Episode Notes That is GEN Stanley McChrystal's dream image of the totality of the COIN problem in Afghanistan. What a mess. It appears the West just can't get counterinsurgency right. I talk about some of the framework ideas that would be good lessons learned for...
Episode Notes I discuss the complex adaptive system that is war that Clausewitz categorically identified as "friction" in the nineteenth century. We'll examine what chaos and complexity has to do with conflict, why it is inevitable and why wars are won by the least...
Episode Notes Despite trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths, the West has nothing to show for the counterinsurgency campaigns it has waged. Despite the enormous industry and vast intellectual and historical apologetics combine, the wasteland is...
Episode Notes In this episode, I make the case that insurgencies are antifragile and that counterinsurgencies are fragile for the most part; we discuss the concepts, examine historical and contemporary examples and set the stage for practitioners and scholars to...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not suffer fools gladly. Author of several books including The Black Swan and Antifragile, Taleb is known for his incendiary personality almost as much as his brilliant work in probability theory. Readers of his very active Medium page will...
Over and over, U.S. government officials and their mainstream media allies called Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine an “unprovoked attack.” The slogan became so overused that people began to ask the obvious question: Why do they protest so much? In Provoked: How...
