0. Modern war

In the last FYSA essay, wrote about The Stack of Power. It is the mental model through which the reality of modern war can be understood: the idea that war is confined to declared hostilities, uniformed forces, or discrete phases of peace and combat is, as James wrote, “a foundationally insufficient view of and expression of power. “

Instead, it unfolds continuously across civilian infrastructure, administrative systems, information environments, partner forces, and public institutions. This often happens long before the first shot is fired.

Advantage no longer accrues solely to the actor with superior weapons or platforms. It accrues to the actor whose systems remain coherent under pressure: whose people can communicate, coordinate, and decide even when networks are degraded, trust boundaries are unclear, and centralized control is contested.

This is Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW): conflict defined not just by capability, but by resilience of coordination.

I view Fifth Generation Warfare through the combined lens of an operator and a product builder. After nearly seven years in the Marine Corps, I’ve seen how quickly coherence breaks down when communications fragment and decision authority blurs. In the private sector, building products at Amazon, Spotify, and Blend Labs, and now as Head of Product at Adyton, I’ve learned how resilient systems are intentionally designed: how identity, trust, synchronization, and user workflows must be architected, not assumed.

The defining challenge of 5GW is not just tactical lethality alone. It is maintaining system coherence under pressure. That is a product challenge as much as it is a military one.

5GW cannot be addressed with role-specific or phase-specific tools. It requires a single operational fabric capable of functioning across the full spectrum of modern conflict — from steady-state operations to the tactical edge, and into the society in between.

It is important that technologists who are building for the Department of War do so in a manner that delivers products to warfighters that align with the modern national security mission. To that end, I want to provide transparency into what we’re building at Adyton and why, against the backdrop of James Boyd’s Stack of Power and within the broader context of Fifth Generation Warfare.

5GW isn’t hypothetical. Its defining characteristics are on display in Europe, a living laboratory of “all-of-society” conflict. Observing these realities, we’ve built AOK to enable military forces, partners, and public safety institutions to operate as a coherent system, even in the face of persistent competition.

1. Fifth Generation Warfare and the collapse of phase-based conflict

Fifth Generation Warfare fundamentally shifts how conflict is manifested and how power is contested.

Unlike earlier generations of warfare — defined by maneuver, firepower, or information dominance — 5GW is characterized by ambiguity, civilian-military entanglement, and systems disruption.

Conflict is no longer bounded by clear transitions between peace and war. It does not begin with mobilization orders or end with ceasefires. Instead, it unfolds continuously across economic systems, information networks, administrative processes, and civilian institutions. The objective is not the seizure of terrain, but the erosion of cohesion: trust in institutions, confidence in leadership, and the ability of societies to act collectively under pressure.

In this paradigm, traditional distinctions collapse. Civilian and military systems are interdependent by default. Logistics, communications, and personnel workflows — once considered rear-area functions — become active surfaces of conflict.

Adversaries operating in this space seek advantage not through decisive engagements, but through exploitation at the seams: Between organizations, between authorities, and between centralized command structures and decentralized actors. The more fragmented the system, the greater the opportunity to disrupt it.

Critically, 5GW expands the cognitive dimension of conflict. Human decision-makers now operate alongside autonomous systems, sensors, and unmanned platforms that continuously generate, relay, and act independently on information, augmenting how decisions are formed, distributed, and executed. Perception, coordination, and tempo are decisive. The challenge is no longer access to data, but the ability to integrate human intent with machine-generated insight across a dynamic battlespace.

In 5GW, advantage accrues not to the actor with the most advanced tools, but to the one whose systems are unified across the conflict spectrum.

1.1 From total war to “all-of-society” defense

The idea that societies must mobilize in wartime is not new. During the industrial wars of the twentieth century, victory depended on the ability to convert civilian industry into military capacity. Factories became arsenals; logistics networks became lifelines.

Today, the nature of mobilization itself has changed.

In modern conflict, resilience is no longer generated primarily through industrial output. It is generated through coordination, trust, and collaborative operations across military, civilian, and private-sector systems. The battlefield has expanded into society, and deterrence depends on whether that society can absorb shocks without fragmenting.

This reality has driven a shift toward all-of-society defense models across NATO and allied nations. Under these frameworks, civilian government agencies, private infrastructure operators, public safety organizations, and partner forces are no longer supporting actors. They are operational participants.

Public safety agencies, emergency responders, and infrastructure operators now operate under conditions that increasingly resemble contested environments: Intermittently degraded communications, incomplete information, high time pressure, increased tempo, and overlapping authorities. These actors are targeted by cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and infrastructure sabotage whether or not they are formally part of a military response.

Despite this recognition, operational tooling has not evolved at the pace necessary to succeed in a 5GW environment. Military systems remain optimized for hierarchy and assumed connectivity. Civilian systems prioritize availability but lack security and interoperability. Partner forces and public safety organizations are integrated slowly, through bespoke arrangements that do not scale under pressure.

Doctrine has evolved toward all-of-society defense.

However, the operational product architecture that these participants use on a daily basis has not.

1.2 Europe: Proof that 5GW is here

Europe today exists in a persistent state of contestation. It is neither at peace nor engaged in declared war, yet it experiences continuous pressure across its infrastructure, information environment, and public institutions.

Rail networks are disrupted. Energy pipelines and undersea cables are damaged or threatened. Communications systems are probed and attacked. Disinformation campaigns target public trust and political cohesion. Drones routinely test sovereign airspace. These actions are deliberately ambiguous, distributed, and deniable —designed to remain below traditional thresholds of military response while imposing real costs on society.

The significance of these activities lies not in their individual tactical impact, but in what they reveal about modern conflict. The primary targets are not military formations. They are societal systems that underpin modern life: logistics networks, communications infrastructure, administrative processes, and public confidence.

These attacks exploit fragmentation that arises from operational architecture that is neither cohesive nor resilient. Civilian and military authorities often operate on separate systems. Public safety agencies lack secure, interoperable coordination with defense organizations. Partner forces remain digitally isolated. Centralized, legacy technologies struggle to extend trust and authority into degraded environments.

Compounding this challenge is cognitive friction. The problem is not a lack of information, but the dispersion of information across multiple disconnected platforms and institutions. Human operators must assemble situational awareness manually, under time pressure and degraded connectivity.

Delay and confusion are not side effects; they are intended outcomes.

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Europe demonstrates a central truth of Fifth Generation Warfare: vulnerability is not rooted in weak militaries, but in fragmented and fragile systems. This is the operational gap modern adversaries exploit — and the one any credible 5GW architecture must close.

2. The operational gap: Fragmentation and fragility as a strategic liability

Despite broad recognition that conflict has expanded beyond traditional battlefields, the systems used to manage operations and communicate remain deeply fragmented. Military, civilian, and public safety organizations operate on a patchwork of disconnected toolsets — each optimized for narrow roles and implicit assumptions that connectivity and control will be continuous and readily available.

Military systems are typically designed for hierarchical command and continuous reach-back. Civilian platforms emphasize scale and availability, often at the expense of security and interoperability. Partner forces are integrated through bespoke mechanisms that are slow to establish and brittle under stress. Critically, these systems that inherently prioritize different functionality do not work in concert with one another.

When these systems inevitably break down, operators use what works: commercial tools like Signal and WhatsApp. These tools succeed not because they are compliant or secure by military standards, but because they are fast, intuitive, and frictionless.

The challenge is not to prohibit such tools, but to render them unnecessary by elevating military technologies to similar standards of speed and intuitiveness.

Administrative friction degrades readiness long before kinetic contact. Uncertainty in personnel accountability, ambiguity in logistics, and breakdowns in command signal create latent vulnerabilities that adversaries can amplify through disruption and narrative manipulation. When kinetic contact comes, its impact is magnified because of administrative failures. When connectivity is contested, centralized systems fail first, forcing ad hoc workarounds that fracture trust and situational awareness.

This is not a failure of doctrine or intent. It is a failure of architecture.

A credible response to 5GW requires moving beyond collections of role-specific tools toward a unified operational fabric — one that maintains usability while embedding security, trust, and operational context by design.

2.1 Atlas: Decentralized, software-defined infrastructure from steady-state operations to the tactical edge

The Adyton Operations Kit (AOK) is the unified product suite. Atlas is its decentralized infrastructure layer. The Atlas Application is its tactical expression built on that infrastructure. Together, they operate across the full spectrum of modern conflict.

The Atlas Platform is the decentralized, software-defined infrastructure for edge and autonomous systems and human-machine teaming in DDIL environments. Atlas resiliently and securely connects people, sensors, effectors, and autonomous systems from any vendor into a resilient, infrastructure-independent network, ensuring the mission is maintained even while disconnected.

By unifying partner force interoperability and human-machine operations in contested environments, Atlas delivers sustained decision advantage and mission success. Built on decentralized cryptographic identity, end-to-end encryption, dynamic multi-transport mesh networking, and offline authorization, Atlas treats infrastructure failure as the base case, not an edge case.

Atlas can be used through its own application, the Atlas Application, or via its embeddable SDK to integrate with other systems such as the TAK ecosystem to enable true, human-machine teaming at the edge.

Together, the Adyton Operations Kit (AOK) and Atlas represent a unified product suite that operates across the full spectrum of modern conflict. Using a shared trust, identity, and data foundation, AOK supports core operational workflows — such as personnel, logistics, and command communications — while Atlas enables tactical execution and human–machine teaming at the edge across disparate forces, without requiring separate systems or re-establishing trust as environments degrade.

Our products are built on the premise that modern conflict does not allow for clean transitions between systems, roles, or phases, a premise being born out of 5GW. Steady-state operations, crisis response, and tactical execution are contiguous parts of a single operational reality.

Warfighters should use the same technology in garrison, on a ship, or in the field.

Adyton’s products reflect this reality by providing one operational fabric whose capabilities adapt to context while the underlying system remains consistent.

Identity, security, and data models are preserved as users move across environments. What changes is not the system itself, but how its capabilities are expressed based on operational need.

AOK is authorized for use within Department of War environments and is deployed through existing accreditation pathways, allowing organizations to adopt the platform without bespoke authorization processes. The Atlas Application, too, is deployed with users down range in EW-denied environments, pressure-testing our technology’s ability to support the warfighter regardless of connectivity, no matter where they are in the world.

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2.2 Architectural foundations: Built for degradation, not assumptions

Atlas is designed around the expectation that modern operating environments are unstable by default.

Operational data is secured and written locally at the endpoint, enabling continued operation during network disruption. Information is shared peer-to-peer when local transports are available and synchronized opportunistically as connectivity returns. This approach avoids single points of failure while preserving operational continuity.

Security is enforced at the endpoint rather than at the perimeter. Identity is bound to users and devices, access is scoped by organization and mission context, and data remains protected from end to end, at rest and in transit, using standards-aligned cryptographic controls. This allows Atlas to support cross-organization collaboration without shared domains or centralized trust dependencies.

Atlas does not rely on a central server for identity, authorization, or data availability. This architectural choice reduces operational fragility and enables resilience under contested conditions.

2.3 Adyton technology in steady-state operations

In steady-state environments (e.g., garrison), AOK is used. AOK structures the workflows that generate readiness long before conditions deteriorate: personnel accountability, equipment visibility, logistics tracking, and command communications. In operational use, these workflows have reduced personnel accountability timelines from hours to minutes during real-world incidents, eliminated recurring equipment reconciliation failures, and materially reduced administrative burden during deployment preparation.

These functions are not administrative overhead. They are foundational.

Operational clarity enables tempo, and friction in these systems represents a latent vulnerability long before kinetic engagement begins.

2.4 Atlas at the tactical edge

At the tactical edge, the same operational fabric is expressed through different products. Atlas is the underlying architecture, the serverless, decentralized, fully interoperable software-defined infrastructure between humans and machines, machines and machines, and humans and humans built for DDIL environments.

Organizations can deploy Atlas to connect disparate endpoints into any UI via protocol adapters. Vendors can define custom protocols via Atlas’s SDK that can run directly on device firmware, using Atlas’s unified schema or their own defined schema and protocols. Atlas then manages the transport, identity, and sync layer.

For organizations that want even more out of Atlas, they can leverage the Atlas Application. This is Atlas “out of the box,” a geospatial application built on top of our software infrastructure with customizable tactical workflows that have been pressure tested in the field.

The Atlas Application provides operators at the edge with tactical workflows including secure chat, voice and video, customizable templates for structured reporting, and a map-based geospatial common operating picture with layers, tracks, and support for offline navigation — all of which are mission-capable in DDIL environments.

The Atlas Application is engineered to function reliably in contested, denied, and degraded environments because it is built on Atlas’s serverless infrastructure. Data is secured at the endpoint, synchronized opportunistically, and shared peer-to-peer as needed — enabling decentralized execution aligned with higher-level intent.

The Atlas Application also supports human–machine interoperability in active operations. Features such as DroneStat, an example of templatized reporting, are already in use to coordinate distributed drone teams, capturing structured, real-time operational data and aggregating it across units. AI and machine learning can surface availability, status, and constraints — reducing cognitive overhead while preserving human decision authority.

2.5 One system, context-dependent expression

Across steady-state and tactical environments, Adyton’s products remain one unified product suite. The distinction is contextual, not architectural. As users move closer to the edge, workflows in Adyton become more immediate and coordination more time-sensitive. As they move back toward steady-state operations, workflows emphasize continuity, accountability, and long-term visibility.

Adyton Operations Kit (AOK)and Atlas provide continuity across the conflict spectrum. In steady-state environments, it structures readiness and accountability. At the tactical edge, it sustains coordination and situational awareness. Across all Adyton products, trust and decision quality are preserved as conditions change. Human–machine teaming reinforces this continuity by protecting human judgment under pressure — not replacing it.

3. Partner forces and public safety: Extending trust without fragmentation

Fifth Generation Warfare is coalition warfare by default. Partner forces, host-nation units, and public safety organizations are operational actors whether or not they are formally designated as such.

Atlas enables rapid extension of the same operational fabric to these actors through scoped trust, data visibility, and authority. “Partner force in a box” is not a separate system — it is Atlas operating with constrained policies and mission-specific boundaries.

Public safety agencies face many of the same conditions as military units in gray-zone conflict: degraded communications, incomplete information, and high-stakes decision-making. Adyton’s products do not militarize these organizations. They provide secure coordination and situational awareness when conventional systems fail.

4. The Infrastructure of Modern Defense

Fifth Generation Warfare is not a future scenario. It is shaping global security today.

We must embrace the concept of war that extends from the battlefield and permeates civilian spaces — financial systems, social media networks, economic capacity, transportation systems, and information information networks.

In this environment, fragmented systems fail first. Organizations that cannot maintain coordination and decision-making under degraded conditions cede advantage before kinetic conflict begins.

Adyton provides the infrastructure required for modern defense: a unified operational fabric that unifies partner force interoperability and human-machine operations together, enabling America and her allies to act clearly and decisively.

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I credit Shane Parrish’s Farnam Street for first introducing me to the idea of mental models — a conceptual idea of how a thing behaves.

Throughout my time in the military, most notably as a Special Forces veteran, I had a mental model of a patrol as an organism. The helicopter lands, and the organism flows off into the woodline, actively working to perceive its surroundings. The organism extends “tentacles” in the form of people — they walk point, they move into a wedge and slither across the terrain. The organism adapts as terrain and obstacles and threats arise.

Having been an engineer by trade for much of my life, I’ve seen how engineering has its own similar concepts and mental models. When anyone builds software, they have a tech stack — a series of components and technical design choices that form layers of dependencies, where higher layers depend on lower ones, where information flows from one layer to another.

The other key aspect of a technology stack is the conversion of information from one form to another as it flows between layers. A UI layer interacts with a business logic layer, which interacts with storage and persistence layers. As information moves, it changes. Information on a screen are pixels and optical energy; they were, at one point, electrons moving through transistors in a CPU to rest on a hard drive as magnetic notches on a spinning disk.

Power, too, is a stack and power, as an idea, can be expressed in a multitude of ways. What I’ve dubbed The Stack of Power — a mental model to understand how power manifests within modern nation states — is necessary to understand who wins the next great power struggle because modern conflict in its myriad forms includes and extends beyond violence.

The next fights (or should they be “contests”) will be determined by legitimacy and production, not just who has the biggest battleship.

1. Power is a stack

Power is the ability to reliably produce outcomes over time despite resistance. Power, like information or energy, can be stored. But power takes maintenance. Entropy is a fundamental law of the universe — the tendency for things to break down over time — so power dissipates over time like a car battery in the winter unless it is continually refreshed and replenished. Additionally, power, like information in a computer or hydrocarbon energy in a car gas tank, can be converted from one form to another. But in doing so, there’s a conversion loss, whether that’s the electricity required to run the computer or the heat from a combustion engine.

In defense circles, between our Armed Forces and our allies and the commercial entities supporting the national security mission, discussions about power — discussions I’ve often been involved in — manifest themselves, primarily, in the forms of military and industrial might. It’s atoms and bits as the form of power, it’s the pace of resupply as the first derivative.

It is a foundationally insufficient view of and expression of power.

To truly understand the mechanisms through which national power and national security can be bolstered or eroded, we need to evolve the conversation — to talk about power in the most fundamental way.

That is why I’ve crafted The Stack of Power for the nation state, which consists of four basic layers.

There are feedback loops across these layers. Higher layers reduce the need for lower layers. If people believe a rule is legitimate (L4), you need fewer enforcers (L1). At the same time, lower layers can prop up the higher layers, but at a cost — force can impose order, but if it hollows out legitimacy, a nation ends up using more force forever until the system breaks.

Power also “converts” across these layers, like how information “converts” into different forms across the software stack. Legitimacy of government converts into taxation of the citizens (L4 → L2). The capital raised from those taxes can convert into institutions as armies are built (L2 → L3). Those institutions can convert into force projection (L3 → L1).

There is an efficiency associated with these power conversions that can be thought of as an “exchange rate.” Legitimacy, for example, buys compliance cheaply, but coercion buys compliance expensively. These are the foundational concepts that underpin The Stack of Power.

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1.1 Examples through history

Prominent institutions throughout human history are the Stack of Power manifest.

1.2 The Church

The Catholic Church demonstrates that if you control legitimacy, you can steer politics without occupying territory. At its peak, the Church functioned as:

• A shared set of moral language (L4: Legitimacy)

• A global administrative network (L3: Coordination)

• A major landholder and economic actor (L2: Production)

• And occasionally, an enforcer via coercion through aligned rulers (L1: Coercion)

For most of its history, the Catholic Church hasn’t traditionally needed L1 (coercion and force) because it relied on L4 (legitimacy and narrative). It could define what was pious and lawful, shameful or sacred. It could then institutionalize those definitions (L3: institutions and coordination) through rituals and governance, which, in the Catholic Church manifest as services and congregations, respectively.

The lesson from the Church is that when L4 (legitimacy and narrative) are strong, an institution need not rely on physical coercion.

1.2 Labor Unions

Workers as individuals have limited power. Organized labor shows how coordination (L3) converts into power over capital and production (L2) and then into policy and norms (L1). The labor union serves as a coordination machine.

• It synchronizes the individual risk into a collective one: “We act together, so retaliation costs more.”

• Unions create negotiating discipline: “We speak with one voice.”

• They turn labor from a set of individuals into a strategic choke point that controls the means of production.

Like the Church, labor unions need not rely on L1 in the traditional sense (coercion and force) because it has L3 (institutions and coordination) as its expression of power. Labor unions can then create leverage through the synchronization of risks, asks, and action. That synchronization is the conceptual “Mass” from the Army’s Nine Principles of War.

1.3 Financial markets

Markets look “neutral,” but they are anything but. Financial markets exert disciplining power by constraining the set of options available to participants. When a government issues bonds (national debt) and borrows money to fund armies or wars, it is putting itself dependent on the market as a means to express its power through L1 (coercion & force). But if the interest rates rise and the borrowing costs increase, it may no longer be able to raise adequate debt, and the set of options the government has decreases. The Spanish Empire and its Army of Flanders demonstrates this cleanly.

Markets attempt to operate across the entire Stack of Power:

• L4 (legitimacy and narrative): Markets leverage confidence and credit in the form of belief that contracts and commitments will hold and that debt will be repaid.

• L3 (institutions and coordination): Institutions like stock exchanges, debt markets, and insurance marketplaces standardize exchange and pricing of risk.

• L2 (capital and production): Credit, liquidity, and investments are allocated to fund endeavors

• L1 (coercion and force): Capital exists and rising costs

The coercion here is not through physical force — it is through the free action in the market which changes the prices of another actor’s choices. When the bond market loses confidence in the value of a nation’s currency or the nation’s ability to manage inflation, or a lender (which could be the troops of the Army of Flanders lending their time) loses confidence that the debt will be repaid, it changes the cost of borrowing for the nation state. If an institution can raise the price of someone’s choices, it can govern them without ever “ruling” over them in the traditional sense.

2. The nation state as the full-stack power actor

The modern state is distinctive because it integrates the entire stack in the traditional senses — unique even from financial markets, which can appear to be a full stack actor. Nation states manifest themselves across The Stack of Power in the following ways:

• L4 Legitimacy: Law, civic identity, moral claims

• L3 Coordination: Bureaucracy, courts, agencies

• L2 Production: Taxation, industry, monetary and trade policy

• L1 Coercion: Police and military

Max Weber is attributed with the idea that the nation state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a territory. We tend to focus on the force in this idea. The word “legitimate” is equally important and it is the connection between the two that is most significant. Force without legitimacy is a recurring drain on power. Force with legitimacy is a backstop, not a dependency.

That’s why, when people think of national security as military and defense apparati through force, they are wrong.

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True national security is the protection of every layer of the Stack of Power against adversarial pressure internal or external; it is the ability of a society to continue to choose its own future, maintain its own sovereignty, to chart its path.

That definition of national security requires far more than territorial defense through force (L1), but also:

• The legitimacy to prevent internal fracturing (L4)

• The institutions to sustain alliances and a nation’s own credibility (L3)

• The mechanisms to protect critical domestic production (L2)

2.1 Military and defense

Critics may posit that no, national security is tantamount to a powerful military, to soldiers and tanks and weapons. The reason why that is not true — why national security extends to the entire Stack of Power — is because, to reliably, repeatedly, and at scale produce outcomes to resist an enemy through physical force, elements from each layer of the Stack of Power must work in tandem in a complex dependency chain. Such elements include:

• Trained personnel: Is your national population growing or shrinking? Are your people healthy?

• Consistent doctrine: Are your training institutions strong? Does it rapidly integrate and update learning?

• Intelligence: Do you have a truth seeking culture, predicated on facts not stories?

• Command and control: Is there clear authority and legitimacy of leaders? Are your troops disciplined and execute lawful orders?

• Logistics and sustainment: Can you fund your armies? Can you convert from capital to munition efficiently?

• Industrial production and innovation: Is your defense market attractive to participants? Does your country develop and attract engineering and scientific talent?

• Political authorization and legitimacy: Do people believe in what you are doing? Will they enlist? Will they support the politicians that aim to use force?

The soldiers and tanks and weapons are the visible and foundational force at the base layer (L1) of the Stack of Power — they are what constitutes force and coercion, the sharp end of the sword, not the blade.

In fact, these visible elements of militaries are wholly reliant on other layers of The Stack of Power. A military is not a standalone instrument; it is a downstream consumer of legitimacy, coordination, and production upon which it relies for its existence.

• Legitimacy determines if the taxable public will sustain costs, allies will trust commitments, and lenders will be repaid.

• Institutions determine whether a strategy turns into plans that turn into execution

• Capital and production determines whether the plans can be supplied, maintained and replenished.

If any one of these layers fail, so too will the ability of a nation state’s ability to exert force without a high cost or damage to itself. Any country can have elite personnel and powerful weapons; if the layers that constitute legitimacy, coordination, and production corrode, that nation will be strategically weak — legitimacy falls, institutions fight amongst themselves, production stutters, logistics fail, readiness drops, deterrence collapses, and war risk rises as the perceived costs of conflict fall for rivals.

Carl von Clausewitz’s basic point that war is a continuation of politics by other means highlights the dependency chain articulated above.

If the political aims aren’t coherent or sustainable (if they do not hold legitimacy), then even a tactical success can still become a strategic failure as national power is channeled through force and coercion to a futile end.

3. Modern conflict: Fighting across the stack

Now that we’ve established that the modern nation state must act across every layer in The Stack of Power, we can understand how a modern nation state’s full-stack strategy can enable it to defeat or defend against rivals.

It is plain to see that, to undermine a nation state’s national security, they need not defeat a military first — they can aim at the upper layers to make the military irrelevant, unaffordable, or politically unusable.

Modern conflict is typified by an increase in pressure applied in mixed forms like narrative shaping, cyber disruption, economic coercion, and proxy conflicts. Look no further than China’s well-documented history of grey zone activities — “coercive actions that are shy of armed conflict but beyond normal diplomatic, economic, and other activities”, Russia’s bots in the UK’s Brexit campaign, and Russia’s sponsorship of climate NGOs in Germany to drive energy dependence on Russian Gas Imports.

Such actions are not part of a separate domain, but are coordinated and integrated attacks against a nation’s national security when national security is defined across the entire Stack of Power.

Full stack coercion could look something like this: Misinformation campaigns degrade legitimacy, internal institutional conflict ensues, production shocks result in turn, and then, once deterrent credibility is weakened, threaten kinetic force.

If a nation does not have the power to defend each layer of the Stack of Power, it is exhibiting weakness. Military defense through coercion and force is a necessary component of power, but it is only a component.

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True national security extends across The Stack of Power to keep each layer resilient under pressure so L1 (coercion & force) is a last result, not a default mode of governance between nations.

It is through this lens — through the total Stack of Power — that the United States must view its national security strategy. Political authorization and legitimacy matter as much as trained personnel; logistics and sustainment for kinetic operations matter as much as industrial supply and innovation which matter as much as the strength of America’s monetary system.

Until we raise our gaze to include but extend beyond force and deterrence and coercion as the sole expressions of national security, America and her allies will remain at risk from near-peer adversaries who seek to readily disrupt the West by levying attacks at each layer in the Stack of Power.

This waste is not a relic of old habits but a symptom of broken tools. Despite decades of “transformation” and billions spent on “modern” systems, the Army still manages logistics in much the same way as Alexander or Napoleon or the Russians we love to malign, with planning based on manual counts, delayed updates, and a life-and-death hope that ground truth is not too different from whatever exists in the official record.

Hope is not a plan. Ask those Russians.

The Army doesn’t cling to clipboards out of nostalgia. It does so because, despite billions invested, its systems have never made it easy to capture ground truth. I’ve seen firsthand how commanders at every level are forced to choose between honesty and compliance, rewarding the illusion of readiness over reality. The result is a culture that erodes training time, corrodes trust, and drives out the best soldiers. Seventy million wasted hours per year is not inefficiency — it is a profound corrosion of combat power.

Digitizing property at the edge and capturing real-time ground-truth data where soldiers actually work is the single most transformative modernization initiative the Army could undertake. Forget AI, autonomy, or long-range precision fires. Automating even 80 percent of logistics billets and repurposing those hours would yield roughly 63,000 soldier-equivalents, four to five divisions of combat power, without recruiting a single new soldier.

In an era when our adversaries will always outnumber us, America’s advantage must be time and truth, not mass. To win the next war, the Army must turn pen and paper into ones and zeroes.

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0. Digitizing the edge is the single most transformative investment our military can make

I was catching up recently with a friend from British SBS, and he shared with me his favorite story from Ukraine, that there is this amazing restaurant in Kyiv called Kanapa. It’s one of the best restaurants in eastern Europe, and it’s nearly impossible to get a reservation. If you go back and look at their reservation book for February 26, 2022, two days after the Russian invasion was initiated, you will find an entry there for a “Mr V Putin, plus one.”

Whether the story is true doesn’t really matter. It captures the psychology of a military and a political system that believed its own PowerPoint. On paper, the Russian Army was ready. Its unit status reports, top to bottom, glowed green, commanders no doubt reporting “full combat capability.” In their mind, there was no reason why Mr. Putin should not treat himself to a nice dinner out as soon as their conquest was complete.

In real life, however, after the war started on February 24, instead of enjoying fancy dinners, the Russians were trying to explain to the rest of the world why their convoys were being abandoned on highways, fuel trucks captured intact, soldiers looting gas stations for lickies and chewies. The Russians didn’t just misjudge the Ukrainians. They misjudged themselves, and this was possible only because their entire military readiness system rewarded compliance over truth.

We should take no comfort in the contrast. Our own readiness dashboards are green by default, regardless of what is happening in our motor pools or supply warehouses where Army soldiers and leaders spend more time reconciling discrepancies between systems of record and their own ground truth than they spend on the jobs they signed up to do. The U.S. Army wastes seventy million hours every year on property accountability, a ritual of counting and re-counting gear that effectively turns entire brigades into glorified supply clerks.

That is the manpower equivalent of three combat divisions doing nothing but paperwork.

The deeper problem is not effort but illusion. Ask any battalion commander what percentage of equipment statuses in G-Army are accurate. Ask a company commander how many “mission-capable” vehicles are good to go. Ask them, if we had to roll tomorrow, how many soldiers by rank and by MOS are actually deployable. You’ll get two answers: the system’s truth and the commander’s truth.

They’re both probably wrong.

Every self-styled military historian loves to remind us that wars are won by logistics. They’ll point to Alexander’s campaign in Persia, Napoleon’s failure in Russia, Hitler’s collapse on the Eastern Front, the present-day Russian invasion of Ukraine. Of course, they’re right. In the age of horses, coal, and canned food, victory went to the army that could keep its wagons moving. In the twenty-first century, we’re still running logistics like Alexander or Napoleon, managing property with handwritten notes and hope. In any near-peer conflict, we will never win by mass. Demographics are destiny, and the math is not hard. Our adversaries will always have more people, more conscripts, more matériel. Our edge will come only from time and truth, from knowing what we have, where it is, and whether it works.

Digitizing property at the edge is not a staff efficiency project. It is the single most transformative investment our military can make. Forget drones, forget AI-powered predictive maintenance and decision support, forget the next generation of long-range precision fires. Until the Army can produce accurate, real-time data about its own gear, everything else is built atop a foundation of shifting sand.

1. The Army spends seventy million hours per year to get the wrong answer

1.1. Seventy million hours cannot possibly be the number

This is not a typo. It’s not supposed to be seven million or seventy thousand. The number is seventy million, and it’s actually a pretty conservative estimate.

First, we assumed 485,000 soldiers in the Army, excluding civilians or contractors, and then we assumed that, on average, every soldier spends at least twelve hours each month on inventories and related paperwork. We know that some soldiers (e.g. 92-series, PBOs, COs and their designees) spend much more, that a change of command or “FLIPL” can chew up hundreds of hours across multiple personnel, but if we use conservative estimates and assume twelve hours per soldier per month, then in aggregate we get to seventy million hours.

Seventy million is an absurd number. If we are again conservative in our assumptions and estimate that every soldier works, on average, two thousand hours per year, then seventy million hours of productivity is the equivalent of about 35,000 full-time soldiers. To put that into context, this is the equivalent of three divisions’ worth of soldiers, all chasing hand receipts and hunting down some variation on “headset, black, miscellaneous.” It would be as if we had gone to the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne and the 10th Mountain Division and said, “Nope. You guys don’t do infantry anymore. You guys do paperwork now.”

To take it a step further, if we convert those soldier hours into dollars and, again using simple and conservative estimates, assume that every soldier costs, on average, about $55 per hour, then that seventy million hours turns into almost $4B worth of productivity. Relative to the entire defense budget, maybe $4B doesn’t seem like a lot, but our military could do a lot with that money.

With $4B I could buy almost 200 brand new UH-60M helicopters, a brand new fleet almost as large as Poland’s entire helicopter force. With $4B, I could buy about 225 M1A2 SEPv3 tanks, which would give me a more sophisticated armor fleet than the whole of Western Europe (except maybe Germany). With $4B, I could buy 23,000 GMLRS missiles, which unfortunately would take Lockheed up to two years to manufacture.

This is how much time we waste. It is existentially stupid.

1.2. Despite seventy million hours of work, the Army still can’t figure out the right answer

The worst kept secret in the United States Army is that all our systems are wrong. I served, and I knew they were wrong. Vantage is wrong. IPPS-A is wrong. GCSS-A is wrong. They’re all wrong, and everyone knows they’re wrong.

Because of this, everything the Army thinks it knows about its personnel and equipment is, at best, an educated guess and, at worst, well, an uneducated guess. The Army does not know how many soldiers it has, much less how many rifles or radios or pickup trucks. The Army does not know how many operational tanks or helicopters it has or how many fully functional HMMWVs or HIMARS platforms.

None of this is any one person’s fault or the fault of any one program. All of the systems that might help the Army with the answers are populated with bad data. Those systems don’t fail because the developers were incompetent or the vendors were crooked. Palantir, who built Vantage, probably has more engineering talent than any other company in the world. I have personally spent time with the teams at places like CACI and BAH and LockheedMartin that support programs like IPPS-A and ADVANA and SOF GLSS. These are hard-working and patriotic professionals. All of these folks are doing the best they can.

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The systems fail, however, because the capabilities they are trying to deliver depend on fantasy inputs to an outdated architecture. Somehow we have yet to wrap our heads around the inescapable fact that if the data generated at the edge is wrong, then everything built on top will also be wrong. Data at the edge is wrong because those soldiers have neither the time nor the tools to enter data accurately. Because those inputs feed everything above them, every output — readiness reports, maintenance forecasts, personnel rosters — is wrong too. DPAS is wrong. LMP is wrong. LIS is wrong. If it ever gets built, EBS-C, the Army’s grand plan to unify its enterprise systems, will be wrong, too.

A monolithic architecture pumped full of bad data does not produce truth.

Now, imagine you’re a company commander. You have inherited this system, You know the systems are wrong. You know that you’ll get crushed if you report that your formation is not as “green” as it was when you took command, and, even if you were willing to assume that kind of career risk, you don’t actually have a reliable way of verifying the readiness of your own soldiers, trucks, tanks, or radios. So what do you do?

You do what commanders across the force have done for years: you game the numbers. You delay reporting a deadlined vehicle so it won’t tank your unit status report. You consolidate the order of repair parts under one serial number so the system thinks only a single tank is down, not six. You prioritize “pacer” items because the metrics overweight them, even if it means your command-and-control trucks sit broken in the motor pool. The system rewards you for paper strength, not combat strength, so that’s what you report.

Meanwhile, you and your leadership team and supply personnel have to figure out some way to document an accurate reflection of your world so that, when called upon to do the job you signed up for, you actually have a chance to make mission. This doesn’t get done with an enterprise system. It gets done with spreadsheets, three-ring binders overflowing with pdf printouts, clipboards stacked high with 2062s, handwritten notes in the margins.

When we need to know how much fuel is left, we send an E-4 with a clipboard to go inspect the blivets. When we need to know how many Patriots are left, we send another E-4 to go do a manual count because the software was never updated after we increased the capacity from four to sixteen. There are probably 1500-1800 company-sized elements in the Army. This is how logistics works in all of them.

And so we have created for ourselves this world of two truths. There is the systems truth, and then there is the observed truth. Commanders can’t admit how wide the gap has become between the systems truth and the observed truth, so they live in both worlds at once, feeding the official numbers upward while keeping a shadow version of reality on their laptops and clipboards and the little green notebooks in their cargo pockets. Over time, up and down the chain of command, those two realities diverge. The official one persists in the various systems of record — aggregated, immaculate and wrong. The observed one is messy but closer to real.

From a reporting standpoint, the delta between system truth and observed truth is why, time and again, over decades, the Department of War has never once passed a financial audit. Not once. Not ever. GAO and DoD IG reports read like a broken record:

• In 2025, GAO found that contractor-acquired property wasn’t even consistently recorded, leaving billions in gear essentially off the books (GAO-25-106868).

• In 2023, GAO reported that DoD was sitting on billions in excess, obsolete, or underutilized spare parts because the data to manage them was wrong (GAO-23-106136).

• In 2019, GAO highlighted $90B in secondary inventory plagued by mismanagement and excess stocks (GAO-19-493).

• As recently as 2024, DoD IG flagged that 23,000 pieces of government-furnished property in Kuwait were missing from Army records — not in wartime chaos, but in daily operations (DODIG-2022-106).

• Congress’s own researchers are blunt: the Department cannot credibly claim readiness while its books are so unreliable (CRS Report R46067).

The hard truth is that digitizing the edge is the only reform that makes the rest of modernization possible. By digitizing the edge, we give every company commander and supply sergeant the ability to capture accurate, real-time property data, making it easier for soldiers to do the right thing and narrowing the delta between systems truth and observed truth, rebuilding trust in the numbers that underpin readiness, maintenance, and even personnel systems. You can’t fix G-Army or IPPS-A or Vantage until you fix the data that feeds them. Another ERP won’t fix it. AI won’t fix it. Sensors won’t fix it. And without a resilient solution, the Army will continue to spend billions getting to the wrong answer more quickly.

Aside from the audit question, the real-world implications of these two truths are much more dangerous. The tragedy is that we plan wars based on the first while relying on the second to win them and come home. We are the finest fighting force in the world — and it’s not particularly close — and we keep track of our gear with color-coded highlighters and sticky notes. We do not actually know how bad it is, how big the delta is between those truths, and history suggests we won’t know until it’s too late.

Before Russia rolled into Ukraine, its own army almost certainly looked “green” across the board on readiness reports. On paper, brigades were no doubt full, tanks operational, all units ready to march on Kyiv. When the fighting started, however, the façade shattered. Vehicles broke down on the march, logistics trains froze on the highways, soldiers abandoned equipment that was either not operational or not maintainable or both. Commanders discovered that the rosy projections in their readiness reports bore no resemblance whatsoever to the truth on the ground.

We love to point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a kind of exemplar for how an overmatched, outgunned, outnumbered fighting force might make a stand against a superior formation. Our soldiers are far better trained, far more well-equipped than the Ukrainians. When it comes to supply and logistics, however, we are much more like the Russians than we would care to admit.

“Green” on a unit status report does not mean green in real life. It means that a salty old E7 helped a wet-behind-the-ears O1 figure out how to do the paperwork correctly. Paper readiness rewards deception; real readiness rewards honesty. Ignoring ugly truths around poor leadership and a culture of fear, what happens when militaries believe their own spreadsheets? Russia did, right up until they didn’t.

2. When the tail wags the tooth, Army culture dies

2.1 When the tail wags the tooth, lethality becomes an afterthought

I applaud the extent to which the current administration has made a priority of re-establishing fundamental lethality as the cornerstone of Army culture.

The Pentagon loves the word. Everything is supposed to make the force “more lethal.” Ask five generals to define it and you’ll get ten answers. Here’s one that works: lethality is the ability of a unit to close with and destroy the enemy.

To oversimplify, that requires three main ingredients:

• Manpower in the right mix. Combat arms, not cooks or clerks.

• Training time. On the range and in the field, not PowerPoints and Excel.

• Equipment that actually works. Green in the motor pool, not just in Vantage.

By that definition, seventy million wasted hours a year isn’t an inefficiency. It is corrosion, rot, a withering away.

Every hour spent chasing a hand receipt is an hour not spent on mission training. A rifle company burning a week reconciling radios and NVGs isn’t on the range. An aviation battalion tied up closing out ULLS-A maintenance actions isn’t flying. A reconnaissance troop scrambling to meet a Unit Status Report window isn’t rehearsing scout-screen maneuvers, conducting weapons qualifications, or holding live-fire exercises. Give the force those hours back and you buy millions of extra reps, miles run and doors kicked and rounds downrange. Instead, we funnel that time into three-ring binders and manila folders.

Even the Army’s premier training events have become hostage to the same dynamic. A Combat Training Center rotation — JRTC in Louisiana, NTC in California, or JMRC in Germany — is supposed to be the pinnacle of collective training: the place where a brigade tests itself against a thinking enemy under field conditions. In practice, getting there is half the battle. Units spend months closing maintenance faults, reconciling property books, and clearing digital discrepancies before they can even load a vehicle on a rail car. Commanders joke that the hardest part of JRTC isn’t fighting “in the box,” but rather surviving the paperwork that gets you there.

The irony is that the Army’s best warfighting exercise has become a year-long administrative marathon ending in a four-week sprint. A brigade might spend six months preparing for thirty days of fighting. The bureaucracy surrounding readiness has swallowed the practice of readiness itself. We’ve built a system where we train harder to report readiness than to achieve it.

And that’s only the visible cost. The invisible cost is the quiet re-engineering of the force itself around administrative maintenance. The Department’s acquisition and contracting workforce now tops 150,000, while the Army and Marine Corps together probably field only about 75,000 infantry soldiers — the people who actually close with and destroy the enemy. Within the Army, roughly one in five active-duty soldiers serves in a logistics or administrative billet. Comparable commercial supply-chain organizations operate with 5–10 percent of headcount in back-office functions; ours runs closer to 25 percent.

The inefficiency is not confined to the uniformed ranks. Behind every rifle company stands a bureaucracy that dwarfs it. DoD employs about 760,000 civilians and contracts with another 700,000 private workers — nearly one for every active-duty service member. The Army’s G-1 data show the civilian back office has grown 25 percent since 2001 while active-duty end strength shrank 7 percent. We are literally adding managers while losing fighters.

And the architecture keeps metastasizing. The 2,300-system tangle identified in 2018 has barely shrunk, even after billions poured into consolidation efforts. Since 2017 the Department has spent another $5 billion on “audit readiness,” still failing every audit. Up to forty percent of the budget now goes to management and support — a larger share than in the years after 9/11 when the Army was fighting two wars. A bureaucracy this large doesn’t serve warfighters; it exists to feed itself.

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Training calendars tell the same story. RAND’s Non-Deployable Time and Administrative Burden in the U.S. Army found that company-grade officers spend 40–60 percent of the work week on administrative tasks instead of tactical leadership. GAO’s Army Readiness: Better Measures Needed estimated that inventories and reconciliations cost units three to five training days per quarter. A 2023 DoD IG audit determined that one in four administrative hours is consumed re-entering the same data into multiple systems. Even the best-run battalions are losing the equivalent of a full month of training every year just to remain compliant.

This isn’t lethality. It’s bureaucracy wearing camouflage. When we tell soldiers their mission is to win wars but structure their workdays like a regional insurance office, the outcome is predictable: training time collapses, initiative withers, and the sharp edge of the force dulls itself on its own paperwork.

2.2 When Lethality becomes an afterthought, culture erodes from within

All that wasted time doesn’t just dull readiness. It changes what the Army values. When the calendar fills with compliance tasks, the culture follows.

Every wasted hour comes out of someone’s hide. Soldiers join to shoot, fly, drive, and fight, not to chase signatures on DA 2062s. When they spend weekends reconciling spreadsheets instead of training or seeing family, they don’t re-enlist. When commanders are judged on compliance rather than competence, they stop telling the truth about readiness. That’s how a bureaucracy eats a profession.

The results are visible in recruiting and retention. The Army has missed its recruiting goal by about 15,000 soldiers two years in a row, lowering future targets just to preserve appearances. Voluntary separations are up 14 percent in three years, and retention among mid-career NCOs is down roughly 10 percent since 2019. The service’s own Why They Leave survey lists the culprits: administrative burden, lack of meaningful work, poor work-life balance, and loss of trust in leadership. RAND’s officer-retention studies reach the same conclusion, that officers are leaving not because they fear real combat but because they’re exhausted by clerical combat.

Trust in leadership is eroding just as fast. Army climate surveys show confidence in senior leaders has fallen from around 65 percent a decade ago to barely 50 percent today. Less than half of enlisted soldiers believe their feedback leads to change, and 41 percent think favoritism or politics influence promotions more than merit. Bureaucracy doesn’t just waste time. It teaches people that honesty is dangerous and that merit is irrelevant.

Administrative drag has become a health hazard. The average soldier works 59–63 hours a week, according to RAND’s Soldier Tempo and Fatigue study, much of it on non-mission tasks. The Army’s risk-reduction reports show over 60 percent of soldiers reporting chronic fatigue or lack of sleep tied to administrative workload. The Army’s suicide rate sits around 36 per 100,000 — more than twice the civilian average — and the Health Promotion Office cites workload and loss of purpose among the top stressors. This is what happens when lethality becomes an afterthought: people stop seeing the point.

The Army is supposed to be hard. We all signed up for hard. A lot of us also signed up precisely because we did not want a job driving a desk, and in this context, when we ask soldiers in survey after survey why they got out, they do not complain that the job itself was hard but rather point to meaningless work and loss of trust as their reasons for leaving. When lethality becomes an afterthought, paperwork becomes the profession. When paperwork becomes the profession, the best people walk. A trained NCO can earn more managing logistics for Amazon, and no one there asks him to enter the same data three times in three different systems.

This is not a culture problem that can be fixed with slogans or leadership summits. It’s a design problem. The systems that govern daily life — G-Army, IPPS-A, Vantage — are built to reward box-checking and punish initiative. They make truth-telling career risk and self-deception career insurance. The longer we tolerate that, the less lethal we become.

When lethality becomes an afterthought, culture dies. And once culture dies, no amount of money, technology, or motivational posters will bring it back. What will bring it back is something simpler and far harder: respecting the soldier’s time. A nation that values its soldiers’ lives enough to send them to war should value their hours enough not to waste them.

3. How to add five divisions of tooth without recruiting a single new soldier

The reforms that matter most aren’t new weapons or doctrines. They’re the ones that give time back to soldiers and truth back to commanders. The math is not hard. The Army maintains an entire MOS series (the 92-series logisticians, property book officers, and supply clerks) whose work keeps the enterprise moving. These are capable, professional soldiers who do exactly what we ask of them. The problem isn’t them; it’s that we need far more of them than we should. In a digital logistics system, a supply section of five could do the work that today requires twenty. The payoff isn’t saving soldiers from their jobs. Rather, it’s redistributing billets to point those soldiers toward combat arms.

Right now, roughly 8 percent of the active Army, about 35,000 billets, is dedicated to logistics accounting and property management. If automation and edge-level digitization reduced that demand by even 80 percent, the Army could reassign nearly 28,000 soldiers to fighting formations. Add the 70 million hours now lost each year to manual inventory work — the equivalent of 35,000 full-time soldiers — and you recover about 63,000 soldier-equivalents of combat power: four to five divisions.

No new recruits. No new bases. Just truth and time returned to the force.

That kind of gain is not a thought experiment — it’s the scale of advantage the United States will need to stay credible against nations that win by mass. China’s People’s Liberation Army fields nearly a million ground troops and adds another 700,000 paramilitary reservists. Russia’s ground force, even after losses in Ukraine, numbers more than half a million. The active U.S. Army sits just under 450,000. We will never win a headcount competition. Our edge has always been time to truth — the speed with which we can sense, decide, and act. Currently, however, our only digital advantage over the Wehrmacht is Microsoft Excel. Excel was written in 1985.

Whatever advantages we have historically enjoyed are shrinking. Today, DoD’s own Joint All-Domain C2 assessments put our logistics-data latency — the time between an event in the field and its reflection in a system — at hours to days. The target is seconds. Each day of lag is a day of lost deterrence. A near-peer who can see real readiness faster will always decide faster. If digitizing property at the edge cuts that latency by even one order of magnitude, it’s worth a hundred new aircraft.

The opportunity cost is visible in training and sustainment. A typical Brigade Combat Team logs 18–20 training days per quarter. RAND’s analysis shows that inventories and administrative cycles erase three to five of those days. Reclaiming that time across the force is the equivalent of adding an extra month of live-fire training every year — without extending deployments or raising costs. Multiply that across 31 BCTs and you buy back the combat proficiency of a small army.

Digitizing the edge does more than make the Army faster; it makes modernization coherent. Every major investment we’re betting on — AI, autonomy, precision fires, even recruiting analytics — depends on clean, timely data. You can’t build intelligent logistics on dumb inputs. Fix the edge first, and every subsequent technology starts working as advertised. Ignore it, and we’ll keep spending billions to get the wrong answer faster.

The math is simple. The imperative is not. Eliminating analog property processes and automating the bulk of logistics billets yields roughly 63,000 soldier-equivalents of combat power, five divisions’ worth of readiness, deterrence, and depth. It is the cheapest, fastest way to strengthen the Army and, by extension, the credibility of American power.

Time and truth

In 2022, Russia booked its reservation in Kyiv because it believed its own slides. We don’t need to make the same mistake to share the same weakness. Every “green” dashboard, every spreadsheet that passes for truth, pushes us a little closer to our own Kanapa moment.

Time and truth are the only advantages that scale without cost. Every hour we give back to a soldier compounds in training, retention, and deterrence. Every byte of accurate data multiplies the value of every other system we own. Digitizing logistics isn’t a staff reform; it’s how the United States preserves the edge that has defined its military for seventy-five years.

Wars have always been won by logistics, but not by this kind of logistics. Alexander marched on foot. Napoleon rode horses. Hitler relied on rail. We rely on Excel. Excel is brilliant software, but it’s forty years old. If that remains the backbone of the most sophisticated army in history, we have confused automation with transformation.

A spreadsheet is not a strategy.

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Our adversaries will always have us outnumbered. Our advantage has to be precision — knowing, faster and more accurately than anyone else, what we have and where it is. In the industrial age, armies maneuvered across geography. In the information age, they maneuver across time. The decisive movement today is not the speed of a tank but the speed of truth — how quickly accurate data moves through the force. Awareness — the ability to move truth faster than the enemy — has become the twenty-first-century form of maneuver. That awareness turns information into lethality.

Digitizing property at the edge isn’t glamorous, but it’s decisive. It frees commanders to train, maintain, and fight instead of reconcile. It ensures that readiness slides finally match the motor pool. No ERP, no AI, no sensor network or precision weapon can deliver greater or faster return on investment, because every one of them still depends on the quality of the data beneath it. Fix the edge first, and everything else starts working as advertised. Ignore it, and we’ll keep spending billions to get the wrong answer faster. Done right, digitizing the edge guarantees that the next war, when it comes, will be won by soldiers, not lost in spreadsheets1.

My co-founder (, who you’ll hear from frequently in this newsletter) and I get it — punchy, tweet-length statements about building or rearming and lethality are easy to write. It’s easy to say we need to have more drones and deploy AI. Few on the side of Western democracies are anti-building or against enhancing the lethality of America’s forces and those of her allies.

It’s much harder to do these things (if they were easy to do, they would be done!) because, in part, meaningful interrogation of the underlying challenges that exist between saying a thing and getting it done remain largely missing from the defense tech discourse.

How should we expand the definition of modern warfare, and how does that impact how the Pentagon operations and technologies it procures? Why does the underlying technological architecture behind the enterprise systems behind the warfighter fail, and how do we fix it? How can the Department of War and Ministries of Defence improve the balance between innovation and hierarchy when these two vital concepts are so often at odds with one another? What are programmatic steps Militaries can take today to improve how it buys and deploys software? How do shifting geopolitical priorities impact defense from Europe to Taiwan, and everywhere in between?

Unpacking these issues can’t be done in a Tweet, and empty platitudes help no one.

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