Civilizational competition takes place on the scale of centuries. Nations that conceive of themselves primarily as economic zones are ill suited to win such games since they lack sufficiently powerful norms to execute strategy intergenerationally.

Read the piece here.

Importantly, Bittman conceives of a uniquely American way of shitposting that diverges from the style pioneered by Russia and China: one that leverages our native strengths as an online culture.

Bittman points out that despite a general recognition of US weakness in online active measures, government investment in this capability has been weak, fragmentary, and fails to utilize the private shitposting patriots that might bring the most power to this fight.

One of our most sincerely held beliefs at DARC is that the American genius for shitposting is a genuine, underleveraged defense asset. "Ladislav Bittman" explores this idea today, advocating for a full throated US adoption of active measures in the global information war.

Designing a fellowship to teach early career defense analysts foundational skills (small arms, cormac mccarthy appreciation).

Nations in this sense can be seen to be situated at different pace layers, with accompanying strengths and weaknesses in playing shorter or longer geopolitical games.

In just a few short years, it will start to matter a great deal whether the global cohort of early to mid career military officers had their strategic instincts shaped by playing Terran, Zerg, or Protoss in their youth.

keep up the good work, bridge

pov: it's an early morning at the DARC office

One of the most important facts about the administration and one that continues to be missed by nearly every piece of the established policy machinery in Washington.

Read the full article here: .

Nelson proposes leveraging DPA authorities to initiate an emergency wartime "Salvage for Technology" campaign that rapidly accelerates US capacity to recover the vast quantities of critical minerals latent in the country's e-waste.

Nelson points out that the proposed solutions around critical minerals exist in a kind of policymaker fantasyland: short-term solutions are a band-aid, and long-term solutions won't take effect at the speed that we need them to. We need something that could be activated today.

At this point, it is a highly likely scenario that America will stumble into large-scale conflict without having done what is necessary to secure access to critical minerals. What is to be done?. "Donald Nelson" sketches out an emergency plan of domestic salvage today with DARC

When you hear “serious” national security voices intone solemnly that “we live in an era of rapid change”, they are really still thinking on the order of years. But the geostrategic metronome ticks now at the level of the month, week, and day. DC rapid is still far, far too slow.

The genius of the American system has always been its ability to harness the ingenuity and initiative of its private sector. That tradition applies with no less force to matters of war and security - we must return to it or face the coming era of conflict at a severe disadvantage.

monitoring the situation

It's NDAA markup season, baby. Awoouu (wolf Howl)

War is best thought of not as a series of events, but instead as a latent, high dimensional manifold. Each conflict samples the distribution: exceptionally large conflicts sample the warspace infrequently so the shape of it is rarely clear.