COL John Boyd was a singular mind in military matters and had a terrific impact on shattering some of the myths that have made the American military art since 1945 so awful and mired in defeat. Boyd was a heavy intellectual lifter in innovative ideas and one of the design inspirations for the F16. Like COL Douglas Macgregor, he was such a maverick, they had no chance of getting into the august flag ranks because they possessed innovative martial imagination, a mastery of their craft and did not care to spend their professional waking hours in Machiavellian whispers and palace intrigue. It is...

Me contemplating the Herculean task before me... I will be pausing Chasing Ghosts from its fortnightly cadence of issuance for the remainder of the year. I am taking the time to regroup and focus on the new occasional podcast, WarNotes: A Conflict Podcast as a companion podcast focusing on conventional conflict and strategic thought. My first WarNotes series will be a comprehensive survey of how to fix the broken, shattered and most expensive paper tiger in the history of the world, the US military complex. The Fixing Fight Club series will be weekly until I finish the survey. I think the...

The South African National Defense Force (SANDF) is in tatters. The SA Navy is also in the hazard. One glaring example is the MTU 1163 propulsion engine. Grimms was paid R55 million for a W6 engine overhaul, yet the engine has still not undergone a dyno test or no measure reports are made available as per OEM specifications. Ironically, Grimms claims to operate the largest dyno testing facility in Sub-Saharan Africa. The engine, sarcastically dubbed the “22-ton anchor,” is prominently displayed on their shop floor. For context, a brand-new 1163 engine at that time would have cost just R32...

Russians play chess and the West plays Naked Twister. ICBMs and IRBMs have been hyper-sonic since the 1950s. Replace the warhead with a terrestrial-launched Rod from God and you have a very effective non-nuclear option to reach anywhere in the northern hemisphere with no nuclear fallout at terminus. The west evens refers to the Soviet/Russian SS-18 as Satan. Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

COL Douglas Macgregor shows the stark choices ahead a defense establishment in the US and the west that is inexorably grinding to a halt in effectiveness and incompetence. The incoming President has three choices: 1. Allow service bureaucracies or external events to drive outcomes, resulting in few or no savings. This is akin to letting the ship drift aimlessly, at the mercy of the storm. 2. Make marginal adjustments to the defense status quo, avoiding conflicts but achieving little change and only modest savings. This is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—it won’t save the...