by Navy Capt (Ret) Pete O'Brien, Project Sentinel Chairman and Distinguished Fellow And to the soon brand new Secretaries of the Army, and Air Force: Congratulations on...

by Navy Capt (Ret) Pete O'Brien In 1864 the Ottomans, under their Provincial Reform Law, reorganized their empire into a hierarchy of regions, at the...

by Navy Capt. Peter O'Brien On the north side of a runway, at an airfield about 60 miles west of Gdansk, Poland, about 10 miles...

by Navy Capt. (Ret) Peter O'Brien President Zelenskyy has now briefed President Biden, former President Trump, Vice President Harris, most of the heads of state...

Tsar Vlad I is in the news again, talking about nuclear weapons. The news media reports he has changed his nuclear policy but I...

Ukraine has the simple and horrible problem of geography. Strictly speaking, it's not a strategic mistake as much as it is just an uncomfortable fact. If you wander through history you will find that countries without hard borders - a nasty mountain range, a raging river, perhaps an ocean - always have troubles with neighbors.

We are 120 weeks into the war in Ukraine, a peace conference begins in a week in Switzerland (at which only one side is represented), and the war continues to evolve.

May 19 marked one hundred years since the passing of a great Jewish scholar and poet, Abraham Elijah Kaplan (1891-1924). His father had been a celebrated scholar, who had passed away in his 30s, leaving young Abraham fatherless. His father’s best friends was Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer (1870-1953), who saw to it that the son was well educated in the schools of Lithuania. Abraham studied under great Jewish thinkers and by his late 20s and early 30s he had written several beautiful essays in scholarly journals.

Much of the modern way of war springs from the writings of 4 men from the 1920s: Gen. Giulio Douhet, LtGen. Walther Wever, Marshal Hugh Montague “Boom” Trenchard, and of course, Col. Billy Mitchell.All were believers in “strategic bombing,” the idea that bombing the right targets would destroy morale while also destroying industrial capacity and disabling lines of communication, and drive any nation to surrender.Over the years the theory, particularly in the west, has undergone some modifications

On January 25th, 1942, USS Sargo (SS-186 (under the command of LtCmdr Tyrell Jacobs)) pulled into Surabaya, Indonesia after finishing a short war patrol, offloaded her remaining torpedoes, loaded 1 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, and headed to Mindanao, the Philippines to provide some ammunition to the US and the Philippine Armies. She then picked up 24 maintenance specialists from the B-17 wing and evacuated them from the Philippines. Jacobs, after three patrols in which he fired a great many torpedoes but sank no ships, turned over command, and ended the war working on, and significantly improving, US torpedoes.

There has been some interesting talk in the past week about deterrence and escalation and proportionality and I’m beginning to wonder if those words still mean what I thought they mean, like the word “secret” on the front page of a newspaper. But it’s important to review what they really mean because getting this wrong can have significant consequences.

We created a Constitution - a remarkable feat, a document that was the envy of the world for 220 years - and still is if you want the root explanation of why millions of people are trying to get into the US and not so much anywhere else. (How many people tried to sneak into China last year?)