Loud hosannas did ring from Republican Households across the land when they opened their July 31 Wall Street Journal to read, “Former Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday she wouldn’t run for governor of California next year, leaving open the possibility of another presidential bid in 2028.” Lord, let it be so! Kamala Harris couldn’t bead Elmer Fudd running the the Flat Earth ticket. Should the Democrats be so stupid as to nominate her, champaign consumption would set a new record on election night (Democrats drink horse piss, otherwise known as light beer).

With a President who hates bureaucracy and both a Vice President and a Secretary of Defense who fought in wars we lost, it seemed reasonable to expect a revival of military reform from the Trump administration.  Instead, so far at least, all we’ve heard has been the usual cries to increase the defense budget.  We did not lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because our opponents outspent us.  If we want to start winning, we have to take on problems in our armed forces that have little or nothing to do with money.

Yesterday President Donald Trump broke faith with his voters and took the United States into another war in the Middle East.  Worse, as his announcement of the airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities made clear, he did so by making the U.S. once again the slave of Israel’s Likud Party and the neocons who serve as Likud’s American enforcers.  This is everything I and millions of other American voters put Mr. Trump in the White House to end.  

There is a wise old saying among European foreign ministries that Russia is never as strong as it appears to be and Russia is never as weak as it appears to be. At present, the tendency is to overestimate Russia’s strength, to the point where European armed forces find themselves under an unexpected shower of gold. That is not a bad thing in itself, but the notion that the Russian army faces Europe with the prospect of invasion is silly.

One of the reasons I supported President Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 is that he was the peace candidate.  He promised he would not get us into any more wars, and in his first term he kept that promise.  But is he going to keep it in his current term?  Some of his recent actions must raise doubt.

American Special Operations Forces (SOF) have a problem, one not of their making.  Quite simply, they are regularly misemployed.  They are employed at the tactical, not the operational level.  This means that, despite their special weapons and techniques, they are not likely to have much impact on the outcome of a conflict unless the enemy is very small.  The reason is numbers: there are not enough SOF to affect the results in a major conflict even if they win every tactical engagement.  To change a conflict’s outcome they must be used at the operational, not the tactical level.

The recent German elections gave a double win to Germany’s real conservative party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AFD).  While the top vote-winner was the establishment conservative CDU? CSU, AFD came in a strong second.  That means it will now be the official opposition in the Bundestag, which gives it a powerful “bully pulpit.”

One of the ways Germany’s World War II “Blitzkrieg” (the Germans did not use the term) worked was by combining speed with multiple thrusts.  Speed cut inside an enemy’s reaction time while multiple thrusts caused him to spread his defending forces so thin that none were effective.  Of the multiple thrusts, one was the Shwerpunkt, the bid for a decision, but the enemy could not tell which one.  More, the Germans could and did switch the Schwerpunkt as battlefield developments required.

As I do every year, on January 27 I telephoned my reporting senior and liege lord, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to offer my felicitations on his birthday.  Somewhat to my surprise, I found him at home in Neues Palais at Potsdam.  Der Reisekairser is more often than not on the road; rumor has it that’s to escape the company of his good wife, but Germany loves Kaiser in Augusta Victoria and I’m sure His Majesty does too, if sometimes better from a distance.

As I have said many times, Fourth Generation war is above all a contest of legitimacy.  (See my recent podcast at link .  Normally, when we think of legitimacy we think of a country, a nation-state.  But can a sub-division of a country, in our case a state, have its own crisis of legitimacy?  I don’t know the answer to that question, but California may provide it to me.  Why?  Because the recent fires in Los Angeles cap a long history of failure on the part of California’s state government. 

The Portuguese Navy has been around for more than 700 years, and for the first time since the days of the carrack, it is leading the world in ship design.  The new ship carries the unlovely name of “Multifunctional Naval Platform,” but the illustrations in Seaforth’s World Naval Review 2025 reveal it looks like an aircraft carrier, with a flat deck, an island superstructure, and a ski-jump launch ramp for fixed-wing aircraft.  It is small, frigate-sized, displacing about 7000 tons.  And while it looks like an aircraft carrier, it is actually built for a specific type of aircraft.  The MNP is the world’s first purpose-built drone carrier.  And it costs only about $135 million, approximately one-hundredth of the price of a Ford-class American aircraft carrier.

The situation in Syria seems to be moving in a new and somewhat unexpected direction.  An Islamist Fourth Generation entity, Hayat Tharir al Sham (HTS), having taken power in Syria, is moving to transform itself into a normal political party governing a broadly secular state.

President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense has an unusual background.  Instead of the usual wealthy corporate CEO, Pete Hegseth is a major in the Army National Guard.  As such, he has acquired combat experience in Fourth Generation wars, wars we lost.  He seems to care about that, perhaps to the point of questioning both why and how we fight such wars.

In 2022, I published a small book, Reforging Excalibur: Creating a Sustainable and Relevant Defense for 21st-Century America.  It received no notice, which did not surprise me.  Its recommendations had no chance of being enacted so long as the Establishment was in power.  But on January 20, 2025, the United States will get its first anti-Establishment administration in living memory.  My little book offers Elon Musk exactly the roadmap he needs in reducing the size and cost of our vast defense bureaucracy.

Even before his inauguration, President Trump is demonstrating in his choices of personnel that his second term will be genuinely anti-establishment.  Given that we lose most of our wars, no choice is more important than that for Secretary of Defense.  By choosing Pete Hegseth, a combat experienced Army National Guard major, instead of the usual corporate multi-millionaire who will change nothing, President Trump has set in motion a renewed process of military reform.

Around this time in every Presidential election year, those of us who write about politics have to walk the plank, i.e., we have to offer our predictions as to the election’s outcome.  We may end up sinking in the ocean of wrong predictions, but that risk is one we have to take.  So here goes:

As of this writing (October 6, 2024), Israel has not yet retaliated from Iran’s missile strike.  That will bring about another change in the situation.  But this sitrep can still note elements of the situation that the mainstream news is missing.