Of history, warfare, leadership, and alcohol
By A Deployed Advisor Advising is a dangerous job. Indeed, it seems to be rapidly becoming the most treacherous combat occupation, because unlike a normal "fighting" role, advising requires long, patient, and intentionally vulnerable periods in close proximity to foreign and, unfortunately, sometimes hostile individuals. It necessitates a relaxation of the traditional reflexes of self …
Continue reading "The Killing of Major Taylor"
So we’ve all written – or read, or heard – a plethora of operations orders, so much so that we can probably recite them in our sleep. This short post isn’t meant to be an operational primer but rather to help redirect order writers back to the single most important part of the order – …
Continue reading "Wait, Whose Intent? The Role of Commander’s Intent in Army Order Writing"
Okay, so can we all admit that as military officers, we’re actually just another category of gigantic nerds? I mean, military society itself can basically be broken down as a cosplaying socialist death cult, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say, the officer corps contains its own special levels of nerdiness. This is to …
Continue reading "If Military Commissioning Sources were Hogwarts Houses"
We talk a lot about mentorship in the military, but for most of us, we don’t have a good example of what that even looks like. It’s not as though there are mentors dropping from the sky to deliver words of wisdom whenever we need them. No, we’re more likely to end up Googling our …
Continue reading "When the Force is Not With You: Mentorship and Star Wars"
By Jared James The Rebel Alliance is going to lose, not because they are outnumbered, but because they have no model on which to base plans for their campaign. There are essentially two kinds of insurgent campaigns: city-out or countryside-in; Leningrad, or Yorktown. The Rebel Alliance is fighting both of them wrongly, and has few …
Continue reading "Rebel Insurgency: Without Hope or Method"
As we move through the centenary of the U.S. experience in World War I, I've had several people ask me for book recommendations on the topic. Which is tough, because when someone generally asks me for recommendations my head goes blank and I mutter something about "Good Omens" (seriously, phenomenal book, nothing to do with …
Continue reading "Reading List for the U.S. in World War I"
By Matt Wright Accident Investigation Board - Rebel Alliance T-47 Airspeeder (Field Modified) Battle of Hoth, 3 ABY Executive Summary During the disastrous Battle for Hoth, a locally modified version of the Incom T-47 Airspeeder was engaged in close proximity to advancing Stormtrooper infantry and heavily armored All-Terrain Armored Transport (AT-AT) units of the Imperial …
Continue reading "If the Hoth Crash was an Air Force Investigation"
First off, no, this is not a discussion on the merits of leaders within the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars universe, though if it were, I'd have to say that the Rebel leadership had very few merits and we should probably not emulate their chaos-based approach to warfare. What's I'd like to talk about is disruptive …
Continue reading "Being a Rebel Leader: Disciplined Disobedience in the Army"
In the U.S. Army we have a long tradition of victory - or so we tell ourselves. We proudly carry the campaign streamers from past conflicts on our unit colors and enjoy hearing about the exploits of past heroes. Victory is our expectation. But what if that isn’t what happens? Now, I’m not talking about …
Continue reading "Training for Defeat"
By Sasha Maggio A classmate commented on my post for the week, and the post was largely on SIGINT but in one part I make a tiny little comment about how sometimes things like radio could be used to broadcast narratives to particular “target audiences” like how the Soviet Union used it to garner public …
Continue reading "Cake and Perfidy: the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia"
The Angry Staff Officer 
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