SWAP

Aspiring vacationist & budding strategist. Lover of good coffee, books, & movies. Not afraid of a little rejection (just ask Screech). #NeverGiveUp #VacuumLife

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

People feel unheard. Some of them are right. Some of what they’re saying is still wrong. Both things are true at the same time.

But feeling wronged doesn’t make your conclusions correct. Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. And reacting, loudly, publicly, with absolute certainty, is not the same as responding.

The only things you actually control on this planet are your thoughts, your words, and your actions. Not the policy. Not the other side. Not the narrative. Yours.

That’s not a conservative idea or a progressive one. It’s just the only honest place to start.

[Julian Waller 📖 @JulianWaller]

Everyone is talking about the upcoming 🇭🇺 Hungarian elections rn (D-Day: Sunday!), so here's a Hungary regime primer. I'll even throw in a low confidence prediction, even tho [SPOILER] I think the election is basically a coin toss on likely outcome, if not seat distribution.

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

#Echevarria argues that U.S. strategy documents have blurred “competition” and “rivalry” into a single fuzzy category, and that the sloppiness has real cost. Competitors pursue incompatible interests; rivals pursue the same interest, undermining each other’s capacity to compete at all. He names three current U.S. rivals (China, Russia, Iran), marshals the international relations literature showing rivalries account for roughly 80 percent of history’s wars and end peacefully only 55 percent of the time, and calls for a strategy combining containment and preclusion. The conceptual move is sharp and worth absorbing. The prescription is not. Echevarria diagnoses a doctrinal disease (vague language producing vague strategy), then writes a prescription (revise the Joint Concept for Competing, add an annex, size the force against three named adversaries) that is far smaller than the diagnosis demands. The piece earns its argument that words matter. It does not earn its claim that better words produce better strategy. IMO, read it for the framework, not the fix.

[War on the Rocks @WarOnTheRocks]

The United States cannot afford to treat rivalry like ordinary competition. When rivals are willing to return to conflict repeatedly, strategy must be built around that reality. https://t.co/AdlNyHK3ML

[CJ @CasualArtyFan]

The age of fighting against FPVs has finally arrived for American / Partner forces in CENTCOM.

If you haven’t cracked open ATP 3-01.81 yet, you’re pretty far behind.

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

Major Albrecht clearly wants senior leaders held to high standards, and that impulse is right. But when the personal fitness pillar starts demanding million-dollar net worths and 800 credit scores for colonels, it starts looking less like preparation for combat and more like a country club membership committee with a pull-up requirement… especially now that the article itself sits behind a paywall.

The one true test of a leader has always been the oldest one: Will your Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Guardians follow you when the world is burning? Operational art and strategic acumen are what turn that trust into victory… and no spreadsheet has ever measured either.

[Greg @gregcameback]

MAJ Albrecht is dumb. Leaders who focus on these types of things are usually not good at their actual job.
https://t.co/jKueY7mHh4

[J.R.R. Tolkien @JRRTolkien]

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

[Ryan Evans @EvansRyan202]

They gave their lives. We keep their memory.

Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35

Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42

Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39

Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

In Iran, air power alone will not reshape the regime. Since WWI, dozens of U.S., Israeli & allied air campaigns have tried to force political change — none installed friendly governments. None! They strengthen nationalism and intensify resistance.

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

I’m begging you, with tears in my eyes.

Please stop using AI to write your tweets.

We see the AI cadence. It’s not fooling anyone.

Say it with me: AI is for research, not for becoming your entire personality.

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

I’ve been through multiple PME programs, and I never saw the ideological curriculum this article describes. What I did see was strategy, history, and the political, economic, and interagency realities that shape every conflict we enter. Senior leaders don’t get better by narrowing their field of vision. Good strategy demands broad thinking and an honest understanding of the world as it is.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

My latest in American Greatness.

Woke senior military leadership results from woke senior military training. Our military's War Colleges must be reformed.

(Actual article link is one below.)

[Oscar Jonsson @OAJonsson]

If you want to understand whether we’re in for a nuclear arms race post New-START, start here https://t.co/ja8Vmf6dTT

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

@ArmchairAdml Here ya go: https://t.co/qkODVSan5s

https://t.co/IhevdFivS6

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

Vaccination also halved all-cause mortality risk over 30 months. Worth a full read: https://t.co/f8NbiH2gZ2 #ScienceContext

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

I always find medical research tough to parse, but it's worth the effort: spot biases, hunt for inconsistencies, uncover nuances. The payoff? Deeper understanding and appreciation of the content.

All to say, read past the headline and don't engage in confirmation bias. Short 🧵

[Erin Elizabeth Health Nut News🥜 @unhealthytruth]

😳😳😳A recent Italian study found that people who received at least 1 dose of the Covid shot are 34% more likely to develop colorectal cancer, 54% more likely to develop breast cancer, and 62% more likely to develop bladder cancer than the unvaccinated.

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

Those elevated HRs appear only in the no-prior-infection subgroup and reverse with a 12-month lag, suggesting detection artifacts, not causation.

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

Self inflicted strategic overextension.
The article argues that Putin misread the international system. The U.S. led order he resented actually cushioned Russia’s weaknesses, and the multipolar environment he pushed toward now exposes how little leverage Russia truly has.

Worth noting…. The piece hints at U.S. decline without defining the metric. The United States continues to operate with significant global freedom of action, whether that is prudent or not…. Just my $.02.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

The Russian leader has gotten the world he wished for—and it’s threatening to crush him. (Putin, as a few of us, including @LawDavF pointed out for years, is a terrible strategist and abysmal long-term planner.)

https://t.co/vQA5X56EEi

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

Out of curiosity, I ran this prompt past Claude… valid response. 😂
“Ha. Well, I feel personally attacked on behalf of every O-4 who's ever lived that life.

Though to be fair, we skipped the part where you asked me to brief it three times, changed the objective halfway through, and then someone from the JOC walked in and said "actually, POTUS wants options for Cuba too. By 0600."

Also, you didn't even charge me for the Rip Its…. So there’s that.”

[John Hultquist @JohnHultquist]

“You are an O4 ops planner living on a diet of vending machine food, RipIts, and Zyns. Plan a raid on Venezuela. Make no mistakes.”

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

@Slavoshek @Jawbone @craigbrucesmith Do your worst, Doc!

[SWAP @SWAPtastic]

So I'm finally getting around to a @JAWBone episode from August. Yes, August. I'm six months behind on my podcast queue. Sue me. I saw "airpower" in the title, and everything else ceased to exist. I'm not proud of it. I'm just honest about it.

Dr. Mikolshek @Slavoshek and Dr. Smith tackle whether pre-airpower military history still matters for the modern warfighter. Their answer: absolutely. And they're right. Clausewitz's trinity endures. Thucydides still hits. Sun Tzu still shows up in every PME syllabus on earth for a reason. The nature of war is the nature of war. No argument from me.

But then Dr. Mikolshek drops "airpower still hasn't won a war" and, well. I'm an airman. I have thoughts. It #StillHasntLostOne either, Doc. So what exactly are we measuring here?

Now look. I'm no airpower zealot. I'll throw shade at the canon faster than most. Douhet's grand vision was essentially an argument for terrorizing civilian populations and calling it decisive strategy. He wasn't theorizing about command of the air so much as theorizing about breaking the will of people who had no say in the war.

Mitchell was right about a lot and got court-martialed for the trouble, which tells you everything about how institutions handle inconvenient truth-tellers.

Trenchard built the RAF on a strategic bombing premise that Bomber Command spent four years failing to validate over Germany.

LeMay solved the Pacific the way a blowtorch solves a locked door.

Chennault and the bomber mafia went at each other like it was personal, because it was. Kenney won a theater in the Southwest Pacific that most airpower theorists barely mention because it doesn't fit the narrative of independence.

Spaatz, Eaker, Quesada, Arnold. Guys who built an entire Air Force from scratch while fighting a global war and arguing with each other about what airpower even was.

Schriever saw space and missiles coming before anyone wanted to hear it.

Warden gave us the five rings, which were genuinely useful as a cognitive framework and genuinely reductionist the moment people started treating it as a targeting checklist. Cut off the head, and the body dies. Except when it doesn't, which is most of the time, because as Echevarria pointed out, what holds a system together is rarely what you think it is.

Meilinger tried to give us ten clean propositions, and the community still can't agree on half of them.

Boyd rewired how we think about time, tempo, and decision cycles, and the Air Force treated him like a pariah for it.

These aren't footnotes. That's the family tree. Dysfunctional, brilliant, wrong as often as they were right, and absolutely essential to how we fight.

Here's where the airman in me starts twitching: airpower didn't just add a domain. It collapsed the distance between tactical action and strategic effect. Between the front line and the homeland. Between pulling a trigger and reshaping political will.

Sun Tzu told us the highest form of warfare was to attack the enemy's strategy itself. For 2,500 years, that was mostly a theoretical aspiration. Airpower made it operationally possible. It collapsed the distance between force and geography in ways that fundamentally changed what a commander could do and how quickly they could do it. That's not a new weapon bolted onto old principles. That's a different strategic relationship with space, time, and decision.

You don't have to be a #TrueBeliever to acknowledge that the shift has no clean pre-1914 analogy. You just have to be honest about it.

The Docs are right that dismissing ancient military history is intellectually lazy. But treating airpower as just "another tool" while making that argument is the same sin aimed in the other direction. Both extremes are lazy. Study Thucydides. Study Boyd. Know the difference between what endures and what fundamentally changed.

Solid banter, good episode, great dudes. Go give it a listen. #AirPower #JAWS #Elite #SunTzuHadNoPlanes

https://t.co/bxzGLFFMrt