THOSE ARE FOR SERIOUS COUNTRIES, WHICH WE NO LONGER ARE: National Defense Strategy? What National Defense Strategy? Imagine the summer of 1940 blissfully planning like it was 1938. “In the name of all that is holy. There is nothing more worn out in natsec discussions coming from the Imperial City than ‘all elements of national power.’ The ‘whole of government’ mating with the ‘interagency.’ Yes, yes, yes, we know – the four walls of the food trough. This is not an insight, this is rice bowl protection.”

Plus: “The primary lesson of the Russo-Ukrainian War, a three-week war now in its third year, is that the West’s iterative layering of assumptions about ‘the needs of the future,’ waiting for magic beans to make war easier, cheaper, and faster, has led to an existential decline in the industrial capability and magazine depth required to actually wage war as it is required. Not as it is desire, but as it is required.”