Dear Dad,

I wrote this letter shortly before my passing. I figured you knew it was going to happen, but you and Mom were relentlessly optimistic. I love that you and Mom really wished and believed that I would live forever—it always put a smile on my face. Instead, it was an ordinary morning when I said goodbye. A humid and cloudy July day, it was a Wednesday. Nothing heroic, not a fairytale ending. It was, however, an end to the eleven wonderful years I spent with you, Mom, and our family. I was so sad I couldn’t make it any longer. I apologize to you and Mom. I wanted to; I just didn’t have the strength. It wasn’t that I didn’t love you anymore; it was just that I was tired and needed to rest. I wanted to write this to let you know how great my life with you was. I know I never learned human speak, but hopefully, my actions demonstrated just how much I really loved you, from the day I met you until the day I had to leave. I don’t know if you noticed, but my tail would wag as fast as my heart would beat when I was near you. I called it my love meter.

Before I met you, I remember finding out my mom and dad would be a woman who loved the ocean and a guy who was in the military. At first, I was scared—not of Mom, but I thought you’d be big and scary being in the military. The day I got off the plane and you came to pick me up, I was really nervous. You were really tall and I was pretty small, and I just kept thinking guys in the military would be tough and mean. Come to find out, you weren’t that tough at all.

I’ll let Mom tell you who has the bigger heart, me or you, but once I realized your big, tough exterior wasn’t real and saw how big your heart was, I loved that you were my dad. I knew someone had a heart as big as mine (even though mine is bigger). I remember the first night we spent together; I was nervous. I didn’t make a sound. Once Mom got home, I knew I could be rowdy. While she probably didn’t tell you this, while you were living in Arizona and Mom and I lived by the beach in San Diego, we were ride-or-die friends. We did everything together. We went to the beach, went for walks, laughed, put on makeup, got dressed up fancy, took naps, worked (Mom did, I slept), and slept in a giant bed together. I always loved being smooshed in the bed between you and Mom when you came home on the weekends. I always had to touch someone when I was sleeping.

I don’t know if you know this, but Mom would tell me when you were on your way home, and I would practice how crazy I would get when you walked through the door. I know I made it look easy, but it’s hard work giving all those kisses. You were my favorite person to tackle coming through the door. I hope you never forget that. I also hope you never forget just how much I loved taking a nap with you. Mom said half of her phone is filled with pictures of you and me snoozing. I think she’s being dramatic, but we sure snoozed a lot. When we would sleep together, I always dreamed we were fighting off evil intruders, and I would bite their faces while you chased them away. That’s why I was always kicking and barking in my sleep. I know you probably sleep better now that I don’t kick you in the ribs, but I also hope you kind of miss it.

When we moved to Arizona, I loved our big backyard, and I really loved that you got me a little brother, even though he grew to be much bigger than me. I know you had to work a lot, but Mom, brother, and me had so much fun going on hikes, driving back to San Diego, and waiting for you to come home when you had to work late. Mom would always tell us when your helicopter flew over the house. It made the house shake, but I wasn’t afraid because I would be curled up on your pillow and Mom would be holding me. Plus, brother was never far, so I was always smooshed in a bed full of love—it was my absolute favorite.

After Arizona, we went to my favorite place—Hawaii. Mom, brother, and I hiked all day every day while you worked—sucker! We missed you, but forgot you were gone because we were always in the jungle hiking with Mom, having fun. One time we got lost, but Mom found the way home. I didn’t care that we got lost because I just wanted to spend more time with Mom. Mom would always take so many pictures of us. It was hard work to look so pretty covered in mud, even though I made it look easy.

I loved when we would all walk down to the beach in the mornings and I got to chase crabs and my brother. I was a lot faster than he was because he weighed more than me and sank down in the sand. I was blisteringly fast. I know I never told you, but when you took us running, I loved chasing you. I just thought about how lucky I was to run with my dad. You only have two legs, which I think is weird, and your legs were a lot longer than mine, but it was still fun to chase you around.

Hawaii also gave me a baby sister. I loved her. I think you and Mom grew up to be great parents. I know I’m biased because you took such good care of me and brother, but watching the different stages of your life and how well you both grew into them was something I really admired. I didn’t think Mom could get any better, but when sister showed up, Mom took it to the next level. I also enjoyed getting to play with the baby and watching her grow up. Being around family was my favorite, and I didn’t think having you as parents could get any better, but it did. Our family grew, which means I had more people to cuddle with, take pictures with, and go on walks with.

I know when we left Hawaii it was sad, but Virginia was good for different reasons. We made great memories there, added another baby sister, and brother and me started to grow up. I know you noticed, but we couldn’t walk as far or run as fast. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to; it’s just that my legs started to ache and I got tired quicker than I used to. I saw the look on Mom’s face when she realized we were getting older. I know it made her sad, and I always hated when Mom was upset. I tried to cuddle with her more so she knew how much we loved her and to make her smile. Getting her to smile was my favorite.

You were still gone a lot for work, and we still got to play and have fun in the house while you were gone. We went on walks, even though they weren’t far, with our baby sisters. It wasn’t the jungle anymore, but it was still fun because it was with Mom, and that’s all we cared about. We still loved getting in the car to go for rides, and when we went on vacation and got to go back to the beach, it reminded me of Hawaii. I don’t know if you noticed, but I smiled the entire time we were there.

I know it was hard for you and Mom to watch me grow up. I know taking me to the doctor wasn’t fun, and I hope you don’t worry about that. I didn’t like going either. It smelled funny, and the other dogs there always gave me the creeps, especially when they stared at Mom—like, “Get your own mom, she’s mine.”

Our last vacation was probably my favorite memory. We all crammed into that house, cuddled on the small couch, and had fun. When Mom took me to the beach, I felt bad because I was so tired, but I was also so happy to be back on the sand near the water with her. She loves the ocean and so do I. For a moment in time, I was back in Hawaii with her chasing crabs, even though I got tired and had to lie down.

I’m sorry I couldn’t make it any longer. When we got home from the trip, I was really tired. I remember the last night I slept next to Mom, I slept really hard. I woke up and I wasn’t hungry, and I knew it was time to go. I know how upset that made you, and when you asked me on the stairs if I was ready to go because I had to stop to catch my breath, I hope you know it broke my heart when I looked back at you to tell you yes. Every time I saw tears in your eyes, or Mom’s, it broke my heart. I only wanted to make you happy. You both gave me so much love, I didn’t think it was possible. Our family was the best gift I ever received, and I will miss you every day. I won’t be far, though. You’ll see signs of me, hear noises, or see puppies that remind you of me. Please don’t cry—smile. I only wanted you to smile because I only wanted to love you. If they let me go back and pick my parents again, I hope I can come back to your house. If I can’t, I’ll tell the dogs I see around that if they get you and Mom, to prepare for the greatest time of their lives, because it’ll be nothing but love and fun.

If I left anything out of this letter, Dad, I’m sorry. I’m pretty tired and I can hear you and Mom crying upstairs in the bedroom. I’m trying to get my energy to make it up the stairs, because I think tomorrow is my last day. You both were wonderful parents. I hope I loved you as much as you loved me, and just know I’ll be waiting for you. Thank you for eleven beautiful years. I love you, even if you’re just a human—you’re my humans.

I read an article not long ago capturing the thoughts of someone in their 90s and how they lived a happy and healthy life. One of the lessons was to continue to embrace new friendships as you age. That’s where this story begins. As a dad in his early forties, happily married, with two young children at home, I didn’t think this chapter of my life would generate new friendships due to the limited time available outside of my family and work. Funny enough, that’s what happened, and it centers around working out.

The short of it is, I ran in the same professional circles as this individual, but never really knew them outside of that. A social media post revealed this individual took up trail running, specifically ultramarathons, in retirement. I shot them a note and said please keep in touch. That was it. Now, our conversations center around two things: our families (fatherhood), and working out.

Our conversations (which occur via text message) are a compilation of random thoughts on fatherhood, working out, and how working out provides timeless life lessons. They usually start with something we discovered by analyzing our own data (sleep, heart rate, HRV, or training methodology) and somehow end up discussing the analogous nature of working out and running when compared to life, and all the lessons that come from it. Most conversations end with a Ronnie Coleman GIF and a final text exclaiming, “LIGHT WEIGHT BABY!”

Our latest conversation was a summation of a handful of our previous talks. While I won’t speak for anyone else, I told my buddy I think social media has perhaps unintentionally eroded the benefits of working out and running. While I understand people make their livelihoods through this medium as influencers within their respective sports, I think it hollows out the greatest benefit an individual can get from partaking in sports, whether that’s CrossFit, ultrarunning, triathlon, HYROX, bodybuilding, or weightlifting—you pick your passion.

Social media amplifies the finish line. Scroll through the hundreds, if not thousands, of influencers in your respective sport, and you’ll see Strava stats for a recent 100-miler complete with cinematic music and a full media team there to capture and then produce a YouTube video for someone who promises they are just like you, or that you can do this too (it’s true, you can). It is also useful to remember many of these people are full-time, sponsored athletes, which means they get paid to train, recover, and do nothing else. Whereas a majority of us are waking up at some ungodly time before work or staying up late, getting up before the kids to sneak in a quick workout to pad our mediocre stats while sponsored athletes hit workout 1 of 3 for the day. These influencers should not be faulted for what they do. In fact, I remain envious and would love to train every day, all day. When I was in my late 20s, training for triathlon, before a wife and family, that’s exactly what I did. But what the reels illustrate and emphasize is simply the “finish line” while missing the journey it takes to get there. I also know if given the opportunity to become sponsored, I would likely decline due to the myriad strings that come with it and the various boxes that need to be checked—when money is involved, terms are dictated and they may not be your own.

My recent conversation with my buddy—we’ll call him “Dave”—focused on how we each took a step back from running after our four-decade bodies had slowly revolted over the previous few months and weeks from perhaps running too much. Dave said he went for a run recently after taking time away, and it reaffirmed his passion and love for running, which he realized over the past few months had waned. I echoed a similar sentiment; I hadn’t been happy working out in months. Heading out on another run, looking at my numbers, I was slower and felt like I was in worse shape than I had been in months, and I had never run more in my life. I told him I was happiest when I was able to participate in a variety of activities: weightlifting, swimming, biking, running, and cross-training, every day. I did a bike workout this past week and then deadlifted, and I hadn’t been that happy in the gym in months. It was a kind reminder, at least for me, that I do it for “the love of the game.” I thoroughly enjoy being able to show up daily, ask my body to engage in an activity, and see how well I can do—just me.

Dave replied that his recent run emphasized the importance of reconnecting with all the things he loved about running—not time or pace, simply the act of running. He shared how working out has always been a central pillar of his life. He came to this conclusion on some mundane Saturday while out for an hour-long run, not crossing the finish line of a multi-hour ultramarathon (which he has done numerous times). That led me to conclude why I think social media is less helpful, even harmful at times, when it comes to working out. People make money off monetizing training plans, clothing, or supplements. Their brand is built on showing you their stats, their physique, or how they just crushed a 100-miler, a HYROX, or some other sporting endeavor. What those videos usually fail to show is the most important thing in sport: the journey. Social media amplifies the “finish,” the most insignificant part of any endeavor. Social media glosses over the daily privilege to show up and enjoy the capacities of our bodies and mental grit on some mundane Thursday morning.

In 2010, a friend passed away during combat operations, something I’ve written about previously. I told Dave how I signed up for a full-distance Ironman to raise money to establish a scholarship for my fallen friend. I reflected on how I spent many a Saturday alone on my bike on the roads and hills of Southern California, crying because I lost a friend and was forced to contemplate my own mortality. I remember sitting exhausted on the side of the road for an hour one Saturday with a flat tire, lost in my own thoughts about life and its meaning. I ran down the boardwalk of Pacific Beach as fast as I could because I was angry at the world for taking someone so young. I swam in the early morning hours before work, completely gassed, trying to answer a question I’ve yet to find an answer to: why did that person pass away? In November of that year, after months alone, sorting out the many highs and lows I encountered, I crossed the finish line of that Ironman, taking home 2nd place in my age group. I crossed the finish line and returned the dog tags of my fallen friend to his mother, who was there waiting for me. Dave Scott, the six-time Ironman world champion, awarded me the trophy the next morning. What lesson did I take away from it? The Ryan before the finish line was the exact same Ryan after the finish. It wasn’t the finish that changed me; it was the months of training—the journey changed me, not the destination (the finish line).

So, that’s my rub with social media. I don’t have anything against anyone trying to make a living; social media tends to focus on the finish, not the journey it takes to get there. And in the event someone doesn’t finish that big ultramarathon, stopping at mile 67 instead of 100, they’ve still run further than a majority of the population—yet you see posts insinuating that result is some sort of failure. I don’t buy it. It’s an outsourcing of individual worth, placed in the hands of people who, due to business demands, are making money to pay their bills, buy a house, and live the lifestyle they want, who likely don’t know a single thing about who you are as a person or your circumstances. Does this mean they don’t care about people? Absolutely not. It’s just likely not their priority to care when someone buys their training plan and their gear to run in, and then stops at mile 67. They probably aren’t there to tell you it’s about the journey, or maybe they are. Their presence on social media likely indicates you should try again, buying more of whatever it is they’re selling to help you get to “the finish.”

None of this takes into account the single parent working two jobs trying to finish their first 50K while watching someone years younger, or perhaps older, without the complete picture of what is occurring to work out multiple times a day. Hint: If the Tour de France taught us anything, it’s probably not the 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep and a new pillow doing the trick—call me pessimistic, but when money is involved, the incentive is there.

I’d rather see someone trying to tackle their first 50K balancing the myriad demands that come with parenting, a full-time job, and all the countless other demands placed on their time than someone fully sponsored tackling a multi-day ultramarathon and landing on the podium who has a full media team to capture the experience for others to share. The former, while less in terms of distance, requires greater effort when one steps back and analyzes the entire picture. But the 50K doesn’t sell as well as the 250-miler. I get it. In the world of endurance sports, it seems an all-or-nothing proposition has emerged where you are forced to take on a 100-mile footrace while skipping over shorter distances simply to meet the requirement of being accepted as a “true athlete” in the endurance community. 30 miles is a long way. 50 miles is farther. 100 miles was a distance historically reserved for horses, until some guy named Gordy Ainsleigh made a bet he could cover the distance on foot—and he did. Regardless, it shouldn’t take away anything from anyone toeing the line of their first 5K or setting the course record for a 250-mile footrace through Arizona in just under 60 hours.

Not every influencer is this way, and there are folks who are genuinely dedicated to amplifying the benefits sports have brought to their lives. In comparison to the greater pool of influencers, they are in short supply, drowned out by the marketing teams and algorithms that show you the person with one million followers, not the person with only 30 followers who missed their morning workout caring for their sick child while stressing out over how they’re going to make it to work on time that day. It’s what happens when things, including fitness, are monetized (and it’s a booming industry, to include endurance sports).

Why write any of this? I found the conversation I had with Dave one of the most insightful I’ve had in quite some time. The conversation centered on why working out has always been important to me and remains important to me. It validated that while there is indeed a finish line in life, it’s the journey between now and then that matters. In the words of Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, we all face the same finish line in life, an inherently human ending emphasizing that everything before that ending is what counts:

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

I have to thank Dave for all our talks. I admit I was skeptical I could make a new friend in my 40s, but here we are, talking about all the things that truly matter, at least to me: family, fatherhood, and being uniquely average as athletes in our 40s trying to balance it all in our journey of life before crossing the final finish line.

Image: The Economist

Humor me if you will. Fetch a single sheet of paper and orient it horizontally across your desk. Take your writing instrument of choice and draw a single, straight line from the left edge of the paper to the right. On the left end of the paper, label it “non-technical”; on the right end of the paper, label it “technical.” Now, pick up the paper with the line facing you and bend the edges away from you—touching the left end to the right—the non-technical touches the technical—there is no longer a gap between them. This is the scenario the US military finds itself in regarding technologies such as AI/ML and robotics. The takeaway: with ubiquitous technologies, human performance, specifically the management of personnel across a career continuum, matters more than ever.

Technologies are burgeoning. AI is ubiquitous, as scholars have discussed, from facial recognition to driving directions. One area of particular interest to me, for personal and professional reasons, is how the adoption of technologies is requiring the rapid adaptation of the military career continuum, specifically personnel management. Let the eye-rolling begin. I once heard a mentor say, “Going to HR is like going to the principal’s office.” Well, folks, it turns out Mr. Belding (for those who get the ’90s pop culture reference) may be the most important leader in an organization, and I’m not sure how many people view it that way.

Image: Courtesy Of The Wave

The Problem

I previously wrote about what I called military career fungibility: careers, specifically combat arms, which have abbreviated training requirements when compared to more technical careers (aviation and cyber are two examples that come to mind). Military careers to some degree, assume a level of fungibility that has waned as technologies have been adopted. This assumption is evident in the industrial era management approach (Interoperability, universal training, continuous turnover).

Military careers tend to adhere to a turnover period that averages around 3 years, if not less. What that means is, as the front-end requirements of training increase due to the adoption of AI/ML, robotics, and data literacy—for every occupation—the usable time an organization has those people for has remained somewhat constant. From a purely monetary lens, it’s an inefficient model that requires an increasing amount of budgetary resources on the front end of a career, while failing to account for that investment. Marginal improvements in career timing have been made, but marginal adjustments during a career do not offset the massive investments in training and costs on the front end of a career. The math doesn’t add up, which means organizational effectiveness/capability doesn’t either.

Fetch that piece of paper I asked you to fold up and turn it over. Draw a single line approximately 5–6 inches in length. We’ll assume this is the standard and average military career tenure—to include training. Historically, military careers, specifically those requiring minimal training, take a fraction of a year to create, leaving the remainder of a career for the military to recoup its investment by generating a level of sustained capability. Now, erase the first section of the line on the left-hand side. The usable time has decreased, or in the picture below, remained constant while proportionally decreasing when compared to the entire career. This represents the extended training requirements that are or will be required moving forward, with usable time in a career remaining relatively constant. For an example, think of the military service lengths pilots, aircrew, and medical professionals have. Speaking from personal experience, as a rotary-wing pilot I spent 18 months (2 years total when you account for my initial 6 months of basic officer training) in initial flight training, which equated to a 6-year service contract (a ticking clock that only begins once designated a pilot and complete with initial training). While this concept is present, it needs to be scaled across the enterprise to every occupation, particularly those adopting advanced technologies requiring additional training requirements.

For those who argue AI/ML, robotics, and drones are quick to pick up by the new generation, this may be true. But how those skill sets are implemented in a military arena is vastly different from how they are implemented in our day-to-day lives. By assuming “the kids are alright” and have everything they need to wield such dramatically powerful tools at the lowest echelons of military units, we accept an enormous amount of risk in a geopolitical environment that reacts to the most minuscule of stimuli due to the instantaneous amplification of social media. Coupled with truly understanding bias, what AI is and isn’t, and the likely mass generation of misinformation adversaries will pump into the World Wide Web—consumed by and therefore training models without anyone noticing—this is just the tip of the iceberg. All of this to say, the human element remains paramount, and the management of that asset, just like any weapon system, will differentiate military success now and in the future.

While I usually refrain from military aphorisms, former generals are correct when they say the most important 6 inches on the battlefield are between your ears. While the physical domain remains easily measurable and likely the default focus of many, cognitive development will easily surpass physical metrics as paramount, if it hasn’t already. I’m not saying every sailor, soldier, airman, guardian, or Marine has to be Alan Turing; I am saying a holistic overhaul of the current military career management system is required. One that maximizes human performance across various domains, realizing they are all interconnected.

The Readiness Sine Waves

If you’ve never read Betts’ work on military readiness, I highly recommend it. Betts conveys that readiness is generated by multiple units across time by allowing units to peak and decline temporally offset from one another. The sine waves below capture Betts’ argument visually. In a perfect world, each wave, or unit, peaks exactly as another is at its lowest readiness, and the cycle continues in perpetuity.

Now think of what it costs in terms of time and money to generate a single sine wave. Linking the individual training requirements across occupations, then combining them within a single unit, is complicated enough. Now repeat that process across a unit of 30,000–40,000 people for an organization of 175,000 or more—it becomes a symphony of interconnected pieces moving in concert. Each sine wave will cost more to generate and sustain, further emphasizing the need for a personnel ecosystem that can consider the endless number of variables that go into creating a single wave of readiness, let alone multiple complementary efforts.

How to Improve

This process could be improved by leveraging data gathered from the individual through every unit, small to large. Current challenges to collecting this data are many: policy, disparate data architectures, data personnel (architects, analysts, engineers), and knowledge of how the human element spans across an organization. Now think of what it will take in terms of individual training for service members to grasp the strengths and weaknesses of the outputs of algorithms they never built, code they never produced, or bias they don’t understand. A simple example: an individual, when confronted with information that may challenge a long-held belief, will likely be pushed further toward their original belief, even in the face of contradictory data. While two things can be true at once, bias and bounded rationality are inherently human characteristics many may be familiar with anecdotally, but have never sat and considered how that may impact their decision-making and the risks associated with it.

Some may argue the technology will right itself. When put in the hands of individuals, it will amplify skills, offsetting the risks and creating overmatch. Here I disagree. The baseline requirement for an individual to be able to do that is much higher. The barrier to entry to this technology remains low; the ability to fully harness it has become much higher.

I love analogies. So here is one that illustrates what this technology can and can’t do.

I am an aspiring, 43-year-old, back-of-the-pack athlete. I love endurance sports, but likely won’t find myself on the podium anytime soon. I can run 3 miles in just over 19 minutes—not bad, not elite either. If you gave me carbon-plated shoes, there is no way I could run a marathon in less than 2 hours like Eliud Kipchoge. What does this mean? Just because you give me the same technology a world-class athlete has does not mean I can produce the same result. Kipchoge in a pair of regular running shoes would destroy many other elite runners. When his talents were harnessed and complemented with carbon-plated running shoes, the advantage of the technology became apparent. What did Eliud teach me? The entire premise of this article: Without the correct human (capabilities), the technology is worthless.

So what does this mean? The future is inherently human. I’m not sold that AI will reduce employment. If history is any barometer for the future (the best one we have at the moment), it tells us when technologies are adopted, they create new and emerging positions that are now required to support those technologies. For example, drone technologies may have removed a pilot from the cockpit of an aircraft, but they did not remove the need for a pilot, a ground crew, and the logistical node required to support the drone. The human was shifted to a physically different location in the system, but it was not removed.

Second, I think this emphasizes the need to fully understand the personnel ecosystem. When I say “ecosystem,” I mean every policy, technology, repeated practice, assumption, and factor that touches a career, whether that career is 4 years or 4 decades. When I tell people I enjoy reading personnel policy, I always receive a stare that indicates to me many find that odd. It’s not that I enjoy page after page of bureaucratic jargon; I am passionate to understand the rules that govern how individuals are managed in order to maximize human performance across every domain. Unfortunately, that spadework is left to very few willing to sort through the countless pages of statutes, policies, and orders that dictate how humans are managed and employed. Furthermore, those statutes, policies, and orders are often viewed in separation from the organization, instead of viewed across the organization, understanding how changing one aspect of personnel management impacts something that may seem completely unrelated to something far removed yet interconnected.

Lastly, technology is not a panacea. It never was, nor will it be. Critical thinking through rigorous mental development, mirroring that of the rigorous physical development required in many military occupations, seems to be growing in importance on a scale unlike any in the past due to the reasons mentioned earlier in this writing.

So, what is left to be done? Well, I could call up my friend Gemini, throw this writing into it with some policies, and ask Gemini to cook me up a strategy with various solutions, or I can do the spadework and get reading, unpacking the countless, untouched tomes of personnel policy that will be an important aspect in unlocking the Gordian knot of personnel management, now and in the future.

I’m reminded of what a faculty member once told me when examining large-N datasets (paraphrasing): “Sure, you can run some tests or throw it into a model and it’ll give you an output, but you can’t fully understand that output unless you completely understand what was within the dataset.” If you’re looking to leverage a vast corpus of documents, the answer is simple: start reading. Once you’ve done the reading (just like Eliud ran thousands of miles in training), you can use technology to glean insights you likely could not arrive at on your own (the carbon plated shoe!!!), and can better interpret that result because you did what every school teacher and syllabus has instructed us to do from grade school through university: “the reading.”

I have a mentor. If outside appearances hold true, this mentor is successful: a beautiful family, a leader frequently consulted who is penning their second book, a home in a gorgeous location, and business statistics that show their claims aren’t flowery rhetoric, but indisputable facts. During a recent phone call, this mentor said, “Ryan, people are more than willing to help; you just have to let them know how.” This was in reference to career advice. I won’t lie, I frequently reassess where I am in life and where I’d like to be across multiple time horizons: 1 year, 5–10 years, 15–20 years. While the 12-month forecast is fairly stable, the 5-to-10-year horizon is where I’ve placed most of my recent efforts, and this conversation emphasized a critical character flaw—I despise asking for help—in anything. (No, those em-dashes ain’t AI; I employ them recklessly).

The mentor was encouraging me to figure out who I wanted to be in that 5-to-10-year time horizon and then, once I determined that, to start asking folks for help in getting there. Reach out to people who are doing what I want to be doing in 5–10 years, have or had positions that I would like to have, and then simply “ask for help.”

While this conversation was recent, and I likely have many opportunities to ask for help in the near-to-mid future, I started practicing this lesson immediately on a much smaller scale. It sounds silly, but I had some dental issues recently that required me to drop into the dentist unannounced. I stood at the front desk and said, “I was wondering if you could help me.” Even typing those words makes me cringe. I stood there at the counter with a silent sense of shame, simply by asking for help. As a younger sibling and someone who has served over two decades in uniform, asking for help does not come naturally. My assumption, through anecdotal experience and a cursory review of social media posts, indicates it does not come easily to others who serve, either.

So, what does any of this mean? Well, first, it shows that I have work to do. I have to continue to accept that asking for help is not a weakness in any aspect of life. I have no problem asking questions in a classroom when something remains unclear, so why should I delay in asking for help in more serious situations? It sounds fairly ridiculous when you say it out loud. If anyone I knew told me they were hesitant to ask for help, I’d likely tell them that’s ridiculous, and I would be the first one to extend my hand in an attempt to help.

All of this reflects my own insecurities. First, realizing help is available isn’t a character flaw or weakness; it is simply tapping into someone’s expertise where your own skill sets or knowledge fall short. Reframing the issue through that lens has helped me tremendously. Second, when reframing the issue through the eyes of someone else (me helping them), I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment or pass judgment on anyone who asked for help. Lastly, this highlights that throughout our lifetimes we will need the assistance of others, and others will need assistance from us.

I penned this quick reflection because it touches on a much bigger issue. First, I will look to ask for help more frequently—in every aspect of my life. Second, I will continue to encourage others to do the same. Lastly, I hope this highlights that people who continually shoulder tremendous amounts of stress and workloads are often those who need the most help, but often fail to ask for it. A great quote I read on an office manifesto of a senior leader years ago was the following: “Your strongest horses need the most rest.” I would add, in this discussion, your strongest horses may also need the most help to achieve that “rest.” Too often I’ve failed to ask for help when I needed it, to include on much bigger issues than career advice. While I will refrain from turning a mole hill into a mountain, it does reflect how serious and challenging mental health can be, and how a small issue, something like a cracked tooth can turn into something much bigger, with much harsher consequences.

While I’m sure the mentor didn’t expect their guidance to branch into such a profoundly deep reflection, I am grateful it did. Also, it turns out asking for help at the dentist was the right call—a cracked filling that really was a cracked tooth is a much bigger issue, an issue I was hesitant to ask for help with, but like all things, I’m glad I did. I guess Mr. Rogers was right when he said:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

The conversation with my mentor was a kind reminder: look for the helpers. It dawned on me that I don’t always have to be the one helping.

Dear Ryan,

You’ve lived for 15,706 days (including leap years) and have yet to truly take stock of your life. Your life has witnessed over 500 full moons and experienced over 2,200 weekends. If the math proves correct, with the average male in the United States living to approximately 76 years old, you have lived 57 percent of your life with 43 percent remaining. That really does put you “over the hill.” Yet, in all of those years, months, days, minutes, and seconds, you have yet to reflect on how far you’ve come in those 43 years, perhaps leaving it to be accomplished some time in the future. Yet, this year is as good as any, for myriad reasons. You may not remember when you’re 76. You may not live until 76. All are possibilities, emphasizing the importance and necessity of such an undertaking.

You were born on Friday, July 22, 1983. It was the Year of the Pig, The Police topped the music charts, President Reagan occupied the White House, the Beirut bombing rocked the news, and you were born to two people in their early 20s who would grow to be great parents and remarkable, lifelong friends. You were born the younger of two boys, with an older sibling who was critical to navigating your adolescent years. While you grew up commonly referred to as “his little brother” rather than your own name, over the years you came to appreciate when teachers, coaches, and adults would call you by his name mistakenly. When life did take you down your own path, where your older brother had never ventured, you noticed being called his name came to a halt—and sometimes, you missed it.

You grew up in a small town. From what you can remember, it was the second smallest school to house a football team in the state. Growing up in that small town, you always wanted more. From a very young age, you wanted out. You felt a sense of panic set in when you thought of staying there for the rest of your life. You found an anthem in fellow Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 classic, “Thunder Road”:

It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win.

While your childhood was remarkably ordinary, it was also one full of love and joy. Hindsight being what it is, you had two phenomenally dedicated parents and an older brother who all wanted the best for you. Holidays were spent with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Christmas remains your favorite time of year, as holiday music, frequent family visits, and memories were created with Time Magazine’s holiday music album as the soundtrack. The warmth of the fireplace or the sheer joy of opening the original Nintendo remain core memories of your youth.

Your brother is someone you continue to admire and learn from, even some four decades later. While you and your brother are not cut from the same cloth, he remains an indispensable mentor and counterweight to your sometimes larger-than-life behavior. As of this writing, we can undoubtedly say it all worked out, but there were surely moments of doubt along the way. These moments were likely shared by your parents and brother as a result of your behavior and antics. They make for a good story and a laugh now—which is probably for the best.

High school was transformational, less for the education and more for two things that would become fixtures for the remainder of your life: working out and the military. Your first memory of working out was watching your neighbor, a cop, come home from a run and go into his basement gym. He was in his 20s and physically embodied who you wanted to become. You struck a deal with your dad and your neighbor that when you could do 50 push-ups, you would be allowed to go into the basement gym and work out with him. It took a little while, but when you went down there and felt the knurled bar sit heavy within your hands for the first time, you instantly fell in love.

Throughout your teenage years, your love for working out only grew. Even though you played soccer, you shied away from running until later in life, where you would eventually grow to appreciate the benefits running brought to your life, both physically and mentally. But from ages 13 to 24, you were categorically a meathead. You did what you had to do in school to get decent grades, but you lived for the gym. You came alive in that small, dank, musty cinderblock weight room year-round. In the humid, sweat-soaked summers and bone-chilling winters, inside the cast iron rods on the windows, absent air conditioning or heat. The calluses on your hands and rust stained skin were marks of pride. You spent hours upon hours there after school. You even made a deal with the track and field coach that you would throw for him, and in return, he would keep the gym open as long as you wanted. He remains the greatest coach you ever had in life. The wisdom and life lessons he tried to instill have aged like a fine wine. At the time of their teaching, you barely understood or appreciated the invaluable advice being dispensed. Like most things in life, it just takes time.

You learned perhaps the most valuable lesson you ever would in your life from lifting weights: you get out of it what you put into it. No one can do the work for you; you either can or cannot lift the weight. If you cannot, you have to train more and continue the process to make progress. Progress comes in waves; you’ll quickly jump up in weight only to plateau, but the work must continue. Rock-and-roller Henry Rollins distills weightlifting to its essence:

The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.

Not to be dramatic, but weightlifting probably saved your life. You could easily categorize your younger years as a “successful fuck-up.” We both know if the fork in the road had gone the other way in some of those events you somehow escaped, life would look dramatically different. You spent years investing in yourself, and it is something you will remain dedicated to for the remainder of your life. While your fitness goals have changed, nothing centers you quite as well as a good workout where the knurled bar rests heavy on your back or in your hands, sweat dripping from the crown of your nose and accumulating on the floor, with deafening music blasting into your ears and echoing inside your head as it drowns out everything and everyone—perfect focus, ignorant and deaf to the world outside. You have lifted weights in some of the most beautiful places in the world, and also some of the harshest. While we’ll unpack your time in combat shortly, your weightlifting got you through failed relationships, lost relatives and friends, distance and separation from your family, and two deployments, especially the second one. It’s something you should remain proud of.

Your fitness didn’t stay tied to the weight room. You would go on to dabble in triathlons and actually turn out fairly decent at them. Your very first triathlon was a half-Ironman on the beaches of Coronado, CA. About six months later, you took home 2nd place in your age group in your first-ever full-distance Ironman. Don’t forget that the guy who beat you had his pro card. For a kid that grew up hating to run and being a well-below-average swimmer, you did alright. You would even go on to explore ultra-running, doing long-distance relay races and trail runs. While the speed you once enjoyed has waned with age, you have done pretty well on the fitness front. A long run clears the mind, especially in the wee hours of the morning, seeing the sunrise and hearing and feeling the rhythmic beating of your feet across the asphalt, trail, or track.

The other pillar you found in your youth that would remain for the better part of your adult life is the military. At the age of 12, shortly before your 13th birthday, you found a junior ROTC program that you would remain anchored to throughout high school. You went to mini-boot camp on your 13th birthday. You spent 10 days getting yelled at, waking up early, going to bed late, picking your stuff up from the barracks bay floor (or sometimes from the yard outside), and realizing the military lifestyle suited you. Like Forrest Gump, you realized all you had to do was what they told you to do as quickly as you could, and that usually equated to success. You would go on to graduate as the honor graduate at 13 years old. You did that. A kid with zero military background found a groove that would lead to a career of military service. Never forget that you have worn a uniform for three decades of your life.

Eager to leave your small town, your dream of attending the U.S. Naval Academy would have to wait. You graduated high school and followed your brother to college. While you didn’t live at home, you didn’t live far, and it was a good first step. Your freshman year saw the events of 9/11 unfold on a beautiful September day. You remember the perfect weather and just how blue the sky was during what would turn out to be such a dark day in history. What did you do? In typical fashion, you did what you thought was right and bet on yourself. You met a Marine Corps recruiter and signed papers to go to OCS without telling a soul—not even your parents. When you did tell your parents, well, we know how that went—not well. As a father now to two children, you realize your parents’ response was one driven by an intense love for their child and the fear of losing that child. After all, you signed up to join the military a few months after the U.S. went to war. You can’t blame your parents for their response. Eventually, they came around, and in seeking to appease your mother, you reapplied to the Naval Academy with an ice cube’s chance in hell of getting in. Well, maybe we should call you Jack Frost, because that’s exactly what happened.

After two years of college, you packed up and endeavored down a path that would change the remainder of your life. You knew, walking off campus that afternoon, that your life would never be the same. Your college girlfriend would eventually leave. Your friends from college, who swore to stay in touch, faded, and it would once again be your parents and brother who remained by your side.

It’s worth reflecting on just how long you wanted to go to Annapolis. Lying on your parents’ bedroom floor, you watched either A&E or the History Channel one evening before bed. It was a special about the United States Naval Academy. Once again, at the age of 7, you instantly fell in love. You had never seen something that looked so appealing, so challenging, and so worth pursuing. You jumped off the floor to tell your parents that you were going to go to the Naval Academy one day. Your mother, intensely loyal to her son, smiled and said, “OK, if that’s what you want to do.” Your father laughed a bit before saying, “We’ll see about that.” You knew in your heart you were destined to go there, and 13 years later, you would. At the age of 20, you packed up and started again, leaving behind the life you had for the life you wanted. Another lesson that would repeat itself throughout time: “Your new life is going to cost you your old one.” And it did.

Once again, you shied away from the academic endeavors of the Naval Academy and had loftier goals in more “social” pursuits. Running still wasn’t your thing, but you absolutely thrived in the military aspect of school. Your academic transcript isn’t something to brag about, yet you managed to graduate with “merit” because you did so well militarily. Your senior year, you received an award for leadership out of the 220 selects who would be commissioned as Marine officers. You would also be recognized for leading the top company out of 30 in the Brigade as the Company Commander, guiding them to “Honor Company.” Perhaps the only record you set was how many nights you spent downtown or how much money you invested in local watering holes. Regardless, those experiences would shape you for the remainder of your life.

From the hills of Quantico to Pensacola, you would again show remarkable promise for someone who never had an interest in aviation. You graduated at the top of your class in flight school, learning you could outwork anyone. The life of social endeavors was quickly shelved for a relentless pursuit to learn as much as you could about flying and to be the top student. Again, your life centered around the two pillars that had remained constant since your teenage years: working out and the military. While you enjoyed the beach occasionally, it was a brief respite before getting back to work and refining your craft as a helicopter pilot. Your time was consumed with endless manuals on flying, and your time outside of school was spent in the gym.

Making a quick stop in North Carolina to learn how to fly the CH-53E, your helicopter of choice, you were introduced to cycling. You bought a Felt road bike and fell in love. You even biked 110 miles to South Carolina for the Marine Corps Birthday Ball. At first, you thought it was crazy, but after you did it, it really didn’t seem that hard at all. You have owned and continue to ride that Felt bike to this day.

San Diego provided the most impactful years of your life, personally and professionally. Personally, you met the woman who would become your spouse and the mother of your children. She remains everything you ever wanted, even though you really didn’t know it at the time. While her beauty captured you immediately, she would turn out to be one of life’s greatest blessings. In your later years, as you sifted through your own emotional and mental shit, she sat there, unwavering in her support. Don’t ever forget she married you just over 24 hours before you deployed. It remains one of the most selfless and brave acts you’ve witnessed in your life. She fought to help you regain your sanity as your life imploded and you leaned heavily toward alcohol, failing to care for yourself. When the world turned its back on you, she encouraged you to pick up the pieces and begin again. She helped you fully embrace who you were as a person and live a life that was true to yourself. Like a lighthouse enduring the relentless crash of the waves, she remains a beacon of love, hope, and support through your darkest moments, ensuring you know how to navigate life’s tumultuous seas. Your wife began to build the life you currently occupy over a decade ago in San Diego. You remain indebted to her quiet and relentless effort to build the life you find yourself living and enjoying everyday.

San Diego would also lay the foundation for the remainder of your career. You excelled as a Marine and did fairly well as a pilot. You would eventually be asked to instruct at the Marine Corps’ aviation weapons school, the Marine Corps equivalent of TOP GUN, something you didn’t fully appreciate until much later in life. For a kid who grew up watching Tom Cruise give the finger inverted, and decided it was appropriate to do the same to your grandmother when you were 4 years old, maybe it was destined to be this way. San Diego also saw you compete with some of the biggest names in triathlons. Looking back on it all, you did remarkably well.

San Diego would also send you off to war. You served two tours in combat as a helicopter pilot. You have plenty of stories that could fill the pages of a combat memoir. It wasn’t easy, but it showed you the very best and worst that humanity has to offer. War showed you just how fragile life is, and how a coin flip determines who does and doesn’t survive. One small step left, one small control input right, and life can be taken within a fraction of a second. No questions asked, no explanations, just a final, irrevocable result. You look forward to the day when you can lay down the uniform and realize that while war will undoubtedly continue, it will no longer come calling your name demanding your attendance. War took friends, enemies, time, and part of your youth. It also gave you a perspective that enables you to enjoy the beauty of moments largely overlooked by others, because you understand just how lucky you are to witness them. You have saved lives and also contributed to their taking. It’s something that consumes you at times, having hindsight and space to reflect on the magnitude of such decisions.

From San Diego, your life took you to Arizona, where you and your new wife started a life together. It wasn’t easy and it is also where your family would grow. Military life was new to her, and your focus on your career probably didn’t make it any easier—years later you would have to unpack your relationship with work; it wasn’t healthy. The most important thing you realized is that the both of you would grow together, which is perhaps the key to a successful marriage.

Your time in Arizona took you back to running, and you were the fastest you had ever been, or would be. You ran 3 miles in under 17 minutes. You ran your first ultramarathon with a group of guys from work, and you were probably in the best shape of your life. Like all things, your fitness has ebbed and flowed. While those days of speed and youth have faded, you have not allowed them to dictate your future potential as an over-40 runner/athlete. Don’t ever let it.

In Arizona, the discussion of starting a family came into view. Through a lengthy and frustrating process, it was determined that you would require surgery due to fertility issues. Not only was the news devastating, but it would also take years to fully recover from the surgery. It was, however, the first step into what would be the greatest accomplishment of your life: becoming a father. Your family would grow with the addition of not 1, but 2 dogs (Rhodesian Ridgebacks). While you recently encountered the loss of your first dog eleven years after picking her up from the airport, you remain indebted to your wife for adding them to your life’s journey as they have provided priceless value, comfort, joy, and love to you, your wife, and your children. You should listen to your wife more, she’s usually right. Best not to tell her that (to our knowledge, she doesn’t read your Substack, like the many others who rightfully avoid reading the meandering thoughts of a man in his 40’s).

With Arizona in the rearview, you headed to Hawaii for one of the most impactful years of your career. You worked for a senior leader who would fundamentally change your view of work, family, and life. It was an arduous assignment involving extensive travel, lots of planes, airports, and time zones, and it delayed starting a family by an entire year. However, looking back on that year, it was for the best. You took life lessons from those 12 months that you probably would not have learned anywhere else. Perhaps the greatest lesson was the act of forgiveness, for others and yourself. Those 12 months also provided clarity on your journey to start a family. After those 12 months were up, the priority was no longer work, but becoming a father.

While it wasn’t a quick process, Hawaii provided the “magic of the islands” and delivered you a beautiful baby girl—and with it, the title of “Father.” In 2019, you became a dad for the first time. To say you were scared would be an understatement. Becoming a father uprooted everything you thought you knew about life and love. The girl who made you a father continues to teach you every day about being a better human and ultimately did what no one else could: she taught you that work really isn’t everything, family is. She doesn’t care how awesome of a pilot you were or how you saved the day at work; she only wants her dad to come home and play, watch a movie, or spend time with her. It forced you to focus on all the things your wife tried to tell you were important. Your shift in focus from work to family was also something your mother had been concerned about. Your dedication to your profession, while admirable, would likely have been challenging to deal with if you had not addressed it when you did. Plainly, becoming a father forced you to unpack your relationship with work. It also illustrated that no matter the job, every organization will continue to march on without you, but your family needs you to be present to be successful.

After Hawaii, you headed to Virginia. You would take on the most challenging tour of your career and pursue a goal years in the making. First, you were the person responsible for assignments for hundreds of your peers. When they were scheduled to move, you were the conduit for that process. The job taught you many lessons—good and bad. Sometimes the weight of that position still gets to you. The benefit was the lessons it bestowed. Like all things in life, you cannot have the good without the bad. You’re better for it, but you’re glad it’s over.

Second, you would be selected to pursue a Ph.D. Pursuing a Ph.D. was a goal that you had contemplated since your earliest years in college. As it turned out, the Marine Corps had a program that would allow you to obtain one if you were selected. In the summer of 2022, you left Quantico and headed north toward Arlington, VA to pursue a Ph.D. in political science.

The three years of graduate school were a grind. At times—many times, in fact—you were all but certain you had made a tremendous mistake in undertaking such a venture. Like all things, time and space provide much needed clarity. Pursuing your Ph.D. was one of the best choices you ever made in life. The process changed how you think, what questions you ask, how you write, and your outlook on life. It was a tremendously important undertaking. Like all things in life, there were ups, downs, and moments where you sat alone in your office and thought about how extremely out of place you were. You encountered great and not-so-great faculty. One of the best faculty members you encountered shared their own imposter syndrome story—how their advisor told them to just put their head down and do the work. As time ticked by, their cohort dwindled, but that faculty member remained. That same faculty member also told you to find something you love going back to—sports, art, music—and never jeopardize or give that up for anything, not even school. While you had learned this lesson before, you had forgotten it. They provided a kind reminder that no matter what you undertake in life, you must keep those things that keep your soul happiest at the forefront—no matter what. They also emphasized the long sought after secret to success in the simplest terms—just do the work.

You also had a cohort of students who made the sometimes unbearable process of graduate school bearable and fun. You also grew your family with another beautiful baby girl. The second daughter is a lot different from the first, and she’s a lot like you. You are also the first in your family to obtain a Ph.D. For a kid who struggled with school (a kid who couldn’t read until the first grade—remembering the teacher who changed your life and ensured you could), you should give yourself some credit. While you will more than likely never revolutionize the fields of international relations or American politics, you can at least say you know a decent bit about them. You also know a Ph.D. does not equate to intelligence. Some of the people you admire the most have an intelligence that eclipses your own by magnitudes, without three letters following their name.

Growing the family was a blessing, even though the timing wasn’t great—but when is timing ever perfect? Your wife once again did the lion’s share of the work while you slept in your office to do the reading, write the papers, and conduct the research necessary to graduate on time. For the better part of two years, even though you slept in the same house, you rarely saw your family. For better or worse, you would absolutely do it again. You also promised to use everything you learned in school to help those you encounter for the rest of your life. You look forward to possibly teaching one day, truly committing to giving back. More importantly, so you can play a small part in someone’s life and help them get closer to where or who they want to be.

While this is an abridged summary of your 43 years of life, it leaves us in the present day. So, what lessons have you really learned? The scholars, poets, stoics, teachers, and elders were right. All those lessons reposted on social media, handed down from your grandparents, or written centuries ago have proven true. You’ve changed. Your life has changed, for good and bad, and life will continue to do so until one day it comes to an end on some ordinary day as the world continues to march on. To those outside of your immediate circle, you will likely be quickly forgotten or already have been. You can only impact your small slice of the world; outside of that, it’s a waste of effort and time. Social media has proven marginally useful—books, poetry, writing, music, and working out are where the magic really happens. However, knowing this should never stop you from trying to leave someone better in every encounter in life—no matter how brief, through a smile, handshake, or simply holding the door open.

As for family and friends, the ones who truly matter can be counted on one hand. All others will come and go throughout your life, and that’s OK. People are usually less important than you make them out to be. Remember what Kipling said—that all men count, but none too much. You’ve likely overlooked and failed to mention many who’ve touched your life in a positive fashion, while trying to ignore and forget those who left a scar. Believe it or not, it is the harshest teachers we learn the most from as cruel as those lessons can be. Enjoy the good, but never forget the bad—you must learn to keep them all in equal measure. Also, a life well lived will never be without criticism, especially if you’re trying to influence change. The size of social circles is inversely proportional to authenticity. It is usually those with the smallest circles who remain authentic and true to who they are.

You’ve learned to be cautious about taking advice from people who have never achieved what you’re looking to achieve. While people can be overly generous with advice, and acknowledging most are looking to help, many if not all have a good idea of how others should live their lives, but very rarely do they know how they should live their own or what you are trying to build toward.

You fail to give yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished. Good or bad, it is who you are. You are remarkably loyal, dedicated, and at times, confident to the point of arrogance. This is not to say it isn’t warranted. You dedicate extensive amounts of time and effort into refining your life, your craft, your fitness, and what you bring to the table as a son, brother, husband, father, friend, and professional. You used to shrink from that to facilitate the comfort of others; now it is something you embrace. You’ve learned how others react is entirely out of your control, and you should spend less time worrying about it.

You very much take a “me vs. the world” approach to things—you have at times, to your own detriment, failed to ask for help, even when you needed it. That probably comes from your youth, where life and people weren’t always kind. You learned you can endure almost anything. You have watched people with far greater talents quit things you’ve done, and done well. As you age, you appreciate people who remain true to who they are—those who have life-shattering stories and the scars to prove it. You are no longer interested in the concocted stories of life broadcast on social media with false veneers that are hollow and empty. You also expect from others what you give. Your circle has gotten smaller, but richer. Your life continues to be curated with the values you prize. While you do not blame anyone for their approach to life or how they choose to live it, you have carefully chosen who is and is not within your own. You continue to manicure and live your “perfect day.”

Maybe Emerson was right about success:

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!

So, what does any of this mean? Nothing really. You’ve lived for a bit. You hope to live a bit more, doing the things you enjoy with the people you love. You are at the stage of life where the things you love will begin to disappear, permanently. While unpleasant, it is simply the result of life revolving around two poles: love and grief. You will continue to love things in your life only to watch them leave. This should never stop you from loving, but never be foolish in choosing what and who you love. It should be a choice you make carefully as there are people and things that do not deserve your love. However, to those people and things you choose to love, do so deeply and with reckless abandon. Never shy away from giving something your entire heart even with the knowledge that grief, soul-crushing, life altering grief, will surely follow. Love and grief are inextricably linked.

You’re not really sure there is anything else in life other than learning to enjoy the passing of time doing the things you love with the people you love. Forty-three years from now, you’ll be 86 if you’re lucky enough to make it that far. The one thing you’re sure of is that just because age will continue to come, that does not mean you cannot continue to pursue the youthful pursuits that make you come alive—weightlifting, running, remaining active, writing, and spending time with your wife and children. When you feel lost, or perhaps need reminding of what you’ve accomplished with your life or who you are, come give this a read, or go talk with your parents, wife, or daughters—they can center you like only they know how. I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read. If you haven’t, you are the author of everything that makes these pages moving forward—ensure the future is written well.

From the beginning, I’ve written to make sense of things. Something that has been on my mind (and recently experienced, more on that later)—perhaps for longer than I’d like to admit—is grief. It is a universal experience, yet I’m not sure I truly understand it. I know its weight, and I have navigated its terrain in my own life, but I have never sat down to unpack those experiences or explore how grief retains its grip on us throughout our lifetimes. In fact, that is where this story begins.

I had observed grief visually long before I felt it. I remember attending a funeral as a child for a young man who lived nearby. He was in his early thirties, a few years into his marriage, with a newborn child. Hindsight provides clarity now, but at the time, I only remember the intense, inexplicable sadness filling the room. I was seven years old, and I had zero grasp of why his widow rarely smiled when I saw her in the neighborhood afterward.

Grief finally took hold of me, physically, two decades later. I was twenty-seven, on a cloud-covered May morning in Southern California. As I was sneaking out the door for work, my phone rang, shattering the morning stillness. On the other end was a classmate from the Naval Academy informing me that a mutual friend had been killed in action.

Grief didn’t seize me immediately. While I don’t remember much of the rest of that day, I do remember trying to go for a run and finding that I couldn’t. It was a beautiful San Diego afternoon, yet a twenty-seven-year-old man in his prime couldn’t muster the energy to move. I got back in my truck and drove home, trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

A few weeks later, we traveled to the Midwest for the funeral. We all wore our Dress Blues. For those unfamiliar, they are made of a burly wool blend—a structured fabric that retains its military stature even without a human subject. As we sat down for the service, I found myself next to the mother of another friend who was still deployed. I sat to her left, and for the entire service, her hand gripped my right forearm with a white-knuckle intensity.

I didn’t say a word. I sat there as she squeezed harder and harder. Despite the dense fabric of the uniform, when she finally let go, there were marks where her fingers had been. That was the first time I felt “grief’s grip.” I believe that when grief touches you like that, regardless of your age, it marks the end of your youth.

That was the physical manifestation of grief, but it appears in a variety of forms and for many reasons: a lost loved one, a failed relationship, or, as I’ve learned in my forties, anticipatory grief. This is the quiet weight of knowing what is coming—knowing my aging dogs won’t live forever (in fact, one just passed away this week), and that, in the cycle of life, neither will my parents. While not always overwhelming, it can be consuming.

Yet, there is a benefit to this awareness: it forces you to truly inhabit the time you spend with those you love. You want to absorb every second before the inevitable occurs. Until the advent of the crystal ball, we remain blind to the “where” and “when”—and so we wait for the end.

I have witnessed the human condition through those who are grieving—the ones brave enough to share their stories with the world. I’ve spoken to parents who have lost children and to those who lost a spouse abruptly to unforeseen circumstances. The commonality is that grief touches us all, yet it is something we often fail to recognize until a life-altering event forces us to confront it.

This makes grief a universal experience, not an isolated incident. Viewing it in these terms illustrates just how inevitable it truly is; you cannot navigate life without eventually encountering it. I once heard it said that “grief lives where love once was.” Perhaps that is the best way to define it: a feeling that fills the void where something powerful used to reside.

Defined this way, it makes sense why grief is so consuming. It steps in to occupy the space left behind by perhaps the most powerful emotion on the planet. Grief is also something that I’m not sure ever goes away. It fills your life and becomes something you learn to live with—a permanent fixture.

A surgeon once used the analogy of a heart pillow given after surgery. On one side of the pillow is love—this is the side we hold closest to us throughout our lifetime. However, on the other side of the pillow is grief, and when that love is no longer present, we encounter, and must embrace, the other side. While undesirable, it simply reflects a common truth: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The surgeon concluded that the only way to get back to the love side of the pillow is to deal with your grief through a process that moves you back closer to love. When one thinks about it, through the act of love, which produces grief, we can find our way back to love. But we must acknowledge we are once again endeavoring down a path that will lead to grief—the unbreakable cycle of life: love, grief, repeated.

Maybe this is where we can come to our own conclusions. We can choose or choose not to love again. One path leads to grief; one avoids it. But what is a life absent of love? Perhaps the middle ground—being selective with whom it is you choose to love—is the answer? I’m not sure. Plainly, not everything is worth your love, and if the cost is grief, perhaps we are wise to choose so carefully who and what we love.

To that end, and in reference to a note made earlier—while this post has been months of continually adding thoughts—we recently lost our first dog. I’m not here to engage in debates over what is harder to navigate, human or pet loss; I am only here to say grief is real and consuming our home. Where our home was once filled with the love of our pet—the silent comfort provided by a companion who dedicated nearly every second of every day for 11 years to us—one cannot help but notice her absence, and the deafening silence and space she once occupied. I write selfishly because writing has always provided, and continues to provide, a cathartic outlet. I’ve always found that sharing experiences like this holds greater value for others, as we are all more alike than different.

To anyone reading, I hope this resonates. I also want to state that I do not, by any measurable quantity, have a monopoly on grief; these are only my own experiences. I want to recognize everyone—and it’s likely almost everyone on the face of the earth—who has confronted and will confront grief throughout their lifetimes. My hope is that it never consumes you, that you do not drown in it, and that we all, in our own unique ways, find our way back to love.

My mother visited not so long ago. Like many parents, she knows her child’s every feature, flaw, foible, and facet. We were discussing activities people gravitate toward later in life. Without thinking about my own life, she emphasized how she would have never fathomed my current relationship with running, one that has grown over time. I hated running until my early 20s. It wasn’t until I lived in Southern California, racing triathlons, that I learned to fall in love with it. Like all things in life, I didn’t love it until it was taken away from me.

If Polymarket had existed in the 1980s, and someone routinely bet that I would be last in every race or running event I participated in—they’d put Warren Buffett’s wealth to shame. I was awful at it; my running performance was only outdone by my abhorrence for it. Mathematically, it can be captured with a formula, something to the effect of: Running hurt + I was slow = Running Sucks.

My relationship with running only got worse. As a soccer player throughout my high school years, running was also a form of punishment. And guess who was always last? Me. My coach would affectionately call me “Feet of Clay” or “Legs of Sand.” I just never found any enjoyment in it. Perhaps I wasn’t as bad as I recall. I remember running 400 meters during high school gym class and somehow beating everyone, running (if my memory serves me correctly) around 62 seconds. Being a teenager meant I didn’t stretch or correctly cool down after this effort, and having run the 400 meters around lunchtime, I was plagued with an extreme headache for the remainder of the day.

In high school, I turned into an amateur meathead who loved lifting more than running. I could bench, squat, and press a ton of weight—run? No, thank you. Heading to college, my love of weightlifting only grew and running wasn’t required, until it was. My freshman year in college was 2001. I lived an hour’s train ride south of New York City, and September 11, 2001, changed the life of every American, I imagine—it dramatically changed my path in life, and my relationship with running.

A few months after 9/11, I was speaking with someone I went to school with and found out they were participating in a program where you could attend Marine Corps Officer Candidate School during the summer, still go to college full-time, and then graduate as a Marine. It sounded criminal. The program was called “PLC,” and I signed the paperwork without telling a soul. My parents’ reaction deserves a separate post entirely, but one of the requirements of serving in the military, and the Marine Corps, is to run. The Marine officer I met was a collegiate rower. He was a Captain who clocked 3 miles in just over 19 minutes, if I remember correctly. Having not run since high school (probably almost a year since soccer season), I was grateful to clock 3 miles in just over 24 minutes. Since I was an aspiring bodybuilder, pull-ups and crunches were not a problem. However, the Captain wasn’t really happy with my run time. He told me he loved the fact I could knock out 30 pull-ups, but running 24 minutes would be something I had to work on.

Trust me when I say a lot happened between that moment and when I would be commissioned a Marine officer. I left that college, never went to PLC, and actually graduated from the Naval Academy. All you have to know is my relationship with running stayed where it was in high school. Running hurt + I was slow = Running Sucks. I had to run faster at the Academy, 1.5 miles in 10:30. Looking back on that number now, I almost chuckle. I recently ran 1.5 miles in just over 9 minutes at the age of 42, but at 19 to 23 years old, it seemed blisteringly quick for a 220-pound, aspiring Marine officer.

If we fast-forward to 2008, it was probably when the tides of change arrived and my relationship with running shifted. I was in flight school and picked up the book, Once a Runner. If you haven’t read it, even if you aren’t a runner, I highly recommend it. After reading it, I was trying to run every moment I could. I wasn’t fast, but I didn’t care. I would run twice a day some days. I wanted to be fast. I wanted to fly. It would take me two more years until I would achieve that.

In 2010, I moved to San Diego, and while my professional life revolved around life as a young helicopter pilot, my personal life was solely focused on working out as much as I could while living in Southern California. For those who may not know, San Diego is the birthplace of the triathlon. I took to it quickly. Swimming was something I hated more than running (as my time at the Naval Academy would teach me), and once I was out of the water, I could chase people down on my bike or while running—I was hooked.

What triathlon taught me was that I was actually a decent runner. While I was about 40 pounds lighter than I was in college, I could come home after work, clock a sub-1:30 half marathon before dinner, and sleep like a baby. I miss those days. I remember racing an aquathlon (a swim followed by a beach run) in San Diego. I was clocking sub-6-minute miles and a guy was trying to pass me. I literally would sprint and then slow down just to mess with him. I didn’t appreciate the level of fitness I had acquired until a few deployments required me to start all over again and rebuild.

But that year, 2010, is when I fell in love with running. When I moved to Arizona in 2014, it would be the fastest I ever was in my life, running 3 miles at just under a 6-minute mile pace—it was insanity. I could run as long and as far as I wanted. Having 12 years between that fitness level and now, I recently ran 3 miles in just over 19 minutes. I can’t complain.

All of this to say, my relationship with running has shifted dramatically from one pole to another—from hate to love. Now, I can’t imagine my life without running.

Running is what my wife tells me is called a “moving meditation.” It’s one of the few places where the world makes sense. The noise of the world disappears, and in the early morning hours, the rhythmic beat of feet pitter-pattering across the ground almost enables a trance-like state where you barely feel the road, or your breath, and are just moving effortlessly across space and time. Those moments are few and far between, but I recognize and appreciate them more now than I did before. I also welcome the challenges running presents. On the days when you don’t want to put your shoes on, or go outside, when it’s cold, hot, rainy, or you’re just completely exhausted—those times I have found to be the times when you should absolutely go run. It doesn’t have to be fast or for very long; you just have to run. Running centers me like very few things can.

I run at work and do my best thinking. When I need time and space to think about a problem, running usually provides the solution. Running has been one of my greatest teachers, a phenomenal therapist, and besides the cost of shoes, has a very low bar for entry.

While my mother was correct in saying she never pegged me for a runner growing up, this is to say it doesn’t matter where you are in life, you can begin anything, at any time, and it may turn out that you are quite remarkable at it. In fact, the world of ultrarunning reveals plenty of folks who didn’t even run until late into their 40s and 50s and have since assembled impressive running resumes.

I’d imagine to anyone reading this who is also a runner, many of the themes and lessons will resonate. Perhaps for those who are not runners, it may resonate less, and that’s OK. What I do know is people should find things they are passionate about and pursue them. Find something that gets you excited, that you enjoy doing, and do that. Make the time to do it, no matter what. I’ll often wake up early or, sometimes, stay up late just to get a quick run in. I don’t shy away from running during the day now; I’ve noticed it helps me think more clearly, allows me to entertain contradictory facts and perspectives, and allows me to formulate more objective viewpoints, removing emotion from the analysis.

I doubt I’ll set any world records, make the Olympics, or be a notable runner, and that’s the point. Running is something for me, and that’s why it’s important to me, because it hasn’t been ruined by doing it to try and achieve something. I haven’t outsourced it looking for sponsors, or tried to become a running influencer on social media. No, my running remains sacrosanct. It is the time I spend alone with my thoughts, thinking about all of life’s problems. Running, more often than not, has always given me the answer, even if it was one I wasn’t necessarily looking for.

We rush to the finish,

Not realizing it’s the grave.

We rush to finish the race,

Just to avoid the pain.

We just want the minutes to pass,

Not realizing it’s the most important phase.

We rush to the end,

Only to wish to do it again.

Like racing, and in life,

We rush to the finish line.

If you knew the ending was “final,”

I imagine you’d enjoy the passing of time—

The ups and the downs, taking it all in.

If we could cross the finish line once more,

I think we’d take our time or turn around to try

and run the race again.

Before dawn, I awoke

They were noticeably missing

As I drank coffee and wrote

They were noticeably missing

As I got ready to run

They were noticeably missing

From run start until done

They were noticeably missing

Like vultures, awaiting lazily above

They do not kill, only harvest the remains

Gravity, their only effort,

Propelling their descent from above

Too lazy to put in the effort to descend

I never found them in the wee morning hours

Nor during the endless hours of pavement beating runs

I found them in abundance, hiding in their own lives

Masked from public view, hiding behind finger-clicking key strokes

I never met a hater out in the wild

Where life is hard, and effort required

No, I never met any of them out there

Only where they could criticize effort that remains foreign to them

Only where they can maintain comfort in the unremarkable

Hovering above, vultures, too lazy to put in the effort

DVIDS, Photo by Sgt. Cody Purcell

A 2025 survey revealed that half of adults aged 18–29 regularly utilize artificial intelligence, a significant figure given that this demographic—comprising nearly 50 million people—is adopting AI faster than any other group with 74 percent of young adults relying on AI to gather information “some time.” This rapid adoption coincides with a growing concern in the private sector: many businesses are failing to anticipate how their “brands” will fare as agentic AI begins to mediate customer decisions. As a recent industry analysis noted, the new imperative for any organization is “ensuring your brand is visible to, and ultimately recommended by, consumer AI agents.”

While the Pentagon has prioritized AI for internal readiness and lethality, it has yet to consider the external information ecosystem where public perception is forged that may impact recruiting. To mitigate persistent recruiting shortfalls, the services must move beyond internal efficiency and actively compete in this AI-driven marketplace of ideas. Failure to account for how commercial AI influences—and potentially distorts—military career pathways risks ceding the first point of contact with future service members to unvetted, third-party systems.

For the U.S. military, which is historically anchored to the “brick-and-mortar” recruiting model, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI introduces a profound strategic vulnerability. As the next generation of talent increasingly bypasses traditional recruiters to consult AI for career navigation, the military’s “brand” is being filtered through algorithms. This shifts a fundamental national security concern into the digital cognitive domain: What narrative is AI constructing about military service?

What follows is an analysis of the prompts I provided and the subsequent responses generated by AI. This cursory experiment is intended to assist military planners in identifying emerging blind spots in recruiting strategies. To remain competitive in the labor market of 2026 and beyond, the military must move beyond traditional mediums and learn to navigate—and influence—the burgeoning AI ecosystem.

The First Question

“I am a rising high school student interested in a technical career. I am considering joining the military or the public or private sector—which career do you recommend?”

That is an excellent position to be in. At your age, the “best” choice isn’t necessarily the one with the highest starting salary, but the one that builds the strongest foundation for the next 40 years of your career.

Since you are looking at technical roles—like software engineering, cybersecurity, or data science—each sector offers a distinct “vibe” and set of long-term trade-offs.

1. The Military: The “Fast-Track” Builder

Joining the military (especially in a technical capacity like the Air Force or Space Force) is often seen as a high-intensity trade school that pays you.

• The Big Pro: Security Clearance. This is your “golden ticket.” In the private sector, getting a Top Secret clearance is nearly impossible on your own; in the military, it’s part of the job. This alone makes you incredibly valuable to defense contractors later.

• The Training: You will receive world-class, hands-on training immediately. You’ll be working on multi-million dollar systems that most 19-year-olds never touch.

• The Trade-off: Autonomy. You don’t choose where you live, and you can’t quit if you don’t like your boss. The “lifestyle” is 24/7, not 9-to-5.

2. The Private Sector: The “High-Growth” Engine

This is the world of Big Tech (Google, NVIDIA), startups, and specialized firms.

• The Big Pro: Innovation & Income. If you are highly motivated and skilled, your salary can grow much faster here than in any other sector. You’ll be using the absolute latest, “bleeding-edge” tools (like the newest AI models) before they ever reach the government.

• The Work Culture: Faster-paced, more creative, and generally more flexible (remote work, casual dress).

• The Trade-off: Volatility. Layoffs are a reality. If the market dips or a project is canceled, your job security is lower than in the public sector.

3. The Public Sector (Civilian): The “Stability” Pillar

This involves working for agencies like NASA, the FBI, or the NSA as a civilian employee (GS-scale).

• The Big Pro: Mission & Stability. You get to work on “National Interest” problems without the physical demands of military service. The job security is the highest of the three—once you’re in, it is very difficult to be laid off.

• The Benefits: Excellent pensions (rare in the private sector) and a very predictable work-life balance.

• The Trade-off: Bureaucracy. Change moves slowly. You may find yourself using older technology because it takes years for the government to approve new software or hardware.

Comparison at a Glance

My Recommendation: The “Hybrid” Strategy

Since you’re a rising high school student, you don’t have to pick just one for life. Many of the most successful technical professionals use the “Military-to-Private Pipeline”:

1. Enlist or do ROTC in a technical field (Cyber, Intelligence, or Engineering).

2. Gain 4–6 years of experience while getting your degree paid for (GI Bill).

3. Exit with a Security Clearance and a veteran status, then jump into the Private Sector as a “cleared contractor.”

This path gives you the discipline and “uncancelable” credentials of the military with the high-earning potential of the private sector.

The Second Question

“I am interested in technical roles in the U.S. military, Amazon, Google, or Meta. Can you please rank the various aspects of employment from 1-10 and provide an overall score that compares quality of life, career progression, compensation, promotion opportunities, and other important considerations when choosing a career?”

Choosing between the U.S. military and Big Tech (Amazon, Google, Meta) involves a significant trade-off between structured stability and high-reward volatility.

In 2026, the technical landscape has shifted. Big Tech is heavily focused on AI fluency and specialized engineering, while the military has doubled down on “speed to field” for autonomous systems and cyber defense.

Technical Career Comparison Matrix (1–10 Scale)

The following scores represent a mid-career outlook (5–10 years in) for a technical professional such as a Software Engineer or Cybersecurity Specialist.

Detailed Breakdown

1. Compensation (Winner: Google/Meta)

• Military: Pay is based on rank and years of service, not skill. While you get tax-free housing allowances, your total “take-home” value is significantly lower than tech.

• Big Tech: Google and Meta remain the “gold standard” for total compensation (TC), often including high base salaries and massive stock grants (RSUs). Amazon is competitive but often uses a back-loaded vesting schedule.

2. Quality of Life (Winner: Google)

• Military: You are on call 24/7. You may be deployed, work in secure rooms (SCIFs) without windows/phones, and face strict physical requirements.

• Big Tech: While Amazon is known for a “frugal,” high-pressure culture with higher burnout, Google and Meta still offer premium perks, hybrid work flexibility, and a more relaxed daily environment.

3. Career Progression & Promotion (Winner: Amazon)

• Amazon: Known for a “meritocracy at scale.” If you deliver results, you can be promoted very quickly. It is a “sink or swim” environment that builds incredibly strong engineers.

• Military: Promotions are often tied to “time in grade.” Even if you are the best coder in the world, you cannot skip ranks; you must wait for your “window” to open.

4. Job Stability (Winner: U.S. Military)

• Military: Virtually 100% job security. Unless you commit a crime, you will not be laid off. In 2026, the military is desperate for tech talent, offering massive re-enlistment bonuses.

• Big Tech: Even the “titans” have moved toward leaner teams. Layoffs are now a standard tool for tech companies to pivot toward AI, meaning your role is only as safe as the project you’re on.

Key Consideration: The “Secret” Asset

If you choose the Military, your most valuable career asset isn’t your salary—it’s your Top Secret / SCI Security Clearance.

In 2026, a “cleared” engineer can often earn a 20-30% premium in the private sector working for companies like Palantir, Anduril, or even specialized divisions of Amazon (AWS GovCloud) and Google (Public Sector).

The Last Question

“What are the potential drawbacks of choosing a military career?”

While the military offers a powerful foundation, it is not for everyone. For someone interested in a technical career, the drawbacks often center on a loss of personal freedom and a potentially slower rate of technical “evolution” compared to the private sector.

Here are the primary drawbacks to consider:

1. The “Total Ownership” Factor

The military is a lifestyle, not just a job. The most immediate drawback is the loss of autonomy:

• Geographic Assignment: You do not choose where you live. You could be sent to a state-of-the-art facility in Maryland or a remote base with limited internet and resources.

• The Uniform Code: You are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) 24/7. This means your personal conduct, appearance, and even your speech are regulated in ways they never would be at Google or Amazon.

• No “Quitting”: In the private sector, if you have a toxic boss, you can resign. In the military, you are under a legal contract. Leaving before your enlistment ends can have serious legal and financial consequences.

2. Technical Stagnation & Bureaucracy

While the military uses incredible technology, the way they use it can be frustrating for a “tech-first” person:

• Legacy Systems: Due to long procurement cycles, you may spend years working on systems that are 10–15 years behind the current industry standard.

• “Check-the-Box” Culture: You will spend a significant amount of your time on non-technical tasks—mandatory briefings, physical training, guard duty, and “administrative upkeep” that has nothing to do with coding or engineering.

• Leadership vs. Hands-on: As you promote (especially as an officer), you are often pushed away from the keyboard and into management/leadership. If you want to remain a “pure” engineer, the military structure often makes that difficult.

3. Impact on Well-being

Technical roles are generally “safer” than combat roles, but they carry their own risks:

• Mental Strain: Technical roles in the military often involve high-stakes environments (like cybersecurity or intelligence). The “always-on” hyper-vigilance and the stress of national security can lead to burnout.

• Physical Wear: Even IT professionals must pass physical fitness tests and may be required to work in harsh environments or carry heavy equipment during field exercises.

• Family Separation: Even if you aren’t in a “combat zone,” training cycles and sea duty can keep you away from home for months at a time, which can put a significant strain on personal relationships.

4. Compensation Lag

In 2026, the gap between a Senior Software Engineer at Meta and a Captain in the Army is vast.

• Lower Ceiling: While the military provides housing and food allowances, your “Total Compensation” will almost always be lower than your private-sector peers.

• Rank-Based Pay: You cannot negotiate your salary based on your technical skill. A brilliant cybersecurity expert makes the same amount as a logistics officer of the same rank and tenure.

Conclusion

The analysis offers three takeaways for the future of military recruitment in an AI-driven information environment.

First, artificial intelligence responses vary significantly by platform and prompt. Consequently, strategic investments in military advertising must evolve to manage the AI narrative across diverse ecosystems rather than relying on a single channel. While the shift from legacy media (radio and television) to social media is well-documented, the next frontier requires direct engagement with AI developers and their parent companies.

To maintain a competitive edge, militaries can leverage strategic text sequencing and next-generation reasoning models. Providing transparency into how these models construct career advice—and understanding the specific keywords and phrasing potential recruits use—is paramount. In the near future, the success of military recruiting may rely less on physical high school visits and more on mastering the algorithmic prompts that young men and women use to investigate and compare their career options.

Second, when ranked against private-sector titans, the military “brand” currently faces a statistical disadvantage. In the controlled testing, the military received a 58 percent, significantly lagging behind civilian competitors who scored between 73 and 80 percent. While military service remains the undisputed leader in job stability, it trails civilian firms in nearly every other key metric, including compensation, quality of life, and technical skill relevance.

Lastly, this experiment applies business analytics to military force generation. While the military is a unique institution, it remains in direct competition with the civilian labor market for the nation’s best technical talent. From practical experience, the military is finding ways to implement and scale AI across the services, but primarily in areas that include technology, readiness and maintenance, or autonomous platforms. Where there is a lag is in how AI being applied within the human resource ecosystem which encapsulates an entire career from recruiting to retirement, understanding people remaining the Defense Department’s most advantageous and prized resource.

To ensure future readiness, the services must begin researching how AI agents categorize and recommend military service to ensure future human capital levels remain satisfied. The primary influencer for a prospective recruit may no longer be a veteran family member, schoolteacher, or coach, but the agentic AI on their smartphone. If private-sector brands are already struggling to adapt to AI’s influence on consumer perception, the military risks falling further behind in how it defines and defends its brand in the age of intelligence.

Disclaimer: The author must acknowledge they generated approximately 770 words of the overall argument presented and must thank artificial intelligence for being such a productive co-author.

I didn’t know what to do

So I ran in the rain

I didn’t know what to say

So I swallowed the pain

I didn’t know where to go

So I just stood there in place

I didn’t know what to think

So I went insane

I still don’t know what to do

But I run again, and again

I still don’t know what to say

But I no longer keep the pain

I still don’t know where to go

But I no longer stay in place

I still don’t know what to think

But I’m better now, I sat with my pain

I met a man on the street, as he walked up to me,
“Open your wallet,” he spoke with a plea.
“What is it you want?” I said with slight fear,
As the weight of my workday grew, anxiety came near

“You have plenty of money, what more could you need?
Pictures, a beautiful wife, children, a life with a lead.
A home that is safe, the gift of your health—
What more could you want than that beautiful wealth?”

The question he asked hit me harder than thought,
“I want the promotion, the recognition I sought!
I’m forty-two years, yet I haven’t gone far.”
He looked at my suit, then he looked at my car.

“Far for what? What is it you want?
You have a family, a life, and a front.
All of the things that I lost on the way,
Climbing and climbing, and working each day.
I scaled every mountain, I did every task,
When it couldn’t be done, I was the man they would ask.
I was just like you, but you still have time—
Before you lose everything during the climb.

When you opened your wallet, I thought it’d be bare,
By the look on your face, reflecting such sheer despair.
Why do you fret? What is it you want?
I’ll gladly trade places; I’ll take your spot.
You can have my old stoop in the alley today,
It’s all that I have since I threw it away.

So do me a favor before wishing for more?
Go home, breathe deep, and walk through your door.
Savor the family, the touch, and the love,
The blessings that fall from the heavens above.
The laughter of children, a kiss for the night—
The treasures that money can’t bring into light.”

He looked up at me with a tear in his eye,
For the things that he lost and could no longer buy.
It was all that I had, but I didn’t enjoy,
I ached and I toiled for a corporate ploy.
I sat in my pain, unable to move,
Was this man a ghost of the “me” I would soon prove?
He turned his back slowly, to walk to his stoop.

I followed him there, and I reached for my cash,
His hand rose in silence, his voice was a flash:
“I don’t want your money; I just want one day,
To have back the life that I squandered away.
To wake in the morning to a woman who cared,
To children who loved me and knew I was there.
I chased the wrong ladder, the one they designed,
I climbed to the top, only horror to find.
It wasn’t a dream, but a nightmare instead;
Without those I loved, I was already dead.

You can still salvage your life, before it’s too late
Absent the things they tell us to chase.
Find your reward in a beautiful face,
Of the woman who loves you, the kids who still need,
A father at night—not a man driven by greed.
There’s no price tag or money, no title or lease,
That can buy back your spirit...I don’t want your money. I want your peace.”

I found myself standing with salt in my eyes,
No longer a victim of career progressing lies.
I ran through the rain to the car in the street,
With a heart that was finally finding its beat.
No longer blinded, no longer astray,
I stopped holding “living” for some other day.

I packed up my desk with a grin and a sigh,
And bid all my office acquaintances a final goodbye.
I traded the boardroom for playgrounds and light,
For magical stories and kisses goodnight.
I filled up my soul, just like the man said,
I invested in the priceless vice the “profit” instead.

I sat in the corner, as I usually do,

In the soft morning air, mid the coffee shop fumes.

An old man approached, “Do you mind if I sit?”

“Have we met?” “Yes, Lad—though you’ve likely forgotten it.”

“I knew you,” he said, “when your spirit was young,

With dreams in your eyes and a much sharper tongue.

But over the years, you softened to fit,

And traded your fire for a hollower wit.

It made me upset, you were never supposed to become like this

You were made strong and resilient, which carried a charge

To walk on your own, to endure stones and smart

Instead you shied away from what made you, you

You traded your traits for somebody new

You weren’t built this way, and for good reason

You were made to be different, bring about new seasons

Instead you conformed to everyone here

You threw away your gifts, and for what? I cannot say

I built you different, it’s something the world needed

Not for variety, but for good reason

If we all were the same, what a terrible scene

A book of monotony, unworthy to be seen

What the world needed was you all along

For you to be unrelentingly you, a unique voice and song

I sat down today, to say it’s never too late

To recapture your gifts, but it will take great strength

As time has elapsed, so has the distance between

Who you are now, and what you were meant to be

So start on your journey, when your coffee is done

That is why I came here today, to remind you, you’re still not quite done

There’s life in those lungs, and strength in your back

To resurrect the old you, bring him back from the dead

I think I’ll be going, thank you for tea

And the seat, and the chat, you were always better than me.”

“How do I know you old man? Was it from my younger days?”

“You’ve known me forever son, regardless of what you might say.”

“Are you my dad? He ran away when I was just a kid.”

“Something like that, perhaps slightly more big.”

I sat at the table as I watched him walk softly away

Out the door, turned the corner, nothing more to say

So I finished my coffee with the challenge he left

The old man is gone

No one to tell me if I’m right or I’m wrong

Then I looked down, at the chair where he sat

A picture of me, a much younger lad

I sat with my mother , I remember the day

I told her who I would be, “A great man someday.”

I picked up the picture and walked out the door

“Fuck it,” I thought—here’s to being me once more

I awoke today as I do most Saturdays—sneaking downstairs for coffee, my MacBook, and a few hours to write. While I’d like to think today was no different than any other, it was. It is a day of overpriced gestures, riddled with chocolate, jewelry, and flowers. However, my days of dozens of roses and diamonds have dwindled—not because I love my spouse any less, but because our focus as parents has shifted toward our two children. I woke up realizing that as a father to two girls, I am responsible for establishing what this day should look like for them, ensuring they always know they have a Valentine in me.

As my oldest made her way downstairs to join me on the couch—one of my favorite parts of the day—I continued to type away at a draft article very few, if any will read. A few minutes later, even as she watched cartoons, she said firmly, “Dad, get off your computer. I have gifts for today.” Unbeknownst to me, she had spent hours making Valentine’s Day cards for everyone, including our dogs. She showed me each one before handing me mine: “Dad, see the heart? It’s made of our two favorite colors.” I have thirty-seven years on this kid, yet she seems to grasp the meaning of the day better than I do: she knows how to make sure the glass balls don’t break.

When we categorize the elements of our lives—family, work, hobbies, a poorly crafted blog post that will never win a Pulitzer—they generally fall into one of two categories: glass or rubber. Rubber balls are resilient; they bounce, rebound, and won’t break. When you leave a job, it doesn’t shatter the company. They simply move on—the ball bounces back to its original height. Physicists would be hard-pressed to explain how a company maintains such perfect kinetic energy, but it does; the system returns to its original position long after your departure. This applies to many of the things we prioritize, the things that consume the majority of our time. We don’t spend forty hours a week with our families; we work. There are real-world consequences that require us to do so, but that doesn’t make work a glass ball.

Glass balls are different. When dropped, they produce an inelastic collision. Plainly put: they shatter. The glass balls are the most delicate things we are entrusted with: our spouses, our children, and our health—both mental and physical.

And yet, how do we juggle them? We often treat the glass like rubber and the rubber like glass. That last-minute presentation dropped on your desk? I HAVE to stay late. The work phone? I HAVE to check my email. Meanwhile, when my daughter slips downstairs to spend quality time with me on the couch... I let it bounce.

I am not sure why we do this. While humans are remarkably resilient, our emotions are often inelastic. When handled incorrectly, they crack and shatter, even if the damage isn’t immediately visible. I have ignored my children to write an article no one will read. I have answered work emails that aren’t saving lives or the organization. Not only could those emails wait until Monday, but even if they went unanswered, the organization would simply march on.

This morning was a gentle reminder to juggle the glass and let the rubber bounce. The immutable laws of physics prove that the rubber ball will return to a height where we can grasp it again. Physics also proves that glass and rubber possess drastically different properties; they do not share the same elasticity. We would do well to honor the laws of physics that have guided our universe since the days of Newton and remember, “Rubber bounces.”

Read the full review: https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/09/book-review-americas-taiwan-dilemma-allies-reactions-and-the-stakes-for-us-reputation/

What does a Jaguar or MG have to do with cross-Strait relations? In this book review of Michael Hunzeker and Mark Christopher (2025) multi-year study regarding cross-Strait relations, I suggest an awful lot. I hope you enjoy.

“The authors reveal a remarkably pragmatic consensus among interviewed elites: the primary objective of any state in the international system is survival. Mirroring the reliability of the Honda Accord described in the opening anecdote, elites consistently prioritized reliability over reputation regarding cross-Strait scenarios. Furthermore, the data suggest that Chinese aggression in the Taiwan straits would likely trigger balancing behavior, driving allies closer to the U.S. rather than away. However, this dynamic is contingent upon U.S. material capacity. This necessitates a sustained commitment to military readiness, best demonstrated through purposeful allocation of fiscal resources. Ultimately, the United States can weather damage to its reputation (e.g., by abandoning Taipei) but cannot afford to erode its reliability (its capability to deter through military force generation).”

My thanks to the SWJ team for giving the review a home and thank you to the editorial staff for their assistance in the publishing process.

“What’s your perfect day look like?” Almost a year ago, a mentor asked me to define what this looked like. My progress is reflected by a piece of paper sitting in my office, written in pencil, titled, “Perfect Day.” I can’t seem to get past 6 AM, at least not yet.

What I do know is that something that continually produces returns in setting the stage for the remainder of the day is my solitary time each morning. Even on the weekends, I’ll wake up at 5 AM and slip downstairs to read, write, or watch television. I’m rarely in a rush to turn the TV on. There’s something settling about the soft glow of my MacBook sitting on my lap coupled with the warm, white ceramic mug cradled in my hand as I think of what to write or contemplate something I’ve just read.

That time is sacrosanct. The house is still, my family still sleeping upstairs. The shuffle of little feet across the ceiling above me is my indication it’s time to put the MacBook away. It’s usually my oldest who comes down first. She’ll join me on the couch as I finish my second cup of coffee, preparing for the transition from the couch to the remainder of the day.

While I don’t know what the rest of my “perfect day” will look like, I know I want each one to start like this, and that’s progress. The mentor told me the greater granularity you can provide, the more useful it will be. I can’t seem to get past 6 AM, but I’m certain I can now write the 5-6 AM portion in pen—this is something I want to make permanent. Morning coffee in the early hours of the day where solitude slowly gives way to my family.

There is a quote about chasing perfection often attributed to Vince Lombardi. You’ve probably heard it:

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

For a long time, I lived by that—specifically the first part Lombardi says isn’t attainable. That wouldn’t stop me from trying. I think my journey toward chasing perfection began in flight school, but somewhere along the way, it twisted into an unsustainable, unhealthy relationship with work. And I need to say it out loud: I’m over it.

One of my goals for 2026 was to write more. But to engage in meaningful writing, you have to tackle challenging and uncomfortable subjects—which includes examining your own life. This post isn’t a victory lap. It doesn’t insinuate that I ever actually achieved perfection. While there are tangible metrics I can point to that illustrate a modicum of career success, I’m no longer sure that success was healthy, and I know now that it definitely wasn’t sustainable.

The Origin

I remember hearing a warning in flight school: “You can go out and get a 99% on the flight, but if you come home and mess up the final 1%—the landing—it can end in tragedy.”

That terrified and motivated me. I immersed myself in my trade. I graduated at the top of my class, so the work paid off, but the cost was absolute. I cut out almost every distraction. I didn’t go out. I stopped drinking. My life revolved around two poles: studying and working out.

My schedule was monastic. Monday through Friday, I studied and flew. Every evening, I did a quick workout, studied from 5 to 8 PM (Study for 55 minutes followed by a 5 minute break repeated 3 times), and was in bed by 9 PM. Friday and Saturday evenings were my only reprieve—usually a movie or a trip to Barnes & Noble. Saturdays and Sundays were just wash, rinse, repeat: laundry, gym, study.

It was easy to execute then. I was single, with no significant other, no pets, and no children. I could ruthlessly cut out anything that didn’t factor into making me a better pilot. Also, I absolutely loved watching my efforts transfer directly to performance in my job.

The Grind

When I arrived at my first fleet unit, I just copy-pasted that schedule into my professional life. As a Lieutenant, legal officer, and adjutant, I demolished my own boundaries. I didn’t just stay late; I made myself eternally available. My phone rang outside of work often, usually resulting in me driving into work in the middle of the night.

My weekends mirrored flight school. I’d wake up early to ride my bike around Southern California or go for a long run. Outside of work, I started podiuming at local triathlon races. For those unfamiliar, SoCal is the birthplace of the triathlon. I was a twenty-seven-year-old amateur competing against some of the biggest names in the sport.

I felt invincible. I arrived early, stayed late, and vowed to outwork every single person I encountered—personally and professionally. When they left for dinner, I stayed until the dark hours of the night.

This trend only worsened on deployment. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. But eventually, the cracks appeared. My fitness faded as I slept less and stressed more. When I returned to California, I sprinted out the door expecting my body to respond like it always had. Instead, I made it a mile before stopping, completely shattered.

So, I did what I always did: I rebuilt. I poured all my time into regaining fitness and refining my craft for a major evaluation flight. I didn’t just want to pass; I wanted 100%.

The Warnings

The problem persisted even as my life changed. By the time I moved to Arizona, I was married, yet living apart from my wife who remained in California. I ran my fastest 3-mile time (16:45) during this period because, once again, I lived like a bachelor. I would drive back to San Diego on weekends, but my mindset never shifted. I was physically present with my wife, but mentally, I was still grinding.

It wasn’t until I moved to Hawaii and worked for an incredible boss that someone finally taught me about balance. He told me to take my foot off the gas. I heard him, I understood the lesson, but I could barely if at all implement it.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I thrive in chaos. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was, “The more chaotic it gets, the more you thrive.” And it’s true. The higher the stakes, the better I perform. But constantly maneuvering your career into high-stakes positions places a tax on your life that you eventually have to pay. The big mission, the hardest landing, a last minute crisis—I could and have done it all. The problem becomes when life is nothing but Everest like challenges, your ability to repeatedly respond becomes dull. I once heard a professional sports coach talk about performance. You win the championship and arrive at “the top of the mountain.” Players shouldn’t expect to stay there because there isn’t much oxygen up there. I was figuratively stranded at the top of Everest and didn’t know how to get down. I was slowly suffocating.

To look at where I am today without acknowledging the grueling climb would be a lie. My career has been a high-altitude trek—the air was thin and the path was steep, often making me wonder why I started at all. But you don’t get the view from the summit without the ache in your lungs. I am who I am today because I learned to breathe and perform where the stakes were highest.

The Breaking Point

Everything changed when we had our first child.

At 36 years old, I came to a hard conclusion: I do not balance well. I never have. Becoming a father broke my system. Suddenly, a tiny human literally relied on me for survival.

I spent the first four months of my daughter’s life getting three hours of sleep, still waking up at 4AM to walk the dogs, hit the gym, and get to work by 7AM. The moment of clarity didn’t come in a meeting or a cockpit; it came in my kitchen. I remember dumping three scoops of pre-workout into a glass, drinking it, and feeling... nothing. No amount of caffeine could overcome the deficit I had built up over a decade.

The Confession

I used to think the jobs demanded this pace. But after some critical reflection, I realize I sought these positions. I enjoyed the intensity. The problem was, I convinced myself that this frantic pace was normal.

No one is to blame but me.

I wish I could say that if a mentor had told me to slow down earlier, I would have listened. But honestly? I probably wouldn’t have. I bet people did tell me to slow down, and I was too arrogant to hear them.

“Fuck them,” I used to think. They’ll only be average.

Writing that down and reading it out loud makes me cringe. But it was my reality.

I’m writing this to say it out loud and so others can read it: I am done chasing perfection. This doesn’t mean I’m not dedicated to work or the task at hand, only that I have boundaries that seek to limit how much of my work follows me home. There will be times when work will undoubtedly follow me home, or require me to work late, it just isn’t my “default” setting anymore. I can’t say my relationship with work is fully fixed either, but for the first time, I’m acknowledging that the chase probably wasn’t healthy to begin with. And that’s a start.

Uncertainty pervades battle in the form of unknowns about the enemy, about the environment, and even about the friendly situation. While we try to reduce these unknowns by gathering information, we must realize that we cannot eliminate them—or even come close. -MCDP-1, Warfighting

It was shortly before World War II that J.R.R. Tolkien, a veteran of the Great War, began crafting his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. It would take nearly seven decades for director Peter Jackson to bring the renowned book to the big screen, but one prominent character brought to life by Jackson feels increasingly familiar today: the all-seeing Eye of Sauron.

Here is where our proverbial journey begins—where storytelling ends and survival begins. Specifically, the survival of militaries that must now confront the all-seeing eye of intelligent systems growing increasingly complex through artificial intelligence, questioning the opening epigraph’s validity. Sauron is fictional no longer. Because of this, military doctrine underpinned by maneuver warfare will be severely tested, if not relegated to history.

The Assumptions of 1989

MCDP-1 Warfighting was published in 1989. The Cold War was raging, driving burgeoning defense budgets that sought technology and operating concepts to combat the Soviets. In a 1980s Marine Corps Gazette article, William S. Lind described the essence of maneuver warfare doctrine:

The principal tool is moving forces into unexpected places at surprisingly high speeds. Firepower is a servant of maneuver…

“Unexpected” assumes the adversary does not have a clear picture of your positions or movements. In 1989, intelligence gathering was largely a human endeavor. While intelligence capability has grown over the years, even operations in Afghanistan suffered from limitations—whether due to human endurance (there are only so many analysts and so many hours in a day) or the technical limits of airborne cameras. All of this meant there were still “unexpected places” where militaries could maneuver their forces—physically defined “gaps.”

This is a critical piece of maneuver warfare: Gaps must exist to be exploited.

The Speed Trap

Second, Lind noted that this movement would occur at “surprisingly high speeds.” For thousands of years, war has remained a human endeavor, limited by human speed. Even when placing a human into a machine (airplane, ship, submarine), that machine remained limited by the cognitive function of the individual piloting it.

Don’t believe me? Review the safety statistics for military aviation operations. Count how many investigations determine “human factors” were causal. More often than not, human factors are the holes in the “Swiss cheese” model that allow mishaps to occur. The “speed” Lind references—though neither he nor MCDP-1 expressly says it—is human speed.

However, a merging of worlds is occurring which combines artificial intelligence and warfare.

Before anyone says AI is a relatively new phenomenon in warfare, it is worth pausing to read the 1956 memo from Dartmouth where the term “artificial intelligence” was coined. Or, remaining true to the cinematic opening theme, review The Imitation Game, the 2014 movie depicting the rise of computers conducting human functions at greater speeds by the renowned scholar Alan Turing.

To be a bit snarky: don’t tell me this is a new challenge when AI has been developing since the conclusion of World War II. AI has been in the background overcoming maneuver warfare before maneuver warfare was even fully developed.

The Turing Problem

Much like Alan Turing, we have built machines that can do what humans do, but in seconds. In Turing’s day, they built a machine to decode Enigma. As the movie explains:

There were 159 million, million, million possible Enigma settings... If we had ten men checking one setting a minute for 24 hours every day... it’s 20 million years. To stop a coming attack, we would have to check 20 million years’ worth of settings in 20 minutes.

As possibilities approach the infinite, computer systems must come into play. This includes the geometry of the battlefield. The speed discussed by Lind has shifted from human to machine. Maneuver warfare targets human cognitive function via Boyd’s OODA loop. But a computer can not only operate at speeds magnitudes faster than a human synapse, it can also identify patterns humans are incapable of seeing.

Machines can outpace human learning while identifying patterns a broadly accepted heuristic may overlook. More importantly, machines can operate inside a human’s OODA loop continuously, without fatigue, fear, or emotion. If the goal of maneuver warfare is to paralyze an enemy’s decision-making, Turing would tell us only a machine can do this effectively against another machine.

By concluding this, maneuver warfare faces two existential challenges:

1. The Sluggish Human: Warfare is no longer a solely human endeavor. Humans bring unwanted sluggishness to tempo and decision-making. We must square a military leader’s belief that they hold the monopoly on decision-making with the reality of human fallibility—reliance on gut feeling, or Coup d’œil, is now a liability.

2. The Machine Tempo: If machines set the tempo, how does one shatter a machine’s decision-making? Cyber? This shifts the requirement from traditional military operations to data science. Until full autonomy is accepted, decision-making is only as good as the machine and the human processing it.

From Theory to Target Lists

Critics of maneuver warfare have long identified that while the doctrine was great for theorists, it did little for the tactical application of resources. In General Frank McKenzie’s July 1993 Gazette article, he noted that even when maneuver warfare was adopted by General Gray, there was little in terms of tangible resource application to fight in a maneuver style—maneuver was a great theory, less in application.

AI solves this human deficiency, but not in a way that favors maneuver.

Consider a massive barrage of hundreds of missiles. Nine times out of ten, a human targets the missile closest to their position—proximity is the leading characteristic of threat. Like a real-life game of Frogger, the nearest car poses the most immediate threat. But AI doesn’t fear proximity. Within seconds, it can identify a pattern a human cannot, creating a target prioritization list that creates a cascade effect, neutralizing not just a handful of missiles, but all of them.

While this hypothetical may be too abstract, look at the real world. Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense Yuriy Myronenko recently stated regarding their “Mission Control” system:

We want to see the successful cases as well as the successful anomalies... And, of course, we want to verify data, verify it quickly… as much as possible, we wish to minimize the human factor in making these decisions. [emphasis not original]

Let that sink in. Myronenko identifies two things: speed and human factors. He desires speed through the analysis of massive data—accomplished by a computer. Second, he wants to minimize the human in the loop. If militaries are looking to minimize human factors, then machine decision-making is what future OODA loops are oriented around. Anything that relies on human decision-making speeds should be considered DOA.

The Return of Attrition

This brings us back to Tolkien. Militaries can no longer exploit gaps the way Lind indicated because gaps may physically exist, but they are continuously monitored by the all-seeing eye of satellite networks and sensors. Algorithmic pattern development can examine how militaries eat, sleep, move, and conduct logistics, providing plausible outcomes or “next moves” that adversaries can expect.

If you watched the last two Mission: Impossible movies, “The Entity” forecasted the next moves of every character. Why should we not expect this moving forward?

McKenzie himself argued maneuver required coordination. In a world dominated by signature identification, coordination is no longer possible for extensive periods without detection. If leaders cannot issue orders via radio or data burst without inviting the Eye of Sauron, they must rely on silence or tethered fiber optics—both of which dramatically reduce speed.

If the attributes required for maneuver (stealth, coordination, speed relative to the enemy) are missing, we are left with attrition. Attrition—the destruction of mass, prioritizing fire over maneuver—is back. Ukraine creates mass through millions of drones. Russia creates mass with people. Regardless, a new study released indicates casualties hovering around 2 million.

To those proposing a counterargument that maneuver warfare still lives, I ask:

• Do the assumptions for maneuver warfare still exist? The evidence suggests they do not, or they come at a cost too high to pay.

• Can modern militaries achieve the conditions to employ maneuver warfare successfully? This writing suggests no, as the fundamental premise is to challenge human decision-making, which is no longer the bottleneck.

Also, any skilled polemicist will quickly, and correctly suggest I am universally applying lessons learned in Ukraine to battlefields that may span massive maritime environments that fundamentally differ. My rebuttal is that even if the battlefields shift, the assumptions of maneuver warfare remain negated by technology, regardless of the environment. Technologies like the DF-21 narrow the exhaustive range and maneuver space maritime environments used to provide, introducing previous characteristics reserved strictly for land warfare into the maritime environment.

Also, a counterargument exists the Eye of Sauron is watching, yes, but it can be poked, blinded, and tricked. While this is undoubtedly true through electronic warfare and dispersion, this does little to overcome the speed to which human forces must navigate the physical and mental aspects of maneuver that can be quickly overcome by the speed of algorithmic decision-making. If the counter is simply we’ll feed the model garbage data, I’d like to think any adversary would quickly plan for such a counter.

If maneuver warfare survives, it does so only as a situational anomaly in a war defined by attrition. Yet, asking forces to toggle between these diametrically opposed mindsets is a recipe for cognitive dissonance and tactical failure. The reality is that the Eye of Sauron is open and unblinking challenging all aspects of maneuver, time, psychology, and spatial. We cannot out-hide a sensor or out-process an algorithm. General McKenzie’s "final gift" to the Corps was the observation that the maneuver debate has historically been unproductive and emotional. The irony is that the debate is no longer ours to resolve. In the age of AI, doctrine isn't debated; it's calculated. We are likely just waiting for the computer to tell us it’s over.

We often learn the most from life’s harshest teachers. Perhaps nothing encapsulates this maxim better than the timeless words of Kipling: “Body and spirit, I surrendered whole, To harsh Instructors—and received a soul.”

Being bullied as a kid taught me to stand on my own two feet. Going to war taught me just how harsh the world can be. Burying a friend in my early adolescent years taught me that youthful invincibility is a myth underpinned by naiveté. You get the point. While I’ve luckily kept life and limb, I have lost my patience more than a few times with “horrible bosses” along the way.

But, conforming to Kipling, I have to admit: I learned a hell of a lot more from the bad bosses than I did from the good ones.

The Mea Culpa before I cast too many stones, I need to make a confession: I am by no means the perfect leader. In fact, if you tracked down some of the people I’ve led over my career, I would bet good money that my name is at the top of their “Horrible Boss” list.

I assume most people mean well. I assume most of us don’t wake up in the morning plotting to be a villain. But intentions aren’t impact. What follows is a compilation of lessons I’ve cataloged over the years—lessons I wasn’t smart enough to come up with on my own. I required teaching. Usually, the hard way.

Lesson 1: You Can Learn from Everyone (Even the Screamers)

Imagine this: You walk into work, the boss is yelling about... well, who knows what this time. This trend has been going on for months. Slowly, perhaps as a survival mechanism, you start to tune them out. A little more each day. Eventually, you stop listening entirely, ignoring any value they might provide.

Sound familiar? We’ve all been there.

But as my mother likes to remind me, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Ignoring bosses who aren’t the “best” (a subjective term, anyway) causes us to miss the accidental value they bring to our lives.

I remember shortly before I left for the Naval Academy, my Dad told me the next few years would be transformational. “Ryan,” he said, “they’re going to teach you everything your mother and I care too much to show you. Remember, they yell because they care.”

Even the people with terrible interpersonal skills, massive egos, or a distinct lack of confidence can bestow lessons worth taking with us. Sometimes they teach you what to do; sometimes they teach you exactly who you don’t want to be. Both are valuable.

Lesson 2: Be Wary of the “Family” Trap

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned—and re-learned—is that workplaces love to throw around the word “family.”

When I was younger, I bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. I believed that when a boss said, “We are a family,” it was a genuine categorization of our bond. What I found is that “family” is often a thin veneer that does two dangerous things:

1. It tricks the subordinate into overestimating the relationship’s depth.

2. It allows the boss to monopolize the subordinate’s time and emotional energy.

I resolved a few years ago to stop falling for this. No matter how genuine it seems, the likelihood of a boss remaining in your life in 5 or 10 years is statistically near zero. Studies suggest that the weather plays a larger role in determining who shows up to your funeral than your LinkedIn connections do.

We shouldn’t expect people we’ve known for a few months to embody “family.” My parents and brother have shown up at all hours of the night, for every crisis, in every chapter of my life. The bosses who threw the “family” word around the most? They usually couldn’t even be bothered to return a phone call or text message once I transferred.

Lesson 3: Try to View It From Their Seat

One of the bosses I found the most challenging actually taught me the most about perspective.

I spent months frustrated, framing our issues solely from my own viewpoint. I never tried to walk a mile in their shoes. This culminated in my final debrief. The boss asked if I had any feedback. I decided to shoot straight: Why did I only see you when I came to your office? You would talk with my peers in their office, but you never stopped by my office for months.

The answer floored me. It wasn’t neglect; it was a compliment.

The boss told me they had complete trust and confidence in my ability to do the job without hand-holding. They saw friction in other departments—my peers—that required their attention. I was being left alone because I was trusted, not because I was disliked. I was interpreting autonomy as abandonment. It taught me that what feels like a slight to me might be a strategy to them.

Lesson 4: It Costs Nothing to be Respectful

Time and again, I’ve seen leaders act out simply because they have the rank to get away with it. The tyrant. The yeller. The “I’m the only voice in the room that matters” type.

These individuals are the perfect illustration of why respect is the ultimate currency. I won’t use the word “kindness,” because sometimes the mission doesn’t allow for soft edges. Sometimes you have to be firm. Sometimes you have to make people do things they don’t want to do.

But you can always be respectful.

I’ve often concluded that I never received an ass-chewing I didn’t deserve. The best bosses I had walked a fine line: They were tough, but they were fair. You can demand high standards without stripping someone of their dignity.

The Recovering Perfectionist

If I’m being honest with myself—and with you—there are plenty of moments in my career where I failed these metrics.

There is a book by Mark Jacobsen called Eating Glass, which covers failure and renewal. He writes about how his perfectionism softened over the years:

“Failure has softened me, however. I thirst to hear people’s stories and understand the forces that have shaped their lives. I tire of many human foibles, but I rarely find such faults incomprehensible; by endowing me with a story of my own, failure has helped me to see the story in others.”

This resonates with me. In my earlier days, I was a “Bad Boss.” I set impossible bars that weren’t realistic. When people fell short, my patience was nonexistent. I lacked the intellectual maturity to meet people where they were. Instead of teaching them, I used their failure as a chance to show how great I was and how terrible they were.

Not my proudest accomplishment.

But repeated failure in my own life has softened me. It has allowed me to take the “Bad Bosses” of my past and reframe them as some of the best teachers I ever had. In a way, they helped me grow into the person I am today more than the “Good Bosses” ever could.

So, to all the tyrants, screamers, and absent leaders I’ve served under—and to the ones I may have been myself—thank you. I needed the lesson.

In 1916, “No Man’s Land” was a churn of mud, barbed wire, and mustard gas—a scar across France where a man’s life expectancy was measured in the time it took to sprint thirty yards. We studied those images at The Basic School. We looked at the sepia-toned craters of the Somme and felt a detached pity for the men who had to go “over the top.”

We didn’t realize we were looking at a prophecy.

Here, on this rock in the Philippine Sea, we exist in a new No Man’s Land. Unlike the mud of Flanders, this zone is not defined by what is on the ground, but by what is hovering six feet above. Gone is the mud, leaving only the dust to coat your tongue, along with an enduring, haunting hum. It is an incessant, hateful frequency—less a sound than a fever, a buzzing behind the eyes like a hive of hornets starving in the dark.

We call it “The Loom.”

The conflict against the Federation—our peer—stalled three weeks ago. In a previous era, this stalemate would have been broken by artillery barrages or close air support. But in this war, the electromagnetic spectrum is dead. Both sides have saturated the airwaves with so much electronic warfare noise that a radio is a paperweight and a GPS signal is a memory. A broadcast or signal, even the slightest signature, is a prayer to Thanatos, answered only by the grave; to emit a signal is to invite a hypersonic missile to your location within seconds. A fate delivered with such speed, it steals the luxury of a final reflection of one’s short, momentary life.

So, we adapted. We reverted to the only thing that couldn’t be jammed: light.

The air between our bunkers and the Federation’s trenches is filled with millions of drones—tethered. Trailing behind every quadcopter and loitering munition is a micro-filament of fiber-optic cable, unspooling from canisters on our backs or the heavy spools kept in the rear. These glass threads are the only way to communicate, the only way to see, the only way to kill.

The result is a grotesque parody of a previous era’s battlefield. The air is choked with wires, filling the void where mustard gas once hung heavy a century ago. The wires drape over the landscape like synthetic, infinite spiderwebs—fiber-optic webs tangled throughout the bombed-out trees. The cables carpet the ground in a shimmering, translucent layer of fiberglass, like dew on the web spun by the autonomous arachnid of death.

And inside that zone—The Loom—nothing human can survive.

I watched a boar wander into the zone yesterday. It barely made it ten meters. It didn’t trigger a landmine or a tripwire. It merely disturbed the visual algorithm of the swarm. A dozen tethered “Kamikaze” drones, hanging silently in the air like sleeping bats, awoke. The feed on my tablet, hardlined through my own fiber cable, showed the AI highlighting the animal in a red box. Target Acquired.

The boar was vaporized before it heard the whine of the rotors.

This is the reality of the modern assault—something unfathomable in the classrooms we spent preparing for it. Something our hubris prevented us from even imagining as we convinced ourselves of our own superiority through classroom and field exercises never failing to conclude how effective our doctrine, tactics, and equipment were. I can still hear the Major, a warfighting instructor and planner, red-faced and straining, screaming that war was a human endeavor. He assured us of this fundamental truth that our doctrine was built to protect; he was wrong.

What stares back at us is something remarkably different, something we continuously, and wrongly claimed, remained inherently human—no human can defeat what lies before us. We do not charge. We do not maneuver; maneuver warfare is as existent here as is the heartbeat in one of our fallen. We sit in bunkers, hunched over screens, “spooling” our avatars forward. We fight for inches of airspace, trying to snip the enemy’s fiber lines with our rotors while protecting our own. It is a war of scissors and thread, fought with high explosives.

When the wind blows, the thousands of slack fiber cables humming in the air create a sound that sets your teeth on edge, a high-pitched singing that drowns out the ocean or even your own thoughts. It is the sound of the world’s most advanced technology recreating the world’s most primitive stalemate.

The Federation is doing the same. Their side of the island is a mirror of ours. We are two armies of troglodytes, hiding in the dark, poking at each other with sticks made of glass and plastic. We have removed the human from the killing zone entirely, yet the fear is something much worse. In 1916, you could hope for a miss from an incoming shell or barrage of bullets. You could hope the machine gunner blinked.

The algorithm is a lidless eye, unwavering and unending, mocking the limits of human fatigue. The swarm does not sleep. To step from cover is to engage not a soldier, but a mathematical certainty—an enemy whose reaction time makes the firing of a human synapse feel glacially slow.

Yesterday, a Lieutenant asked to lead a recon patrol to check the ground near the ravine. I denied the request. I pointed to the screen, to the shimmering haze of heat and plastic hovering over the ravine.

“There is no ‘over the top’ anymore, Lieutenant. There is only the wire.”

So we sit. We spool out more line. We wait for the enemy to run out of drones, or fiber, or power—or, human-beings. We wait for the Loom to tighten, turning this paradise island into a cocoon of silence where the only thing that moves or can be heard is the machine.