David T. Cloft

David T. Cloft is a competitive smallbore and long range rifle shooter from the United States, who has won seven National Championships and has set 11 US National Records. In 1999 he became the first American to be Knighted by the Princess of Buedingen, Germany after winning their annual Schutzenfest. He formerly served as a United States Army officer and retired at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Violence Was the Weapon: Fear Was the Payload

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October 7, 2023 was Israel’s 9/11—a surprise attack on Shabbat and Simchat Torah, almost exactly fifty years after the Yom Kippur War. Terrorists understand that violence is the weapon, but fear is the payload, and calendars, holidays and symbolism can amplify the blast. Three years later, the consequences have spread far beyond Gaza: Israel abandoned containment, Iran’s proxy strategy collided with Israeli deterrence, and America discovered once again that being the global hegemon means everybody sends you the bill. The old Middle East wasn’t stable. It was merely temporarily not exploding.

Can We Finally Call It Biowar 1.0?

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COVID-19 may never be proven to have been an act of biological warfare, but strategically it gave the world something almost as valuable: a full-scale demonstration. A microscopic threat closed borders, disrupted militaries and supply chains, crippled economies, expanded emergency powers, and turned fear and information into weapons—all while leaving cities, factories, farmland, and infrastructure standing. That is the thesis: COVID was effectively the world’s Biowar 1.0 field exercise, regardless of intent. Now, as outbreaks, laboratory incidents, and biological threats generate headlines from Congo to Russia, the unsettling question isn’t whether COVID was deliberately weaponized. It is whether governments watched the experiment, studied the vulnerabilities, and are now saber-rattling—perhaps even conducting psyops—with what Biowar 2.0 might look like.

Don’t Wait for the Rain: Elon Musk and Humanity’s Next Ark

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Elon Musk isn’t Noah, and Mars isn’t the Ark—but the comparison raises an interesting question. Humanity has eight billion people, one planet, and no backup plan, while the richest man on Earth is spending his fortune trying to build one. Noah understood something we routinely forget: the time to build the Ark is before it begins to rain.

My Will Be Done

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We spend our lives chasing happiness—more money, more success, more pleasure, more control—yet somehow the appetite always survives the meal. Ecclesiastes called it vapor. Augustine called it restlessness. Tolstoy discovered that even extraordinary success couldn’t answer death. Maybe the problem isn’t that God hasn’t given us what we want. Maybe it’s that we keep praying “Thy will be done” while quietly demanding “my will be done.” Happiness comes and goes. God offers something deeper: peace.

MOA vs. Mils: No, Mils Aren’t More Accurate

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MOA vs. mils: no, mils aren’t “more accurate.” Math is math. They’re just beautifully idiot-resistant.

Tell Private Snuffy to add ½ and ¼ and you can smell the electrical fire. Tell him to add .3 and .5 and he can probably do it on his fingers. Suddenly the military’s love affair with mils makes perfect sense.

PRS speaks decimals. Traditional American riflemen speak fractions. Different dialects, same X-ring.

Presidential Marksmanship: Teddy, Ronnie, Barack, and the Day Dick Cheney Shot a Guy

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Teddy Roosevelt hunted lions and elephants in Africa. Ronald Reagan looked perfectly comfortable shouldering a rifle aboard Air Force One. Barack Obama proved he could shoot skeet at Camp David. And Dick Cheney? Well, Dick Cheney shot a dude in the face… A brief, slightly irreverent tour through presidential firearms history—and a reminder that the Four Rules apply even when the Secret Service is standing nearby.

The Great Reset of 2019: You Just Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

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We have become experts on trees. Trump said something. Russia bombed something. China sanctioned something. The market moved, somebody posted something stupid, gas prices suck, and by lunchtime half the country is furious. But zoom out to December 2019 and a different picture emerges: COVID, debt, inflation, war, rearmament, economic fragmentation, broken supply chains and great-power competition. Maybe these aren’t separate crises at all, but chapters in the same historical transition. Call it the Great Reset. Call it World War III. Historians will decide what to name it. Our problem is simpler: we’re standing three feet from an oak tree arguing about the bark while the entire forest behind us is on fire.

5th Generation War, Part 5: Who Gets to Decide What Is True?

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The ultimate weapon in fifth-generation warfare may not be a missile, a drone, or even propaganda. It may simply be convincing Americans that truth itself no longer exists. Once we believe elections are meaningless, institutions are irredeemably corrupt, rights belong only to our tribe, and our neighbors are enemies, nobody has to conquer us. But the answer cannot be a government Ministry of Truth deciding what citizens are allowed to believe. A free republic survives differently: evidence, transparency, free speech, skeptical citizens, honest institutions, and the freedom to argue—even to be wrong. It’s messy, frustrating, inefficient, and occasionally ridiculous. Good. That’s what freedom looks like. I’ll take the argument.

Game Theory for WW3: When Rational Decisions Create Insane Outcomes

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What if the geopolitical insanity of 2026 isn’t actually insane? Game theory suggests something more disturbing: perfectly rational nations, each acting in their own self-interest, can collectively produce disastrous outcomes that nobody actually wanted. Born from Cold War-era work at RAND, the Prisoner’s Dilemma explains everything from arms races to alliances and deterrence. Sometimes nobody has to be crazy for the world to go completely nuts.

5th Generation War, Part 4: Rights, Privileges, and the Fine Art of Leaving Each Other Alone

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The hardest rights to defend are usually the rights of people we disagree with. Freedom of speech protects obnoxious opinions. Freedom of religion protects beliefs we may consider ridiculous. Peaceful assembly protects protesters whose signs make our blood pressure rise, and due process protects defendants we may already despise. But liberty is not a license to commit crimes, and every desire, benefit, opportunity, or government service is not automatically a constitutional right. A republic survives when we understand both sides of that equation: I don’t have to agree with you, and I certainly don’t have to like you—but I’ll defend your right to be wrong. Just stay off my lawn.
What exactly are we trying to save?

PRE-ELECTION: Trump, Dracula, and the Art of Looking Crazy

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Maybe Donald Trump isn’t crazy. Maybe looking a little crazy is the whole point. Vlad the Impaler understood that reputation, fear, and unpredictability could be weapons against a stronger enemy. Six centuries later, Trump may be playing a strangely similar game: keep Putin, Xi, and Tehran wondering, “WTF…he might actually do it.”

5th Generation War , Part 3: How Do We Save the Republic Without Committing Suicide?

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The greatest danger in fifth-generation warfare may not be what our enemies do to us, but what we do to ourselves trying to stop them. Lincoln warned that if America were ever destroyed, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The answer isn’t censorship, blind trust in government, or blind distrust of it. It is resilient institutions, transparent elections, evidence, critical thinking, and citizens willing to defend the rights of people they despise. The Human Domain is contested terrain—but if we surrender our liberty to defend it, we have already lost the battle.

Karelia: The Finnish Paradise That Wasn’t

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In the 1930s, thousands of Finnish-Americans left places like Michigan and Minnesota for Soviet Karelia, promised jobs, security, and the chance to build a Finnish workers’ paradise. Then paradise met Stalin. Some escaped, some disappeared into the Gulag, and some ended up in mass graves. Today, Karelia remains on the map, but much of its Finnish character is gone. It’s a fascinating and tragic lesson about political promises, cultural identity, and why—when someone promises you paradise—you should probably check the return policy.

5th Generation War Part 2: When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

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We spent decades studying the Human Domain, mastering information warfare, funding democracy programs, training activists, monitoring elections, and learning that legitimacy itself can become a battlefield. The uncomfortable question is not whether influence operations exist—they do—but what happens when the tools used overseas become tools that every major power can study, copy, and deploy. From Serbia to Ukraine, from covert action to open democracy assistance, the world learned a lesson: political legitimacy is strategic terrain. Now, in an age where every citizen carries a global information weapon in their pocket, the chickens may have come home to roost. The greatest threat to a republic may not be an army at the gates, but a population that no longer agrees on what is real.

5th Generation War, 1462: Vlad the Impaler Understood the Human Domain

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History remembers Vlad the Impaler as a blood-soaked medieval psychopath. But what happens if we assume Vlad was a rational actor? Suddenly the stakes, the terror, and the infamous Forest of the Impaled start looking less like random savagery and more like calculated deterrence. Vlad couldn’t outspend or outfight the Ottoman Empire, so he weaponized the one battlefield where a small power could compete with a giant: the human mind. Five hundred years before “fifth-generation warfare” became fashionable, Dracula was already playing game theory—with sharpened stakes.

5th Generation War, Part 1: Don’t Capture the Capitol—Just Convince Half of the People it’s Corrupt and Illegitimate

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You don’t have to invade a nation to defeat it. You may only have to convince its citizens that their elections are rigged, their courts are corrupt, their institutions are illegitimate, and their neighbors are the enemy. As early as 2012, the U.S. military was wrestling with the Human Dimension and emerging ideas about the Human Domain—the recognition that wars ultimately turn on human behavior and human will. Add smartphones, algorithms, information warfare, color-revolution dynamics, and fifth-generation warfare, and the battlefield starts looking considerably different. The Capitol can still be standing, the flag can still be flying, and elections can still happen right on schedule. But if nobody believes any of it anymore, an enemy may never have to conquer us. We may eventually do the job ourselves.

No Green Vomit Required — The Spiritual War Hiding in Plain Sight

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What if the greatest victories of evil don’t involve possession, spinning heads, or levitating furniture? What if they’re much simpler—pride, lust, greed, deception, hatred, and division? Ephesians 6 reminds Christians that our struggle is not ultimately against flesh and blood. Maybe we’ve become so busy identifying the enemy in everyone else that we’ve forgotten where the real battlefield is—and which weapons Paul actually told us to carry.

Fort Wilkins: Once again, US Army Sends a West Pointer to the End of the Earth

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In 1844, the U.S. Army sent a West Point graduate and a couple companies of infantry to the very tip of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula to keep order during America’s first great copper rush. Captain Robert Emmet Clary and his soldiers arrived in the wilderness, built most of a fort in five months, and then watched history move somewhere else when war with Mexico began. But Clary’s story gets even better: his West Point classmate—and reportedly his wedding best man—was Jefferson Davis. Three decades later, Davis headed the Confederacy while Clary remained loyal to the Union and earned brevet promotion to brigadier general for his Civil War service. Fort Wilkins is a wonderfully obscure reminder that long before Gettysburg, some remarkably tough Americans were already busy building this amazing country.