap toys with their cheap toys. C2, good staff work, and units trained in man-machine teaming make operations smoother and more effective. These successes will build upon one another, or they can break the chain if your network of warbots is all built on a broken API.

This is hardly the first time I’ve thought about autonomous attrition: fighting autonomous mass in a war of attrition in the Indo-Pacific is one of the key themes of my first novel, Ex Supra. In Ex Supra, the Americans forego weaponized AI after a backlash against domestic abuses (sound familiar?) and suffer the onslaught of a PLA that invested heavily in warbots. The common American vision of war is usually the highlight reel: the training montage, the missiles flying, the heroic charge into battle, the final assault on the enemy, the survivor walking into the sunrise. Our vision of war, both culturally and doctrinally, is expeditionary maneuver. The idea of staging and deploying thousands upon thousands of autonomous systems in mass, acting in concert with humans, day after day on the other side of the planet is a new one for us but hardly impossible.

The secret to winning a war of autonomous attrition isn’t to solely bet on autonomy, but to bet on man-machine teaming that amplifies the most potent effects of both. We cannot view humans as the weakest link in combat, nor can we afford to ignore how rapidly autonomy has improved for the warbot. Autonomous mass affords us the ability, as a less-populous, less-industrious nation, to survive the weight of attritive battle long enough to wear down the PLA and swing heavy with our advantages in expeditionary maneuver. If we want to win the 12-round title fight, we have to be able to take punches just as hard as we throw them. You have to go into the fight prepared for that knockdown, drag-out brawl in the ring. You can’t just plan for a one-round sucker punch. And we can’t wait until we run out of missiles and ships to start figuring out how to bring autonomous mass to bear 8, 15, 24 or 36 months into the war.

PS: I’ve got a new podcast: Second Breakfast w/ Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Eric Robinson. It’s all about defense tech, policy, and warfare.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the failures of US foreign policy, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

And that’s what attrition warfare is: waking into the same nightmare, clawing at the walls hoping to change enough to break the stalemate.

In simplest terms, the combined arms breach can best be described as the most complex operation on the ground requiring the most planning, rehearsals, synchronization, resources, and bodies. You are attempting to punch a hole into the enemy’s defenses, likely somewhere the enemy has identified you will do so, so your forces can quickly rush through and get behind enemy defensive lines in the hopes of catching them out of position and exploiting this rapid shift of battlefield geometry to your advantage. If you fail, you are caught in the open, there’s a traffic jam of friendly forces behind you and every available enemy asset yeeting ordnance (including artillery-launched mines to trap you) in hopes of making you Go Away. I’ve previously talked about the evolution of combined arms warfare, but in this article I want to specifically focus on the breach because it is the hardest problem and one which spooked the US Army when Ukrainian counteroffensives began failing against well-planned Russian defenses in 2023.

Who does the breaching?

A combined arms breach is conducted by a mix of units operating in sync. Technically, a platoon or company can do it organically against light defenses, but against planned defenses you will likely need a lot more to get the job done. In reality, you’re looking at a Brigade, Division, or Corps level operation (thousands to tens of thousands of soldiers) working in concert to get the job done. Depending upon available avenues of approach (read: potential breach points that support the movement of friendly forces), you can have one or multiple breaching lanes open during an operation. These may all be conducted at once or tied to specific lanes being opened first depending on factors ranging from enemy response to friendly resourcing. In a large scale operation, the breachers are likely combat engineers trained in explosives, mine clearance, wire cutting, and other techniques. Depending on the enemy’s defenses and assets available, the engineers may clear these with anything ranging from wire cutters to bulldozers to Mine-Clearing Line Charges (MICLICs). These engineers are supported by infantry and armor who provide security and direct fire support leading up to and during the operation. Artillery provides cover with smoke shells and high explosives against priority targets, and air assets ranging from drones to helicopters and jets soften targets further behind the front lines to disrupt or delay the enemy response. If the operation is large enough, you’ll even see cyber and electronic warfare operations to strike certain infrastructure targets or disrupt enemy communications to delay their response.

What do you do in a breach?

SOSRA: Suppress the enemy, Obscure their line of sight, Secure the near side of the breach lane, Reduce the obstacles, Assault through the lane.

In a large scale operation you will encounter what we refer to as complex obstacles: different defenses interwoven with multiple obstacles (concertina wire, mines, trenches, etc). You will need to create a lane wide enough for friendly traffic all the way through to a (relatively) safe zone. So you need to synchronize how you work your way through these obstacles in the most efficient manner with the most assurances that those obstacles are in fact defeated. You will (obviously) need to shoot back at the enemy while doing this and you will need to clearly communicate with friendly forces for both safety and effective employment of costly resources (like precision munitions or smoke). You will need to do this quickly because your friends only have so much ammo and so much smoke (measured in tens of minutes) to clear a hole that could be hundreds of meters long. The enemy’s reinforcements are also on their way. So the engineers blow up some mines and cut some c-wire, mark their lanes (so you don’t drive into the rest of the mines) and secure the far side of the breach with the infantry. All this time, everyone is shooting specifically at *you* and they likely pre-planned artillery and other fires because there are only so many good spots to conduct a breach in a given line. Oh, did I mention defense-in-depth?

What’s the modern challenge?

Congratulations, you’ve made it through the breach and have made it to the far side and set up security. That was hell and half of your engineers are wounded or dead. The first tanks are rolling through and pushing forward. Only there’s one small problem….about half a kilometer down the road is another set of obstacles. And then another set 2 km behind that. And so on. In Eastern Ukraine, the Russians rapidly established defensive lines dozens of kilometers deep. Meaning the resources required to breach Russian defenses were enormous, thus either draining resources elsewhere from the Ukrainians or grinding their axis of advance to a complete halt as they slogged with fewer forces than necessary through Russian defenses. This much was present during World War I and shows how quickly maneuver can turn to attrition.

The modern breach is compounded by pervasive and cheap ISR techniques from roadside cameras connected to Wi-Fi for early warning to overhead satellite constellations. And while these systems can be spoofed, degraded, and deceived, it’s a constant battle to poke out the enemy’s eyes while protecting yours. So you have to add even more planning and additional enabling elements to your breach. More subtasks in your operation means more things that can go wrong or threaten the operation by giving away the target. Let’s not forget about the proliferation of precision fires from one-way attack drones armed with collection mechanisms and warheads so they can pass back intelligence to the second and third waves of strikes before they identify and strike their priority targets. This all makes breaching that much more costly and the breach site even more deadly, demanding more and more resources from the attacking force. This is why both Ukraine and NATO nations (including the US) are researching and testing autonomous systems specifically for the combined arms breach. If we can perfect the equation for cost x mass x efficiency for autonomous systems in the breach then we can successfully restore the attacking force advantage. And as an expeditionary force, the US Army favors the attack and maneuver, rather than planning for heavy, slow attrition in the offense (defense is a different story and for another article.)

Where is the Army falling short?

As with many other operational challenges, the Army has spent the last few decades emphasizing precision and exquisite over plentiful when it comes to munitions, equipment, and people. Exquisite systems have their place in modern war, despite what some may tell you, but they can only do so much in such a crowded battlespace. When I did my first combined arms breach at the brigade level at the National Training Center in California, we punched a lane through a single set of complex obstacles without consideration for having to think about doing the same thing a kilometer away or with a swarm of drones in the sky. Pretty much anyone who has went to NTC has done this or a version of it. And it still sucks. And you know what? Even if we tried to perfectly replicate Eastern Ukraine in a training environment, what would be the point?

Sure, training against drone swarms and booby traps is important, but after your third trench crossing that’s not an evaluation of a unit’s combat readiness (which is the purpose of places like NTC), that’s an evaluation of national policy and military force design. Where the Army failed was in thinking that the testing grounds of NTC were the end-all for combined arms evaluations. And to be fair, in 2022-2023 there were maybe a few dozen officers who’d been present for any combined arms breaches in the Thunder Run to Baghdad (which were nowhere near as hard) and maybe a handful that remembered Cold War era wargames when they were junior officers (which even then was still a maneuver game).

Where the Army did focus on new technologies and threats, they focused on the tactical level: how do we deal with mini drones collecting ISR? How do we intercept and outrange Russian artillery? how do we kill Russian armor columns? All of these are important questions but the Army missed the forest for trees. They missed how all of these threats and technologies would combine into one larger picture where a defensive Russian lines extend for hundreds of kilometers and sit dozens of kilometers deep. And for Ukraine, they’re limited by available systems donated or sold by NATO members and by simple manpower. At the end of the day, blood and steel still dominate the mathematics of the battlefield. The US Army is now waking up to this and starting to research and invest in potential solutions, but it’s only the beginning of a new arms race. Even if/when we do solve the equation for autonomous breaching so we can apply fewer costly resources to a greater area, we will still have to throw humans into the breach because surely new autonomous defenses will have defeated the autonomous breachers. Ukraine has demonstrated over and over that technological advantage is forever and rapidly fleeting. Or as MP Ferguson argues in TNSR, humans will become the new high-value target when drones cheaply proliferate requiring us to once again reconsider how we approach warfare.

Why does it matter for the Pacific?

If some day we must once against go to war in Europe, the Army has to have this problem solved. But this isn’t a Europe blog, So what does this all matter for the Pacific?

“Tony, there’s no wide open spaces in the First Island Chain like Eastern Ukraine for massive combined arms warfare by mechanized units.”

Well, defensive obstacles can come in many forms and for many reasons. And you know who has to breach a bunch of mines and terrain-integrated defenses in a short amount of time with armored vehicles while under fire from a world of hurt?

The People’s Liberation Army when it tries to invade Taiwan. You better believe they’re paying attention.

Eventually, we’ll probably have to take a few islands back ourselves. And you don’t want to be the man or woman in the breach figuring this all out for the first time.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the failures of US foreign policy, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

If we want to revive the foreign policy establishment then we have to overcome biases against the inconvenient, reform academia, and build and care for a new cadre of staffers and experts. Let’s begin.

“War is icky” has become the shorthand of a few foreign policy bloggers for the problem within the Democratic party and academia concerning the dearth of military history and operational knowledge. (I can’t remember if I came up with it first or someone else did). It’s not that all Dems are anti-war (far from it) but more that it’s basically uncool to Know Things about it. Knowing the engagement range of a DF-17 is fascist-coded, or something. Well, ignorance is bliss until the other side decides ignorance is a family value. Being a responsible, capable foreign policy analyst and leader means understand all the various realms of foreign policy, even the ones we don’t particularly like. There’s a difference between understanding war and warfare and being a bloodthirsty heathen.

Fixing the “war is icky” perspective requires starting at the academy level. Undergraduate IR students at most programs are flooded with various competing ideas and thematic areas, but very rarely are students introduced to anything that resembles sensible military history. Georgetown SSP’s graduate program actually offers a weekend course to introduce students to military terminology and ideas (this is a Good Thing and more programs should do it.) You can teach military history without blind patriotism, but so is the legacy of Vietnam-era academia that they cannot. It’s a false moral high ground and those who fail to know history are doomed to repeat it.

At the other end of the spectrum, the quality of existing military history programs has been rather sad. There’s only a few big name programs, mostly in the history (not IR) departments, and historians have noted how bad this is for us. Anyone with an eye for critical thinking who’s had to suffer through an ROTC Military History program knows that there are some things worse than ignorance. And it goes without saying that those policy staffers who get their military history from memes, TikTok, or the History Channel are a danger to us all. Reintegrating military history, specifically quality lecture and textual analysis, to the undergraduate and graduate programs of international relations at scale is the only way to remove the “war is icky” perception that plagues the foreign policy field.

The Pipeline

Dropping the war “ick” is only one component of the necessary to the IR training pipeline.

I’m gonna make this clear (and most certainly get hate mail): no one who actually works in foreign policy thinks about IR theory. If you want to talk IR theory, leave it for the PhD track where none of us care what you do. And when I say IR theory, I do not mean things like Schelling’s Arms and Influence or Von Clausewitz’s On War or even the classical texts, I am referring to the overarching schools of thought that have done more to inspire bad policy than good. I dunno how many times people in the field have to say it but literally no one thinks about Realism or Liberalism in Foggy Bottom, the Pentagon, or Capitol Hill. People do talk about centers of gravity, deterrence theory, and the like (even if they are often wrong about them). Perhaps more time spent actually studying and debating the underlying concepts of the foreign policy practice would serve us better. Spending entire semesters on these schools of thought as required courses and trying to drive it into undergrads and graduate students is not only useless but counterproductive to preparing them for the world they’re entering. All of this is to say that reforming the IR field and better preparing students for the burning hellscape of foreign policy requires focusing more on what actually happens in the field and the relevant theoretical texts, not concepts that never leave the ivory tower. When so many of the proponents of these fields lost their minds or sold out to the bad guys, this should be an easy shift.

This brings me to another matter: stop worshipping Kissinger. He was not a grand strategist nor an icon for western liberalism. He bombed innocent Cambodians to hell, sent Latin America into bloody chaos, got rolled by Mao and the CCP, and then spent his later years taking money cash over fist from bad guys all around the world as a consultant while being treated like royalty by the establishment. This isn’t about cancel culture or anything like that, it’s about correcting the record and actually championing people good at their jobs. Kissinger did a lot of harm to American foreign policy in and out of office and it is a stain upon the field to name chairs and centers after him. It’s like handing out first place trophies to sixth place runners up. If the future of American foreign policy when this is all over is fighting authoritarianism wherever it rests its head (as I argue in Why We Fight), then you can’t wear the Kissinger bumper sticker or that of those like him.

Leaving academia, our foreign policy pipeline is plagued by nepotism, classism, and a culture of yes men and women. If you want to promote, shut the fuck up. Never mind the damage to the country or the people. If you want a good internship, hope your dad is at the right country club or that you can afford to work 40 hours unpaid in a new city with a dozen other roommates. In the Army there’s two types of suffering: purposeful and “well that’s the way we always did it.” Making the intern do the grunt work is purposeful, ensuring they remain in poverty for a dozen years after because this unpaid internship got them a 40k a year think tank job with another 50k in loans is the “well that’s how we always did it” with a side of classism if they can pay for it all.

Unsurprisingly, conservative orgs usually pay their interns better and have for years now. It might seem ridiculous but when you’re young and need money and a chance, the office that you don’t like but pays seems like a better option to a lot of people than the one that doesn’t pay at all. Pay your interns and your staff a decent wage and you’ll attract a lot of impressionable young talent that you can mold for years. Let them speak their minds, teach them the difference between critical thinking and contrarianism, show them how to be persuasive and work from the facts. For years Dems and IR academics (rightfully) decried the risk of groupthink and yes men as the driver of the Iraq War, and yet that exact same culture became a tool of promotion inside the foreign policy wing of the party at the end of the GWOT and the start of the Second Cold War. Of course, if it wasn’t uncool to know things about war and warfare, maybe leadership could’ve seen the difference between good and bad policy and more eloquently argued for doing the right thing. Maybe we wouldn’t be at risk of losing our global advantage in scientific research or at risk of losing in the Pacific or abandoning Ukraine. The problem with American foreign policy isn’t some bullshit about masculinity or lethality, it’s about not knowing what the hell we’re doing.

There’s probably a dozen other things I could rant about here, but I think the above encapsulates the basic issues with democratic foreign policy thinking. And to be sure, there are people up and down the chain of liberal schools of thought that do know their stuff. They are just too few to fight the good fight themselves and no singular administration will fix that. The foreign policy class faces an identity crisis and it feels like some are just waiting around for a grand strategy that will justify it all like the second coming of a Messiah. But there is no one else, there is no secret backroom of geniuses waiting for their chance. Grand strategy is bullshit. A strategy is grand when it works and misguided when it doesn’t. The only way you make a strategy work, the only way you manage the massive foreign policy arm of the United States, the only way we win…is by building a cadre of capable, critical thinkers and doers from the ground up. And if you’re just starting out and reading this, don’t give up. Victory starts with you.

So let’s get to work, it’s only the end of the world as we know it.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the failures of US foreign policy, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

At this point, it feels like Admiral Paparo and INDOPACOM’s only option to deter Beijing will be to invade Tampa and overthrow CENTCOM.

In the past 18 months, Iran has fired thousands of missiles and drones at Israel and more than a few at US forces in the Middle East. Its proxies in Yemen have lobbed their fair share of munitions and drones into the Red Sea, keeping the US Navy on its toes but hardly producing real results. Post COVID and Soleimani strike, its clear the Iranian regime ain’t what it used to be. Because in addition to lobbing a bunch of high explosive across the region, most of its proxies and their leadership have been exploded by RadioShack parts. Years of sanctions have hobbled their military’s ability to maintain their machines and their allegedly capable Russian-supplied air defense have been neutered by the Israelis fairly easily. The Big Bad Wolf that every CENTCOM commander and cable news guest has screamed about and stolen Aircraft Carriers to TLAMs from INDOPACOM for the last decade is actually just like…a starved Coyote: feral, but hardly a real threat to your existence.

In its single-eyed pursuit of its greatest enemy in the Middle East, CENTCOM has greatly harmed broader US national security, our ability to deter the actual main enemy in the Pacific, and expended money and resources on a threat that turns out is more like Iraq in 2003 than Germany in 1939. And so now with the latest US strikes on Iran (battle damage assessment pending as of this writing), we wait and see if the Iranian nuclear regime has successfully been delayed another ten years and if the Iranians are going to throw whatever is left at us (which isn’t much). Most likely, we end up in a continuous low-level conflict environment that pops off every few months and that is dangerous enough and scary enough in CENTCOM PowerPoints to DC that we continue to bleed resources on the problem set. Meanwhile, the PLA grows stronger every day.

You shouldn’t shed a tear for a regime that has oppressed, tortured, disappeared, and murdered its own by the bushel, spread chaos and extremism throughout the Middle East, and killed hundreds of Americans with EFPs during the Iraq War. The Iranian regime is undoubtedly evil and independent of second and third order effects, I’d practically yawn at all of this. The concern here is not WWIII, despite what you may see on social media. The real concerns here are tangible security challenges and thorny constitutional issues. As I see it, there are five outstanding issues at hand here:

• The Constitutionality of the strike and US war powers. I am not a lawyer (nor do I ever wish to be one), but I cannot see a reasonable justification through existing law for these strikes. This matters a lot at a time when many American institutions are crumbling. Who can direct use of force and when is a key underpinning of the rule of law both domestically and internationally. For years, we’ve stretched justification for actions around the world under GWOT-era authorities. Even the invasion of Iraq had an AUMF. I’ll leave the deeper analysis to the experts here. Will anyone care? Probably not.

• Nuclear material in the wild. Supposedly the Iranians moved their centrifuges and enriched nuclear materials days ago (I haven’t seen confirm on this, only RUMINT. The BDA will let us know more). If that’s the case, well then this is simply a pause (albeit a significant one if the strikes are successful). Underground bunkers still take a lot of time to build. But how secure is this material, and is there any strategic interest from radicals in the regime in building a dirty bomb as revenge with the knowledge that actually building a real arsenal may never manifest?

• Iranian sleeper cells in the Western World. Countless novels and think tank analysis have gone into the potential threat of Iran and its proxies inserting sleeper cells in the Western world lying in wait for war. There’s not much actual proof in the open source that this threat is manifest, particularly in the US, but yeah maybe avoid large crowds in major cities for a bit (just in case) until we get clarification from law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

• The continuous drag on US resources. Once again, we are burning valuable resources and munitions on a regime that is not the existential threat they have been made out to be. More worryingly, because we have no apparent desired end state (maybe Iran surrenders tomorrow and the regime becomes a democracy, but I seriously doubt it) we have no way to fight the CENTCOM resource beast. We will continue to throw assets at the Middle East because the problem isn’t just quite solved. I don’t think we get pulled into a regime change war. The administration is many things, but they seem remarkably uninterested in replicating the aftermath of Iraq 2003 (even if the buildup to these strikes resembles pre-invasion Iraq discourse). Bombing nuclear sites might seem an appealing policy option but troops on the ground don’t seem aligned with his beliefs or many of his advisors. One way or another, it is in US national security interests for the CENTCOM resource drag to end.

• How the aftermath/success will impact administration views on intervening over Taiwan. If the strikes are successful in their ability to disable the Iranian nuclear program and in convincing the regime in Tehran to stop lobbing missiles and the like, the administration will likely be more encouraged to intervene over Taiwan…or at least threaten it. The problem is that the Iranian military and the PLA are wildly different beasts and the costs and demands of the conflicts practically in different dimensions. Should the strikes fail, or be perceived to fail, in any way, the isolationists in the administration will only become louder. I don’t particularly think these strikes will impact Beijing’s calculus one way or another (unless this drags on for a very long time), but I do think the technical data from the bunker strikes will impact how Beijing continues to invest in its own command facilities.

CENTCOM has finally gotten to strike Iran and not only is it clear that no one has any idea of “how this ends”, it’s clear CENTCOM has been overhyping the Iranian conventional threat for years now. All of this has been at the expense of American capabilities and readiness in the primary theater (as identified by MULTIPLE national defense strategies.) End CENTCOM’s grip on the American foreign policy and give INDOPACOM the money, resources, and priority it actually needs to deter the PLA and keep Americans safe. Regardless of what happens next with Iran, every military history of a US-China conflict will open with how much time and energy we wasted on a middling regime in the Middle East and how much blood and treasure it cost us in the Pacific.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the failures of US foreign policy, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! And don’t forget to subscribe!

At its peak, it has been estimated Ukraine fired tens of thousands of artillery shells per day. In order to sustain this tempo, the UA was able to call upon a portion of NATO’s shell reserves as well as additional production that ramped up after the war broke out. The Russians fired a similar number per day at their height, and burned through so much of their stock that they began making drug deals with the North Koreans to support their artillery barrages. This is to say nothing of the millions upon millions of rounds of small arms munitions, food, water, medical supplies, and other materiel expended day to day on the front lines. Both sides have employed a variety of means to disrupt logistics supply chains from targeted missile strikes on supply depots and drone attacks on critical infrastructure, to sabotage campaigns ranging from the Russian Far East to Western Europe. Roads, rail lines, ships, and planes compose a warfighting conveyor belt that stretches thousands of miles and collides in Eastern Ukraine every hour of every day. A war in the Pacific would be no such fair fight.

There is no series of highways and rail lines from Oahu to Taipei. There are shipping lanes, which are far more treacherous than driving through the relatively safe Polish or German countryside these days. There are few runways on Taiwan capable of handling the kind of air bridge necessary to sustain the fight, presumably all of which would be cratered in a PLA opening salvo. In Japan and the Philippines, we have plenty more air and sea ports, but still face the problems of infrastructure disruption, blockade, and swarms of PLA missiles and sensors from which we must hide, disrupt, kill, or deceive in order to survive.

To make matters worse, that which we fail to defeat will inevitably come screaming at our forces as they make their way to the front lines. It takes a lot of ships and aircraft to move the necessary equipment and personnel into theater. It took 73 C-17 cargo aircraft flights to move a single Patriot (anti-air and anti-missile) battalion in a non-contested environment recently. There’s only about 220 C-17s in the US inventory total (and that’s assuming all are functioning at a given time.) A single Patriot battalion in the Pacific, at outbreak of war, buys us only so much time.

The United States military is not designed to wage a far-reaching, military campaign of attrition against a peer threat in a contested environment. By tradition, the US military is an expeditionary force, and historically, our massive industrial base has allowed us to rapidly scale up production to pivot that expeditionary force into a sustainable mass of firepower. During World War II, the American shipbuilding industry and maritime fleet ensured we could get everything we needed *in quantity* anywhere we needed it, even while taking losses en route. As aircraft became more capable of strategic lift and the US shipbuilding industry declined in the second half of the Cold War, we leaned more and more on being able to get things somewhere *quickly* and after the end of the Cold War, what was left of our maritime fleet and shipbuilding industry really started to collapse. Without a peer and imminent threat capable of shooting down our aircraft, we leaned even harder on our aircraft. Now the problem is the opposite: our aircraft (while still very capable) face a significant threat from a peer, but we don’t have enough aircraft or ships to get the job done. Sure, we can put a Burger King anywhere in the world inside of a week, but if you want to get ammo to the Army and Marine Corps in the 1st Island Chain or the Navy when it runs out of missiles in open waters, the only thing that BK capability will help you with is eating the pain away of a lot of dead Americans.

We have an obsession with lethality. Don’t get me wrong, a lethal military is good when you have to face down the bad guys, but it’s only as good as having the ammo to get the job done. In the last 30 years, we have allowed the logistics capabilities and capacity required to support a fight against a peer threat (China/Russia) to atrophy. And despite countless quotes by famous military figures from Napoleon to Ike to Sun Tzu, logistics is still the red-headed stepchild of military planning. I’ve written before about the necessity to fund and expand the military industrial base to ensure we can fight a Pacific war, but being able to deliver missiles to the right place, at the right time, in quantity, in spite of the enemy’s best efforts to kill you is just as important to deterrence as having the missiles in the first place. If the enemy thinks it can choke you out of the fight, starve your troops on the ground and run your magazines dry, it will gladly do so before grinding its own forces away on the front lines. We strangled the Confederacy with the “Anaconda plan”, the Brits kept the Germans surface fleet mostly bottled up in both world wars, the German U-boats tried to cut Britain off from American aid in the Atlantic and now we and our allies face the same challenge in the Pacific against the PLA Navy. The fact that I’ve heard multiple people use the phrase “getting Guadalcanal’d” to describe what might happen to them is not very encouraging.

Let me break down exactly why this is so bad for us: the USAF and Navy don’t have enough refueling tankers to support air operations in the Pacific. The USAF doesn’t have enough transport aircraft (like those C-17s) to move enough stuff fast enough, especially once you consider possible combat losses. The boats that the Army and Navy have to support intra-theater lift are either nonexistent, undermanned, rusting away, or incapable of defending themselves. If we push too many munitions forward before the war, we risk losing them in a first strike. If we distribute them to mitigate risk, we invite new risk in being unable to mass and redistribute them quickly enough. Yes we do have some civilian aircraft we can call up to support operations (like FedEx), but those take time and aren’t very survivable. Our civilian maritime capacity is incredibly sad, to say the least. In the last few years we have ramped up production of new munitions, but that only solves part of the problem. If we can’t get those munitions to the fight, they’re useless. Some have taken to saying that “industrial capacity is deterrence” but that only matters if you can apply that capacity at the right time, in the right place, with the right people aiming it down range.

So what can we actually do?

Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but there is no quick fix solution here. There is no single system you can build that solves every part of the Pacific logistics equation. What you actually need is a (funded) Replicator-scale initiative for Joint logistics.

So you need quite a few new or expanded Congressional line items (which makes no one happy in this environment).

First, think of a traditional global transportation enterprise. You have a factory somewhere that makes the widget, this widget is then transported by truck or rail to a port of embarkation (a maritime or airport). From there, a ship or plane take it to another hub, where it is once again put on a truck or train to a distribution center, and then finally delivered to its final destination (likely by truck). If I am an international commercial enterprise, I can’t just buy a fleet of 737s and be done with it. I need to either buy, build, or contract our those additional services. And I have to ensure they are all coordinated, likely down to the hour, if not minute. Perhaps I need to invest in security to protect my packages (train robberies in the US are up 40% this past year), or maybe a bridge collapsed and now my ships have to sit outside the port burning money waiting for the transit route to clear and I have to decide when to divert them to another port to prevent a serious loss of income. What if there’s suddenly a new surge in demand for additional product? Well, then I need a reserve fleet to pick up the slack. And this isn’t just about transport, it’s about capacity to resupply under fire and that takes training, a lot of it.

I would argue that from the Joint Force perspective there are five primary groups/lines of effort that need to be accelerated in order to ensure we can actually get to and sustain the fight in the Pacific:

Army and Navy transport watercraft: These are the actual craft transporting material, weapons, and sometimes people to the front lines. Despite the oft-repeated quote about the “Army having more boats than the Navy” (many of these belong to the Corps of Engineers for domestic work and are less than helpful in sustainment), the watercraft the Army and Navy have to get stuff to the fight are mostly old, poorly protected, slow, and unfit for a peer fight. The Gaza Pier debacle highlights this more than anything I can write by myself.

Aerial lift: C-17s and C-130s are amazing machines, and we need more of them. But production lines can only be accelerated so much, and pilots produced only so quickly. Additional medium-range, probably autonomous, lift that is cheaper to produce is required to distribute and mass forces around the island chains and limit C-17 and C-130 exposure to enemy fire. Vertical lift (helicopters) helps some, but only if you can build enough cheaply (and if you can get them in theater). Remember, pilots take a long time to train. Imagine the big birds getting personnel and equipment into theater, and then smaller craft moving that stuff from major hubs to smaller facilities, just like our imagined business. As for aerial refueling, the most recent programs have been plagued by issues. We keep searching for a singular solution when what we need is to invest in multiple classes of tankers at once, in order to cover gaps and ensure we can keep birds in the air even after taking significant losses.

Oilers: This is a catch-all term for the vessels that refuel and rearm the Navy’s gray hulls at sea. The present set of vessels costs a lot of money, and there certainly aren’t enough to go around in a high end fight. More than anything, this is a problem of shipbuilding.

Submarine tenders: We’ve only got two and we’ve got a lot more submarines than that. You can see the obvious problem here if we lose even one due to maintenance or a missile.

VLS-Reloaders: Yes, the Navy cannot currently reload missiles at sea. Yes, that’s an insane problem to have ignored for *checks notes* 30 years. Yes, we are working on it. Yes, again, it’s insane it took this long. If we don’t have these, the ships have to go back to either ports in the Pacific that can be under fire by enemy missiles or all the way back to Hawaii. You can’t hold control of the sea lanes if you have to keep running back home for missiles. Again, this is insane.

Conclusion: So right now, we can’t get our forces to the fight in quantity, the transport we do have isn’t numerous or survivable enough, and can’t be easily replaced if we lose it. We don’t have enough vessels to supply our forces at sea or on land during the fight. All the missiles we buy, warbots we build, and troops we train mean nothing if they can’t get to the fight or if they run out of ammo mid-fight. No one is actually stopping us from doing this. There is no escalatory concern about building another C-17 or some transport boats. Hell, it’s good work for a struggling economy right now. This is a multi-decade failure that we now have uh *looks at the ticking clock* not much time to remediate. America is a global and historical logistics icon, we should be able to get this done.

Build the logistics enterprise, win the war.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the importance of logistics, or what happens when we unilaterally disarm from the AI arms race, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

Note: If you’re new to Breaking Beijing, you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about since you allegedly subscribed to a China policy Substack. I assure you I have a point in here that’s worth your time. But first, I’d like to welcome all of you who joined after my appearance on the China Talk podcast a few weeks ago (which if you haven’t, please check out and subscribe to them!) Now, back to our scheduled programming!

The title of this article references S6 Ep15 of Supernatural, in which our heroes, Sam and Dean Winchester, find themselves cast into a parallel reality where magic isn’t real, there are no angels or demons, and their lives don’t revolve around roaming the American heartland hunting monsters and fighting the good fight. Rather, they live in Vancouver, Canada and they’re something called a Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki who are the stars of the TV show Supernatural. It’s the fourth wall break of fourth wall breaks and as an abnormally patriotic American, some days I feel a bit like I too was cast into a different reality where everything I believed in isn’t real. But I refuse to give into the nihilism that has overtaken so many in this country.

“America sucks” being the only remaining bipartisan issue simply cannot stand. Nihilism is the enemy of opportunity and freedom; the killer of the American ideal. We cannot be the land of opportunity, flawed as we are, and simultaneously subscribe to the idea that nothing matters. That is the core of our global fight against authoritarianism: opportunity vs nihilism. To that end, we need the revival of the American narrative (ostensibly through art and cinema) to keep us in the fight. Enter the latest news that we’re going to tariff films made overseas and the recent news that the CCP will once again be restricting the availability of American films in the PRC. I fear that this, among many other things, is going to lead to a new era of cultural censorship in the United States at a time when our story is needed most, unfiltered. Hollywood is already struggling to keep itself afloat and has partially done so in the past by agreeing to terms of censorship by one group or another.

There’s a complicated history between Hollywood and US national security. It was less than a century ago that moral codes were used by government and industry alike to strictly regulate what the American eye saw on screen. Under the 1930s-60s era Hays Code, most of what I rwrite about could not appear on screen. There would be no Tarantino, no Scorcese, no Kubrick, no John Wick, no Sinners. Many have used the security of society (what most of us would call moral policing by folks who most certainly have no standing) to justify censorship like the Hays Code and others. It’s not lost on me that my own existence would be erased in the era of the Hays Code and its ilk: a patriotic, atheist, bisexual soldier turned strategist and science fiction writer would most certainly not compute (and still doesn’t to many today.) And yet if you look closely enough, you can always find the subversion of rules of old among the black and white. It is perhaps perfectly American that as some seek to silence us, others will always get creative to route the censors.

In the 1940s and 50s, politicians and Feds hunted commies in Hollywood and blacklisted those who opposed the government. Some were commies, some weren’t, but none were put on public trial for anything more than thought crime. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone fought authoritarianism at home and abroad through science fiction and parable on the television. The Civil Rights movement and sexual revolution found home and hostility in Hollywood as various groups and powers fought for the dominance of the American mind through the screens the American family watched religiously. All the while, our biggest hits broadcast around the world, providing hope and opportunity to the oppressed masses who wanted a better life even as we battled each other in the streets and halls of government. The American narrative sells tomorrow, no matter how awful the today, because we at least have the opportunity to make things better. This is the duality of Americana.

With the rise of the PRC market after its opening in the latter half of the Cold War, Hollywood became increasingly uncomfortable with any films that criticized the PRC or even went beyond the limits of showing China in a way that the CCP would not show its own citizens. You see, there’s a lot of moviegoers in the PRC and a lot of censorship to “maintain social harmony.” The PRC only allows a certain number of outside films to be shown each year, a number that varies by political sentiments and corruption. Vanity Fair and the Hollywood Reporter have actually done outstanding reporting on this in the last decade. Most famously, you may remember the Red Dawn remake that had the CCP switched out for the North Koreans as the baddies. You may also remember the weird Chinese product placement in the Transformers movies. There’s about one major exception to this rule and it’s not even a film, but a blockbuster video game: Battlefield 4.

Now, I could sit here and complain about my lack of quality media about the US-China fight, or even just showing the CCP in an honest light (the latter is a far more valid complaint), but that’s not what I’m going to do. I’m not in the business of telling Hollywood what to make, and neither should the USG or the CCP. (But if Hollywood wants to buy an Ex Supra-related script, I’m working on one). As the US and CCP trade barbs on trade (including film production, somehow), I can only hope Hollywood takes the opportunity to revive the subversive Americana that we are best known for. Hollywood has welcomed overseas censorship for decades, that cannot be allowed to come home. Show the America we know, film it where the story makes sense, tell our stories, and don’t bow to the new wave of attempted cultural censorship that is inevitably coming stateside. Don’t give into nihilism either, remind us of who we are and what we can be. The American narrative must survive.

I suppose this is all part of my grander scheme to reclaim patriotism for the liberal democratic order. The first step of which is battling nihilism, and we can only do that through owning the narrative about ourselves and our country. I’ve written before in “Why We Fight” that America is a nation built upon choice. The 1st Amendment guarantees your right to choose how to express yourself and your beliefs. Soldiers sign on the dotted line because they want to live in a world where they and their families and friends get to choose how to run their lives without harm to one another. Capitalism, when properly regulated, gives you the ability to choose how to use your money, how to live your life, what careers to pursue, and how to get hammered on a Saturday night. When those choices go away, or appear that they might be taken away; we start to remember. We see their true value just as those who were inspired by American cinema, by the American narrative, to risk it all and emigrate here saw their value.

Hopefully we can still get back to our reality.

P.S. If you like real film critiques more than my rambling nonsense, I recommend subscribing to Sophie from That Final Scene, I do!

If you liked this article, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

-Prax, The Expanse

I like to consider it my business to be an observer of macro trendlines, I’m a strategist and science fiction writer, after all. More than a particular stock or sector, I understand systems and how to break them. Looking at the chaos of the last few days, I could just write an article about why (most) tariffs are bad, but Matt Turpin has already done that quite well in his Substack. For those who don’t know Matt, he was the China Director at the National Security Council in the first Trump administration. He’s one of the two Matt’s still worth listening to from that period (the other being Pottinger.) His piece is a little more sympathetic than I’d be, but I also recognize the specific audience he’s trying to grab by the shoulders and violently shake back to reality in a very calm voice. In pop culture terms, we’re somewhere between The Big Short and The Ganymede Incident.

So rather than duplicating Matt’s work, I want to step back and talk about what I’m afraid comes next: cascading damage to multiple sectors of the American and global economy. As of now, I see three specific critical risks that can generate a cascading event: depletion of cash reserves of major institutions and funds, the price of money for the consumer and major player, and supply chain shockwaves. (Note: Nothing in this article should be considered financial or legal advice, simply a collection of observations.)

The American economy is a massive ecosystem. Like any ecosystem, there’s a safe threshold for pain and prosperity. Markets go up and down every day. If I dump a gallon of gasoline in the wetlands, I’m an asshole, but the wetlands will recover. If I set the wetlands on fire and slash the fire department’s tires when I was hired on the expectation that I’d preserve the wetlands and even grow more Mangrove trees…well, you see the problem.

The thing is, everyone was betting on the economy growing like its 2019. We really needed those Mangrove trees. Despite the fact that tariffs have been an obsession of POTUS since the 1980s, and policy analysts (myself included) have been warning that the backstops (like the Matt’s) in place during Trump I are not present in Trump II, people kept believing it was all woke hysteria. *gestures at the inverted red arrows on your computer screens* Not hysteria.

Wall Street fund managers and CEOs are losing their minds behind the scenes even more than they are on CNBC. Markets around the world are tanking. Of the biggest whales, it seems only Warren Buffett properly protected himself as best as anyone could. As of Friday, the market has lost at least $5 trillion in value and early looks at the Asian markets say that trend is going to continue. Of course, it’s also not just Wall Street. Your 401(k) is tanking too. Everyone is feeling pain with absolutely no clear path to prosperity.

It’s important to remember that despite some of the more effective industrial policy and legislation put into place under the Biden administration, there were already a few warning lights going off about the economy. People had jobs, but their credit cards were maxed out or delinquent, student loans came back online after being paused during the pandemic, car prices never really dropped after the pandemic, broader supply chain aftershocks from global conflict and Covid gunked up the works, the housing market is a proverbial crime, interest rates are up, and the tech companies that felt a second wind during Covid were coming back down to the reality of being multi-decade old bureaucratic corporations instead of being the new cool kid on the block. Inflation on a year to year basis was down by 2024, but the basic prices never came back down from pre-pandemic levels. In other words, we recovered from covid but came out wounded and every day we woke up staring at those scars and looking nostalgically back at 2019. This nostalgia put us at risk of ignoring the broader systemic risks in the ecosystem and now we face multiple paths to cascading calamity.

Cascade Path #1: Priced Out.

To quote a friend on Wall Street this past weekend:

“Dude, we were already pricing in perfection.”

This collective hope for a new booming economy in spite of all evidence to the contrary is central to my cascading thesis. America needed the economy to boom. To do nothing about the economy would be one thing, we could stroll along a little crippled but maybe heal on our own as long-term trendlines point up. But to unleash a new wave of uncertainty, and then overdose on tariffs against everyone including the world’s most adorable bird is a whole other story. And even when bad policies normally hit, Wall Street is pretty good at “pricing in” the risks of a policy or global event. In fact, I spent a fair amount of time in a former job trying to help people understand why decoupling from the PRC is the only way to “price in” a war over Taiwan. By all appearances (and through conversations I’ve had w/ folks on Wall Street and Capitol Hill) it seems the vast majority did not price in this wave of tariffs. They really did not think it would happen, and if it did, it would be minor hits against the PRC (which they would price in). What does this mean? It means that the pain to be felt from these tariffs (and market panic) is beyond the bounds of our healthy ecosystem. And so the real question for everyone is: a trillion here, a trillion there, when do we start talking real money? At what threshold do the safety barriers break, and major funds and banks are left exposed to real damage because they didn’t keep enough cash on hand for this typhoon of a rainy day. Here there are two threats: 1) the big tycoons of today run short on cash, leading to larger market slowdowns. 2) That those core financial institutions begin to bleed real blood and not only collapse their sectors, but bleed over into other sectors partially due to Cascade #2.

Cascade #2: The Price of Money

In order to manage inflation, the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates. All this means is that the “price of money” has essentially went up. You might have noticed this if you’ve tried to buy a car or home in the last few years. At the macroeconomic level, this impacts how corporations do business and conduct long-term planning because at its most simplistic it impacts the cost of expansion because it costs more to borrow from the banks. Sure the Fed could still lower rates to take some of the pressure off the costs of the tariffs, but it would also run the risk of inflation returning. The Fed at this stage is caught in the doldrums, and thereby so is the US economy. And that is where the pain returns to the consumer: either the price of *everything* goes up because tariffs impact everything or inflation returns and the cost of *everything* goes up by devaluing your hard earned dollar. Either way, if you’re one of millions of Americans with high credit card debt or student loans, you’re facing some very difficult decisions in the future. And that’s assuming that the tariffs and price of money didn’t force your employer to layoff large segments of their workforce or postpone expansion plans in order to stay afloat. And that’s how the price of money feeds into cascade #3.

Cascade #3: Supply Chains

Here comes the national security punch (you know, aside from setting the economy on fire and pissing off all of our allies): we need things from other places. Even our defense industrial base depends on raw materials from friendly and non-aligned actors. And even the things we do have here will be impacted by the prices of others. These are basic economic facts. We will see the first shockwaves from the tariffs in global supply chain as orders are paused or held in port to figure out what the hell is going on. These will compound as the entire conveyer belt of the global supply chain slinkies like rush hour traffic. This will drive additional costs for the consumer and corporation (see above) that will wreak havoc on a fragile economy. And these shockwaves, unlike the others, will come in iterations as longer term orders come due or contracts are renegotiated. For the US defense industrial base (and I assume other sectors), many contracts are fixed price contracts. This means that the prices pre-tariffs will be paid to companies for some amount of time, but those companies will still have to take the hit on costs immediately. Then when contracts come up for renewal, suddenly the cost of a missile is going to be a lot more. Defense budgets don’t take too kindly to bleeding economies in democracies if we’re not at war, and so it’s very likely that should these tariffs continue long term, you will see an even greater decline in US defense production. The US’ inability to respond to a crisis, both politically and militarily, will undoubtedly result in some country invading another. The worst case, and most likely at this point, is a war between the PRC and Taiwan that as I’ve detailed elsewhere, would go off like a nuke at the center of the world economy. So whatever we gain out of the minute amount of industry that returns to the US from these tariffs, we lose because the entire global economy, and perhaps the Pacific itself, is set aflame.

The Endgame:

So what happens if calamity cascades? Well, like Ganymede Station in The Expanse, we live in a fragile, artificial ecosystem: the market may be dead already and we not even know it yet. Personally, I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but it’s gonna get bloody. If the fallout from the tariffs starts to cascade down the paths I’ve described, not only may we be helpless to stop calamity, but we may drag the world with us. My outlook for 2025-2035 was never great, I wrote a whole book about it (which includes a great recession kicking off in 2025), but this is a nightmare I’d prefer not to endure. Should this continue (and I suspect it will) unemployment will rise significantly, the world economy will slow significantly into recession, US financial and political influence abroad will decline rapidly, PRC influence (if they don’t shoot themselves in the foot as they tend to do) will grow, and the US economic and political systems will continue to unravel if left unchecked. We’re all going to feel this pain.

It’s important to remember that the three cascades: risk pricing, the price of money, and supply chains don’t have to flow in one direction. They can all bleed over into others. Supply chain shockwaves can drive inflation thereby forcing the Fed to act and/or driving consumers and companies into debt. The price of money may drive a few corporations of billionaire tycoons into bankruptcy because they didn’t price in the risk of tariffs, crumbling corporate empires that may lead to huge changes in the employment landscape in the US and around the world.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll all wake up and tariffs will be illegal and the Fed will lower interest rates. I rate those odds at about 5%, because anything can happen. At best, we will see perpetual uncertainty as we bounce back and forth between high and low tariffs…but as Matt Turpin points, this administration is built upon the idea of a “trade independent” America even though that is a thing that cannot like, physically happen. The one permanent truth of globalization, no matter the policy, is that we don’t have everything. No one does. Mercantilism is on the ash heap of history because it doesn’t work and yet here we are. The only real advice I can give now is brace for impact.

If you liked this nightmare, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

So goes the line from hundreds of military writers, leaders, politicians, and that podcast bro at the bar. And yet in war, the simplest things are hardest: accurate shooting, coordinated movement, clear communication…hell, even deciding where to sleep.

Shoot, move, communicate.

These three actions lie at the heart of all warfare. For all the drones in the sky and electrons fired in anger across the internet, all of warfare can be simplified to three functions (four if you’re a logistician). But not if you listen to the endless barrage of pundits, grifters, and know-nothing staffers. A lot of people who should know better want to pick their favorite weapon of the week as a magic victory button and a lot of people who want to sound smart parrot those talking points. You’d think we’d discovered a new dimension with unknown physical laws every time we build a shiny new toy. Blood and bone still hold ground, soldiers still die in the mud, and the end game is still to close with and destroy the enemy. That’s the nature of warfare. The shape that takes as culture, tactics, and technology evolve is what’s known as the character of warfare. But what does that all mean in 2025? Well, I thought I’d take the time to lay out a 101 brief on modern warfare, our ongoing technological evolutions, and what it means for the next battlefield.

What is combined arms warfare?

For the uninitiated, combined arms warfare is a symbiotic, team effort. Rather than just infantry (what you think of when you think of soldiers) marching through a battlefield to meet the enemy or long-range missiles rocking targets to break the population’s will, we synchronize these operations with others to make them more effective. Tanks with their armor and big guns work with nimble infantry to seize and hold ground, engineers clear gaps in minefields or other obstacles to open a new path for the tanks and infantry, helicopters and planes provide cover from above and strike deep in enemy territory to incite chaos, artillery blows up large formations of all of the above. Combined arms warfare is a symphony of destruction. When we work together, it’s a beauty like no other. When someone plays out of tune or misses a note, the enemy notices and tries to exploit it with their own music.

The Road So Far

Prior to the 20th Century, you had direct-fire cannonry, cavalry, and infantry working in concert from the perspective of a field general. But that wasn’t quite combined arms warfare as we think of it. Infantry stayed in infantry formations, artillery with artillery firing on their own targets, and cavalry either acting as reconnaissance or to flank the enemy and cause chaos in the rear by themselves. These groups still perform versions of these functions today, but beginning with the development of the wired and then wireless communications you begin to see experimentation with more synchronized effects. Rolling barrages of artillery from miles behind the front lines march forward ahead of infantry, horse cavalry is replaced with armored cavalry (tanks) as they cross trenches and push through other obstacles, and the first airplanes conduct reconnaissance and even limited bombing missions. These effects are coordinated and synchronized, forcing the enemy to have to deal with multiple challenges at once at the most opportune time, instead of sequentially or simultaneously in a way that is easier for the enemy to manage. Imagine the difference between getting jumped by two kickboxers in an alley vs someone punching you and saying “ok, your turn!”.

What you think of when it comes to combined arms warfare really comes into being through the experimentation of the interwar period between WWI and WWII, and implementation on the fields of global battlefields of WWII. Through wireless communications (radios), infantry and tanks begin to work in concert. Infantry clear buildings and take and hold ground while providing security for tanks (tanks can only see and shoot in so many directions at once). Tanks meanwhile provide additional firepower and security for infantry. Scouts, infantry, and anyone else with authority and a radio can call in artillery on enemy targets and even guide friendly aircraft on target with strafing and bombing runs. What people often get wrong about early German successes in WWII is that it wasn’t their superior tanks that won them the battles against the French, Poles, and Soviets alone. The elite German panzers we think of actually came a little later. The Germans were able to execute their blitzkrieg against the Allies in France so well in 1940 because they were early, large-scale adopters of radio communications so they could coordinate fires and maneuver on a much larger, faster scale than their early opponents! This, combined with their emphasis on mission command (allowing small units and lower commanders and NCOs to take initiative without detailed direction) gave them an early edge against the Allies. Up above, bombers are escorted by fighter planes and conduct strategic bombing of critical targets behind enemy lines to weaken their ability to get to and support the front lines. While air defense cannons fill the air with flak and lead as they try to down their prey.

After the war, we see various improvements to the capabilities of air, armor/cavalry, infantry, and artillery. Aircraft getter better engines, payloads, and guidance systems. Tanks get better optics, firepower, and armor, along with the mass adoption of mechanized infantry to keep pace with tanks. Artillery grows more powerful, becomes more mobile, guided missile and rocket artillery complements the traditional cannonry, and air defense artillery begins to develop capable surface to air missile (SAM) systems. We also see large-scale adoption of a few others: special operations forces (SOF), helicopters, electronic warfare, and of course, nuclear weapons. SOF provide exquisite capabilities from the ability to support targeting ahead of friendly and behind enemy lines, sabotage, direct action raids, and more. Helicopters provide improved medical evacuation, reconnaissance, airlift of troops and materiel, and close air support against tanks, vehicles, and soldiers. Nuclear weapons inspire a thousand nightmares and are the subject of separate but still relevant conversation. Over the last 50 years, weapons become more precise with guidance systems ranging from lasers to GPS to now emerging self-targeting capabilities (what you may think of as a *component* of autonomy). Digitization, various telecommunications technologies, and of course the internet all add to evolution of combat. Satellites provide intelligence and early warning, and strike at each other with lasers, electronic warfare, and even kinetic attacks. Yes, even the proverbial blue-haired hacker is a part of combined arms warfare in the 21st century, writing code for pre-packaged battlefield programs meant to take down drones via unprotected datalinks or striking deep in the rear on enemy infrastructure via a string of zero days to delay a counterattack as our forces seize an objective. And for all those ones and zeroes, the billions in R&D to create the perfect kill chain, the shiny toys on display at your local defense conference, we’re still beating each other to death in the mud over inches of ground and the person beside us.

Shoot, move, communicate.

The Character of Warfare in 2025

So where are we in 2025? Well, that’s the thing about the character of combined arms warfare: it builds on each past evolution. Infantry and tanks still communicate via radio on the move just like in WWII. Just now we have real-time map displays on internal computers, encrypted radios, thermal optics, and small UAS to throw up to improve situational awareness. Aircraft fire missiles from hundreds of miles beyond the target, led on target by internal software or third party guidance. Artillery still kills by the bushel, and even in an age of precision, massed fires are still the King of Battle…particularly in GPS and communications denied or degraded environments. If you’d like a brief read on what combined arms warfare looks like in Ukraine, I recommend this post that includes an interview with a Ukrainian commander.

In 2025, a hypersonic missile can fly thousands of miles to strike a single target built on the backs of days’ worth of intelligence collection, analysis, deception, and SOF-enabled targeting behind enemy lines…and simultaneously, a few blocks away one guy can beat another guy to death with a shovel in the same war for the same piece of ground.

The Future Starts Slow

But like, where are we going? I was promised my warbots. YOU, Tony, promised me my warbots.

To be fair, I told you how to build a robot army. And we’re working on it. You will get your warbots. You just won’t get your sanitized version of war to compliment the fiber optics and silicon. So as we build our warbots, as we put them in the field, toss them in the mud, and slam them into the enemy…we are doing this in concert with the flesh and blood of soldiers, the steel and advanced energetics of a 155mm artillery barrage, and the synchronized airstrikes of an F-35 squadron paving the way for the advance on the ground.

Enter Combined Minds Warfare.

I’ve written about this before, in fact, I coined the term. Where combined arms was about the different mechanical functions of war working together, this is about those functions linking in with the machines that have the ability to observe, orient, decide, and act for themselves. It’s not about replacing human with machine, but rather maximizing the speed and efficiency of each when they work together.

Warbots for enablers

At its least complex, the warbot is a sensor package. It can sit and observe, it can hunt, and it can collect on everything from weather to the presence of WMDs. These sensors already exist, you’re just throwing them on something that doesn’t require a human to sit bored for hours, days, weeks. Or you can use it to perform tasks, like large-area reconnaissance, that would take a human team a lot longer (though you still may need humans to confirm the results of that reconnaissance, sensor collection is not perfect and warbots break.) You also don’t have to constantly monitor or fly it like you would a Predator drone. Tell it where to go, what to look for, and report back when able. Analysis of what it sense may be on board, it might be in the rear with a larger processing system. Humans interpret this data and the results and feed it into their larger analysis. This data then goes into human decision-making at the tactical, operational, or strategic level. In other words, warbots are able to stay out in the field longer and in harsher (or more boring) conditions, collect data, and use that to enable how the larger force can shoot, move, and communicate.

But collection missions aren’t the only support function: Ukraine has used unmanned vehicles for casualty collection and there has been talk of using unmanned construction equipment to build fighting positions and the US is actively discussing how to make these work for their own formations. Why is this so important? Because the security required (bodies and guns) to protect construction missions and evacuation teams is significant, and for MEDEVAC, two to four soldiers are needed to carry every one injured soldier. If the warbot can do these jobs, that places a lot less stress on the frontlines, particularly while they’re under fire from the enemy.

Warbots as Fires.

Most famously you may think of the the First Person View (FPV) drones in Ukraine by both sides that seek out targets from on high, track them, and come screaming down for the kill. Some of these are human operated, some simply require humans to arm the warhead or sign off on the kill, some not at all (though these are very crude at the moment). The US Army actually classifies (for a few reasons) these sorts of drones like the Switchblade 300 as munitions, not UAS. And I think this is correct, FPV and other UAS carrying warheads (either internally or like traditional bombers) are just the latest evolution in a form of tactical fire support. They exist somewhere in the triangle between close air support, long-range missiles, and artillery depending upon capability and mission set. Fires support both the shoot and move functions. Obviously, they shoot and kill things. But they can also enable maneuver through the suppression of enemy fire and disruption of enemy maneuver. The warbot that can loiter on station and send back reconnaissance data to other warbots while it hunts a target is an extremely effective form of fires, the Russians have used it to great effect for both long-range strike and direct support ahead of ground maneuver in Ukraine.

For example, imagine an operation where UAS go forward and identify priority targets for more traditional artillery, once identified and passed back to the gun teams, the UAS go into attack mode and strike at counter-battery radar systems, preventing enemy artillery from striking back once your artillery hits its targets. This isn’t a drone replacing traditional artillery or aircraft, but making their existing functions more effective.

Warbots for Maneuver

The purpose of the infantry is to close with and destroy the enemy, seize and hold ground. Blood and bone hold ground because if your people aren’t on the ground the enemy didn’t want you to have, then why are you fighting? Human presence is the physical representation of the political change sought in war. A warbot is just a machine, and does not carry with it the same socio-political significance of a human marching down your street. Though it can still kill you.

The warbot in maneuver is the least developed of these three lines of effort. It is the very embodiment of “shoot, move, communicate” and so it requires the most complex tasks in the most complex and challenging terrains from the open oceans and littorals to urban hellscapes and swamps. You are also expected to survive the maneuver fight so you can push deeper into enemy territory or hold your own ground for longer. This requires the warbot in maneuver to be more rugged, durable, maintainable, and to carry a larger magazine. In order to build, test, and deploy these at scale on land, air, and sea, you need to build on the fires and enabler lines of effort and combine them into a single system. And the larger you build, the more complexity you introduce. That’s why you have to start small first. That’s how we evolved and war is no different.

The most common image of the warbot in maneuver in media is the Terminator robot, or something akin to it, but we’re far from that. Unmanned tanks and gun trucks are the most immediate innovations on the ground in the now and near future, and their counterparts at sea are also growing in firepower, range, and complexity. We’re also seeing combat engineers adopt these systems readily, as Sappers have some of the most dangerous missions in combined arms/minds operations: entering and opening the breach.

Imagine using using unmanned systems to clear paths in minefields, reducing human exposure in the breach and drawing enemy fire, while sappers finish clearing and marking paths for the rest of the formation to pass through and attack the enemy.

The Ukrainians have launched small raids with their new warbot forces with some success. Although the cost of these individual systems is quite high, and getting them to the reliability of manned systems will take time. War is the ultimate innovation lab, and the Ukrainians have led the way in a lot of novel and evolutionary progressions in all three major domains of warfare. But they’re not the only ones.

How do we win the age of combined minds?

Defense primes and startups in the US and around the world are chasing the evolution of the warbot, but there is a gap between our present and near-term abilities and the public’s understanding of those abilities. The challenges of technological maturity, ruggedization, mission relevancy, and production at scale keep planners awake at night, but overconfidence in a shiny toy makes me just as nervous. No matter how shiny the tech or extensive the lines of code, all serve the basic functions of shoot, move, communicate. If we lose sight of that, if we choose to chase silver bullets, we will open ourselves up to the kind of failure we cannot easily recover from when the shooting starts. The priority for the US is preparing for a war over Taiwan, something I’ve covered extensively in this blog. And so the priority of warbot research is focused on that fight, and it covers every domain. The high-tech fight may get the news coverage, but on the ground and at sea, it will be the bloodiest of knife fights that can only be won by the successful coordination of man and machine.

In war, the simplest things are hardest. The elements make them harder. Rust, moisture, dust, cold, heat, etc. are things that annoy humans but they don’t deadline our bodies on their own. These evolutions also don’t replace exquisite systems, but rather augment them. Why burn an F-35 for a mission that a few bots worth 1/5 the cost of a single F-35 can achieve under the same conditions? And why burn hundreds of bots when the stealth, payload, and range of an F-35 can do the same damage?

Threats come and go, war and people evolve, but no matter the challenge, if we can focus on mastering the triad of “shoot, move, communicate" in all that we build; then the age of combined minds warfare can still be won.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when we unilaterally disarm from the AI arms race, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

The first senior NCO I ever met told us that one day soon we’d have to be prepared to fight our domestic enemies, possibly even our family. He was not well, and we all knew it (I think). Our 1SG told us he wished he could just take injured soldiers out back and shoot them, as we ran past an injured soldier hobbling along trying to finish our run (and certainly not quitting). I watched drill sergeants take hours of their time at the end of the day to make sure their people were trained on their tasks, who took no greater pride than growing new infantry. The best imbued us with wisdom that I still quote to this day. It’s a strange love to worship the man who makes you hold a rifle squat for half an hour in the Ft Benning heat. Several fellow recruits were recovering addicts, some former college athletes, others just your average American. All joined for different reasons, all held together by common purpose.

My first platoon leader complained that West Point didn’t teach him doctrine. He had a Ranger tab and a bunch of other chest candy. I, like many, had a company commander I would’ve went to hell and back for. Had a few others I would like to forget. Had a 1SG who was loved by everyone (myself included) and called me the dumbest smart guy he’d ever met (fair). I had a first line NCO who I drank with and worked on cars with in the barracks parking lot against regs. He was a self-described conspiracy theorist but also really good at his job and once woke me up by tossing PBRs at my head. Another my ex referred to as “SSG Kill Yourself” because that’s how he greeted me for the first six months I knew him. I leaned into it and told him the arsenic was taking a while. We were later roommates overseas.

I had a roommate who probably broke every regulation in the book but was good at PT and so he promoted and joined the airborne. I’m pretty sure I almost died one night because he angrily drove off from a Sonic after a waitress rejected him and he insisted on Tinder swiping while driving. I nearly died half a dozen times in cars going 120 miles an hour on the backroads and highways around post with people whose names I can barely remember. We all laughed and drank together, some cried together. Some chased each other with stun guns in the barracks on a Friday evening. One guy forgot to shower off the industrial lubricant for the guns before he uh, went to relax. You could hear the screams down the hall. Nearly all of us were in bad relationships. We all came through for each other when the breakups eventually happened. The first time I ever puked from drinking was because me and two E7s had to help a guy get past a breakup via Jack Daniels.

Some had side jobs, some took college classes at night, some published papers, and others had three dependents on an E3’s salary. We ran from MPs and kept each other from getting our asses kicked by the local cops and frat boys alike. We towed each others’ cars when they broke down and talked shit on them when they worked. Sometimes we sucked at our jobs, other times we felt invincible. No matter how we felt, we made sure to complain. This is the way.

Some of my fellow gunners pissed hot for an assortment of drugs. Our Platoon Sergeant once quipped that he could skip the Friday DUI brief, since we were more of a druggie platoon anyway. I had more than one NCO pitch me on steroids (just take cranberry juice, you’ll be fine they said). Back then, I could take pre-workout at 1900 and still be in bed by 2200.

I had a battalion commander that nobody really liked and he didn’t quite care, yet he took me under his wing. I sometimes learned what not to do by watching him, but he also made me learn how to plan at the battalion level. That dude could fucking plan. The first time he told me to do COA dev at 2100 with “the other LTs”, I thought he was joking. He was not. Surely none of this made me look cool to my fellow E4s, nor the LTs and CPTs who had to babysit me. But I learned, a lot. The jump start I got on operations planning for mechanized units is why I’m good at what I do today as both a strategist and science fiction writer. He was probably the only actual mentor I’ve ever had, and if I saw him today I’d still be more than a little nervous about his judgment.

Despite being an atheist, I once had a thrice-divorced chaplain who I got along swimmingly with. No one showed up to his sermons, but everyone went to him for advice up and down the ranks. One of my sergeants major had a theater kid and would sing along to Katy Perry, though he’d always deny it. Another assured folks they could keep crossbows in the barracks so he had hunting buddies (this was questionable.)

When I got my own soldiers, I changed. That burden of responsibility, the honor of responsibility hits different. It’s a high and a weight. I fucked it up more than once. I was an angry kid. Most of us were. I had to feel myself out, learn when to use my temper and when to be the disapproving but stable leader (hint: the latter works better most of the time and makes the former more effective.) I got a lot better down the line as my responsibilities grew, helped by good NCOs beneath me.

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I’ve had real shitheads and hard chargers, the kind that would make you proud 40 years from now and the kind that on more than one occasion had me up at 0200 driving to the scene of a domestic incident. I’ve had real crafty soldiers who could fix anything and others who could break track just by looking at it. Another I had to escort to jail more than once, with a senior NCO mocking him the entire way because he was sick of his shit. I once surveyed my section and everyone had been beaten or abused in some way as a kid. They still showed up to work every day and served their country. I knew single fathers who somehow kept it together, making me feel only somewhat more disappointed in my own deadbeat dad. I knew single mothers who took all the shit in the world from every asshole in mouth breathing distance just for being a woman. I’ve known soldiers to battle hunger, alcoholism, homelessness, mental illness, assault trauma, and more. But also none of that matters when you’re in formation or in the mud with the guy or girl next to you. But the thing is, you don’t need to stop caring about people just because you’re not in a foxhole with them.

Some had legions of family that had served, others were the first. Their service was all worth the same. One of my proudest moments was when one of my soldiers finally got his citizenship.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve known some of the best and worst people you’ll ever meet. And they’re all American.

Compared to the Federal budget, the foreign assistance (not including the arms trade, which is handled by DoD/State) budget is quite small. Since 2001, it has hovered around one percent. For most of the Cold War, we spent almost 5% at our peak and by 1989, we were at about .9%. In other words, foreign aid has remained largely flat compared to other federal expenditures. A majority of Americans believe we spend roughly a quarter of our budget on the rest of the world, that is flat out wrong. There’s a few reasons for this belief, I think some of it has to do with scaling things in billions when the median American salary is in the five figures and because it’s always easier to take political shots at money going overseas than it is at waste or even effective similar programs deployed at home because the poor country overseas doesn’t have a seat in Congress. It’s easy for folks to forget in DC that the money that’s played with is on a scale that 99.99% of Americans will never touch, and it’s their tax dollars. We as Americans are perpetually caught in a push-pull between the righteous sense to help others, and to also feel that DC is neglecting us. In most other countries, when someone on the other side of the country gets federal help, it’s a three hour drive. In the United States, it could be a whole continent away. So when we talk about foreign aid, it might as well be talking about another planet. I say all of this because it’s important to contextualize what I’m going to say next: that foreign assistance saves lives, especially American lives, thousands of miles away.

About 3/4 of foreign aid is spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health, split relatively evenly. Economic development can be anything from digital banking support to rebuilding businesses after war so people get on with their lives and don’t keep fighting. Humanitarian assistance can most famously be thought of giving out food and water to starving people, usually in the form of rice grown by American farmers. And then there’s health: which goes to things like vaccination programs, basic clinics, and PEPFAR (the HIV/AIDS prevention program started under President Bush) which is lauded as one of America’s greatest contributions to humanity. Now, if you know your bible, you know that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are war, famine, plague, and death. Foreign aid directly fights three of them, the DoD fights the other one. And when foreign aid works well, it even prevents war from breaking out or escalating by reducing the conditions for conflict (like say, who gets control of the limited food or water). So yes, vaccination programs, clinics, early monitoring programs, humanitarian assistance to conflict zones and the impoverished parts of the world all do good work and they are both morally good and good for America. Growing global economies, healthy people, less conflict, all means American can invest more in itself in the long run and can trade and grow with an ever richer list of friends around the world. But let’s say you don’t buy any of that, what’s something that really hits home? Let’s talk about how it could save you or your son or daughter on the battlefield when the war still breaks out (because while foreign aid is helpful, it is not a panacea.)

Let’s say the day has finally come and the PLA is making the run for the beaches of Taiwan. It didn’t matter whether we committed to the fight or not, the PLA didn’t care and struck a carrier in the Western Pacific. We are at war. An F-35 goes down over the South China Sea while slinging anti-ship missiles into the enemy fleet. They bail out over any of a half-dozen countries who may not be involved in the war but whose governments may lean one way or another. Your eldest son or daughter is wounded and limping in the jungle, the authorities after them because they weren’t cleared to enter their territory and are afraid of CCP retaliation. Desperate, your son or daughter seeks refuge in the local fishing village and is given aid and a place to hide at great risk because the family they stumble upon remembers how USAID or other assistance saved their own kid from dying of a preventable disease, fed them after a typhoon, or helped their kid go to school. Meanwhile, the combat search and rescue team dispatched to recover you is tipped off to your location by a local who remembers how they helped her leave her abusive husband and start a small business through a digital banking grant program. Your son or daughter gets to come home because your government gave help when they didn’t have to do so. Foreign assistance doesn’t come with a 10X return like a Silicon Valley unicorn because sometimes the ROI isn’t always quantifiable. But if I tried to quantify it, I would say that American foreign assistance buys us good will by helping foreign families, so Americans get to be home with theirs.

At scale, these programs make whole governments, today or in a decade, friendlier to the United States, to democracy, to our way of life. They become our allies in war, they make trade deals with us, and they fight the bad guys when we cannot. Countries saved from plague or famine, democratized by an educated populace, liberated from poverty by investment, join us when it counts. We rebuilt Europe after WWII to fight the Soviets and spread of communism. By today’s politics, the Marshall Plan would be condemned as Marxist or woke. Today as we fight for influence against the Russians and Chinese, foreign aid and the investments we have made for decades stack the deck against the tyrants. There’s a reason the Russians and Chinese have long spewed propaganda against USAID and American foreign assistance and are gleeful at its potential demise. The stories of American kindness spread and build good will, they build favor, and they fight the brutality and subservience that Moscow and Beijing hope to spread. We build alliances that deter and defeat the bad guys because we build a network of good guys. We help people, we kill commies. That’s the job. You give up on one part of it, the other is much harder.

There are countless stories like those above where we saved lives or found bad guys because people recognized America as the good guys, even by the smallest action. Ending foreign assistance, slashing it significantly, or turning it into a pay-to-play game puts us all at risk. Does it always work? No, no program does. But it’s a small risk to take for democracy, peace, prosperity, and health.

One last note: if you really don’t believe the profound impact that small kindnesses can have on someone’s life that they would risk theirs for a stranger, then I don’t know what kind of life you’ve lived.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when we retreat from the world, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It’s even an audiobook now! It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future articles, please send them my way on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

— Root, Person of Interest

It's no secret that Jonathan Nolan's Person of Interest is my favorite television series of all time. A five-season epic that starts off as post-9/11 paranoia crime of the week episodic and steadily grows into one of the best written stories about artificial intelligence, humanity, and the role of the state. As the AI arms race between the US and China heats up, there is perhaps no better show to help understand the current state of affairs and why the unveiling of China’s DeepSeek should be an inflection point for the US, particularly for the national security community. In fact, I would say there is no piece of fictional media that should be prioritized more for consumption by policymakers, leaders, and pundits than Person of Interest (stop watching Sicario). Please indulge me for a moment as I explain and then I’ll get into my real analysis of DeepSeek, chip restrictions, and US AI investment.

In the United States, it is nearly impossible to talk about AI development without some allusion to the Almighty. It goes like this: first we build narrow AI (what we have today), that somehow gets us to AGI (equivalent of human capacity and capability) and one iteration after we get an ASI (an intelligence greater than our own capable of growing on its own beyond our comprehension). Thusly, many of Silicon Valley’s titans apply a religious component to the future of AI. Some fear AI as an engine of creative destruction, others a benevolent savior removing the burden of work and governance from humankind. And yet none should ever have that sort of power or claim to be able to create it. Machines are not gods, they are tools, they are our created, but they are not and cannot be god. I’m not a religious man and this has nothing to do with blasphemy, but rather the very real human fault of hubris. This leads us to my favorite tv show. In Person of Interest, the core philosophical (and physical) battle between the good guys and the bad guys is whether an ASI should be a servant of humanity or its omniscient ruler, and whether a machine (or a person) can be inherently good, bad, or simply the product of decisions made by algorithm and by creator alike. So why does this matter for us? Because if we don’t understand what we are building, what we are buying, and the underlying challenges, issues, and implications surrounding artificial intelligence beyond headline hysteria, we will fail. We must understand that not only would the CCP’s development and deployment of a superior artificial intelligence spell disaster for the free world, it will also be our fault if we obsess over the mystical instead of reality. With OpenAI’s Sam Altman and others claiming that AGI and/or the Singularity is just around the corner…until we all look under the hood and realize the model of the week is just another hallucinating chatbot, it’s a bit hard to take AI development seriously. I’m a long-time proponent of both AI research and weaponized AI. We will get there. I have little doubt we will someday achieve AGI and perhaps even greater, but not like this.

In other words, we have three serious problems when it comes to our AI programs: grift, bloat, and cults.

The Bloat

DeepSeek provides us with a glimpse into alternate development pathways for AI, compared to what the titans of Silicon Valley have assured us is the only way to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in artificial intelligence. To be sure, I am not arguing that DeepSeek’s model is the One True Method, but I can tell you that it's clear there is a lot of bloat and waste in American AI development. The lean, innovative companies and culture of early Silicon Valley have now all morphed into bureaucratic nightmares. Nor can you simply throw money at a problem until it goes away without a clearly articulated strategy that isn’t just “we’re gonna build god.”

It’s rather novel but I’d also like to point out that there is a key cultural difference between the US and PRC that has, in this specific case, likely aided in DeepSeek's development: Chinese developers certainly for political reasons cannot market themselves publicly and to CCP leadership as attempting to build god. They are simply building a machine to help the Party. To build god would be to make the Party irrelevant, and that cannot be tolerated. If a Chinese engineer asked for $500 billion to build god, they'd be disappeared. Chinese political and economic culture is built on graft and patronage, so it should say something when their companies can do something as big as develop DeepSeek on the relative cheap. It should also say something about the misdirection and resource allocation of their US counterparts.

The Cult

At its core, the development of any level of artificial intelligence is an engineering problem. But to many in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, the development of even an AGI is a stepping stone to a new deity. They want, hell they must, believe that AI will be able to solve all of the messy problems of humanity and democratic governance. AI is a mystical problem to them, not a scientific one. And if you truly buy into the cult of an AI-deity, can you really put a price on divinity?

As I wrote two years ago, we should not fear the god from the machine but the man or woman who wants their machine to be seen as a god. So much of the AI industry is grift, and the only way to keep selling when the grift doesn’t deliver is to rely on belief rather than replicable proof. The American philosophical obsession with AI as the new god, and thus the pursuit of it as some sort of holy crusade for humanity's redemption, is our chief impediment to actually appropriately resourcing the problem. You cannot apply the religious to the scientific and assure your flock that a large enough donation to the pastor and a sip of Kool-Aid will grant you enlightenment with no evidence to support such a claim. That is not the Manhattan Project, that is Jonestown.

The Grift is Real

It would be incredibly inaccurate to say there has not been tremendous progress in the development of narrow AI like ChatGPT and autonomous weapons systems. Yet somehow in press releases, briefings to the USG, and demonstrations, Silicon Valley has done nothing but overhype and underdeliver. We cannot accurately assess the progress of ourselves or our competitors if we bet on the marketing department instead of production. To believe every lobbying pitch, everything is AI-enabled these days. A string of If-Then-Else statements, Samaritan does not make.

Please understand that I'm not overhyping DeepSeek's development either as some sort of Sputnik moment. The fact that the Chinese managed to develop an effective, cheaper, and censored AI chatbot is entirely consistent with how they've been developing and operating in other fields, particularly weapons systems. It's probably also true that they have their own marketing issues, development failures, inefficiencies, and grift. I wouldn't be surprised if the PRC government secretly offset some of the cost/resources but the larger development community seems to believe that DeepSeek is not a theater performance. Gone are the days where we should bet that the PRC’s incompetence outweighs our own. DeepSeek is only the latest evidence smacking us in the face that the CCP is not fucking around and that quite frankly, modern Silicon Valley and venture capital runs more on its own hype than delivery. The enshittification of the internet is proof of that.

Our policy response to DeepSeek cannot be a crash of resources without any sort of substantial, critical review of Silicon Valley's hype machine. Nor should that be the response of the private sector. No longer are the giants of technology in America nimble organizations, they have become what they sought to disrupt. If we're going to make this the age of efficiency, maybe we start with asking why we need $500 billion dollars to build an abstract concept when the PRC can do what we do for far less? Both government and industry are signing off on AI projects left and right without any serious analysis on ROI. We’ve seen this before in every panic from the H-Bomb to GWOT. If we do not pause and review our AI investments and methodologies, the PRC's AI sector is going to turn us into the Soviets of the 1980s as they chased SDI: overspending and resourcing in a panic while failing to keep pace with the Main Enemy. If we want to win, if we want to keep the CCP from leading the world’s AI revolution, we have to cut the bullshit and give Silicon Valley the scrutiny it deserves. Money doesn’t solve the problem if we’re just burning it for a fancy light display.

On Chips Restrictions

There's commentary out there that this success was driven by the CCP's necessity to innovate under sanctions and restrictions. But I think we need to flip the argument on its head: where is our necessity to innovate? Is that not the American claim to fame? Perhaps we have fallen behind (or at least become complacent) because there is no necessity to innovate, no sense of urgency, no rigor attached to design. The Chinese design for DeepSeek, born of necessity, reminds me a lot of the shift in supercomputer and chip design in the 1970s when instead of building larger and larger, we pivoted to building smaller and ushered in a new age of computing. DeepSeek (most likely) cost more than the $5 million claimed, but it's fairly obvious it's not going to cost Silicon Valley's $500 billion either or however much we’ve spent on the latest ChatGPT model. When efficiency is the name of the game, a blank cheque only invites failure. You need a forcing function to drive innovation.

Relatedly, some folks are making the argument that our restrictions on chips to the PRC led to this necessity-driven innovation, and that's why we shouldn't have cut off chips. To that I'll say, let's play this out: the PRC gets a bolt of success and we should give them even better technology to advance that lead? As Jordan Schneider points out, this doesn't really line up with the relevant deployment timeline of chip restrictions. Nor does it match internal commentary from DeepSeek investors about the long-term need for more compute even if efficiency is the short-term game. Never mind that many of us, including China policy heavyweights like Bill Bishop and James Mulvenon, were critical of how the Biden administration handled the chip restrictions because they were too little, too late, and had some glaring holes. It's clear that not only did we buy our own bullshit, we underestimated (again) the quality of talent and ecosystem for innovation in the PRC. We are not fighting the Soviets who hoped to just copy our technology, the PRC actually believes in innovation. For all of its brutality and bureaucratic absurdity, we are fighting an enemy that is far more like us than we care to admit. We have to learn to accept that.

It’s clear that design efficiency matters, DeepSeek proves it, but compute power remains our advantage. Anyone worth their salt knows AI development is dictated by three main factors: compute, data, and algorithms. DeepSeek has an effective set of algorithms on an efficient design. Everyone has plenty of data. And we have the high ground (for now) on chips. Chip restrictions slow the PRC’s ability to scale the success of DeepSeek,. Where these chip restrictions also still matter is in restricting scale and protecting proprietary designs that may not have helped with DeepSeek, but may help with other critical technologies development like weapons systems or even other AI designs. If DeepSeek teaches us anything, it is that innovation (particularly for AI) is not carved along a single path and our strategy must simultaneously close as many paths to the CCP while exploring more on our own.

On Censorship

My secondary policy concern regarding DeepSeek is that it is yet another case (like TikTok/Rednote) where Americans are more than open to playing with machines that censor them to a point of comedy. Have we as a culture become more complacent with censorship in exchange for capability, is it because we have endured years of claims about censorship that wasn't really there, or is it because we don't believe PRC-style censorship could ever happen here? I don't like any of these answers, but this is an area that especially now is something to watch as we develop new AI models and forms of interactive media for a wide range of purposes from education to military decision-making. I do worry about a world where we default to the quality of Chinese technology and the cultural and political norms that are sure to follow. If we fail to overhaul our AI investment and development process, that is exactly what will happen.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when we unilaterally disarm from the AI arms race, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on Twitter @Iron_Man_Actual and on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

Geography and Climate

The Arctic is a beautiful, hellish place. No matter what your policy interest, you have to understand that you are not operating or investing in the Mediterranean Sea. Geographically, the Arctic has several subregions composed of varying types of geology, weather patterns, wildlife, and indigenous cultures. The Arctic of Scandinavia or Russia is not the Arctic of the Alaskan North Slope. Lines of communication at sea and ashore can vary wildly year to year and even within the calendar year. The cost of hydrocarbon and mineral extraction is high short of major supply chain crises elsewhere, and even then that high extraction cost makes long-term investment by corporations a difficult risk to write off without long-term state backing (like PRC-RU joint ventures). For its residents, the cost of everything runs high from vegetables to fuel to heat homes. GPS and other satellite resources function poorly at high latitudes, and basic infrastructure like paved roads, waste removal, and reliable emergency response personnel are a lot harder to come by. In American Arctic communities, climate change threatens to drown coastal towns and dry up Salmon populations for which the people rely on for commerce and sustenance. There may come a time soon when the USG is faced with a choice of investing to protect Alaskan coastlines from flooding with expensive barriers or invest in relocation for the coastal populations (this is also a likely threat to the people of Southern Louisiana and other low-lying populations). Oh, and then there’s the exploding methane pockets.

Resource Extraction and Territory

The Arctic is a live, lethal experiment in the collision of climate change and human commercial evolution. As climate change destroys the livelihoods of the indigenous Arctic peoples, it opens new opportunities for outside investors (and potentially to save the indigenous economies.) Tourism is the most ready commercial option, with a new Arctic cruise through the Northwest passage now running in the summer months (at some tens of thousands of dollars per ticket). Then there are the more traditional resource extraction industries for hydrocarbons, rare earth minerals, timber, fish, and ores. Despite decades of political posturing, resource extraction is not easy and cheap in the Arctic. It is not a quick business success nor is it a solution for America’s energy or industrial woes. We are now the world’s largest hydrocarbon exporter, which makes additional extraction not worth the investment in such a harsh place with long supply lines and uneasy political support. Rare earth extraction and traditional ore mining is easier to invest in (the North and West slopes already have seasonal mining operations), the problem is that the raw materials are often then shipped off to the PRC or elsewhere to be refined. Thus, this extraction makes us no more secure if we cannot refine these materials at home or in a friendly nation. Overfishing is a real threat to the Arctic ecosystem, and what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Moreover, climate change is making entire species disappear or relocate that it threatens the stability of the Arctic economy today. Finally, these raw materials are most often transported by ship through the Bering Strait, thus leaving them vulnerable to interruption in a time of war to commerce raiding unless we can dedicate substantial resources to their defense. The Port of Anchorage is a singular point of failure and risk for the Alaskan people and American commerce, bringing in and sending out a large swath of critical supplies and resources. Resource extraction in Canada has fewer infrastructure problems than Alaska, but Greenland faces the same if not even more hurdles to actual, reasonable investment risk and ROI. On that note, building traditional infrastructure from housing to bunkers can be a challenge due to melting permafrost. To keep it simple, when the ground thaws it can not only cause the soil to shift, it can force structures upward. This is why when you build basements in temperate environments in the US for your houses, you have to consider the depth to which the ground will freeze in the winter.

If you think resource extraction is costly, then think about the insurance market. The insurance market for everything from oil platforms to massive container ships is hardly low for the Arctic even in peacetime, and while its getting cheaper, its not yet overcoming other chokepoints like the Suez and Malacca Strait for route priority. There’s very little resourcing available for securing or recovering ships in the event of calamity, and the cost of an environmental catastrophe in the remote Arctic still looms large with minimal true policies in place to manage clean up logistics. Nobody wants the ship they own or insure to become the next household name like the Exxon Valdez. There are three famous routes through the Arctic that grow a little more available every year. These are often pointed to as the new South China Sea routes by champions of Arctic investment. The opportunity for large scale traffic flow is not there yet, but just because it may take another decade or so for the scales to flip doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in the supporting infrastructure today. Industrial policy is back, if you can stomach it.

Operations in the Arctic

So now that you have the basic geographic and economic layout of the Arctic, let’s talk about the military and security factors that shape and are shaped by the High North.

The Arctic technically belongs to three US commands. EUCOM owns Greenland because Denmark manages Greenland and our Scandinavian friends belong to EUCOM. NORTHCOM/NORAD owns Canada and Alaska, and INDOPACOM has interests in Alaska-based units because of their response time to a major contingency (war) in the Western Pacific. This setup is super annoying, but it is what we have to work with and I’ll be honest the power sharing agreement we have here is better than setting up a new Arctic four-star command on par with NORTHCOM. I would prefer we not build another backwater bureaucracy and the theater-level Alaska Command that falls subordinate to the combatant commands works just fine.

The preeminent forces for the Arctic are a bit wonky. The Coast Guard does a lot of day to day work from law enforcement to scientific research support (and they own our icebreakers). The Army trains in the Arctic but the quality of those forces for actual Arctic operations is undergoing an overhaul. Light airborne infantry and SOF are the name of the game here. National Guard troops also play a big role in search and rescue. The Air Force/Space Force have a lot of stake in the Arctic both because of the need to track and intercept missiles and aircraft aimed at the Homeland and because of the early warning site and ground communications relay at Pituffik Space Force Base in Greenland. The Marines have a rotating presence in Norway, but beyond that they’re busy elsewhere. Absent here is the Navy, but not really. The Navy’s operations in the Arctic are largely silent because they belong to the silent service (our submarines) hunting other submarines and conducting deterrence patrols.

The Russians and PRC meanwhile have wildly different postures in the Arctic. The Russians invested a lot in infrastructure, equipment, and troops of the Arctic in the 2010s. Then they ran them into a sledgehammer in Eastern Ukraine. The resulting need to rebuild the Russian Army in the middle of a war and salvage the bleeding Russian economy bought us some breathing room to improve our Arctic posture without needing to panic. However, it also opened the door for the CCP to leverage its investment in the Russian war machine to push for greater access to the Arctic both in terms of investment in resource ventures and for joint maritime security agreements. Previously the Russians were super opposed to PRC presence in the Arctic at any level but their hand was forced by their own stupidity.

The PRC meanwhile has a long way to go before it establishes a military presence in the Arctic or before it can even maintain long-range patrols up North, but they are trying. In the past, the PRC has tried through various state-backed corporations to buy up land and access in the Arctic and most often they have failed (including in Greenland). Nobody, not even the Russians, wants them up there and everyone (especially with a little pressure) has been pretty good about keeping them out until recent. Keeping them from buying up land is one thing, keeping out their scientists is a lot harder but a manageable risk for now. The point is that both the RU and PRC threat in the Arctic is manageable right now, but we ignore the region at our own peril to only one day wakeup with a very different reality under the midnight sun.

Much like resource extraction, it is costly to maintain a large-scale military presence in the Arctic. It’s certainly much easier on land than at sea, but none of it is particularly easy. In terms of basing, just like on the Pacific islands, it is an expensive and temperamental endeavor: construction materials are pricey with long delivery times, and building “to code” costs a lot more in the harsh climate. Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expand basing in our Arctic and even in Greenland. There are a lot of sensing and air cover gaps and I would rather have a few extra barebones airfields and bases available for surge capacity than to be stuck without adequate operational support in a crisis.

For maritime operations, the only real port the US has in the Arctic is at Pituffik and that is for the purpose of…seasonally resupplying the base, not supporting a DDG squadron. Airbases and airfields are easier to maintain and build, but the shifting ground from melting permafrost can challenge design reliability (this is a threat to all infrastructure in the Arctic that isn’t built with ground shifting in mind). Everything is harder in the Arctic, except dying. If you want a new port in the Arctic, you can’t just dredge next to a coastal town. You probably have to build all the supporting infrastructure line road and rail lines and power lines to support it (as is the case with the Port of Nome). Basing in the Arctic matters for everything from early warning for nuclear missile strikes to fighting the PLA in the Western Pacific. Commercial viability or not, USG investment in Arctic infrastructure can’t be pushed off.

If You Build It

Politics aside, ambitions like buying Greenland do little to change our strategic posture in the Arctic. It’s still NATO soil and we already have basing there. This is to say nothing of the benefit of the Danes paying for the costs of managing Greenland where we don’t have to. It would be one thing if the people of Greenland were voting to leave Danish rule, but they are not (yet). The rest of our Arctic territory explains exactly why it won’t change anything: if you don’t invest in infrastructure then it doesn’t make us any more secure or wealthy. We’re already far behind on securing our present Arctic territories. Remember that of the 8 Arctic nations, 7 belong to NATO and the other is Russia. If we want to make the Arctic a priority for 2025 and beyond, we should consider the following:

-Invest in our science agencies. Climate science isn’t just for studying climate change, it matters for everything from commercial exploration to submarine navigation. These agencies need more collection vehicles, sensors, and funding for research.

-Research and build climate-resilient infrastructure. This goes for everything from military bases to commercial ports and seawalls. Climate mitigation isn’t just about carbon capture, it’s about mitigating the damage to our people and infrastructure that is already underway in the Arctic. The lessons learned early in the Arctic could pay dividends elsewhere in the world, but the lessons will hit first in the Arctic.

-Lean heavy on unmanned systems. The Arctic is a harsh place for people and machines, but the supply lines for machines are a lot shorter than for manned systems and they can endure a lot more. The North American Arctic coastline and waters are a lot of ground to cover and persistent sensing is going to require large investments in new systems. We only have so many resources, and while the Arctic is a long term priority, it is not THE priority. The INDOPACOM and EUCOM theaters still (rightfully) take priority for the limited number of big grey hulls.

-Expand the shipbuilding industrial base. This is already partially underway thanks to a US-Finland-Canada memorandum on a joint venture to build new icebreakers. This is a huge opportunity and might not only help kickstart the icebreaker fleet but also make the whole US shipbuilding industry more resilient by generating more long-term demand for skilled workers.

-Expand US refinery capacity for raw materials like rare earths and other ores. Extracting resources from the Arctic only works if the CCP doesn’t have access to the supply chain, otherwise we’re just making it easier for them at the expense of national security for a few corporations to make some cash.

-Rather than pursue territorial annexation with extremely risky investment ROI, negotiate for additional basing in Greenland. It supports American and NATO security in the North Atlantic while minimizing the cost to US taxpayers and to our public image and relations with our European partners.

-Expand SOF training for the Arctic and dedicate an SF battalion to Arctic operations out of JBER. If you want to fight in the Arctic, you have to live in it. The most likely scenarios for Arctic combat operations for land forces demand a light footprint and Arctic-conditioned training and endurance. The ability to target and conduct reconnaissance, sabotage, and other SF missions in the Arctic requires an intensive familiarity with the environment, people, and logistics of the Arctic.

Conclusion

The Arctic is an alluring problem set for the investor and national security leader, it is also deadly. The Arctic is a slow burn and we need to build policy and infrastructure for it that takes that timeline into account. The Arctic may not be a global crisis today, but when it becomes one, it’ll be too late to start preparing. If you want the Arctic to be profitable, if you want the US to remain dominant and deter incursions and threats from the High North, if you want to be able to respond to and protect the Arctic from environmental catastrophe or even if you just want the indigenous Arctic peoples to live their lives in the way they want to…you have to build the infrastructure to make it happen from seawalls and roads to airfields and research stations. Land unused, facilities neglected, or alliances weakened by infighting does not make the Arctic more secure. Nothing new happens in the Arctic without a lot of money, relationship-building, and a willingness to think about ROI in terms of decades instead of the next election cycle. In other words, the Arctic is an infrastructure problem.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when climate change shapes our battlefields, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on Twitter @Iron_Man_Actual and on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

The first time literacy manifested as a real national security concern for me was years ago in infantry basic training. One of the first events you go through in the US Army is a leadership confidence course. You do a series of teambuilding activities and get the absolute dogshit smoked out of you. You also read Medal of Honor citations at each station, and that’s where I watched a number of my fellow recruits struggle to read aloud the stories of those who came before us. What a welcome to the Army. If you can’t read well how can you decipher orders, how can you understand battlefield intelligence, how can you effectively communicate? The Army will tell you brevity, clarity, and precision matter; the Army has also slaughtered the English language in its professional development courses, lending no favor to those who already struggle. This should’ve been the canary in the coalmine for me when thinking about society writ large, but admittedly I didn’t think it was that bad. I thought it was an anomaly: an issue for soldiering on a complex battlefield but not necessarily for the whole country.

The truth is that the United States faces a literacy crisis, and visual social media only makes it worse. Contrary to popular belief, the data suggests it started long before COVID hit, even if the pandemic made things worse. No, I’m not talking about the evolution of the English-language in the form of textspeak and Gen Z-isms as we gather online but rather the ability to comprehend the meaning of whatever textspeak or formal words we use in life and work. Language evolves and always will, the Bard himself added many a new word to the English language. Lack of comprehension, not the presence of invention, is the threat. Literacy is the underpinning of critical thinking and contextualization. Without comprehension of the written word you cannot contextualize the modern world and leaving ourselves vulnerable to abuse. If the only source of media we consume is decontextualized TikToks, Instagram Reels, viral tweets and AI-manufactured Facebook slop, then we are collectively regressing as a society. If you are not sufficiently literate then you cannot fact check, you cannot challenge presented truths in fractured realities, you cannot even understand when you are being deceived because you have no comparative means. Social media and the way we consume media is just the symptom, our no-shit reading comprehension skills are problem.

It’s not that we are raising a society without an alphabet, but rather that we collectively cannot read in a manner and at a level that enables us to survive and thrive in society without leaning on the malevolent and/or idiotic influencer as a crutch. If you can’t understand the statistics, the geography, the verbiage in an article, thread, or video, how can you hope to know what isn’t true? Conspiracy theorizing and fake news propagation is on the rise partially because the decline in literacy and critical thinking means people are more prone to make illogical linkages. In policymaking, particularly in national security, we talk about how to improve the American education system to prepare us for tomorrow so we can compete with the Chinese Communist Party. We talk a lot about graduating more coders and STEM majors, but that does us no good if they too cannot contextualize the world around them. Consider the following:

Combatting Disinformation

We’ve faced a disinformation crisis for sometime, it’s hardly new. But because we’ve been unable to fight the root causes: data compromise, algorithm abuse, absent critical thinking, societal and financial incentives that promote falsehoods and ignorance, we have been unable to gain an edge. We cannot elect leaders and train tomorrow’s who are capable of ensuring our prosperity if we do not know how to assess them and how to navigate the flood of bullshit in our feeds. Even worse, what happens when the enemy steals the keys to our systems or abuses our algorithms and ignorance to their advantage in an age where narrow AI can be deployed to feed you bullshit without the need for the vast troll farms the Russians relied on in 2016. Critical thinking and literacy is our best defense against foreign disinformation campaigns, but instead we have unilaterally disarmed.

The Chatbot Singularity

As we’re making Americans dumber, the bots are getting smarter. The real singularity isn’t the creation of an artificial superintelligence (aka new god) as many in the tech futurist community theorize, rather the inescapable gravity well of doom will emerge at the intersection of declining human literacy and growing chatbot intelligence. In other words, what happens when the chatbot becomes smarter and more reliable than the real human online? What happens to social trust, critical thinking, human development and any sense of community when the default assumption online (or in person) is that the human will hallucinate (generate false results) more often than the AI? At its most existential, there is a direct linkage between this upending of human trust and the proverbial Skynet scenario: handing our nukes to the machines. But for most scenarios the threat is far more simple: we become a society where truth is held with more disdain than narrative and that drives bad policy, bad governance, bad outcomes for all Americans because we stop thinking twice about pulling the wrong lever.

What happens online is more often than not connected to real life these days. We are consumed in our digital worlds and to argue that the digital doesn’t transfer to our day-to-day would be to ignore all manner of election results, rhetoric, and even military operations. The machines are coming whether we like it or not, and the inevitable human abuse of those machines is coming too. I wrote about that back in 2022. The only path to survival in a democratic society under these conditions is to never get caught in the pull of the singularity in the first place. That only happens if we improve our collective ability to critically decipher our fractured realities, and that starts with reading.

Our education system, and therefore we as the proverbial policy elite, have failed to ensure the basics remain strong. Like with other aspects of policy, we bet on the eternal positive growth of the American economy and society in a unipolar world. We bet on a consensus that a lot of people didn’t agree to and we failed. The gap between the have-reads and the have-not-reads is growing. For all that emphasis on not leaving a child behind, we left a lot of kids behind who are now voting adults who consume a lot of dumb media and live in their algorithmic echo chambers, and that includes some of us to our left and right in our policy circles! You, yes you, may also be a child left behind. When it comes to basic education and the staying power of critical thinking, it matters less if your 8 year old can read Dostoevsky and more that at 18 he can tell you what it means. Education is a lifelong journey, and it’s clear from the data that we stopped ensuring that journey continues uninterrupted. So what do we do?

Get hooked on phonics, baby.

No, seriously, the solution is to return to what some have deemed “the science of reading” which includes an re-emphasis on phonics. But it doesn’t stop there.

Once we rebuild the foundation, we have to invest in programs that promote reading not just for testing but for life. We cannot stop once someone becomes literate, we must promote skillful reading that takes the training wheels off and doesn’t simply push students to graduation.

Finally, some of you may be asking what we do about the people around us: our family members, our friends and colleagues caught in their fractured realities. Well, short of regulating the algorithms in a way that doesn’t incentivize bias and conspiracy (good luck with that), the adults are kinda SOL from a policy perspective. This is more of a long-term play for the future of America, not so much for its present. However, what YOU can do as an individual is work in your community to promote critical thought, to check your own biases, to fund literacy programs, and to bend the algorithm back by boosting think pieces and positive debate over conspiracy theories and hate. Culture is shaped by people, not policy. And at the end of the day, we can choose to be a culture of thinkers or not. No one made you rot your brain, they’re just taking advantage of the fact that you did.

If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when AI-enabled disinformation is operationalized for war, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on Twitter @Iron_Man_Actual and on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!

Ex Supra is the story of the war after the next war. First published two years ago, Ex Supra was my first full-length novel. It started out as a one-off short story for the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare program many years ago. When I finally published the full book, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect to be recording my own audiobook at audience request! To my surprise, Ex Supra was nominated in 2022 for a Prometheus Award for Best Science Fiction novel.

Ex Supra is part cyberpunk technothriller, part military science fiction. To tell the story of our many possible futures, I put a lot of effort into getting the politics, science, geography, and operations right. I drew on my experiences as a soldier and policy staffer, with more than a few nods to the films, books, and video games I grew up on. Oh, and even a few nightmares.

You’re likely subscribed to this newsletter for my China commentary, well, this book puts into (fictional) action many of the ideas and approaches I write about in this newsletter. The book has made its way, largely by word of mouth, through the halls of Congress, the Pentagon and interagency, and Silicon Valley. I’m currently working on the sequel.

I think my favorite review was from my friend, Chris Dougherty, who said:

“It’s as if Tom Clancy and Philip K. Dick dropped acid and wrote a cyberpunk thriller inspired by Apocalypse Now about a US-China war.”

But if that hasn’t sold you, you can read the synopsis below. You can also read sample chapters:

The Fall of Taiwan

The Missiles on Maple Street are Fake News

As Above, So Below

The Synopsis:

In 2024, Taiwan fell.

In 2035, an AI-driven disinformation campaign turned us on ourselves. We became the enemy's first strike weapons, and as we set fire to our own country, the People's Liberation Army seized half of the Pacific. From the first combat jump on Mars to the climate change-ravaged jungles of Southeast Asia, EX SUPRA blends the bleeding edge of technology and the bloody reality of combat.

In EX SUPRA, the super soldiers are only as strong as their own wills, reality is malleable, and hope only arrives with hellfire. Follow John Petrov, a Ukrainian refugee turned CIA paramilitary officer, Captain Jennifer Shaw, a Green Beret consumed by bloodlust, and many more, as they face off against Chinese warbots, Russian assassins, and their own demons in the war for the future of humanity.

Buy the audiobook here.

And if you prefer good ole fashioned hardcopy or a digital copy, you can find them here.

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