The Mechanics of Asymmetric Exemption

The Incoherent Alliance: The Left and Radical Islam

One of the most confusing and baffling alliances today is that between the left and radical Islam. They should be ideological enemies, considering that Islam, especially the radical strain that follows Sharia to the letter, does not believe in gay rights, women’s rights, freedom of speech, or many of the other Western Enlightenment ideals that the left claims to be defending from conservatives in their own country. So the real question becomes: why does Islam get a pass, but the left’s own neighbors do not? These are the neighbors who share the church, tradition, culture, schools, hospitals, grocery stores, and many other community spaces with them for as long as they have been alive. Yet there has been a growing notion that because white people are not considered “diverse,” they are inherently evil and bear the inherited sin of colonization. The deeper question then becomes: does a perceived injustice from hundreds of years ago, inherited by the modern West today, somehow trump the actual atrocities being committed by the left’s allies, atrocities substantially worse than the colonization they claim to oppose?

Edward Said and the Origins of the Narrative

If we want to trace this back to where it all began, we would have to start with Edward Said, a Columbia professor who grew up in fabulous privilege as the son of another Columbia professor in the United States of America. He wrote a book called Orientalism that purports that the West is guilty of putting all of the Orient into a single box and treating it as monolithic, a position that stems from the idea that Western academics believe themselves superior to those of the East. The irony is striking, considering Said himself was a Western academician who grew up in the heart of Western academia. What authority, then, did he have to speak for both the West and the East? Is he inherently an Eastern scholar because of his Lebanese descent, or is he actually a Western scholar, given that it is the culture he was raised in? It seems he wanted to have his cake and eat it too, yet no one else was permitted the same perspective.

Even though Said was neither a historian nor an archaeologist, he made claims as if he were and dismissed those who had actually conducted rigorous research into Middle Eastern studies. Like Howard Zinn, the left flocked to his book for the sole reason that it offers a harsh critique of Western ideology. They do not care about the facts; they care about the rhetoric that casts the West as the villain of history.

The Problem of Biased Sources

What is even more ironic is that Said relies on primary sources from Muslim authors who are not permitted to criticize Islam. As a result, these sources will always present a rose-colored view of Islamic history, absent the kind of self-critical analysis that characterizes Western academia’s engagement with its own past. This means the West actually has the capacity to criticize itself, while Islam does not.

It does not make sense to take Muslim scholars entirely at their word, given that they operate under an enforced bias. The West, for instance, can genuinely grapple with the behavior of its colonial period and the atrocities committed therein. Islam does no such thing, even though it effectively eliminated the Coptic Christian population of the Middle East and expanded as far as Tours in France and Vienna, Austria. Islamic scholars will invariably frame this as a glorious expansion of the faith. During that expansion and colonization by Islamic forces, acts were committed far more atrocious than anything perpetrated during the Western colonial period. So why are they not held to the same standard of accountability that leftists demand of the West?

The Left’s Historical Ignorance

The primary reason is that the left is genuinely uneducated about history. Its adherents are content to receive talking points, distortions, and propaganda from non-Western sources aimed solely at tearing down the Enlightenment ideals upon which Western civilization was built. What is further ironic is that Muslims can flee to the West, but Christians cannot flee to the East, not if they value their safety, for fear of persecution, violence, and even genocide.

Increasingly, the left views the West as an open-borders society where participation is a right rather than a privilege. Because of this, we have seen radical Islam infect Western societies with an ideology fundamentally at odds with Western values. This is why you see women walking the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, or Birmingham, England, in full burqas and hijabs. We are importing Third World cultural and religious frameworks into the freest societies ever constructed.

The Neuroscience of Empathy and Its Political Consequences

So why does this dynamic persist? Consider a study conducted in the mid-2000s at University College London. Men and women were placed in MRI machines and had their brain activity monitored while watching two people play a prisoner’s dilemma game. One player was identified as a cheater; the other was playing fairly. Each player had a shock device attached, and whenever they lost, they received a shock. When the fair player was shocked, both men and women showed activity in the brain’s empathy centers, indicating that both sexes view fairness as a positive ideal.

However, when the cheating player was shocked, women showed the same empathetic response they had shown for the fair player. Men, by contrast, showed no such activity in the empathy center. What did activate in men was the region of the brain associated with pleasure. This suggests that women are more inclined to apply emotional judgment when determining punishment, even when a wrongdoer has caused harm to an innocent party, preferring leniency even when it is unwarranted.

How This Applies to Cultural Infiltration

How does this connect to the broader argument? It means that even when a society is objectively backward and hostile to Western values, women will be inclined to view that society as a victim, simply because it lacks the same social dominance as the host population. This dynamic becomes clearer when one examines shifting demographics in academia: women now represent approximately 60% of college enrollees, while men account for roughly 40%, and that gap continues to widen. Women increasingly dominate not only the humanities but also business and STEM programs.

This means that rather than providing a well-grounded, rigorous, and logically disciplined education, universities are increasingly becoming vehicles for propagandistic and polemical rhetoric that does not teach students to think but instead relies on rote memorization to advance an agenda. It is one reason more men are opting out of college entirely, viewing it as a six-figure piece of paper that merely certifies the memorization of propaganda.

Reforming Academia

To reverse this, we need to return to earlier academic curricula and standards, before the infiltration of a feminist, Islamist, and radical left agenda that turned universities from institutions of free inquiry into institutions of ideological enforcement. This means that humanities departments across all universities need to be fundamentally restructured around patriotic, Western-values-affirming scholarship that rewards free speech and challenging ideas rather than punishing them. Even so, this would be only a partial remedy.

Judicial Accountability

We see this same pattern of misplaced empathy in our court systems. The most direct way to address it is to hold judges accountable for their decisions. For example, consider a recent case in Seattle in which a judge deemed a man mentally unfit to stand trial after he shot a woman and her children in their car for no apparent reason, and subsequently released him to a mental institution from which he could be discharged at any time, at the discretion of the staff. If that man were to so much as steal a glass of water from a restaurant, the judge should be held legally liable for every crime he commits from that point forward, up to and including murder. In theory, this could expose a judge to trial for multiple murders carrying the death penalty. Only consequences of that magnitude will restore a justice system in which the public feels genuinely safe.

Voting Standards and Civic Investment

We should also implement knowledge requirements for voting, not merely basic civics, but an understanding of Western cultural ideals and what distinguishes the West as the most open and free civilization in history. A voter who actively seeks to undermine foundational rights, such as the First Amendment, as is currently happening in California with the STOP Act, should be ineligible to cast a ballot. It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers did not extend suffrage universally, and that this was arguably a feature rather than a flaw: those who voted were directly invested in the continuation of America’s founding ideals. History views this as prejudice, but in practice, it helped produce the greatest nation in the world, not only in terms of military and economic power, but in terms of freedom of speech and protection from government tyranny.

The Paradox of Unlimited Democracy

Paradoxically, the more we allow unconstrained democracy to determine the country’s direction, the more we watch our freedoms erode. It is only those who genuinely believe in and love the United States of America, its founding principles, its history, and its culture, who should be voting and holding office. It is therefore troubling that figures like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib hold federal office. In a country that authentically values freedom, their platforms would find no constituency. Unfortunately, our institutions have been steadily reshaped by a leftist framework that treats every culture, every religion, and every set of values as equally valid. That is simply not true. While human beings may be equal before God, they are not equal in intellect, values, or outcomes, and if people are not equal in those respects, then societies and cultures certainly are not. It is precisely the cultures that are antithetical to Western ideals that we should be most cautious about importing. They have their own nations, their own land, their own people. Importing Third World problems into the most advanced civilization on Earth serves no one.

The Call to Action

What remains is action, action to implement these difficult but necessary measures that will restore America to its rightful place, not merely as the world’s leading power, but as the world’s leading culture: one defined by freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and the freedom to use both to defend against a tyrannical government.

Some will read this and call it extremist, alt-right, or fascistic. But as recently as thirty years ago, these were broadly understood truths in American society, held by both Democrats and Republicans alike.

Post 1 of this series opened with a framework. War is always a violent, political act, subject to friction and chance. The distinction between war’s nature — timeless, unchanging, irreducible — and war’s character — historically variable, technology-shaped, domain-specific — is the most important analytical tool the strategist possesses. Every generation that mistakes a change in character for a change in nature pays for the confusion.

Eleven posts later, the world this series has described looks like this: contested orbital high ground being attacked by both kinetic and non-kinetic means on a daily basis. A war in Ukraine where an $800 drone has made the $10 million tank effectively obsolete on the open battlefield. A Middle East theater where the strategic question is not whether sophisticated defenses can intercept missiles but whether they can afford to do so indefinitely. A Chinese military doctrine specifically designed to blind and deconstruct the American reconnaissance-strike complex before a kinetic shot is fired. Expired arms control treaties. No verification protocols. Conditions for catastrophic miscalculation that have rarely been more structurally favorable.

And underneath all of it, unchanged: war is always an instrument of policy. The political object always reasserts itself. Friction and chance remain inescapable.

This final post applies the series’ framework to the world it has described, and asks what wise strategy actually demands.

The Net Assessment of the Current Competition

Applying the methodology of Post 2 — examining both sides simultaneously, hunting asymmetries, thinking in decades — what does the U.S.-China military competition actually look like?

The United States holds genuine strengths that its strategic discourse habitually underestimates. Its commercial space sector is the most capable on earth: Starlink alone has demonstrated what proliferated LEO constellations can do in wartime conditions, and the broader commercial launch and satellite manufacturing industry is advancing faster than any government program. Its AI development capacity, concentrated in companies that are beginning to engage seriously with national security applications, is globally unmatched. Its alliance network — NATO in Europe, treaty allies in the Pacific — provides aggregated industrial capacity, geographic access, and burden-sharing that no adversary can replicate. And its existing satellite architecture, however exquisite and therefore vulnerable, provides ISR and communications capabilities that underpin every operational advantage the joint force currently enjoys.

The weaknesses are equally real. Organizational adaptation — the fourth component of every successful military revolution — is conspicuously absent at institutional scale. Pentagon acquisition cycles measure in years and decades; the Ukraine drone war measures in days. The civil-military talent gap that Karp identified — the generation best positioned to build AI weaponry is also the most hesitant to do so — remains only partially bridged. Doctrine is lagging technology by a margin that is difficult to measure precisely but impossible to ignore.

China’s strengths are equally real and equally underappreciated in American strategic discourse. Doctrinal coherence is the most important: three decades of focused intellectual development have produced a warfighting framework — intelligentized warfare, systems destruction warfare, multi-domain precision warfare — that is specifically calibrated against the American way of war. The PLA’s willingness to integrate civil and military development sectors has produced an AI capability that, while not uniformly superior to American AI, is being deliberately applied to military problems at an institutional scale the U.S. has not yet matched. Long-horizon planning — the 2045 space dominance goal is not a slogan; it is a resource allocation framework — enables investments that produce results over decades rather than budget cycles.

China’s weaknesses are genuine and strategically consequential. Organizational rigidity at tactical and operational echelons, historically a persistent PLA problem, means that even superior doctrine can fail in execution against adaptive adversaries. The logistics challenge of a Taiwan amphibious operation at scale remains formidable. And the democratic deficit in feedback loops — the absence of the iterative, bottom-up adaptation that Ukraine’s frontline drone operators have demonstrated — is a structural disadvantage that may matter enormously in a sustained conflict.

The asymmetry that creates both the greatest opportunity and the greatest danger is this: China has doctrine and organizational intent; the U.S. has technology and commercial dynamism. Neither side has fully converted its advantages into a complete four-component RMA. The competition will be decided by whichever side closes its gaps first.

Where the Four-Component Framework Stands

Post 3 established that military revolutions require all four components: technology, systems, concepts, and organizational adaptation. Post 11 applied the diagnostic to the next RMA. Here is the honest assessment of where each side stands.

Technology: No clear dominant advantage. The U.S. commercial AI sector leads in foundational model capability. China leads in certain applied AI domains relevant to military operations and is closing rapidly. Both sides have access to drone technology that is effectively commoditized. Commercial launch capability is bifurcating into a U.S.-commercial-led and China-state-led competition that will take years to resolve.

Systems: The U.S. has existing architecture that works and is being stress-tested in real conflicts. China is building faster. The PLA’s satellite constellation has doubled in ISR coverage since 2019. Its counterspace arsenal — co-orbital systems, directed energy weapons, cyber capabilities against satellite ground segments — is the most rapidly developing component of the military balance.

Operational concepts: This is where the gap is most visible and most consequential. China has intelligentized warfare. The U.S. has Joint All-Domain Command and Control — a program with a compelling concept and a troubled acquisition history. The lesson from Post 3 bears repeating: the U.S. military was at the forefront of developing the technologies of the precision-guided revolution. Soviet theoreticians were at the forefront of theorizing its consequences [1]. That inversion is potentially repeating itself, with Chinese theoreticians developing intelligentized warfare doctrine against American technologies.

Organizational adaptation: Neither side has fully executed. The U.S. has the more acute problem because its existing organizational structures — service branches, acquisition bureaucracies, requirements processes — are optimized for a world that no longer exists. Large organizations are not simply slow to change; they are designed not to change [2]. The commercial defense sector — Anduril, Palantir, SpaceX, and others — is performing the organizational adaptation that the Pentagon cannot perform for itself. Whether that adaptation can be integrated into joint force structure at the required pace and scale is the open strategic question.

The Deterrence Stability Problem: Managing the Most Dangerous Environment in Decades

Post 7 established the structural conditions for catastrophic miscalculation: no verification protocols, space assets underpinning nuclear C2 under daily non-kinetic attack, adversary doctrines calibrated to operate below the armed attack threshold, and a ‘left of launch’ paradigm creating pre-delegation incentives on the adversary side.

The net assessment methodology demands that this be stated plainly: the conditions for catastrophic miscalculation have rarely been more structurally favorable. This is not alarmism. It is a diagnostic finding that should shape every element of American grand strategy.

Krepinevich identifies one partial solution in the domain competition itself: shifting the fight into new domains, while avoiding direct kinetic attacks on a rival great power’s homeland, may also reduce the risk of the war escalating to nuclear Armageddon [3]. The space and cyber domains offer the possibility of competitive interaction below the level of armed conflict — a kind of permanent low-intensity competition that is costly but manageable. This is exactly what Russia’s non-kinetic counterspace operations represent from Moscow’s perspective: calibrated escalation that imposes costs without triggering a response.

The management of this environment requires two things that American strategic culture finds uncomfortable. First, clarity about what is and is not a red line in space — because without it, every non-kinetic attack is interpreted through the adversary’s framework rather than our own. Second, some form of communication about nuclear-adjacent space operations — not arms control in the New START sense, which is gone, but operational transparency measures that reduce the probability that a routine commercial satellite maneuver is interpreted as preparation for a disarming strike.

Neither of these things is easy. Both are more important than any specific weapons program.

Competition Is Not Conflict: The Grand Strategy Frame

Mahnken establishes the foundational distinction: competition is not the same as conflict. Competition lies midway on a spectrum whose ends are defined by conflict and cooperation [4]. The goal of competitive strategy is not to defeat the adversary in war. It is to shape adversary choices in favorable directions over time — to get the adversary to play your game rather than theirs.

Grand strategy encompasses more than military competition. As The New Makers of Modern Strategy establishes, grand strategy came to include not only how governments sought to win wars using all available means, but also the most effective combination of means — non-military as well as military — to achieve the objectives of national security and prosperity at times of peace [5]. The military competition in space, cyber, and autonomous systems is a real and consequential competition. It is also one component of a larger strategic contest that includes economic competition, alliance management, technology governance, and the management of escalation risk.

Dolman’s contestation principle applies: if one cannot achieve or sustain control, it is vital that one’s potential adversary cannot achieve or sustain control either [6]. In the space domain, this means that the strategic goal is not necessarily American dominance — a goal that may not be achievable given proliferation trends — but the prevention of Chinese dominance. A contested orbital environment in which neither side can operate freely without cost is strategically preferable to one in which either side has achieved the commanding heights.

This is a different strategic objective than the one that animated the post-Cold War American approach to space, which assumed sanctuary and acted accordingly. That assumption is gone. The strategic question is how to manage a contested domain in ways that preserve American advantages, deny adversary advantages, and reduce the probability of escalation to catastrophic conflict.

The Technology-Strategy Inversion

The most dangerous failure mode in American strategic culture is one this series has identified repeatedly: technical enthusiasm substituting for strategic clarity. It produced a generation of Gulf War doctrine that failed in Fallujah. It produced a decades-long investment in exquisite satellite systems that were never designed to be survivable in a contested environment. It is producing, right now, a Golden Dome program that may cost $3.6 trillion and whose deterrence stability implications have not been fully worked through.

Means-ends thinking is indispensable. Policymakers must not fall into the trap of reducing ends to the common denominator of economic efficiency or technical feasibility. Economic reasoning guided by statesmanlike prudence recognizes that national priorities have value even if they can’t be priced [7]. The same logic applies to military capability: the value of a weapon system is not its technical performance. It is whether, deployed in the context of a specific political competition with a specific adversary, it serves the political object that justifies the competition.

Every capability the series has examined must be evaluated through this lens. Space-based interceptors: technically feasible, strategically consequential, deterrence implications underanalyzed. Autonomous drone swarms: operationally compelling, conceptually immature, arms control implications essentially absent from current policy discourse. AI-enabled battle networks: genuinely decisive if integrated, organizationally dependent on an adaptation the Pentagon has not demonstrated it can perform.

The Lutes formulation from Post 1 and Post 5 remains the cleanest statement of what is required: strategy is the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy [8]. Every new capability is a means. The ends have not changed. They remain the political objects that justify the competition: preserving a balance of power in which the United States and its allies can pursue their interests without coercion, maintaining the stability conditions under which catastrophic war is avoidable, and sustaining the economic and technological foundations of long-term competitive advantage.

What the Series Has Argued

Eleven posts have built a specific argument. It is worth stating it plainly at the close.

War’s nature has not changed. The political object still determines the military objective. Friction and chance are still inescapable. The distinction between nature and character is still the most important tool available to the strategist.

Military revolutions change the character of war but not its nature. They require all four components to succeed. The side that develops superior concepts while the other side accumulates hardware wins — as Germany demonstrated against France in 1940, as the Soviets demonstrated by theorizing the RMA before America named it, and as China is demonsteding by developing intelligentized warfare doctrine against American technologies.

Space is the commanding height of modern warfare. The scouting advantage it provides is the decisive variable that the interwar cases predicted and that Ukraine has confirmed. The space-cyber entanglement means that the most effective attacks on that commanding height will come not from kinetic weapons in orbit but from code delivered through ground networks.

Deterrence is more fragile than the strategic community acknowledges. The structural conditions for miscalculation are at historic highs. Managing the competition so that it does not become catastrophic conflict is at least as important as winning the military competition itself.

And China is a serious, capable, long-horizon competitor that has been studying the RMA with more discipline than the country that pioneered it.

Closing: The Grammar and the Logic

Ziarnick’s formulation, drawn from Clausewitz and applied to space, remains the best single sentence this series has encountered: war may have a grammar of its own, but not its own logic [9].

The grammar of war has expanded dramatically. It now includes orbital mechanics and key orbital trajectories. It includes electromagnetic warfare against satellite communications links. It includes cyber operations pre-positioning malicious code in satellite ground segments for activation at the adversary’s chosen moment. It includes fiber-optic-guided drones maneuvering through urban terrain while autonomous systems fight their counterparts in the skies above. It includes algorithm confrontation — the competition between AI systems processing the same battlespace at machine speed.

The logic has not changed. It is still the subordination of military means to political ends. It is still the recognition that war’s ultimate purpose is to compel an adversary to accept your political interests — and that every gram of military capability deployed in service of an unclear or unachievable political object is not strategy. It is confusion with weapons attached.

The strategist this era demands is the one the Space Capstone imagined: fluent in Kepler and Clausewitz, Maxwell and Sun Tzu, Goddard and Corbett and Mahan [10]. Fluent in the grammar of the new domains and disciplined about the logic that governs them all.

The grammar keeps changing. The logic never does.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “While the U.S. military was at the forefront of developing new technologies, including precision strike, Marshall assessed that Soviet military leaders were at the forefront of theorizing about the changing character of war. He believed ‘it was the Soviet military theorists, rather than our own, that were intellectualizing about it, and speculating on the longer-term consequences of the technical and other changes that the American military had initiated.’”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[2] “Large organizations do not simply find it difficult to change, they are designed not to change. Innovation can occur but is not guaranteed.”

Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century — Thomas G. Mahnken. Open in Readwise

[3] “Shifting the fight into these domains, while avoiding direct kinetic attacks on a rival great power’s homeland, may also reduce the risk of the war escalating to nuclear Armageddon.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[4] “Competition is not the same as conflict. Indeed, as used throughout this book, competition lies midway on a spectrum whose ends are defined by conflict and cooperation.”

Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century — Thomas G. Mahnken. Open in Readwise

[5] “Grand strategy, therefore, came to include not only how governments sought to win wars using all available means, but also the most effective combination of means — non-military as well as military — to achieve the objectives of national security and prosperity at times of peace.”

The New Makers of Modern Strategy — Hal Brands et al. Open in Readwise

[6] “Following the primary dictum of classical geopolitics, if one cannot achieve or sustain control, then it is vital that one’s potential adversary cannot achieve or sustain control. This is called contestation.”

New Frontiers, Old Realities — Everett Carl Dolman. Open in Readwise

[7] “Means-ends thinking is indispensable. But policymakers must not fall into the trap of reducing ends to the common denominator of economic efficiency. Instead, economic reasoning guided by statesmanlike prudence recognizes that national priorities have value even if they can’t be priced.”

An Economic Strategy for American Space Supremacy — Alexander William Salter. Open in Readwise

[8] “Strategy is defined here as the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy.”

Toward a Theory of Spacepower — Charles D. Lutes. Open in Readwise

[9] “Clausewitz said, ‘War may have a grammar of its own, but not its own logic.’ From this historic quote we will derive a space power corollary: Space power may have a grammar of its own, but not its own logic.”

Developing National Power in Space — Brent Ziarnick. Open in Readwise

[10] “Military space forces must internalize the science and art of space warfare — we must be fluent in Kepler and Clausewitz, Maxwell and Sun Tzu, Goddard and Corbett and Mahan, as well as Newton and Liddell Hart.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

Post 3 established that military revolutions require four components working in concert: new technology, new systems, new operational concepts, and organizational adaptation. Post 4 showed that the interwar period was the greatest laboratory for this process in modern history, and that the side which developed the concept while the other side accumulated the hardware consistently won. Posts 8, 9, and 10 examined three ongoing cases of revolutionary change in the character of warfare. This post examines what comes next — and whether the United States is organized to lead it.

The next military revolution is not a single phenomenon. It is the convergence of three concurrent developments that are individually significant and jointly transformative: autonomous systems enabled by artificial intelligence, proliferated commercial LEO constellations that are reshaping the scouting and communications architecture of warfare, and intelligentized warfare doctrines that treat military competition as fundamentally an algorithmic contest. All three are underway simultaneously. None is complete. And the organizational adaptation required to integrate all three into a coherent warfighting capability is, by any honest assessment, lagging behind the technology on the American side.

The Warfare-as-Software-Century Thesis

Karp and Zamiska, in The Technological Republic, state the central challenge directly: one of the most significant challenges facing the United States is ensuring that the DoD turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry — the unmanned drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield. The twenty-first century is the software century. And the generation best positioned to develop such weaponry is also the most hesitant, the most skeptical of dedicating its considerable talents to military purposes [1].

This is the organizational adaptation problem in its starkest form. The talent required to build the AI systems, the autonomous platforms, and the battle network software that will define the next generation of military competition exists primarily in the commercial technology sector. That sector has, for a generation, been systematically disinclined to work on defense applications. The cultural and institutional gap between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is one of the most consequential asymmetries in the current military competition — and it is one that China does not have, because the PLA operates without the civil-military separation that structures American technology governance.

From Drone War to Swarm War

Post 8 established the Ukraine drone war as Phase 1 of the autonomous systems revolution: human-operated FPV drones, executed at industrial scale, iterating at machine speed. This phase has already reshaped the character of tactical warfare. But it is not the endpoint.

Defense firms will need to develop AI-powered systems that enable drones to communicate automatically — not just with one another but also with a host of sensors. These networks exist, but not at the required scale. And the task is getting harder each day: as the drone-versus-drone war escalates, the quantity of drones deployed in each operation will grow from hundreds to thousands, making their automated coordination increasingly difficult [2]. Defense companies are racing to create AI that can coordinate attacks by multiple drones in an automated drone swarm — the holy grail of drone operations [3].

China is already planning for this phase. China has ambitious plans for its swarms. One involves taking drone swarms into near space, as part of a “combined arms” strike force of stealth drones, hypersonic vehicles, and high-altitude airships [4]. This is not a theoretical concept. China’s air force has announced projects to develop fully autonomous swarms of intelligent combat drones — even while officially calling for international agreements to ban the use of autonomous lethal weapons [5].

Anduril’s Lattice platform represents the American conceptual response to this trajectory. Lattice for Mission Autonomy provides a fundamental paradigm shift in how we conduct military operations, enabling the military to regain affordable mass with teams of low-cost autonomous systems under the command of a single human operator, increasing speed and accuracy by processing and analyzing data far faster and accurately than humans, and most importantly, saving lives by reducing risk to human operators in dangerous, highly-contested environments [6]. The “affordable mass” concept is a direct response to the cost-exchange problem identified in Post 9: if cheap adversary systems can overwhelm expensive defensive systems, the answer is cheap friendly systems that can overwhelm at equivalent or greater scale.

Proliferated LEO: Commercial Space as Military Infrastructure

Starlink’s performance in Ukraine demonstrated the military value of proliferated commercial LEO constellations. The USSF has drawn the doctrinal conclusion. The U.S. Space Force Commercial Space Strategy explicitly directs leveraging the commercial sector’s innovative capabilities, scalable production, and rapid technology refresh rates to enhance the resilience of national security space architectures, strengthen deterrence, and support Combatant Commander objectives [7].

The numbers explain the urgency. An anticipated 50,000 spacecraft in orbit by 2030 [8] will represent a total transformation of the orbital environment. Commercial operators — most of them not subject to direct military authority — will constitute the majority of the space infrastructure on which military operations depend. This creates both an opportunity and a vulnerability. Proliferation increases resilience: an adversary cannot attrite a constellation of thousands of small satellites the way it can attrite a constellation of dozens of large exquisite ones. But proliferation also expands the attack surface, multiplies the number of ground terminals requiring cybersecurity, and creates attribution problems when any of those thousands of satellites is interfered with.

The architectural response is disaggregation: distribute capability across many platforms rather than concentrating it in a few. This is the proliferated LEO strategy applied to military space architecture. It is also, not coincidentally, the strategy that best leverages the commercial sector’s cost curve and production rate advantages.

Algorithm Confrontation: The Decisive Variable

The sensor-to-shooter compression is the central competitive dynamic of the next era. Warfare has become a contest of networks as much as of weapons. Precision fires, autonomous systems and AI-driven analytics all rely on fast, secure data exchange. The side that can connect sensors to shooters faster wins [9].

The bottleneck is not sensors. Between proliferated LEO constellations, ground-based radar and optical networks, and tactical ISR drones, the modern battlefield is drowning in data. Traditional workflows can’t scale to the data volumes streaming in from space, air, sea, land, and cyberspace, meaning critical clues might be missed, or arrive too late, if processed manually [10]. The competitive variable is the AI that processes that data, fuses it into a coherent operational picture, and generates targeting solutions faster than a human analyst can. The next phase of space domain awareness will depend on how effectively companies can integrate diverse data streams — radar, optical, RF, and on-orbit — into unified, AI-powered systems [11].

This is the algorithmic warfare that China’s 2013 Science of Military Strategy anticipated and that the PLA has been building toward through three doctrinal revolutions. It is also the domain in which the American commercial AI sector has the deepest technical capability — if it can be mobilized for defense purposes at the required scale and speed.

The Organizational Adaptation Problem

Applying the four-component framework to the next RMA:

Technology is present in abundance. Commercial AI development is advancing at a pace that dwarfs any government program. Autonomous platforms are being deployed in Ukraine at industrial scale. Commercial launch is reducing the cost of orbital access dramatically.

New military systems are being built. Lattice, Starlink, proliferated small satellite constellations, AI-enabled targeting systems — these constitute the building blocks of a genuinely new combined arms architecture.

Operational concepts are being developed, but unevenly. The Ukraine frontline has generated more conceptual innovation in three years than the Pentagon has produced in a decade. Commercial defense firms like Anduril and Palantir are building operational concepts into their products. But the institutional processes for evaluating, validating, and scaling those concepts — doctrine, training, wargaming, acquisition — have not kept pace.

Organizational adaptation is the critical gap. The Army’s NGC2 program, building a modular open-architecture command-and-control backbone to integrate AI and commercial space connectivity, represents a serious attempt at the organizational transformation required [12]. It is also a single program in a department that has launched and killed similar programs repeatedly. For the Army, success won’t mean fielding a flawless system. It will mean building one that can evolve — fast enough to survive the next war, not the last [9].

Krepinevich’s verdict from Post 3 bears repeating: from the post-Cold War transformation effort through the rise and fall of Joint Forces Command through repeated attempts to develop operational concepts, the United States’ armed forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed at disruptive innovation. That verdict was delivered before the current moment. It has not become less accurate.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “One of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry — the unmanned drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield. The twenty-first century is the software century. And the generation best positioned to develop such weaponry is also the most hesitant, the most skeptical of dedicating its considerable talents to military purposes.”

The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Open in Readwise

[2] “Defense firms will need to develop AI-powered systems that enable drones to communicate automatically — not just with one another but also with a host of sensors. These networks exist, but not at the required scale. And the task is getting harder each day: as the drone-versus-drone war escalates, the quantity of drones deployed in each operation will grow from hundreds to thousands, making their automated coordination increasingly difficult.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[3] “Defense companies are also racing to create AI that can coordinate attacks by multiple drones in an automated drone swarm — the holy grail of drone operations.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[4] “China has ambitious plans for its swarms. One involves taking drone swarms into near space, as part of a ‘combined arms’ strike force of stealth drones, hypersonic vehicles, and high-altitude airships.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[5] “In April 2018, the Chinese government expressed support for an international agreement ‘to ban the use of fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.’ China explicitly did not call for a ban on developing these advanced weapons... On the same day that China called for banning the use of autonomous weapons, its air force announced a project to develop fully autonomous swarms of intelligent combat drones.”

The Kill Chain — Christian Brose. Open in Readwise

[6] “Lattice for Mission Autonomy provides a fundamental paradigm shift in how we conduct military operations, enabling the military to regain affordable mass with teams of low-cost autonomous systems under the command of a single human operator, increasing speed and accuracy by processing and analyzing data far faster and accurately than humans, and most importantly, saving lives by reducing risk to human operators in dangerous, highly-contested environments.”

Anduril Unveils Lattice for Mission Autonomy — Anduril Industries. Open in Readwise

[7] “The USSF will leverage the commercial sector’s innovative capabilities, scalable production, and rapid technology refresh rates to enhance the resilience of national security space architectures, strengthen deterrence, and support Combatant Commander objectives.”

U.S. Space Force Commercial Space Strategy — Rudolph Bowen et al. Open in Readwise

[8] “Adoption of artificial intelligence could transform an industry with an anticipated 50,000 spacecraft in orbit by 2030.”

Military Spending and Direct-to-Device Competition Are Reshaping the Space Economy — Debra Werner. Open in Readwise

[9] “Warfare has become a contest of networks as much as of weapons. Precision fires, autonomous systems and AI-driven analytics all rely on fast, secure data exchange. The side that can connect sensors to shooters faster wins... For the Army, success won’t mean fielding a flawless system. It will mean building one that can evolve — fast enough to survive the next war, not the last.”

Space Is Key to the Army’s Long March to a Connected Force — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[10] “Traditional workflows can’t scale to the data volumes streaming in from space, air, sea, land, and cyberspace, meaning critical clues might be missed, or arrive too late, if processed manually. That’s where AI agents excel — they accelerate triage, automate first-pass analysis, and surface anomalies and patterns in near real-time.”

From Analyst to AI Orchestrator: Evolving Roles in the Age of Autonomy — NV5. Open in Readwise

[11] “Many space trackers say the next phase of SDA will depend on how effectively companies can integrate diverse data streams — radar, optical, RF and on-orbit — into unified, AI-powered systems.”

Managing Space Domain Awareness Data Has Become a Greater Challenge Than Collecting It — Jason Rainbow. Open in Readwise

[12] “Now the Army is trying again, under a new banner: Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2). Instead of the closed, bespoke systems that have defined Pentagon programs for decades, NGC2 is being built around an open architecture — a modular tech stack of software, data infrastructure and resilient communications. The Army wants to plug in innovations from the commercial world: cloud computing, artificial intelligence and, increasingly, space-based connectivity.”

Space Is Key to the Army’s Long March to a Connected Force — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

This series began with a definition and ends with a demand. The definition: the West is a tradition, not a race or a geography — a specific body of ideas, institutions, and practices accumulated over three millennia that answers particular questions about law, liberty, knowledge, and self-government. The demand: that those who inhabit and benefit from this tradition take responsibility for it.

Seven posts have built a specific argument. The postwar consensus, designed to prevent fascism’s return, generalized into a systematic assault on every strong cultural attachment. The intellectual forces of critical theory, poststructuralism, CRT, and postcolonialism provided the academic architecture for this assault. The university transmitted it to an entire generation. The assault found its most revealing expression in the progressive establishment’s response to October 7 — an episode that demonstrated, with unusual clarity, what the ideology produces when its internal logic runs to completion.

The argument is not that the West is perfect, or that its history is clean, or that its critics have nothing legitimate to say. The argument is that the tradition is under assault by forces whose own logic is incoherent, whose evidentiary standards are non-existent, and whose practical effects are destructive — and that the people most capable of defending the tradition are the least inclined to do so.

This post examines what a genuine defense looks like.

What It Is Not

A genuine defense of the West is not ethnic nationalism. The tradition defined in Post 1 is not the property of any race — it belongs to those who inherit it, practice it, and transmit it, and that has always included people from everywhere. Any defense that frames Western civilization as a racial inheritance rather than a cultural one is both historically false and strategically self-defeating, because it concedes the enemy’s core framing.

It is not nostalgia. The West at any given point in its past was imperfect in ways that are documented and that the tradition itself diagnosed. The idealized past these arguments sometimes invoke did not exist. The tradition is worth defending not because it was ever perfect but because it contains the resources for self-correction — and because its alternatives are demonstrably worse.

It is not a refusal to acknowledge genuine failures. The series has acknowledged them throughout. Slavery was real. Colonialism produced genuine wrongs. The gap between the tradition’s proclaimed values and its historical practice was real and large. Acknowledging this is not a concession to the critics’ framework. It is what honest engagement with the tradition requires.

Reno’s own caveat applies: one of the strong gods the nations of the West must overcome is the nation itself [1] — the deified, absolutized nationalism that produced 1914-1918 and 1933-1945. The return of strong gods does not mean the return of those specific gods. The postwar consensus diagnosed a real pathology. Its error was in thinking the only cure was to abolish all strong attachment rather than to distinguish healthy from pathological forms.

The Real Threat, Correctly Identified

Reno names the enemy with precision that the political mainstream has not yet matched: “Our danger is a dissolving society, not a closed one; the therapeutic personality, not the authoritarian one” [2]. This is the diagnostic inversion that the postwar consensus cannot perform, because it would require acknowledging that the cure has become the disease.

The political and cultural crisis of the West today is the result of our refusal — perhaps incapacity — to honor the strong gods that stiffen the spine and inspire loyalty. We are told that every motif of weakening, dispersion, and disenchantment serves the common good because it forestalls the return of Hitler. But we are not living in 1945. Our societies are not threatened by paramilitary organizations devoted to powerful ideologies [3].

The actual threat is identified in what Reno says next: in the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler [4]. The postwar consensus’s obsessive focus on fascism has produced a governing class so attuned to one historical threat that it has become functionally blind to the one actually operating: the progressive dissolution of the intermediate institutions — family, church, civic association, national community — that make self-government possible.

What the Strong Gods Are

Reno’s concept requires careful handling, because it is easily misread as a call for the very pathologies he is warning against. The strong gods are not fascism, ethnic nationalism, or theocracy. The strong gods are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies [5]. They are what make it possible for people to belong to something larger than themselves without belonging only to the state.

Reno’s positive vision: “The essential task of political leadership is to help men shelter together within traditions and communities of shared loves. Unless we are clothed in this way, we are naked before the world” [6]. The dissolution of those sheltering communities — the attenuation of faith, family, civic association, and national identity in favor of the frictionless individual consumer — does not produce freedom. It produces vulnerability. The retreat of the strong gods leaves a dangerous vacuum. Spiritually inarticulate, abandoned, and vulnerable, those living in a god-abandoned world seek the narcosis of spiritual self-deception, busyness, and technological mastery [7].

The vacuum will be filled. The question is what fills it. The postwar consensus, having spent seventy years evacuating the legitimate strong gods from public life, has created the conditions in which the most pathological versions of them — identitarian tribalism, conspiratorial politics, cult-of-personality demagogy — become attractive.

What the Tradition Actually Requires

Murray puts the affirmative case most directly: “People who have the good fortune to live in the West are not just the inheritors of comparatively good economic fortune. They have inherited a form of government, justice, and law for which they ought to feel profound gratitude” [8].

Ibrahim, writing about the historical defenders of Western civilization, identifies what made them capable of defense: “What did the West’s past possess that its present — which seems to be far superior in every conceivable way, including militarily — does not? The answer is men who had something worth fighting for — from their faith and family, to their countries and cultures” [9].

This is the crux. A civilization that has been systematically taught that its inheritance is a legacy of oppression, that its history is a record of shame, and that the appropriate posture toward its own tradition is critique and deconstruction, does not produce people who will defend it. It produces people who will collaborate in its dissolution — not from malice but from a combination of ignorance and cultivated self-contempt.

The defense requires reversing this. Specifically:

The Enlightenment inheritance — reason as the tool for understanding the world, evidence as the criterion of truth, falsifiability as the test of claims — must be affirmed against the CRT framework that substitutes lived experience and power analysis for evidence. This is not reactionary. It is the condition of possibility for any serious intellectual life.

The liberal constitutional inheritance — individual rights, rule of law, equal treatment under the law regardless of identity — must be defended against the equity framework that demands racially differentiated treatment as the remedy for past discrimination. Murray showed where that leads: a rise in racial thinking, not a reduction in it.

The civic inheritance — citizenship as an active practice requiring knowledge, responsibility, and loyalty to the constitutional order — must be restored in institutions whose explicit purpose has become the production of activists rather than citizens.

The cultural inheritance — the literature, philosophy, art, and music that embody and transmit the tradition’s values — must be taught without apology in institutions that have spent three decades treating it as an embarrassment.

The Honest Acknowledgment

None of this requires pretending that the tradition is without failures. It requires the honesty to apply to those failures the same analytical standards that a genuinely liberal education would apply to anything: evidence, context, comparative judgment, and the recognition that moral understanding develops over time.

Biggar’s framework from Post 5 applies as a general principle: the tradition contains the resources for its own self-correction, and has used them. The abolition of slavery, the extension of rights, the democratic reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — these happened within and through the tradition, not in spite of it. The appropriate response to the tradition’s failures is not its abandonment but its deepening.

Closing

Reno’s diagnosis demands a closing: “Our time — this century — begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods” [10].

The series has argued that what is at stake is not a culture war in the ordinary political sense. It is a question about whether a specific tradition — one that developed over three millennia, that produced the rule of law and representative government and individual rights and the scientific method and market economics — will be transmitted to the next generation with enough fidelity to remain functional.

Traditions are not self-sustaining. They require people who understand them well enough to transmit them, who love them enough to defend them, and who are honest enough to acknowledge their failures without letting that acknowledgment become a pretext for abandonment.

The West is not a race. It is not a geography. It is a tradition. Traditions can be lost. The most important ones are the most vulnerable, because they require the most active maintenance.

They can also be defended. This series has tried to show what that defense looks like when done honestly.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “One of the strong gods that the nations of the West must overcome is the nation itself.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[2] “Our danger is a dissolving society, not a closed one; the therapeutic personality, not the authoritarian one.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[3] “The political and cultural crisis of the West today is the result of our refusal — perhaps incapacity — to honor the strong gods that stiffen the spine and inspire loyalty. We are told that every motif of weakening, dispersion, and disenchantment serves the common good because it forestalls the return of Hitler. But we are not living in 1945. Our societies are not threatened by paramilitary organizations devoted to powerful ideologies.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[4] “In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[5] “The strong gods are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[6] “The essential task of political leadership is to help men shelter together within traditions and communities of shared loves. Unless we are clothed in this way, we are naked before the world.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[7] “The retreat of the strong gods from the culture of the West leaves a dangerous vacuum. Spiritually inarticulate, abandoned, and vulnerable, those living in a god-abandoned world seek the narcosis of spiritual self-deception, busyness, and technological mastery.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[8] “People who have the good fortune to live in the West are not just the inheritors of comparatively good economic fortune. They have inherited a form of government, justice, and law for which they ought to feel profound gratitude.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[9] “What did the West’s past possess that its present — which seems to be far superior in every conceivable way, including militarily — does not? The answer is men who had something worth fighting for — from their faith and family, to their countries and cultures.”

Defenders of the West — Raymond Ibrahim. Open in Readwise

[10] “Our time — this century — begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

Post 3 established a finding that bears repeating: when ONA analysts began examining what Chinese officers were writing about military transformation in the 1990s, they discovered that the Chinese were among the most thoughtful and attentive observers and commentators on the changing character of war. That observation was made a generation ago. It has not become less relevant. It has become more urgent.

China did not merely watch the 1991 Gulf War and take notes. It watched, studied, theorized, invested, and built — over thirty years, through three distinct doctrinal revolutions — a warfighting framework specifically designed to defeat the American military at the one operational task that matters most to Chinese strategic objectives: preventing U.S. intervention in a Taiwan contingency. This post traces that arc and examines what it means for the competition now underway.

Three Doctrinal Revolutions in Thirty Years

The pace of PLA doctrinal evolution is itself an indicator of institutional seriousness about the RMA that American defense establishments would do well to study.

The first revolution came in January 1993. In December 1992, PLA leadership began a formal analysis of China’s military strategy triggered by observations of the Gulf War. Within a month, the PLA had established a new strategic guideline: winning local wars that may occur under modern technology, especially under high-technology conditions [1]. This was China’s Gulf War lesson, distilled and institutionalized within weeks of the war’s end.

The second revolution came gradually through the 2000s and accelerated under Xi Jinping. In the summer of 2014, the PLA’s strategic guidelines advanced and emphasized the role of ‘informatization’ in warfare — the transition from the industrial age to the information age caused by the development and use of information technology [2]. The 2015 defense white paper called for China to focus on “winning informatized local wars” and explicitly identified space as a fifth domain alongside land, sea, air, and information [3]. The 2013 Science of Military Strategy had already declared that China needed to expand its battlespace beyond national borders to increase strategic depth.

The third revolution is the one underway now. China’s People’s Liberation Army has already moved beyond the era of ‘informationized warfare’ to what it calls ‘intelligentized warfare’ — a doctrine built around AI-driven command systems and autonomous platforms [4]. This is not a rhetorical relabeling. It represents a genuine conceptual shift in what the PLA believes the decisive variable in future warfare will be.

Systems Destruction Warfare

The operational concept at the heart of Chinese military doctrine is systems destruction warfare — and understanding it is essential to understanding why China’s military buildup is not simply an imitation of American capabilities but a direct response to them.

Krepinevich’s analysis of PLA operational thinking is precise: China’s operational system comprises five subsystems — the information-confrontation and reconnaissance-intelligence systems; the command and integrated support systems; and the firepower-strike systems. Within this context, the PLA sees the military competition centering on deconstructing the enemy’s reconnaissance-strike complexes [5]. The targeting logic follows: to defeat the American military, you do not need to match it system for system. You need to attack the connections between its systems — the battle networks, the satellite links, the command nodes — that make those systems function as an integrated whole.

In waging systems destruction warfare, the PLA sees computer-centered battle networks as the nerve centers of modern military forces. Information superiority is achieved primarily through the cyber and electromagnetic domains, and through strike forces resident in the physical domains [6]. The sequence matters: blind the adversary’s ISR first, disrupt its battle network, then strike its forces while they are operating in information poverty.

This is the direct inversion of the American way of war. The U.S. military derives its decisive advantages from integration — the ability to see the battlefield clearly through its satellite constellation, communicate that picture to distributed forces, and execute precision strikes at standoff range. Systems destruction warfare targets precisely that integration. It is, in the most literal sense, the weapon designed to defeat the American reconnaissance-strike complex.

A2/AD: The ONA-Identified Asymmetric Response

Marshall’s ONA had identified the strategic logic of A2/AD even before China had fully implemented it. One of the more significant insights that surfaced from ONA’s research was the realization that the PLA was aggressively pursuing anti-access/area-denial capabilities. The premise was that any serious adversary would surely seek ways to blunt or degrade U.S. capabilities to conduct precision strikes from forward deployed naval forces such as carrier battle groups [7].

China’s DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile — with a range of nearly 1,000 miles, dubbed the “carrier killer” — is the canonical systems response to this logic [8]. It does not need to sink aircraft carriers to be strategically effective. It needs only to make carrier operations within its range envelope sufficiently costly that U.S. planners must operate outside it — beyond the effective range of carrier-based aircraft. The DF-21D is not a weapon that copies American capabilities. It is a weapon that negates them.

China has built the corresponding doctrinal framework: multi-domain precision warfare, designed to improve the PLA’s ability to fight by leveraging a C4ISR network; rapidly coordinate firepower using artificial intelligence, big data, and other emerging technologies; and identify and exploit U.S. vulnerabilities [9].

Space as the Decisive Domain

In the PLA’s framework, space is not a support function. It is the domain whose control is the prerequisite for everything else. China’s 2013 Science of Military Strategy established the principle: seizing command of space network dominance will become crucial for obtaining comprehensive superiority on the battlefield [10]. This is not doctrine inherited from Soviet theory or adapted from American thinking. It is China’s own strategic conclusion, reached independently and implemented consistently.

The implementation is visible in the numbers. China has more than doubled its number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites since 2019, from 124 to 250 [11]. Its total satellite constellation, at 499 as of early 2022, is second globally only to the United States. China’s rapid progression in space capabilities, augmented by AI and cyber integration, reflects an omni-domain approach — fusing space, cyber, and AI — that illustrates Beijing’s ambition to command the strategic high ground of space [12].

The AI integration is already operational. In 2023, China successfully conducted an experiment where an AI system was given control of the Qimingxing-1, a low-Earth orbit remote sensing satellite. The AI control system autonomously operated the satellite for 24 hours without any human intervention, demonstrating a potent capability in developing and fielding autonomous systems for space operations [13]. AI-driven tools now empower the PLA to forecast, simulate, and execute space operations with minimal latency [14].

On the counterspace side, China has expanded its arsenal with jammers, high-powered microwave weapons, and fractional orbital bombardment systems for both nuclear and conventional strikes from orbit [15]. By the mid-to-late 2020s, the PLA is expected to deploy ground-based laser weapons high enough in power to physically damage satellite structures [16]. These are not aspirational programs. They are near-term deployments.

The U.S. government’s State of the Space Industrial Base report warned bluntly: China continues to compete toward a strategic goal of displacing the U.S. as the dominant global space power economically, diplomatically and militarily by 2045, if not earlier [17].

Algorithm Confrontation: The Third Doctrinal Revolution’s Core Claim

The conceptual foundation of intelligentized warfare is a specific claim about what the decisive military variable will be in future conflicts. Intelligentized warfare is rooted in the PLA’s assessment that war is transitioning from ‘system confrontation’ to ‘algorithm confrontation’ [18]. The system confrontation era was about which side could build and field more capable weapons platforms and connect them into more effective battle networks. The algorithm confrontation era is about which side’s AI can process the battlespace faster, generate targeting solutions more rapidly, and coordinate autonomous platforms at a scale that exceeds human cognitive capacity.

This assessment, if correct, has profound implications for every element of the four-component framework. Technology in the algorithm confrontation era is not primarily hardware — it is software, training data, and algorithmic architecture. Systems are not primarily platforms — they are the networks through which autonomous agents communicate and coordinate. Operational concepts must account for machine-speed decision cycles that no human command structure can match. And organizational adaptation requires building institutions that can develop, validate, and field AI-enabled warfighting systems on timelines measured in months rather than years.

The Taiwan Scenario and What the U.S. Would Need

All of this doctrine is calibrated against a specific operational context: Taiwan. The PLA’s systems destruction warfare concept, its ASAT buildup, its multi-domain precision warfare framework, and its A2/AD posture are all optimized for a Taiwan contingency in which the United States attempts to intervene and China attempts to prevent that intervention.

Jones, summarizing Admiral Paparo’s operational response, captures what the U.S. would need: “I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities so I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything” [19]. This is an autonomous systems-heavy, ISR-dependent, precision-strike concept that mirrors China’s own systems destruction warfare logic — directed back at the PLA’s own reconnaissance-strike complex.

The problem Jones identifies is that the U.S. lacks both the operational concept and the acquisition to execute this. If the United States does not develop a joint concept of operation and follow through by making the necessary investments and acquisitions to offset Beijing’s numerical and industrial advantages, the United States risks losing a war with China [20]. The four-component diagnostic is stark: China has technology, systems, and concept. The U.S. has technology. The organizational adaptation question — can the Pentagon move fast enough to build the systems and develop the doctrine before the window closes — is the open and most consequential one.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “In December 1992, PLA leadership began a formal analysis of China’s military strategy. Within a month, the PLA had established a new strategic guideline that the Central Military Commission adopted in early January 1993. China’s goal would be ‘winning local wars that may occur under modern technology, especially under high-technology conditions.’”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[2] “In the summer of 2014, the PLA’s strategic guidelines advanced and emphasized the role of ‘informatization’ in warfare — the transition from the industrial age to the information age caused by the development and use of information technology.”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[3] “China’s 2013 Science of Military Strategy concluded that China needed to expand its battlespace beyond national borders to increase the country’s strategic depth. The Science of Military Strategy emphasized that modern war now included five major domains: land, sea, air, space, and information.”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[4] “China’s People’s Liberation Army has already moved beyond the era of ‘informationized warfare’ to what it calls ‘intelligentized warfare’ — a doctrine built around AI-driven command systems and autonomous platforms.”

Space Is Key to the Army’s Long March to a Connected Force — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[5] “China’s operational system comprises five subsystems: the information-confrontation and reconnaissance-intelligence systems; the command and integrated support systems; and the firepower-strike systems. Within this context, the PLA sees the military competition centering on deconstructing the enemy’s reconnaissance-strike complexes — what the Chinese call ‘systems destruction warfare.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[6] “In waging systems-destruction warfare, the PLA sees computer-centered battle networks as the nerve centers of modern military forces and activity... Information superiority is achieved primarily through the cyber and EM domains, and through strike forces resident in the physical domains.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[7] “One of the more significant insights that surfaced from this body of research was the realization that the PLA was aggressively pursuing anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities. The premise was that any serious adversary would surely seek ways to blunt or degrade U.S. capabilities to conduct precision strikes from forward deployed naval forces such as carrier battle groups.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[8] “China had developed the DF-21D, an antiship ballistic missile with a range of nearly 1,000 miles dubbed the ‘carrier killer,’ which posed a threat to U.S. ships — including aircraft carriers — in the Pacific.”

The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy — Seth G. Jones. Open in Readwise

[9] “The PLA developed a concept called ‘multi-domain precision warfare,’ designed to improve the PLA’s ability to fight a war by leveraging a C4ISR network; rapidly coordinate firepower using artificial intelligence, big data, and other emerging technologies; and identify and exploit U.S. vulnerabilities.”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[10] “The 2013 Science of Military Strategy anticipates that future wars will begin in space and cyberspace, arguing that ‘seizing command of space network dominance will become crucial for obtaining comprehensive superiority on the battlefield and conquering an enemy.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[11] “China has more than doubled its number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites since 2019, from 124 to 250.”

Chinese scientists call for plan to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites — Ben Turner. Open in Readwise

[12] “China’s rapid progression in space capabilities, augmented by AI and cyber integration, helps realize a new phase in China’s military strategy. A strategy characterized by a very comprehensive, omni-domain approach — fusing space, cyber, and artificial intelligence — illustrates Beijing’s ambition to command the strategic high ground of space.”

China’s Fast Growing Military Space Capabilities — Amir Husain. Open in Readwise

[13] “In 2023, China successfully conducted an experiment where an AI system was given control of the Qimingxing-1, a low-Earth orbit remote sensing satellite. The AI control system autonomously operated the satellite for 24 hours without any human intervention.”

China’s Fast Growing Military Space Capabilities — Amir Husain. Open in Readwise

[14] “AI-driven tools now empower the PLA to forecast, simulate, and execute space operations with minimal latency. Machine learning algorithms enhance surveillance and satellite-based reconnaissance systems, positioning China very well in terms of orbital warfare preparedness.”

China’s Fast Growing Military Space Capabilities — Amir Husain. Open in Readwise

[15] “Since then, China has expanded its arsenal with jammers, high-powered microwave weapons, and fractional orbital bombardment systems for both nuclear and conventional strikes from orbit.”

War in Space Is Not a Future Problem: It’s Happening Now — Christopher Stone. Open in Readwise

[16] “’Aside from missiles, the PLA has fielded multiple ground-based laser weapons able to disrupt, degrade, or damage satellite sensors. By the mid-to-late 2020s, we expect them to deploy systems high enough in power that they can physically damage satellite structures.’”

How China Is Expanding Its Anti-Satellite Arsenal — Audrey Decker. Open in Readwise

[17] “The U.S. government’s State of the Space Industrial Base report bluntly warned, ‘Strategic competition in space remains a paramount concern — China continues to compete toward a strategic goal of displacing the U.S. as the dominant global space power economically, diplomatically and militarily by 2045, if not earlier.’”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[18] “Intelligentized warfare is rooted in the PLA’s assessment that war is transitioning from ‘system confrontation’ to ‘algorithm confrontation.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[19] “’I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities so I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.’”

The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy — Seth G. Jones. Open in Readwise

[20] “Technology is important, but it has never been sufficient to win wars. The United States needs to develop a joint concept of operation and follow through by making the necessary investments and acquisitions to offset Beijing’s numerical and industrial advantages. If it does not, the United States risks losing a war with China.”

The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy — Seth G. Jones. Open in Readwise

Every coherent worldview contains within it a set of commitments that can be tested by events. The commitments of the progressive ideology examined in this series — anti-oppression, anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, solidarity with the colonized — were tested on October 7, 2023, and in the weeks and months that followed. The ideology failed the test. Not at the margins but at the center. Not because individuals behaved badly but because the framework itself produced the failure as a logical output.

October 7 was not merely a terrorist attack. It was, as Brendan O’Neill establishes in After the Pogrom, a pogrom — the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-twentieth century that progressives love talking about [1]. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered 1,200 people, raped women, abducted 250 hostages. This was not ambiguous. It was documented, filmed, and acknowledged by the perpetrators themselves.

The response from the progressive intellectual establishment was not condemnation. It was, in significant measure, celebration.

What Actually Happened

The timeline is worth stating precisely, because its speed is part of what it reveals.

Within hours of the attack, “decolonisation” was the word on the lips and tweeting fingertips of many academics and students [2]. An Islamic scholar at UC Irvine described October 7 as “a gift from Allah” [3]. A professor at Columbia University, the day after the pogrom, wrote of the “jubilation and awe” inspired by Hamas’s “remarkable takeover” of facilities in southern Israel. Students at Columbia organized a “Resistance 101” event at which speakers praised Hamas, one referring to “our friends and brothers in Hamas and Islamic Jihad” [4].

O’Neill’s inventory of the silence is as damning as the celebration: “Where were the feminists? Hamas is a notoriously misogynistic movement. It had just kidnapped, raped and killed huge numbers of women. Yet feminists, too, certainly those of the intersectional persuasion, were likewise prepping their Palestine flags in the immediate aftermath of 7 October. As for the LGBTQ activists — could they not find one word of condemnation for the homophobes of Hamas whose incursion into Israel involved the mass murder of young Israelis at a music festival in the desert? Apparently not. The ‘Queers for Palestine’ set also responded to the pogrom by protesting against the nation it was inflicted on” [5].

A dawning, chilling realization: too many had taken up the cause not of the Jews, but of their persecutors [6].

O’Neill’s Central Question

O’Neill frames the question that anyone who watched this unfold was compelled to ask: “Why did self-styled anti-fascists cosy up to the fascists of Hamas? Why did anti-racists make excuses for racist violence? Why did feminists whose mantra is ‘Believe women’ refuse to believe that women were raped on 7 October?” [7]

The answer is not hypocrisy, though hypocrisy is present. The answer is internal logic.

The decolonization framework — examined in Post 3 and Post 5 — organizes the world into oppressor and oppressed along lines of race, colonial history, and what it regards as structural power. Israel is positioned as a settler-colonial project; Palestinians are positioned as the colonized. Within this framework, the moral valence of any action is determined not by the action itself but by the identity and position of the actor. The barbarous dearth of sympathy for the dead and raped of Israel is the logical, inhumane conclusion to a pseudo-progressive politics that judges people’s moral worth by their skin color, their presumed privilege, and their placement on a racial hierarchy fashioned by the unaccountable overlords of Western opinion [8].

This is not an aberration from the ideology’s principles. It is a direct application of them.

The Fascism Panic Inversion

O’Neill identifies what may be the most revealing single data point in the entire episode. For years before October 7, the same progressive commentariat had maintained a near-constant state of alarm about the return of fascism — in Trump, in Brexit, in any manifestation of national populism. The fascism analogy had been their standard intellectual currency.

Then October 7 happened. There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom — the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-twentieth century these people love talking about — their fascism chatter evaporated. In fact, they started warning people not to use Nazi analogies. Not to compare October 7 to the 1930s. Just two weeks after the pogrom, the Guardian published a piece denouncing Israel for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’ in its response to Hamas’s assault [9].

The logic is not obscure. The fascism analogy was always instrumentalized — deployed against political enemies identified by the framework as oppressors, and withheld from movements identified by the framework as the oppressed. When the oppressed commit acts that look fascist, the analogy is suppressed. And now we have the activist class on the streets, forbidding the Jewish State from mentioning the Holocaust while also accusing it of carrying out a new Holocaust in Gaza [10].

Butler’s Formulation: The Logic Made Explicit

Judith Butler, one of the most influential academics in the progressive humanities tradition, supplied the clearest available statement of the framework’s internal logic when she described Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are parts of a global Left” and declared that understanding them as such was “extremely important” [11]. Murray notes the obvious implication: if Butler lived under a regime run by Hamas or Hezbollah, she would be executed at worst and made to cover her face from male attention at best.

The Queers for Palestine activists were operating by exactly the same logic Butler articulated: they are “bewildering” in their “flirting with justifying Hamas’s atrocities” given that Hamas’s Islamist ideology is “clearly antithetical to the rights and values these groups claim to champion.” Hamas’s “reactionary agenda” is “profoundly hostile to women’s rights and LGBT individuals” [12]. But the decolonization framework overrides all of that, because position on the oppressor/oppressed hierarchy is the only variable that matters.

The Rotten Fruit of Abandoning the Enlightenment

O’Neill’s synthesis is the most important sentence in After the Pogrom: “It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilisation. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance” [13].

Post 2 traced the postwar consensus’s systematic weakening of the West’s intellectual and cultural inheritance. Post 3 traced how critical theory replaced the search for truth with the analysis of power. Post 4 showed how CRT made race the only legitimate lens. Posts 5 and 6 showed how this framework produced historical falsification and civic dissolution. October 7 is where the accumulated logic arrives at its real-world endpoint: a progressive establishment so thoroughly captured by the decolonization worldview that it cannot extend sympathy to Jewish victims of political violence without first computing where those victims fall on its racial hierarchy.

This is what the abandonment of Enlightenment universalism produces in practice. Not the multicultural harmony its architects promised. A hierarchy of victims, administered by people who cannot say the word “pogrom” without first checking whether their framework permits it.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper... without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom — the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-20th century these people love talking about — their fascism chatter evaporated.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[2] “’Decolonisation’ was the word on the lips and tweeting fingertips of many academics and students in the hours and days after Hamas’s savagery.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[3] “An Islamic scholar at the University of California, Irvine described 7 October as ‘a gift from Allah’. It was a just attack on the ‘bloodthirsty animals’ of Zionism, he said. A professor at Columbia University, just a day after the pogrom, wrote of the ‘jubilation and awe’ inspired by the ‘storming of Israeli checkpoints’ by Hamas’s ‘resistance fighters’.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[4] “Students at Columbia University organised an event titled ‘Resistance 101’ at which speakers praised Hamas. One referred to our ‘friends and brothers in Hamas and Islamic Jihad’.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[5] “Where were the feminists? Hamas is a notoriously misogynistic movement. It had just kidnapped, raped and killed huge numbers of women. Yet feminists, too, certainly those of the intersectional persuasion, were likewise prepping their Palestine flags in the immediate aftermath of 7 October. As for the LGBTQ activists — could they not find one word of condemnation for the homophobes of Hamas? Apparently not.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[6] “A dawning, chilling realisation came: too many had taken up the cause not of the Jews, but of their persecutors.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[7] “Why did self-styled anti-fascists cosy up to the fascists of Hamas? Why did anti-racists make excuses for racist violence? Why did feminists whose mantra is ‘Believe women’ refuse to believe that women were raped on 7 October?”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[8] “The barbarous dearth of sympathy for the dead and raped of Israel is the logical inhumane conclusion to a pseudo-progressive politics that judges people’s moral worth by their skin colour, their presumed privilege and their placement on a racial hierarchy fashioned by the unaccountable overlords of Western opinion.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[9] “Just two weeks after the pogrom, the Guardian published a piece denouncing Israel for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’ in its response to Hamas’s assault.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[10] “And now we have the activist class on the streets, forbidding the Jewish State from mentioning the Holocaust while also accusing it of carrying out a new Holocaust in Gaza.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[11] “Butler responded: ‘Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are parts of a global Left, is extremely important.’ If Butler herself ever lived under a regime run by Hamas or Hezbollah, she would be executed at worst, and made to cover her face from male attention at best.”

On Democracies and Death Cults — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[12] “The keffiyeh classes ‘seem eager to make excuses for Hamas’, but they are ‘conspicuously uninformed about exactly what or who this terrorist group represents.’ Hamas’s ‘reactionary agenda’ is ‘profoundly hostile to women’s rights and LGBT individuals’.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[13] “It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilisation. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

Post 8 examined Ukraine as the ISR-strike complex RMA: cheap autonomous systems enabled by commercial satellite constellations, precision at industrial scale, the four-component framework playing out in real time on a contact line in eastern Europe. This post examines a different problem — one that the same framework illuminates from a different angle.

The Middle East is not primarily a drone war in the Ukrainian sense. It is a saturation problem. When a regional power fields thousands of cheap drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and increasingly hypersonic glide vehicles, the strategic question is not whether the defender can intercept any single weapon. Sophisticated air defenses can do that. The question is whether the defender can afford to intercept all of them, every time, indefinitely. At some point, the cost asymmetry between offense and defense inverts the economic logic of deterrence. This is the problem that Iran has been systematically constructing for two decades — and that the United States is spending between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion to answer with Golden Dome.

Iran’s Saturation Doctrine

Iran’s missile and drone arsenal represents a deliberate asymmetric strategy rooted in the same logic that animates all successful asymmetric approaches: exploit the adversary’s structural constraints. Israel and the United States have invested heavily in sophisticated, expensive air defense systems. Those systems can intercept individual threats with high reliability. They cannot do so indefinitely without exhausting their interceptor magazines and the industrial capacity to replenish them.

The April 2024 Iranian attack on Israel — the first large-scale direct exchange between the two countries — made this calculus visible. Iran launched approximately 300 drones and ballistic missiles. Israeli and allied forces, including American naval assets and Jordanian air defenses, intercepted the overwhelming majority. The operation was, from a kinetic standpoint, a near-total defensive success. But the cost structure was deeply unfavorable to the defender. Israeli officials estimated the intercept operation cost approximately $1 billion. Iran’s launch cost was a fraction of that. The saturation doctrine does not need to succeed on any single salvo to achieve its strategic objective. It needs only to persist long enough that the defender’s cost advantage erodes.

This is the logic of attrition applied to air defense — and it is precisely the kind of strategy that the RMA framework, focused on precision and ISR-enabled targeting, does not naturally address. The next conflict won’t unfold in a single domain — it will be a multi-threat, multi-axis synchronized, multi-domain assault. Adversaries will launch blended strikes that combine drones, hypersonics, cyberattacks and electronic jamming, designed to stretch and overwhelm traditional defenses [1]. Iran is not the only actor developing this doctrine. China’s DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles, Russia’s Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles, and North Korea’s expanding ballistic missile inventory all represent variants of the saturation strategy applied to different operational problems.

October 7 as Reconnaissance-Strike Complex Failure

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel was, among other things, an intelligence failure of the first order. It is worth examining what kind of intelligence failure it was, because the answer connects directly to the RMA framework.

Israel’s ISR architecture is among the most sophisticated in the world. Its combination of signals intelligence, human intelligence, drone surveillance, and satellite reconnaissance has been the foundation of the precise targeting that has characterized Israeli military operations for decades. The October 7 attack was not defeated by that architecture. A large-scale ground assault, involving hundreds of fighters crossing multiple breach points simultaneously, achieved operational surprise against a defender that possessed virtually every element of the modern reconnaissance-strike complex.

The lesson is not that ISR is overrated. It is that the scouting advantage that is decisive when it works creates a specific kind of vulnerability when it fails or is deliberately circumvented. Adversaries who cannot defeat the scouting advantage technologically will attempt to defeat it conceptually — through deception, patient preparation below the detection threshold, and exploitation of the defender’s tendency to discount warning signals that don’t fit the anticipated threat picture. Krepinevich’s observation that winning the scouting competition may be aided by securing information on the enemy’s scouting plans and destroying or corrupting the information provided by its scouting forces [2] applies equally to offensive planners. Hamas understood the Israeli ISR system well enough to operate below its effective detection threshold.

Iron Dome’s Design Limits and the Layered Defense Problem

Iron Dome was designed for a specific threat: short-range rockets launched from Gaza and Lebanon, with flight times measured in seconds to minutes, requiring rapid intercept at terminal phase. It is extraordinarily effective against that threat. It was not designed for combined-arms barrages integrating ballistic missiles with flight times measured in minutes, cruise missiles flying at low altitude on evasive routes, drones operating in swarms, and hypersonic glide vehicles maneuvering unpredictably within the atmosphere.

No single air defense system can be. This is why layered defense — multiple systems optimized for different threat types, altitude bands, and intercept phases — is the architectural response to saturation. But layered defense creates its own problems. Each layer must be maintained, integrated, and staffed. Each interceptor has a cost. Each magazine has a reload time. The Trump administration directed the Pentagon to develop Golden Dome as a comprehensive shield against ballistic and hypersonic threats, led by Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, envisioned as a layered defense architecture capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world or from space [3].

The cost implications are staggering. A report estimated the Golden Dome missile defense program could cost anywhere from $252 billion to $3.6 trillion over 20 years [4], depending on design choices. The vast range reflects how many fundamental architectural questions remain unanswered — including the central one: boost-phase intercept or terminal-phase intercept?

The Hypersonic Problem and Why Boost-Phase Matters

The design choice at the heart of Golden Dome is the decision to pursue boost-phase intercept via space-based interceptors — catching missiles before they deploy warheads, decoys, and maneuvering reentry vehicles. The technical rationale is straightforward. Hypersonic missiles complicate traditional geographic defenses. Unlike conventional ballistic missiles that follow predictable arcs through space, hypersonic glide vehicles can maneuver at high speed within the atmosphere, potentially crossing multiple countries’ airspace and different combatant command boundaries before reaching a target [5]. By the time such a vehicle reaches terminal phase, defeating it requires interceptors capable of matching its speed and maneuverability — an extraordinarily expensive proposition.

Boost-phase intercept eliminates the terminal-phase problem entirely by destroying the missile before it separates from its booster. Golden Dome is a paradigm shift because it includes the deployment of space-based missile interceptors, opening the door to a new chapter in how the U.S. military uses space [6]. Space-based interceptors, maneuvering in orbit, would strike hostile missiles during their boost phase — while still over enemy territory, before any decoys can be deployed.

This is the technical solution. The strategic complications — including the deterrence stability problems examined in Post 7 — are real and substantial. But the technical logic of boost-phase intercept is sound, and the Iranian and Chinese threat trajectories make the capability increasingly necessary.

Space Command and Cyber Command as First Movers

The most operationally significant element of the U.S. response to Iran’s missile program is not defensive. It is the ‘left of launch’ paradigm described in Post 7, applied here in a documented operational context.

Among the combatant commands directly involved in Iran operations, Space Command and Cyber Command were highlighted. Space Command oversees military operations in the space domain, including protecting satellites and delivering missile warning and navigation support. Cyber Command conducts offensive and defensive military operations in cyberspace [7]. The combination of persistent space-based ISR and offensive cyber operations against Iranian missile command and control represents the most operationally mature implementation of the pre-kinetic warfighting concept in current U.S. practice.

The ‘left of launch’ approach is not a substitute for air defense. It is a complement — one that reduces the number of missiles that need to be intercepted by disrupting launch operations before they occur. The Iranian experience demonstrates both its value and its limits: disruption can reduce salvo size but cannot eliminate the saturation threat entirely so long as the adversary’s missile inventory is large and dispersed enough.

The RMA Diagnostic Applied to Iran

Applying the four-component framework from Post 3 to Iran’s missile doctrine:

Technology is present and improving. Iran’s Shahed drone series, Fateh and Zolfaghar ballistic missiles, and increasingly hypersonic-capable systems represent a maturing arsenal.

New military systems are present: the integration of drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles into coordinated salvo doctrine constitutes a genuine combined arms system organized around the saturation concept.

Operational concept is clearly articulated: asymmetric cost exchange, exhaustion of defensive capacity, multi-domain blended strikes timed to saturate sensor-to-shooter kill chains.

Organizational adaptation is uneven but demonstrable. Iran has shown the ability to coordinate complex multi-axis operations involving proxies (Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias) executing simultaneous attacks from multiple geographic vectors. The April 2024 salvo required coordination across multiple launch platforms and geographic locations.

The Iranian case is, in a specific sense, more analytically revealing than Ukraine. It demonstrates that the RMA is not a single phenomenon but a competitive environment in which multiple actors are developing distinct approaches to the same underlying challenge: how to overcome an adversary’s defensive architecture. Ukraine shows the ISR-enabled precision solution. Iran shows the saturation solution. The question for the next generation of military competition is which combination of approaches — and which defensive architectures — will prove most durable.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “The next conflict won’t unfold in a single domain — it will be a multi-threat, multi-axis synchronized, multi-domain assault. Adversaries will launch blended strikes that combine drones, hypersonics, cyberattacks and electronic jamming, designed to stretch and overwhelm traditional defenses and resource availability.”

Aerial Defense 2.0: Why Speed, Scale and Survival Define the Golden Dome Era — Kevin Kelly. Open in Readwise

[2] “Winning the scouting competition may also be aided by securing information on the enemy’s scouting plans and operations, and destroying or corrupting the information provided by its scouting forces.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[3] “The Trump administration directed the Pentagon to develop Golden Dome as a comprehensive shield against ballistic and hypersonic threats. Led by Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, the program is envisioned as a layered defense architecture capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world or from space.”

Northrop Says Investments Position Company for Golden Dome Missile Defense Demand — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[4] “A new report estimates the Golden Dome missile defense program could cost anywhere from $252 billion to $3.6 trillion over 20 years — depending on which threats it counters and where it provides coverage.”

Golden Dome’s Cost: Anywhere From Billions to Trillions, Depending on Design — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[5] “Hypersonic missiles complicate traditional geographic defenses. Unlike conventional ballistic missiles that follow predictable arcs through space, hypersonic glide vehicles can maneuver at high speed within the atmosphere, potentially crossing multiple countries’ airspace and different combatant command boundaries before reaching a target.”

Golden Dome to Require Unprecedented Coordination Between U.S. Combatant Commands — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[6] “Golden Dome is a paradigm shift because it includes the deployment of space-based missile interceptors, opening the door to a new chapter in how the U.S. military uses space.”

The Future of Military Power Is Space Power — Clayton Swope. Open in Readwise

[7] “Among the combatant commands ‘directly involved,’ Caine highlighted U.S. Space Command and U.S. Cyber Command. Cyber Command conducts offensive and defensive military operations in cyberspace. Space Command oversees military operations in the space domain, including protecting satellites and delivering missile warning and navigation support to joint forces.”

Pentagon Details Cyber, Space ‘First Mover’ Role in Iran Operations — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

Mark Twain’s epigraph to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Dying Citizen does not waste words: “Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it. What keeps a republic on its legs is good citizenship” [1]. The observation is 120 years old. It has become considerably more urgent.

Previous posts in this series examined the intellectual history of the forces attacking Western civilization from the outside of its traditions — critical theory, postcolonialism, CRT. This post examines a different kind of threat: the decay from within. Not the assault on Western institutions by their ideological critics, but the failure of the citizens who are supposed to inhabit and sustain those institutions to understand them, take responsibility for them, or transmit them. The critics could not succeed without this failure preparing the ground.

Citizenship as Active Inheritance

Hanson’s foundational claim runs against the grain of contemporary political culture, which tends to frame citizenship primarily in terms of rights — what the state owes the citizen, what protections the individual can claim, what entitlements flow from membership in the political community.

Hanson inverts this: citizenship is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities — and they don’t worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges [2]. The citizen does not have to thank anyone for his rights. They are innate and properly his own [3] — but that innateness does not mean they are self-sustaining. They require the active practice of citizenship to survive.

This distinction — between rights as innate and rights as requiring active maintenance — is precisely what the current cultural moment has collapsed. The inheritance is real. The obligation to tend it is also real. A civilization that insists on the former while abandoning the latter is consuming its capital.

The self-critical capacity that Post 1 identified as a specifically Western achievement is also, Hanson notes, a double-edged instrument: “In sum, the nature of consensual government at its origins was constant self-critique and reassessment. When such perpetual introspection ceases, so does citizenship” [4]. The introspection must be genuine — aimed at improvement — not a performance of guilt or a vehicle for political power. When it becomes the latter, it corrodes the very institutions it claims to be correcting.

The Middle Class as the Republic’s Structural Foundation

Hanson draws on Aristotle’s Politics for the structural claim that underlies the entire book: the middle class is not merely morally superior to the elite, but more stable and reliable than the poor [5]. The middle class is the glue that makes republican government possible. It is large enough to outvote the rich, independent enough to resist the blandishments of the poor, and sufficiently invested in property and social order to prefer law to upheaval.

Without a middle class, the republic’s foundations dissolve. Hanson’s formulation is stark: “Without a middle class, society becomes bifurcated. It splinters into one of modern masters and peasants. In that situation, the function of government is not to ensure liberty but to subsidize the poor to avoid revolution and to exempt the wealthy, who reciprocate by enriching and empowering the governing classes” [6].

This is a description, not a prediction. It is an accurate description of a significant portion of contemporary American institutional life: an administrative and credentialed class that has progressively insulated itself from the economic pressures affecting everyone else, combined with a welfare apparatus that manages the bottom of the income distribution and a regulatory architecture that suppresses the middle-class business formation that once provided upward mobility. The bureaucratic and administrative state overregulated commerce and choked economic growth and start-up businesses, reflecting the interests of a largely well-to-do affluent class that had profited enormously from globalized marketing [7].

The most prominent symptoms for younger generations: radical disruptions in the usual middle-class patterns that encourage traditional citizenship and national cohesion — marriage, child rearing, and home ownership [8]. The economic conditions for forming the households that produce the social fabric of republican citizenship have been systematically undermined. The consequences for civic culture are not accidental.

The Paradox of Affluence

Hanson’s most counterintuitive claim, and perhaps his most important: failure can occur at any time and results more often from what we, rather than others, do to ourselves — affluence and leisure often prove more dangerous to citizenship than poverty and drudgery [9].

This paradox has a specific contemporary manifestation. The farther American society has progressed from the founding conditions — chronologically and materially — the more aggressively it has blamed the founders for their failures rather than examining what is being done with what they built. The strange habit of faulting the present-day United States for its past purportedly illiberal generations: it is as if, when unhappy with the opulent present, we look to the impoverished past to blame our unhappiness on the dead, who faced daunting natural obstacles, rather than on the living, who so often don’t [9].

The translation of genuine historical criticism into a totalizing narrative of guilt — the move that Post 4 and Post 5 examined — is partly a symptom of this affluence pathology. A citizenry that takes its inheritance for granted, that has never had to defend it or earn it, that has never lived under the alternatives, finds it easy to perform dissatisfaction with it. The performance costs nothing. The erosion it produces costs everything.

Civic Illiteracy: The Numbers

The data Hanson assembles on American civic knowledge is not merely discouraging. It is diagnostic. In a 2017 poll by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, thirty-seven percent of Americans could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Only one out of four could name all three branches of government. One in three could not name any branch of government [10].

It is harder to lament the potential loss of constitutional freedoms when majorities of Americans willingly do not know what they are [11]. You cannot defend what you cannot name. You cannot transmit what you do not understand. The educational institutions that were supposed to produce citizens have, as Post 3 established, deliberately replaced civic formation with political activism — and activism of a kind that treats the constitutional tradition as an obstacle rather than an inheritance.

The Citizenship Condition and National Cohesion

Hanson’s treatment of citizenship and immigration is precise in a way that the current debate almost never is. The argument is not ethnic but civic: “Citizens differ from visitors, aliens, and residents passing through who are not rooted inside borders where a constitution and its laws reign supreme. For citizenship to work, the vast majority of residents must be citizens. But to become citizens, residents must be invited in on the condition of giving up their own past loyalties for those of their new hosts” [12].

The operative principle is loyalty transfer, not ethnic conformity. A republic is held together by shared commitment to its laws and institutions, not by shared ancestry. But it requires that commitment to be real and primary: “Once a man owes more loyalty to his first cousin than to a fellow citizen, a constitutional republic cannot exist” [13]. The question is not where one came from. It is what one is loyal to.

The Populist Signal

Hanson’s reading of the 2016 political moment deserves more attention than it typically receives. The simultaneous rise of Trump and Sanders — antithetical in nearly every programmatic respect — shared a common diagnostic: both believed youth did not have the same opportunities as their forebearers. Both alleged that the ‘system’ — respectively, either the greedy oligarchy or the swampy government — had thwarted opportunity [14].

The middle class’s political revolt is not, on this reading, primarily ideological. It is the expression of a structural reality: the conditions for middle-class formation have been eroded, the institutions that were supposed to serve ordinary citizens have been captured by a credentialed class that serves itself, and the people who know this most acutely have been told, repeatedly and with great condescension, that their perception is a symptom of their racism, ignorance, or cultural resentment.

The condescension is itself diagnostic. Reno’s observation from Post 2 applies with full force: the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism but the decline of solidarity and the breakdown of trust between leaders and the led [15]. That breakdown is visible. It is not being honestly addressed. And Hanson’s warning closes the loop: republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade [16].

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it. What keeps a republic on its legs is good citizenship. —MARK TWAIN, 1906”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[2] “Citizenship, after all, is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities — and they don’t worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[3] “The citizen does not have to thank anyone for his rights. They are innate and properly his own.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[4] “In sum, the nature of consensual government at its origins was constant self-critique and reassessment. When such perpetual introspection ceases, so does citizenship.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[5] “Aristotle envisions the middle class not just as morally superior to the elite but also as more stable and reliable than the poor.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[6] “Without a middle class, society becomes bifurcated. It splinters into one of modern masters and peasants. In that situation, the function of government is not to ensure liberty but to subsidize the poor to avoid revolution and to exempt the wealthy, who reciprocate by enriching and empowering the governing classes.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[7] “The bureaucratic and administrative state overregulated commerce and choked economic growth and start-up businesses. Such a near command economy reflected the interests of a largely well-to-do affluent class that had profited enormously from globalized marketing.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[8] “The most prominent symptoms of economic ossification for younger generations — and of concern for the country at large — are radical disruptions in the usual middle-class patterns that encourage traditional citizenship and national cohesion: marriage, child rearing, and home ownership.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[9] “Failure can occur at any time and results more often from what we, rather than others, do to ourselves — affluence and leisure often prove more dangerous to citizenship than poverty and drudgery... The farther we progress from our origins, both chronologically and materially, the more we blame our founders for being less and less as anointed as we see ourselves.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[10] “In a 2017 poll taken by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, most Americans appeared ignorant of the fundamentals of the US Constitution. Thirty-seven percent could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Only one out of four Americans could name all three branches of government. One in three could not name any branch of government.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[11] “It is harder to lament the potential loss of constitutional freedoms when majorities of Americans willingly do not know what they are.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[12] “Citizens differ from visitors, aliens, and residents passing through who are not rooted inside borders where a constitution and its laws reign supreme. For citizenship to work, the vast majority of residents must be citizens. But to become citizens, residents must be invited in on the condition of giving up their own past loyalties for those of their new hosts.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[13] “Once a man owes more loyalty to his first cousin than to a fellow citizen, a constitutional republic cannot exist.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[14] “The ascendance of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in 2016 is a testament to dissatisfaction with the establishments of both parties. Both believed youth did not have the same opportunities as their forebearers. Both alleged that the ‘system’ — respectively, either the greedy oligarchy or the swampy government — had thwarted opportunity.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[15] “Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[16] “Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

Posts 3 and 4 established a framework for understanding military revolutions: four components working together, a through-line of speed, range, and scouting, and the consistent pattern of concept defeating hardware. Post 5 established space as the commanding height that enables the modern scouting advantage. Post 6 showed how cyber and space are structurally entangled. Now the series turns to the present — to a war that is, in real time, demonstrating which parts of the framework are right, which are incomplete, and which questions the framework did not anticipate.

Ukraine is not the first conflict to use drones. It is not the first to use satellite communications. It is not the first to employ electronic warfare at scale. It is the first conflict where all three are integrated into a coherent ISR-strike complex at the tactical level, operated at industrial scale by both sides, and iterated against an equally adaptive adversary on a timeline of days rather than years. What began as a war with drones has become a war of drones [1]. And the war of drones has become, in many respects, the clearest window available into the current state of the revolution in military affairs.

The ISR-Strike Complex, Realized

The reconnaissance-strike complex that Soviet theoreticians imagined in the 1970s, and that American precision-guided munitions began to realize in the 1991 Gulf War, has now been implemented with commercial off-the-shelf components at a fraction of the cost anyone predicted.

The architecture is straightforward. Starlink provides persistent, low-latency satellite communications that enable command and control even when terrestrial infrastructure is destroyed. Russian attacks on Ukrainian communications infrastructure triggered an immediate Starlink response: “These kits can be life or death, as the opponent is now focusing heavily on comms infrastructure. They are asking for more” [2]. One Ukrainian commander’s assessment has become the war’s most quoted operational summary: “Fighting without Starlink service at the front line is like fighting without a gun” [3].

Above the Starlink layer, drone ISR provides near-real-time targeting. Surveillance and reconnaissance drones have become so ubiquitous that both Russian and Ukrainian forces scarcely move in the daylight [4]. The motion of a single Russian van, five miles from the frontline, can trigger immediate engagement by drone operators. Movement near the frontline now happens primarily at dawn and dusk, when neither daylight cameras nor night-vision infrared systems operate at full effectiveness — a battlefield adaptation as fundamental as the shift from marching in columns to dispersed formation after the introduction of accurate rifle fire.

Below the ISR layer, FPV drones — small, cheap, maneuverable quadcopters that transmit real-time footage and detonate kamikaze-style on their targets — execute precision strikes at a cost-effectiveness ratio unprecedented in modern warfare [1]. Ukrainian drone strikes now account for 90 percent of destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles and 80 percent of Russian casualties [5]. A first-person-view drone costing less than $800 is, thanks to its ability to strike with precision and move much faster than any ground vehicle, now the best weapon to defeat a tank that costs more than $10 million [6]. No armored vehicle, regardless of camouflage or anti-drone barriers, can survive for long on the modern drone-swept battlefield.

The tank-led assault, which dominated ground warfare from 1940 through the Gulf War, has been made suicidal. Ukrainian soldiers believe tank-led assaults to be suicidal. Russia still launches them occasionally, but most do not make it to the front line [6]. The interwar pattern has been inverted: instead of armor defeating entrenched infantry, cheap precision munitions are defeating armor with the same relentlessness that machine guns and barbed wire defeated infantry in 1914.

The Action-Reaction Cycle: Innovation at the Speed of War

The most strategically significant feature of the Ukraine conflict is not any specific weapon system. It is the speed of the innovation cycle — and the inability of conventional acquisition processes to keep pace with it.

The most important progress in drone development is happening at the front. Operators are supported by research and development labs and manufacturing and repair facilities located near the frontlines. Drone teams constantly test and deploy new radios, antennas, and circuit boards; software updates are pushed out on a near-daily basis. To create an effective weapon now requires adapting and iterating against an equally adaptive adversary, resulting in a highly dynamic contest of action and reaction [7].

This cycle has produced a succession of dominant weapon systems, each of which has been countered and then replaced on a timeline that would be unrecognizable to any major defense acquisition program. Two years ago the Russian Lancet loitering munition was the most threatening model on the battlefield. Then came the FPV drone. Now fiber-optic-guided drones — first fielded by the Russians — have taken hold of the frontline: quadcopters that spool up to 25 miles of fiber-optic cable in their wake, hard-wired to their operators, impervious to jamming, operating outside radio line of sight, with no radio emissions to betray the pilot’s location [8]. Each innovation creates a counter. Each counter generates a counter-counter. The cycle has no obvious terminus.

The scale is staggering. One Ukrainian brigade spends nearly $2 million each month on small quadcopters for frontline reconnaissance and more than $500,000 per month on longer-range fixed-wing surveillance drones [9]. Every engagement is tracked. Every drone mission is logged. That data drives procurement decisions. This is not how the Pentagon buys weapons. It is, however, how wars are won.

Starlink as Spacepower Case Study

Starlink’s role in Ukraine is the most important spacepower case study since the GPS-enabled precision strikes of 1991. It demonstrates, in operational conditions, exactly what Post 5 argued theoretically: space-based communications resilience is not a support function. It is a warfighting capability.

Starlink helped blunt Russia’s attempts to jam signals, block the internet, and undermine Ukrainian command-and-control capabilities [3]. When Russian cyber and missile attacks degraded the Ukrainian electricity grid — a deliberate campaign to eliminate Starlink terminals’ power supply — SpaceX responded with solar and battery kits. The satellite network adapted faster than the adversary’s campaign to deny it.

China has drawn its own conclusions. Chinese military researchers have called for the development of hard-kill weapons to destroy Starlink if it threatens China’s national security, noting the constellation’s “huge potential for military applications” [10]. China has more than doubled its number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites since 2019, from 124 to 250 [10], in a direct response to the Starlink demonstration. The proliferated LEO commercial constellation has entered the military balance. Every future great-power conflict will feature this dynamic.

The Four-Component Framework Applied

Applying the diagnostic from Post 3: which of the four components of a military revolution are present in the Ukraine drone war?

Technology is present in extraordinary abundance. FPV drones, Starlink terminals, AI-assisted targeting, fiber-optic guidance, electronic warfare systems — all are available, cheap, and proliferating rapidly.

New military systems are present: the integrated ISR-FPV strike complex constitutes a genuinely novel combined-arms system, one that did not exist in its current form before 2022 and that has already obsoleted several prior weapon categories.

Operational concepts are developing, but in an unusual location: at the front, among battalion and brigade commanders, in near-frontline R&D labs — not in staff colleges or doctrine centers. This is simultaneously the war’s greatest conceptual strength and its institutional vulnerability. The concepts are being generated at machine speed by people with immediate feedback on what works. They are not being systematically captured, codified, or institutionalized.

Organizational adaptation is present on the Ukrainian side but uneven. Ukraine has reorganized rapidly around drone warfare. Russia has adapted more slowly, with heavier organizational inertia, but has closed the gap in several domains including electronic warfare and fiber-optic drone deployment.

The verdict: a genuine military revolution is underway in Ukraine, in the sense that the character of warfare has changed discontinuously. But the conceptual and organizational components are still catching up to the technology — on both sides, and especially in every military that is observing from the outside.

The Forward Edge: Automation

The current drone war is a human-operated war, in the sense that most drone strikes still involve a human in the loop making the terminal engagement decision. That is changing.

Automating drones with artificial intelligence would solve a variety of problems facing the modern warfighter: pilot error, vulnerability of control links to jamming and spoofing, the labor-intensive nature of surveillance data processing, and the exposure of drone pilots at the frontline [11]. Defense companies are racing to create AI that can coordinate attacks by multiple drones in an automated drone swarm — the holy grail of drone operations [12]. Drone pilots have become prime targets, and with many traditional weapons rendered obsolete, drones are increasingly fighting other drones. The two sides are inching toward a new frontier: entirely automated warfare [13].

This frontier is the subject of Post 11. The analytical point here is simpler: the Ukraine war has demonstrated, in live fire conditions, the operational viability of the ISR-strike complex that theory predicted. The next step — removing the human from the loop and scaling from hundreds to thousands of coordinated platforms — is the question that will define the next decade of military competition.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “In summer 2023, the commander of Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade’s Drone Unit told us that a new weapon had begun to change the conflict: first-person-view drones. These small, cheap, maneuverable quadcopters transmit real-time footage to their operators and detonate kamikaze-style on their targets. That year, Ukraine flooded the field with thousands of them and Russia soon followed suit. What began as a war with drones has become a war of drones.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[2] “’Russia took offline a bunch of Ukraine communications infrastructure today, and a number of Starlink kits are already allowing Ukraine Armed Forces to continue operating theater command centers. These kits can be life or death, as the opponent is now focusing heavily on comms infrastructure. They are asking for more.’”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[3] “Starlink was crucial for a Ukrainian military at war. One Ukrainian commander quipped, ‘[F]ighting without Starlink service at the front line is like fighting without a gun.’ Starlink helped blunt Russia’s attempts to jam signals, block the internet, and undermine Ukrainian command-and-control capabilities.”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[4] “Surveillance and reconnaissance drones have become so ubiquitous that both Russian and Ukrainian forces scarcely move in the daylight. During a recent visit, we witnessed the motion of a single Russian van, five miles from the frontline, cause a sensation among drone operators, who then destroyed it.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[5] “This represents a profound shift in warfare, largely instigated by Ukraine to compensate for its shortfalls in conventional weapons and manpower. In the world’s first drone war, drones determine how battles are won and how soldiers die: Ukrainian drone strikes now account for 90 percent of destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles and 80 percent of Russian casualties.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[6] “A tank was long regarded as the best weapon to defeat another tank; now, a first-person-view drone costing less than $800 is, thanks to its ability to strike with precision and move much faster than any ground vehicle, the superior choice. No armored vehicle can survive for long on the modern, drone-swept battlefield. As a result, Ukrainian soldiers believe tank-led assaults to be suicidal.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[7] “The most important progress in drone development is happening at the front. Operators are supported by research and development labs and manufacturing and repair facilities located near the frontlines. Drone teams constantly test and deploy new radios, antennas, and circuit boards; software updates are pushed out on a near-daily basis. To create an effective weapon now requires adapting and iterating against an equally adaptive adversary, resulting in a highly dynamic contest of action and reaction.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[8] “Now, strike drones controlled by fiber-optic cables, first fielded by the Russians, have taken hold of the frontline. Unlike drones that run on standard radio frequency, these quadcopters spool up to 25 miles of fiber-optic cable in their wake, leaving them hard-wired to their operator. They are impervious to jamming, relay clear images, and can operate outside radio line of sight. Since they do not emit radio signals, their pilot’s location cannot be identified by electronic means, and they strike with shocking precision.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[9] “Fil’s brigade tracks every engagement, drone mission, and vehicle or piece of equipment hit. The brigade spends nearly $2 million each month on small quadcopters, mostly Mavics, for frontline reconnaissance and more than $500,000 per month for longer-range fixed-wing surveillance drones.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[10] “Chinese military researchers have called for the development of a ‘hard kill’ weapon to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system if it threatens China’s national security... China has more than doubled its number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites since 2019, from 124 to 250.”

Chinese scientists call for plan to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites — Ben Turner. Open in Readwise

[11] “Automating drones with artificial intelligence would solve a variety of problems facing the modern warfighter. A large number of drones are lost to pilot error. And the Ukrainian battlefield is saturated with systems that jam and spoof signals across the electromagnetic spectrum, making it difficult to rely on any technology that requires constant radio connection to a human operator.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[12] “Defense companies are also racing to create AI that can coordinate attacks by multiple drones in an automated drone swarm — the holy grail of drone operations.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

[13] “Drone pilots have become prime targets, and with many traditional weapons rendered obsolete, drones are increasingly fighting other drones. Amid this cycle of innovation, the two sides are inching toward a new frontier: entirely automated warfare.”

The Dawn of Automated Warfare — Eric Schmidt. Open in Readwise

Nigel Biggar is a professor of moral theology at Oxford and a trained historian. He is not a polemicist by instinct or by career. When he published Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning in 2023, he was engaging in the scholarly activity his discipline demands: examining evidence, making distinctions, and arriving at conclusions calibrated to the complexity of the subject.

The response was predictable. He was accused of apologizing for empire, of racism, of providing cover for contemporary injustice. His institution received complaints. The controversy confirmed, for anyone paying attention, exactly the thesis Biggar was making: this unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past [1].

Biggar is right. The decolonization movement is not primarily interested in the historical British Empire, or the historical Portuguese Empire, or the historical Belgian Congo. It is interested in the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945 [2] and in stripping that order of its moral legitimacy. Empire is the vehicle. The destination is the present.

What the Historical Record Actually Shows

Beginning with the actual history is itself now a somewhat radical act, which tells you something about the state of the debate.

The British Empire transported enslaved Africans to its Caribbean and American colonies for roughly 150 years. This is true, well-documented, and genuinely appalling by any reasonable moral standard. It is also, on the prosecutorial reading of colonial history, the only truth that matters — the lens through which every subsequent aspect of the British imperial record must be assessed.

Biggar’s more complete accounting of the record: after a century and a half of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, the British abolished both the trade and the institution within the empire in the early 1800s. They then spent the subsequent century and a half exercising their imperial power in deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave ships crossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in suppressing the Arab slave trade across Africa [3].

The scale of this effort is not widely taught. Kaufmann and Pape concluded that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone in 1807-1867 was “the most expensive example of costly international moral action recorded in modern history” [4]. Factoring in direct costs and secondary costs — the higher prices for goods British consumers paid throughout this period — this was an extraordinary sustained commitment of national resources to a moral objective. Murray’s summary of the same finding: the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade constituted “the most expensive example” of international moral action “recorded in modern history” [5].

None of this appears in the decolonization curriculum. Biggar’s conclusion follows directly: “The British Empire cannot be equated with slavery, since, during the second half of the empire’s life, imperial policy was consistently committed to abolishing it. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit” [6].

This is not a defense of everything the British Empire did. It is a statement of what honest historical assessment requires: to assess the legacy of empire, it is necessary to assess the period in the round [7].

How to Judge the Past Honestly

Biggar’s treatment of the moral judgment question is one of the most carefully argued parts of his book, and worth understanding precisely because it avoids the twin failures of the debate: refusing to judge the past at all (the relativist cop-out) and judging it with complete anachronism (the prosecutorial standard).

His position: we can and should make moral judgments about the past. The claim that we cannot judge the past at all is not moral humility — it is moral abdication. History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world [8]. We are not forbidden from noticing.

But good moral judgment will account for two things. First, that human beings are always in the process of moral learning, and that some moral truths that are obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors [9]. Slavery seems to us horrible. It used not to seem horrible. The fact that we now know better is itself evidence of moral progress — progress that originated overwhelmingly within the Western tradition.

Second, that the peace and security that most people in the early twenty-first century West take for granted as normal are, historically, quite extraordinary [10]. Judging the conduct of a colonial administrator in 1890 by the standards of a Oxford don in 2024 is not moral rigor. It is moral anachronism. Biggar’s quotation of Joseph Chamberlain — “We have to lie on the bed which our predecessors made for us” — represents what he calls an admirable practical wisdom that academic activists typically lack [11]. Not having such wisdom, they also lack forgiveness for honest error and tragic failure.

The Asymmetric Ledger

Murray names the central structural problem of the colonial debate with precision: it is clear that some unfair ledger has been created — a ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong — or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it [12].

The empirical prerequisite for this ledger is the ignorance Murray identifies: “In order to be able to judge the West, you would have to know at least some of the history of the rest. The only thing modern Western populations are more ignorant about than their own history is the history of other peoples outside the West. Yet such knowledge is surely a prerequisite to being able to arrive at any moral judgments” [13].

Biggar provides the comparative history that closes the argument. When Cecil Rhodes judged British civilization superior to what he encountered in South Africa in 1870 — in natural science, technology, finance, communications, commerce, naval power, and liberal political institutions — he was making a judgment that every civilization in every era has made about civilizations it encountered. Arab geographers and philosophers compared their own cultural sophistication favourably to what seemed to them the more primitive cultures of white northern Europeans and black Africans. The imperial Qing dynasty regarded the British and other Westerners as barbarians, without any embarrassment at all. Somalis held their contempt for Bantu peoples — ‘We cannot obey slaves. It is impossible for us to live under slave people’ [14].

The cultural judgment Rhodes made was not unusual. It was universal. The asymmetric standard that condemns him for it — while ignoring identical judgments made by non-Western actors throughout history — is not a moral standard at all. It is a political weapon.

O’Neill states the logical conclusion with his characteristic bluntness: to judge non-whites by a lower moral standard than the one you use for whites is the very definition of racism [15]. The decolonization framework, by refusing to apply to non-Western historical actors the same critical scrutiny it applies to Western ones, embeds the hierarchy it claims to dismantle.

The Strategic Beneficiary

Murray identifies who benefits from the West’s sustained exercise in self-accusation with a clarity that the Western commentariat largely avoids: while the CCP has been actively engaging in the most appalling human rights abuses, it is clearly delighted that the West has distracted itself with a set of self-abasements of its own [16].

The asymmetric ledger applied to colonial history is not merely a historical error. It is a strategic liability. The United States and the United Kingdom, the primary inheritors of the liberal world order, spend enormous institutional energy prosecuting themselves for their historical failures while China, Russia, and others with rather more recent and rather more severe records of oppression attract virtually no equivalent scrutiny from the same institutions.

Biggar identified the real target from the outset: the controversy over empire aims at the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945. The people most invested in dismantling that order from outside know that the decolonization movement is doing their work for them, from inside, for free.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[2] “The reason for this focus is that the real target of today’s anti-imperialists or anti-colonialists is the West or, more precisely, the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[3] “After a century and a half of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, the British abolished both the trade and the institution within the empire in the early 1800s. They then spent the subsequent century and a half exercising their imperial power in deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave ships crossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in suppressing the Arab slave trade across Africa.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[4] “Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807-67 was ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[5] “Britain’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade constituted ‘the most expensive example’ of international moral action ‘recorded in modern history.’”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[6] “The British Empire cannot be equated with slavery, since, during the second half of the empire’s life, imperial policy was consistently committed to abolishing it. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[7] “The rise of postcolonial studies had been a necessary correction within academia, but that period itself now needed interrogating. For to assess the legacy of empire, it is necessary to assess the period in the round.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[8] “History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[9] “It is true that we should not judge the past by the present, if it means... that human beings are always in the process of learning morally, and that some moral truths that are obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[10] “The peace and security that most people in the early twenty-first century West take for granted as normal are, historically, quite extraordinary.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[11] “When Joseph Chamberlain commented on imperial policy, ‘We have to lie on the bed which our predecessors made for us’, he spoke with an admirable practical wisdom that academics and student activists typically lack.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[12] “It is clear that some unfair ledger has been created. A ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[13] “In order to be able to judge the West, you would have to know at least some of the history of the rest. The only thing modern Western populations are more ignorant about than their own history is the history of other peoples outside the West. Yet such knowledge is surely a prerequisite to being able to arrive at any moral judgments.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[14] “When Cecil Rhodes landed in South Africa in 1870... it was manifestly obvious to him that British civilisation at the time was superior... In the medieval period Muslim Arab geographers compared their own cultural sophistication favourably to what seemed to them the more primitive cultures of white northern Europeans and black Africans... The imperial Qing dynasty regarded the British – and other Westerners – as barbarians, without any embarrassment at all.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[15] “To judge non-whites by a lower moral standard than the one you use for whites is the very definition of racism.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[16] “At the same time that the CCP has been actively engaging in the most appalling human rights abuses, it is clearly delighted that the West has distracted itself with a set of self-abasements of its own.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

Nuclear deterrence theory was one of the twentieth century’s most impressive intellectual achievements. Out of the terrifying novelty of the nuclear age, strategists and analysts produced a framework — mutual assured destruction, second-strike stability, crisis management protocols — that appears to have prevented nuclear war for eighty years. The framework was not perfect, and its success may owe more to luck than is comfortable to acknowledge. But it was analytically coherent, built on identifiable structural conditions, and testable against evidence.

The problem is that those structural conditions have changed more dramatically in the past decade than at any point since the Cold War. The world nuclear deterrence theory was designed for — two superpowers, roughly symmetric capabilities, verifiable force levels, and reasonably clear red lines between war and peace — no longer exists in the form that made the theory workable. What replaced it is more complex, less transparent, and more susceptible to catastrophic miscalculation.

This post identifies why, and what the space-cyber nexus has to do with it.

The Cold War Framework That Worked

Classic nuclear deterrence rested on a specific structural insight: if both sides have secure second-strike capabilities — the ability to absorb a first strike and still deliver an unacceptable retaliatory blow — neither side has an incentive to strike first. The logic is elegant. Both sides are deterred not by the other’s offensive capability but by the certainty of their own destruction if they initiate.

The critical stabilizing technology was the submarine-launched ballistic missile. As Petraeus notes in Conflict, it was not until 1972 that Nixon and Brezhnev both recognized that MIRVs had made ballistic missile defense effectively impossible, leading to SALT’s ABM limitations. What prevented the offensive from completely overwhelming the defensive, and thus increasing the attraction of a surprise attack, was the invulnerability of nuclear-armed submarines [1]. SSBNs — ballistic missile submarines — are mobile, concealed, and essentially untargetable in peacetime. They provide the assured second strike that makes first strikes irrational.

Dolman, extending nuclear theory to the space domain in Astropolitik, identifies the three most consequential nuclear dilemmas: centralized versus decentralized control, the logic of the First Strike Advantage (FSA), and counterforce versus counter-C3I strategy [2]. The Cold War architecture was designed to suppress the FSA by making second strikes survivable, and to make counter-C3I — targeting command, control, communications, and intelligence assets rather than warheads — an unattractive strategy by hardening and dispersing those assets.

Both of these design goals are now under structural stress.

The Space-Nuclear Nexus

Modern nuclear deterrence depends on three space-enabled functions that most discussions of nuclear strategy treat as background assumptions rather than as the vulnerabilities they actually are.

The first is early warning. Satellites provide persistent infrared detection of missile launches, giving decision-makers minutes of warning before impact. Without this warning, the deterrent posture shifts from assured retaliation to hair-trigger launch-on-warning or launch-under-attack — both of which dramatically increase the risk of accidental nuclear war.

The second is ISR for targeting. Effective nuclear deterrence requires credible targeting. Satellites provide the reconnaissance that makes targeting precise and credible. Degrade that reconnaissance and you degrade the credibility of the threat.

The third is communications for launch authority. The chain of command for nuclear release depends on satellite communications. Disrupt that chain and you create uncertainty about whether launch orders can be transmitted and executed — uncertainty that may, perversely, create pressure to delegate launch authority or pre-authorize release under specific conditions, both of which lower the threshold for nuclear use.

Sciutto, in The Shadow War, draws the implication directly: if adversaries can target and take out the satellites protecting the United States from nuclear attack, those space weapons are by definition an existential threat [3]. This framing, which Sciutto attributes to senior U.S. officials, collapses the distinction between conventional military competition in space and nuclear strategic stability. An ASAT weapon, or a cyberattack against a satellite ground segment, is not merely a conventional military act if the satellite targeted is part of the nuclear C2 architecture.

New START Is Gone

On February 5, 2026, the New START Treaty expired without a successor agreement. The formal expiration of New START removed the final terrestrial guardrail of nuclear transparency between the United States and the Russian Federation, leaving global security in a state of strategic blindness. This treaty, which for 14 years limited deployed strategic nuclear warheads and allowed for rigorous on-site inspections, lapsed without a follow-on agreement [4].

The implications compound the space-nuclear vulnerability. In a world with verification protocols, a satellite maneuver near a Russian nuclear C2 node is an observed event with known context. In a world without them, the same maneuver exists in an interpretive vacuum. In a world without the verification protocols once provided by New START, a commercial maneuver near a nuclear command-and-control node could be misinterpreted as a prelude to a strike, creating a hair-trigger environment where a technical error or a pilot’s misjudgment becomes an existential threat [5].

The loss of New START is not merely a bilateral U.S.-Russia problem. It signals to every nuclear-armed state that the arms control architecture of the post-Cold War era has collapsed. China, which was never party to New START, is now modernizing and expanding its nuclear arsenal without any treaty constraints. The three-way nuclear competition that emerges from this environment has no established framework for stability management.

Russia’s Escalation Doctrine

Understanding the current deterrence environment requires understanding Russia’s strategic logic, which is substantially different from the American framing.

Fink’s analysis of Russian strategic deterrence doctrine reveals a holistic concept for managing escalation and containing adversaries in peacetime by integrating military and nonmilitary means. As a theory of escalation management and war termination, Russian strategic deterrence communicates to a would-be opponent that the Russian military can inflict progressively higher costs while lowering their expected gains in a conflict [6]. The operating mechanism is calibrated escalation — the deliberate, controlled ratcheting of costs to signal resolve and to compel de-escalation.

This doctrine has direct implications for the space domain. Russian non-kinetic attacks on American satellites are not irrational provocations — they are applications of calibrated escalation logic. They impose costs below the threshold of armed attack, they test adversary resolve, and they demonstrate capability in ways that strengthen deterrence without crossing a line that triggers response. The fact that the U.S. has not responded in kind to daily non-kinetic attacks on its space assets is itself a data point that Russia’s doctrine is, in its own terms, working.

The ‘Left of Launch’ Paradigm and Its Risks

The United States has developed an operational concept for the pre-kinetic phase of a conflict that is closely tied to space and cyber capabilities: the “left of launch” paradigm. The concept envisions defeating an adversary’s missiles before they are fired rather than intercepting them in flight — through intelligence, special operations, cyber operations, and electronic warfare.

In the Iran operations context, this means Space Command providing persistent surveillance and tracking through space-based sensors for early detection of missile launch platforms, while Cyber Command adds the capability to infiltrate or disrupt an adversary’s missile command and control networks via offensive cyber operations, potentially preventing launch orders from being executed [7].

This is a strategically elegant concept. It is also a source of significant escalation risk. An adversary that knows the U.S. can penetrate its missile launch networks has strong incentives to launch early, to pre-delegate launch authority, or to interpret ambiguous signals as the beginning of a disarming cyber attack. The same capability that reduces the threat of missile attack may increase the probability that an adversary chooses to use its missiles before they can be disabled.

Golden Dome and the Stability Paradox

The Golden Dome proposal — a layered missile defense architecture with a substantial space-based interceptor layer — concentrates the stability problem in a single system. Golden Dome is envisioned as a multi-layer homeland defense system combining new sensor networks, command and control tools, and a mix of ground and space-based kinetic interceptors. Space-based interceptors would maneuver in orbit and strike hostile missiles during flight [8].

The deterrence logic for missile defense is straightforward: if the adversary cannot deliver a second strike reliably, the logic of MAD breaks down in America’s favor. The stability problem is equally straightforward: an adversary facing a credible missile defense has strong incentives to expand its offensive arsenal, develop countermeasures, and — most dangerously — to strike before the defense is fully operational.

Chow’s projections of adversary responses include the development of “space stalkers” derived from dual-use spacecraft to disable space-based interceptors, increases in nuclear missile inventory to overwhelm defenses, and pressure for arms control that constrains space-based systems [9]. The adversary responses to Golden Dome will reshape the orbital environment and the nuclear balance simultaneously — in ways that are difficult to model and impossible to fully predict.

The Diagnostic: Maximum Conditions for Miscalculation

Applying the net assessment framework from Post 2: what does the current deterrence balance look like when you examine both sides simultaneously, account for asymmetries, and think in decades rather than budget cycles?

The picture is not reassuring. No verification protocols. Space assets underpinning nuclear C2 under daily non-kinetic attack. Adversary doctrines explicitly calibrated to operate below the armed attack threshold. A ‘left of launch’ paradigm that creates strong pre-delegation pressures on the adversary side. Missile defense deployments that expand offensive nuclear inventories. Commercial satellites operating in orbital regimes adjacent to nuclear C2 nodes without any framework for distinguishing intelligence preparation from attack preparation.

The conditions for catastrophic miscalculation — not deliberate nuclear war but an error that neither side intended — have rarely been more structurally favorable. The series will return to this in the closing post. What the framework demands here is the same thing it demands everywhere: clarity about ends, rigor about means, and the humility to understand that war is always an instrument of policy — and that instruments can slip from the hands that hold them.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “It was not until 1972 that President Richard Nixon of the United States and Leonid Brezhnev of the USSR both recognized that the introduction of multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) meant that the number of warheads could be increased so dramatically that it would overwhelm any antiballistic missile (ABM) defences. The result was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that limited ABMs and MIRVs to minimal numbers. What prevented the offensive from completely overwhelming the defensive, and thus increasing the attraction of a surprise attack (’first strike’), was the invulnerability of nuclear-armed submarines.”

Conflict — David Petraeus. Open in Readwise

[2] “To illustrate the span of competing nuclear theory, and to extend nuclear theory to the realm of outer space, three of the most perplexing dilemmas in the use of nuclear weapons are discussed: centralized versus decentralized control, the logic of the First Strike Advantage (FSA), and counterforce versus counter-C3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence) strategy.”

Astropolitik — Everett C. Dolman. Open in Readwise

[3] “If adversaries can target and take out the satellites protecting the United States from nuclear attack, those space weapons themselves are by definition an existential threat.”

The Shadow War — Jim Sciutto. Open in Readwise

[4] “On February 5, 2026, the formal expiration of the New START Treaty removed the final terrestrial guardrail of nuclear transparency between the United States and the Russian Federation, leaving global security in a state of strategic blindness. This treaty, which for 14 years limited deployed strategic nuclear warheads and allowed for rigorous on-site inspections, lapsed without a follow-on agreement.”

The Ghost in the Orbit: How Hybrid Surveillance Reshapes Risks — Zohaib Altaf. Open in Readwise

[5] “In a world without the verification protocols once provided by New START, a commercial maneuver near a nuclear command-and-control node could be misinterpreted as a prelude to a strike, creating a hair-trigger environment where a technical error or a pilot’s misjudgment becomes an existential threat.”

The Ghost in the Orbit: How Hybrid Surveillance Reshapes Risks — Zohaib Altaf. Open in Readwise

[6] “The overarching concept for this system at the national level is called ‘strategic deterrence.’ It is a holistic Russian national security concept for managing escalation, and containing adversaries in peacetime, by integrating military and nonmilitary means... These actions signal to the opponent’s leadership and populations the need to forgo aggression, de-escalate hostilities, and/or terminate the conflict. The strategy suggests that the Russian military has a strong predilection for cost imposition (rather than denial of benefits) in thinking about deterrence and that the operating mechanism is calibrated escalation.”

Russian Strategy for Escalation Management: Evolution of Key Concepts — Anya Fink. Open in Readwise

[7] “In theory, this collaboration means that while Space Command provides persistent surveillance and tracking through space-based sensors, allowing early detection of moving missile launch platforms, Special Operations Command operates covertly on the ground to gather intelligence on missile forces... Meanwhile, Cyber Command adds the capability to infiltrate or disrupt an adversary’s missile command and control networks via offensive cyber operations, potentially preventing launch orders from being executed.”

‘Left of Launch’ Becomes Central Focus in Next-Generation Missile Defense — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[8] “Golden Dome is a proposed layered U.S. missile defense architecture... including a substantial space layer, potentially involving hundreds or thousands of satellites for sensing, tracking and interceptor coordination. Space-based interceptors would maneuver in orbit and strike hostile missiles during flight.”

Golden Dome to Require Unprecedented Coordination Between U.S. Combatant Commands — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[9] “We can reasonably project how China and Russia might counter the centerpiece — a space-based interceptor system — of the Golden Dome in five ways: developing a fleet of ‘space stalkers’ derived from dual-use spacecraft to disable this space-based system; devising countermeasures to better protect their own missiles during boost phase; increasing their nuclear missile inventory to compensate for those likely to be intercepted; pursuing their own space-based missile defense development; and pressing for arms control agreements.”

Golden Dome for NATO Is Better Than One for America — Brian G. Chow. Open in Readwise

Critical Race Theory is routinely described by its defenders as a natural development of the American civil rights tradition — an extension of the work done by the movement that produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This description is not merely imprecise. It is the opposite of accurate.

The civil rights movement appealed to the foundations of the liberal order: equality before the law, individual dignity, the universal application of constitutional principles regardless of race. The movement’s most powerful arguments were arguments from within the Western tradition — from the Declaration of Independence, from the Fourteenth Amendment, from the claim that America had promised something to all its citizens and needed to deliver it.

CRT does something structurally different. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law [1]. This is not a reform of liberalism. It is an argument against it. And understanding that distinction is essential to understanding why CRT’s spread through American institutions represents something more serious than a policy disagreement.

What CRT Actually Claims

The Episcopalian Church’s definition of CRT, quoted by Murray, is reasonably representative: “a social and theoretical framework that understands race as a lens through which to seek understanding of the world. It insists, like critical theory at large, that social problems are created by structures and institutions, rather than by individuals” [2].

The three core claims follow from this foundation:

First, that racism is primarily structural and institutional rather than individual — that it is embedded in laws, policies, hiring practices, educational systems, and cultural assumptions in ways that persist regardless of the intentions of any specific person. Individual racists are less important than racist structures.

Second, that power is racially distributed in ways that determine who can be a racist. In the power structure that devotees of CRT remorselessly laid out, it was axiomatic that only white people had power. Therefore, only white people could be racist. Black people either could not be racist or, if they were racist, were racist only because they had ‘internalized whiteness’ [3].

Third — and most consequential for its epistemological character — that “lived experience” trumps conventional evidence. CRT’s assertions are based not on evidence, as it might previously have been understood, but essentially on interpretations and attitudes. While rarely announcing the fact, the rules of CRT had no need for normal standards of evidence. If a person’s ‘lived experience’ could be attested to, then the question of evidence or data had to find a place further back in the queue, if at all [4].

This third claim is where CRT breaks most decisively from the Enlightenment tradition. Post 3 identified the Enlightenment contribution as empiricism: truth discovered rather than decreed, with evidence as the mechanism of discovery and falsifiability as the test of claims. CRT substitutes identity-based testimony for evidence and renders itself structurally unfalsifiable. The more places scholars could see invisible racism, the more popular they became [5]. There is no observation that could, in principle, disprove the structural racism claim — because any absence of evidence is itself evidence of how deeply the racism is buried.

The DiAngelo and Kendi Problem

Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are the two most institutionally influential popularizers of CRT in the contemporary United States, and both illustrate the unfalsifiability problem with unusual clarity.

DiAngelo’s framework: white identity is inherently racist, and a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy [6]. Her prescription: white people should strive to be “less white” because being less white means being less racially oppressive. The solution to racism, in this framework, is for one racial group to systematically diminish its own identity while the framework itself defines that identity as inherently oppressive.

The evidentiary standard DiAngelo applies to her claims is illustrated by her assertion that “there is a kind of glee in the White collective when Black bodies are punished” [7]. No evidence is offered. The claim is presented as self-evident to those sufficiently attuned to the structural reality CRT describes. Absence of evidence is, again, evidence of how deep the problem runs.

Kendi’s framework produces what may be the most explicit illustration of the unfalsifiability trap in contemporary public discourse. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” [8]. From this foundation, Kendi constructs a system in which disagreement with any of his specific policy positions constitutes racism: opposing reparations is racist, having no opinion on reparations is racist, opposing voter ID laws is right and supporting them is racist, referring to a ‘post-racial society’ is racist. Everywhere you turn, the other exits are blocked [9].

This is not analysis. It is a closed system designed to make dissent impossible without self-incrimination.

The 1619 Project: Ideology Displacing History

The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times in 2019, presented itself as a corrective historical reckoning: the claim that 1619 — when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia — rather than 1776 represented the true founding of America, with the protection of slavery as the Revolution’s primary motivating cause.

The project attracted criticism not only from conservative commentators but from leading academic historians of early America, including Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes. They wrote to the New York Times objecting that on “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or framing,” the project had got its history severely wrong. The historians said that the 1619 Project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology” [10].

Murray’s summary is pointed: the project’s team set out to ignore the historical record and scour the land for anything that could accord with their own preordained theory [11]. This is the deductive method Hanson identified in Post 3: beginning from the predetermined conclusion and working backward to the evidence.

Biggar on the Expansion of ‘Racism’

Nigel Biggar, approaching these questions as a trained ethicist and historian rather than as a polemicist, identifies what may be the deepest problem with CRT’s conceptual apparatus: the systematic expansion of the concept of racism to the point of analytical uselessness.

Nowadays the sin of ‘racism’ has been loosened and broadened to mean any negative judgment made by a member of one race upon the culture of another, but especially by a ‘white’ person upon a ‘black’ culture. This assumes a basic cultural equality and a radical moral relativism and is designed to contradict Western assumptions of superiority [12].

The consequences of this expansion are significant. If racism means any negative cultural judgment by a white person about a non-white culture, then the entire apparatus of cultural criticism — the basis on which any civilization assesses its own performance and argues about its values — becomes structurally impossible within this framework. You cannot argue that female genital mutilation is wrong, that honor killing is wrong, or that any cultural practice of a non-Western society is morally inferior to the standard the Western tradition has developed — without exposing yourself to the charge of racism.

Biggar also identifies the specific moral error involved: the sins of racism are two — first, the racial group is viewed in relentlessly negative terms, and second, the individual is not permitted to appear as anything other than a member of such a group [13]. CRT’s framework applies exactly these two errors, in reverse direction, to white people: viewing the group in relentlessly negative terms, and refusing to allow any individual to escape the group’s ascribed characteristics.

The Practical Outcomes

Murray’s verdict on the practical consequences of CRT’s application to social policy is blunt and, on the evidence, defensible: if the problem in everything is racism and the answer to everything is to disrupt the racist system, it produces only two verifiable outcomes: a lowering of standards in the name of antiracism and a rise in the need for racist policies in order to deal with a problem that is always said to be racism. The war against standardized testing, like the war against religion, philosophy, and everything else in the West, does not erase racial differences. It foghorns them [14].

This is the central paradox of the CRT enterprise. A framework that claims to diagnose and dismantle racism systematically creates new forms of race-consciousness, racial categorization, and race-based policy. It does not produce the colorblind society that the civil rights movement envisioned. It produces a society organized entirely around race, in which everyone’s standing, credibility, and moral status is determined by their racial identity. This is not the West’s inheritance. It is its repudiation.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[2] “[CRT] is a social and theoretical framework that understands race as a lens through which to seek understanding of the world. It insists, like critical theory at large, that social problems are created by structures and institutions, rather than by individuals.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[3] “In the power structure that devotees of CRT remorselessly laid out, it was axiomatic that only white people had power. Therefore, only white people could be racist. Black people either could not be racist or, if they were racist, were racist only because they had ‘internalized whiteness.’”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[4] “One of the distinguishing marks of CRT was that its assertions were based not on evidence, as it might previously have been understood, but essentially on interpretations and attitudes... the rules of CRT had no need for normal standards of evidence. If a person’s ‘lived experience’ could be attested to, then the question of ‘evidence’ or ‘data’ had to find a place further back in the queue, if at all.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[5] “The more places scholars could see invisible racism, the more popular they became.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[6] “A positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[7] “DiAngelo may or may not be a scholar, but she had no evidence to back up her claims. Instead, she simply made another (unrelated) assertion: ‘There is a kind of glee in the White collective when Black bodies are punished.’”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[8] “’The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.’”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[9] “Kendi is opposed to voter ID laws. So, can anybody guess what people who support voter ID laws might be? That is right: they, too, are racists. Everywhere you turn, the other exits are blocked.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[10] “A number of leading scholars complained that on ‘matters of verifiable fact’ that ‘cannot be described as interpretation or framing,’ the project had got its history severely wrong. The historians said that the 1619 Project reflected ‘a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.’”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[11] “For the 1619 project, they were not, and so its crack team set out to ignore the historical record and scour the land for anything that could accord with their own preordained theory.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[12] “Nowadays the sin of ‘racism’ has been loosened and broadened to mean any negative judgement made by a member of one race upon the culture of another, but especially by a ‘white’ person upon a ‘black’ culture. This assumes a basic cultural equality and a radical moral relativism and is designed to contradict Western assumptions of superiority.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[13] “The sins of racism are two: first, the racial group is viewed in relentlessly negative terms; and second, the individual is not permitted to appear as anything other than a member of such a group.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[14] “If the problem in everything is racism and the answer to everything is to disrupt the racist system, it appears to produce only two verifiable outcomes: a lowering of standards in the name of antiracism and a rise in the need for racist policies in order to deal with a problem that is always said to be racism. The war against standardized testing does not erase racial differences. It foghorns them.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

At 4:00 AM local time on February 24, 2022, one hour before Russian armor crossed into Ukraine, Russian government hackers executed a cyberattack against the KA-SAT satellite network operated by the American company Viasat. The attack used a wiper malware payload delivered through a vulnerability in the satellite’s ground network management infrastructure. Ukrainian military command and control, which relied on Viasat for communications, suffered an immediate and significant disruption in the early hours of the invasion [1]. Collateral effects reached across Europe: 5,800 wind turbines in Germany lost their satellite communications links [2], rendering them unable to report status or receive operational commands.

This was not a prelude to the space war. It was the space war — conducted entirely through cyberspace, before a single kinetic weapon had been fired in anger. The most consequential opening move of Europe’s largest land war since 1945 was not a tank column or an artillery barrage. It was code, delivered through a ground segment, targeting a commercial satellite network.

Post 5 established that space is the commanding height of modern warfare. This post establishes the corollary: the most effective way to attack that commanding height is not through kinetic weapons in orbit but through cyberspace on the ground. Cyber and space are not parallel domains. They are structurally entangled — and that entanglement is the central vulnerability of the modern military architecture.

The Structural Entanglement

Every satellite has three segments: the space segment (the satellite itself), the ground segment (the control infrastructure, antennas, and processing facilities), and the link segment (the communications path between them). Of these three, the ground segment and the link segment are accessible through cyberspace. They run on networks. Networks have vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are exploitable at a fraction of the cost and risk of deploying a kinetic anti-satellite weapon.

The Space Capstone Publication states this plainly: cyberspace operations are a crucial and inescapable component of military space operations and represent the primary linkage to the other warfighting domains. These dependencies can also create avenues of enemy attack that offer lower costs and higher chance of success than orbital warfare within the space domain only [3]. This is not a theoretical observation. It is a doctrinal acknowledgment that the cheapest and most effective path to degrading American spacepower runs not through the vacuum of low Earth orbit but through the internet.

Christopher Scolese, director of the National Reconnaissance Office — the agency responsible for the United States’ most sensitive intelligence satellites — has reportedly articulated this clearly: when it comes to warfare in space, many envision lasers and missiles, but Scolese isn’t worried about death rays. He’s worried about hackers [4]. The NRO director’s framing reflects a hard-won institutional understanding. Deploying kinetic or directed-energy weapons in orbit remains technically and financially daunting. Offensive cyber capabilities, by contrast, are far easier to acquire and notoriously hard to trace [4].

The Full Spectrum of Non-Kinetic Counterspace

The Viasat attack sits at one end of a broad spectrum of non-kinetic counterspace capabilities that are already being employed against American and allied space assets. In November 2021, General David Thompson, U.S. Space Force’s vice chief of space operations, confirmed that both China and Russia are regularly attacking U.S. satellites with non-kinetic means, including lasers, radio-frequency jammers, and cyber [5]. The attacks are not hypothetical future threats. They are ongoing operations.

Krepinevich’s assessment of the trajectory is equally direct: the global threat of electronic warfare attacks against space systems will expand in the coming years in both number and types of weapons, with focus on jamming against dedicated military satellite communications, synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites, and GPS. The blending of electronic warfare and cyber-attack capabilities will likely expand in pursuit of sophisticated means to deny and degrade information networks [6].

The spectrum of capabilities runs from reversible to irreversible effects. At the reversible end: GPS jamming and spoofing, communications disruption, laser dazzling of optical sensors. These degrade capability without destroying hardware, leaving the adversary uncertain whether an attack has occurred and providing plausible deniability. Further along: cyber intrusion disabling satellite operations or ground segment control. Further still: co-orbital proximity operations — satellites maneuvering to approach, surveil, and potentially physically interfere with other satellites. At the irreversible end: kinetic direct-ascent ASAT missiles and nuclear electromagnetic pulse in space. China is rapidly building out its arsenal across this entire spectrum: ground-based lasers, satellites that can grab other satellites, all of which pose a ‘grave threat’ to the U.S., according to Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman [7].

A Space Force general has stated that American satellites are attacked by adversaries every day in ways that flirt with ‘acts of war’ [8]. That sentence, delivered publicly by a senior military officer, deserves to be absorbed in full. The space war is not coming. It is underway.

The Legal Gray Zone

Non-kinetic counterspace operations have a strategic advantage beyond cost and deniability: they operate in a legal vacuum. International accords including the Outer Space Treaty and the UN Charter provide no clear prohibition on non-kinetic attacks. Kinetic ASATs are attacks that apply direct physical force, creating debris and attracting international condemnation — as China’s 2007 test demonstrated when it generated thousands of debris fragments still tracked today. Non-kinetic ASATs like lasers, jammers, and cyber attacks only disable satellites without creating debris, making them less susceptible to legal regulation [9].

The result is a weapons category specifically calibrated for the legal and political environment. Non-kinetic counterspace capabilities can be employed below the threshold of armed attack as defined by international law, below the threshold of public acknowledgment, and below the threshold of alliance Article V obligations. Both kinetic and non-kinetic attacks pose substantial risk to effective satellite services, but only kinetic ASATs have met with evident international condemnation [10]. This asymmetry is not accidental. It is strategic.

The Silent Siege: Pre-Positioning for Future Disruption

The Viasat attack was a relatively blunt instrument — a disruptive strike timed to the start of a military operation. The more sophisticated version of cyber-enabled counterspace is subtler and more dangerous: pre-positioning for future exploitation rather than immediate disruption.

Incidents like Salt Typhoon illustrate how cyber infiltration is used for reconnaissance, telemetry mapping, and the prepositioning of malicious code to be activated later. These activities threaten the integrity of national security operations, defense communications, and civilian infrastructure reliant on continuous and trusted satellite services [11]. The most serious damage from a cyber intrusion against a satellite network may occur invisibly, long before any service disruption. In this phase, intrusions allow hostile actors to establish persistent access, map vulnerabilities, and quietly position themselves for future exploitation [12].

Maguire’s framing is the most pointed: a satellite without cybersecurity is already compromised. It just hasn’t failed yet [13]. When it does fail — at the moment the adversary has chosen, in the operational context the adversary has planned for — the failure will appear sudden. But the attack will have been underway for months or years.

China’s Omni-Domain Approach

China has developed the most comprehensive doctrine for exploiting the space-cyber entanglement. China’s rapid progression in space capabilities, augmented by AI and cyber integration, reflects an omni-domain approach — fusing space, cyber, and artificial intelligence — that illustrates Beijing’s ambition to command the strategic high ground of space [14].

This is not rhetorical. The PLA’s 2013 Science of Military Strategy explicitly anticipates that future wars will begin in space and cyberspace, arguing that ‘seizing command of space network dominance will become crucial for obtaining comprehensive superiority on the battlefield and conquering an enemy’ [15]. China’s military strategists have read the interwar cases. They have absorbed the lesson that the scouting advantage is decisive. And they have concluded that the most effective path to denying the United States its scouting advantage runs through the networks that connect American space assets to the forces they support.

China’s broader military strategy of ‘fighting and winning local wars under informationized conditions’ means applying information technology in all aspects of military operations, from cyber warfare on the ground to disrupting and destroying an enemy’s information technology in space, including by targeting satellites [16].

The Doctrinal Response: Dynamic Space Operations

The U.S. military is beginning to develop a conceptual response to the space-cyber threat, though the organizational adaptation — the fourth component of the RMA framework from Post 3 — has not yet fully followed.

The emerging concept is “dynamic space operations” and “sustained space maneuver” — satellites that move frequently and unpredictably rather than remaining in fixed, predictable orbits, enabling evasion, deception, and responsive actions in orbit [17]. This is the direct application of the interwar blitzkrieg lesson to the space domain: predictability is vulnerability. The satellite that stays where the adversary expects it to be is the satellite that gets attacked.

The Space Capstone’s seventh discipline — cyber operations — encompasses both defensive and offensive dimensions: the ability to employ cyber security and cyber defense of critical space networks and systems, and the skill to employ future offensive capabilities [18]. The offensive dimension remains constrained by policy, classification, and institutional caution. But the structural logic is identical to the offensive cyber operations in other domains: if the adversary is conducting persistent cyber operations against American space assets, the credible deterrent requires a demonstrated capability to do the same.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “A Russian cyberattack ahead of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was a real-world example of hybrid space warfare, combining attacks against commercial space systems with the movement of military land forces. An hour before Russian troops crossed the border, Russian government hackers conducted cyberattacks against the American satellite company Viasat. The attack resulted in an immediate and significant loss of communication in the early days of the war for the Ukrainian military.”

Fight for the Final Frontier — John Jordan Klein. Open in Readwise

[2] “In the early days of the war, Moscow conducted several attacks against Viasat KA-SAT modems to disable satellite services in Ukraine. The attacks impacted 5,800 wind turbines in Germany, rendering them unable to communicate because of issues with their satellite communication.”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[3] “Because of these dependencies, cyberspace operations within this network dimension are a crucial and inescapable component of military space operations and represent the primary linkage to the other warfighting domains. These dependencies can also create avenues of enemy attack that offer lower costs and higher chance of success than orbital warfare within the space domain only.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[4] “When it comes to warfare in space, many envision lasers, missiles and maybe a nuclear device tucked into orbit. But Christopher Scolese, who runs the National Reconnaissance Office, isn’t worried about death rays. He’s worried about hackers... Deploying kinetic or directed-energy weapons in orbit remains technically and financially daunting. Offensive cyber capabilities, by contrast, are far easier to acquire and notoriously hard to trace.”

The Real Space War Is Being Fought in Cyberspace — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[5] “In November 2021 Gen. David Thompson, U.S. Space Force’s vice chief of space operations, commented that both China and Russia are regularly attacking U.S. satellites with non-kinetic means, including lasers, radio-frequency jammers, and cyber.”

Fight for the Final Frontier — John Jordan Klein. Open in Readwise

[6] “The global threat of electronic warfare (EW) attacks against space systems will expand in the coming years in both number and types of weapons. Development will very likely focus on jamming capabilities against dedicated military satellite communications, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging satellites, and enhanced capabilities against Global Navigation Satellite Systems, such as GPS. Blending of EW and cyber-attack capabilities will likely expand in pursuit of sophisticated means to deny and degrade information networks.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[7] “China is rapidly building out its arsenal of counterspace weapons: everything from ground-based lasers to satellites that can grab other satellites, all of which pose a ‘grave threat’ to the U.S., according to Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman.”

How China Is Expanding Its Anti-Satellite Arsenal — Audrey Decker. Open in Readwise

[8] “A Space Force general said American satellites are attacked by adversaries every day in ways that flirt with ‘acts of war,’ and the US will lose a space arms race if it doesn’t take action.”

Space Force General Says US Satellites Are Attacked on Daily Basis — Jesse O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[9] “A satellite could be momentarily hindered by a ground-based laser, have its signals disrupted, or be given corrupt data... Non-kinetic ASAT techniques like lasers or jammers only disable satellites without causing any debris... Kinetic ASATs are attacks that apply direct physical force to a target, turning it into fragments and creating space debris.”

When Satellites Are Hacked: The Legal Gray Zone of Non-Kinetic Space Attack — Aakansh Vijay and Udit Jain. Open in Readwise

[10] “Both kinds pose a substantial risk to effective satellite services, but only kinetic ASATs have been met with evident international condemnation.”

When Satellites Are Hacked: The Legal Gray Zone of Non-Kinetic Space Attack — Aakansh Vijay and Udit Jain. Open in Readwise

[11] “Incidents like Salt Typhoon illustrate how such infiltration is used for reconnaissance, telemetry mapping or the prepositioning of malicious code to be activated later. These activities compromise far more than service uptime, they threaten the integrity of national security operations, defense communications and civilian infrastructure reliant on continuous and trusted satellite services.”

Space Assets Are Under Silent Siege. Cybersecurity Can’t Be an Afterthought — Paul Maguire. Open in Readwise

[12] “The most serious damage may occur invisibly, long before any service disruption. In this phase, intrusions can allow hostile actors to establish persistent access, map vulnerabilities, and quietly position themselves for future exploitation.”

Space Assets Are Under Silent Siege. Cybersecurity Can’t Be an Afterthought — Paul Maguire. Open in Readwise

[13] “In space, a satellite without cybersecurity is already compromised, it just hasn’t failed yet. And when it does, the first sign won’t necessarily be a customer outage. The real damage often happens silently, when adversaries map vulnerabilities, plant hidden access and wait for the moment when disruption will hurt the most.”

Space Assets Are Under Silent Siege. Cybersecurity Can’t Be an Afterthought — Paul Maguire. Open in Readwise

[14] “China’s rapid progression in space capabilities, augmented by AI and cyber integration, helps realize a new phase in China’s military strategy. A strategy that is characterized by a very comprehensive, omni-domain approach — fusing space, cyber, and artificial intelligence — illustrates Beijing’s ambition to command the strategic high ground of space.”

China’s Fast Growing Military Space Capabilities — Amir Husain. Open in Readwise

[15] “The 2013 Science of Military Strategy anticipates that future wars will begin in space and cyberspace, arguing that ‘seizing command of space network dominance will become crucial for obtaining comprehensive superiority on the battlefield and conquering an enemy.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[16] “China’s broader military strategy of ‘fighting and winning local wars under informationized conditions.’ In layperson’s terms, that means applying information technology in all aspects of military operations, from cyber warfare on the ground to disrupting and destroying an enemy’s information technology in space, including by targeting satellites.”

The Shadow War — Jim Sciutto. Open in Readwise

[17] “As adversaries develop counterspace capabilities — from jamming and cyber attacks to co-orbital systems — U.S. planners are increasingly focused on concepts such as ‘dynamic space operations’ and ‘sustained space maneuver.’ Those terms describe satellites that can move frequently and unpredictably rather than remaining in fixed or highly predictable orbits, enabling evasion, deception and responsive actions in orbit.”

Space Command’s Case for Orbital Logistics — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[18] “Ability to employ cyber security and cyber defense of critical space networks and systems. Skill to employ future offensive capabilities.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

The ideas that currently govern elite universities, school curricula, corporate diversity programs, and mainstream cultural journalism did not arrive by spontaneous generation. They have an intellectual history, a set of founding texts, a recognizable methodology, and a career arc that can be traced with precision from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Understanding that history is essential, because the ideas are not going to be effectively answered by people who do not understand them.

The intellectual lineage runs from Gramsci through the Frankfurt School, through French poststructuralism, through the American university’s adoption of postcolonial theory, and finally into CRT — and they share a single underlying purpose: replacing the search for truth with the analysis of power. Every iteration of the tradition is a variant on this move. What looks like scholarship is, on examination, advocacy. What claims to be analysis is, on examination, a predetermined verdict.

As Douglas Murray observes with his characteristic directness: “As usual with bad ideas, they originated in the universities” [1].

The Genealogy: From Class to Culture

The starting point is not the Frankfurt School but Gramsci, whose concept of cultural hegemony made the decisive move that shaped everything that followed. Marx had argued that the ruling class maintained power through economic control; Gramsci added that it maintained it through cultural dominance — through control of the ideas, values, and assumptions that most people regard as simply normal and natural. The corollary was that the path to revolutionary change was not primarily the seizure of economic power but the long march through the institutions — the gradual capture of schools, universities, media, and cultural organizations that shape what is regarded as normal and natural.

This was a much more penetrating analysis of how liberal societies actually function than anything Marx had managed, and it proved far more practically effective. The Frankfurt School — Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and their colleagues, many of whom migrated to American universities after fleeing Nazi Germany — extended this analysis into culture, art, and psychology. Where classical Marxism had analyzed economic relations, critical theory analyzed cultural ones. The form of analysis was the same: identify the hidden power structure that oppressive norms serve, and expose it.

The shift from class to identity as the primary analytical category came later, and it came partly from practical failure. Marxist economics had not produced revolution in the Western democracies. But the structural analysis proved exportable to race, gender, and cultural identity — and those proved far more effective as mobilizing categories in late twentieth-century liberal societies.

Derrida and the Disenchantment of Truth

Reno’s analysis of Derrida’s role is worth examining carefully, because it corrects a common misconception. Derrida is often portrayed as a revolutionary or an agent of deliberate cultural destruction. Reno argues that he was neither. Derrida was a theorist of the postwar consensus — not a revolutionary. He became famous because he made disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture, turning the historical contingency of the postwar consensus into a timeless, anti-metaphysical truth [2].

What this means in practice is that poststructuralism did not bring new radical content from outside the Western tradition. It took the postwar consensus’s commitment to weakening all strong cultural attachments and gave it a philosophical foundation that made it appear to be a timeless truth about language and knowledge rather than a historically conditioned response to 1933-1945. Once you accept that all texts are exercises of power, that all truth-claims are historically conditioned, and that all cultural ideals are rationalizations of interests — what Reno calls “the thoroughgoing therapy of disenchantment” [3] — then every inherited institution, every received truth, and every cultural tradition becomes an object for critique rather than transmission.

An educated person in the twenty-first-century West is now an expert at unmasking pretensions to transcendent truth, exposing them as instruments of economic competition, class domination, patriarchy, and white privilege. We no longer think of higher education as the source of strong truths. It is instead devoted to critique and reduction [4].

Postcolonialism and the Warping of Historical Scholarship

The migration of these ideas into the study of empire and colonialism produced postcolonial theory, whose bible is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Murray’s analysis of Said is pointed. Said’s framework treats all Western scholarly study of non-Western cultures as an exercise of imperial power — the Western gaze is inherently oppressive, the Western scholar is inherently suspect. Yet for Said, so long as the people doing the looking are Western and the cultures being looked at are not, it is very sinister indeed. He ignores the fact that the Orientalists he spurns were remarkable men and women: people who learned the languages and dialects of faraway societies and who studied these cultures almost always because they were fascinated by and admired them [5].

Murray also identifies the structural irony at the heart of postcolonial theory: “Intent on shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism.” Marx was a Western thinker with next to no knowledge of non-Western cultures. To deploy Marx as the tool of decolonization is to replace one form of Western intellectual imperialism with another [6].

Karp and Zamiska trace the metastasis of this framework beyond the academy. Beginning in the late 1990s, postcolonial studies was no longer simply an academic field but an entire worldview, with its highly particularized jargon — ‘the other,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘difference,’ ‘Eurocentrism’ — terms that could now be found in theater programs and publishers’ lists, museum catalogs, and even Hollywood film. A broad swath of intellectuals and those adjacent to academia situated their politics around this worldview without ever reading its founding texts [7].

Stanford and the Death of Western Civilization in the Curriculum

The institutional turning point in American higher education was Stanford’s elimination of its Western Civilization course requirement in 1987. Murray’s account: “In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject — the product of a bunch of ‘dead white males’” [8].

William McNeill of the University of Chicago had resisted the earlier pressures in this direction, defending Western civilization course requirements against what he identified as “patently false assertions of the equality of all cultural traditions” [9]. He lost. The assertion that all cultural traditions are equally valuable — which Biggar calls a claim of basic cultural equality and radical moral relativism — became the founding premise of the reformed curriculum. To argue otherwise was to be racist.

Victor Davis Hanson documents where this ended: universities that “saw themselves no longer as teachers of the inductive method and the elements of foundational knowledge” but as activists intent on shaping young minds to adopt a politicized agenda — whether defined as unquestioned embrace of climate change activism, identity politics, or redistributive economics [10]. The deductive method — picking and choosing examples to conform to a preconceived result — replaced the inductive method that had been the basis of genuine intellectual formation.

The Logical Endpoint: The Anti-University

The trajectory of this tradition leads, with grim logical consistency, to the King’s College London grading guidelines examined by Michael Rainsborough in 2024. The guidelines: flexible assessment criteria, rejection of ‘one-size-fits-all’ assessment as exclusionary, the designation of ‘Standard Academic English’ as an oppressive tool [11].

Rainsborough identifies what this represents with the precision the moment deserves: “These ‘guidelines’ mark the natural endpoint of post-structuralism in academia. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then there can be no objective educational standard. And if there is no educational standard, there is no university. Only its successor remains: the post-academic university, the anti-university — an institution that has mislaid the very reason for its existence and decided to celebrate the loss” [12].

This is not a satire. This is where the long march arrives. The tradition that set out to expose the hidden power structures of Western knowledge has, at the endpoint, abolished the distinction between knowledge and power — and in doing so, has abolished the possibility of the institution whose purpose was to pursue the former. The university has become what it set out to critique.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “As usual with bad ideas, they originated in the universities.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[2] “Derrida became famous because he made disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture, laying the foundations for the fusion of economic and cultural deregulation that characterizes mainstream, establishment politics today. His singular contribution was turning the historical contingency of the postwar consensus into a timeless, anti-metaphysical truth.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[3] “We see it at work in postmodern academic theory, which reigns in universities and provides the intellectual underpinnings for multiculturalism. At every turn we analyze ‘down,’ beginning our critique of social reality with things that might attract our loyalty and devotion and analyzing downward to the low, the ugly, and the base. What is today called ‘critical thinking’ amounts to a thoroughgoing therapy of disenchantment.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[4] “We no longer think of higher education as the source of strong truths. It is instead devoted to critique and reduction. An educated person in the twenty-first-century West is an expert at unmasking pretentions to transcendent truth, exposing them as instruments of economic competition, class domination, patriarchy, and white privilege.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[5] “For Said, so long as the people doing the looking are Western and the cultures being looked at are not, it is very sinister indeed. He ignores the fact that the Orientalists who he spurns were remarkable men and women: people who learned the languages and dialects of faraway societies and who studied these cultures almost always because they were fascinated by and admired them.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[6] “Intent in shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism. Marx was a Western thinker, with next to no knowledge of non-Western cultures or societies.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[7] “Beginning in the late 1990s, ‘postcolonial studies was no longer simply an academic field,’ but rather an entire worldview, with a highly particularized jargon, including ‘the other,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘difference,’ ‘Eurocentrism’ — terms that ‘could now be found in theater programs and publishers’ lists, museum catalogs, and even Hollywood film.’”

The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Open in Readwise

[8] “In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of ‘dead white males.’”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[9] “William McNeill had the temerity to resist the rise of what he would describe as the moral relativism that was ascendant in the second half of the twentieth century... McNeill wrote in an essay published in 1997 that attempts to construct world history courses had themselves ‘often been contaminated’ by what he regarded ‘as patently false assertions of the equality of all cultural traditions.’”

The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Open in Readwise

[10] “Too often the universities saw themselves no longer as teachers of the inductive method and the elements of foundational knowledge. Instead, they were activists. They became intent on shaping young minds to adopt a politicized agenda.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[11] “The document warns that ‘Standard Academic English’ (once known as ‘English’) is an oppressive tool that advantages ‘already privileged students’. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence.”

King’s College London Has Ceased to Be a University — Michael Rainsborough. Open in Readwise

[12] “These ‘guidelines’ mark the natural endpoint of post-structuralism in academia. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then there can be no objective educational standard. And if there is no educational standard, there is no university. Only its successor remains: the post-academic university, the anti-university.”

King’s College London Has Ceased to Be a University — Michael Rainsborough. Open in Readwise

The dominant American conception of military space capability is still, in most policy circles, framed as a support function. GPS enables navigation. Communications satellites relay data. Reconnaissance satellites provide intelligence. These things are true, and they are important. But they are incomplete in a way that is strategically dangerous, because they frame space as a utility layer — something that makes other military operations easier — rather than as a domain of military competition in its own right.

This post argues that framing is wrong, and that the wrong framing produces wrong strategy. Space is not a support domain. It is, in the language the Space Capstone Publication uses and which the strategic logic of this series has been building toward, the commanding height of modern warfare. The side that controls the high ground in space controls the persistent scouting advantage that, as Posts 3 and 4 showed, is frequently more decisive than any kinetic capability. This is not a future concern. It is the present competition.

Spacepower as a Distinct Formulation of Military Power

The United States Space Force’s foundational doctrine is unambiguous on this point. Spacepower is a distinct formulation of military power on par with landpower, seapower, airpower, and cyberpower [1]. Not derivative. Not secondary. Not supportive. Par.

This claim has theoretical grounding that goes back to the lineage established in Post 1. Lutes, in Toward a Theory of Spacepower, defines strategy in explicitly Clausewitzian terms — the use of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy — and then applies it: spacepower is the ability to exert prompt and sustained influence in or from space for the purposes and furtherance of policy in peace and war [2]. Carlson extends this further: spacepower is military force that can exert influence in and from the domain and create effects in other domains for strategic benefit [3].

The distinction matters. Spacepower is not just about what happens in space. It is about what space enables against, and for, every other domain simultaneously. A satellite providing ISR to a joint force is not merely supporting the land component. It is exerting influence — the scouting advantage, the targeting advantage, the communications advantage — across every domain that force operates in. Remove it, and every other capability degrades. This is why the Space Capstone states that the space domain encompasses all of these attributes, making military spacepower a critical manifestation of the high ground in modern warfare [4].

The Clausewitz-Corbett-Mahan lineage applies here as it does to every domain. Ziarnick’s formulation from Post 1 remains the cleanest: space power may have a grammar of its own, but not its own logic. The grammar is orbital mechanics, delta-v budgets, access windows, electromagnetic dependencies, and the physics of the vacuum environment. The logic is Clausewitzian: political compellence, the ends of policy, the subordination of military means to strategic purpose.

Orbital Mechanics as Geography

The most important conceptual move in spacepower theory is recognizing that space is not boundless. It is, in the relevant strategic sense, a demarcated and bounded domain — because orbital mechanics constrain where spacecraft can actually operate effectively.

Dolman makes the point precisely in Astropolitik: knowledge of orbits and orbital mechanics is vital for one primary reason — spacecraft in stable orbits expend no fuel. Thus the preferred flight path for all spacecraft will be a stable orbit, specifically limited to a precise operational trajectory [5]. The strategic implication follows directly: if stable orbits are the preferred trajectories, then stable orbits are contested terrain. The most militarily valuable orbital slots are not infinite in number. They are finite, predictable, and therefore subjects of strategic competition exactly as sea lanes and straits have always been.

The Space Capstone formalizes this through the concepts of Lines of Communication (LOCs) and Key Orbital Trajectories (KOTs). A systematic understanding of LOCs and KOTs allows military space forces to grapple with the vastness of the space domain when planning, executing, and assessing spacepower operations [6]. KOTs are defined relative to a celestial body (inertial), an advantageous energy state (energy), or other trajectories (orbital). The most basic forms of key terrain are Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO), Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO), and sun-synchronous orbits [7]. A key orbital trajectory is any orbit from which a spacecraft can support users, collect information, defend other assets, or engage an adversary [8].

The analogy to Mahan’s analysis of chokepoints and sea lanes is direct and not accidental. Mahan’s insight was that the ability to quickly concentrate naval force and project offensive action depended on controlling the nodes through which maritime traffic was obliged to pass. In space, the nodes are not straits but orbital regimes — and the predictability imposed by orbital mechanics means that an adversary who knows where your assets are can plan against them far more effectively than any terrestrial stealth capability allows.

The orbital perspective of military power describes the reach of military operations based on access windows, revisit rate, mission lifespan, survivability relative to threat systems, and the tradeoffs between time, position, and total energy [9]. Each of these parameters is a strategic variable, not a technical one. Access windows determine when ISR coverage is available over a target. Revisit rates determine how persistent that coverage is. Mission lifespan determines the cost of attrition. Survivability relative to threat systems determines whether contested operations can be sustained. These are the variables that spacepower strategy must optimize.

The Seven Spacepower Disciplines

The Space Capstone identifies seven disciplines that together constitute military spacepower theory: orbital warfare, space electromagnetic warfare, space battle management, space access and sustainment, military intelligence, engineering and acquisition, and cyber operations [10].

Each discipline maps onto a functional capability set that has equivalents in other domains. Orbital warfare is the kinetic and maneuver competition within the domain itself. Space electromagnetic warfare is the jamming, spoofing, and directed-energy contest over the electromagnetic links on which virtually every space capability depends. Space battle management is the command-and-control problem specific to operating at orbital distances and speeds. Space access and sustainment addresses the logistics of the domain — launch, resupply, maintenance. Military intelligence is the ISR function that is both the primary output of space capabilities and a discipline in its own right. Engineering and acquisition is the development pipeline. And cyber operations is the domain interface that connects space to every other contested domain.

Orbital warfare is defined as knowledge of orbital maneuver as well as offensive and defensive fires to preserve freedom of access to the domain [11]. This definition is worth unpacking. It is not merely about shooting down satellites. It encompasses the full spectrum of maneuver and fires in the orbital environment — and it frames the objective as freedom of access, which is the same objective Mahan identified for seapower and Corbett operationalized into limited war theory. Control space not for its own sake, but to preserve the ability to use it in pursuit of the political object.

Cyber operations as the seventh discipline is the bridge to Post 6. The Space Capstone is explicit: cyberspace operations within the network dimension are a crucial and inescapable component of military space operations and represent the primary linkage to the other warfighting domains. These dependencies can also create avenues of enemy attack that offer lower costs and higher chance of success than orbital warfare within the space domain only [12]. This observation — that cyber may be a more effective attack vector against space capabilities than kinetic counterspace weapons — is the analytical foundation of the next post.

Two Schools and Why the High Ground School Won

Dolman identifies two primary schools of spacepower theory: space as strategic sanctuary, and space as the ultimate high ground [13]. The sanctuary school argues that the militarization of space detracts from the security of states that pursue it — that mutual restraint in the orbital domain serves all parties’ interests, and that the weaponization of space creates escalation risks that outweigh any tactical advantage. The high ground school argues the opposite: that whoever controls the orbital high ground controls the persistent advantages of altitude, global coverage, and domain access that are decisive in modern warfare.

The sanctuary school has lost this argument empirically, regardless of its normative merits. China’s military documents and even scientific papers emphasize deployment of capabilities for “killing” key disaggregated constellations like Starlink and the belief that space is the “commanding heights” [14]. Russia has tested direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons. China has demonstrated co-orbital systems capable of approaching and grappling other satellites. Both states have fielded jamming and laser dazzling capabilities targeting American space assets. The competition is underway. The question is not whether space will be contested but how.

The Air Force Secretary’s warning is pointed: “We didn’t start the race to weaponize space, but we have to make sure we can continue to operate in that domain. Going forward, we can’t lose that high ground” [15]. This is the high ground school’s position stated in plain operational language. It is also, given the evidence of adversary behavior, the only strategically defensible posture.

Space as the Scouting Advantage Realized

Post 4 established the pattern: the interwar military revolutions consistently rewarded the side that developed superior scouting — the ability to see the adversary before being seen. The Luftwaffe’s reconnaissance aircraft for panzer forces. The carrier’s scout aircraft finding the enemy fleet first. ULTRA’s code-breaking giving the British and Americans critical advance knowledge of adversary intentions.

Space-based ISR is the modern realization of all three simultaneously. A mature satellite constellation provides global coverage, persistent revisit, and near-real-time data at a scale that no prior scouting system has achieved. It is the aerial scout that never lands, the code-breaker that operates continuously, the carrier’s reconnaissance aircraft that sees every corner of the theater at once.

This is why the post’s central argument is not hyperbole. Space is the high ground because it is where the scouting advantage lives. Space support enabled a level of precision, stealth, command and control, intelligence-gathering, speed, maneuverability, flexibility, and lethality heretofore unknown [16]. The Gulf War was the first demonstration of what this looks like at scale. Ukraine is the first demonstration of what it looks like when commercial constellations enter the picture. The near-future great-power competition will be the first test of what happens when both sides have it and both sides are trying to take it away from the other.

That is the subject of Posts 6 and 7.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Spacepower as a distinct formulation of military power on par with landpower, seapower, airpower, and cyberpower.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[2] “Strategy is defined here as the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy... A theory of spacepower is about the ability to exert prompt and sustained influence in or from space for the purposes and furtherance of policy in peace and war.”

Toward a Theory of Spacepower — Charles D. Lutes. Open in Readwise

[3] “Spacepower is defined as military force that can exert influence in and from the domain and create effects in other domains for strategic benefit.”

Spacepower Ascendant — Joshua Carlson. Open in Readwise

[4] “The space domain encompasses all of these attributes, making military spacepower a critical manifestation of the high ground in modern warfare. When employed against adversaries, military spacepower has deterrent and coercive capacities.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[5] “Knowledge of orbits and orbital mechanics is vital for one primary reason — spacecraft in stable orbits expend no fuel. Thus the preferred flight path for all spacecraft will be a stable orbit, specifically limited to a precise operational trajectory. With this knowledge we can begin to see space as a demarcated and bounded domain.”

Astropolitik — Everett C. Dolman. Open in Readwise

[6] “A systematic understanding of lines of communication (LOCs) and key orbital trajectories (KOTs) allows military space forces to grapple with the vastness of the space domain when planning, executing, and assessing spacepower operations.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[7] “KOTs can be defined relative to a celestial body (inertial KOT), relative to an advantageous energy state (energy KOT), or relative to other trajectories (orbital KOT). Some examples of an inertial KOT are Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO), Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) and sun-synchronous orbits.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[8] “A key orbital trajectory (KOT) is any orbit from which a spacecraft can support users, collect information, defend other assets, or engage the adversary.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[9] “The orbital perspective of military power describes the reach of military operations based on access windows, revisit rate, mission lifespan, survivability relative to threat systems, and the tradeoffs between time, position, and total energy.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[10] “Seven Spacepower Disciplines have emerged as necessary components of military spacepower theory: orbital warfare, space electromagnetic warfare, space battle management, space access and sustainment, military intelligence, engineering/acquisition, and cyber operations.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[11] “Orbital Warfare – Knowledge of orbital maneuver as well as offensive and defensive fires to preserve freedom of access to the domain.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[12] “Because of these dependencies, cyberspace operations within this network dimension are a crucial and inescapable component of military space operations and represent the primary linkage to the other warfighting domains. These dependencies can also create avenues of enemy attack that offer lower costs and higher chance of success than orbital warfare within the space domain only.”

Space Capstone Publication Spacepower — US Government United States Space Force. Open in Readwise

[13] “The general sentiment led to the first of the two primary schools of space power theory: space as strategic sanctuary and space as the ultimate high ground.”

Astropolitik — Everett C. Dolman. Open in Readwise

[14] “China’s military documents (and even scientific papers) emphasize deployment of capabilities for ‘killing’ key disaggregated constellations like Starlink and the belief that space is the ‘commanding heights.’”

War in Space Is Not a Future Problem: It’s Happening Now — Christopher Stone. Open in Readwise

[15] “’We didn’t start the race to weaponize space, but we have to make sure we can continue to operate in that domain. Going forward, we can’t lose that high ground.’”

Air Force Secretary Warns of ‘Sputnik Moment’ as U.S. Faces China’s Rapid Military Advances — Sandra Erwin. Open in Readwise

[16] “Space support enabled a level of precision, stealth, command and control, intelligence-gathering, speed, maneuverability, flexibility, and lethality heretofore unknown.”

Toward a Theory of Spacepower — Charles D. Lutes. Open in Readwise

The ideology now dismantling Western civilization did not begin as an attack. It began as a defense.

This is the most important thing to understand about the intellectual forces examined in this series, and the thing that is most systematically avoided in popular arguments about them. The postwar consensus — the complex of ideas, attitudes, and institutional reflexes that have organized Western cultural and political life since 1945 — was a response to genuine catastrophe. Two world wars, the Holocaust, totalitarianism in its Nazi and Soviet forms: these were real, enormous, and produced by specific intellectual and political currents that the postwar consensus was designed to prevent from recurring.

The problem is not that the response was malicious. The problem is that it generalized — and then could not stop generalizing. What began as a historically specific defense against fascism became, over seven decades, a systematic assault on every strong cultural attachment, every shared truth, and every inherited loyalty. In R.R. Reno’s formulation, it became a “weakening of Being” — and it is now consuming the civilization it was designed to protect.

The Trauma That Created the Consensus

To understand the postwar consensus, you have to take 1933-1945 seriously as a civilizational shock. What produced Nazism was, at least in part, a toxic combination of strong national loyalty, strong racial identity, strong ideological certainty, and strong charismatic authority. The lesson drawn by the intellectual architects of the postwar order was direct: if strong attachments of these kinds produced Auschwitz, then weakening such attachments is the path to peace.

This was not, in its original context, an unreasonable conclusion. Reno is clear-eyed about this. “Nearly all the leading intellectuals since 1945, left and right, have promoted the weakening of Being. The cultural-political project of the West should not be organized around strong gods, the postwar consensus has insisted” [1]. The driving logic was diagnostic: strong loves and strong truths had led to oppression; therefore liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths [2].

The specific intellectual architecture was largely supplied by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies — the argument that the key to social progress is restricting truth-claims to the falsifiable, “tossing out nearly all of what the West has regarded as religiously, culturally, and morally foundational” [3]. The open society, on this account, must be committed to openness above all — not to any particular truth, tradition, or cultural inheritance. These are too dangerous. They lead to Plato, and Plato leads to Hitler.

Reno, writing with precision, identifies the atmosphere of anti-imperatives this produced: “We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist” [4]. These anti-imperatives became the postwar consensus — the ground rules of respectable public life in the Western world.

The Generalization Problem

The consensus was coherent so long as the specific threat it was designed against remained real. During the Cold War, there was a genuine totalitarian adversary with world-conquering ambitions. Vigilance against strong ideological commitments made sense when the alternative was Soviet Communism.

But the consensus had a structural problem built in from the beginning. As Reno observes, postwar liberals understood that an open society is not self-inaugurating. It requires driving the strong gods out of public life and remaining on watch against their return [5]. This is a permanent project with no natural terminus. You cannot reach a point where you have weakened cultural attachments enough and stop. Any strong commitment that appears is, by the logic of the consensus, a potential proto-fascism.

The consensus therefore advanced even after the specific conditions that justified it had changed. After 1989, we did not relax our vigilance. On the contrary, people began to monitor pronouns and search for “microaggressions” to punish [6]. The anti-imperatives continued without an external enemy to give them direction — turned inward, toward the civilization itself.

This trajectory was also shaped, Reno notes, by Jacques Derrida’s decisive contribution in the 1970s and 1980s. Derrida was not, as his enemies claimed, a revolutionary. He was a theorist of the postwar consensus. His work became famous because he made disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture, laying the foundations for the fusion of economic and cultural deregulation that characterizes mainstream establishment politics today. His singular contribution was turning the historical contingency of the postwar consensus into a timeless, anti-metaphysical truth [7]. What had been a historically conditioned response to 1933-1945 became, through Derrida’s influence, a permanent philosophical commitment: all strong truth-claims are exercises of power, all cultural inheritance is oppression, all meta-narratives must be deconstructed.

The Paradox: Left and Right Both Caught

One of Reno’s most penetrating observations is that the postwar consensus is not a phenomenon of the left alone. “The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms. It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life” [8].

This is a point worth dwelling on, because it complicates the simple story of left-wing attack on Western values. The neoliberal economic consensus — open markets, open borders, open cultures, the dissolution of national particularity into global commercial integration — is, in its own way, an expression of the same postwar consensus that animates multiculturalism. Both seek to dissolve strong cultural attachments in favor of a frictionless openness. Both treat inherited loyalties as obstacles rather than resources. The culture war has two flanks, and the right’s economic flank has been complicit in the civilization-thinning that the cultural left is now completing.

Reno identifies the endpoint: “Only open markets are for the best. Only open cultures are for the best. Only open borders will bring saving diversity. Only open minds can stop the return of Auschwitz. There is simply no other way. When intelligent, educated, and responsible people talk this way, we know that we’ve reached a dead end” [9].

The Countercultural Illusion

One of the sharpest observations in Return of the Strong Gods concerns the fate of apparent dissent within the postwar consensus. Reno notes that what presents itself as countercultural — academic critique, artistic transgression, identity politics, radical theory — is “not ‘countercultural’ at all, as is obvious when these critiques are championed by elite institutions and rewarded with prestigious fellowships and prizes. Disrupting nothing other than what remains of the memory of the strong gods, they contribute to the weakening of Being, which is thought always to be morally salutary and necessary for an open society” [10].

This is a devastating point. The most transgressive, most radical, most aggressively anti-Western positions in contemporary academic and cultural life are not actually transgressing against the establishment. They are the establishment. What actually transgresses against the postwar consensus — nationalism, religious conservatism, cultural inheritance, loyalty to particular traditions — is treated as the extremist position. The consensus defines transgression as anything that maintains or transmits the strong gods it was designed to eliminate.

The Result: Dissolution Where There Should Be Solidarity

Reno’s diagnosis of where this leads is measured but bleak. “Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led” [11]. And further: “Our time — this century — begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home” [12].

The postwar consensus set out to prevent the specific pathologies of strong attachment — ethnic nationalism, totalitarian ideology, racial supremacy. These were real pathologies. But the cure has created its own pathologies: the dissolution of the intermediate structures (family, church, civic association, national identity) that make it possible for people to belong to something larger than themselves without belonging to the state. When you strip away those structures, you do not get free-floating individuals enjoying open possibilities. You get loneliness, resentment, and a population susceptible to the first demagogue who offers them a community, however crude.

The postwar consensus was designed to prevent the strong gods from returning. Instead, it has created the conditions in which their return — possibly in a much uglier form than their predecessors — becomes more likely.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Indeed, nearly all the leading intellectuals since 1945, left and right, have promoted the weakening of Being. The cultural-political project of the West should not be organized around strong gods, the postwar consensus has insisted.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[2] “In the pages to follow, I will show how anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism inspired a general theory of society... characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong — strong loves and strong truths — leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[3] “The key to social progress is the restriction of truth-claims to those that are falsifiable, Popper insists, tossing out nearly all of what the West has regarded as religiously, culturally, and morally foundational.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[4] “We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the ‘postwar consensus.’”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[5] “Postwar liberals understood, however tentatively, that an open society is not self-inaugurating. It requires driving the strong gods out of public life and remaining on watch against their return.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[6] “After 1989, we did not relax our vigilance. On the contrary, people began to monitor pronouns and search for ‘microaggressions’ to punish.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[7] “Derrida became famous because he made disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture, laying the foundations for the fusion of economic and cultural deregulation that characterizes mainstream, establishment politics today. His singular contribution was turning the historical contingency of the postwar consensus into a timeless, anti-metaphysical truth.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[8] “Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[9] “Only open markets are for the best. Only open cultures are for the best. Only open borders will bring saving diversity. Only open minds can stop the return of Auschwitz. There is simply no other way. When intelligent, educated, and responsible people talk this way, we know that we’ve reached a dead end.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[10] “Professors market critiques. Artists sell transgressions. But these critiques and transgressions are integral parts of the postwar consensus, not ‘countercultural’ at all, as is obvious when they are championed by elite institutions and rewarded with prestigious fellowships and prizes.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[11] “Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[12] “Our time — this century — begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

The interwar period — roughly 1919 to 1939 — is the richest laboratory for the study of military revolution available to the modern strategist. Within two decades, three major revolutions in the character of warfare occurred simultaneously, under conditions of genuine resource constraint, intense institutional resistance, and real uncertainty about which direction war was heading. The armies and navies that got the revolutions right gained decisive advantages. Those that got them wrong were destroyed.

The cases examined here — armored warfare, carrier aviation, and signals intelligence — are not just history. They are templates. They demonstrate, across three different domains and three different kinds of capability, the same underlying pattern that Post 3 articulated as the framework: the side that develops the superior concept for exploiting a new capability wins, even when it does not have the superior hardware. France entered 1940 with tanks that were, by measurable parameters, better than Germany’s. It was defeated in six weeks. The lesson has not yet been fully absorbed.

Case Study 1: Armored Warfare — Concept Beats Hardware

The British invented the tank in 1916. The Germans took the concept and made it a revolution.

As Guderian himself recalled, “the current English handbook on armored fighting vehicles was translated into German and for many years served as the theoretical manual for our developing ideas” [1]. The weapon came from Britain. The doctrine came from the country that had absorbed the weapon’s implications most deeply and built an organizational structure capable of executing them.

The German approach was built on a single, unambiguous priority. Everything is therefore dependent on this: to be able to move faster than has hitherto been done, and to carry the attack deep into the enemy’s defenses [2]. Speed and range were the supreme values. Armor protection and firepower were deliberately subordinated to them. Early German tanks — Panzers I through IV — maxed out at twenty-five tons, with speeds of twenty-five miles per hour or greater. The tactical logic was explicit: when forced to choose between a “thick skin” and a “fast runner,” German panzer leaders would always choose the latter [3].

The French made the opposite choice. Their Somua S35 and Char B heavy tanks had twice the armor of German Panzers and superior anti-tank guns. They were designed for a conflict characterized by positional warfare and attrition — the war that had just ended. The French tanks were better than ours, and as numerous — but they were too slow. It was by speed, in exploiting surprise, that we beat the French [3]. This verdict from General von Thoma, delivered after the fall of France in 1940, is perhaps the most direct summary of what a failed military revolution looks like from the winning side.

Three enabling technologies made the German concept executable: radios in every tank and aircraft, enabling real-time coordination in a fluid battle that no map or telephone could track; the Luftwaffe’s specialized reconnaissance aircraft, functioning as aerial scouts that gave advancing panzer columns continuous situational awareness [4]; and mobile maintenance and fuel support units that extended effective operational range well beyond what tank fuel capacity alone allowed. Together these formed the organizational infrastructure without which the concept would have remained a brilliant idea on paper.

The four-component framework applied: Germany had all four. New technology (tanks, radios, aircraft). New systems (panzer divisions, motorized infantry, close air support). New operational concept (deep penetration, bypassing resistance, collapsing rear areas). New organization (combined arms formations structured around the concept, not around existing branch hierarchies). France had the first two but not the third or fourth. The result was catastrophic.

Murray’s assessment is pointed: it was not the further development of technology that drove major improvements but rather conceptual thinking. The Germans’ marriage of combined-arms exploitation tactics with armored fighting vehicles accounted for the Wehrmacht’s astonishing success [5]. The gunpowder revolution echoes through the centuries, and its lesson is the same: the conceptual innovator defeats the hardware accumulator.

Case Study 2: Carrier Aviation — The Eclipse of the Battleship

The second interwar revolution unfolded at sea and was, in some ways, even more total than the armored revolution on land. By the end of World War II, the Navy counted twenty-eight large fast carriers and seventy-one smaller carrier types in the fleet. It included fewer than a dozen battleships, and none were being built [6]. Two decades earlier, the battleship had been the unquestioned capital ship of every major navy on earth.

The carrier revolution followed the same conceptual logic as the armored revolution: it prioritized speed, range, and scouting over firepower and armor. Relative to the battleship, the carrier emphasized speed, range, and scouting, while sacrificing firepower and armor [7]. A battleship could destroy anything it could reach and survive anything it encountered. The carrier could reach far more, and survive by not being there when the enemy struck.

The critical insight that drove carrier doctrine was the offense-dominant logic of the new weapon. Technology had yet to yield solutions for mounting an effective defense — in the form of radar, long-range radio, and proximity fusing for anti-aircraft shells — which meant that carrier operations appeared relentlessly offense-dominant: the first carrier whose aircraft spotted their adversaries’ carriers and executed an attack seemed certain to reap an enormous advantage [8]. This observation drove interwar fleet problem exercises toward one overriding question: who scouts the enemy first?

The answer to that question shaped doctrine. Fleet exercises convinced naval aviators that in carrier operations, it was better to “give” than “receive” — to locate and attack enemy carriers before they could return the favor [9]. This led to Vice Admiral Cole’s proposal for permanent carrier task forces — a carrier, cruisers, and destroyers structured around the principle of mobile offensive power projection — which became the fast carrier task forces that dominated the Pacific War [9].

Midway in June 1942 was the proof of concept. The U.S. fleet had prior knowledge of Japanese intentions and dispositions through code-breaking — the signals intelligence revolution discussed below. That foreknowledge enabled the concentration of American carriers at the decisive point. The Japanese carriers, caught with aircraft on deck being re-armed, were destroyed. Four Japanese fleet carriers sunk in a single day. The course of the Pacific War turned.

Case Study 3: Signals Intelligence — The Invisible Revolution

Running in parallel to the kinetic revolutions in armor and aviation was a third revolution that was less visible, operationally decisive, and, in many ways, the most durable of the three.

Signals intelligence and cryptography played a major role in the war, as belligerents worked to decipher their enemies’ codes. Successful code-breaking efforts like ULTRA provided the British with key information regarding German military capabilities and intentions. Similarly, American code-breakers provided the U.S. fleet with vital information on Japan’s fleet and intentions prior to the Battle of Midway [10].

ULTRA and the Midway code-breaking represent the scouting dimension of the interwar revolution in its most extreme form. The through-line in all three cases — armor, aviation, signals — is the competitive advantage of knowing where the enemy is before the enemy knows where you are. Guderian needed aerial reconnaissance. The carrier task force needed its aircraft to scout the enemy first. The code-breakers eliminated the scouting problem almost entirely for those with access to the intelligence.

This is the conceptual bridge to the space domain. Space-based ISR — the persistent, global, near-real-time surveillance capability provided by satellite constellations — is the modern equivalent of the ULTRA intercept, the carrier’s scout aircraft, and the Luftwaffe reconnaissance squadron simultaneously. It provides the scouting advantage that, as the interwar cases show, is frequently more decisive than any kinetic capability.

The Through-Line: Speed, Range, Scouting

Across all three cases, and across the broader pattern Krepinevich traces from the Industrial Revolution to the present, the winning formula is consistent. Since the Industrial Revolution, those military organizations leading the way to disruptive change in war’s character have generally emphasized speed, range, and stealth of military systems relative to armor, and accurate ranged fires relative to volume fires [11]. The trend is not absolute — there are always situations where mass and armor are decisive — but as a generalizable pattern it has held across two centuries of military competition.

The reason connects to the domain expansion argument from Post 3. Every new domain that militaries have entered — air, electromagnetic, undersea, space, cyber — has been entered because it offers one or more of these advantages: speed, range, or stealth. The battleship admiral who dismissed the aircraft carrier as a gadget was not wrong that battleships were powerful. He was wrong about which attributes would dominate future competition.

The current equivalents of that mistake are visible. The analyst who counts tanks in Ukraine without accounting for the ISR-drone-strike complex that has made armored vehicles near-suicidal on the open battlefield. The strategist who counts missile batteries without accounting for the satellite constellation that provides targeting. The policymaker who assesses Chinese military power by counting ships without accounting for the reconnaissance-strike complex — what the PLA calls “systems destruction warfare” — that those ships are designed to support [12].

Forward Linkage: The First Space War

Krepinevich makes a prediction that follows directly from the interwar cases and deserves to be stated plainly: given the extended ranges over which modern strike operations can be launched and the speed at which they can be prosecuted, scouting forces will be tasked with searching a far greater area than ever before. This may lead to heavy reliance on space-based scouting forces. Given the key role space-based systems play as part of a battle network, and advanced militaries’ ability to neutralize them, space control and denial operations are likely to be a key focus of belligerent activity at the onset of war. Simply put, the next great-power war will be the first “space war” [13].

This is not a prediction about futuristic weapons. It is the application of the interwar pattern to the current domain frontier. The side that controls the scouting advantage — that can see the adversary without being seen — holds a structural advantage that no amount of kinetic capability can fully offset. In 1940, that advantage was the aerial scout and the radio. In 1942, it was the code-breaker. In any great-power conflict in the near future, it will be the satellite constellation, and the ability to protect one’s own while denying the adversary’s.

That is the subject of Posts 5 and 6.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Heinz Guderian, the self-proclaimed father of Germany’s panzer forces, recalled that during this early period, ‘the current English handbook on armored fighting vehicles was translated into German and for many years served as the theoretical manual for our developing ideas.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[2] “German panzer formations emphasized speed and range, sacrificing armament and armor protection to get it. As General Heinz Guderian summarized it, ‘Everything is therefore dependent on this: to be able to move faster than has hitherto been done [and]... carry the attack deep into the enemy’s defenses.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[3] “Von Thoma concluded, ‘The French tanks were better than ours, and as numerous — but they were too slow. It was by speed, in exploiting surprise, that we beat the French.’ Forced to choose between a ‘thick skin’ (heavy armor protection) and ‘a fast runner’ (speed), he said that Germany’s panzer leaders would ‘always’ choose the latter.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[4] “One involved developing and maintaining an accurate picture of the situation in a dynamic war of movement. Rapidly advancing panzer forces would need situation awareness, and the Luftwaffe created a force of specialized reconnaissance aircraft to function as ‘aerial scouts.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[5] “It was not the further development of technology that drove major improvements but rather conceptual thinking. Thus, the Germans’ marriage of combined-arms exploitation tactics with armored fighting vehicles accounted for the Wehrmacht’s astonishing success against the French in spring 1940.”

The Dark Path — Williamson Murray. Open in Readwise

[6] “When the war ended in September 1945, the Navy counted twenty-eight large ‘fast’ carriers and seventy-one smaller carrier types in the fleet; the Navy’s aviation arm had more than 41,000 planes. The fleet included fewer than a dozen battleships, and none were being built.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[7] “The revolution in war at sea during the interwar period witnessed the eclipse of the battleship as the capital ship, displaced by the aircraft carrier. Relative to the battleship, the carrier emphasized speed, range, and scouting, while sacrificing firepower and armor.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[8] “Technology had yet to yield solutions for mounting an effective defense in the form of radar, long-range radio, and proximity fusing for anti-aircraft shells. Hence, it appeared that carrier operations would be relentlessly offense-dominant: the first carrier whose aircraft spotted their adversaries’ carriers and executed an attack seemed certain to reap an enormous advantage.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[9] “The exercises convinced many naval aviators that in carrier operations, it was better to ‘give’ than ‘receive’ — to locate and attack the enemy carriers before they could return the favor. Based on the experience in the fleet problems, Vice Admiral Cole called for establishing permanent carrier ‘task forces’ consisting of a carrier, a division of four heavy cruisers, and a squadron of eight destroyers — the forerunner of the fast carrier task forces that would dominate the coming Pacific War.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[10] “Signals intelligence and cryptography played a major role in the war, as belligerents worked to decipher their enemies’ codes. Successful code-breaking efforts like ULTRA provided the British with key information regarding German military capabilities and intentions. Similarly, American code-breakers provided the U.S. fleet with vital information on Japan’s fleet and intentions prior to the Battle of Midway.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[11] “Since the Industrial Revolution, those military organizations leading the way to a disruptive change in war’s character have generally speaking emphasized speed, range, and stealth of military systems relative to armor. Similarly, the trend with respect to fires has been toward favoring accurate, ranged fires relative to volume fires.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[12] “China’s operational system comprises five subsystems: the information-confrontation and reconnaissance-intelligence systems; the command and integrated support systems; and the firepower-strike systems. Within this context, the PLA sees the military competition centering on deconstructing the enemy’s reconnaissance-strike complexes — what the Chinese call ‘systems destruction warfare.’”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[13] “Given the extended ranges over which modern strike operations can be launched, and the speed at which they can be prosecuted, scouting forces will be tasked with searching a far greater area than they ever have before. This may lead to heavy reliance on space-based scouting forces... space control and denial operations are likely to be a key focus of belligerent activity at the onset of war. Simply put, the next great-power war will be the first ‘space war’.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

Every debate about Western civilization suffers from the same foundational problem: nobody defines the term. Its critics use it as an accusation — shorthand for imperialism, racism, and exploitation — while its defenders deploy it as a rallying cry without stopping to specify what, exactly, they are rallying for. Both sides argue past each other, which suits neither well but suits the critics better, since vagueness allows them to prosecute a case without having to identify what they would replace the defendant with.

This series insists on a definition. Not because definitions settle arguments, but because without one, this particular argument cannot even begin honestly.

The West Is a Tradition, Not a Race

Western civilization is not a race. This point cannot be stated too plainly, because much of the intellectual apparatus assembled against the West in recent decades depends on treating these two things as identical — so that defending Western civilization becomes automatically suspect as racial advocacy, and attacking it becomes automatically virtuous as anti-racism. This conflation is false, and it is worth understanding why.

The tradition that we call Western civilization is the accumulated product of specific ideas, institutions, and practices that developed over roughly three millennia across multiple peoples, none of whom had any particular claim to racial homogeneity. Greek philosophy was built in part on Egyptian mathematics and Babylonian astronomy. Roman law drew on precedents across the Mediterranean world. The English common law tradition drew on Germanic tribal custom, Norman administrative practice, and Latin ecclesiastical learning. The Enlightenment was a pan-European phenomenon that owed debts to Islamic preservation of Greek texts during the medieval period. The tradition does not belong to any race. It belongs to those who inherit it, practice it, and transmit it — and that has always included people from every part of the world.

Nor is the West a geography. As Victor Davis Hanson notes, today only a little more than half of the world’s seven billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments enjoying constitutionally protected freedoms — and they are almost all Western, or at least they reside in nations that have become ‘westernized’ [1]. Japan is not geographically Western. South Korea is not geographically Western. India’s constitutional democracy is not geographically Western. But all three are heirs to specific Western ideas about law, rights, and self-government — ideas that have proven portable precisely because they were never exclusively European to begin with.

What the Tradition Contains

The Western tradition is best understood as a series of specific intellectual and institutional contributions, each of which answered a particular problem in the organization of human life.

The Athenian contribution was the idea that reason, rather than tradition or divine command, is the appropriate tool for understanding the world. This was not an obvious idea. Most human societies have organized themselves around authoritative tradition — the way things have always been done — or divine revelation — the way things have been commanded to be done. Athens was among the first to insist that public argument, open to challenge and counter-argument, was the proper method for arriving at truth about politics, ethics, and natural phenomena alike. The jury system, which gave twelve ordinary citizens the power to overrule the state, was a direct institutional expression of this principle. That law flows from the people and not from the king.

The Roman contribution was systematic jurisprudence — the idea that law is not merely the command of whoever happens to be in power but a body of principles that applies universally, including to those who govern. Roman law established concepts like res communis (things belonging to everyone), the distinction between natural law and positive law, and the idea that contracts are binding even between parties of unequal power. The English common law tradition that Churchill traces through the Plantagenet kings carried this forward: ‘law flows from the people and is not given by the king’ [2]. The jury system was its institutional guardian.

The Christian contribution was the equal dignity of every person before God, irrespective of social station, and the distinction between spiritual and temporal authority that prevented the total fusion of religion and state. The latter is often underappreciated: the separation of church and state — the idea that the emperor’s domain and God’s domain are distinct — was a specifically Christian innovation that created the conceptual space for political liberty. A civilization in which the state is not also the church has room for conscience, for dissent, for the individual to say that Caesar’s law is not God’s law.

The Enlightenment contribution was empiricism and the scientific method: the systematic application of reason and evidence to questions about the natural world, with the result that those questions became answerable in a way they had not been before. The scientific and medical advances that have transformed human life over the past three centuries — germ theory, vaccines, surgery, the understanding of DNA — all flow from this epistemological tradition.

The liberal constitutional contribution synthesized these inheritances into specific political institutions: representative government, individual rights, freedom of thought and conscience, freedom of speech, the rule of law. As Hanson observes, citizenship — the status of being a full participant in self-government — is not an entitlement. It requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities [3].

What the Tradition Produced

This tradition is not merely a set of ideas. It is a track record. Douglas Murray, in The War on the West, makes the uncomfortable but necessary observation that the culture that gave the world life-saving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought anywhere in the world is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity [4].

The market economy that has lifted more than a billion people out of extreme poverty in the twenty-first century alone originated in the West. So did the institutional frameworks — property rights, contract law, independent courts — that make markets function without devolving into predation. So did the abolitionist movement that ended the slave trade — which existed in some form in every major civilization in human history, but which was uniquely subjected to systematic moral assault from within the Western tradition itself.

This last point is critical. The capacity to look at one’s own civilization’s failures and demand better is itself a Western achievement. It is not universal. The self-critical tradition — the idea that existing institutions must justify themselves before the bar of reason and conscience, and that they can be reformed if they fail — is an inheritance from exactly the Athenian, Christian, and Enlightenment strands identified above. When the critics of Western civilization deploy the language of rights and justice against the West, they are using tools that the tradition they are attacking developed and transmitted.

The Asymmetry of the Current Critique

Murray identifies the deepest problem with the current moment: the West gets no credit for having got anything right — not the least of the things it got right being the development of individual rights, religious liberty, and pluralism. Indeed, these things are held against it [5].

This is intellectually incoherent. You cannot use the principle of equality to prosecute the West for failing to live up to the principle of equality without acknowledging that the principle came from the tradition you are prosecuting. You cannot invoke the rights of the colonized without invoking a framework of rights that was developed, articulated, and institutionalized in the West. The critics of Western civilization are, in a very precise sense, parasitic on the tradition they claim to oppose.

This does not mean the failures were not real. They were. Slavery was real. Colonialism was real. The gap between the tradition’s proclaimed values and its actual practice was real, large, and lethal. But — and this is the argument this series will make repeatedly — every society in history has those failures. What is distinctive about the West is not that it had them. It is that it developed the intellectual and institutional resources to recognize them as failures, argue about them in public, and change. Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe, without irony or caveat, what the Western tradition actually contributed to the world? [6]

What This Series Is and Is Not

This is not a series arguing for racial supremacy. It is not an argument that the West has been perfect. It is not an argument that non-Western civilizations have nothing to offer.

It is an argument that a specific tradition — identifiable, traceable, and transmissible — is under systematic assault from within the institutions that exist to transmit it. That the assault uses bad history, unfalsifiable theory, and a double standard that would not survive application to any other civilization. And that the consequences of the tradition’s dissolution will not be the multicultural utopia its critics promise, but something considerably darker — as Reno argues, the hollowing out of the loyalties and inheritances that make any civilization, Western or otherwise, sustainable.

The defense of the West does not require the pretense that its record is clean. It requires the honesty to acknowledge that the record is complicated, the achievements are real, the failures have been confronted more seriously than critics acknowledge, and the alternatives on offer are worse.

That is the argument. The prosecution will be examined in the posts that follow.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Today only a little more than half of the world’s seven billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments enjoying constitutionally protected freedoms. They are almost all Western — or at least they reside in nations that have become ‘westernized.’”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[2] “Thus amidst the great process of centralisation the old principle was preserved, and endures to this day, that law flows from the people, and is not given by the King.”

The Birth of Britain, 1956 — Winston S. Churchill. Open in Readwise

[3] “Citizenship, after all, is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities — and they don’t worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges.”

The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise

[4] “The culture that gave the world life-saving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought anywhere in the world is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[5] “Not the least of them is that while the West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now gets no credit for having got anything right. In fact, these things — including the development of individual rights, religious liberty, and pluralism — are held against it.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[6] “Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe without irony, cringing, or caveat the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world?”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

After every war, defense establishments face a powerful temptation: identify the weapon system that won, and build more of it. After 1918 it was the machine gun and barbed wire — the instruments of defensive dominance. After 1940 it was the tank. After 1991 it was the precision-guided munition. After Ukraine, it is the first-person-view drone. This logic is not entirely wrong, but it is radically incomplete, and the incomplete version of it has sent armies into the next war prepared for the previous one more times than any strategist should be comfortable acknowledging.

The reason is straightforward once stated: a weapon is never a revolution. The revolution happens when a weapon is combined with new systems for employing it, new concepts for integrating it into combined arms operations, and new organizational structures capable of exploiting what the concept demands. All four components are required. The absence of any one of them means the revolution stalls — and the side with the hardware but not the doctrine finds itself losing to an adversary that understood the concept even without the hardware.

This post establishes the four-component diagnostic framework that the rest of this series will apply to every military revolution it examines.

The Four-Component Framework

The framework comes directly from ONA research on the interwar period, crystallized by Mahnken and Marshall: major military revolutions integrate four main elements — new or advanced technologies, the application of those technologies to new military systems, innovative operational concepts, and organizational adaptations [1].

None of these four is sufficient alone. Technology without systems is a laboratory curiosity. Systems without concepts are expensive hardware waiting for a doctrine. Concepts without organizational adaptation are brilliant ideas that die inside institutions designed to resist them. And organizations without technology are eventually overwhelmed by adversaries who have it.

But the sequencing matters as much as the presence of all four. Marshall and his ONA associates were explicit: the most difficult and important components of the MTR were not new technologies or their applications, but how to develop appropriate operational concepts for new military systems and how best to organize forces to employ them [2]. This is why they deliberately replaced the term Military-Technical Revolution — which gave too much weight to the technical dimension — with Revolution in Military Affairs. The word choice was a corrective embedded in the terminology itself [3].

Marshall’s formulation, cited by Jones in The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy, is the cleanest summary: “Technology makes possible the revolution, but the revolution itself takes place only when new concepts of operation develop” [4]. The implication is direct. A defense establishment that excels at acquisition but atrophies at concept development is, in the most important sense, falling behind — regardless of what it spends.

The Soviet Intellectual Surprise

One of the most counterintuitive facts in the history of military thought is that the term “Revolution in Military Affairs” — the phrase that would come to dominate American defense discourse for a generation — was coined by Soviet theorists, not American ones.

The Soviets became the first to grasp this phenomenon as a discontinuity. They coined the term and produced theoretical literature without developing new weaponry or technology. Beginning in the late 1970s, Soviet military theorists issued seminal writing on the military-technical revolution predating U.S. and NATO efforts by nearly a decade. The Soviet Union used the technological superiority of the West as the starting point for its own conceptualization of what that superiority meant — and where it was leading [5].

This is the same inversion encountered in Post 2: the U.S. built the tools, and an adversary theorized their implications first. The Soviets identified three twentieth-century MTRs in sequence: the first arising from aircraft, chemical weapons, and motorization in World War I; the second from nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and early computers in World War II; and a third they anticipated beginning in the late 1970s from what would become precision guidance, advanced sensors, and information integration [6].

That periodization is more analytically useful than the American tendency — still common — to treat the 1991 Gulf War as the inaugural moment of modern high-tech warfare. The Gulf War was the demonstration of a revolution long underway in theory and technology. The Soviets had seen it coming for fifteen years before Desert Storm.

The most striking part of this story, noted by Jones in The American Edge, is what Marshall concluded from it. While the U.S. military was at the forefront of developing the technologies, Soviet military leaders were at the forefront of theorizing about the changing character of war — intellectualizing the longer-term consequences of the technical changes the Americans had initiated [7]. Marshall’s analysis of this gap was one of the founding insights of ONA’s RMA research program.

Krepinevich and the Attributes of Disruptive Innovation

Krepinevich, whose work grew directly out of ONA, extended the four-component framework into an analysis of what organizational characteristics allow militaries to execute disruptive innovation during periods of revolutionary change.

His synthesis in The Origins of Victory is worth quoting at length because its implications for the current moment are uncomfortable. Militaries that succeed in leading the way into a new and far more effective way of waging war during periods of military revolution gain an enormous advantage. Those that fail to keep pace find themselves operating at a severe disadvantage [8]. This is not a gentle claim. Military revolutions create steep, often irreversible, competitive discontinuities.

The organizations that succeed share identifiable attributes. They have a guiding vision — a clear answer to two questions: what are we trying to do, and how can we do it far more effectively than we can now? [9] They engage in what Krepinevich calls either “technological push” (exploiting new technologies as they emerge) or “technological pull” (actively seeking technologies that enable a concept already identified but not yet achievable) [10]. And they enjoy or develop advantages in time-based competition — the ability to shift to a new mode of warfare before rivals can react, or to catch up rapidly when a rival has moved first [11].

The sobering finding is the assessment of the U.S. military’s current performance against these criteria. From the post-Cold War transformation effort, through the rise and fall of Joint Forces Command, through repeated attempts to develop operational concepts over the past decade, the United States’ armed forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed at disruptive innovation [8]. This verdict, rendered by an analyst deeply embedded in the ONA tradition, is not a political argument. It is a diagnostic finding.

Large organizations are not simply slow to change — as Mahnken notes in Competitive Strategies, they are designed not to change [12]. Military bureaucracies optimize for continuity, predictability, and the reduction of variance. These are rational responses to the demands of peacetime administration. They become catastrophic liabilities when the competitive environment shifts discontinuously.

Domain Expansion as the Through-Line

Krepinevich’s most durable contribution to the framework may be the domain expansion thesis, which provides the structural explanation for why military revolutions recur with such regularity.

Since the Industrial Revolution, those military organizations leading the way to disruptive change have generally emphasized speed, range, and stealth relative to armor, and accurate ranged fires relative to volume fires [13]. This is not coincidence. It reflects a consistent competitive logic: militaries move into new domains because those domains offer speed, range, or stealth that is unavailable in existing domains.

The progression is traceable: land and sea have been contested for millennia. By World War I, the competition had expanded to the electromagnetic and undersea domains and, in nascent form, to air. Following World War II, military systems were positioned in space and on the seabed. More recently, cyber has become an area of intense competition. Four of the six new domains — electromagnetic, air, space, and cyberspace — are characterized by speed of action and extended range, while the undersea domain offers stealth. As militaries moved into these domains, they leveraged precisely those characteristics [13].

Space and cyber are the current frontier of this expansion — and the domain expansion thesis predicts that the first military to develop not just space-based capabilities but the concepts and organizational structures to exploit them will gain the kind of asymmetric advantage that armored warfare innovators gained in the 1930s. That prediction will be tested in Posts 5 through 7.

The Qiao Liang Counterpoint and McMaster’s Warning

Qiao Liang’s Unrestricted Warfare offers a counterpoint worth taking seriously: the weapons revolution invariably precedes the revolution in military affairs by one step [14]. Doctrine is always catching up to hardware. The implication is that conceptual leadership is inherently reactive, never fully ahead of the technology curve.

This is partially right, and the partial truth matters. There is always a lag between the arrival of a transformative weapon and the development of concepts mature enough to exploit it. The tank was introduced in 1916. The concept of armored exploitation — deep penetration, bypassing resistance, collapsing rear areas — was not operationalized effectively until 1940. That twenty-four-year gap is full of strategic danger for the side that has the weapon but not the concept.

But the counterpoint is also incomplete. What Krepinevich’s cases show is that the most dangerous actors in a military revolution are not those who move fastest to acquire the hardware, but those who develop the concept while the hardware is still maturing. Germany in the 1930s did not have tanks superior to French tanks in 1940 — it had a superior operational concept, rehearsed through exercises and doctrine, waiting for the moment the hardware was adequate to execute it.

McMaster’s warning connects here: flawed thinking about the impact of technology on future wars corrupted American strategic and operational thinking for the decades following the Gulf War [15]. The lesson drawn from 1991 — that American technology had made warfare nearly frictionless — was exactly the wrong lesson. It was a lesson about character, applied as if it were a lesson about nature. The result was a generation of doctrine built on a foundation that crumbled in Fallujah and Kandahar.

The Diagnostic Applied Forward

The four-component framework now becomes a diagnostic tool the rest of this series will deploy. For each military competition examined — the interwar period in Post 4, Ukraine in Post 8, the space domain in Posts 5 and 6, the AI-autonomous systems competition in Post 11 — the same four questions apply:

Which of the four components is clearly present? Which is lagging or absent? Who is building hardware? Who is building doctrine? Who is reorganizing their forces to exploit the concept? And — the question that matters most for the long-term competition — who is asking the right questions before the hardware arrives?

The Soviets asked those questions first about the precision-guided revolution, and they lacked the resources to exploit the answers. China is asking them now about the space and AI revolutions. The most striking foreign writings about the RMA were coming out of China. ONA analysts who began studying Chinese military writing in the 1990s discovered that Chinese officers were among the most thoughtful and attentive observers and commentators on the changing character of war [16]. That finding was rendered a generation ago. It has not become less relevant.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Research on the interwar years suggested that major military revolutions integrated four main elements: new or advanced technologies, the application of these technologies to new military systems, innovative operational concepts, and organizational adaptations.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[2] “But as the assessment had stressed the most difficult and important components of the MTR were not new technologies or their applications, but how to develop appropriate operational concepts for new military systems and how best to organize forces to employ them.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[3] “In contrast to the technology-driven mentality of the defense establishment, Marshall and his associates stressed concepts and doctrine rather than the purely technological aspects of the RMA. They openly stated that although superior technology is desirable, the real competition is not technical but intellectual. The central task was finding innovative concepts of operations and organizations and then exploiting current and emerging technology. Because the term MTR gave too much weight to technology, the alternative term Revolution in Military Affairs was adopted.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[4] “Technology is important, but it has never been sufficient to win wars. As Andrew Marshall argued, ‘Technology makes possible the revolution, but the revolution itself takes place only when new concepts of operation develop.’”

The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy — Seth G. Jones. Open in Readwise

[5] “The Soviets became the first to grasp this phenomenon as a discontinuity; they also coined the term revolution in military affairs and produced theoretical literature without developing new weaponry or technology. Although the United States had laid the technological groundwork, it was Soviet rather than American theorists who considered the long-term consequences of the RMA.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[6] “Looking back over the 20th century, Soviet theoreticians had identified two prior periods of technology-driven revolutionary change in how wars were fought. The first MTR arose with the introduction of aircraft, chemical weapons, and motorization during World War I; the second was sparked by the advent of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and early computers during World War II. By the late 1970s, the Soviet military anticipated a third twentieth century MTR.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[7] “While the U.S. military was at the forefront of developing new technologies, including precision strike, Marshall assessed that Soviet military leaders were at the forefront of theorizing about the changing character of war. He believed ‘it was the Soviet military theorists, rather than our own, that were intellectualizing about it, and speculating on the longer-term consequences of the technical and other changes that the American military had initiated.’”

The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise

[8] “First, the world is in a period of disruptive change in the character of warfare... Second, under these conditions of radical change in the competitive environment, the need to engage in disruptive innovation is both compelling and profound... Militaries that succeed in leading the way into a new and far more effective way of waging war during periods of military revolution can gain an enormous advantage over their rivals... the United States’ armed forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed in this endeavor.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[9] “Each of the four military organizations profiled in the histories had a guiding vision of the new warfare regime. This vision addressed two questions of fundamental importance: What are we trying to do? and How can we accomplish this in a far more effective way than we can at present?”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[10] “In each of the four cases, disruptive innovation was either driven or enabled by significant advances in military-related technologies. In some instances, it was a case of ‘technological push’ — new technologies emerged, leaving militaries to figure out how to best exploit them. There were examples of ‘technological pull,’ where militaries were actively seeking out technologies that would enable them to exploit big opportunities that they had identified but lacked the means to exploit.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[11] “Military organizations enjoying a superior position in time-based competition are well placed to adopt strategies based on exploiting the first- and second-move advantage.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[12] “Large organizations do not simply find it difficult to change, they are designed not to change. Innovation can occur but is not guaranteed.”

Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century — Thomas G. Mahnken. Open in Readwise

[13] “Since the Industrial Revolution, those military organizations leading the way to a disruptive change in war’s character have generally speaking emphasized speed, range, and stealth of military systems relative to armor... This era of military revolutions has also coincided with the Era of Domain Expansion... four of the six new domains — the electromagnetic, air, space, and cyberspace — are characterized by speed of action and extended range, while the undersea domain offers stealth.”

The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise

[14] “The weapons revolution invariably precedes the revolution in military affairs by one step, and following the arrival of a revolutionary weapon, the arrival of the revolution in military affairs is just a matter of time.”

Unrestricted Warfare — Qiao Liang. Open in Readwise

[15] “Flawed thinking about the impact of technology on future wars not only occurred at the stage of paradigmatic change. H. R. McMaster indicated how the military often failed to understand the implications of the RMA concept. As a result, superficial thinking has corrupted American strategic and operational thinking in the ensuing decades.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

[16] “The most striking foreign writings about the RMA, however, were coming out of China. As SAIC analysts began digging into what Chinese officers were writing about military transformation, they quickly discovered that the Chinese were among the most thoughtful and attentive observers and commentators on the changing character of war.”

Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise

Reno calls the resulting settlement the “postwar consensus.” It was characterized not by what it affirmed but by what it opposed: Western elites defined themselves as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist [4]. The strong gods — loyalty, nation, inherited culture, religion, strong truth-claims — were driven out of public life not because they were inherently evil but because they had been implicated in the catastrophe [5].

This produced a general theory of society: whatever is strong leads to oppression, while liberty requires the reign of weak loves and weak truths [6]. An open society must be committed to openness above all things, not to truth. Strong commitments of any kind were recast as proto-fascist temptations. Derrida turned this historical consensus into a timeless philosophical principle, making disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture. What began as a reasonable post-war precaution became an ideology of perpetual weakening with no natural resting point.

The Soviet collapse in 1989 was the moment to relax. Instead, the postwar consensus intensified. People began monitoring pronouns and hunting microaggressions where they had once hunted actual totalitarians [7]. As Reno writes, the imperative of ever-greater openness has become as unbalanced and dangerous as the ideological fevers it was designed to replace — its ideological opposite, and just as dangerous [8].

The Architects of Anti-Westernism

The intellectual scaffolding was provided by a tradition running from Edward Said through Howard Zinn and into the contemporary academy. Said’s project is singularly anti-Western in its framing — uninterested in crimes committed by non-Western powers, interested only in subjecting the West to a Marxist critique of power [9]. The deep irony is that the postcolonial tradition’s answer to Western cultural dominance is Western Marxism — an ideology developed by a man with next to no knowledge of non-Western societies.

The downstream effect has been systematic. History has been made into a history of Western sins, with ignorance reigning not only over everything the West ever got right but over everything anyone else has ever gotten wrong [10]. As Brendan O’Neill argues, the post-October 7th hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s abandonment of its own civilizational inheritance — the trading of Enlightenment ideals of rational deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance [11].

What Moral Realism Actually Means

Nigel Biggar offers the clearest definition of what has been lost. Moral realism holds that human understanding of right and wrong is preceded by, and responsible to, a moral order rooted in objective reality — not in whoever currently holds power [12]. This is a philosophical claim: that there is something against which moral arguments can be measured, something that cannot be reduced to a power relation.

The postwar consensus explicitly dismantled this. All truth-claims are historical, power relations shape the meta-narratives, and at every juncture commitments must be disenchanted [13]. The logical conclusion is stated with unusual clarity in The Technological Republic: if all beliefs are equally historically contingent, there is no superior moral position from which to condemn even the most abhorrent practices [14]. The postwar consensus judged that strong moral convictions were more dangerous than moral relativism. The result is a left that can produce infinite critique of Western imperfections and zero condemnation of theocratic murder.

Kaczynski — whose intellectual gifts, whatever his crimes, are not easily dismissed — identified the psychological root: self-hatred is a leftist trait [15]. It runs deeper than politics. It is the product of a culture taught since 1945 that strong attachments to one’s own civilization are the first step toward fascism.

What Abolition Knew

The sharpest evidence that the West once possessed a working moral realism is the abolition of slavery. The movement that ended the transatlantic slave trade was driven not by postmodern critique but by a popular, national movement grounded in a Christian ideal of basic human equality [16]. The argument was absolute: enslaving another human being violated a moral order that existed prior to and independent of any human political arrangement.

What followed was the most consequential demonstration of moral seriousness in the modern era. Britain not only abolished the trade in 1807 but deployed the Royal Navy globally to suppress it, growing the West Africa Squadron until a sixth of the entire Royal Navy was committed to that mission [17]. British taxpayers spent almost as much suppressing the slave trade as the country had profited from it, with the government dedicating roughly 40% of the national budget to compensate slave-owners upon emancipation [18]. Scholars Kaufmann and Pape confirmed this constituted the most expensive example of costly international moral action recorded in modern history [19].

Murray puts the question directly: every schoolchild now knows about slavery, but how many can describe, without irony or caveat, the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world? [20] The abolitionists were not operating from moral relativism. They were operating from moral realism — the conviction that a wrong is a wrong regardless of who commits it.

The Left Has No Language for Evil

The contrast with the contemporary left could not be more complete. The tradition that began as the defense of the weak against the powerful now defends the powerful against the weak whenever the powerful can be coded as anti-Western. Without a moral order higher than power relations, “anti-oppression” politics simply realigns with whoever can most plausibly claim victim status relative to the West — regardless of what that party does to its own people. The framework cannot condemn Maduro’s Venezuela, because Venezuela’s oppression is internal; it cannot condemn Khomeini’s theocracy, because Islam can be framed as a victim of Western imperialism; it cannot condemn Hamas, because Palestinians are the oppressed party in a Western colonial project. The framework produces exactly the politics we observe, reliably and logically.

Reno’s diagnosis is correct: the political and cultural crisis of the West results from our refusal — perhaps incapacity — to honor the strong gods that stiffen the spine and inspire loyalty. The insistence that every motif of weakening serves the common good because it forestalls the return of Hitler presumes we are still living in 1945. We are not. The threat today is not paramilitary nationalist organizations. It is the vacuum the postwar consensus created: a civilization that has disenchanted itself so thoroughly that it has no language left for evil.

Conclusion: Recovering the Language

The argument here is not that the West is without sin. The historical record is genuinely mixed — the same empire that abolished slavery also committed real brutalities, and honest accounting requires holding both. The argument is that the capacity to make that honest accounting requires a moral order that transcends power. The abolitionists had it. They could recognize slavery as evil in themselves, in Arab slave traders, in African kingdoms that sold captives. The condemnation was universal because the moral framework was universal.

The postwar consensus dismantled that framework. It replaced universal moral claims with an epistemology of power relations, then expressed surprise when a left emerged that cannot distinguish oppressor from oppressed once the oppressor can be coded as a victim of the West. The cure is not nationalism, not religious fundamentalism, not a denial of Western failures. It is the recovery of a position old enough to have survived every attempt to replace it: that there is a moral order prior to and independent of human power, that some things are wrong regardless of who does them, and that this conviction — not openness, not diversity, not disenchantment — is what once made it possible for a civilization to look at itself and say: this must end, whatever it costs.

The abolitionists proved it could be done. The question for the contemporary West is whether it still believes anything worth paying that price for.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “In recent years, the critics of the West have marked themselves out through a set of extraordinary claims. Their technique now has a pattern. It is to zoom in on Western behavior, remove it from the context of the time, set aside any non-Western parallels, and then exaggerate what the West actually did.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[2] “Demonization of the West and of Western people is now the only acceptable form of bigotry at international forums such as the United Nations.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[3] “Two major problems come from celebrating all non-Western cultures. The first is that non-Western countries are able to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[4] “We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the ‘postwar consensus.’”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[5] “Postwar liberals understood, however tentatively, that an open society is not self-inaugurating. It requires driving the strong gods out of public life and remaining on watch against their return.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[6] “In the pages to follow, I will show how anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism inspired a general theory of society...it is characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong-strong loves and strong truths-leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[7] “After 1989, we did not relax our vigilance. On the contrary, people began to monitor pronouns and search for ‘microaggressions’ to punish.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[8] “The imperative of ever-greater openness has unbalanced the West. Our openness is the distorted mirror of the singular, untempered, and destructive passions and ideological fevers that shipwrecked the West in the first half of the twentieth century; it is their ideological opposite. And it is just as dangerous.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[9] “Like other postcolonial writers, Said’s central claim is singularly anti-Western. He is uninterested in crimes committed by non-Western powers.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[10] “History becomes the history of Western sins. And ignorance reigns not only over anything good the West ever did but over anything bad that anyone else has ever done.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[11] “It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilisation. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance.”

After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise

[12] “Moral realism takes the view that human understanding of what is good and right is preceded by, and responsible to, a moral order that is rooted (somehow) in the nature of things-in objective reality.”

In Defence of War — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[13] “All truth-claims are historical, power relations shape the meta-narratives, and so forth. At every juncture our commitments need to be disenchanted-weakened and lightened.”

Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise

[14] “If all beliefs are equally true or historically contingent, if the belief in reason is simply an ethnocentric Western prejudice, then there is no superior moral position from which to judge even the most abhorrent practices.”

The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Open in Readwise

[15] “Self-hatred is a leftist trait.”

The Unabomber Manifesto — Ted Kaczynski. Open in Readwise

[16] “Inspired by a Christian ideal of basic human equality, a popular, national movement arose in late-eighteenth-century Britain to bring about the abolition, first, of the trade in slaves from Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the American colonies, and subsequently of the institution of slavery itself throughout the empire.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[17] “Britain also led the world in the abolition of that trade. And Britain not only abolished that trade for itself but used its navy to seek to wipe out that trade in all parts of the world the navy could reach...grow the fleet until a sixth of the ships and seamen of the Royal Navy were employed in the fight against the slave trade.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[18] “It has been proven that British taxpayers spent almost as much suppressing the slave trade for forty-seven years as the country profited from it...The British government of the day spent 40 percent of the entire national budget to buy freedom for the people who had been enslaved.”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise

[19] “Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807-67 was ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’.”

Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise

[20] “Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe without irony, cringing, or caveat the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world?”

The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise