Military – The Optimistic Conservative

Veterans Day 2025: A new age ahead

A tribute to America’s best at a turn of the tide.

[Apologies to all that this article is a day late. My all-purpose excuse is that I was saving a sailor from a burning space.]

Much changes from year to year now as one composes a Veterans’ Day post, and 2025 is no different. In 2024, I found myself wanting to include the groundwork of thoughts from earlier years, and instead of rewriting everything simply copied in the articles from 2022 and 2021, each of which had content that merited repeating.

Since I shifted from putting up the same article annually (with a few alterations), which was my practice from 2009 to the centennial in 2018 of the end of World War I, I’ve included links to that older treatment, and a copy of John McCrae’s iconic 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields.” The torch held high, and passed through the generations, has been a touchstone of visualization and inspiration since this series began. Has the torch from McCrae’s Dead in Flanders Fields been effectively caught, by each generation in its time? Pondering that is the exit question.

I will let earlier work speak for itself, for those inclined to review it. Continue reading “Veterans Day 2025: A new age ahead”

TOC Ready Room 27 October 2025: Two pings (Aircraft carrier to counterdrug fight off Venezuela; Geopol rhetoric versus actual results)

What’s wrong and right with the world of national security and power rhetoric.

These will be a pair of Ready Room notes on the headline topics. More people with each passing month seem to be catching up with the OODA loop of current events (while others like the Carlson/Owens fold are pegged on bizarre takes that have nowhere to go). And so much is always happening that it’s not a good use of time to try to write at length about most of it.

But there are some points worth making about the headline topics. So, diving right in, the carrier situation.

Ping One: A carrier to Venezuela

USS Gerald R Ford (CVN-78), which Is currently deployed in the Mediterranean, was ordered on Friday 24 October 2025 to the Caribbean to enter the counterdrug fight there. Ford will bring at least one Aegis destroyer escort (four deployed with the carrier in June), one of which will presumably be USS Winston S Churchill (DDG-81), which has been serving as the carrier’s air defense commander during this deployment. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 27 October 2025: Two pings (Aircraft carrier to counterdrug fight off Venezuela; Geopol rhetoric versus actual results)”

Football Follies 2025: NCAA week 7 – “We got us a shootout”

When the Shootout starts, it all gets real.

It’s the week of weeks, the Storied Rivalry of Stored Rivalries, the End Times Saga of I-35, the week when pagan gods go to work and Texas becomes Baja Oklahoma, and Oklahoma becomes Alta-Texas, and everybody dresses funny, and you can smell the Texas State Fair from Cleveland, and you can smell the exhaust of thousands of Okie pickups and RVs from Mars, and it’s sick-crazy, dude. Chiggers in the brain crazy. The tailgating alone rivals Armageddon.

It’s the Red River Shootout, and no prissy insistence by ABC that it’s the Collegial Conference Meeting of Unarmed Men Waving Origami Cootie-Catchers Who Like to Skip Around a Maypole and Sing Summer-Camp Songs Together will ever change that.

Don’t get in its way. It’s ain’t gon’ stop fer ya. Continue reading “Football Follies 2025: NCAA week 7 – “We got us a shootout””

TOC Ready Room 14 August 2025: Gaza et al; Russian missiles; Perspectives on Qatar, Iran; Mental health; more

What’s wrong and right with the world – though today, mostly wrong.

It’s past time for another Ready Room, and I’m running with a random batch of topics that have been prominent recently (or at least of interest to me). The topics should explain themselves pretty well. I’ll introduce the first one, which is incident to Trump’s move to clean up the streets in Washington, D.C., with a minimum of commentary.

Back in January 2021, I wrote about the process of deploying the National Guard in the National Capital Region, which is in its entirety a designated federal reserve. (At the link, I recommend doing a word-find on “Title 32” to go directly to the relevant portion. It’s a multi-topic post.)

The whole NCR extends beyond the District of Columbia, but encompasses it and makes it in U.S. law a federal reserve 100% of the time. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 14 August 2025: Gaza et al; Russian missiles; Perspectives on Qatar, Iran; Mental health; more”

“Establishment” for a better future: The historic need of our time

A better future won’t just establish itself.

This essay, while a long one, is considerably shorter than it could be, if I included a lot of quoted citations and deeper discussion of the technical aspects of some of the targeting sequences alluded to (in Iran and Yemen, and with the recent Ukrainian attack on Russia’s high-value strategic aircraft).

It takes forever to put those articles together, and my priority is to convey clearly a top-level point about the “meta-trend” of our thinking on matters like game-changing geopolitical developments, negotiations, and warfare and the uses of power in today’s environment.

I think the meta-trend will be seen more distinctly and usefully if the discussion focuses on that, and doesn’t try to make too many ancillary points. I don’t even want to talk about the ancillary points; I want to get us ahead of the action, inside the OODA loop, by pointing out how appreciating the meta-trend makes us smarter in the face of President Trump’s negotiating style, rather than being held back by overlaying our incorrect assumptions on his actions. Continue reading ““Establishment” for a better future: The historic need of our time”