A brief introduction to the Department of Defense activities in special operations. I will not be discussing the dark organizations and specifically address the "vanilla" SOF in all the services.

We discuss the Israeli emergency in its latest iteration in the horrific attacks by Hamas into Israel in October 2023 and the simmering conflict bands that emerging globally in which this is another explosion in the global conflict rift. For those who thought the podcast died, its death has been greatly exaggerated. My move to FL from AZ is now complete and many apologies for the disturbance of my fortnightly podcast episode rhythm by being late two weeks with a new episode. The podcast...

Every war has a seminal novel, a book that really resonates with generation that wrote it and the following generations from the Iliad to Gore Vidal's historical fiction to The Centurions by Jean Larteguy to From Here to Eternity by James Jones to this one.

In the one year anniversary episode (!), we chat about the use of thin-skinned vehicles in the modern age and the asymmetric nature of the fight. The employment of commercially produced vehicles for conduct of raids and ambushes employing a wide array of weapons medium- to heavy-machine guns to mortars to ATGMs and everything in between. Please note that Toyota outside of Japan does not produce these for purpose-built military employment. And, to my fellow CruiserHeads, I salute you.

I take the time to discuss some of the conventional ramifications of modern warfare and book recommendations that have given me a deeper and more nuanced understanding of why wars begin and end as they do.

The defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan was part of a broad tapestry of disasters that eventually brought the Russian communist state crashing down. The shattering of Soviet forces by the indigenous rebels aided by foreign fighters and sophisticated weapons technology from the West doomed the USSR to failure. The American would later respond with: "Hold my beer..."

We examine the Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On by Leigh Neville and Matt Eversmann to discuss the book, the event and what led up to the event.

We discuss the book, guerrilla and insurgency warfare during the American war in 1861-65, the atrocity cycle, guerrilla math and the hopelessness of occupation avoiding the injury of civilians.

It appears the West just can't get counterinsurgency right. I talk about some of the framework ideas that would be good lessons learned for those who I think wisely and would try to avoid COIN. The major takeaway is that insurgencies are rather antifragile and bureaucracies are the enemy of effectiveness and innovation.

I discuss the complex adaptive system that is war that Clausewitz categorically identified as "friction" in the nineteenth century. We'll examine what chaos and complexity has to do with conflict, why it is inevitable and why wars are won by the least incompetent armies and navies.

The April 1961 Generals’ Putsch of Algiers (Putsch des généraux), was a failed military action to press French President Charles de Gaulle to not abandon French Algeria, along with French people and pro-French Arabs living there. The putsch in French Algeria was conducted by four retired generals, led by Maurice Challe, the commander of the French Armed Forces in Algeria in 1958-60 and the author of the successful Challe Plan. The plan which in effect helped to defeat militant rebels across...

In this episode, I go through some of the more interesting emails and comments I have gotten since the podcast began in September 2022.

his episodes examines the unconventional and eccentric mind sets of Lawrence and other famous and obscure military figures. We examine the way some armies embrace this while others discourage it.

In this episode we will discuss how Lawrence's medievalism gave him a tremendous advantage serendipitously advising and leading the local Arab revolt during WWI against the Turks and more deeply, Allied efforts to map a post-war world. His predilections in study, preparation and application of his 27 points led to a success the British army and the larger Allied effort could not have achieved without him.

One of the peak guerrilla fountainheads in the early twentieth century, TE Lawrence has been in both the popular imagination and a large part of the engine in the Middle East that signed the death knell for foreign colonial powers to leave the region, Eccentric and brilliant, one of the few successful insurgency leaders during WWI.

The brilliant John Milius helmed this production in the thick of the cold war waning with the USSR. This will be the first episode where we examine the collision between irregular warfare and popular culture.

Government, for a variety of reasons, is manifestly incompetent in everything it does and this lends parts of the explanatory framework in why systemic failure is the feature not a bug in Western martial efforts. The critiques of the government supremacist mindset are legion and one can find many rational and elegant theses if you start at the Mises Institute and listen to the podcasts of Scott Horton at Antiwar.com. Scott and I recently did a deep dive together in Episode 5850 "Bill Buppert:...

As a former Appleseed instructor and Shoot Boss, I had the opportunity to teach a marksmanship/history project that had me master the origins and details of the first month of the First American Revolution. I cover the "Three Strikes of the Match" that we used as an organization to educate folks about the marriage between marksmanship and liberty that initiated the divorce from London in 1775.

I review and discuss Sean McMeekin's brilliant tome on Stalin being the ascendant and most successful antagonist in WWII.

I discuss the French experience in north Africa and the devastating consequences of the double blow of losing Indochina and Algeria in north Africa.

In this episode, I discuss the fundamentals of French irregular warfare doctrine with a concentration on COIN, French martial history in a thumbnail and the tragedy of French arms in post-WWII Indochina.

A short but effective tome that is a sound introduction to why the western COIN complex is so wrong-headed and intellectually bankrupt.

I discuss the combat framework from the tactical to the strategic level and mission command for both regular and irregular warfare (IW). A deep knowledge of conventional warfare is very useful to fully grokking how IW works.

In this episode, I sketch the lives and exploits of three guerrilla luminaries: TE Lawrence, Paul Emil von Letter-Vorbeck and Michael Collins. I want to use them to illustrate what I consider the next step in guerrilla evolution employing age-old techniques and strategies harnessed to modern technology and employment against the new age of mechanized warfare.

Despite trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths, the West has nothing to show for the counterinsurgency campaigns it has waged. Despite the enormous industry and vast intellectual and historical apologetics combine, the wasteland is evident to all who take the time to examine the details. The emperor of COIN is naked.