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.

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.

Bambi Is an Insurance Company Actuarial Liability

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My dad, Tom, always had a theory that automobile insurance companies would eventually destroy deer hunting. Not because they hated hunters or because a shadowy cabal of claims adjusters met beneath Lansing every full moon, but because Dad understood basic economics: deer hit cars, insurance companies pay for cars, and insurance companies don’t enjoy paying for cars. To a hunter, a big Michigan whitetail is November tradition. To an insurance actuary, he’s a hood, grille, radiator, two airbags and a rental vehicle standing beside the highway eating grass. Dad didn’t need a conspiracy theory. He understood something far more powerful—incentives. Eventually, somebody was going to put Bambi into MS Excel.

The Original Deer-Camp MRE: The Lost Art of Canning Venison

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Before freezers and generators, Michigan hunters had another way to make November’s deer feed the family all winter: the Mason jar. Pressure-canned venison may be the original deer-camp MRE—simple, shelf-stable, already cooked, and requiring no refrigeration. It’s a nearly forgotten skill worth bringing back.

From Finland to the U.P.: SISU, Socialism, Saunas

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From Finland’s rocky farms to the copper mines and forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Finnish immigrants brought more than strong backs and “SISU” to America. They brought faith, saunas, traditions—and fierce arguments over labor, capitalism and socialism that divided “Church Finns” and “Red Finns” more than a century ago. Their remarkable story of immigration, revolution, war and assimilation helped shape northern Michigan and reminds us that many of the political debates Americans wrestle with today are anything but new.

What If World War III Started in 2016 and We Just Missed the Memo?

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What if World War III didn’t begin with missiles, mushroom clouds, or tanks crossing a border? What if it quietly started around 2016, and we were too busy arguing about elections, surviving COVID, watching AI explode, and complaining about gas prices to notice the clouds gathering? Grab the heavy-duty aluminum foil and follow me down the rabbit hole as we connect geopolitics, oil, emerging alliances, artificial intelligence, biblical prophecy, and one wonderfully uncomfortable question: What if history has already changed—and nobody bothered to send us the memo?

A Beginner’s Guide to CMP AR Tactical and F-Practical

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Competitive long-range shooting used to look like a sport where the entry fee was a custom rifle, a pile of specialized equipment, and possibly a second mortgage. CMP’s new AR Tactical and F-Practical categories are changing that. Built around affordable AR-platform and factory-production rifles, practical rests, bipods, and limited-power optics, these events offer ordinary shooters a pathway onto the 600- and 1,000-yard firing line without first building a NASA-grade race gun. This beginner’s guide explains the rifles, equipment, rules, match formats, and what to expect at your first match. The wind is still free—and it will still humble you.

AR Tactical: Can Your Rifle Even Reach 600 Yards?

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Think you’re a rifleman? There’s only one way to find out. AR Tactical is one of the fastest-growing rifle sports in America, challenging everyday shooters to stretch their skills to 600 yards with practical rifles and real-world marksmanship. Along the way, even experienced competitors discover that old habits don’t always translate—and that’s part of the fun. The question is simple: Will your rifle even reach 600 yards?