How Economic Warfare Theory Evolved from Blockade to Sanctions
From wooden warships to frozen assets, economic coercion's core theoretical problem remains stubbornly unresolved
Why Strategic Surprise Succeeds Despite Being Strategically Predictable
Intelligence often sees the attack coming—three structural reasons it still fails to prevent surprise
Why Mahan's Sea Power Theory Created the Modern Naval Arms Race
How a nineteenth-century naval theorist's ideas drove great powers into catastrophic competition and continue to shape maritime rivalry today
The Strategic Paradox: Why Offense and Defense Keep Trading Dominance
How weapons innovations create temporary advantages until opposing doctrines adapt, generating cycles that have shaped the character and catastrophes of warfare.
How Clausewitz's Trinity Explains Why Wars Spiral Beyond Control
Clausewitz's remarkable trinity reveals why political leaders who start wars become prisoners of forces they cannot control.
The Real Lesson from Napoleon: Strategy Is Operational Art at National Scale
Napoleon's genius wasn't winning battles—it was coordinating military, political, and economic power into a unified strategic system that eventually consumed itself.
How Douhet's Air Power Vision Created Strategic Bombing's False Promise
Why the theory that bomber fleets would break civilian morale failed repeatedly yet continued shaping air strategy for a century
How Thucydides Predicted Modern Alliance Dynamics 2,500 Years Ago
Ancient Greek insights into alliance formation and collapse that still explain modern coalition warfare and great power competition.
Why Every Strategic Genius Eventually Encounters Their Culminating Point
Clausewitz's culminating point explains why the greatest commanders march confidently past the invisible threshold that transforms victory into catastrophe.
The Strategic Theory Behind Successful Insurgencies
How revolutionary theorists from Mao to Giap developed frameworks for defeating stronger enemies through political-military strategy
The Forgotten Strategist: How Antoine-Henri Jomini Shaped American Military Thinking
The Swiss theorist American officers actually read shaped U.S. military doctrine far more than Clausewitz ever did.
Why Great Powers Keep Failing at Counterinsurgency Despite Superior Resources
The strategic logic explaining why overwhelming military force consistently fails against weaker opponents reveals fundamental limits of great power intervention.
The Strategic Logic of Terrorism: Provocation, Attrition, and Intimidation
Why weaker actors choose violence that rarely achieves political objectives—and the structural constraints ensuring strategic failure
How Nuclear Weapons Created an Entirely New Strategic Logic
The strategic theorists who taught nations to prevent wars they could never win—and the concepts that still govern nuclear thinking today.
The Strategic Logic Behind Sun Tzu's 'Supreme Excellence'
Why history's most influential military theorist taught that the greatest generals win by making battle unnecessary and how this logic still shapes strategic competition today.
Why Clausewitz's 'Fog of War' Still Defines Modern Command Decisions
Two centuries of technological revolution haven't dispelled warfare's fundamental uncertainty—understanding why transforms how we think about strategic decision-making.
How Jomini's Geometric Warfare Shaped and Misled Generations of Officers
Why the most teachable military framework in history produced the most systematically miseducated officer corps—and what this reveals about doctrine itself.
Why Revolutionary Wars Defy Classical Strategic Theory
How Mao and Giap exposed the hidden assumptions in classical military theory by making time, population, and legitimacy the true terrain of strategic competition.