Donald Vandergriff

Friction at the Source: Tom Rogan’s Assessment of Trump, Colombia, and the Cartels as a Maneuver Problem

Donald Vandergriff — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:10:29 GMT

Introduction:

Tom Rogan has written a clear-eyed piece that does what too little official commentary still does: it treats the Latin American cartels as a strategic problem rather than a law-enforcement inconvenience or a talking point. “Trump Has Cartels on Heels with Columbia Help” (the Examiner’s headline misspells the country) records a shift that matters. President Donald Trump’s campaign against the cartels has imposed cost.

Corrupt Mexican politicians feel pressure they have not felt in a generation. Nicolás Maduro, long the region’s most conspicuous drug chieftain in presidential clothing, sits in a Brooklyn cell after the January 2026 raid that extracted him and Cilia Flores from Caracas. Colombia, under newly inaugurated President Abelardo de la Espriella, has abandoned the Petro-era posture of negotiation and relative sanctuary and has moved, within weeks of taking office on 7 August, toward joint operations and a Medellín joint operations center.

That is the operational picture. The human picture is Brigitte García.

García was twenty-seven, a nurse, the youngest mayor in Ecuador, elected in San Vicente on a platform of potable water and tourism. In March 2024 she and her communications director were shot in the head from inside a rented vehicle. Fernando Villavicencio had been murdered the previous August. Luis Carlos Galán was murdered in 1989 on Pablo Escobar’s orders.

Mexican journalists continue to die. Rogan is right: these are not isolated crimes. They are the cartels’ method of destroying the possibility of honest local government. A movement that assassinates mayors and candidates is not merely a smuggling enterprise. It is a fourth-generation threat to the political order of the hemisphere.

The center of gravity is not the last gram sold in an American city

Rogan correctly identifies two facts that reformers have repeated for decades. First, “winning the war on drugs” in the sense of extinguishing demand is an impossible goal. Profit margins at street level will always recruit new distributors and new customers. Second, the United States and willing partners can still impose friction on production, transit, and political capture.

Friction raises price, lengthens decision cycles, and makes the life of a mid-level commander or a bought mayor less attractive than it was last year. That is a Boydian insight applied to a criminal system: disrupt the opponent’s orientation and tempo even if you cannot annihilate the market.

Colombia is the place to apply that friction. The country remains the principal source of cocaine that Mexican organizations and others then move north. The Clan del Golfo (Gulf Clan / Gaitanistas), not the Mexican Gulf Cartel as Rogan’s shorthand sometimes blurs, is the dominant Colombian producer and wholesaler, with thousands of armed members, control of cultivation and corridor terrain, and alliances that reach Mexican cartels. FARC dissidents and the ELN still protect fields and laboratories. Petro’s “total peace” approach treated these groups as political interlocutors.

De la Espriella, a political outsider who campaigned as “El Tigre,” has rejected that bargain. He has authorized joint military activity, joined the Shield of the Americas / Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition as its nineteenth member, and accepted a Medellín hub for real-time intelligence fusion. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the authorization in Panama in mid-August. SOUTHCOM’s commander was in Bogotá within days.

Plans include intelligence support, possible ground action, renewed aerial eradication, MQ-9 transfer talk, and a regional counter-narcotics center. That is Plan Patriota 2.0 language married to Trump’s lethal interdiction campaign already underway against boats.

A joint operations center in Medellín is not a headquarters for micromanagement. Properly run, it is an Auftragstaktik node: shared picture, commander’s intent, subordinates free to act on fleeting targets. The 1990s hunt for Escobar succeeded when Colombian and American operators shared time-sensitive information and then moved. Centralized permission chains would have let Escobar live longer. The same principle applies to cultivation sites, go-fast boats leaving Colombian ports, and mid-tier Clan del Golfo commanders. Speed of decision is the weapon. Bureaucracy is the enemy’s friend.

Regional pattern, not isolated deal

Rogan lists the wider set of counter-drug agreements, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago, and notes that even Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico has been forced to move beyond the old ritual of occasional extraditions and minimal cooperation. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s brutality and the Sinaloa split have changed the cost-benefit calculation in Mexico City.

That is accurate as far as it goes. The larger point is that a coalition of governments willing to accept risk now exists. Coalitions fail when the strong partner treats the others as subcontractors and when the weak partners receive lectures instead of capability and political cover. Trump’s instinct to reward countries that take risks is sound. Capability transfer, intelligence fusion, and public credit matter more than communiqués.

Rogan’s caution about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Albanian business dealings is a legitimate warning about money-laundering vectors. Cartels do not care about family brands; they care about jurisdictions that convert cash into clean assets. The president should close that aperture. He should also speak plainly to the American public, as Rogan urges.

A gram of cocaine purchased in an American city is not “victimless fun.” It is a salary payment to the men who shot Brigitte García in the back of the head. Tens of thousands of Latin Americans have been murdered or maimed in the last decade by the same networks. That is the moral center of gravity. Until American demand is treated as a strategic input rather than a lifestyle choice, the supply side will always regenerate.

Balanced expectations and the reformer’s caveat

Rogan is honest: the trade will persist. What can change is the degree of sanctuary, the political cost of collaboration, and the operational tempo of the networks. Joint action in Colombia attacks production and port departure rather than waiting for the product to reach Mexican plazas or American streets. That is the correct Schwerpunkt.

It is also the opposite of the industrial-age habit of measuring success by tons seized after the fact. Outcomes-based thinking asks whether the enemy’s decision cycle is slower this quarter than last, whether mid-level talent is dying or defecting, and whether local politicians calculate that siding with the state is safer than siding with the Clan. Those are the metrics that matter.

None of this works if the American side imports its own personnel and command pathologies—ticket-punching, centralized approval, risk aversion dressed up as “process.” Mission Command is not a slogan for a briefing slide. It is the only command culture that can keep pace with adaptive criminal organizations that already practice decentralized execution. The Medellín center will succeed or fail on whether American and Colombian officers on the ground are trusted to act inside the commander’s intent without waiting for Washington or Bogotá to clear every strike. History is unambiguous on that point.

What Does It All Mean?

For the first time in a long time the cartels are being forced to spend money and attention on survival rather than expansion. Maduro in a Brooklyn cell, a Colombian president who has chosen confrontation over negotiation, a joint operations node in the city that once belonged to Escobar—these are not the status quo.

They are the beginning of systemic friction. Credit belongs to Trump, to de la Espriella, and to the operators who will actually close the OODA loop. The rest of us should insist that the system supporting them is built for adaptability rather than for the next PowerPoint cycle.

Endnotes

Tom Rogan, “Trump Has the Cartels on Their Heels — Now with Colombia’s Help,” Washington Examiner, August 27, 2026, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in_focus/4685586/trump-has-cartels-on-heels-with-colombia-help/.
“Far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella declared Colombia’s president-elect,” Buenos Aires Herald, June 25, 2026; “Colombia’s De la Espriella Takes Power, Vows Crime Crackdown,” Bloomberg, August 7–8, 2026. Inauguration occurred August 7, 2026.
“Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to face June 2027 drug trafficking trial in NYC,” CBS New York, July 22, 2026; “Prosecution of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores,” Wikipedia (accessed August 2026). Capture occurred January 3, 2026; detention at Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn.
“Brigitte García,” Wikipedia; “Ecuador’s youngest mayor found shot to death alongside staffer,” Reuters, March 24, 2024. Assassination March 23, 2024, San Vicente, Manabí.
National Counterterrorism Center, “Gulf Clan” profile (as of January 2026); InSight Crime, “Gaitanistas – Gulf Clan,” updated 2026. Dominant Colombian cocaine wholesaler; U.S. FTO designation December 2025.
“US general visits Colombia to discuss war on drugs,” AFP/Yahoo, August 26, 2026; “New Colombian president authorized joint military operations with US targeting cartels: Hegseth,” Washington Examiner, August 12, 2026; “The US and Colombia Agree on Joint Strategy: Plan Patriota 2.0,” Colombia One, July 21, 2026.
Donald E. Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019); William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).
John R. Boyd, “The Essence of Winning and Losing” (unpublished briefing, 1996), on orientation and tempo.
Donald E. Vandergriff, Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War (Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2006); The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2013).
SOUTHCOM and Department of War statements, August 2026, on Shield of the Americas / Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition membership and Medellín hub.

Begin Article: Trump has the cartels on their heels — now with Colombia’s help

By Tom Rogan Published August 27, 2026 6:00am ET | Updated August 27, 2026 10:08am ET

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.

President Donald Trump‘s fight with the Latin American drug cartels is one of this administration’s success stories. The cartels have been forced into expensive evasion efforts. Corrupt politicians in Mexico are under unprecedented pressure. Venezuelan dictator and drug chieftain Nicolas Maduro now lives in an American prison cell. And the United States has just restored a key counter-drugs alliance with Venezuela’s neighbor, Colombia.

Issues and Answers Interview in 1970 with COL David H. Hackworth. Hack was a close friend. I was the ranking Army officer at his funeral in 2005.

Donald Vandergriff — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:01:05 GMT

This interview features Colonel David Hackworth, a highly decorated veteran who criticizes the United States military's performance and leadership during the Vietnam War.

Hackworth argues that inadequate training and a reliance on outdated conventional tactics resulted in excessive and unnecessary American casualties.

He further alleges that senior military officials manipulated data, such as enemy body counts, to present a false image of progress to the public and the government.

According to Hackworth, the Vietnamization program is fundamentally flawed because it prioritizes sophisticated hardware over the motivation and specialized skills required for guerrilla warfare.

Ultimately, he expresses profound disillusionment with a bureaucratic command structure that he believes prioritized career advancement over the lives of soldiers.

Here is an open letter he wrote to Army Chief of Staff General Pete Schoomaker about me and my work. Note: I had nothing to do with it. He just did it.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2004/02/05/army-must-transform-itself-to-succeed/

Vandergriff Analysis of Michael Smith’s “Trump Drops in a Hemi,” It has taken a while to round up the parts, but Trump Performance Motors has installed a new engine in America

Donald Vandergriff — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 10:02:58 GMT

Excellent summary by Michael Smith of President Trump’s success, both foreign and domestic, so far in his 2nd year!

Michael Smith’s essay is valuable because it does the work most midterm-season commentary refuses to do: it treats Trump’s second-term foreign and industrial policy as a system rather than a pile of isolated headlines. The frustration he names—agitation as November 2026 approaches, “doomers” hunting for a priest to expel—is real. His counter-claim is sharper: the pieces only look chaotic if you refuse to assemble the puzzle. What follows is a positive reading of that argument, tested against the public record of 2025–26.

Seeing one strategy instead of many crises

Smith’s central move is methodological. Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, tariffs, Canada and Mexico, “Lake America” and the “Gulf of America,” the shutdown of what he calls the Democrats’ foreign-aid “boomerang,” and manufacturing revival are not five files on five desks. They are instruments of one hemispheric project: restore U.S. productive capacity, deny extra-hemispheric rivals a foothold in the American backyard, and force allies to carry their own lawns—or watch Washington cut the grass. That is the logic the administration itself has labeled a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and that Trump, after the Caracas raid, joked had become the “Donroe Doctrine.”

The November 2025 National Security Strategy put the same idea in official language: reassert American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere so that “American dominance… will never be questioned again.” Smith is therefore not inventing a doctrine after the fact; he is naming the architecture the White House has already claimed.

Venezuela as the cleanest single case

Smith is right that Venezuela is the nearest thing to a one-campaign illustration. After boat strikes failed to change Maduro’s calculus, Operation Absolute Resolve on 3 January 2026 captured Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores in Caracas—an operation the White House still lists among its signature national-security acts.

What Smith emphasizes, and what is easy to miss in the raid footage, is the sequel: no occupation, no Marshall Plan, no lecture on overnight republican virtue. The standard is binary—do you help America or hurt America?—and the offer is commercial. Venezuela’s oil sector had collapsed under socialism to a fraction of its former output; the United States has the capital and know-how.

Trump later spoke of more than 80 million barrels already received and of working with the post-Maduro leadership (Delcy Rodríguez) to raise production. Smith’s guessed split—roughly a third of incremental barrels flowing north so Caracas can still double revenues—is conjecture, but the structure of the deal matches the administration’s pattern: access and security in exchange for alignment, not nation-building.

That is “no better friend, no worse enemy” applied to a petro-state that had hosted extra-hemispheric patrons and exported gangs and narcotics. It is also why Smith can treat the raid as hemispheric signaling rather than a one-off kidnapping: neighbors watched a dictator removed and an olive branch extended on commercial terms.

Reshoring, materials, and the Covid lesson

Smith’s manufacturing section is the essay’s industrial heart. Covid exposed a security problem, not merely a consumer inconvenience: antibiotics, guidance-system components, and everyday goods routed through chains that crossed as many borders as the sun. The second-term answer has been tariffs as negotiation leverage (“Liberation Day” and the subsequent Agreements on Reciprocal Trade), sectoral protection, and a flood of announced plant investment.

The record is mixed in the way long-cycle industry always is, Kearney’s reshoring index improved but stayed negative; some employment gains in metals and autos sit beside losses elsewhere, but the direction Smith describes is visible.

Auto makers have publicly shifted models back onto U.S. lines citing tariff arithmetic;
pharma announcements now run into the hundreds of billions under Section 232 pressure and onshoring plans;
White House trackers tout factory construction and energy output. Smith’s refinement is important: not every factory must sit inside the fifty states.
Nearshoring into the hemisphere still shortens the kill-chain of disruption and still pulls feedstock and finished goods out of Chinese, Russian, or Iranian orbit. That is national security dressed as supply-chain math.

The same logic covers raw materials and energy: capture by contract, not crusade. Venezuela’s barrels, North American energy, critical-minerals partnerships with Europe and Japan—all fit Smith’s “true capture by trade and contract.”

Allies as products of the 800-pound gorilla

Smith’s line that allies are “manufactured by the 800-pound gorilla process” is rude and, as NATO numbers now stand, empirically hard to dismiss. At The Hague in June 2025 allies pledged a path to 5 percent of GDP in defense-related spending by 2035—a structural jump from the old 2 percent Wales benchmark. By early 2026 NATO’s own accounting had every member above the old floor, with a large year-over-year European increase.

They complain. Smith’s teenager-doing-chores metaphor is unkind and accurate. The free ride after 1945 was a choice the United States could no longer afford once it decided the next systemic contest was West versus East and that a three-front war with China, Russia, and a fully enabled Iran was either unwinnable or catastrophically expensive. Pushing Europe to tend its own lawn is not abandonment; it is burden-shifting so U.S. mass can concentrate on the hemisphere and the Pacific.

Iran, training, and “defeated”

Here Smith is most bullish, “Iran is defeated”, and the war that opened in late February 2026 is the bloodiest test of the claim.

U.S. and Israeli strikes killed senior leadership including Ali Khamenei,
Wrecked much of the conventional navy and air force,
And badly damaged missile plants and the defense-industrial base.

Administration statements still describe a demolished military and a collapsing economy; independent tallies speak of partial achievement, a surviving (and harder) regime, a Hormuz crisis, and munitions strain at home.

Smith’s secondary points survive even a cautious reading. The campaign has been a live-fire school for new munitions and depleted old stocks. The Pentagon has since signed surge contracts for cheap cruise missiles and Patriot/THAAD components precisely because magazines ran down. Whether one calls that “defeat” or “severe degradation plus unfinished political business,” it fits his larger map: remove an extra-hemispheric enabler, exercise the force, and refuse to let a nuclear-threshold sponsor of terrorism sit unpunished while Washington tries to lock the Americas.

Destination over path

Smith’s best character judgment is the last: Trump announces a destination and will change heading a thousand times on the way. Reciprocal tariffs became bargaining chips; an Iran MOU opened Hormuz and then collapsed when Tehran hit shipping; Venezuela went from boat strikes to a raid to an oil partnership. The destination—productive America, cleared backyard, allies that pay—has not moved. That is why the “Doomer Never Trump” coalition cannot replace the project even if it unseats the man. Isolationists and forever-war neocons agree only on the priest they want gone.

The HEMI metaphor is pure Smith and fair enough as rhetoric. A 1500-horsepower crate engine is expensive, loud, and not subtle. It is also what you drop into a wheezing four-cylinder when you have decided the next race is not a parade. Midterms will test patience. They will not, by themselves, refute the picture Smith assembled: enough puzzle pieces now lock that the image is no longer a rumor. It is policy.

Endnotes

“Trump Administration Accomplishments: October 2025 – Present, Part Two,” American Greatness, August 21, 2026, https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/21/trump-administration-accomplishments-october-2025-present-part-two/.

“Donroe Doctrine,” Wikipedia, last modified August 19, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donroe_Doctrine.

“What is Monroe Doctrine and why Trump invoked it in Maduro’s arrest,” Associated Press, January 4, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/monroe-doctrine-venezuela-trump-western-hemisphere-maduro-e5581d71ea15f2fb02461e74ac6b08ca.

“Strengthen National Security,” The White House, accessed 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/priorities/national-security/.

“State of the Union 2026: National Security Excerpts,” Lawfare, February 25, 2026, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/state-of-the-union-2026--national-security-excerpts.

“Liberation Day, One Year Later,” Commonplace, March 26, 2026, https://www.commonplace.org/p/liberation-day-one-year-later.

“President Trump’s Trade Agenda Is Rebuilding the American Auto Industry,” The White House, August 19, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/08/president-trumps-trade-agenda-is-rebuilding-the-american-auto-industry/.

“FAQ: Where US Pharma Reshoring Stands in 2026,” Pharmaceutical Commerce, August 29, 2026, https://www.pharmaceuticalcommerce.com/view/faq-where-us-pharma-reshoring-stands-in-2026.

“Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: August,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies, August 3, 2026, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/08/03/trump-administration-foreign-policy-tracker-august-2/.

“From nukes to Hormuz: The shift in Trump’s Iran war objectives,” Times of Israel, August 27, 2026, https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-nukes-to-hormuz-the-shift-in-trumps-iran-war-objectives/.

Begin Michael Smith Article:

“Trump Drops in a Hemi,” It has taken a while to round up the parts, but Trump Performance Motors has installed a new engine in America

by Michael Smith (Substack 29 August 2026)

People are getting frustrated with President Trump and the progress of his agenda. I understand that the nearing mid-term elections are part and parcel of the agitation, but there are also some Doomers out there who, like the old Never Trumpers, think if they can just rid themselves of this troublesome priest, they can take control and get back to their business of…well, whatever they think their business was.

Even if they were successful at expelling Trump or shutting down his progress, there is too much divergence on in the DNT (Doomer Never Trump) alliance to get anything moving in the same direction. There is no way the anti-Israel isolationists and the neocon war forever grifters will agree on anything other than, just like the left, they just hate Trump.

Let me lend some insight into what I have been thinking and seeing. I’ve laid back and haven’t said much until now, but I was waiting until I could see enough to reason through events with enough clarity and gravitas to form a cogent opinion.

First, understand that the mistake people are making is to look at events in isolation. They assume the Iran action is one thing, Cuba and Venezuela is another thing, tariffs are another thing, Canada and Mexico and the Lake America and Gulf of America are another thing, shutting down the Democrat boomerang funding mechanism of foreign aid another and rebuilding manufacturing is yet another thing.

But they are all really just one thing, and it is a hemispheric thing.

1. Manufacturing is reshoring to America and to the Western Hemisphere, and that is not just an economic boost but a national security one as well.

2. Allies are being manufactured by the 800-pound gorilla process. They may not love us but they need us.

3. International threats are being dealt with. Global terrorism is still a threat to the US and its allies.

4. Europe is being prepared to provide its own defense. The post WWII free ride is over.

5. Iran is defeated and this conflict is giving our military a chance to train, to test new weapons, and to use up antiquated ordnance.

We all joked about the “Donroe Doctrine” months ago, but I believe it is real and President Trump clearly sees 1) the next conflict will be West vs. East, 2) past presidents have done little to protect America’s security within the hemisphere, and 3) is now securing America in the best way he knows how. He knows that China, Russia and Iran oppose the US, all have meddled in our backyard, and that a global war that united those three is unwinnable, or if it is winnable, at a catastrophic cost. He knows it is best not to have enablers of your enemies sitting in your back yard.

So, he is solidifying America’s own productive capacity, the raw material to feed it, cleaning up our back yard, and letting the rest of the area to take care of their own lawns to our established standards, or we won’t hesitate to come in and cut your grass if you don’t.

We learned during Covid, in vivid IMAX and THX surround sound, just how much of our national security and future we had given up. American businesses, from small to gigantic corporations, offshored so much critical manufacturing that we couldn’t make basic, but critical drugs (we don’t even make simple antibiotics), we lost the ability to build gyroscopes for our missile guidance systems (we are buying them from Japan), and even some household, everyday items were sourced via supply chains that crossed as many borders every day as the sun.

Trump may not be able to bring everything back to the domestic American market, but is at least bringing it back to this hemisphere, much of it to North America, and much of it in support of American companies – and he is reminding American companies of their necessary allegiance to America.

He is also working to capture raw materials and energy production.

This is a true capture by trade and contract; it is not about nation building or expecting a country that has been socialist for half a century to adopt being a representative republic overnight. His process is not dependent on what kind of government any country has or wants to have, he is putting America in the position of being the 800-pound gorilla of the Western Hemisphere and implementing a “no better friend, no worse enemy” program by taking out the brutal, despotic leadership (Maduro) and working with what is left. He is allowing the remaining leadership to run their country but letting them and every other regime across the region understand they are being watched.

And the simple standard used is this: Do you help America or hurt America?

Very similar to Rush Limbaugh’s excrement list, if you don’t help America, you go on the list – and there are penalties. You can get off the list by not being our enemy, not working to harm us, or supporting those who want to. Simple as that.

Like him or not (and I could do with less bombast) but President Trump is a rare breed of someone who tells you what he is going to do and then does it. He may change directions a thousand times on the way there, but the destination is always the same.

Venezuela comes as close to an example of a single strategy as any so far. Maduro and his regime were our enemy, supporters of terrorism, an exporter of drugs and gangs to America. They were begged by former presidents to stop, but there never were consequences to not stopping – until Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth started blowing up drug boats headed for the US. Even then Maduro didn’t get the message. When it was clear that he wasn’t getting it, Trump sent the US military to get him.

Now that the driving force behind those efforts is gone and the region saw how he was removed, Trump has held out an olive branch. No nation building, no regime change, no massive American aid package to buy their love, just the reminder that American power still exists, it will be used to create a buffer of safety, the demonstration of the necessity to cooperate for the good of the hemisphere, and the consequences if you don’t.

America will help you if you help us.

Over the past thirty years, Venezuela’s oil and gas industry production has dropped to a third of what it once was because socialism does what socialism does and their entire hydrocarbon infrastructure is crap and they don’t have the money or knowhow to fix it. We do, and I think he just offered to invest and get them back up to where they were those many years ago, for a price. My guess is that he showed them a plan to raise their production 3X with two thirds going to them and a third coming to the US – that allows Venezuela to double their oil revenues so the one third of the oil that comes to the US doesn’t cost them a cent. It is a win-win-win, with Venezuela falling under the US umbrella and away from China, Russia, and Iran.

Same message to the moribund, disrespectful, freeloading NATO/EU – we love you guys, but damn son, time to stand up and be counted.

And they are.

They are bitching about it, but like a petulant teenager, they are doing their chores.

I’m sure there is plenty to disagree with in this assessment, but in my estimation, it all fits together, and like a 5000-piece puzzle, you can’t see the big picture until enough of the pieces are linked together.

This is that.

President Trump and his administration have pulled America’s wheezing little 2-liter four cylinder and dropped in an American made Dodge Direct Connection 1500 horsepower HEMI V8.

It ain’t cheap (it retails for 60 grand), but anything good has a price.

I gotta admit that even with the cost, it feels pretty good.

Introduction to “THE INNOCENCE OF THE WARRIOR” by InfantryDort, Aug 29

Donald Vandergriff — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:00:53 GMT

InfantryDort has delivered something rarer than another policy brief: a clean statement of the moral physics of combat. His essay “The Innocence of the Warrior” names the one quality that still holds a formation together when the ramp drops and the first rounds crack overhead. It is not a slogan. It is an act of faith: the man or woman beside me is my brother or sister; my leaders will tell me the truth; my country will judge me by what I do.

That faith is the mortar of the force. Destroy it and you do not get a more “inclusive” unit. You get a collection of strangers who have been taught to inspect one another before they trust one another.

I have spent more than a quarter century arguing that Mission Command and maneuver warfare live or die on that same mortar. Decentralized operations, commander’s intent two levels up, and the speed of the OODA loop all presuppose something industrial-age personnel systems and identity ideologies cannot manufacture: unhesitating trust under friction.

A foxhole has no spare capacity for competing identities. When the shooting starts, no one wants an “oppressor” or an “oppressed person” on his left. He wants an American who will stay when every animal instinct says run.

That is not romantic nostalgia. It is the oldest finding in cohesion research. Task cohesion—shared purpose, mutual competence, and the belief that the man next to you will do his job—predicts combat performance. Social or identity-based fracture does the opposite. Robert Putnam’s work on diversity and social capital showed that, in the short and medium term, emphasizing difference reduces trust and discretionary effort even in ordinary communities.

A rifle squad or a ship’s CIC is not an ordinary community. It is a high-stakes, high-turnover group that must generate instant reliability. Pouring grievance categories into that bloodstream is not “harmless HR.” It is an acid. The enemy spends fortunes trying to fracture American units. We have, for years, done it to ourselves for free.

InfantryDort is right about the mask.

Many of us gave the ideology a hearing. Then we asked questions. Questions were met with accusations. Skepticism became moral failure. Careers were threatened in the name of “inclusion.” An idea that requires intimidation to survive has already lost the argument. The warrior has already signed the blank check. He has already agreed to give you his body. You do not also get to crawl inside his mind and teach him to distrust the people he may have to die beside.

What Does It All Mean?

The good news is that the remedy is not mysterious. It is the same remedy I have urged in The Path to Victory, Raising the Bar, Manning the Future Legions, and Adopting Mission Command: restore a culture of shared American identity, competence, and oath. Select and promote for demonstrated adaptability under stress, not for demographic scorekeeping.

Train so that soldiers discover they can count on one another before the first volley, not after. Keep the personnel system from treating people as interchangeable parts while simultaneously sorting them by grievance. The warrior’s innocence—the belief that when the ramp drops we are one people—is not naïveté. It is the operating system of a force that intends to win.

InfantryDort has performed a public service by stating the truth without apology. The warrior deserves protection from any ideology that teaches him otherwise. Stay vigilant. Remember the Oath. Division has no place in our force.

Endnotes:

InfantryDort, “THE INNOCENCE OF THE WARRIOR,” Substack, August 29, 2026.
Donald E. Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019).
Donald E. Vandergriff, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2013; originally published Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 2002).
Donald E. Vandergriff, Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War, 2nd ed. (CreateSpace, 2012).
Donald E. Vandergriff, Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008).
On the distinction between task cohesion and social/identity fracture and their relationship to combat performance, see the literature summarized in National Defense Research Institute, Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: An Update of RAND’s 1993 Study (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), chap. 6; and Brian Mullen and Carolyn Copper, “The Relation between Group Cohesiveness and Performance: An Integration,” Psychological Bulletin 115, no. 2 (1994): 210–27.
Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137–74.
On Mission Command as the American expression of Auftragstaktik and its dependence on trust rather than centralized control, see Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command; and William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).
Oath of Enlistment, 10 U.S.C. § 502; Oath of Office, 5 U.S.C. § 3331.

Begin Article THE INNOCENCE OF THE WARRIOR

by InfantryDort Aug 29

There is something almost sacred about the innocence of a warrior.

That sounds strange because warriors do terrible, adult things. They run toward gunfire, kill, watch friends die. They sign a blank check knowing the nation may someday cash it for everything.

But beneath all of that violence is an extraordinary act of faith:

The one beside me is my brother or sister. My leaders will tell me the truth. My country will judge me by what I do.

That faith is the mortar holding the formation together.

And then along comes an ideology telling the Soldier to inspect his brother before trusting him. What race is he? What sex? Who is privileged? Who is oppressed? Which grievance belongs to whom?

That is not harmless HR nonsense. Its acid poured directly into the bloodstream of a military.

A foxhole has no room for competing identities. When the rounds start cracking overhead, nobody wants an oppressor or an oppressed person beside him. He wants an American who will stay when every animal instinct says run.

I gave these ideas a hearing once (DEI). Many of us did. Then we asked questions. And THAT was when the mask slipped.

Questions were met with accusations. Skepticism became moral failure. Careers were threatened over disagreements that supposedly belonged to an ideology of “inclusion.”

Funny kind of inclusion, isn’t it?

Here is what I finally understood: an idea that requires intimidation to survive has already lost the argument.

The warrior deserves protection from that poison because his trust is too valuable to gamble with. He has already agreed to give you his body. You don’t also get to crawl inside his mind and teach him to distrust the people he may have to die beside.

The enemy spends fortunes trying to fracture American units. Imagine doing it to ourselves for free?

The warrior’s innocence is believing that when the ramp drops, we are one people. Any ideology that teaches him otherwise has no place anywhere near the formation.

Stay vigilant. And remember your Oath. Division has no place in our force.

America’s Acquisition Crisis: A Symptom of Second-Generation Warfare Culture That Blocks Mission Command and Maneuver Warfare

Donald Vandergriff — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:03:31 GMT

Introduction:

Doug Beck’s “America’s Missing Military Revolution” delivers a clear-eyed diagnosis of the Pentagon’s acquisition system that every serious student of modern conflict should read carefully. Writing from the rare vantage of an Apple executive who later directed the Defense Innovation Unit, Beck exposes how the Department of Defense still buys technology as if it were ordering battleships in 1947 rather than fielding systems that must adapt weekly on battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East.

If The US Military Acquisition System Were a Business?

The iPhone analogy is not mere rhetoric; it is a precise illustration of an industrial-age process colliding with the tempo of contemporary war. Yet the deeper problem is not simply slow procurement. It is the persistent Second-Generation Warfare culture. It is and remains centralized, process-obsessed, risk-averse, and inwardly focused. It continues to dominate the Department of Defense and prevents the full adoption of Mission Command and maneuver warfare required to fight and win in the Third, Fourth, and emerging Fifth Generations of conflict.

Beck correctly notes that the roots of today’s system lie in post-World War II efforts to impose order and accountability after wartime chaos. Those reforms, reinforced by successive scandals and congressional reactions, produced layers of regulations that prioritize auditability, competition paperwork, and compliance over speed, initiative, and adaptation. The result is a bureaucracy that locks designs years in advance, subjects even software updates to multi-star sign-off, and incentivizes officials to avoid any action that might later be second-guessed.

When soldiers die or campaigns fail because the force lacked the latest drones, AI tools, or counter-jamming capabilities, no one traces the failure back to the staffer who chose caution five years earlier. This is the classic pathology of Second-Generation Warfare: an inward focus on process and massed, synchronized effort rather than an outward focus on the enemy and the rapid exploitation of fleeting opportunities.

In the framework first articulated by William S. Lind and colleagues, and refined across decades of observation, warfare has evolved through generations.

First-Generation linear tactics gave way to Second-Generation attrition based on firepower and rigid procedures.

Third-Generation maneuver warfare, embodied in the German Auftragstaktik and later American Mission Command, emphasizes tempo, surprise, decentralization, and the psychological disruption of the opponent’s cohesion.

Fourth-Generation conflict blurs war and peace through non-state actors, information operations, and cultural subversion;

Fifth-Generation warfare centers on information dominance and shaping cognition. Battlefields today demand leaders and organizations capable of cycling through the OODA loop faster than the adversary, updating tactics and technology in real time, and exercising disciplined initiative under the commander’s intent.

Ukraine’s weekly software updates and hardware modifications, Iran’s asymmetric use of commercially derived systems, and China’s rapid integration of dual-use technology all illustrate this reality. America’s acquisition system, by contrast, remains locked in Second-Generation habits.

Mission Command is not a slogan or a PowerPoint slide. It is a command culture that trusts subordinates who understand the higher intent two levels up, who possess the professional judgment (Fingerspitzengefühl) to adapt when the situation changes, and who are rewarded for taking calculated risks in pursuit of the mission.

The same cultural prerequisites apply to technology acquisition.

When requirements documents run to hundreds of pages prescribing exact solutions rather than describing problems and allowing innovators to propose solutions, the Department is practicing directive command rather than Mission Command. When budgeting locks product designs years ahead and integration into training and doctrine waits until fielding is complete, the system cannot support the continuous adaptation that maneuver warfare demands.

Beck’s account of DIU’s evolution, from early bridge-building, through flexible Other Transaction Authority, to portfolio-style funding and real-time congressional transparency, shows what is possible when a small element is granted the trust and authorities that Mission Command requires. The Saronic maritime drone example is particularly instructive: rapid prototyping, operator involvement, flexible funding, and scaling within a compressed timeline produced operational capability and private-sector investment. Yet DIU still represents a tiny fraction of the budget and a workaround rather than a transformed system.

The risk-averse incentives Beck describes mirror the personnel and promotion pathologies I have long examined. Officials who color outside the lines face investigations; those who cling to process rarely do. The same dynamic appears in leader development: selection and promotion systems still reward conformity to industrial-age metrics more than demonstrated adaptability under friction and uncertainty.

Without changing the underlying criteria for evaluation, promotion, and career advancement, both for acquisition professionals and for warfighters, exhortations to “reward outcomes and risk-taking” will remain empty. Technology alone cannot compensate for a culture that suppresses initiative. History shows that doctrine and culture must lead; technology then becomes an enabler. Developing adaptive leaders first, then equipping them with tools that amplify their judgment, has repeatedly proven superior to fitting doctrine to whatever technology the bureaucracy eventually delivers.

Beck’s prescriptions, scale DIU’s dual-fluency approach, carve out flexible portfolio funding with rigorous transparency, reduce the cost and time of traditional platforms through commercial partnerships, overhaul hiring for dual-fluency talent, and shift incentives toward appropriate risk-taking, are necessary and overdue. They align with the concept of parallel evolution: simultaneous reform of doctrine, training, education, personnel systems, force structure, and acquisition so that each reinforces the others.

Isolated pockets of excellence, however impressive, will not produce enduring change if the larger institution remains mired in Second-Generation habits. Congress and the Department must accept that transparency and mutual trust are the price of flexibility; the private sector must accept that defense is not a guaranteed revenue stream free of Darwinian competition; and leaders at every level must accept that the greater risk is continuing to field yesterday’s solutions against tomorrow’s threats.

What Does It All Mean?

The United States has historically risen to existential challenges after shock. Beck is right that we should not wait for another Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The simultaneous pressure from China, Russia, Iran, and others demands a force that can deter and, if necessary, win through superior tempo, adaptability, and initiative. It is precisely the attributes of Mission Command and maneuver warfare.

Technology is essential, but culture is destiny. Until the Department of Defense sheds its Second-Generation acquisition and personnel pathologies and fully embraces the decentralized, risk-tolerant, outward-focused culture required by modern conflict, even the best commercial innovations will arrive too late, in too few numbers, and without the trained, empowered operators needed to employ them decisively.

Beck’s article is a call to action. The response must be a genuine revolution in the human dimension of war, not merely rearranging the deck chairs on a bureaucratic Titanic.

Notes

Doug Beck, “America’s Missing Military Revolution: Why Washington Still Risks Losing the Tech Race,” Foreign Affairs 105, no. 5 (September/October 2026), published online August 18, 2026.
Donald E. Vandergriff, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, rev. ed. (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013; originally published Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 2002); William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985) and The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook (2023 update).
On the generations of warfare framework, see William S. Lind et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette (October 1989), and subsequent refinements; Donald E. Vandergriff, “Developing the Technology to Enable Maneuver Warfare and Mission Command, or Developing the Technology and Fitting a Doctrine to It? That Is the Question?,” Substack, March 31, 2026.
Donald E. Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019); Donald E. Vandergriff, Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War, 2nd ed. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012).
Donald E. Vandergriff, Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008); Donald E. Vandergriff, “‘Parallel Evolution’ to Move DoD to Maneuver Warfare and Mission Command,” Substack, May 5, 2025.
Donald E. Vandergriff, “A Battle Cry for Revolution: Slash the Bloat, Empower the Warfighter, and Unleash Mission Command and Maneuver Warfare,” Substack, November 17, 2025; Donald E. Vandergriff, “Gunfire as the Ultimate Personnel Board: Why Credentialism Fails Before the First Volley,” Substack, August 14, 2026.

Begin Article: America’s Missing Military Revolution

Why Washington Still Risks Losing the Tech Race

Doug Beck

September/October 2026 Published on August 18, 2026

Imagine buying new iPhones for yourself and your family. You visit a store to see the latest model, the iPhone 17, and then go to Apple’s website to buy yours. But before finalizing your purchase, you have to spend two to three years experimenting with your pick. By then, Apple will have released two newer models, perhaps an iPhone 18 and iPhone 19. Yet you are not allowed to upgrade your order—you have to stick with the model you tested.

Even then, your already two-year-old iPhone 17 cannot be delivered for two more years, at which point the iPhone 20 and 21 have been unveiled. And only your phone will be delivered at that time—your kids and spouse won’t get their iPhone 17s for another year or two. You may also be locked into whatever operating software was available on the iPhone 17 when you first tested it.

This is how the Defense Department has long been forced to buy technology, including missiles, drones, and the software that controls them. When Pentagon officials identify a problem, the process of finding a system that can solve it and purchasing it typically takes years. It then takes years more to acquire enough of that solution to meet the military’s requirements. By then, the solution is outdated. Relentless private-sector competition has spawned new technologies, but the military cannot buy them, much less do so at scale, because they have not gone through the same cumbersome testing, evaluation, and purchasing processes.

Having lived at the cutting edge of one side of this equation, as an Apple executive, and then at the other, as the official charged with driving defense innovation for the Pentagon, I’ve seen both sides up close and personal.

The entrenched, byzantine system for acquiring things is why the most sophisticated country in human history is at risk of no longer having the world’s most sophisticated military. The U.S. private sector sets the global standard for creativity, nowhere more than in tech hubs such as Silicon Valley. Yet the way the United States buys and deploys military technology is, like the rigid, Soviet-style five-year plans that even China and Russia have long since jettisoned, mind-numbingly bureaucratic. And despite real progress, the United States is still not changing this process fast enough, or at sufficient scale, to keep America safe in an increasingly dangerous world.

Battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East have demonstrated with brutal clarity just how much warfare has changed. The breakneck pace of technological innovation makes it possible to roll out new autonomous weapons, AI algorithms, and other sophisticated systems that are updated constantly and easy to scale. The Russians are demonstrating every day in Ukraine that their army of developers can crank out new drones while updating hardware and software, sometimes daily, to match Kyiv’s constant advancements, which continue, in turn, to allow Ukraine to keep Russia at bay even though its armed forces and economy are far larger. China has embarked on a massive military buildup, including increasing its production of ships, satellites, missiles, and drones, and has demonstrated the ability to adopt and integrate the latest technology into them. Even Iran has successfully used new technologies to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz this year, despite being completely outmatched by American military power.

The United States faces simultaneous challenges from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told his military to be prepared to defeat the United States in the Taiwan Strait by 2027. War with China is neither inevitable nor imminent. But Washington and its allies must be able to deter Xi, and they must be ready to win if forced to fight. To do so, they must harness the power of commercially derived technology.

It is nearly impossible for the Pentagon to make bets on truly new technologies.

Americans understand that the acquisition system is broken. The Trump administration, the Biden administration before it, Democrats and Republicans in Congress, military leaders, and the tech sector’s founders and funders have all called for dramatically changing the way the Department of Defense buys and deploys technology. This consensus represents progress. Ten years ago, only a small group of people were arguing that the Pentagon needed to make such a transformation, or that Silicon Valley’s commercial technology was pivotal for military power. Now, it is central to every defense-related conference, to policies originating in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, and to the investment theses of an ever-growing, dynamic defense tech sector.

But Americans would be foolish to think that Washington is anywhere near solving this problem. It is not. The United States is not yet delivering on this strategic imperative or making the permanent transformational changes necessary to do so. Progress has been relatively isolated. Successes have captured the news, but improvements have taken place largely at the military’s margins. Even the herculean efforts to acquire capabilities for the conflict with Iran largely amounted to a collection of waivers, special actions, and brute-force leadership.

To deliver real, enduring change at the scale required, the entire system needs to be transformed. The Pentagon, Congress, and the private sector need to build on the momentum of the last five years, and shed, once and for all, their mutually reinforcing pathological caution when it comes to purchasing technology. They need to get comfortable, together, taking risks, making mistakes, and quickly become adept at innovating at scale—just as private-sector companies, investors, and customers do every day. Otherwise, the changes thus far will amount to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the national security Titanic.

RUNNING IN OATMEAL

The origins of the current military procurement system date to 1947, when Congress passed a law meant to standardize and simplify Washington’s chaotic purchasing process from World War II. The new rules worked well as the country scaled up to meet the Soviet threat through the 1950s. But they also gave rise to new risks as the military, defense contractors, political leaders, and science and technology institutions forged an increasingly tight relationship, creating the “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address. The complex, Eisenhower said, threatened to self-deal, overspend, and ultimately misdirect U.S. policy. His predictions proved prescient. Over the next several decades, cost overruns and defense scandals prompted Congress to create ironclad rules emphasizing competition, auditability, documentation, and compliance and to add procurement regulations aimed at safeguarding fairness, frugality, and transparency.

These laws were well intentioned and served (and still serve) an important purpose. But as they accumulated over decades, they resulted in a stunning morass of regulatory restrictions, policies, and learned behaviors, reinforced by a web of entrenched interests both inside and outside government, that have slowed procurement and adoption.

The problems begin before anything is ordered, when requirements processes yield hundred-page documents that dully describe the precise product the government wants built rather than letting the tech sector’s experts determine how best to apply new technology to solve military problems. These documents might be fine for crafting orders for a legacy capability that military experts are familiar with. But they do not work when applied to commercially derived technology that moves at the speed of a market driven by billions of global consumers. The most innovative companies, not their customers, typically know how technology might leap ahead. If the engineers at Apple, where I worked from 2009 to 2023, had asked average consumers in 2007 what they wanted a smartphone to be, the answer would likely have been a faster flip phone, in brighter colors. The world would never have seen an iPhone, an App Store, or all the other innovations that followed.

The Pentagon’s risk-averse culture, reinforced by rules established by Congress, encumbers every stage of the military development, procurement, and integration process. Military leaders who understand the need for speed often feel as though they are running in oatmeal. The Pentagon takes the same experimentation rules it uses for crewed aircraft that fly above populated areas and applies them to drone experiments held far out at sea, meaning that drone testing is constrained by procedures designed to protect human pilots and people on the ground. Minute software updates and bug fixes that the commercial world might complete several times a day in the run-up to a product launch can require multiple meetings and, ultimately, sign-off from a three- or four-star officer. Perhaps most damaging of all, the budgeting process established by Congress and the Defense Department locks in specific product designs at least two years in advance. The integration of that product into military planning, training, and staffing doesn’t even begin until after the acquisition process is complete and the Pentagon is ready to field the product. As a result, it is nearly impossible for the Pentagon to make bets on truly new technologies or adapt at the constantly accelerating speed of war.

The myriad processes governing acquisitions are implemented by an army of patriotic, hard-working officials. But they are incentivized to never color outside the lines. If a system has defects or major cost overruns, procurement staffers, their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses face congressional inquiries and outside investigations. They might lose their jobs. Many fear they could wind up in prison if their actions are misinterpreted as corrupt. But if soldiers die or the U.S. military loses because it doesn’t have the most up-to-date innovations, no one goes back five years to find the staffer whose conservatism led to that result. Little wonder, then, that procurement teams exercise extreme caution. Even after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s November call to reward outcomes and risk-taking rather than adherence to process, the Pentagon’s performance incentives remain structured around compliance, prescribed milestones, and avoiding cost overruns.

All these problems are aggravated by the dysfunctional codependence of procurement officials and traditional defense contractors. Companies that have grown up meeting increasingly complicated bureaucratic needs are compliance machines. As much as ten percent (and perhaps even more) of their staff work on law-related, contracting, and cybersecurity teams. Another up to 20 percent are experts dedicated to helping navigate the Pentagon’s bureaucracy. At normal tech companies, legal, compliance, and government affairs teams make up an average of two to five percent of headcount—and much less at tech startups. Those companies are not keen on hiring an army of employees or consultants to manage relations with the military—especially when it is far from clear it will buy their products. Some do so anyway. But they then risk becoming like many existing contractors: more focused on how to work with the government than on how to create breakthrough inventions.

It is thus no surprise that the American military acquires capabilities at a speed completely out of touch with the pace of modern change. Ukraine will pump out roughly seven million drones this year. It updates its drone software weekly and modifies its hardware every few weeks to adapt to changes on the ground. The United States, by contrast, purchased just 4,000 small drones in 2024. It has publicly claimed that it purchased roughly ten times that figure in 2025, but many of those drones are older models that have not been updated in response to lessons learned in Ukraine or recent conflicts in the Middle East—for example, the need to cope with GPS jamming. The department has pulled out all the stops to buy more drones for the war in Iran. It has requested funding from Congress to purchase up to 340,000 modern drones over the next two years for its Drone Dominance Program and has contracted for the first 30,000 so far in 2026. The army is aiming even higher, hoping to procure a million drones over the next couple of years. But these aspirational numbers are still nowhere close to Ukraine’s, and reaching them—much less converting them into fielded military power—depends on massive, unrealized changes in the military, Congress, and the private sector.

NEED FOR SPEED

The Defense Department knows it has a problem, and it has spent the last decade taking steps to solve it. In 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter established the Defense Innovation Unit (then called DIUx) specifically to help deliver commercially derived technology to the military. The organization had a slow start. In early meetings, tech leaders wearing jeans and T-shirts sat across from DIU defense officials wearing suits, each side speaking a language the other couldn’t understand. But after Carter reset the unit later that year by bringing in new leaders who were native speakers of both the tech world’s dialect and the language of warfighting, the organization succeeded in building a bridge between the two communities.

This revamped unit, DIU 2.0, proved that real military problems could be solved with commercially derived technology. It also showed that the commercial tech sector could create those solutions quickly, delivering prototypes within weeks or months rather than the government’s usual five to ten years. The team achieved this by pioneering the use of “other transaction” acquisition authorities (OTAs), which allow the department to bypass most of its tedious procurement rules when including nontraditional suppliers. These authorities, legally available since the space program began in the late 1950s but almost never used, helped DIU drive a rapid, competitive acquisition process that responded to real needs. Its procurement team featured both frontline military operators and technologists and focused on speed as well as quality. Between 2017 and 2023, that team delivered solutions at a success rate of over 50 percent—meaning the prototype was accepted by the military—across hundreds of projects and helped innovative companies such as Anduril get off the ground. It brought in mission-planning tools, drones, counterdrone technology, and space launch capabilities.

But prototypes neither deter nor win wars, and they do not deliver the kinds of financial returns companies need to make sizable investments. Thanks to the Pentagon’s bureaucratic processes and entrenched bias toward traditional sources, DIU struggled to help the innovations it introduced go from prototype contracts to fielded capabilities. The military did not get the strategic impact it needed. Investors grew antsy. Katherine Boyle, of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, warned in 2021 that “time was running out with Silicon Valley.”

Defense procurement officials are incentivized to never color outside the lines.

Then, in 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin elevated DIU so that it reported directly to him instead of to the undersecretary of research and engineering. I was the new director, and Austin charged us with inventing a fresh strategy. The resulting DIU 3.0 was based on five pillars. The first was embedding DIU teammates with the staff of each four-star combatant commander—the commanders who oversee U.S. military activity in a given region or function, such as cyber-operations—to keep DIU focused on the highest-leverage problems. For example, the commercial tech lead for Admiral Samuel Paparo, who helms U.S. Pacific Command, was an embedded DIU teammate charged with helping close critical operational and strategic gaps in the Pacific and mobilizing the rest of DIU and the Pentagon to do so.

The second pillar was to partner directly with each of the service branches (army, navy, air force, space force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard) that man, train, and equip the military, to ensure that initiatives conceived through the first pillar aligned with their priorities and had what the new strategy called a “pathway to scale.” The third pillar called for turning the more than 200 Defense Department entities focused on innovation into a cohesive community. The fourth pillar focused on ensuring DIU’s depth, its connectivity to the tech sector, organic tech expertise, and knowledge base, in each of its tech portfolios—such as autonomous weapons, AI, space, human systems, cyber-capabilities, and energy—so the Defense Department could access the latest and best innovations. This pillar also focused on removing barriers for firms working with the military, to broaden the base of suppliers. The fifth pillar called for building relationships with allies and partners so that American and allied militaries could grow stronger together.

Congress then codified Austin’s organizational switch into law, making the DIU director a “principal staff assistant”—the same level as an undersecretary of defense—with a seat at the Pentagon’s leadership table. It increased DIU’s budget to nearly $1 billion and changed the nature of the budget itself. Beginning with the 2024 National Defense Appropriations Act, championed by Ken Calvert, the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, Congress gave DIU groundbreaking flexibility. DIU could move money within its portfolio to meet the most critical needs and fund ideas all the way from conception to the initial fielding of operational units. This facilitated real-time experimentation and optimization. DIU could now help partners in the military services buy new technology, quickly prototype and test it, and begin deploying it in a single year. Then, in the second year, DIU could help the services begin scaling that new technology while continuing to update it. Now, in the third year, even the cumbersome current budgeting dynamic allows true scaling by the services, assuming they plan for that expansion when first collaborating with DIU in year one. DIU and the services, working together, finally have the tools to make the iPhone analogy obsolete.

To see how this works in practice, consider Saronic, a young defense tech startup. In January 2024, DIU, working with the navy, announced it would field proposals for a new model of highly capable, inexpensive maritime surface drones, similar to those the Ukrainians had famously used to sink parts of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet despite having only a tiny navy of their own. Over 100 companies responded to that solicitation, from established defense contractors to startups. In July, DIU awarded prototype contracts to three applicants, including the venture-backed Saronic, a small company led by a former navy SEAL. By December, Saronic’s prototype boats had passed rigorous testing by navy operators, DIU technologists, and others, earning a DIU “success memo” for scaling. DIU used its new flexible funding to buy the first operational units for a freshly created navy squadron so that its sailors could train with these boats and develop tactics for them as they were produced. The navy then awarded Saronic a $392 million contract in mid-2025, enough for hundreds of vessels. Already, Saronic’s boats have helped the U.S. military in Iran, including by rescuing helicopter pilots stranded off the coast of Oman earlier this year. The company’s valuation reflects this rapid acceleration: Saronic raised $600 million in Series C funding in February 2025 and $1.75 billion in Series D funding in March 2026 at a $9.25 billion valuation. None of this would have been possible without DIU, its flexible funding, and its partnership with the navy.

Congress paired the unprecedented trust and leeway it granted DIU with new reporting requirements for transparency and oversight. But these are reasonable: DIU must advise Congress of its spending plans before it executes them. It can still implement them as it sees fit, choosing the best technologies from the best companies. DIU has taken transparency even further, providing Congressional appropriators with updates as often as every two weeks on every project, including news both good and bad. This has unsettled some Pentagon officials who fear the scrutiny will invite meddling. But although Congress has asked hard questions, it has not intervened even once. Instead, openness has built trust, preserving and bolstering DIU’s freedom of action in support of the military’s most pressing needs. DIU has put that freedom to work across a broad array of critical fields, including drones and counterdrone technologies, AI-based command-and-control systems, AI-driven biological threat detection, and many others.

The Pentagon’s current leadership has taken steps to build on that progress. Hegseth has called for a “Warfighting Acquisition System” to propel acquisition reform more broadly and mandated the use of DIU’s OTA process for all software purchases. On priorities such as the Golden Dome missile defense system, submarines, and drones, he has centralized decision-making. Congress has issued multiple legislative proposals, and the White House has launched a steady stream of executive orders, signaling support for innovation.

Meanwhile, commercial firms are investing far more in defense innovation than at any time since the early Cold War. In fact, it is one of the few areas of venture capital that has grown in recent years. In 2025, venture firms invested between $30 billion in defense technology alone and $50 billion if dual-use companies are included, up from less than $10 billion (some estimates suggest less than $2 billion) in 2020. That number has continued to rise in 2026, with over $35 billion invested in defense technology and dual-use goods in the first half of the year alone by both established firms and new actors dedicated to the industry.

The American military now has more uncrewed systems in the air, on the sea, and under the sea. It has used them to strike targets in the Middle East. It is adapting tactics worldwide to reflect new capabilities. It has access to more AI models and is making better use of them, including for improving its defenses against adversaries’ drones. It is developing new tech solutions across the spectrum, and it is getting better at doing so.

ROOT AND BRANCH

Still, these steps are not nearly enough. Even with all the expanded authorities, executive orders, new policies, and public pronouncements, somewhere between one and three percent of the U.S. defense budget is spent on truly innovative technologies. DIU’s own budget is around one-tenth of one percent of total defense spending. And only about one-third of one percent of contracts written are OTAs, whether from DIU or elsewhere, representing slightly less than three percent of new funding commitments. The rest remain mired in the old way of doing things, and the vast majority still go to traditional defense contractors. The reforms of recent years have created positive, accelerating momentum, yet they remain workarounds rather than changes to the system. Washington needs to take much more fundamental steps toward real, systemic change that will outlast this administration, and the next.

First, the United States should reinforce and scale its early successes in accessing, prototyping, delivering, and integrating commercially derived technology. This means strengthening DIU’s role in leading the dual-fluency world—people who understand both tech and the military—by more thoroughly embedding its personnel across the Department of Defense, through service partnerships, and by deepening outreach to the tech community. It should stay focused on the country’s most strategic needs and be put in a position to dismantle remaining barriers between the Pentagon and the commercial sector. Congress should also increase its flexible budget. DIU should remain small, but it should be empowered to serve as the vanguard of change.

But taking risks and bringing in cutting-edge tech is the job of the entire department, not just one unit. And without revamping the way the Pentagon’s money works, current reforms designed to move the department’s organizing construct for procurement from traditional programs to more flexible portfolios won’t matter, and the innovative rewiring underway across the military will not have the effect it must. Congress should thus carve out a portion of the budget—say, 20 percent of today’s research and procurement budget—for each of the services and require it to be spent on technological solutions in areas such as autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, space, cyber-technology, advanced manufacturing, and quantum computing. Within these portfolios of record, the services should have the freedom that today’s DIU has to switch from product to product, version to version, and from prototype to operational fielding without having to go back to Congress.

The Pentagon must reward appropriate risk-taking rather than punish every failure.

Alongside this new flexibility, the services should be required, just as DIU is, to provide detailed, real-time reporting that shows how they use this money and offer frequent updates, including when the news is bad, ensuring appropriate oversight for Congress and the American people. Many in the Pentagon believe such information sharing will be too risky or too hard. But project-tracking technology that is already standard in private industry makes this kind of reporting increasingly a governance standard, not a unique burden. Congress has already made clear that it will not grant the services the same flexibility DIU has enjoyed without the same transparency and mutual trust.

The department also desperately needs to reduce the cost and increase the speed of acquiring more traditional platforms, such as ships and planes. This problem might seem unrelated to drones and AI, but the commercial sector can assist here, too, by providing components, materials, and advanced manufacturing techniques that could help the military produce these systems at greater scale and lower cost. This is already happening with the F-35 fighter jet’s software, the navy’s use of the manufacturing firm Hadrian’s software for submarine production, and experimentation by several services with advanced manufacturing firms for cruise missiles and other platforms. Success on major platforms will require partnerships between nimble commercial companies and traditional contractors with the capacity to manage large programs. The Pentagon needs to use its muscle to facilitate that teamwork.

To take full advantage of new technology, American officials will also need to look beyond their borders. The best innovations typically draw on talent, hardware, and software from many places—mostly U.S. allies—and require global markets to compete against China’s manufacturing ecosystem. Washington needs its allies to have the best technology, both to be effective against common adversaries and to be interoperable with American forces. It needs allied tech companies to have opportunities in the U.S. market, and for U.S. tech companies to have opportunities in allied markets, so all can compete without relying on Chinese money or parts. Although pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump is finally unlocking increased allied defense spending, friction over issues such as his stated desire to annex Greenland, tariffs and trade imbalances, and the war in Iran is simultaneously undermining allied confidence in Washington. Decisions like the one in June to cut off allies’ access to Anthropic’s latest AI models have exacerbated concerns in many allied capitals about the risk of being overly dependent on U.S. technology. The United States has to focus on its own critical needs, but with the full understanding that true strength in technology and national security comes from partnerships, not from any one country alone.

Driving change and capitalizing on it will require the Defense Department to hire, develop, and retain far more dual-fluency talent. Despite its talk about bringing in staffers who understand the commercial world, the Pentagon has done a terrible job of actually doing so. This is largely because its hiring processes are infuriatingly slow. Although qualified, patriotic tech warriors will take a 90 percent pay cut to do important work for the country, it is hard to convince them to wait six to 18 months before starting their new jobs—the time it typically takes from first discussions to hiring. That does not even include the additional waits associated with security clearances for those who don’t already have them. Exceptions exist, but like so many things in today’s defense innovation world, they result from direct pressure from the top, often only for individual cases. Solving this will require a major overhaul of the way the Defense Department conducts hiring and thinks about talent. Highly bureaucratic processes reminiscent of those for procurement must be replaced with more efficient ones like those in the private sector. In addition, the Pentagon will need to create new job categories, compensation structures, incentives, and career paths to retain and develop dual-fluency uniformed and civilian personnel. Today, too many of these people see little opportunity for advancement in the military and leave to join the private sector’s defense tech boom. The vast majority of the changes needed both for acquiring new talent and retaining tech warriors are within the Pentagon’s control. Congress is eager to help with the rest.

Perhaps most important, the Pentagon must do more to unlock its teams’ latent potential. It must change performance incentives for acquisitions, contracting, and adoption personnel, rewarding appropriate risk-taking rather than punishing every failure. It is not enough for defense leaders to simply demand that Pentagon staffers change their behavior; they must change the underlying criteria for evaluation and promotion that govern officials’ careers. The effective balancing of risk and opportunity across workforces as they scale is at the heart of what has made Silicon Valley so successful, and it is achievable in government. Congress has a role to play, too, by balancing the censuring of officials whose risks don’t pay off with awards for those who take heroic gambles for the right reasons.

The tech sector’s founders and funders must change, as well. Defense technology is experiencing a gold rush, spurred by the combination of massive need, enormous potential, real steps toward government reform, growing defense budgets, and positive examples from an ever-larger number of successful companies. The sector spans both increasingly saturated areas—such as simple aerial drones—and nascent ones still wide open for new entrants, meaning some areas are ripe for consolidation and scale, whereas others remain fertile ground for startups. Programs like the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, which funded over 100 companies, two-thirds of them small businesses, while turning away over 300, illustrate that fierce, Darwinian competition is both inevitable and healthy in this sector. Out-innovating China demands the Silicon Valley mindset of constant churn—launches, failures, acquisitions, and redeployment of capital and talent—rather than the traditional contractor reflex of taking their losses to Congress or the press.

THE RIGHT RISKS

Fundamentally, what the defense world needs is a sea change in its approach to risk. Officials in both the Defense Department and Congress, working with the private sector, must take appropriate financial, process, and reputational risks today to avoid taking more dangerous ones—risks to military missions, to the troops, and to the nation more broadly—later. Americans are very good at driving dramatic change in response to terrible shocks, such as Pearl Harbor, September 11, or the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, the United States should not wait until tragedy strikes.

Fixing the military’s procurement and adoption systems cannot, of course, guarantee that Washington will deter U.S. adversaries or win a major conflict. But the current administration and Congress have a historic opportunity to work with an eager tech sector in support of the best warriors in the world, to bring real change right now, and to make the United States and the world much safer in doing so. No matter where individual Americans stand on the political spectrum, and no matter how different their views on domestic or foreign policy choices, none can afford for the nation to miss that chance.

DOUG BECK served from 2023 through August 2025 as Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which he helped found in 2015. From 2009 to 2023, he was Vice President at Apple, leading Apple’s businesses in Northeast Asia and the Americas. He is a Captain in the U.S. Navy Reserve and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Great article on Mission Command in Action: “The Warrior Battle Rhythm: What Marines Gain from JTF Southern Border” by Major Jeffrey Smeriglio USMC.

Donald Vandergriff — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:02:06 GMT

Examples of Mission Command

Major Jeffrey Smeriglio’s account of Charlie Company, 2d Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, operating under Joint Task Force Southern Border is not merely a useful after-action reflection. It is living proof that the principles of mission command and maneuver warfare—principles I have spent decades urging the American military to internalize—can still take root when the conditions of sustained operational responsibility are present.

From April through July 2026, Smeriglio’s Marines conducted more than two hundred squad patrols, nine platoon-level operations, and ninety days of continuous company-level effort across complex terrain in support of U.S. Border Patrol. The decisive insight he records is that mission command rests on discipline.

Mission Command In Action

Standardized pre-combat checks, rigorous accountability of ammunition and equipment, trusted vehicle operators, deliberate terrain analysis, intelligence-driven tasking, and the purposeful employment of sensors and unmanned aircraft systems created the foundation that allowed decentralized execution.

When those foundations were strong, leaders could grant freedom of action. When they weakened, friction, lost equipment, and diminished readiness followed. This is not theory. It is the daily practice of Auftragstaktik under real operational demand.

I have argued for years that the United States military remains largely trapped in the cultural patterns of second-generation warfare: centralized control, attrition-focused processes, industrial-age personnel systems, and a preference for detailed orders and synchronization over initiative and adaptation.

Third-generation warfare—maneuver warfare—demands the opposite. It requires leaders who understand the commander’s intent two levels up, who can sense and decide faster than the opponent, and who are trusted to act within that intent when the situation changes.

Mission command is the American expression of that Prussian-derived culture. It cannot be taught solely in classrooms or scripted exercises. It must be lived inside a continuous operational rhythm of prepare, receive the situation, understand the mission, issue concise orders, move, observe, report, decide, coordinate, debrief, recover, and repeat.

Smeriglio’s rotation restored precisely that “old school” warrior battle rhythm:

At the individual level, Marines discovered that their personal competence—pace count, sector sketch, radio report, night-optics employment—directly affected adjacent teams and higher purpose.
At the team and squad level, sequential leader-owned accountability and a disciplined daily cycle of inspections, execution, debrief, and recovery built cohesion and tactical flexibility.
Vehicle teams retained mobility while establishing observation positions; terrain was occupied for influence over avenues of approach rather than mere elevation.
Platoons practiced converting intelligence into concise radio orders measured in seconds, creating a genuine command-and-control feedback loop: intelligence informed assessment, the platoon issued task and purpose, the squad executed within intent, and reports shaped the next decision.
Company leadership balanced standards and accountability with subordinate initiative, treating logistics and equipment issue as tactical enablers rather than administrative burdens.
Battalion contributions—shared operational graphics, intelligence-driven tasking, staff battlefield circulation, and purposeful unmanned aircraft system employment—enabled rather than smothered subordinate action.

These are not incidental benefits of a border-security mission. They are the measurable outcomes of placing Marines inside a persistent operational demand that cannot be fully replicated in garrison.

Training can introduce the concepts of mission command.

Sustained responsibility converts them into habits.

Junior leaders learn that disciplined initiative is not independent action detached from higher purpose; it is action grounded in shared understanding, adjacent-unit awareness, and a reliable feedback loop.

Senior leaders learn that decentralization is not the absence of control; it is the product of clear standards, timely intelligence, concise orders, trust, and continuous assessment.

The institutional value to the Marine Corps is therefore profound. Formations that have repeatedly practiced operational decision-making under real consequences carry that experience into future deployments, exercises, and combat.

Leaders who have owned the daily responsibility of small-unit decisions tied to commander’s intent are better prepared for the friction, uncertainty, and rapid tempo of third-generation and higher forms of warfare.

In an era when the military still struggles to escape second-generation habits, credentialism over character, process over adaptability, micromanagement over trust, JTF Southern Border offers a practical laboratory. Units can treat it as repetitive post coverage, or they can use it, as Charlie Company did, to forge disciplined Marines, tactically competent squads, decisive platoon leaders, responsive companies, and enabling battalion staffs.

What Does It All Mean?

The difference, as Smeriglio correctly concludes, is leadership.

Standardized preparation creates trust.
Intelligence creates purpose.
Concise orders create shared understanding.
Terrain analysis creates tactical advantage. Reliable accountability creates freedom of action.
Debriefs and assessments create learning.

When these elements are joined in a sustainable battle rhythm, Marines at every echelon practice the habits the Corps will require in future operations. Incoming leaders should therefore approach the mission as an operational leadership crucible: preserve junior-leader responsibility, strengthen the command-and-control feedback loop, exploit sensors and unmanned systems, integrate continuously with interagency partners, and remove staff friction that prevents timely action. Done well, the deployment leaves the Marine Corps with leaders who are not merely trained in mission command, but practiced in it.

This is the path I have long advocated: parallel evolution of culture, education, training, and personnel systems toward a genuine maneuver-warfare ethos. Major Smeriglio’s article shows that the path remains open wherever operational demand, disciplined standards, and trust in subordinates are allowed to coexist. The warrior battle rhythm is not nostalgia. It is the essential condition for developing the adaptive judgment required by the generations of war we actually face.

Endnotes

Donald E. Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019); see also Vandergriff, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, rev. ed. (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2013).
William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985); on the generational framework, see William S. Lind, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette 73, no. 10 (October 1989): 22–26, and subsequent discussions in Vandergriff’s works.
Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command; see also Donald E. Vandergriff, Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War, 2nd ed. (CreateSpace, 2012).
On the persistence of second-generation cultural patterns and the requirements of third-generation maneuver warfare, see Vandergriff, Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008), and more recent analyses on Substack, including “Parallel Evolution to Move DoD to Maneuver Warfare and Mission Command” (2025).
The concept of a continuous operational battle rhythm as the crucible for mission command appears throughout Vandergriff’s writings, notably in discussions of outcomes-based training and education and the adaptive course model in Adopting Mission Command.

Begin Article: The Warrior Battle Rhythm: What Marines Gain from JTF Southern Border

By Major Jeffrey Smeriglio Aug 18, 2026

The Connecting File

The Warrior Battle Rhythm: What Marines Gain from JTF Southern Border

16 days ago · 10 likes · 1 comment

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From April through July 2026, Charlie Company, 2d Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, supported U.S. Border Patrol at Brown Field Station in the San Diego Sector while attached to V17. During the rotation, the company conducted more than 200 squad patrols, nine platoon-level operations, and 90 days of sustained company-level operations across a broad operational area. Those repetitions made clear that the greatest benefit of the JTF Southern Border mission is not the number of posts covered or patrols completed. It is the sustained operational battle rhythm in which individual discipline and small-unit decisions matter every day.

The mission is not identical to combat, nor should it be described as one. Properly led, however, it is more than an extended security task or a collection of posts. Marines repeatedly prepare, patrol, observe, report, receive orders, make decisions within commander’s intent, account for weapons and equipment, coordinate with U.S. Border Patrol and joint partners, and accept responsibility for real outcomes. The persistent demand gives leaders at every echelon repeated opportunities to practice mission command, reinforce warfighting fundamentals, and improve the feedback loop between intelligence, orders, execution, and assessment.

The decisive insight from our rotation was that mission command rests on discipline. Standardized pre-combat checks and inspections, deliberate ammunition and equipment accountability, trained and trusted vehicle operators, consistent U.S. Border Patrol coordination, intelligence-driven tasking, purposeful use of terrain, and tactically employed sensors and unmanned aircraft systems enable decentralized execution. When those foundations are strong, leaders can give teams freedom of action. When they are weak, the unit loses time, equipment, readiness, and the ability to operate safely.

The institutional value of JTF Southern Border is restoring an operational warrior battle rhythm that cannot be fully replicated in garrison: disciplined Marines, cohesive teams, and leaders practiced in decentralized execution within the commander’s intent. This article describes the mission’s benefits at the individual, team, squad, platoon, company, battalion, and institutional levels; identifies the conditions that allowed those benefits to emerge; and offers practical recommendations for incoming units. For the broader infantry and reconnaissance communities, it also shows how sustained operational responsibility turns mission command from a concept into a habit.

Benefits to Individual Marines

The mission turns routine standards into operational habits. Marines see the direct relationship between preparation, fieldcraft, accountability, and mission success.

Operational Mindset and Ownership

The mission gives individual Marines a tangible sense that their daily actions contribute directly to an operational purpose. Unlike many garrison events, the consequences of preparation and inattention are immediate. Marines learn that they are not merely completing a shift; they are part of a continuous effort to detect activity, understand terrain, maintain contact, report accurately, and enable U.S. Border Patrol to act.

This mindset increases ownership. A Marine’s observation, radio report, sector sketch, pace count, equipment status, or decision to correct a deficiency can affect the team, the adjacent patrol, the watch floor, and U.S. Border Patrol. When leaders reinforce that connection, junior Marines begin to understand how individual competence feeds commander’s intent.

Repetition of Core Skills

The deployment provides repeated opportunities to refine individual and team-level tasks that can otherwise become episodic in garrison. These include movement techniques, halts, hand-and-arm signals, use of night optics, observation and reporting, sector sketches, terrain association, radio discipline, and reconnaissance fundamentals. Because these tasks occur in an operational context, Marines receive immediate feedback on whether their techniques are useful, understood, and sustainable.

Night operations are particularly valuable. Marines learn the difference between knowing how to operate a device and being able to execute a patrol, maintain control, observe effectively, and communicate under darkness. This benefit is lost quickly if PCCs and PCIs become inconsistent or if leaders allow batteries, mounts, optics, communications equipment, or other mission-essential items to go unchecked.

Confidence Through Competence

Confidence grew fastest when Marines entered the mission with realistic patrolling repetitions and then continued to receive close supervision from team and squad leaders. Before deployment, opposing-force patrolling exercises in which one element attempted to infiltrate across a designated boundary while another screened the avenue of approach provided useful repetitions. Training grounded in relevant adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures prepared Marines to recognize movement, use terrain, and understand the purpose of a screen.

Benefits to Teams and Squads

Discipline as the Foundation

Team and squad discipline is the most important determinant of success. PCCs and PCIs must be conducted the same way, every time, against a clear standard. Inconsistent inspections produced predictable failures: misplaced or lost ammunition, missing equipment, preventable injuries, and Marines arriving at night operations without the equipment or readiness required to execute.

The most effective accountability method was leader-owned and sequential. Squad leaders issued ammunition, communications equipment, and other sensitive or mission-essential gear one team at a time, maintaining positive accountability through issue, employment, recovery, and de-issue. This reduced ambiguity and made responsibility visible.

Cohesion Through a Disciplined Battle Rhythm

The best team and squad leaders established a sustainable daily rhythm. Although duty and rest cycles varied across the rotation, the pattern remained disciplined: PCCs and PCIs, movement to post, mission execution, debrief, return, physical training, recovery, and rest. Repetition reduced friction and made standards predictable. Time away from the mission was used to prepare for the next operational cycle.

This battle rhythm also created a coaching structure. Team leaders knew when to inspect, rehearse, correct, and capture observations. Marines knew what right looked like and could focus their attention on the tactical problem rather than improvising administrative processes every day.

Tactical Flexibility at the Team Level

Properly staffed vehicle teams offered a useful balance of flexibility and security. A vehicle team could establish an observation position while retaining mobility, allowing the element to observe, reposition, communicate, and respond without collapsing into a single static posture. This structure provided options that reduced teams did not consistently offer.

The mission also sharpened the relationship between observation and maneuver. Terrain is key because it enables observation of an avenue of approach, influence over that approach, freedom of maneuver to interdict activity, or the ability to screen effectively by detecting and reporting. This improved tactical judgment and reduced the tendency to occupy terrain merely because it was elevated.

Preserving Patrolling Fundamentals

Patrolling basics did not disappear immediately, but some small-unit habits began to erode late in the rotation: security at halts, pace and formation control, hand-and-arm signals, and deliberate movement control. The lesson is not that the mission degrades warfighting skills by design. Rather, repeated operations can normalize shortcuts unless leaders deliberately sustain standards through rehearsals, spot checks, and periodic tactical evaluations.

Benefits to Platoons

This mission provides repeated practice in converting intelligence into concise orders, enabling decentralized squad execution while retaining platoon-level oversight and assessment.

A Real Command-and-Control Feedback Loop

The platoon-level benefit increased substantially when watch officers and watch chiefs shifted from passive battle tracking to tactically employing the squad operating in the area. Instead of only moving icons or pins, the watch received an intelligence update, assessed current activity, developed a basic order with mission and tasks, and transmitted concise direction over the radio.

This change created a complete command-and-control feedback loop: intelligence informed an assessment; the platoon issued a task and purpose; the squad executed within commander’s intent; the watch maintained oversight; and reports informed the next decision. Squads already knew the terrain and made decisions, so they adapted quickly. They also appreciated the improved coordination because orders helped deconflict adjacent teams and linked local actions to a larger plan.

Concise Orders and Leadership

Platoon leaders improved by practicing concise combat orders and assessments over the radio. A useful standard (McBreen) was to deliver in approximately three transmissions, thirty seconds or less. The purpose of the time standard was not speed for its own sake; it forced leaders to identify the decision, communicate the task and purpose, state the relevant assessment, and avoid unnecessary narration.

Repeated radio orders benefited both the transmitter and the receiver. Officers and staff noncommissioned officers practiced making timely assessments and giving usable guidance. Team and squad leaders gained practice listening for intent, extracting what mattered, confirming understanding, and acting without waiting for a detailed script.

Leader Understanding of the Area of Operations

Incoming platoon commanders and platoon sergeants should spend their first days understanding the area. Daylight battlefield circulation allows leaders to see routes, terrain compartments, observation points, communications limitations, vehicle hazards, and distances. Night patrols reveal a different problem: reduced depth perception, altered traffic and activity patterns, optical limitations, and the practical difficulty of controlling teams in darkness.

When available and authorized, aerial orientation provides an additional perspective. It can help leaders understand the area’s geometry, the relationship between routes and terrain, and the general use of observation and sensing capabilities.

Benefits to the Company

Mission Command at Operational Tempo

At company level, the mission creates a persistent requirement to balance control and initiative. Company leadership must set standards, maintain accountability, coordinate with U.S. Border Patrol and higher headquarters, manage shifts, and preserve readiness, while allowing platoons and squads to adapt to activity in their sectors. The company becomes more effective when it provides a disciplined framework rather than attempting to direct every movement from the command post.

Logistics and Accountability as Tactical Enablers

Several actions have outsized effects on operational performance: ammunition handling, vehicle-key issue and de-issue, and communications-equipment issue and de-issue. These are not administrative details separate from tactics; they are key transitions. They determine whether teams depart on time, whether equipment is available and serviceable, whether custody is clear, and whether the company can identify and correct a problem before it becomes a mission failure.

The recommended model: assign squad leaders direct responsibility for sequential team-level issue and recovery; use standardized rosters; reconcile discrepancies immediately; and prevent informal pass-downs that separate custody from accountability. During relief in place, complete a deliberate, documented ammunition transfer or turn-in/issue process rather than relying on verbal handoff.

Vehicle Operations and Risk Management

Mountain and unimproved-road driving demands judgment, not merely licensing. The team leader does not have to be the assistant driver and may be the most appropriate primary driver when that Marine is more capable and experienced. Company leadership should identify early who has mountain-driving experience, who demonstrates sound judgment, and who is responsible and trustworthy enough to operate in the area. Billet or seniority should not substitute for demonstrated competence.

Integration With U.S. Border Patrol

Trust with U.S. Border Patrol was built through consistent leader presence. A Marine leader, platoon commander, platoon sergeant, or company staff representative should attend each U.S. Border Patrol shift muster or turnover. That touchpoint enables direct coordination with the watch officer or shift supervisor, clarifies current activity and priorities, surfaces friction early, and reinforces that the Marine unit is an integrated operational partner rather than a detached supporting element.

Attendance alone is not enough. The Marine representative should arrive prepared to exchange relevant observations, confirm responsibilities, understand changes in U.S. Border Patrol priorities, and carry information back into the Marine command-and-control process.

Employment of Sensors

Company personnel who operate persistent surveillance systems every day often develop the best practical understanding of how those systems can support the mission. When approval processes for routine repositioning are too slow, the unit can lose the opportunity to adapt within the operational cycle. Authorities should preserve accountability while allowing timely decisions at the appropriate level.

The broader benefit is leader development in tactical sensor employment. Company leaders learn to connect sensor employment to operational requirements, terrain, observation limits, and maneuver options. Higher headquarters should retain appropriate oversight while delegating routine decisions to the lowest level with the competence, information, and responsibility to act.

Benefits to the Battalion

Intelligence-Driven Operations

One of the most valuable battalion contributions was the transition to intelligence-driven tasking. A shared operational graphic highlighting priority movement corridors identified through available reporting gave companies a common picture and allowed missions to tie to assessed avenues of movement. This improved unity of effort and helped companies place squads and enabling systems with greater purpose.

The lesson is that intelligence must generate operationally useful products: clear priorities, relevant indicators, collection gaps, and recommended decisions. The battalion should then task companies against those priorities while preserving enough flexibility for local leaders to adapt based on what they see.

Battalion Staff Understanding of the Operational Area

Battalion staff sections should get into the area of operations with company leadership during the first thirty days. Staff officers and chiefs who have not seen the terrain and operational demands firsthand will struggle to appreciate the time and friction involved in meeting their requirements. Battlefield circulation improves the quality of planning, resourcing, approvals, and staff estimates.

This is especially important for intelligence, operations, logistics, communications, aviation/UAS integration, and force-protection personnel. The goal is not ceremonial visits. Staff members should observe a full operational cycle, ask company leaders what creates delay or risk, and return with specific actions to reduce friction.

Building UAS Competence

The mission offers recurring opportunities for unmanned aircraft system training and employment. Incoming battalions should bring as many qualified 7316 unmanned aircraft system operators as practical, prepare to employ approved systems where authorized, and train additional sensor operators before deployment. This creates immediate operational value and an opportunity to build unit-level competence in aviation-enabled reconnaissance and surveillance.

The battalion should connect UAS sorties to operational questions rather than treating flight hours as the objective. Missions should support terrain analysis, pattern development, cueing of ground forces, validation of observation points, or assessment of activity. The same intelligence-to-operations feedback loop used for ground patrols should govern aerial collection.

Institutional Benefit to the Marine Corps

The mission produces disciplined, confident leaders and cohesive units that have repeatedly practiced mission command in a live operational setting. That experience carries forward into future deployments, exercises, and combat preparation. The enduring institutional benefit is developing leaders who have lived inside an operational battle rhythm. Daily, team leaders, squad leaders, platoon commanders, platoon sergeants, and company leaders make decisions tied to commander’s intent and own the consequences of those decisions. Their choices are not theoretical staff exercises. They affect real patrols, real coordination, real readiness, and continuous mission execution.

This experience helps restore an “old school” warrior battle rhythm associated with sustained operational deployments: prepare, receive the situation, understand the mission, issue orders, move, observe, report, decide, coordinate, debrief, recover, and repeat. The rhythm develops practical judgment and resilience because the organization cannot wait for perfect information or a perfectly scripted training event.

The mission also offers a laboratory for mission command. Junior leaders learn that disciplined initiative is not independent action detached from higher purpose. It is action grounded in shared understanding, commander’s intent, adjacent-unit awareness, and a reliable command-and-control feedback loop. Senior leaders learn that decentralization is not the absence of control; it is the product of clear standards, timely intelligence, concise orders, trust, and assessment.

For the Marine Corps, the payoff is a formation with more leaders who have practiced operational decision-making, more squads accustomed to accountable decentralized execution, and more staffs that understand how to enable rather than smother subordinate initiative. Training can introduce these ideas. A sustained mission makes them habits.

Command Emphasis

The commander should repeatedly communicate that this is an operational mission. Marines must understand both the significance and the limits of their role. They are expected to think, observe, report, maneuver, coordinate, and act within commander’s intent and legal authorities. The mission becomes professionally valuable when leaders demand disciplined standards and then trust subordinates to execute.

Conclusion

JTF Southern Border offers a rare combination of persistent operational demand, frequent opportunities for reconnaissance and surveillance, interagency integration, complex terrain, night operations, and decentralized small-unit action. The mission’s value is not automatic. A unit can reduce it to repetitive post coverage, or it can use the same mission to build disciplined Marines, tactically competent squads, decisive platoon leaders, responsive companies, and enabling battalion staffs.

The difference is leadership. Standardized preparation creates trust. Intelligence creates purpose. Concise orders create shared understanding. Terrain analysis creates tactical advantage. Reliable accountability creates freedom of action. Debriefs and assessments create learning. When these elements are joined in a sustainable battle rhythm, Marines at every echelon practice the habits the Corps will require in future operations.

Incoming leaders should therefore approach the mission as an operational leadership crucible. They should preserve the daily responsibility placed on junior leaders, strengthen the command-and-control feedback loop, exploit the UAS and sensor environment, integrate continuously with U.S. Border Patrol, and remove staff friction that prevents timely action. Done well, the deployment leaves the Marine Corps with leaders who are not only trained in mission command, but practiced in it.

-----------------------

Major Jeffrey Smeriglio recently completed command of Charlie Company, 2d Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, and currently serves with II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group.

Chuck de Caro’s diagnosis of America’s information-war shortfall against Iran is not merely a media critique.

Donald Vandergriff — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:02:05 GMT

De Caro’s central observation is straightforward and damning: the United States can systematically dismantle Iranian military hardware, command nodes, and regional proxies, yet still lose the contest over meaning. Iranian strikes are timed for American prime-time cycles, spokesmen speak directly into the camera with disciplined visual authority, and AI-generated content targets younger domestic audiences hostile to the administration.

The goal is not battlefield attrition but the shaping of will—ours, the Iranian public’s, and the global audience’s. De Caro labels this “SOFTWAR”: the hostile use of global visual media to change another society’s view of reality. Iran has internalized it; too many American officials still treat television as a passive record rather than a decisive battlespace.

This is classic fifth-generation warfare. While definitions remain contested, 5GW centers on non-kinetic means—narrative, perception, social engineering, and cognitive influence—aimed at decision-making processes and societal cohesion. It does not replace earlier generations; it layers atop them. First-generation linear tactics, second-generation attrition and firepower, third-generation maneuver, and fourth-generation irregular and non-state methods all remain relevant.

The information domain simply becomes the decisive one for political effect. Iran is fighting a four-dimensional guerrilla war across land, sea, air, and the infosphere, selecting residual kinetic actions primarily for their telegenic value. The United States, by contrast, still privileges the kinetic and treats the cognitive as an afterthought or public-affairs problem.

Maneuver warfare and Mission Command offer the corrective framework. Maneuver warfare, as developed from Prussian practice and refined by theorists such as William S. Lind and John Boyd, seeks relative advantage through speed, initiative, deception, and disruption of the enemy’s decision cycle rather than pure attrition. Mission Command (the American expression of Auftragstaktik) operationalizes that culture: clear commander’s intent, decentralized execution, trust in subordinates’ judgment, and rapid adaptation to friction.

In the information domain these principles demand that influence operations drive the campaign design, with kinetic actions subordinated to narrative and cognitive objectives—not the reverse. De Caro’s proposed “TV drone” concept and reactivation of a specialized SOFTWAR unit are practical expressions of that inversion. They aim to seize the initiative in the enemy’s information system, force the regime to reveal and expend air-defense assets, and speak directly to the Iranian body politic that the theocracy must control to survive.

The American failure is cultural and institutional, not technological.

We still operate with second-generation habits:

centralized control, process over outcomes, and a personnel system that rewards credentialism rather than adaptive judgment under uncertainty:

Spokesmen brief the room rather than the global audience;

uniforms and lighting are treated as afterthoughts rather than instruments of command presence;

the only dedicated airborne broadcast platform was retired without a ready replacement.

These are symptoms of an organization still optimized for industrial-age synchronization rather than the fluid, multi-domain tempo required by third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation conflict.

De Caro is right that information warfare is not an elective. It is the core course. A force that can smash every designated target yet loses control of the story has not won. Mission Command and maneuver thinking, properly extended into the infosphere, supply the intellectual and organizational tools to reverse that outcome.

The question is whether American leadership will treat the cognitive battlespace with the same seriousness it already claims for the kinetic one—before the midterms, and before the next conflict makes the cost of continued second-generation habits irreversible.

Endnotes

Donald E. Vandergriff, “Tehran’s Cognitive Offensive and the American Second-Generation Trap: An Analysis of Gregg Roman’s ‘Tehran’s War on American Morale,’” Donald Vandergriff (Substack), August 19, 2026, https://donvandergriff.substack.com/p/tehrans-cognitive-offensive-and-the.
Chuck de Caro’s definition and long teaching record on SOFTWAR appear in multiple sources, including his own writings and Department of Defense-related briefings since the early 1990s; see, for example, the summary of his career and thesis at https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/5100062.
On fifth-generation warfare as a contest of information and perception, see “Fifth-generation warfare,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_warfare; and the broader generational framework in “Generations of warfare,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_warfare.
Donald E. Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019); William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985 and later editions); and Vandergriff’s related Substack discussions of commander’s intent across third- and fourth-generation contexts, e.g., “Commander’s Intent in Modern Combat,” June 30, 2025, https://donvandergriff.substack.com/p/commanders-intent-in-modern-combat.
On the persistence of second-generation, industrial-age personnel and command culture as an obstacle to maneuver and Mission Command, see Donald E. Vandergriff, “Gunfire as the Ultimate Personnel Board,” Donald Vandergriff (Substack), August 14, 2026, https://donvandergriff.substack.com/p/gunfire-as-the-ultimate-personnel; and The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2013; originally Presidio Press, 2002).

Begin Article:

The U.S. Is Losing the Information War: A TV Drone Can Tip the Balance

By Chuck de Caro

August 24, 2026

As yet another U.S. bombing halt takes effect in the sixth month of the Iran war, the United States has demonstrated that it can smash Iran’s military piece by piece, but it continues to lose the information war in Iran, here at home, and around the world.

American forces can and do strike targets across Iran and hit Tehran’s regional allies, especially the Houthis in Yemen. By every conventional military measure, Iran is taking severe losses. Yet a growing domestic and international audience believes Tehran is fighting the United States to a standstill. Why?

It is because too many senior American officials are still treating television (via Internet or broadcast) as a record of an event rather than a battlefield in its own right. The War Department treats global visual media as though it had forgotten about 1991’s Desert Storm media triumphs and as though there was no need for domestic and foreign public support. The little bit being tossed out is reminiscent of a kind of bureaucratic ‘let them eat cake.’

That will work...right up to the U.S. mid-term elections when the Iranian influence campaign ever so slightly tips the balance wrong way.

Iran is not fighting the U.S. to a standstill. But Iran is gaining ground in the Information War because it has adapted to the global media environment far more effectively than has Washington.

U.S. military planners still tend to think in Clausewitzian terms: that War is the extension politics that uses the controlled application of violence to constrain the enemy to accomplish our will. That formulation reflected the technology of the early 19th century. It does not account for an Information Age in which images cross the globe in milliseconds and political effects can precede, outweigh, or even replace battlefield effects.

I call this form of conflict “SOFTWAR”: The hostile use of global visual media to shape another society’s will by changing its view of reality. I and three other like-minded colleagues have taught this kind of warfare to decades of U.S. War College, Staff College, and Intelligence College graduate students since the early 1990s. But very few have actually adapted.

Unfortunately, the entire Iranian military and intelligence structure has adapted, since at least 2003...and has even stolen the term “SOFTWAR” of this American invented warform in its own publications!

The Iranian use of SOFTWAR helps explain why the United States has spent billions of dollars over five months while Iranian drone and missile attacks continue, and Iranian televisive defiance continues. Washington is using Cold War systems and industrial-age doctrine against an asymmetric enemy that has organized itself for the Infosphere.

Iran’s theocratic dictatorship is fighting a four-dimensional guerrilla asymmetric war across land, sea, air, and information. Its military losses have reduced its ability to retaliate against U.S. forces directly. Its remaining attacks are therefore selected less for battlefield effect than for global media impact: Oil tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a desalination facility and power plant in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil hub, a liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar, a U.S. communications center in Jordan, and American naval facilities in Bahrain all produce frightening images and headlines.

Iran absolutely times its “onesie-twosie” counterattacks in its own early-morning hours, so that the images arrive during the American prime-time news cycle. The objective is not merely to damage a target, but rather to shape the story being told about the war here, there, and around the world.

Meanwhile, Iranian propagandists study the American audience, especially younger people hostile to the Trump administration, and target them with AI-generated Lego-character videos. The goal is to unite disparate American factions, erode domestic support for the war, and above all, influence the midterm elections.

When Iranian military officials such as Brig. Gen. Ebrahim Zolfaghari or IRGC spokesman Abolfazl Shekarchi speak, they are usually seated behind a desk with the Iranian flag visible. Their uniforms are immaculate, their beards trimmed, and their war faces dramatically lit. Most important, they look through the camera lens directly at the audience. This is Television 101.

Viewers who speak no Farsi still receive the intended message: discipline, seriousness, and defiance.

American military spokesmen often squander the same opportunity. They ignore, disdain, or have never considered acquiring the skills to effectively communicate on television.

General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is informed and capable, but at his Pentagon press conferences his televised manner is that of a serious squadron commander consulting his notes as he briefs the weather to the three rows in front of him.

He should instead address the millions watching beyond the room. Place the camera a few feet away, frame him from mid-bicep to just above the head, and have him look through the lens to establish and maintain direct eye contact with the intended audience. The reporters can sit on either side. The difference would be immediate.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the Combatant Commander of U.S. Central Command, makes a similar mistake. He often appears in a green camouflage uniform designed to defeat electro-optical observation - including television - rather than in the Navy service uniform designed to convey authority, experience, and command. He also stands too far from the camera for viewers to read his face. His folksy Ozzie Nelson manner may work before Congress or the Navy League. It does not put an enemy on his heels.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, whose warrior credentials are undisputed and whose television experience is well noted, knows more about televisive perception than his military subordinates but is underperforming. To quote from his address to General Officers last year: “We just have to be honest. We have to say with our mouths what we see with our eyes... to point out the obvious things right in front of us.”

So, Mr. Secretary, from an Instructor who has been teaching strategic Information Warfare since you were in grade school, here are the obvious things in front of us: You are no longer pitching to the Fox demographic. You need a tighter camera shot, better lighting, and a visual style designed for wartime communication.

Your presentation is crowded with distractions: A tight European-cut suit, patterned tie, clashing flag pocket square, and hair product that makes your scalp appear to glisten under studio lights. Deep-set eyes require careful lighting. Without it, viewers may read strain or evasiveness where none exists. The Pentagon has fixed studio lighting for briefings at the podium, and it should be properly adjusted for you. Alfred Hitchcock understood the rule: Dress the leading man simply and light him properly so the audience watches the man rather than the costume. Cary Grant in “North by Northwest” remains a timeless example.

Iranian officials would earn an “A” in my information warfare seminar, I’m sorry to say. Too many American officials are still treating television as a record of an event rather than a battlefield in its own right. The American officials bungling this Information War would receive an “F” ...and three hours of detention.

That needs to change. Now.

The TV Drone and the U.S. Unit To Run Its Counter-Propaganda Function

The United States inadvertently helps Tehran by concentrating almost exclusively on visible military targets while leaving the regime’s domestic television system intact. Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) continues to broadcast dozens of TV channels across Iran giving only the Mullah’s view of the war. Thus, the only information that the vast majority of Iranians are getting comes from television and radio stations controlled by the Iranian government. With access to the Internet long ago cut off by the regime, the only “news” the body politic receives is pure propaganda.

Meanwhile, Washington destroys weapons and commanders but fails to effectively contest the information environment that gives those losses political meaning. It seems no one has thought to bomb the TV transmitters and follow up with drones to broadcast information to the Iranian body politic. Iran’s real engine is that selfsame body politic - a population that has endured repression and the reported killing of tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators. Yet today, outside of a small fraction of Iranians who may have Starlink receivers, the United States has no coherent means of speaking directly to those people.

It’s not as though the United States lacks the technological wherewithal, it’s simply that the U.S. military has weakened its own capacity to respond. In 2024, the military decommissioned the EC-130J aircraft of the 193rd Special Operations Wing, the only U.S. airborne radio and television broadcast platform. The aircraft were judged too vulnerable for modern combat, but no announced drone replacement has assumed the mission.

The solution is simply to take any drones with the proper range and endurance, such as the dozen-or-so now-obsolete Predators sitting in the boneyard at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, and strip them of their reconnaissance gear. Next, rewire the on-board Ku satellite antenna to optimize its broadband receive function and then hook that to any Phase Alternating Line, or PAL, TV transmitter and dipole antenna compatible with Iranian home TV receivers.

By flying the drones from semi-autonomous Kurd areas in eastern Iraq three hundred miles to Tehran, each will have about a five hour endurance over downtown. By orbiting at or above 15,000 feet the drones will not be easy targets for shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles.

As the drones reach their selected orbit points, precision guided munitions launched from distant attack aircraft take out all the transmissions towers in the area, leaving the airwaves clear for live programming from the drones.

The Iranian dictatorship, which absolutely must control information flow, will then be forced to turn on its radars so that its sophisticated antiaircraft missiles can shoot down the drones. Except that when they do, every U.S. air defense suppression weapon known to man will be directed at those sites.

Programming the video from the drones on a real time basis can be fixed by reactivating the 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual) that I designed for the War Department’s Office of Net Assessment a decade ago. That Unit, composed of some 50 men and women from the California Air and Army National Guard used their state-of-the art civilian occupational skills from Hollywood and the Silicon Valley to pioneer new and effective methods of Information Warfare. Unfortunately, the Obama sequestration chopped the 1st JSU(V) with the grace of a blunt meat ax. But fortunately, it could be up and running again in about two weeks!

In summary, at present America possesses overwhelming kinetic power but lacks a direct means of reaching the Iranian public at scale: A doctrine which resembles a mechanic who responds to an engine warning light by cutting the wire to the bulb. The warning disappears. The failing engine problem remains.

The United States is not losing the military contest with Iran. It is losing the contest over what the world believes the military contest means.

A nation can destroy every designated military target and still lose the war if its enemy controls the images, the timing, and the story. Information warfare is not an optional elective. It is the core course. And America, so far, is failing.

The answer is a genuinely four-dimensional American military capable of operating on land, at sea, in the air, and throughout the Infosphere. Information Warfare should be driving the organization and the direction of the campaign, with kinetic operations supporting the strategic influence objectives - not the other way around. Iran already understands this hierarchy.

Chuck de Caro was hired by Ted Turner as CNN’s 1st Special Assignments Correspondent. In 1986, he started AEROBUREAU a huge flying newsroom. He also advised TV’s JAG and NCIS. Since 1991 he taught at the National Defence and National Intelligence Universities and for 24 years served as outside consultant to the War Department’s secretive Office of Net Assessment and progenitor of the 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual).

image: A woman waves an Iranian flag next to a billboard showing a graphic of a man wearing a shirt showing the face of late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed during a joint U.S. and Israeli strike on Feb. 28, with words calling upon the avengers of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam’s most beloved historical saints, in a square in downtown Tehran, Iran, Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Germany did not survive Leipzig because of its defenses. It survived because a detonator failed.

Donald Vandergriff — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 10:01:01 GMT

A purpose-built quadcopter carrying roughly 800 grams of Semtex and PETN flew into Leipzig/Halle Airport on 4 August 2026, struck the wing of a parked Ukrainian Antonov An-124 near the fuel tanks, bounced off, and sat on the tarmac for hours until a bus driver found it.

A second object, almost certainly another drone, clipped a diverted DHL jet. The airport’s sensors never saw the first one coming. U.S. intelligence assesses it as Russian. DNA tied it to the 2024 DHL parcel fire at the same hub. Leipzig is a NATO strategic airlift node. The only reason this was not a fireball next to ammunition or fuel is that the firing train broke. That is not a security success. That is luck.

Europe (and the US) is running out of luck. The World Politics Review piece is correct on that narrow point. What it does not say clearly enough is that this is 4th Generation Warfare executed with professional tradecraft: cheap, custom, low-observable delivery against a logistics node that matters, using the civilian environment as cover. It is not “sabotage” as a nuisance. It is reconnaissance by fire and a rehearsal.

I have spent decades arguing that our institutions remain trapped in 2nd Generation Warfare thinking: centralized control, exquisite platforms, industrial-age personnel systems, and the comforting illusion that the homeland is a sanctuary. Leipzig is the latest data point. The United States is far more exposed than Germany.

The American vulnerability is structural

Box trucks and 18-wheelers already own the American road network. They require no special permit to park within a few kilometers of an airport, a substation, a refinery, a port, or a base. One truck can carry dozens of small or medium drones, launch rails, batteries, and payloads. Ukraine’s Spider’s Web operation proved the concept: trucks drove deep into Russia and released 117 FPV drones against airfields. Inside the continental United States there is no border to cross. The vehicles and the operators can already be here. A coordinated launch from multiple trucks in multiple states on the same night is not science fiction. It is logistics.

Our current counter-UAS posture cannot meet it. Authority has been narrowly limited to certain “covered” facilities. Many bases still lack operational systems because of bureaucratic designation fights and glacial fielding. NORAD and Northern Command have said publicly that sensors and effectors are inadequate against low-altitude, short-range swarms launched from inside the country.

Standard surveillance radars were built for a different threat. Legal, spectrum, and safety constraints further hobble what can actually be used over populated areas. Recent expansions of authority and some contracting are real but incremental. They do not create a nationwide, adaptive detection-and-defeat web. Most of the country still relies on a bus driver noticing something.

This is the same cultural problem I have written about since The Path to Victory and Adopting Mission Command. We prefer centralized, risk-averse, technology-first solutions that look good in briefings. An adversary using 4GW methods prefers cheap, distributed, adaptive, hard-to-attribute means that exploit our own infrastructure and our own slowness. The OODA loop at the tactical level belongs to the side that can launch from a truck, hit, and disappear while we are still arguing about who has the authority to jam or shoot.

What actually works

We already know the principles. Mission Command and maneuver warfare demand that initiative live at the lowest competent level, that we train for outcomes rather than checklists, and that we accept that the enemy will use the civilian environment against us.

Homeland defense against this class of threat requires layered sensors and effectors, yes, but more importantly it requires adaptive leaders and organizations that can decide and act faster than a truck-launched swarm. It requires treating the interstate system and the parking lot as part of the battlespace, not as someone else’s problem.

Leipzig was a single-drone probe that failed because of a mechanical fault and a chance discovery. A truck-delivered campaign against American nodes would be a distributed saturation attack. We cannot count on the detonator failing every time. We cannot count on a bus driver. The technology, the vehicles, and the method already exist. Our culture and our systems do not yet match the threat.

Endnotes:

“Europe Is Running Out of Near Misses From Russian Sabotage,” World Politics Review, August 19, 2026, https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/europe-russia-sabotage-deterrence-leipzig-airport/; Jeremy Hsu, “Explosive Drone Found Hovering Near Ukrainian Cargo Aircraft at German Airport,” Ars Technica, August 6, 2026, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/germany-disarms-explosive-drone-found-at-airport-hunts-possible-second-drone/.
“German Police Examine Suspicious Object at Leipzig Airport,” Reuters, August 5, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/german-police-examine-suspicious-object-leipzig-airport-2026-08-05/; “Drone Carrying Explosives at German Airport Marks ‘New Level of Danger,’ Says Interior Minister,” The Guardian, August 5, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/05/drone-german-airport-dhl-cargo-plane-collides-object-leipzig.
Alexander Dobrindt statements reported in Hsu, “Explosive Drone Found”; “Leipzig Drone Bomb Was Semtex and PETN, Built to Slip Past the Airport’s New Drone Defenses,” DroneXL, August 7, 2026, https://dronexl.co/2026/08/07/leipzig-drone-bomb-semtex-petn-defenses/.
“US Intelligence ‘Believes Russia Was Behind Leipzig Airport Drone Bomb,’” The Guardian, August 10, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/10/us-intelligence-russia-leipzig-airport-drone-bomb.
“DNA Links Leipzig Drone Attack to Suspected GRU Plot,” AeroTime, August 12, 2026, https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/dna-leipzig-drone-antonov-an-124-gru-parcel-plot; reporting in Die Zeit and Bild on the DNA match to the July 20, 2024, DHL incident.
Ferdinand Knapp, “German Anti-Terror Police Investigate Explosive Drone Found at Leipzig Airport,” Politico, August 5, 2026, https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-police-investigation-explosive-drone-leipzig-airport/.
“Europe Is Running Out of Near Misses From Russian Sabotage,” World Politics Review, August 19, 2026.
“‘Spider’s Web’ Warning: The US Must Prioritize Drone Defense to Avoid Russia’s Fate,” Breaking Defense, June 9, 2025, https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/spiders-web-warning-the-us-must-prioritize-drone-defense-to-avoid-russias-fate/.
Congressional Research Service and statutory authorities under 10 U.S.C. § 130i and 6 U.S.C. § 124n; see also “Don’t Wait for a Disaster to Develop Strong US Counter-Drone Capabilities,” Atlantic Council, June 11, 2026, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/dont-wait-for-a-disaster-to-develop-strong-us-counter-drone-capabilities/.
“US Northern Command Warns Drone Defense Gaps Leave Military Bases Exposed to Domestic Swarm Attacks,” Army Recognition, August 19, 2026, https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2026/us-northern-command-warns-drone-defense-gaps-leave-military-bases-exposed-to-domestic-swarm-attacks.

Begin Article:

Europe Is Running Out of Near Misses From Russian Sabotage

Candace Rondeaux Aug 19, 2026August 19, 2026

Police officers on the grounds of Leipzig Airport, in Schkeuditz, Germany, Aug. 7, 2026. (Sebastian Willnow for dpa via AP)

Eight hundred grams of Semtex. That was roughly how much of the plastic explosive German investigators say was packed into a tin-can-sized device attached to the drone discovered at Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany on Aug. 4. For perspective, forensic investigators estimated that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, contained roughly 350 to 450 grams of Semtex. All 259 people aboard that flight were killed, along with 11 people on the ground.
No one was killed in Leipzig. The drone’s detonator failed, and an airport bus driver managed to kick the device clear of the Ukrainian cargo plane it was apparently targeting. Part of the heavy-lift pipeline that flies NATO’s strategic airlift missions to Ukraine, the Antonov jet was loaded with ammunition. Aviation authorities halted air traffic and diverted several inbound DHL freighters to Hanover after one such flight arriving from Marseille was struck by an object German authorities suspect was a second drone, though it caused only minor damage.
Twice in two years, Leipzig has come close to disaster. The first time was in 2024, when a parcel containing an incendiary device caught fire shortly before it was loaded onto an aircraft at the airport’s DHL hub. Saboteurs linked to Russia are implicated in both cases. Europe cannot afford to bide its time while it decides what deterrence looks like.
For More go below,

https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/europe-russia-sabotage-deterrence-leipzig-airport/

InfantryDort’s “The Cost of the Arena” is a polemical indictment of a society that outsources violence, then treats the men who perform it as contaminated once they return.

Donald Vandergriff — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:01:28 GMT

The essay, posted 20 August 2026, argues that America sends young men into “hell,” demands they become intimate with killing and chaos, and later subjects their “ugly years” to drinking, broken relationships, moral struggle as a forensic public scrutiny when they seek further service (I know first hand this struggle). Accountability is not rejected; redemption is. The country, the author contends, now prefers “warriors without scars.”

This critique maps directly onto the intellectual architecture of maneuver warfare, Mission Command, and the generations-of-war framework developed by William S. Lind and his collaborators. Those doctrines are not merely tactical or organizational; they are cultural. They presuppose a particular kind of human being and a particular relationship between the fighting force and the society that fields it. Dort’s essay describes the erosion of that relationship.

Third-Generation Warfare and the Human Requirements of Maneuver

William S. Lind’s generations schema distinguishes first-generation linear tactics of order, second-generation attrition (“the artillery conquers, the infantry occupies”), and third-generation maneuver warfare. The last was pioneered by the German army in 1917–1918: nonlinear infiltration, surfaces and gaps, tempo as a weapon, and the goal of shattering cohesion rather than grinding down numbers.

U.S. Marine Corps doctrine formalized this in FMFM 1 / MCDP 1 Warfighting: maneuver warfare “seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a series of rapid, violent, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which he cannot cope.” It operates in the moral and mental domains as much as the physical. It therefore demands decentralized command, initiative, and self-discipline rather than imposed process.

Those qualities are not produced by clean, risk-averse, careerist personnel. They are forged in the “arena.” The psychological residue Dort describes—the smoke, the mud, the wrecked personal lives—is the predictable byproduct of operating inside the OODA loop under conditions of fear, moral injury, and isolation. A society that recoils from that residue is, in effect, rejecting the human capital required for third-generation methods. It prefers the more industrial, process-heavy second-generation model in which soldiers are closer to interchangeable fire-support assets.

Lind repeatedly noted that American forces often remained culturally second-generation even after formally adopting maneuver language: inward-focused, checklist-driven, and uncomfortable with the disorder that true maneuver exploits. Dort’s complaint about elites who have never been “in the dirt” yet sit in judgment is a civilian analogue of that same cultural mismatch.

Mission Command: Trust as the Prerequisite

Mission Command (the American rendering of Auftragstaktik) is the command philosophy that makes maneuver possible. ADP 6-0 lists its principles: mutual trust, shared understanding, commander’s intent, disciplined initiative, mission orders, and acceptance of prudent risk. The entire system rests on the commander trusting subordinates to act in the absence of orders when the situation changes, and on subordinates trusting that their seniors will back them.

Dort’s essay is an argument that this trust has broken down at the societal level. Confirmation hearings and media “forensics” treat a veteran’s post-combat struggles as disqualifying rather than as evidence of having paid the price the nation asked. If the political class and commentariat will not extend grace or recognize redemption, they signal that they do not trust the warrior class. That signal travels downward. It becomes harder to sustain the high-trust, high-initiative culture Mission Command requires inside the force when the larger society treats the same men as morally suspect.

The essay’s linkage to “merit” is therefore not incidental. Mission Command and maneuver warfare are meritocratic in a harsh sense: they reward those who can think, decide, and act under stress. Ideological filters that subordinate demonstrated competence and character to other criteria undermine the selection and retention of the very people the doctrine needs.

Fourth-Generation Warfare and the Home-Front Battlefield

Lind’s 1989 article with Schmitt, Wilson, and others introduced fourth-generation warfare: the state’s loss of its monopoly on war, the return of cultural rather than purely state-on-state conflict, and the blurring of battlefields so that the enemy’s society itself becomes a target. In 4GW the home front is not a rear area; it is contested space. Legitimacy, will, and social cohesion are decisive.

Dort’s “balcony” metaphor—journalists and lawmakers whose greatest danger is a hostile headline pointing down at the scarred man in the dirt—is a 4GW observation. The attack is not kinetic; it is moral and informational. By denying redemption and demanding warriors without residue, the cultural elite weakens the martial legitimacy of the state and the willingness of the next generation to enter the arena. Recruitment, retention, and the intangible cohesion that 3GW and 4GW both require suffer.

In 4GW terms, a society that wants the violence performed “neatly packaged, then returned to us without residue” is attempting to have the benefits of a warrior class while refusing the costs. That is a form of strategic self-disarmament.

Limitations and Tone

The essay is not a scholarly treatise. The phrase “gay race communism” is a crude, dismissive shorthand for identity-politics frameworks that, in the author’s view, invert merit and treat certain veterans’ redemption as politically inconvenient. It will alienate readers who might otherwise accept the core claim about scars and hypocrisy. Accountability is acknowledged—“some things cannot be excused by war”—but the piece does not dwell on specific cases or draw lines between recoverable human failure and disqualifying crime.

Its value as analysis lies in the clarity with which it names a cultural contradiction. Maneuver warfare and Mission Command are not merely techniques; they are bets on a particular kind of man operating in a high-trust environment. Fourth-generation conflict makes the moral and psychological health of the society that fields that man a center of gravity. Dort’s argument is that America is currently trying to field third- and fourth-generation capabilities with second-generation social attitudes toward the people who must fight.

History, as the essay concludes, is unlikely to remember the names of those who stayed in the balcony.

Notes

InfantryDort (@infantrydort), “THE COST OF THE ARENA,” X, August 20, 2026,

William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).
William S. Lind, “The Four Generations of Modern War,” LewRockwell.com, December 28, 2021 (reprint of earlier essays).
William S. Lind, Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette 73, no. 10 (October 1989): 22–26.
Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, MCDP 1 Warfighting (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 1997).
Headquarters, Department of the Army, ADP 6-0 Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces (Washington, DC: HQDA, July 2019).

Begin InfantryDort Article

THE COST OF THE ARENA

InfantryDort

Aug 20

READ IN APP

There is something obscene about a country asking a man to walk into hell, then recoiling because he comes home smelling like smoke. This is all tied to our recent discussions about “merit”.

We take young Americans, hand them rifles, send them across oceans, and ask them to become intimate with things most lawmakers, journalists, and professional moralists will spend their entire lives safely avoiding. Then years later, some of those veterans are called to serve for something important and suddenly the people in the balcony become forensic experts on every ugly year of their lives.

Maybe they drank too much after the war. Perhaps their relationships were a wreck. They behaved badly and struggled. Look at him! Look how dirty he is!

No. Fucking. Shit. You sent him into the arena.

Accountability matters. Some things cannot be excused by war. But neither can redemption be erased because it complicates a confirmation hearing. If a warrior broke, fought his way back, made amends, rebuilt his life and became useful to his country again, that story should count for something more than another line of attack. But it doesn’t, unless you’re lined with gay race communism.

Instead, America increasingly wants warriors without scars. We want the violence performed somewhere far away, neatly packaged, then returned to us without residue. And we want men willing to enter the arena, but God help them if they bleed on the carpet afterward.

The ugliest part is watching people whose greatest professional danger is a hostile headline point down from the marble seats at the scarred man below and laugh at the mud on his face.

You may be physically cleaner than him because you were never in the dirt. But your soul is filthy.

And history will not remember your name.

Tehran’s Cognitive Offensive and the American Second-Generation Trap: An Analysis of Gregg Roman’s “Tehran’s War on American Morale”

Donald Vandergriff — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:01:21 GMT

Falling into the 2nd Generation Warfare Trap

Gregg Roman, Executive Director of the Middle East Forum, has produced a timely and clear-eyed essay that should be required reading for every American military professional, policymaker, and citizen concerned with the character of contemporary conflict. Published on 17 August 2026 and made freely available, “Tehran’s War on American Morale” documents a deliberate Iranian information operation built around the prolonged deployment of USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72).

Iran’s state media organs and affiliated amplifiers fabricated the deaths of seven American sailors, invented a near-mutiny, and recycled genuine crew and family grievances into a sustained narrative of a “floating prison” whose sailors are breaking under the strain of fighting for “the Holy Land.”

Roman correctly insists that this is not a media story or a public-relations inconvenience. It is a military operation aimed at the one center of gravity Tehran can reach: the will of the force and the families that sustain it. His diagnosis is precise, his evidence detailed, and his prescriptions, transparent data release, platform accountability, sanctions review, professional consequences for launderers, and civil-society pre-bunking, sound.

Yet the deeper significance of the essay lies in what it reveals about the generational character of the war we are actually fighting and the cultural lag that prevents the United States from competing effectively in it.

While the United States has largely avoided the classic “tar pit” of protracted fourth-generation warfare on the ground in the Middle East, it is losing the fifth-generation fight for perception and morale. It does so despite undisputed dominance in the technical domain of cyber operations.

The reason is institutional and cultural: the American military and its associated information apparatuses remain trapped in a second-generation warfare mindset of centralized control, industrial-age personnel practices, risk aversion, and the belief that information is a supporting public-affairs function rather than a primary warfighting domain.

Generations of Warfare: A Brief Orientation

The framework of successive generations of modern warfare, first articulated by William S. Lind and colleagues in 1989 and refined by Thomas X. Hammes and others, remains the most useful intellectual tool for understanding the problem.

First-generation warfare was the ordered line-and-column combat of the smoothbore musket era after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), when the state monopolized legitimate violence.
Second-generation warfare, perfected by the French in World War I, is attrition warfare organized around massed firepower, centralized control, detailed plans, and the linear synchronization of resources. Its cultural hallmarks are hierarchy, predictability, process compliance, and the treatment of soldiers as interchangeable parts in an industrial machine.
Third-generation warfare is maneuver warfare: decentralized initiative, mission-type orders (Auftragstaktik), speed, and the collapse of the enemy’s system rather than its sequential destruction.
Fourth-generation warfare returns war to non-state or transnational actors who attack the political will of their opponents through protracted, networked, often low-intensity means that blur the distinctions between war and peace, combatant and civilian.
Fifth-generation warfare, still contested in definition but increasingly observable, is primarily non-kinetic. It is a war of information and perception, social engineering, deepfakes, narrative shaping, and cognitive influence aimed at the decision-making processes and morale of populations and forces. Daniel Abbott and subsequent analysts describe it as the deliberate manipulation of an observer’s context to achieve desired outcomes without, or before, decisive kinetic engagement.

The United States has spent two decades trying (with mixed and often unsatisfactory results) to adapt to fourth-generation realities. It has largely stepped back from large-scale nation-building occupations that invite classic 4GW quagmires. Yet the cognitive and informational campaigns now directed against American service members and their families represent a clear evolution into the fifth generation.

Tehran is not trying to sink the Lincoln with missiles (though it has tried that narrative). It is trying to sink the will that keeps the ship at sea and the recruiting pipeline that will man the next one.

The Iranian Operation as Textbook Fifth-Generation Warfare

Roman lays out the architecture with clinical clarity.

The campaign begins with a true kernel: the Lincoln departed San Diego in November 2025 on what was expected to be a routine deployment and found itself in sustained combat operations. By mid-2026 the carrier had logged more than 200 consecutive days at sea without a meaningful port call, flown thousands of sorties, and expended enormous quantities of ordnance.

Crew and family complaints about food, showers, mail, and exhaustion were real enough that senior commanders eventually acknowledged and addressed some of them. Parallel extended deployments, including the Gerald R. Ford’s 326-day cruise, confirm that long deployments are becoming a structural feature of naval force generation rather than an aberration.

Tehran’s method is classic: take the true kernel, inflate it beyond recognition, fabricate decisive events that never occurred (seven dead sailors, an invented mutiny, spikes in suicidal ideation contradicted by Navy data), and then launder the product through multiple layers. State wires (Mehr, Tasnim, IRNA) originate the lie under anonymous sourcing. English-language outlets such as PressTV convert it into meme-ready form.

Diplomatic accounts in third countries serve as billboards. Western aggregators and individual influencers—most prominently the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi—amplify unverifiable “field” artifacts that feed precisely the same narrative lane at the same moment. The result is a self-reinforcing information cascade that outruns official denial by days or weeks.

Roman’s dossier on Parsi is careful and documented. It rests on the public record of the 2008–2015 defamation litigation against Hassan Daioleslam, the summary judgment against Parsi and the National Iranian American Council, the $183,480.09 sanction for a “disturbing pattern of delay and intransigence,” and the district court’s observation that Parsi’s work was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.”

Roman explicitly declines to claim formal agency; the point is functional.

In wartime, fluent, credentialed American voices that supply enemy-convenient framing and unverifiable material at scale become force multipliers for the adversary’s cognitive campaign whether or not they take orders. The historical analogies to Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose are apt not as legal verdicts but as descriptions of a recurring wartime function: the native-speaking transmitter that reaches the target audience in its own accent and with its own cultural credibility.

The five strategic purchases Tehran seeks are equally clear: domestic legitimacy at home, exploitation of collapsing American public support for the campaign, polarization along the Israel wedge, long-term degradation of the recruiting base, and narrative dominance in the Global South. None of these objectives requires a successful kinetic strike on a carrier. All of them are advanced by the perception that the Americans are already breaking.

The American Second-Generation Response

Here is the core of the problem. The United States possesses unmatched technical capacity in cyber operations, electronic warfare, and the collection and analysis of information. Yet its institutional response to a sophisticated cognitive campaign remains characteristically second-generation.

Second-generation culture prizes control, synchronization, and the suppression of bad news until it can be managed. When families first raised concerns about conditions aboard the Lincoln, the initial institutional reflex was denial or minimization. When the fabricated massacre appeared, CENTCOM’s public response lagged by days—ample time for the lie to circulate, harden, and be laundered through Western channels.

Subsequent official statements that the problems were “completely misrepresented” or that the sailors had not been deployed “nearly long enough” supplied Tehran with precisely the fuel its denial-inversion machine requires: every cracked blanket denial becomes evidence of cover-up, and every subsequent genuine grievance video becomes the “brave truth” the authorities tried to suppress.

This is not a failure of individual officers. It is the predictable output of a system still organized around industrial-age assumptions. The personnel system continues to reward ticket-punching, risk aversion, and the management of appearances over adaptive initiative.

Information remains largely the province of public affairs rather than a primary warfighting function integrated into the operational design. Transparency is treated as a public-relations risk rather than force protection. Data that would devastate the “floating prison” narrative—the Lincoln’s 84.4 percent reenlistment rate, among the highest in the carrier force—was released only after the fabrication cycle had already peaked.

In third-generation terms, the American OODA loop is too slow and too centralized. In fifth-generation terms, the United States is fighting a perception war with an industrial-age toolkit. Cyber Command can degrade Iranian networks; it cannot, under current cultural constraints, rapidly and credibly shape the cognitive battlespace in which American families and potential recruits actually live.

I have argued for more than two decades that the American military’s deepest vulnerability is not technological but cultural: the persistence of second-generation assumptions about hierarchy, control, and the interchangeability of people long after the character of conflict has moved on.

Mission Command and true maneuver culture are the necessary foundations for competing in fourth- and fifth-generation environments. They require leaders selected and developed for judgment under uncertainty, units that trust one another because they have trained and lived together, and an institutional willingness to publish the data that undercuts the adversary’s narrative before the adversary can weaponize the vacuum.

Roman’s Prescriptions and the Path Forward

Roman’s concrete recommendations align closely with what an adaptive, third-generation approach to a fifth-generation problem would demand:

Standing public release of granular readiness, mental-health, retention, and logistics data by hull. Transparency is force protection against an enemy whose theory of victory is the gap between official adjectives and lived experience.
Enforcement of platform rules against state media and sanctioned entities.
Review of designations for outlets functioning as instruments of a wartime information campaign.
Professional accountability—corrections, provenance questions, institutional scrutiny—for those who launder fabrications at scale.
Independent civil-society archiving, forensic analysis, and pre-bunking, because official messengers will always be discounted.

These are not censorship. They are the ordinary disciplines of professional accountability and operational security applied to a domain the adversary already treats as decisive. The sailors of the Abraham Lincoln have absorbed missiles, drones, and now sustained cognitive assault and have held. Their 84.4 percent reenlistment rate is the most powerful rebuttal to the floating-prison narrative. The institutions behind them must now match that discipline.

Morale is a warfighting domain.

Tehran already operates as if it understands this. The United States will continue to lose the fifth-generation fight—regardless of its cyber advantages—until its military culture, personnel system, and information posture escape the second-generation trap that still defines them. Roman has described the enemy’s campaign with unusual clarity. The remaining question is whether we will finally treat the cognitive battlespace with the seriousness we already claim to apply to the kinetic one.

Endnotes

William S. Lind et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette 73, no. 10 (October 1989): 22–26; Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2006).
Daniel H. Abbott, ed., The Handbook of 5GW: A Fifth Generation of War? (Ann Arbor, MI: Nimble Books, 2010); see also the evolving literature on cognitive warfare in NATO and U.S. doctrinal discussions.
For contemporaneous reporting on the Abraham Lincoln deployment strain, see Peter Suciu, “USS Abraham Lincoln Faces Poor Morale From Twice-Extended Deployment,” Forbes, 6 August 2026; Alison Bath, “Navy carrier in Mideast at sea for more than 200 days, testing crew resilience,” Stars and Stripes, 9 July 2026.
Parsi v. Daioleslam, 890 F. Supp. 2d 77 (D.D.C. 2012); Parsi v. Daioleslam, 778 F.3d 116 (D.C. Cir. 2015); the $183,480.09 sanction and the district court’s language on advocacy are a matter of public record.
Donald E. Vandergriff, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, 2nd ed. (Presidio Press / CreateSpace, 2013); Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Naval Institute Press, 2019); and related essays on the persistence of second-generation culture.

Begin Article: Tehran’s War on American Morale

It is a military operation. Treat it like one. Plus: the file on Tehran Trita. Free for every reader.

Gregg Roman

Aug 17, 2026

MIDDLE EAST INSIDER

Monday, August 17, 2026 · Special Edition

From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum

This Edition

Two special editions in two days is not a habit; it is a week that demanded them. Yesterday I told you about the book. Today’s subject found me: this past week, the Islamic Republic invented the deaths of seven American sailors, and the machinery that spread the invention ran better than most Americans realize, some of it running through Washington. The Insider’s pause holds, the Dispatch carries the dailies, and this essay goes to every reader, free and premium alike.

Tehran’s War on American Morale

It is a military operation. Treat it like one.

By Gregg Roman

Seven Dead, in Print

On August 11, Iran killed seven American sailors. It killed them in print. Mehr News, a wire service of the Islamic Republic, reported a violent clash aboard USS Abraham Lincoln: seven dead, several wounded, an adviser to the CENTCOM commander booed and pelted with water bottles on the deck of America’s flagship in the Arabian Sea. The source was Tasnim, an outlet tied to the Revolutionary Guard, citing one anonymous “informed military source.”

The story ran for two days before US Central Command said a word. By the time CENTCOM called it what it was, false, zero deaths, the one sailor who went overboard on August 3 recovered safely, an English-language newsletter had already dressed the massacre up as analysis, complete with knives. Within two days of the denial, an Iranian embassy was selling “America’s floating prison at sea.” The lie had lapped the truth twice.

No sailors died. That is not the point. The point is that a state at war with the United States manufactured their deaths, on a schedule, for an audience, and most of Washington still discusses it as a media story. It is not a media story. It is a military operation aimed at the one American system Tehran can actually reach: the will of the force, and the families behind it.

The True Kernel

Tehran deserves its due here: the targeting is intelligent. The Lincoln’s deployment is genuinely brutal. The carrier left San Diego in November 2025 for a routine cruise and got a war instead. More than 260 days at sea. A record stretch of more than 200 days without a port call. Ten thousand aircraft flights, a million and a half pounds of ordnance expended, an extension with no announced end.

Families raised real complaints, about food that ran thin last spring, about showers, mail, and exhaustion, and some were real enough that CENTCOM’s commander acknowledged problems “raised months ago” and fixed them. American reporters covered it, as they should. Senators demanded answers, as they should.

Nor is the strain an aberration. USS Gerald R. Ford logged 326 days before returning in May, the longest American carrier deployment since Vietnam. The extended cruise is becoming a feature of naval force generation, not a fluke of this war. None of that is disinformation. That is a democracy metabolizing the cost of a long conflict.

The Pivot

What Tehran built on top of it is something else. The method takes the true kernel, tired crew, long deployment, worried families, and inflates it past recognition. “America’s floating prison at sea,” in the words of Iran’s embassy in Kenya, which decorated the phrase with an anonymous spouse’s quote lifted from Western press coverage and a graphic of a sailor behind bars. “Worse than a public toilet! … No wonder troops want to jump overboard!” from PressTV, over a shaky bathroom video that an IRGC-adjacent account recycled a day later, same footage, new caption, as proof that sailors were defying CENTCOM’s denial. A Lego cartoon mocking the crew, captioned “Four Score! No Shore!” And beneath the mockery sit the hard fabrications: the seven dead, the invented mutiny, the claimed spike in suicidal ideation that the Navy says its data does not show.

We have seen this movie. Tehran produced the first reel in the spring. In February and March the same apparatus manufactured a different collapse: the Lincoln struck by four ballistic missiles, the Lincoln burning, the Lincoln sunk, the Lincoln “forced to retreat” under the avenging fire of the Iranian navy. Fact-checkers rated the videos Pants on Fire. The footage turned out to be recycled clips and video-game renders. The New York Times logged more than 110 unique pro-Iran deepfakes in two weeks; the Foundation for Defense of Democracies traced the campaign to regime-linked networks.

The carrier kept flying. So Tehran did what propagandists do when the lie about the battle fails: it started lying about the men. The pivot from “we sank the ship” to “the ship is destroying its own crew” preserves the claim, American defeat, while removing the evidence requirement.

“You cannot photograph a sinking that never happened. A rumor about morale needs no photograph at all.”

The Architecture

Axis Sally needed a transmitter. Tokyo Rose needed a studio. Tehran needs neither, because we built its distribution system for it and called it a social network. The Islamic Republic’s morale operation runs on a layered architecture that any student of Soviet active measures would recognize, updated for the algorithm.

State wires, Mehr, Tasnim, IRNA, originate the fabrication under gray sourcing. PressTV translates it into meme-grade English. Diplomatic accounts in Nairobi and Freetown, of all places, serve as billboards; last April it was Iran’s embassy in Sierra Leone sneering that there were “no goodies on the table for Israel’s foot soldiers… They sure get to die for them, though!”

Then comes the laundering layer, and this is the part Americans need to understand, because it happens here. The seven-dead fabrication reached American readers through a Substack calling itself “Middle East Report,” a name that free-rides on a long-established journal, and it sourced its “Lincoln Massacre” story entirely, and I mean entirely, to Tasnim, PressTV, and IRNA.

Tehran Trita

The widest-reaching artifact of the August cycle did not come from a state wire at all. It came from a Washington think-tank executive. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, published a photograph he said was “sent to me from the field”: graffiti written in the dust of an aircraft, “Operation Epstein Fury,” “ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” plus an anonymous serviceman declaring the operation “has no morale behind it.” It drew 13.7 million views in under a day. Within hours, aviation-literate readers identified the aircraft as an apparent land-based KC-135 tanker, a plane that cannot operate from a carrier, photographed over what looks like concrete. He did not claim the image came from the Lincoln. It did not matter. The post fed the exact lane Tehran was working, at the exact hour, and as of this writing the provenance questions sit unanswered while aggregation accounts strip his hedging and repost the image as fact.

Wars on morale produce a particular voice: the fluent one, the credentialed one, the one that reaches the home audience in its own accent. Americans named the genre in the 1940s, Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose, and the names outlived the courtrooms because they described a function, not a verdict; America later pardoned Iva Toguri, and kept the name. This war’s version does not need a transmitter in Berlin. It has a podium three blocks from the White House, and the shorthand writes itself: Tehran Trita.

The file runs longer than one photograph. Parsi was born in Ahvaz and raised in Sweden from age four, in a family that fled the regime; his father was jailed by the Shah and then by Khomeini, a history he tells himself. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins under Francis Fukuyama, and in 1997 founded a group called Iranians for International Cooperation, whose stated goal, in internal documents the Forum’s writers have published, was to “pressure U.S. lawmakers to pose a more Iran-friendly position.” In 2002 he founded the National Iranian American Council and ran it for seventeen years. In 2019 he co-founded the Quincy Institute on seed money from George Soros and Charles Koch, and moved one door down from advocacy into scholarship’s clothing.

The court record is where the file gets specific. In 2008 Parsi and NIAC sued an Iranian-American researcher, Hassan Daioleslam, for writing that they lobbied for the regime. The suit ended in 2012 with summary judgment against Parsi on every claim. Discovery pried NIAC’s files open along the way, and what fell out included Parsi’s role arranging meetings between Javad Zarif, then Iran’s UN ambassador, and members of Congress, and an internal NIAC email conceding “I believe we fall under this definition of ‘lobbyist.’” The court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Parsi’s side intentionally altered a produced document, the old IIC charter, in which the word “lobby” had become “advocacy” seven years after the group went defunct. The judge sanctioned Parsi and NIAC $183,480.09 for a “disturbing pattern of delay and intransigence,” a penalty upheld on appeal, in a defense the Forum’s Legal Project helped fund. And the district court wrote a sentence that has followed Parsi since: his work was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.”

Neither NIAC nor Parsi has ever registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In 2020, three senators asked the Justice Department to review whether they should. NIAC called the accusations “slanderous,” said it takes no money from any government, and noted that it routinely condemns the regime’s human-rights abuses; no investigation was ever announced. The network has a European wing as well: a second Parsi, Rouzbeh, left the Swedish Institute of International Affairs after an internal review of his undisclosed role in the “Iran Experts Initiative,” a network that leaked foreign-ministry emails showed was guided from Tehran. He denies collaborating with the regime.

The Line

Precision is the whole ballgame here, so let me be precise. I am not saying these Americans take orders from Tehran. I have no evidence of that, and neither does anyone else. The court never ruled Parsi an agent of Iran; it ruled that the researcher who called him one could not be proven malicious, and it priced the way Parsi litigated at $183,480.09. Those are different findings, and the difference matters. Amplification is something propagandists do to a target ecosystem, with or without its consent. A senator quoted inside Iranian propaganda is evidence about the propaganda, not about the senator.

Criticizing this war is every American’s right; I have my own criticisms of how Washington has fought it. But there is a difference between opposing a war and supplying, at scale, unverifiable artifacts and enemy-convenient framing that a hostile state is actively weaponizing against American families, and then declining to answer basic questions about where the material came from. The first is dissent, and it needs no one’s permission. The second is negligence with a reach of millions, in wartime, on the exact terrain where a hostile state is operating. And the negligent have names, platforms, and institutional affiliations that confer the credibility Tehran cannot buy for itself. An American University professor sat for an interview with Al Mayadeen, a Hezbollah-aligned channel, to tell its audience the Lincoln was becoming “unlivable” and a “desperate” American president might go nuclear. The channel got exactly what it booked him for.

Five Purchases

Tehran spends this much on morale warfare because it is buying five things at once. It signals effectiveness to its own battered public: we are breaking the Americans. It rides a real collapse in American support for the war; by July only 12 percent of Americans told Marquette pollsters the campaign had achieved its goals, down from 21 in April. It drives the Israel wedge, framing every hardship as a price paid “for the Holy Land,” a message engineered for the far left and the isolationist right simultaneously.

It seeds the recruitment well, telling every military mother that the Navy is a floating prison, sabotage aimed at next year’s enlistment lines. And it plays to the Global South, where embassy accounts in English tell Nairobi and Johannesburg that the American century is ending in moldy showers. What Tehran never had to do is invent the raw material. American reporting, family testimony, and political conflict supplied it. Tehran selected, inflated, fabricated on top, and re-exported.

The Fuel

Here is the uncomfortable part for our side: Washington keeps handing Tehran its best material. In April, when families circulated photographs of thin rations, the Navy’s response was that the reports were “false.” Some of the problems turned out to be real. In August, the secretary of war dismissed the conditions reporting as “completely misrepresented” while the president declared the sailors had been deployed “not nearly long enough.”

Every blanket denial that later cracks becomes a permission slip to believe the next fabrication. Tehran’s denial-inversion machine runs on exactly this fuel: CENTCOM says “false,” and within days the machine presents any new grievance video as the brave rebuttal of a cover-up. You do not beat that machine with adjectives. You beat it with data.

Strike the Colors

So publish the data. The Pentagon should release, on a standing basis, the granular numbers it currently doles out under duress: mental-health caseloads by hull, retention by ship, resupply logs, port-call schedules against historical baselines. The Lincoln’s reenlistment rate, 84.4 percent by CENTCOM’s own accounting, among the highest of any carrier in the fleet, is the single most devastating rebuttal to the “floating prison” narrative in existence. The command disclosed it only after the fabrication cycle peaked. Transparency is not a public-relations nicety. Against an adversary whose entire theory of victory is the space between official adjectives and visible facts, transparency is force protection.

Second, make the platforms do what their own rules promise. Iran’s embassy accounts are state media by any honest definition; they should carry state-affiliation labels and the reach penalties that follow. PressTV, an arm of a state broadcaster the Treasury sanctioned years ago, romps through American feeds unlabeled. The deepfake archive from the spring sits in plain view of synthetic-media policies that go unenforced. Congress should ask X and Meta, in writing and in public, why.

Third, review the designations. Treasury and State should examine whether Mehr, Tasnim, and Al Mayadeen’s current sanctions posture matches their documented wartime conduct. That is not punishment for speech; instruments of a hostile state’s military-information campaign should be treated as what they are. And the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force should publish an unclassified assessment of Iranian operations targeting American military families. The families are a targeted population. They deserve to be told so by their own government, not left to discover it in their Facebook groups.

Fourth, impose professional costs on the laundering layer, lawfully, publicly, with the proof attached. Editors who ran the seven-dead story owe their readers corrections, and those who refuse should be listed by name in a public scorecard of outlets that laundered a state fabrication and shrugged. Commentators who post “field” artifacts to thirteen million people should answer basic provenance questions or wear the refusal permanently. Universities whose faculty perform for Hezbollah-aligned cameras should be asked, on the record, whether they have a view. None of this is censorship. It is the ordinary machinery of professional accountability, applied to people who have grown comfortable assuming it would never reach them. This is the Daylight Doctrine applied to wartime: force the foreign hand, and the hands that launder for it, into the light, and let Americans judge what they see.

Finally, civil society has to do what government cannot. Official Washington will always be a suspect messenger on its own behalf; the proof has to come from outside. That means independent trackers that archive every state-media fabrication before deletion, and Tehran does delete. It means forensic analyses of viral artifacts, published whatever they conclude. It means prebunking the next narrative before it lands, and it will land: the Navy has ordered USS George Washington to relieve the Lincoln, and Iranian outlets have already begun framing the relief as retreat. Above all, it means a message to military families that takes their grievances seriously precisely because it refuses to let Tehran own them. Raising real problems through real channels is patriotic. Letting a hostile state wear your worry as a costume is the enemy’s whole plan.

The sailors of the Abraham Lincoln spent nine months absorbing everything the Islamic Republic could throw at them: missiles, drones, and finally this, the slander of their own breaking. They held. The 84.4 percent held. The question is whether the institutions behind them, the Pentagon, the platforms, the press, the professoriate, can manage even a fraction of that discipline. Tehran is sailing under false colors, flying our families’ grief as its battle flag. Strike those colors. Do it with data, with labels, with corrections, with names. Morale is a warfighting domain now. The enemy already knows it. The only question is when we start acting like we do.

Gregg Roman

Executive Director, Middle East Forum

The Long View, Free Again

The Long View runs every Sunday for premium members. This week it has run free twice, because I am on vacation and the week refused to cooperate. Premium membership is $12 a month or $100 a year, and it now includes first access to excerpts from Alone in the Ranks, the book I told you about yesterday. Every MEF donor reads free; if your invitation has not arrived, write mefnews@meforum.org.

Digging Below the Death Zone: An Analysis of John Spencer and Drew Craig’s Examination of Ukraine’s Underground War through the Lenses of Maneuver Warfare, Mission Command, and the Generations of War

Donald Vandergriff — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:48:35 GMT

John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute and a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare, together with Colonel Drew Craig of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, have produced a timely and necessary corrective in their 12 August 2026 article “Digging Below the Death Zone: The Underground War in Ukraine.”

While the global defense community remains fixated on the spectacular proliferation of first-person-view drones, loitering munitions, and AI-enabled targeting that have rendered the surface of the Ukrainian battlefield a near-perfect “death zone,” Spencer and Craig force us to look downward. Their central thesis is straightforward and historically grounded: when firepower and persistent surveillance make the surface intolerably lethal, armies dig.

Ukraine and Russia have done so at industrial scale, transforming trenches into interconnected tunnel networks, buried command posts, logistics corridors, medical facilities, and even drone production sites. What emerges is not a niche engineering problem but a fundamental adaptation that reopens axes of maneuver, restores a measure of surprise, and challenges the very assumptions of the transparent battlefield.

Viewed through the framework of the generations of war and the enduring principles of maneuver warfare and Mission Command, the Ukrainian underground war is far more than defensive shelter. It is an operational response to a sensor-shooter revolution that has driven conventional surface operations toward something resembling industrialized attrition—Second Generation Warfare characteristics in a twenty-first-century guise. The solution has been to create a subsurface domain in which Third Generation maneuver logic can again operate, enabled by the decentralized initiative that defines true Mission Command.

The Transparent Battlefield and the Return of Attrition

Spencer and Craig open by acknowledging the dominance of the aerial domain in public and institutional discourse. Fiber-optic, jam-resistant drones with thermal sensors, satellite constellations, acoustic arrays, and AI-assisted targeting have compressed the kill chain to minutes. In sectors around Pokrovsk, drones have accounted for as many as 80 percent of casualties.

Soldiers describe a thirty-kilometer “death zone” in which any movement above ground risks near-immediate detection and destruction. This is the logical culmination of the “transparent battlefield” that theorists have long predicted. When every vehicle, trench line, and concentration of troops can be seen and struck, the surface favors the side that can mass precision fires and sensors—an inherently attritional dynamic.

This reality echoes the Western Front of 1915–1917 more than the fluid campaigns of 1940 or 1991. Firepower dominance forced both sides into elaborate subterranean systems then, just as it does now. The difference lies in the quality of the sensors: World War I lacked continuous overhead observation; Ukraine faces a persistent, multi-spectral, AI-fused surveillance network. The result is the same adaptive pressure: survival and combat effectiveness migrate underground.

Historical Continuity and Qualitative Evolution

Spencer and Craig correctly situate Ukraine within a long pattern. The mining operations beneath Messines Ridge and the Somme, the Cu Chi tunnels of the Viet Cong (approximately 250 kilometers of interconnected command posts, hospitals, and fighting positions), Hamas’s politico-military tunnel complex under Gaza, Hezbollah’s hardened systems in southern Lebanon, North Korea’s thousands of underground facilities, and Iran’s buried nuclear and missile infrastructure all demonstrate the same logic. When the surface becomes a killing ground, the subsurface becomes both sanctuary and avenue of approach.

What distinguishes the Ukrainian case is scale, sophistication, and the integration of civilian industrial capacity. Ukrainian forces have moved beyond improvised field fortifications to multilevel, reinforced facilities equipped with fiber-optic communications, ventilation, and concealed corridors that allow movement between positions without exposure. Civilian tunneling and construction firms—Automagistral-Pivden’s thirty-kilometer complex near Pokrovsk, Metinvest’s underground hospitals, and associations of real-estate developers—have been mobilized because military engineers alone cannot deliver the required volume and depth.

Russian forces have constructed vehicle-capable underground corridors near Zaporizhzhia and elsewhere, and have repeatedly exploited existing industrial infrastructure: gas pipelines near Sudzha and Kupiansk, and kilometers of sewer pipe prior to the capture of Avdiivka. These are not romantic “rat wars”; they are deliberate engineering solutions to a reconnaissance-strike complex that has made surface movement prohibitive.

Maneuver Warfare Restored Beneath the Surface

Maneuver warfare, properly understood, seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion and decision cycle rather than destroy him through cumulative attrition. On the transparent surface, the defender’s ability to see and strike rapidly neutralizes many classic maneuver techniques. The underground domain restores several critical advantages.

First, it provides protected mobility and logistics. Troops, ammunition, and even manufacturing capacity can shift between positions without continuous exposure to the drone swarm.

Second, it creates genuine surprise. Infiltration through pipelines and sewers allows forces to appear inside or behind defensive lines, disrupting the enemy’s orientation and decision-making—the classic Boydian OODA loop exploitation.

Third, it forces the opponent to divert scarce resources to tunnel detection, flooding, mining, and ambush, thereby diluting the concentration of sensors and fires on the surface.

In short, the subsurface becomes an additional axis of approach that the sensor-saturated surface cannot easily close.

This is classic Third Generation Warfare logic applied to a new physical domain. Just as the German stormtroopers of 1918 used infiltration tactics to bypass strongpoints, modern forces use tunnels and pipes to bypass the death zone. The difference is that the “strongpoint” is now the entire observed surface.

Mission Command in the Subterranean Environment

Mission Command—decentralized execution based on shared understanding of commander’s intent—is both more necessary and more difficult underground. GPS is denied. Satellite communications are blocked. Line-of-sight radios are severely degraded. The physical environment itself (limited air, darkness, structural risk, disorientation) imposes constant friction. Under these conditions, only units and leaders trained to operate with high initiative, mutual trust, and a clear understanding of the higher purpose can succeed.

Spencer and Craig’s description of Ukrainian adaptation implies exactly this cultural requirement. Rapid construction of sophisticated facilities by mixed military-civilian teams, the ability of small groups to clear and exploit kilometers of sewer or gas pipe, and the continuous evolution of tunnel networks all demand lower-level initiative within a coherent operational concept. Centralized, detailed control—the hallmark of Second Generation industrial warfare—cannot function effectively in the labyrinth. Mission Command is not optional; it is the only viable command philosophy once forces move below the surface.

Implications for Future Conflict and Professional Military Education

The Ukrainian experience is not an aberration. As sensors proliferate and precision strike becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, every peer or near-peer conflict will generate similar pressures. NATO’s Eastern Flank Defensive Initiative already reflects awareness of the need for protected underground infrastructure. Future force design, doctrine, and training must treat the subterranean domain as a distinct battlespace requiring specialized engineering, navigation, communications, medical, and leadership competencies.

For the U.S. Army and its allies, this means moving beyond episodic “tunnel warfare” training modules. It requires embedding subterranean operations into the larger framework of maneuver warfare and Mission Command education. Officers and NCOs must understand that the underground is not merely a place to hide; it is a domain in which combat power can be preserved, repositioned, and projected in ways the transparent surface no longer permits. Outcomes-based learning focused on adaptive problem-solving under extreme friction—precisely the approach long advocated for Professional Military Education reform—is the only way to prepare leaders for this environment.

Spencer and Craig close with a stark observation: armies that cannot survive above ground must adapt below it. Their article is a warning and an opportunity. The side that masters the integration of surface sensors with subsurface maneuver, that institutionalizes the cultural prerequisites of Mission Command in the dark, confined spaces beneath the death zone, will hold a decisive advantage in the conflicts to come. The generations of war have not been abolished by drones; they have been driven underground, where the principles of maneuver and decentralized command remain as relevant as ever.

Endnotes

John Spencer and Drew Craig, “Digging Below the Death Zone: The Underground War in Ukraine,” Modern War Institute, 12 August 2026, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/digging-below-the-death-zone-the-underground-war-in-ukraine/.
Ibid. On the “death zone” and drone casualty rates, see also contemporaneous reporting cited within the article from Reuters graphics and Le Monde.
For historical parallels drawn by Spencer and Craig, see their discussion of Messines Ridge and the Somme (World War I), the Cu Chi tunnels (Vietnam), Hamas infrastructure in Gaza, Hezbollah systems, North Korean underground facilities, and Iranian hardened sites. Primary supporting sources linked in the original article include History.com on Cu Chi and Washington Post reporting on Gaza tunnels.
Specific Ukrainian examples—Automagistral-Pivden’s thirty-kilometer complex near Pokrovsk, Metinvest underground hospitals, and Russian pipeline/sewer infiltrations near Sudzha, Kupiansk, and Avdiivka—are detailed in the article with supporting links to Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Business Insider, and Institute for the Study of War assessments.
On the conceptual linkage to maneuver warfare and the OODA loop, see John R. Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict” (briefing slides, various editions); and William S. Lind et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette (October 1989). For Mission Command doctrine, see U.S. Army ADP 6-0, Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces (current edition).
For the broader argument that sensor proliferation drives forces underground and elevates the subterranean domain, compare Spencer’s related Substack essay “The Next Domain of Warfare Lies Underground,” 20 May 2026,

John Spencer - Urban Warfare

The Next Domain of Warfare Lies Underground

Palmer Luckey recently went viral arguing that the next domain of warfare will be subterranean. He is right, although probably not in the way many people understood it. Most people heard the comment and immediately thought about tunnels, bunkers, or trench systems. Luckey was talking about something much larger: a future where the surface battlefield be…

3 months ago · 88 likes · 4 comments · John Spencer

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/digging-below-the-death-zone-the-underground-war-in-ukraine/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTuqelwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMXU3OWNMN1lLcDdrZGtYSzVzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe_xkkhgHlCR-I02IvfN7d4pIUzEWKkYLCIHJVPN08z2IrCpjP_Jl0DdSQOH0_aem_0md7zYq6N-VosQHSFB4zxQ

When Sailors Reach for the Rail: The USS Abraham Lincoln Crisis, Combat Fatigue, and the Failure of Second-Generation Leadership in a Fourth-Generation War

Donald Vandergriff — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 10:01:49 GMT

What is Happening?

The reports emerging from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln should alarm every serious student of war and leadership. Families of crew members have stated that multiple sailors have attempted to go overboard during an extended deployment supporting operations against Iran.

One wife, Annabelle Loma, described her husband’s attemp…

Victor Davis Hanson’s “Not Winning? Just Change the Rules” as a Diagnostic of Democratic 4th- and 5th-Generation Warfare

Donald Vandergriff — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:02:33 GMT

Victor Davis Hanson’s essay “Not Winning? Just Change the Rules,” published in American Greatness on August 11, 2026, offers a clear-eyed account of the contemporary Left’s characteristic response to political defeat: when electoral or institutional outcomes deny it power, it does not recalibrate its arguments or seek broader consent. It rewrites the rules, the institutions, and ultimately the demography of the nation itself.

This pattern is not episodic opportunism. It is the operational signature of what I describe in Internal Insurgency: How the Democratic Party Mastered 4th and 5th Generation Warfare and the Conservative Path to Victory as a sophisticated, asymmetric internal campaign:

“For over a generation, a political movement inside the United States has waged a sophisticated, asymmetric war against the nation’s founding principles, its institutions, and its people. … This is not traditional politics. It is insurgency—conducted from within the system by those who control its levers.”

Hanson’s catalogue of rule-changing, lawfare, demographic transformation through mass illegal immigration, the demolition of merit standards, the dilution of military physical requirements, and the assault on constitutional structure are maps directly onto the operational concepts of fourth- and fifth-generation warfare that form the analytical core of the book: legal and bureaucratic warfare (lawfare), cultural and educational subversion, identity-based tribal mobilization, psychological and information operations, and the systematic erosion of trust in core American institutions.

Shadows Over Albion Book 7 of the Reforging the Sword Series: Forward by Major Gerry Long UK Army retired. Video summary below.

Donald Vandergriff — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:05:00 GMT

The Reforging the Sword series has always been more than fiction. It is a warning and a call to action. In Shadows Over Albion, we move the story to the summer and fall of 2027, when the United Kingdom stands on the brink of falling to radical Islamist forces backed by the Spector Collective and internal Cultural Marxist enablers.

A bold new Prime Minister, Sir Malcolm “Mac” Ironbridge, is elected on a platform of sovereignty, secure borders, and cultural renewal. His efforts are met with violent resistance from those who have long prepared for this moment. Hidden weapons caches are opened, and the fight for Britain’s soul begins as well as its nuclear arsenal is at hand.

This book explores what happens when a great nation’s institutions are hollowed out by ideology of Cultural Marxism i.e., political correctness. It also shows the power of reformed, adaptive leadership. Secretary of War Emory Upton’s hard-won changes—Mission Command, decentralized initiative, realistic training, and merit-based excellence—are put to the ultimate test as American forces stand with loyal British brothers and sisters to secure the country and its nuclear arsenal.

The story draws from real lessons of history, my own service, and the ongoing struggle to prepare Western civilization for the threats of the 21st century. To the veterans, serving members, and citizens on both sides of the Atlantic who refuse to surrender their heritage: this book is for you.

The sword is being reforged not only in America, but wherever free people choose courage over comfort.
The darkness may spread, but so does the light of determined resistance.

Order all three versions of the book here (still working the audio version):

https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Over-Albion-Reforging-Sword/dp/B0HDRK1W49/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Wh_uoX3zUlflHh4qcUT4SpFF0H2EOLmvJkY3rYi4_c9HN2uwQ5M9VtMjpiplQj_B3yDmvDCGsOS1wMjlyNFDJ6EYGSV2_Y9YVAkVh8_h6rY.3kUCVWQjQq_CM4G2Z29K98HAiQxF4oE--VWJKg0Yi5E&qid=1786886953&sr=8-3

Gunfire as the Ultimate Personnel Board: Why Credentialism Fails Before the First Volley

Donald Vandergriff — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 13:43:17 GMT

InfantryDort has delivered a concise, historically grounded, and urgently relevant indictment of modern military personnel systems. His essay “The First Volley Melts the Credentials” uses the 1755 disaster on the Monongahela to expose a timeless truth: elaborate gates of pedigree, paperwork, schools, and sponsors collapse the moment reality arrives with a musket. What remains is the only qualification that has ever mattered in war—can you carry the weight when everyone else is breaking?

That insight is not merely historical color. It is a precise diagnosis of what I have long called the industrial-age, second-generation warfare personnel culture that still dominates the American military. We have constructed a résumé society in which officers and leaders are advanced by collecting the right bullets: key developmental assignments, the correct timeline, the favored school, the powerful sponsor.

Many of these assignments have little or no proven correlation to the ability to lead under the friction, uncertainty, and violence of combat. We then convince ourselves that these bureaucratic artifacts measure talent. InfantryDort is right: they measure conformity to a system designed for mass mobilization and attrition, not for the adaptive, decentralized leadership required by maneuver warfare and Mission Command.

George Washington’s experience at the Monongahela remains the perfect parable. As a provincial officer, he lived beneath a glass ceiling of royal commissions and London pedigree. British regulars with the King’s paper could outrank colonial officers of far greater frontier experience. Washington swallowed the insult and served as an unpaid volunteer aide to Braddock rather than accept the absurd hierarchy.

Then the woods erupted. Formations dissolved, officers fell, Braddock was mortally wounded, and the credential hierarchy evaporated. Washington, the man the establishment had rated inferior, became the one who carried orders, rallied survivors, and helped organize the retreat. Gunfire performed the personnel board that paperwork never could.

Two decades later, another institution such as the Continental Congress, looked past pedigree and entrusted him with the entire Continental Army. Britain, which had once possessed Washington and could not find the bureaucratic box for him, later faced him across the battlefield and lost thirteen colonies.

As InfantryDort observes, if one is searching for candidates for the most expensive personnel decision in military history, start there. The danger of credentialism is that credentials can tell you what someone has done; they become poisonous when institutions pretend they can tell you what someone is.

This is precisely the pathology I have documented for more than a quarter century. In The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, I traced how the industrial-age personnel system—rooted in Elihu Root’s early-twentieth-century reforms and perfected under the pressures of World War II mobilization—treats people as interchangeable parts.

The Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) and its “up-or-out” timelines force officers to rush through assignments simply to check boxes. The result is ticket-punching: the right school, the right staff job, the right amount of time patiently waiting for permission to become what many already are.

Unit cohesion is destroyed by the individual replacement system. Experience in command is truncated. Initiative is punished. The system rewards those who master the résumé game rather than those who can operate inside the enemy’s OODA loop.

That industrial model was optimized for second-generation warfare—linear, attrition-based, centralized control, mass firepower. It is lethally mismatched to third-generation maneuver warfare and the hybrid, fourth- and fifth-generation conflicts we actually face.

Maneuver warfare demands leaders who can sense, decide, and act faster than the opponent, who understand the commander’s intent two levels up, and who are free—and expected—to adapt when the situation changes. That culture is Mission Command, the American expression of the Prussian Auftragstaktik. Mission Command cannot flourish inside a personnel system that selects and promotes primarily on paper credentials and chronological progression.

I have argued repeatedly that the first enemy volley should never be our waiver authority or our primary talent identification tool. When artillery has to fall before an institution recognizes its best leaders, casualties have become part of the selection process. That is both immoral and strategically suicidal.

Free-play force-on-force exercises, tactical decision games under stress and incomplete information, extended command tours evaluated by demonstrated adaptability rather than timeline compliance, unit-based rather than individual manning, and competency-based rather than time-based advancement are the practical alternatives. These are not theoretical. They are the conditions required to produce the adaptive leaders Mission Command demands.

InfantryDort’s central question is the right one: Why the hell are we waiting for the crisis? The “résumé society” is comfortable in peacetime. It produces orderly career maps, measurable “development,” and a sense of fairness among those who have mastered its rules. It is catastrophic the moment the first volley arrives and the paper hierarchy melts. Washington’s story is not a quaint anecdote from the French and Indian War. It is a warning that has been repeated, at far higher cost, in every major American conflict since.

We already know what works. We already know that gunfire is the most ruthless—and most honest—personnel system ever devised. The task is to build selection, education, assignment, and promotion systems that approximate that honesty before the first round is fired. Anything less means we continue to let the enemy do our talent management for us. That is not a system. It is a surrender of responsibility.

InfantryDort has performed a public service by restating an old truth with clarity and force. The first volley melts the credentials. The only question left is whether we will continue to wait for that volley, or whether we will finally reform the personnel system so that the leaders who can carry the weight are already in position when the shooting starts.

Endnotes

InfantryDort, “THE FIRST VOLLEY MELTS THE CREDENTIALS,” X, August 14, 2026.
Donald E. Vandergriff, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2013; originally published Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 2002).
Donald E. Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019).
Donald E. Vandergriff, “A Personnel and Manpower System That Enables Maneuver Warfare and Mission Command,” Substack, July 27, 2026.
Donald E. Vandergriff, Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008).
On the mismatch between industrial-age personnel systems and the requirements of maneuver warfare and Mission Command, see also Donald E. Vandergriff, “Stuck in the Industrial Age,” Substack, February 10, 2025, and the broader discussion in William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985; later editions).

Begin InfantryDort’s article:

THE FIRST VOLLEY MELTS THE CREDENTIALS

InfantryDort

Aug 14

READ IN APP

The British Empire once had George Washington standing directly in front of it and still couldn’t recognize what it had. He wanted a royal commission in the British Army, but provincial officers like Washington lived beneath a glass ceiling of pedigree and paperwork. British regulars with the King’s commission could outrank colonial officers with vastly greater rank and experience, and Washington hated the absurdity enough that he joined Braddock in 1755 as an unpaid volunteer aide rather than submit to it.

Then came the Monongahela, and reality entered the room with a musket.

Braddock’s army was torn apart in the woods. Officers fell, formations collapsed, Braddock was mortally wounded, and suddenly nobody gave a damn which commission had come from London. Washington, the colonial officer whose status the establishment considered inferior, spent the catastrophe carrying orders, rallying survivors, and helping organize the retreat.

Gunfire is a ruthless personnel system. It burns away the résumé, the pedigree, the schools, the patrons, and all the little pieces of paper men use to establish superiority over one another. What remains is the oldest qualification on earth: Can you carry the weight when everyone else is breaking?

That is the part of this story we should understand today.

We still build elaborate gates around advancement and then convince ourselves the gates measure talent. Right assignment, school, timeline and sponsor. Right amount of time patiently waiting for permission to become what someone may already be.

Then the crisis comes and the credential hierarchy suddenly melts away because everyone starts looking around for the person who can actually do the job.

Why the hell are we waiting for the crisis?

If artillery has to start falling before an institution recognizes its best leaders, then casualties have become part of the selection process. The first enemy volley should not be our waiver authority.

Britain eventually did recognize Washington’s ability. Virginia made him colonel and commander of its forces after Monongahela, but the royal commission he wanted never came. Two decades later, another institution looked past the pedigree and entrusted him with something far larger: Congress made him commander in chief of the Continental Army.

The historical irony is almost too perfect. Britain once had Washington asking to serve under its flag and couldn’t find the right bureaucratic box for him. Later it found him on the opposite side of the battlefield and lost thirteen colonies.

If you’re looking for candidates for the most expensive personnel decision in military history, start there.

That is the danger of credentialism. Credentials can tell you what someone has done. They become poisonous when institutions start pretending they can tell you what someone is.

If we need the first volley to tell us who can actually lead, then the enemy is doing our talent management for us.

Trump’s Theory of Victory Validated: Maneuver Warfare, Mission Command, and Generational Triumph in the Iran Campaign

Donald Vandergriff — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:26:30 GMT

James Jay Carafano’s recent assessment that President Donald J. Trump has already won the Iran war is not optimistic spin. It is a clear-eyed recognition of strategic reality measured against a coherent theory of victory.

The maximalists who demanded full regime overthrow, the minimalists who preferred paralysis, and the procrastinators who mistook disc…

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos has delivered a timely and necessary diagnosis of what ails America’s professional military education system. In “Do Hegseth’s Reforms to Military Universities Go Far Enough?”

Donald Vandergriff — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:01:21 GMT

Introduction and Analysis:

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos has delivered a timely and necessary diagnosis of what ails America’s professional military education system. In “Do Hegseth’s Reforms to Military Universities Go Far Enough?” published today in The American Conservative, she moves past the necessary but incomplete fight against ideological capture and zeroes in on the deeper institutional failure: war colleges and service academies that produce ambitious, process-compliant officers rather than the adaptive, outcomes-focused leaders required to win wars.

Vlahos interviewed current and former instructors, retired senior officers, and longtime reformers. The consensus is clear. Ending tenure and scrubbing curricula of divisive social engineering are welcome steps. Yet they risk becoming another layer of conformity if the system continues to measure success by attendance, networking, and ticket-punching instead of the cognitive agility, rapid decision-making under uncertainty, and moral courage demanded by Mission Command and multi-domain operations against thinking adversaries. I am quoted making precisely that point, and I stand by it.

The real danger is not autonomous killers; it is the systematic atrophy of the adaptive judgment that Mission Command, maneuver warfare, and genuine military professionalism require.

Donald Vandergriff — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:01:49 GMT

Patrick Tucker’s March 25, 2026 Defense One piece correctly identifies a deeper cognitive threat than the public debate over lethal autonomy.

Large language models, when rushed into daily use without deliberate countermeasures, homogenize thinking, induce “cognitive surrender,” and replace non-linear intuition with linear, sycophantic Chain-of-Thought o…

Analysis of Pentagon weighs eliminating civilian tenure at military academies and reviewing all curriculum, draft memo says By James LaPorta, Eleanor Watson, CBS 31 July 2026

Donald Vandergriff — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:34:02 GMT

The list of major U.S. military War colleges and staff colleges you is exactly the industrial-age architecture we must confront if we are serious about producing adaptive leaders for 21st-century warfare. These institutions—CGSC at Leavenworth, The Army War College at Carlisle Barracks PA, the Naval War War College and Command and Staff course Newport R…

Shadows Over Albion Book 7 of the Reforging the Sword Series is available for customers to pre-order.

Donald Vandergriff — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:25:20 GMT

The provided text outlines Shadows Over Albion, the seventh installment in Donald E. Vandergriff’s Reforging the Sword series, which explores a fictional Islamist uprising in 2027 Britain. Following the election of a hard-line Prime Minister, radical forces backed by the mysterious Spector Collective exploit internal cultural divisions to seize control of major cities and threaten the nation's nuclear arsenal.

In response, the United States deploys a cutting-edge military force transformed by the Upton reforms, utilizing decentralized Mission Command, robotic systems, and powered exoskeletons.

The narrative emphasizes the professionalism and cohesion of rank-and-file soldiers and police who bypass compromised senior leadership to restore order.

Ultimately, the story celebrates the "Special Relationship" as American troops and loyal British citizens form an unbreakable alliance to defeat extremism and ideological subversion.

This military thriller serves as both a warning about institutional decay and a tribute to adaptive, merit-based leadership in modern warfare.

Shadows Over Albion Book 7 of the Reforging the Sword Series is available for customers to pre-order. You can view in the Kindle Store. If you resubmitted your book, your changes are now live.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HDR7GFM5?spcref=PUBLISHED_PREORDER_LIVE

Donald Vandergriff

Friction at the Source: Tom Rogan’s Assessment of Trump, Colombia, and the Cartels as a Maneuver Problem

Introduction:

That is the operational picture. The human picture is Brigitte García.

The center of gravity is not the last gram sold in an American city

Regional pattern, not isolated deal

Balanced expectations and the reformer’s caveat

What Does It All Mean?

Endnotes

Begin Article: Trump has the cartels on their heels — now with Colombia’s help

Issues and Answers Interview in 1970 with COL David H. Hackworth. Hack was a close friend. I was the ranking Army officer at his funeral in 2005.

Vandergriff Analysis of Michael Smith’s “Trump Drops in a Hemi,” It has taken a while to round up the parts, but Trump Performance Motors has installed a new engine in America

Seeing one strategy instead of many crises

Venezuela as the cleanest single case

Reshoring, materials, and the Covid lesson

Allies as products of the 800-pound gorilla

Iran, training, and “defeated”

Destination over path

Endnotes

Begin Michael Smith Article:

“Trump Drops in a Hemi,” It has taken a while to round up the parts, but Trump Performance Motors has installed a new engine in America

Introduction to “THE INNOCENCE OF THE WARRIOR” by InfantryDort, Aug 29

What Does It All Mean?

Endnotes:

Begin Article THE INNOCENCE OF THE WARRIOR

America’s Acquisition Crisis: A Symptom of Second-Generation Warfare Culture That Blocks Mission Command and Maneuver Warfare

Introduction:

If The US Military Acquisition System Were a Business?

The same cultural prerequisites apply to technology acquisition.

What Does It All Mean?

Begin Article: America’s Missing Military Revolution

Great article on Mission Command in Action: “The Warrior Battle Rhythm: What Marines Gain from JTF Southern Border” by Major Jeffrey Smeriglio USMC.

Examples of Mission Command

Mission Command In Action

What Does It All Mean?

Endnotes

Begin Article: The Warrior Battle Rhythm: What Marines Gain from JTF Southern Border

Chuck de Caro’s diagnosis of America’s information-war shortfall against Iran is not merely a media critique.

Endnotes

Begin Article:

Germany did not survive Leipzig because of its defenses. It survived because a detonator failed.

The American vulnerability is structural

What actually works

Endnotes:

Begin Article:

Europe Is Running Out of Near Misses From Russian Sabotage

Candace RondeauxAug 19, 2026August 19, 2026

InfantryDort’s “The Cost of the Arena” is a polemical indictment of a society that outsources violence, then treats the men who perform it as contaminated once they return.

Third-Generation Warfare and the Human Requirements of Maneuver

Mission Command: Trust as the Prerequisite

Fourth-Generation Warfare and the Home-Front Battlefield

Limitations and Tone

Begin InfantryDort Article

THE COST OF THE ARENA

InfantryDort

Tehran’s Cognitive Offensive and the American Second-Generation Trap: An Analysis of Gregg Roman’s “Tehran’s War on American Morale”

Falling into the 2nd Generation Warfare Trap

Generations of Warfare: A Brief Orientation

The Iranian Operation as Textbook Fifth-Generation Warfare

The American Second-Generation Response

Roman’s Prescriptions and the Path Forward

Morale is a warfighting domain.

Endnotes

Begin Article: Tehran’s War on American Morale

Tehran’s War on American Morale

Digging Below the Death Zone: An Analysis of John Spencer and Drew Craig’s Examination of Ukraine’s Underground War through the Lenses of Maneuver Warfare, Mission Command, and the Generations of War

The Transparent Battlefield and the Return of Attrition

Historical Continuity and Qualitative Evolution

Maneuver Warfare Restored Beneath the Surface

Mission Command in the Subterranean Environment

Implications for Future Conflict and Professional Military Education

Endnotes

When Sailors Reach for the Rail: The USS Abraham Lincoln Crisis, Combat Fatigue, and the Failure of Second-Generation Leadership in a Fourth-Generation War

What is Happening?

Victor Davis Hanson’s “Not Winning? Just Change the Rules” as a Diagnostic of Democratic 4th- and 5th-Generation Warfare

*Shadows Over Albion* Book 7 of the *Reforging the Sword* Series: Forward by Major Gerry Long UK Army retired. Video summary below.

Order all three versions of the book here (still working the audio version):

Gunfire as the Ultimate Personnel Board: Why Credentialism Fails Before the First Volley

Endnotes

Begin InfantryDort’s article:

Candace Rondeaux Aug 19, 2026August 19, 2026

Shadows Over Albion Book 7 of the Reforging the Sword Series: Forward by Major Gerry Long UK Army retired. Video summary below.