Warfare

DIME Part II: When People Begin Voting With Their Feet

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Part II: Economic collapse doesn’t begin when everyone runs for the exits. It begins when the people who can leave quietly decide they should. Scientists take foreign grants. Engineers follow better jobs. Entrepreneurs move companies. Families move their money and children. The poor may be stuck, while the very people capable of rebuilding the country disappear. History’s warning may be remarkably simple: watch when people begin voting with their feet.

Trump has ‘EVERY OPTION’ on the table against Iran, national security expert says

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Heritage Foundation Vice President of National Security Victoria Coates analyzes the impact of protests breaking out across France, reports of potential strikes on Iran and ongoing Russian attacks in Ukraine on ‘Mornings with FOX Business.’

Trump’s Partly Right: A ‘1929-Style Depression’ Is Just Around the Corner

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A few days ago, President Donald Trump warned of a “1929-style Depression…if the Democrats get in.”

Trump is, of course, referring to November’s midterm elections. And throwing hearty rhetoric at the wall – hoping it sticks for electoral effect.

DIME Part I: The Next World War Started Before Anybody Fired a Shot

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History teaches us that wars rarely begin with the first shot. Long before the tanks move, capital flees, talent leaves, economies fracture, alliances shift, and nations begin using every tool of power except the one labeled “military.” From brain drain to DIME, Clausewitz, game theory, nuclear deterrence and the Madman Theory, the warning signs are usually there. The problem isn’t that history doesn’t teach us anything. It’s that humans keep waiting for the shooting before admitting the war has begun.

The Big Devil Is USa

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The three Muhammads, the plan they wrote down, the countries that already lived it, and why the American Left is holding the door open.

Yes, the capitalization is a pun. Khomeini named America “the Great Satan.” Big Devil. U-S-A. Us. I teach high school, and there is a clause somewhere in my contract requiring at least one terrible pun per lesson. Box checked. Moving on.

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.

US troops exit Iraq after more than two decades

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US forces have withdrawn from their remaining bases in Iraq, bringing an end to two decades of military presence in the country. The departure, agreed in 2024, is being carried out by the Trump administration despite the ongoing war against Iran. It’s led to fears that a security vacuum could embolden Iran-backed militias and lead to a resurgence of Daesh. Rahul Radhakrishnan reports.

Midterms diplomacy: Iran is waiting for Democrats to take back Congress

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But the Wall Street Journal’s spin is Trump is twisting arms to make Iran a pariah. After 47 years of Iran declaring “death to America,” the Journal should not act surprised, but it does. The media wants Trump to fail and if misrepresenting America’s accomplishments in this war hurts Trump, the media will continue such spin.

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.