EDIT: see this entry for an apology to the Major. I don’t feel that this was my best hour.

Beyond Maj. Cavanaugh’s distaste for violence and the notion of being seen as a killer and a breaker, he makes another…

EDIT: see this apology to the Major. I do not think that this was my best hour, and I’m sorry for that.

Critics will counter with Clausewitz, dismissing my argument as the naïve, “kind-hearted” words of someone that misguidedly believes there is “some…

Both of the prior blogs struck a nerve and the Major had a rather surprising response for me online. At the Major’s request I have accepted his apology for his reaction and deleted my screenshot of the reaction from this blog post. Obviously, nothing on the Internet ever…

Niall Ferguson, in a (paywalled) piece, argues we need to relearn the lost arts of war and strategy. Readers may find this line of reasoning similar to that of my own here. I will dissent, however. There is a recent piece in Jacobin that I (for the first time) will…

I don’t really agree with Bruce Hoffman that ISIS/ISIL is “winning” but there is a lot here that makes profound sense.

It must start with the recognition that ISIL’s appeal will not diminish nor its allure end until this movement is militarily defeated and…

At Marginal Revolution, there is an intriguing retrospective on the failure of “Broken Windows” crime policies:

Why did the experiment fail? Longer sentences didn’t reduce crime as much as expected because criminals aren’t good at thinking about the future…

I got this book as a book on tape to listen to for the long commutes to GMU and back. I later heard of the controversy surrounding it only after beginning to listen to it. It has been very interesting, mostly for its no-frills presentation of the bureaucratic problems of…

Good stuff at SWJ. In my opinion, this also depends a great deal on how much the patron’s aims are served by varying degrees of control and autonomy.

The US strategy of selecting reliable proxies against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)…

Despite what I’ve said about Andrew Marshall hagiography, I do believe that the guy truly was a genius. So I’m going to recommend picking up this new biography of Marshall’s intellectual journey. A full review may come later, but for now just do it The book is a great tour…