The Long March

Editor's note: this post first appeared in November, 2016 I can’t remember the exact moment (if there even was one)...

This is the final Long March post. My best wishes to you all, and my thanks to all who contributed, both as writers and commenters

One last dog photo before I go.

Friends and enemies were made and I've enjoyed meeting Tom Ricks and other TBD/TLM regulars. I regret not knowing some better and resolve to befriend others before the venue closes

Graft and lying to investigators, yep. He had retired and gone to work for awhile on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee and was up for a job in USAID, which isn't going to happen now

The remains of John Paul Jones' ship, the Bonhomme Richard, have been found just off the British coast, and are supposedly visible from a cliff and walkable at certain tides

What can we do to counter the negative effects of ambitious promotion seeking? Don't look at your evaluation, speak truth to power, and strive for impact, not promotion

3 Tips On How To Make It Through A Serious History Book

Cargo Cultists provide an example of how not to implement change — one the Army should consider as it struggles to make Mission Command a reality

I am skeptical of a lot of the recommendations I read on leadership, which often strikes me as pyramids of buzzwords, but I liked this article by a former British submariner who went on to do a PhD in leadership.

The murky relationship between trade, technology, and national security will remain a problem

Here's a letter I sent last week to the fine people who run Task & Purpose. We'll be wrapping things up over the next week or so

The lead letter in the January issue of the Marine Corps Gazette is a salute from Commandant Gen. Robert Neller thanking the magazine for the articles

A report indicated that former Senator Jim Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran who briefly was Navy secretary during the Reagan Administration, might become President Trump's next secretary of defense.

'The Many Faces of War' is a well-researched, creative, historical, mythological and academic look at war, in the cold and often harsh light of trauma, damaged brains, mythology and a very broad sweep of literature

Why do we, as a society, insist on searching for absolute meaning in stories about war?

I recently signed up to volunteer at my local animal shelter. Their rules of behavior stuck me as pretty generally applicable to any organization, but perhaps especially to small military units

I don't know, and there's no caption information that I can find. Nor for this one: National Library of Scotland

The powers that be in Congress, the media, DoD bureaucrats, and the traditional think tanks like CNAS might want you to believe that they have a plan to recraft American foreign policy—they don't

1. The Wehrmacht was the best at it and their military excellence relied on it. The idea of Mission Command...

The recent resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis reminds us that serving the nation at the strategic level is not an amoral activity, nor a place where realism pushes ethics off the stage or where Machiavelli is more useful than Aristotle

150 is about as large a group of people as the human brain can handle in personal relationships, notes a British military commentator

I have spent the past year being graded, evaluated, and assessed as a student at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC). After graduating and reflecting over the past year, I will now grade, evaluate, and assess CGSC.

Tom note: Here is the seventh entry in our 10 Long March posts for 2018, the 4th most-read item of...

And so Mattis goes. It was probably inevitable after his former subordinate John Kelly was said to be leaving his...