Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
I spent almost 10 years of my journalistic career covering Japan—a place long considered inscrutable by Westerners, even though today’s decidedly Westernized Japan is about as inscrutable as Iowa. During those years, I watched Japanese leaders wrestle with a foreign policy hamstrung by a constitution that essentially prohibits war as an option for failed diplomacy.
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.
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.
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.
In just a few weeks after our nation remembers and mourns the loss of nearly 3000 souls murdered on 9-11, President Trump will be meeting with Xi Jinping. What is truly surreal about the summit and our continued engagement of China, is that the summit will occur while Xi is waging war on the United States of America.
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?
The cavalry gets the glory. The infantry gets the dust. For thousands of years, warfare has invented faster horses, bigger guns, tanks, aircraft, drones, and now cyber warriors—but eventually somebody still has to walk onto the objective with a rifle and take the ground. Call them ground pounders, earth pigs, grunts, soldiers, or Marines: they are the infantry. Not everyone should be one, and thank God for that. But every army needs them, because wars may be shaped by technology, artillery, armor, and airpower—but ground is still won by the poor bastard standing on it.
The evening news shows you the criminal with an AR-15. It rarely shows you the millions of Americans who own one, go to work, raise families, shoot matches, hunt, protect their homes—and never hurt anybody. The 2026 National Firearms Survey estimates 26.4 million Americans own an AR-15 or similar semiautomatic rifle. At that point, perhaps we should stop pretending it’s some exotic fringe firearm and call it what it has become: America’s Rifle. Behind every blade of grass? Maybe not—but we’re certainly working on it. God bless America. Shall not be infringed.
The Army has a remarkable ability to take a perfectly functional warrior, promote him a few times, hand him three computer monitors, and turn him into a PowerPoint-slinging indoor cat. Thus begins the evolution of the FOBbit: that mysterious creature who once went outside the wire but now survives on RFIs, synchronization meetings, Green Beans coffee, and Baskin-Robbins. The real horror comes when you finally look down at your ice cream, look at your clean uniform, hit “Send” on another 1600 suspense, and realize the terrible truth: Oh, $h!tt! I’m the FOBbit.
Before America entered World War II, Uncle Sam looked at the Singer Sewing Machine Company and essentially asked, “Nice factory. Can you make a .45?” The result was just 500 Singer M1911A1 pistols—one of today’s great military-firearms collectibles. Singer wasn’t forced into gunmaking by the Defense Production Act; that law wouldn’t exist until 1950. Instead, the Army paid civilian companies to learn military production before the shooting started. It was industrial mobilization with refreshingly little mystery: you cannot surge a factory you don’t have.
White House Office of Science and Technology policy director Michael Kratsios discusses the Trump administration’s push for fewer regulations on artificial intelligence at the G20 on ‘Kudlow.’
Red China is hurting for certain. The world’s largest oil importer lost oil from Iran and Venezuela, which supplied 15% of the oil it bought last year.
Under Trump, the USA is a net exporter of oil. That should be the case for decades to come because thanks to President Trump and Chief Warrant Officer Five Eric A. Slover, America now controls 65 billion barrels of oil in Venezuela. Slover is the helicopter pilot who took a licking of bullets but kept on ticking as the military extracted Maduro on January 3, earning a Medal of Honor.
Reagan National was a perfectly reasonable airport when it opened in 1941. Eighty-five years later, we’ve packed commercial jets, military helicopters, presidential transportation, restricted airspace and national-security missions into the same tiny patch of sky—and the warning signs are getting difficult to ignore. After 67 deaths, an emergency airspace redesign, repeated communications failures and a Marine One separation incident, perhaps the problem isn’t the latest procedure or antenna. Perhaps Washington’s convenience has simply outlived the acceptable risk.
The Pentagon doesn’t fight just one kind of war. Some are fought with tanks and rifles; others with spreadsheets, PowerPoint, and somebody quietly asking, “Where haven’t they spent their money yet?” Born from Robert McNamara’s 1960s-era attempt to bring rational analysis to defense spending, the POM process evolved into an institutionalized food fight where the Active Army, National Guard, and Army Reserve defend their rice bowls while hunting for everyone else’s leftovers. I happened to be pretty good at looking under the fiscal seat cushions—and somewhere, I suspect, a retired National Guard programmer still mutters my name. Welcome to the Pentagon Wars.
America’s next battlefield may not begin with missiles, tanks, or troops crossing a border. It may begin with a transformer failure, a cyberattack, a communications outage, and a supply chain that suddenly stops supplying. The new executive order protecting America’s bulk-power system recognizes an uncomfortable reality of fifth-generation warfare: the electrical grid is now strategic terrain. Securing foreign vulnerabilities and rebuilding domestic manufacturing are important first steps—but preparing for the next war means building a nation resilient enough to keep fighting, communicating, manufacturing, and rebuilding even when somebody tries to turn the lights out.
Imagine explaining to a military planner in 1985 that the laser weapons designed to blind enemy soldiers would never become the future of warfare. During the Cold War, some experts genuinely believed that bullets would eventually give way to directed-energy weapons that would simply remove an enemy’s ability to see. Then reality intervened. It turned out that permanently blinding someone wasn’t viewed as the humanitarian breakthrough some had imagined. The battlefield stayed remarkably old-school, and the age of the battlefield ophthalmologist never quite arrived.
Libertarians and limited government/free market-oriented conservatives should be thrilled about what is happening in Latin America generally and in Argentina in particular. The latter lit the fuse to the Revolution that is now engulfing the former. The Liberty Movement spearheaded by Javier Milei, by melding sound governance and politics, is defeating socialism and spreading freedom …
What if the duty to protect your family didn’t begin with the Second Amendment at all? The Armed Christian Creed argues that our responsibility to defend innocent life comes from God, while the Constitution simply recognizes and protects a pre-existing right to keep and bear arms. We worship God, not our arms. They are not symbols of aggression, but tools carried with discipline, humility, and the hope they are never needed. The firearm is not sacred. The life we may someday be called upon to protect is.
Technology has made us faster, smarter, and more capable than any generation that came before us. But somewhere along the way, we forgot an uncomfortable truth: every technological advantage eventually becomes a dependency. The Romans understood it. Napoleon understood it. The Army wrote it down more than a century ago. Use the calculator. Use the GPS. Use the ballistic computer. But never forget the skills that allow you to function when the batteries die. A truly advanced military isn’t the one that fights brilliantly when everything works. It’s the one that can still fight when nothing does.
Five years ago, the world watched one of the most devastating foreign policy failures in modern American history unfold in real time. The fall of Kabul in August 2021 was not merely the end of America’s longest war. It was a collapse of credibility, an abandonment of allies, and the start of a dangerous new era in global geopolitics.