I couldn't possibly despise Vladimir Putin any more if I tried. My upcoming paper on this site has an entire section dedicated to "Vlad the Impaler" that explains his massive body count of Russian citizens he's had killed, his abuse of the Russian people, his rise from low-level economics analyst for the KGB (I hope you weren't duped into thinking he was an operational spy or anything cool) into an inside-man at the St. Petersburg mayor's office on behalf of the Tambov Gang's funneling of heroin into Europe, until he ultimately worked his way to the Presidency as basically a mafiosa.

No, I just want to thank him for reminding me that the last six years that I've spent with my nose down, thinking about winning wars for the United States using new doctrine and new ways to think, I wasn't wasting my time. A lot of my civilian friends spent the past half decade worried about being part of the woke mob, about cancel culture, about fair trade coffee, well, real "First World Problems." I was beginning to think maybe I'd chosen poorly, doing pullups in my garage while thinking about offset pivots relative to economic modalities from a defense acquisition perspective, or talking to my wife about basic close air support doctrine versus advanced combined attack methodologies when she was having trouble going to sleep. Worrying about green energy is pointless if there's plutonium fission going on; creates a rather catastrophic global warming problem.

Anyway, as nice as it is to know I was right the whole time, secretly, I wish I was wrong. I'd much prefer the US faded from sole hyper-power to just another fun country in a peaceful, organized and free world. However, that's not going to happen. The US must maintain superior defense capabilities including hyper-equipped forward power projection because, well, the world is still full of assholes.

And some of them have nuclear weapons and horrific ambition.

What is truly nice to know is that most of my friends I've made in the last 19 years are on this journey with me, and will be more than happy to lay waste to America's enemies so all of our kids can grow up in a free and prosperous society.